Interview with Dr. Jerry Lembcke

Lembcke, Jerry, 1943- ; McKiernan, Stephen

Dr. Jerry Lembcke is an associate professor emeritus of Sociology at Holy Cross University. He has a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Oregon. He is the author of The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam and Hanoi Jane: War, Sex, and Fantasies of Betrayal.

2010-07-30

In copyright

2017-03-14

McKiernan Interviews

144:35

McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: Jerry Lembcke
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: REV
Date of interview: 30 July 2010
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(Start of Interview)

JL (00:00:05):
Jeremy. Excuse me. Jerry Lembcke.

SM (00:00:14):
I might be taking some quotes here too for your reaction to that. You write in your book, Hanoi Jane, that many of the attacks on her are oftentimes based on the need to explain our defeat in Vietnam through betrayal on the home front. Then you also add, "the emasculation of the national will to war." Can you explain what you mean by that in more detail?

JL (00:00:41):
Well, I think that the United States went into Vietnam, slid into Vietnam, with no idea that it would ever maybe be fighting a major war to begin with, and much less that it would lose its first war on foreign soil. The defeat in Vietnam was a very hard pill to swallow for a lot of Americans. Still is, I think. We were almost, I think, universally self-imagined to be the most powerful nation on earth. Our trajectory in the early (19)60s was even upward from those expectations. Indeed, materially speaking, we were far superior, should have been far superior to the Vietnamese. We had more gunpowder, gun power, better-trained, formally-trained troops and so forth. And yet we lost the war. I think that the country turned inward for explanations for why we lost the war. The short form on that is a scapegoat or scapegoats, alibis, excuses for why we lost the war, and looking for reasons internally. We were too weak. We were not manly enough. That is the emasculation part of it. Vietnam was an emasculating event, I think, culturally speaking for a lot of people, for a lot of people. Looking for reasons for that, looking for scapegoats for that kind of loss, I think you look toward the feminine side of the culture. You look to women perhaps, and Fonda, for reasons we might go into, Fonda fit the bill pretty well.

SM (00:02:50):
Bobby Muller, who you are aware of-

JL (00:02:52):
Sure.

SM (00:02:52):
He was one of the most vocal anti-war vets, once he came out of, after overcoming those terrible tragedy, losing access to his legs and everything. But he said he went into that war knowing that America was a good nation. We were a good nation. We did not do anything wrong. And he came out of that war feeling that we were the bad guy. If you talk to some other Vietnam vets, who also had similar experiences, though some of them will say, "Oh, Bobby. Bobby does not have the attitudes that a lot of other vets had. He just continues to think the way he did and a little bit more critical than he should be." But he has not changed much. Is that part of it too, that even we can use scapegoats with Jane Fonda, we can use scapegoats to the anti-war movement as prolonging the war. That could be a myth too. But really, United States was now seen as not a very good guy in world affairs.

JL (00:04:08):
Well, I came home from Vietnam having re-thought things that way. Maybe I was not quite as conscious of America as Bobby Muller was going in, a vague... I grew up in an apolitical environment, so I probably did not think about those kinds of those things very much. But to the extent that I did, certainly... I had uncles that fought in World War II. That was part of my sense that in World War II, there is still no doubt in my mind that we were on the right side-

SM (00:04:41):
Oh, I agree.

JL (00:04:42):
Of those conflicts. And so sure, going into Vietnam, I thought, "Well, the country goes to war. All the wars I have ever heard of the United States going into, we were on the right side. Why would not Vietnam be the same way?" But in the course of being in Vietnam, and for me, part of coming to that Bobby Muller kind of consciousness was I, being a chaplain's assistant and working for about half the time I was there for a chaplain who was opposed to the war. So if we are talking about religious righteousness, in a religious sense of righteousness, here is the priest, a Catholic priest, and he had worked in the mission’s field in South Asia before the war and had volunteered to come in as a chaplain, which "to do his stint" as he said. But he did not support the war. He was one of the first people from whom I heard, "We are going to lose this war."

SM (00:05:54):
And what year did you hear that?

JL (00:05:56):
1969.

SM (00:05:57):
That is right in that (19)67 to (19)71 period, which is the real crazy time there.

JL (00:06:02):
Yeah. Here is the chaplain telling me, "We are going to win." And I suppose I said, "Why? Would you say that?" Or excuse me. He said, "We are going to lose. We are not going to win." His explanation for that was that these people do not want us here. That was his explanation for it. I felt like he knew what he was talking about because he had been in the mission’s field in South Asia. That was a key moment for me in... "Okay, we are on the wrong side of this war. And there might be a righteous side to this war, but we are not on it." As I was going along through this, my questioning became, I think, more sophisticated, more nuanced, to the point where even today I am not a pacifist principally. I think that in the case of Vietnam, I think there was a righteous side to that war. I think the Vietnamese cause was a supportable cause. But we were on the other side. We were on the other side of that.

SM (00:07:19):
What year were you there?

JL (00:07:21):
(19)69. I got to Vietnam, I think, New Year's Day, 1969. And I left about the 1st of February (19)70.

SM (00:07:34):
Were you drafted, or was it volunteer?

JL (00:07:36):
I was drafted. I was drafted. I was a junior high school math teacher in Fort Dodge, Iowa-

SM (00:07:44):
Oh, wow.

JL (00:07:45):
In 1968 and got snared by the Johnson administration's post-Tet call-up of more people. I had been deferred, of course, for college. And then I had been deferred for two years for teaching.

SM (00:08:08):
Your deferments are running out.

JL (00:08:10):
I was about to turn 25, and my friendly draft board in Le Mars, Iowa, which is Plymouth County, Iowa, they kept telling me with a smile, "But you are going to have to go eventually. Yes, we will defer you for one more year. But eventually you are going to have to go."

SM (00:08:29):
Had you been involved in any anti-war activity while you were in college?

JL (00:08:30):
No, not a lick.

SM (00:08:32):
Of course, as a teacher, you probably could not because you could lose your job.

JL (00:08:35):
Well, yeah. But no, I was not. I was political. I was not political right up into induction. I tried to stay out of... I tried to still stay out on the grounds that I was a teacher and that I was of better service to my country as a math teacher than I would be in the army.

SM (00:09:04):
Yeah, because that whole era was about service. And I got questioned about the different opinions about service, pro and con, later in the interview.

JL (00:09:14):
Sure.

SM (00:09:14):
Another charge is that protests at home prolonged the war. I mentioned that as previously. College students on college campuses are [inaudible] that helped lose the war for Americans took place within America so that the North Vietnamese only had to wait it out. Le Duc Tho, I think, was the one in his biography who states that, "We knew America was not going to stick." There was protests going on back in the United States and that they were not going to stay the long course like they were. And of course, they had always stayed the long course in their history, no matter what.

JL (00:09:49):
Sure.

SM (00:09:51):
But do you consider this also another one of these myths that we constantly hear, particularly amongst the people that are against the anti- war movement, the New Left and that group, that they prolonged the war by their protest?

JL (00:10:06):
Yeah, I do not think that that is true. I think that if anything, the protests shortened, shortened the war. I think we lost the war because we were beaten by the Vietnamese. We were not beaten by the anti-war movement. There is a chemistry there between the resourcefulness and the resilience of the Vietnamese people and what is going on back home, on the home front. There is no doubt that the anti-war movement initially, that some people in the anti-war movement saw the Vietnamese cause as a righteous cause and protest the war because of that. And you have got pacifists at home who are protesting the war because it is a war, who are not going to support any war. As time went on, I think, more and more Americans came to the anti-war movement, simply because of the length of the war itself. The war went on and on, and people could see no light at the end of the tunnel, and so begin to be won over to the anti-war cause, if not the pro-Vietnamese cause, but simply because this war is not going anywhere. People came to see it as being divisive, a drain on economic resources. But if the Vietnamese had not been doing well enough to at least fight the US to a stalemate, to a standstill, then a lot of this other stuff would not have been going on at home. So I think that, to the extent that the anti-war movement becomes a factor in the outcome of the war, that in turn is attributable to the Vietnamese themselves. So it is really back to the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese won the war, and they won the hearts and minds of a lot of American people.

SM (00:12:20):
There is no question that we could have physically won that war with all of our military capability and of course, that mentality of the - I forget the generals - and those bomb to the Stone Age, that that kind of mentality, "Yeah, we could have ended the war there just like we did in Japan, with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki." But the key question is, they won psychologically, I believe.

JL (00:12:45):
Sure.

SM (00:12:46):
They won the psychological game. And it is because they knew who they were, and they knew their history, they knew their culture, and they knew that they were not going to be defeated, no matter what.

JL (00:12:56):
Right.

SM (00:12:57):
Whether it be the French, whether it be the Chinese, the Japanese, or any other, back in their history.

JL (00:13:03):
We are fighting, we are fighting on their terrain. The commonplace interpretation is that, "Well, then they know the hills and the valleys and then the jungles." That might have been true too. But I think it is more psychological. It is the emotional. They are fighting for their homeland, and we are not. So they are going to be more committed to that. They are going to stay the course for a long period of time.

SM (00:13:37):
You said you learned from the chaplain that this war was not going to be, that we were not going to win this war. But from the time you arrived on the airplane in Vietnam to the time you left, can you specifically state when you personally felt an experience, not necessarily with a chaplain, that said, "This is ridiculous. We are not going to win this thing. Or that something is wrong here, the strategy's wrong," and whether you were saying this to your peers? That maybe you were not saying it, but other soldiers were saying it. Was there a specific instance where...

JL (00:14:13):
There are two that come to mind right away. Maybe as we talk more, there might be maybe. But two things that come to mind. Very early on, I saw the remnants of the French presence there. And I had no clue whatsoever. I do not know that... I graduated from college in 1966, Augustana College in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I was a math major. I had had one American history class. I am not sure I had ever heard the words "colonialism" or "imperialism". When I saw the first... I still have the photograph; occasionally I run across the photograph of a bridge. I traveled around my little Instamatic. It was a bridge that had a French word on it, probably the French construction company that built the bridge and a date on it. I think it was 1941. I asked the Chaplin about that. Probably I did not even know that word was French. But I asked, "What is this?" I began to learn. I began to learn about the French colonization of Indo-China. That was hugely enlightening for me. That was just a big light pole that went off. That was one thing. The other thing that does not quite fit into your question, but I think it belongs here anyway, was seeing the permanency of what the US was putting in place there. For the first six months I was there, I was near, I was in a small Army camp near Phu Cat Airbase, which was just west of Qui Nhon. Most Americans, still to this day, have never heard of Phu Cat airbase. But to get to our little Army camp, we had to drive through Phu Cat, had to come through the main gate and then go out on the other side, so we were in and out of Phu Cat all the time. I remember vividly the cement roads, the cement - not asphalt - cement roads, cement curb, curb and gutter. "Holy cow, this is built to stay." This is not like my little Army camp that is half tents and sandbag bunkers and stuff like that. This airbase permanence, its permanence. "What is going on? What is going on with this?" Again, a light bulb, began to ask, began, "Why would we be building, why would we be building this thing here?" And I suppose at some point even, not consciously, that French bridge, the permanency of that, and the permanency of this air base began to come together. And then seeing on the air base, seeing the swimming pools, the bowling alleys, a library, football pools 10 years from now, the Sioux Bowl. Now, when I hear about Iraq, I hear the same things.

SM (00:17:41):
And Afghanistan.

JL (00:17:42):
People who have been there - and maybe Afghanistan too - say the US is building these big bases.

SM (00:17:48):
This gets right into my next expression here, which is Ronald Reagan, I interviewed Jack Wheeler. I do not know if you know Jack. He was a fundraiser for the Vietnam Memorial, and he was in Vietnam. He had done a Triple Heart. Ronald Reagan, he said, "Listen to Ronald Reagan's speech in (19)84," because Ronald Reagan did not come to the Vietnam Memorial when it opened in (19)82, because it was politically feasible to be there or was not the right thing. But in (19)84, he came to the Wall, and Peggy Noonan had written a great speech for him. But he said, Ronald Reagan's famous 1984 speech at the Vietnam War Memorial, he said, "We will never enter a war again without making sure that we are going to win it. We are going to give the military everything they need." And basically, he was blaming it on the leaders of the time, plus we must be... When you figure this also out, if he had been president, he probably would have been tougher, even though Nixon was pretty tough. He blamed it on the leaders. And then he also believed that we must be tougher on the dissent. Like his years as governor, where he came to power fighting students in (19)64 and (19)65 in the Free Speech Movement and (19)69 at People's Park. Reagan came to power based on two things. Number one, his law and order mentality against the students at university campuses in (19)64, (19)65, and in (19)69, when Meese was with him. And secondly, on ending the welfare state. That was the mentality. So my question is, what are your thoughts on that speech? And is this a myth? Because you have already brought the fact that we lost the war, but he is saying that if we had put everything into it, like Jim Webb and others have said, we would have won that thing. But we just did not have the will. We did not have the strategy. We did not have the desire to, whatever. Is that a myth? Is what Ronald Reagan is saying, that if we put everything into it, we would have won?

JL (00:20:07):
I think, no. I do not think we would have won. I think we could have prolonged the war. We might have been able to occupy Vietnam in a reasonably peaceful manner for a while. But the Vietnamese would have eventually thrown us out.

SM (00:20:32):
You think, even if they had done, "God, this never would have happened." I think, was it Hershey that... Who was the guy that had the mentality of dropping bombs and putting them back to the Stone Age? Was that General Hershey?

JL (00:20:46):
Oh, no, that was...

SM (00:20:49):
Oh, what is his name? Come on, Steve. I see him. There is a biography out on him right now. But anyways, we would never do that. But if by some chance we had ever dropped one bomb on Hanoi, do you think they would have continued?

JL (00:21:04):
Yeah, I think so. I do not know. That is the thing.

SM (00:21:15):
See, there is only one major city. They did not have any other major cities like that.

JL (00:21:19):
Yeah. But again, it maybe depends on at what point that bomb was dropping. By the end of the war, Hanoi was pretty much evacuated anyway. The Christmas bombings in 1972-

SM (00:21:31):
Yeah, they really did not hit much. They were bad though.

JL (00:21:34):
They were bad. But everything was out of the city. They had moved manufacturing out of the city, decentralized it. They had moved schools and art institutes and this stuff. It was spread out all over. It became, by the end of the war, Americans, I think, widely recognized that a country that is not very industrial is not very susceptible to bombing, because there is nothing to bomb. In 1969, as a chaplain's assistant, I was out and about all the time, on the roads, either on the roads or in helicopters. I was in an artillery unit. I was assigned to an artillery unit. These artillery units get broken up into these little gun pods that are on hilltops and checkpoints just all over the place. The chaplain and I, on a weekly basis, we made our rounds to all of these gun placement sites. The ones that we could reach by road, we drove to. The other ones, then we would helicopter to. But my point here is that I do not think there was a bridge that was still standing in the central highlands where I traveled. All the bridges had been bombed out. We had come up to the river or the creek and down into it. Maybe there had been some gravel down there, so the water was not too deep, if there was water at all. But the bridge itself was gone.

SM (00:23:18):
Wow.

JL (00:23:21):
So what are you going to... I do not know, I do not know.

SM (00:23:25):
When you were with the chaplain, did you give Last Rites to many? Was that part of his role?

JL (00:23:31):
Yes. Yes. A few. Oh, Last Rites as opposed to memorial, not a memorial service.

SM (00:23:36):
A combination either memorials of those who had died, and then of course, Last Rites right at the spot.

JL (00:23:43):
Well, not right at the spot, no. At the hospital, the chaplain would follow up after a fight. We were never on the scene of a ground attack on an LZ or a fire base. We would come in afterwards. In fact, there was a few times when we stayed in a helicopter in the air until things were cleared out. People in combat roles do not want you around if you are not part of it. They really do not.

SM (00:24:29):
So then in combat-

JL (00:24:31):
Combat's work. It is a form of work. I came to see what these guys are doing like looking at a construction site. When people are working on a construction site, they do not want you wandering around looking at things, because you are in the way. You might get hurt.

SM (00:24:52):
So those Joe Galloway stories, I know journalists were allowed to go with these troops. But the Joe Galloway story's a rare one.

JL (00:25:01):
You know what though? You better follow up on a lot of these stories about journalists going out? A lot of that stuff is baloney, because you... Closer to the truth is that they could not, they could not, they were not allowed to. There are good exceptions.

SM (00:25:20):
So that is another myth.

JL (00:25:23):
I think that is a big myth. And it has grown bigger over the years.

SM (00:25:26):
Well, the Joe Galloway was the big one, because we were soldiers once and brave, and he was there. And I know the story about catching the last helicopter, and he was there. And he had to take a gun up. And that is true. But that might have been a rare case then.

JL (00:25:43):
One of my best friends, the artillery unit where I was assigned, was the press officer. Well, he was not an officer. He was a Spec/5, but he was the press liaison person for the artillery. You have batteries. That is different, a different terminology. The artillery also have group. Those are the 41st Artillery Group. He was the press liaison officer. And I asked him, I said, "What do you do?" I said, "I never see you doing anything." This is what he said. He said, "My job is to see that any journalists who make it out here to Group Headquarters do not get any further."

SM (00:26:30):
Oh, wow.

JL (00:26:32):
He said, "I give them a story and send them back to Saigon."

SM (00:26:37):
Does that include the TV people? Because Walter Cronkite and Morley Safer and Dan Rather, and the African American person from 60 Minutes, Bradley, they supposedly were out there with the troops.

JL (00:26:53):
In 13 months I was there and out and about all the time, never saw a journalist of any kind. And more importantly, never heard of one being there. And these are places where, if there had have been a journalist at LZ Uplift, they had have been talking about that for six months.

SM (00:27:11):
How about the photographers like Larry Burrows and I forget the guy. There is several. Kenley, James Kenley, I forget his name was. Let me get into this from here. You wrote the great book, titled Spitting Image. First, what was your main inspiration in writing it? And second, when it was shown that this myth had little visible facts, how did Vietnam vets respond overall? Let me finish my other comments here. "The image of the vets being spit upon is still out there because I know. I have heard from people that I thought would be a little more educated about this issue. Some vets continue to use it as an example of how they were treated when they came home. The image of vets was based due to My Lai and other atrocities. Many vets were upset that they were placed in situations that made no sense and cost lives, upset with the strategy. People were upset with the leaders, and the military leaders and political leaders and the anti-war protest protestors were really not against the troops." There was a lot here, but what has been the reaction of your book Spitting Image in the Vietnam veteran community?

JL (00:28:31):
Almost 50-50 from what I hear. That was the pattern to begin with, and it continues to be the pattern. About half the guys I hear from say, "Right on, this never happened. It is about time somebody wrote this book," even though I wrote it, now, 12 years ago. And just as often, I hear from people who are just outraged, just beyond themselves.

SM (00:29:00):
But the ones that are outraged though, are they people that say...

SM (00:29:03):
The ones that are outraged though, are they people that say, it happened to me? Or are they going from hearsay?

JL (00:29:10):
It is a bit of both, but quite often it happened to me. That is what I hear. And the stories seem to get wilder all the time. By that I mean less believable, less plausible, loaded up with more exaggeration. And the guys who are locked into that are really locked into it. And I think the exaggeration reflects a kind of desperation on their part to be believed. And they keep loading in more stuff.

SM (00:29:48):
Is this another one of those reasons why some, we lost the war, this is our way of blaming others for the situation we were a part of? It is not like the anti-war people protesting and prolonging the war or Jane Fonda should be sent to jail for crimes that she committed against the nation?

JL (00:30:18):
I think it is a victimization identity. A victim identity or almost an ideology is what they are hooked on. It is a twist in the culture. It is not rational. You cannot really make sense of it. But it is that to be a victim is a credentialing. In the same sense that having a Purple Heart is a kind of credential. It is a way of saying, I am the real deal. Because I have a Purple Heart. The spat upon story. I have to step back on that one. The Purple Heart, if you are wounded, in a sense you are a victim. You have suffered, you have taken a loss.

SM (00:31:11):
Right.

JL (00:31:13):
You extend that a little bit, give it a little bit of a twist. Being spat on is also victimization. And if you believe that the real war all along was at home, not in Vietnam, if you got a Purple Heart in Vietnam, that was one front of the war.

SM (00:31:32):
Let us change this, this the 30 minute. This is the 40. All right, bear with me. Okay.

JL (00:31:43):
Vietnam was one front of that war. You got your Purple Heart there. Many people would say the real war was at home and I got my Purple Heart at home when I was spat on. You see what I am getting at. It is identity construction and they are really locked into that.

SM (00:32:13):
I have also wondered if people are not, they were not actually spit upon physically, but they used the term I was spit upon. It is a term they used if I was treated like crap. I am wondering if people interpret it differently?

JL (00:32:33):
It might be that their own thinking started that way, but then that they congealed it, or what is the word I want? It became more graphic to them even that they really were spat on. And then they start telling the story that way.

SM (00:32:54):
Well, I have two examples. This is your interview, but I want to bring this in here. And that is, I have been at the Vietnam Memorial now since 94, both for Memorial Day and Veteran's Day. I sit down amongst a lot of people and let them know I am not a veteran right away. And I am proud, I am very close to a lot of the Vietnam vets and I care about them. And I sat next to a mother when John McDermott was there, the singer who was singing a song and she had tears in her eyes and she said "right above John McDermott's shoulder is where my son's name is." She could see it from a distance and you know something, "the anti-war movement, when my son was buried near Penn State," that is where they lived. "The anti-war protestors were screaming and yelling and calling all kinds of names, baby killers. When my son was being buried, it was a protest. And it probably was not against the person who had died, but it was against the military as a whole." And so she said, that is an experience she will never forget. And the second person I sat next to many years later, it was raining at the Vietnam Memorial, and she said to me, there was an experience. "My son was buried at Arlington and that was a fresh grave. And there had been a major protest in Washington." And she went out to Arlington to visit the spot where her son had just been buried with the dirt put over. And it was raining and they had put canvas covers over the spots. She went out there and she noticed that somebody was moving around underneath the spot. There was an anti-war protestor underneath that little tarp to protect themselves from the rain and laying right on her son's grave. And she was so upset with him saying that, "how dare you lay on my son's grave" and "I am just protecting myself from the rain." And she said, "You are a protestor?" "Yeah, I was a protestor." "Do you really care about the war?" "No, I was paid to come here to protest." He did not care about the war at all. It was just an experience I wanted to share there. One powerful Vietnam vet said, "that the real generation gap was within the generation itself, not between parents and children." I think we know that there was a generation gap between the World War II generation and their kids. That is a well-known fact. But I had never thought of it in terms of the generation gap within. I want your comments on these, those who served and those who evaded the draft. And we are not talking about people who protested the war. We are talking about people who evaded the draft. This same person thought that the boomer generation saw service is a good thing. Because Kennedy, when he gave that speech, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." I have interviewed several people that were inspired by that. And that service could be serving in the military, serving your country in the military or in the Peace Corps or VISTA or whatever. But the reason that same person says that he defines the boomer generation as a generation that was weak in service because they did not understand that when your nation calls, you go to war. The Peace Corps and VISTA is not enough here, if you are talking about defining generation. Being a service-oriented generation is that when you are called to serve, you do. And I will mention who this person was in a minute. This is based on the Lost Generation book and the symposium that took place with James Webb and Bounty Mueller and several others, Phil Caputo and everything. Basically it was James Webb who said, who was not even a United States senator, that said that "I do not consider the boomer generation, that generation that was raised after World War II as a service-oriented generation that we look of them as because of the fact that they evaded the draft, that there were many that evaded the draft just to save their own skin." And even James Fallows has written about the fact that he felt guilty that he had evaded the draft and he had not protested against the draft. And he has felt a big difference. And he has come to terms with that and has admitted his wrongs in front of vets. He has gained the respect to vets. I would just like your thoughts on that concept that the generation gap is as strong between parents and children as it is between young people within the generation, those who served Vietnam and those who evaded the draft.

JL (00:38:13):
A lot of people who evaded the draft went on to serve, if not this country, serve humankind in wonderful ways. My learning for this, there is a book called Northern Passage.

SM (00:38:33):
Yeah, I have it.

JL (00:38:36):
You have it? Okay. I reviewed that book for a Canadian...

SM (00:38:39):
Kind of a conscientious objectors.

JL (00:38:40):
Yeah, both all the people who went to Canada and what an enormous talent drain that was from the United States. Some of these people have become some of Canada's most creatively productive citizens. People working in the arts, people working in politics, people working in education. People in my view, the way I view service with a huge commitment to serve and to put your talent to good use. And I know a few people who evaded the draft and who did alternative service and things like that. And there is not a slacker among any of those people. And I go back to what I was about to say at the beginning here was that I think a lot of people tried to stay out of the draft. I tried to stay out of the draft because I thought being a teacher, being a math teacher in a junior high school was a much better way for me to serve the country. And I think that motivated a lot of those people. I do not think it was to save their own hides. I do not think those people were afraid in the usual sense of the term. Some of them were philosophically or morally opposed to the war. But again, they were not trying to stay out of hard work or something like that or to stay out of service because they did service. They did service in some other way.

SM (00:40:28):
When I was a senior Binghamton, I remember playing basketball in the gym, my junior and senior year on athletics. And I can remember all the conversations of the draft, the lottery numbers were coming up. I was actually 72. And students were saying, oh, I do not have anything to worry about because I am going to get an alternative service as a teacher. And I remember some of the students saying, why are you going to be a teacher? I do not really want to be a teacher. It just gets me out of the draft. And the question I asked Leon Botstein, I did not interview him for my book, but I interviewed him when he came to our Westchester University campus. And I asked him, do you think there is any link between the quality of education that went down after the boomer generation in terms of quality based on the quality of the teachers? And he did not really come up with an answer. He said, nothing has ever been written about it. But I knew that those people that were becoming teachers were going to quit as soon as they could get another job as soon as the war was over. This is not about you now, this is about, do you think there is any link between the poor quality of teaching that took place after the (19)60s, we are talking late, mid (19)70s and beyond, because the teachers were not dedicated enough to being good teachers and they were only there to get out of the draft, particularly male teachers, and then they quit once the draft ended?

JL (00:42:01):
I have never thought about that, because I have never heard anything like that. People get out of teaching because the pay is not very good and the conditions are pretty hard. I still say today it is the hardest job I ever had teaching junior high school math. That was a tough job. That was a hard job. And I think that is why maybe, I would have to think about the political economy of education for a minute, but it might have been in the (19)70s that funding for various education programs were cut, things like that. I do not know.

SM (00:42:46):
I think he was making reference. I think somebody needs to do a study of this because you may be onto something. Because there was a period that students were not as well prepared, not in elementary education. Elementary education has been sound from the get-go, something happens when they reach seventh grade.

JL (00:43:03):
People do not stay in teaching long now. I teach at Holy Cross College and we have quite a few students who go out of college that go into teaching but they do not stay. It is a gateway or a stepping stone, a holding pattern, just something else. There are not many who go into it and stick with it.

SM (00:43:22):
You are teaching in a great school though.

JL (00:43:24):
Oh, thank you.

SM (00:43:25):
I know all about Holy Cross and long before Bob Cousy. Because I read about that.

JL (00:43:31):
That goes back a long way.

SM (00:43:32):
Yeah. I was a kid and I saw Bob Cousy play at the Syracuse War Memorial when the Celtics came in and played the Syracuse Nationals and they were on an 18 game winning. We lived in Binghamton and my dad drove me up. It was a winter storm there and I will never forget. The Celtics were on an 18 game winning streak. And the Nationals beat them and I will never forget Tommy Heinsohn putting his fist up with his flat top as they were booing. And then of course Jim Loscutoff got a big fight.

JL (00:44:01):
Geez, I have not heard these names.

SM (00:44:03):
And Larry Siegfried called me...

JL (00:44:04):
Oh my god.

SM (00:44:05):
Larry Siegfried was an Ohio State guy.

JL (00:44:07):
Ohio State guy. Yeah.

SM (00:44:09):
My dad and I went up to him for an autograph and he said, get out of here you little runt. Yeah, Larry Siegfried, he was as mean in person as he was on the court. He got in a lot of fights with the Sixers. Larry Siegfried and the Sixers, and of course Loscutoff was their hatchet man. Have you had any thoughts about other myths linked to the Vietnam War? I would like to list two myths that I think are here. you have already talked about the spitting image myth and the image of Jane Fonda. We are going to get in and talk about Jane in a couple minutes. But these are two myths that I came up with. Nixon's Peace with Honor. Peace with Honor was what he said in his speech in 1973. Peace and honor. What we did to Vietnam by killing 3 million people and destroying the land and agent orange and generations and so forth. Honor? I think that is a myth. And secondly, the people of South Vietnam supported their leaders and made every effort to defeat the north. We had advisors there since (19)63. I remember when I interviewed the professor at Harvard, Hue-Tam, I cannot pronounce her full name, she teaches Vietnamese history at Harvard. And when I mentioned the fact that Thieu Ky Diem regime knew, that particular group, that they were puppets. She really got upset that I said that. And she went from being a friend, and I am not going to put this on the tape, but she got very upset. She said they were elected. Let me tell you that Diem, Thieu Ky were elected, whether you like it or not, the people voted them in. Well, I thought they were puppets, but it is her interview.

JL (00:45:58):
Yeah, sure.

SM (00:45:59):
And then she said, by the way, Diem put my father in jail. It is not like she liked him. What other myths do you see in Vietnam or anything linked in Vietnam?

JL (00:46:15):
I wish I had some time to think about that. It was only a few days ago or a couple weeks ago that I had one really good thing in mind, but I cannot remember now what it was. You are catching me by surprise.

SM (00:46:30):
You can email me.

JL (00:46:31):
Maybe it will come back to me, but something quite big, quite broad that I did not think anybody had taken a look at. There are smaller pieces that I think need to be looked at. The journalism one, the idea that journalists could go everywhere in Vietnam.

SM (00:47:00):
My batteries are going in pretty good. Yeah, I am fine.

JL (00:47:11):
The one that I get-get asked about occasionally is the stories of throwing prisoners out of helicopters. That the US took captive VC and took them up in helicopters and we would throw one out in order to make the others talk. And probably a couple of times a year I get an email from somebody saying they have heard this story, is this story true? And I doubt if it is, but it is certainly out there. But now the question about that for a scholar like me is not the story in itself. Maybe it did happen once. I think things like that could have happened. But how does that play in then to the American imagination? That is the myth. A small story that is really a building block for something that is quite larger. It is like the spitting stories. The spitting stories are really about the myth that we lost the war on the home from. That is the myth. Where does this prisoners out of helicopters?

SM (00:48:28):
I have read it in books. I have read it in history books on Vietnam. Very top-quality books where there is a scene in one where there is three prisoners taken up in the helicopter. And the guys knew in the beginning that they were only going to have one coming back no matter what. Speak up. Tell me the truth. You got to tell me the truth. Are you going to tell me the truth? You got to tell me the truth. I am going to throw this guy out here if you do not tell me the truth. You do not believe I am going to tell you the truth. That kind of stuff.

JL (00:49:03):
The story goes also that I have heard it half a dozen times, that you never counted prisoners when you put them on the helicopter because the number might not square with how many you had when you got off the helicopter.

SM (00:49:19):
Is not there another one here that Americans turned over their capture to the South Vietnamese army and they basically killed them all? I remember we had Country Joe McDonald on our campus during then and Country Joe brought up something, James [inaudible] was in the room and he did not say anything, but he made a reference. [inaudible] they know why there were no prisoners of war on our side. We got POWs, but there were none on our side. And then of course, nobody ever said anything more than we just went back to the conversation about other things. But I think he was making a reference where do we ever hear about POWs on the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese forces were there? And we did hand them over to the South Vietnamese army. Did they kill them?

JL (00:50:13):
I do not know that I have ever heard that they did. We tried to convert them, get them to turn over, turn around course. We did that. There were the tiger cages on Con Son Island, the South Vietnamese did imprison some people there. There was the Phoenix program that was an assassination program that we operated.

SM (00:50:46):
I think Senator Kerry was in that too. Was not he the one, the president of the new school? Was not he a Phoenix programmer? I think.

JL (00:50:54):
I believe so. I believe the story that he tells that he was a Navy Seal. He tells one of the stories. Yeah. I do not know. That is a good question there, actually.

SM (00:51:06):
These are stories to get down to the truth of things. It is always the context. From the truth to the reality or some of these personal experiences may be just a onetime experience and it may not be across the board. And we cannot get caught up in, what do you call it, stereotyping and generalizing reality. A personal experience may be true, but a general experience may be ridiculous.

JL (00:51:30):
Yeah-yeah.

SM (00:51:31):
You bring up in your book Hanoi Jane, the destruction of characters as a key to opponents of when the neocons or the people on the right, they try to destroy character. I mentioned just some names here and I would like you to respond because you talk about Jane Fonda. But certainly Daniel Ellsberg with what happened to him and Nixon trying to find his psychiatric files or whatever to try to destroy his character. Obviously Bill Clinton went through a lot with what he did many of it on his own behalf. John Kerry in 2004, saying that he lied about his military record trying to find the Achilles heel. And nobody's perfect to that, trying to destroy character. Could you talk a little bit more about that and particularly with respect to Jane Fonda?

JL (00:52:30):
What seems to bug some people on the right is what they consider unstable character. The character flaw that they see is instability, inconsistency. And I think the sources of that are religious or religious ideology. What comes out of the Old Testament and the New Testament is, stories of deception, stories of betrayal, that evil masquerades as good, the good people are tricked by, are fooled, are misled into following false gods, false saviors. People need to be aware of that. People need to be able to trust what they see and what they hear. Instability becomes a clue maybe that there is something that does not meet the eye going on here. She does not seem to be stable. She herself seems to be susceptible to other characters. She is easily wooed by this or that. Again, in the religious terms, somebody who follows one image of goodness for a while, but then changes and follows a different image of goodness for another while then becomes part of the problem. They are easily deceived by Satan, easily deceived by the devil. In political terms, then that person becomes a liability, a political liability, because the enemy can use that person as an inroad. And I think they might not articulate it that way. They might not even think about it that way, but you are asking me why they, the political right in America today is very infused with Christian conservatism. And those notions are fundamental. That is those ideas, those fears of betrayal, deception, that book of revelation Christianity is fundamental.

SM (00:55:32):
Is another way of saying it, when people are unpredictable. When you work someplace, you would like to have people around you and you can predict how they are going to act or react in a certain situation. But when a person is unpredictable, that sends all kinds of waves up. The person may not go with the flow, may not agree with us, may be against us, may just be at the center or whatever. And it seems like we need more of those kinds of people unpredictable than we need predictable because they make us better because they challenge us more. Challenge our ways of thinking. That is when I look at Jane Fonda and I think of Daniel Ellsberg and I think of John Kerry and I think of all the other people, I consider them unpredictable people who have a conscience and will speak their minds but not necessarily agree with the mainstream.

JL (00:56:27):
Well, Howard Zinn notably said that the problem is not dissent from authority. The problem is complicity with authority. We got the Holocaust because people were too obedient. People were unwilling or unable to resist authority. And I think that that is true, not universally true, but I think certainly in the last half of the 20th century, I think that that was true. And I think it continues to be true today. Another thing that factors into this with the Hanoi Jane, John Kerry, had all kinds of characters and the attack on their character is the difference between people whose worldview is based on belief as opposed to evidence. People who live in an evidence-based epistemology or live with an evidence-based epistemology or worldview way of knowing the world are going to change based on new information. New information changes your view of how things are. And that is a part of what makes the...

JL (00:58:02):
That is a part of what makes the educated people, the intellectuals, that is what makes them intellectuals. But it is also what makes them suspect by people on the fundamentalist, religious right wing. They are suspicious of people who know quote unquote. Who know as opposed to who believe.

SM (00:58:30):
Beautiful. Yeah.

JL (00:58:31):
Knowledge is one thing. Belief is something else. And that goes clear back to the suspicions about the French Revolution, the role of intellectuals in the enlightenment period of European history. And the religious based people were always, well, the Christian, religious based people were always kind of suspicious of people who thought they...

SM (00:58:56):
That explains intellectuals being killed throughout the decades.

JL (00:59:02):
And so that is why I think, I tried to make that point in the book.

SM (00:59:05):
You do a good job of it.

JL (00:59:07):
Oh, thank you. Because she is, people would not usually think of Jane fond as an intellectual, but she works in that world of ideas.

SM (00:59:17):
Yes, she does.

JL (00:59:18):
The world of ideas and images, and a world that affects how people view the world, how people feel about the world. And so, in the way I use the term intellectual, she is an intellectual. She does intellectual work. She is a part of intellectual America. And I think that adds to her...

SM (00:59:47):
Yesterday when I interviewed Dr. Baxandall, I brought this up about the 1950s. Because we are talking about boomers now, people raised after 1946. But I am going to preface this by saying that I believe people born between (19)40 and (19)46, (19)45 are in this group as well. Because most of the leaders of the anti-war movement were born before 1946. And probably about one third of the people I have interviewed cannot stand the term boomer to begin with. It is about a group of people, it is about an idea, it is about a period, and they have a problem with even the younger boomers.

JL (01:00:20):
It might be about a marketing demographic.

SM (01:00:22):
Yeah, marketing demographic. But I bring up the (19)50s, because I think the 1950s are a very important part of the psyche of just about all boomers, whether they were activists or not. And I said this yesterday, and I will say it again today for your response that in the 1950s it seemed like there were three things that stood out in my mind above anything else, there was a concept of fear. There were a lot of good times for young people in the (19)50s because the parents were home. But there was a concept of fear because the Cold War was happening, the threat of nuclear war may have been in the backs of people's minds. And of course, the McCarthy hearings that anybody of the early boomers saw on television, seeing these voices saying that, "Are you or are you not a communist?" And lives being destroyed, careers being destroyed, people committing suicide because they could not get a job. Those kinds of things. So a concept of fear. Second is that the concept of being very quiet. People were quiet, they did not speak up very much. Security meant everything to people seemed like in those times. And thirdly, I felt that we were naive. And I think as boomers have evolved, the naivete was hit real hard in the 1960s, because you started seeing that black and white television, there were no black people on black and white television, you saw what was happening in the south, issues with the women and African Americans, and certainly Native Americans, the black and white cowboy and Indian culture. So what I am getting at here is the kind of a do not speak until you are spoken to mentality, which was what the (19)50s was about. Then you get in the 1960s where fear is replaced by being assertive, quiet becomes outspoken and naive becomes, you see the injustices and you want to speak. You want to speak when you have something to say, kind of a different mentality. So I would like your thoughts on that. That the (19)50s was really the very important in shaping everything that followed.

JL (01:02:40):
The one thing that I would add to that, and I think you are onto something, there might be an intra generational thing here. The people who are a little older and maybe... People who are a little older...

JL (01:02:59):
What is this? Is this...

SM (01:03:01):
Not that one. Hold on. Actually, this does a better job. I got to get my 45 into this one. Okay, this cannot be used again. There we go. [inaudible]

JL (01:03:23):
People who are a little older and who maybe came to political consciousness in the late (19)30s maybe, or during the World War II years themselves, and were more politically conscious at a younger age, might have had that sense of the 1950s.

SM (01:03:50):
Right.

JL (01:03:52):
People Who are a little younger may have experienced the 1950s as years of economic security, of hope and promise. The idea that you would ever be unemployed, growing up in the 1950s at least where I grew up, unthinkable. That was the (19)30s. I grew up hearing about the old days. That was the 1930s. My parents were working class, by the way. My father went to seventh grade country school.

SM (01:04:47):
I heard all about the hobos and all the stories from my parents, my mom and dad. My mom's family did not have any hard time. My dad did because he was a son of a minister.

JL (01:05:01):
But what I am getting at here is that maybe the masses, so to speak, of the (19)60s generation come out of the (19)50s with a lot of audacity, a lot of strength right there. A lot of resilience. A lot of that might have been false, but they were, what is the term? Possibilists?

SM (01:05:32):
Possibility thinkers?

JL (01:05:33):
Possibility thinkers, yeah. So you put those two things together. People who have a little more political consciousness, the older people, with a large bunch of people who really are not afraid of anything. I was not afraid. I did not go to college for job security. I went to college because my parents thought I could have a better life if I went to college. It was not out of necessity so much as it was taking advantage of an opportunity.

SM (01:06:15):
Right. And that is what the GI Bill was all about, was taking advantage after World War II, of getting a degree and education. That is another quality too, that the (19)50s was the beginning of the importance of higher education. It was always there, but the (19)50s and the (19)60s to me are at the time when the higher education really blew.

JL (01:06:36):
Really took off.

SM (01:06:36):
Particularly in the (19)60s.

JL (01:06:38):
Really grew.

SM (01:06:38):
Yeah. Really big community college movement and everything else. I am going to get back to Jane Fonda here, because I think she is fascinating in so many ways. Fonda, I am going to read this. It is page 154. I know some people do not like me to read their stuff. I have got to get my glasses again. 154. So when something strikes me, I have to put it in the interview. And I have done it, with Dr. Lifton, I had so many things. Okay here it is. Actually, sometimes I ought to ask the author to read it, you want to read it?

JL (01:07:24):
I am willing to.

SM (01:07:25):
Yes. Some people are not.

JL (01:07:27):
Now I need to get my glasses out.

SM (01:07:28):
Yeah. To me, this paragraph on 154, I want you to respond to it because I think this is very important because when I interviewed Dr. Baxandall yesterday, a lot of things she said about her life and a lot of females were comparable to what you say about Jane Fonda in this paragraph, and about speaking up for the first time. So if you could just read this paragraph from there to there, and I will have it on record. And I think it is a beautifully written paragraph.

JL (01:07:55):
"In an April 1974 Playboy interview with her and Tom Hayden, for example, Fonda speculated that the rising hostility to her was due to her having violated feminine norms by speaking her mind in public places. Punctuating the point by saying she would quote, 'No longer accept the image of a mindless Barbarella floating through space.' Unquote. Intending to strike a pose of mindfulness through those words, she inadvertently and unnecessarily in the light of later interpretations of Barbarella, fed the perception of discontinuity in her career that critics would soon throw back at her. 10 years later, she was still putting distance between herself and the galactic warrior woman, telling Erica Young for a Lady's Home Journal interview, that the film and her role as an activist were contradictory."

SM (01:08:49):
Yeah, I think that is beautiful. And it is like speaking up. Dr. Baxandall yesterday told me that she was in meetings with men and she had all the ideas, and they took her ideas during the anti-war movement. She was the one that came up with the ideas, but they did not want her to speak. Do not speak until you are spoken to, but we will take every idea that you had, and we will take the idea and say that we thought it up.

JL (01:09:15):
Yep.

SM (01:09:16):
So it is like, this is a recognition too. This is obviously, when you talk about an intellectual, she is getting it. She is getting these things here, the stereotypes about women. Do you have anything else to add on that paragraph?

JL (01:09:38):
One of the things, it is the galactic warrior woman thing there. I think that is the most troublesome image of Fonda for a lot of people. And I think that has gone unrecognized, and I think it is unspoken. That is what bothers a lot of people about Fonda, is this outspokenness, but it is also the combativeness for gender and sexual roles in the roles that she plays in her films. There is a real continuity in her film career, certainly from Barbarella on.

SM (01:10:27):
Oh, yeah. Coming home was just like, whoa. Of course Klute, we all know Klute. I remember going to see all these movies, and Coming Home was, all I can say is, wow. And there is another one, it was... There were two movies.

JL (01:10:48):
Well, Julia is on my mind because I read in the course of working on the book, I do not know if I wrote it in here. Do you know the film Julia? Late (19)70s, she played the Lilian Hellman.

SM (01:11:00):
Yes.

JL (01:11:01):
And in there, one of the reviewers, or one of the critics said, "It is the first romantic kiss between two women in a major Hollywood film." Now that is pretty breakthrough, breakout kind of stuff.

SM (01:11:18):
And oh On Golden Pond too, which was (19)81, which is the conflict with her dad, and coming together. I remember going to see that movie and all the press. It was 1981. And of course her father was an interesting person as well. You bring it up here that he was really a liberal.

JL (01:11:34):
Quiet.

SM (01:11:34):
Yeah. So his influence on her way of thinking, that is... What you do in this book is, and I think it is very important with college students, is do not believe everything you read. The gossip columns, there is context to everything. Even though I do not like Newt Gingrich personally as a politician, I do not dislike him as a human being. And I can remember (19)94, and I am a liberal, and the Women's Center had put a sign up on the door, Women's Center I hate Newt Gingrich. I said, that is inappropriate. That is inappropriate. And of course, I had to do it with the administrator on the side because I did not want to embarrass the administrator in front of the students. But I did confront the students. The students thought I was... What are you, a conservative [inaudible] guy? So I just think, you do not know Newt Gingrich. You do not know him. I do not like his politics, but do not judge him. They said "Oh, he is just some southern [inaudible]." And I said, "Did you know that he was born in Pennsylvania? He lived the first 12 years in his life in Pennsylvania near Harrisburg."

JL (01:12:38):
Yeah.

SM (01:12:39):
He has also a PhD. You may not like his politics, but anyways. This is the question you may have already answered. How did you become the person you are? Who were your greatest influences in your life, and who were your role models? Who were the role models that you most admired in the (19)50s through the (19)80s? Basically, when you were very young who were the people you looked up to that kind of inspired you? You have already talked about the chaplain you served in Vietnam, but of all the personalities and figures of that period, when boomers were young in the (19)50s, (19)60s, (19)70s, and early (19)80s, who did you admire?

JL (01:13:22):
I think it was people in my family. Because as I have said already, I was not politically conscious at all. My parents were not political people. I did not have much of a sense of culture or popular culture in those years. So were I to think of a film star or a political figure or something like that, there would be nobody. So it would be my Uncle Clay, who was a medic in World War II, and was sort of the, I guess, family war hero. Although he was, I guess the kind of classic reticent war veteran who would not say anything unless you have asked him. And then it was all medical stories, no combat stories. And then as I began to come to political consciousness, then political figures became more important to me. And then it was mostly labor people. And I have a former life as a labor historian.

SM (01:14:46):
Probably know about Bayard Rustin then, do not you?

JL (01:14:48):
Oh, yes, Bayard Rustin.

SM (01:14:52):
We did a national tribute at Bayard in Westchester, and we brought in Norman Hill and Rochelle Horowitz and that group.

JL (01:14:56):
Yeah. And so I became, oh gosh, there were so many labor sort of labor people from the 1930s. My dissertation was a study of a CIO union...

SM (01:15:09):
Oh wow.

JL (01:15:10):
In the lumber and wood products' industry. So those were my... I was a little bit older then. It was after Vietnam when I was in graduate school in, I moved away from math and into sociology and history. But it was union organizers, the people who organized the auto industry and the steel industry, and of course, the lumber and wood products industry that...

SM (01:15:40):
So you were probably a Woody Guthrie fan then too. Was there a...

JL (01:15:46):
Yeah-yeah-yeah. Woody Guthrie.

SM (01:15:49):
And Pete Seeger and their music. And I think it was John L. Lewis, was that the guy that...

JL (01:15:52):
He was the head of the CIO.

SM (01:15:54):
He was a big, big guy.

JL (01:15:56):
Yeah. Really important.

SM (01:16:03):
What kind of feedback you have gotten so far from this book in terms of, did you hear from Jane Fonda at all?

JL (01:16:10):
Oh, she blogged about the book before... I saw the cover of the book for the first time on Jane Fonda's blog.

SM (01:16:20):
Oh, wow.

JL (01:16:20):
Her January 13th blog. And she liked it. And then she was on the Larry King show probably two months ago, and she mentioned the book on the Larry King show.

SM (01:16:38):
Oh, wow. Very good.

JL (01:16:39):
So yes, she has weighed in, and she is very...

SM (01:16:44):
Did you talk to her at all?

JL (01:16:45):
Not since the book came out? I did...

SM (01:16:48):
Interview her for the book?

JL (01:16:49):
Well, I did not interview her. This is preface.

SM (01:16:54):
I tried to get her to interview for my book, that is when she was with Ted Turner, so I have been doing this for...

JL (01:17:00):
Well, you should try again.

SM (01:17:01):
Yeah, some people think I should try again, because some of the feminists that I have interviewed are friends of hers.

JL (01:17:07):
This is the first sentence of the preface. "'Oh, So it is not about me?' Jane Fonda asked, when I told her I was working on a book about Hanoi Jane. Right, I replied, it is the biography of Hanoi Jane. A phrase laden with myth and legend that plays into people's memories of the war in Vietnam."

SM (01:17:28):
Yeah.

JL (01:17:29):
We were in Harvard Square. She wanted to talk to me. It was when she was working on her memoir.

SM (01:17:37):
Oh yeah, that is right. I have that book too.

JL (01:17:38):
And she wanted to talk to me about The Spitting Image and the film chapter in The Spitting Image where I wrote about Coming Home, the 1978 film Coming Home, because I had gotten into the film archives in Los Angeles for Coming Home. And she was interested in some of the things I wrote. So she, through her research assistant called me into the Charles Hotel in Harvard Square to talk to me about that. And then in the course of that, I said, "You might be interested in the new book that I am working on." And she said, "What is that?" And I said, "It is about Hanoi Jane."

SM (01:18:22):
Oh my gosh.

JL (01:18:24):
And that comment came out, and after about a two and a half hour sit down together, which was just wonderful, there was a knock at the door, maybe a phone rang first. And she said, "Yes, I am almost finished. Come on up." And Howard Zinn walked in.

SM (01:18:49):
Oh my gosh.

JL (01:18:52):
Yeah.

SM (01:18:53):
So he was there the whole time you were there?

JL (01:18:55):
No, he just came in just as I was finishing, just as Jane and I were.

SM (01:18:58):
Oh, okay. And you were with her for two hours?

JL (01:18:59):
Yeah-yeah. A little more than two hours, yeah.

SM (01:19:02):
Did you tape it?

JL (01:19:07):
No. The terms of it was that it was not to be an interview. That was the terms of it, that I was not to be interviewing Jane, because we were talking about the Spitting Image. If anything, she was kind of interviewing me to find out...

SM (01:19:23):
Oh, okay,

JL (01:19:25):
So where did you get this?

SM (01:19:29):
Oh my gosh.

JL (01:19:33):
Because I did not like that Coming Home scene in the film, when Bob gets off the, Sally's husband, Bob gets off the airplane. And he gets off the plane and he says, where are the protestors? They told us on the plane that there would be protestors here to greet us. And then as they drive away from the airport they are greeted by protestors, and Bob flips them the bird as they drive away. And so I wrote in the book, I said, "That scene, that is fictional. That never happened. That is not the historical truth." I have met her one more time actually, when the film No Sir came out, and I saw her again at that point, and she turned to somebody, it might have been Cora Weiss actually, who was... Did you interview Cora Weiss?

SM (01:20:34):
No, I do not even know who Cora Weiss. Is-

JL (01:20:37):
Carol Weiss was the woman who, she was one of the founders of Women Strike for Peace, but she founded the Underground Mail Service between the US and Hanoi.

SM (01:20:58):
Where does she live, New York?

JL (01:20:59):
New York City, yeah.

SM (01:21:02):
She retired now?

JL (01:21:02):
Oh yeah.

SM (01:21:04):
Oh, wow.

JL (01:21:06):
But anyway, Jane Fonda turned to her, and then pointed at me and said "He is the one who said, that we got the Coming Home scene all wrong in the film." So apparently she had been talking to... Because Fonda and I were both in that film, Sir! No Sir! You probably know that, right, or not?

SM (01:21:29):
No, you are in the film itself?

JL (01:21:32):
Yeah. Because of the book, The Spitting Image.

SM (01:21:37):
I got to go...

JL (01:21:38):
Yeah, you got to see that film.

SM (01:21:39):
No, what is it?

JL (01:21:42):
Sir! No Sir!

SM (01:21:43):
I think I saw it.

JL (01:21:44):
I would think probably you have.

SM (01:21:47):
I go to the Ritz Theater in Philly, may have been shown there. Well, that is interesting. I might try. Although one of her best friends, I am not sure if it was Holly Near or Torie Osborn, who I interviewed, they said she does not like to talk about Vietnam at all.

JL (01:22:06):
Fonda?

SM (01:22:07):
Yeah.

JL (01:22:08):
I would not be surprised. In my case, that is why we were talking, but I did detect some reluctance.

SM (01:22:20):
In a nation that professes that free speech and the right to protest is part of the definition of liberty. Why has our government been so rough on the people who challenge the system. And I use these examples of historic events through the time that boomers have been alive. We all know about the McCarthy hearings in the early (19)50s, the HUAC hearings in the late (19)40s, the stories about the Hollywood Ten, several movies have been out on that recently. The stories of COINTELPRO that are terrible. I have had several revelations of what happened to some people, and what they did to destroy lives and the infiltration, and they did not care. We just got to go get them because they are against us. I do not care what happens to them. No sense of humanity at all. This is a United States of America, and we have a constitution and we can disagree, but they are the enemy. And of course, in a simpler way, the enemies list. A lot of people seem to be very happy that they were on it, including the late Daniel Shore who just passed away. And of course Watergate, we all know about that. Why is it that the most articulate seemed to be the greatest threat? Yes, we do not murder activists like they do in other countries, but we tend to subtly destroy them through the issue that you talked about, the destruction of their character. And you are not one of us, you are a troublemaker, all kinds of labels to put out people. We are supposed to be in a democracy where people agree to disagree.

JL (01:24:14):
I am not sure I can make this compelling. When I am in the classroom I am more prepared for this. But the answer is, it is precisely because this is a democracy. It is precisely because the people are sovereign, that notion of popular sovereignty.

SM (01:24:35):
Give you this, especially on my 45.

JL (01:24:39):
In the context where the economy is privately held, there is no democracy in the economy. And so the two of these together produces a kind of passive-aggressive political culture. I do not know, if I just start talking, it probably becomes less clear. But it is that trying to reconcile those two, that makes criticism of that incompatibility so dangerous. And so criticism has to be shut down. Because the people are empowered for the ballot, then the people have to be dumbed down. The people have to be kept uninformed.

SM (01:25:59):
The term liberty means a lot to me, and I think it is a term we do not use enough of. We talk about other terms, but liberty, it is freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom to be who you are, freedom. And then we hear these kinds of things happening in the United States, and even leaders that we admire will destroy a person who disagrees. I heard stories about Al Gore, if someone went against him he would really destroy their careers. I do not know if that is true, but I heard about it. Just because they disagree with them, or said bad things about them or whatever. You got to have thick skin to be in politics. And it amazes me that democracy is a really good system, that we have a constitution that protects these things and that liberty is something we aspire to and we are proud of, and we do not kill people, but we can destroy them in other ways. That is what bothers me...

SM (01:27:03):
Them in other ways. And that is what bother me about that. And certainly the Vietnam War is that whole period. And the whole period the Boomers have been alive and they have seen these things throughout their lives. But it may be is part of the whole human experience throughout time too. It has probably been forever. And it may be for... It is just it confounds me and we go on, so to speak. But the breakup of the American society is due to the activities in the (19)60s and (19)70s. Now I bring up the breakup... Make sure I got my glasses here. The breakup of the American society due to the activities in the (19)60s and (19)70s. Newt Gingrich, when he came to power in 94, Mike Huckabee on his TV show. Glenn Beck all the time does this on his show. Hannity, Rush Limbaugh. I do not want always say conservatives. There are some liberals that do it as well, but they blamed a lot of the problems that we have in our society today in America on those times back in the (19)60s and the (19)70s. They say that the loss of family values, that fewer people are going to church. The divorce rate is skyrocketing, there was rampant sex. There was no commitment to the "love the one you are with" mentality. There was a drug culture. There was a lack of respect for authority. And we need to get all those values back because that is what the (19)50s were about. And that is what America's about. It is about... And just your thoughts on that because George Will, oftentimes in his books, make commentaries on this. And other people have written about it that they like to go back and whip that period, constantly whip it. And even Barney Frank, when he wrote his book, "Speaking Frankly", which was a very good book, he said that the Democratic party is going to survive and has to say goodbye to all those people that supported Montgomery. The anti-war movement and all the... He writes about it, and that was in the (19)90s when he wrote this book that the Democratic party is going to survive. It has to say goodbye to the anti-war people. So then that is a diehard, a liberal thing.

JL (01:29:20):
Well, Barack Obama was quoted in some way that is very close to that too, that the words there that you used goodbye to the anti-war movement. There is an internet site called Open Left. And they picked up on a conference paper that I wrote out of this. And it is in there that whoever edited that piece had a quote from Barack Obama that distances him. He is distancing himself from the anti-war movement. So that is interesting. Me putting those two together, the Barney Frank with Barack Obama, I think that maybe there is something there to pursue.

SM (01:30:12):
See, the book "Speaking", it is a little thin book, a great book that came out. And there is a biography on Barney Frank right now, but this is at the time he was younger. We are talking 15 years ago. It is a very good book. And I got it underlined and it is basically talking about the survival of the Democratic party.

JL (01:30:27):
Yeah.

SM (01:30:28):
And that McGovern, if you were linked to McGovern, you just simply kind of disassociated yourself with those kinds of...

JL (01:30:36):
I think the key word here on the view of the (19)60s that you are referring to here, I think the key word is permissiveness. That is what really bothered them. And some of that has to do with religious values. And again, things are already talked about, the instability unpredictability. I mean, those are almost antonyms or predictability antonym for permissiveness. You can kind of see those things. But there is a gender component too, to this permissiveness part of it that I think is important. The idea that maleness, that masculinity is about discipline, whereas the female side of the culture is more permissive. It is more fluid. It is more free ranging. And that we lost the war in Vietnam and America is losing its way because we have lost our focus. We have lost our discipline. And it is the quote unquote "feminine" in the culture that has percolated to the surface and did so big time during the war in Vietnam. And so what really cost us was culture. And of course that the culture was-

SM (01:32:15):
We all know what the pill did. And women had brought that up, this pill. It is crucial for women. And to deny that what was happening in the (19)60s was not happening in the (19)50s and the forties... Not the people that I knew.

(01:32:37):
Want to take a break here, Chris?

(01:32:37):
Where are we going on this one? This looks like...

SM (01:32:37):
Here we go.

SM (01:32:53):
This next question deals with the healing. I took a group of students to Washington DC in 1995 to see Senator Edmond Musky and the students and I came up with this question that they wanted to ask him based on the divisions that they saw on video. They were not alive in 1968 of the police and the students hitting each other. And they knew about the assassinations that year, Bobby and Martin Luther King. They knew that the president had resigned and they saw the burnings in the cities and so forth. So the question they wanted to ask is, do you feel that the boomer generation or that generation that was reared after World War II and was shaped by those first 20 to 30 years of the life and the divisions between those who supported the war and those who were against the war, those who supported the troops and were against the troop, blacks against whites, gays against straights, men against women, and all the other isms that we saw at that time. Do you think that because of all the tremendous divide that was happening in the Stratton atmosphere on every side that the boomer generation is going to go to its grave, like the civil War generation not healing? And I will tell you what must be said after I get your response. This is a whole issue of healing. And this is a lot of what I was going to talk to Dr. Lifton about, because he has written about healing with respect as the survivor concept and the whole concept of guilt and things like that.

JL (01:34:44):
Well, I think the notion of healing is kind of mythical because it is an idea that American society was-

SM (01:34:55):
No, that is that side. Oh, here we go. Wait a minute... Now that is the other side. It is an hour and a half, I am going to do this. I only started using two tapes in the last six interviews because somebody said if something happened to one, so... Go right ahead.

JL (01:35:17):
The notion of healing presumes that the society was, that there was a oneness or unity to the society.

SM (01:35:28):
Hold on one second, let us see which one. There is a... I guess that is... It has got to be here because I put the tape in here.

SM (01:35:42):
Very good. All right. Sorry.

JL (01:35:48):
The notion of healing presumes that there was a oneness or a unity to the society to begin with. And I think that the nine... Maybe some people coming out of the 1950s, maybe growing up in the 1950s, and I say it was only maybe, right, might have had that kind of illusion or an illusionary sense of America that was not already divided racially speaking or class wise. A lot of people of my age would remember Michael Harrington's book, "The Other America", is that what it was called?

SM (01:36:39):
Yes. That was the one Kennedy was in for...

JL (01:36:42):
A re-discovery, right, of poverty in America that had been there all along, but which a lot of things in the 1950s had sort of masked the presence of. People did not see it. So I guess what I am getting at here is that the notion of healing or the Boomer generation or (19)60s generation needing to heal has never been part of my thinking at all. Not at all. So will we heal or will we not heal? I guess I would be inclined to say that that is a wrong question. I mean, heading down that road probably is not going to produce anything that is very useful.

SM (01:37:27):
Somebody said that it might have been a better question by saying, simply put, those who served in the war and those who protested the war, whether they were going to be able to come to be, because certainly the wall was built to try to heal the Vietnam generation that served in Vietnam. And Jan Scruggs wrote "To Heal a Nation", that was his book. It was not only to heal the veterans and their families in a non-political way, but as he hoped would help heal the nation over this war that seemed to divide us so much.

JL (01:38:05):
Well, I have never felt like that there was a big divide between those who fought the war and those who opposed the war. I think that by the late (19)60s that there was a lot of mutuality between those two groups and large numbers of Vietnam veterans were coming home opposed to the war themselves. Some of them joined the anti-war movement. So I think the reality is one of more solidarity and unity than there is a wound between the two that needs to be healed. I do not think there is a lot of healing that needs to be done. Now on the margins, certainly there are people who came home from Vietnam, still very pro-war and very hostile to the anti-war movement. Chris Appy in his book "Working Class War" writes about that. More hostility that way than from the anti-war movement towards Vietnam veterans. Although again, on the margin, right, on the outer margin, I have heard some expressions from people who say that they were part of the anti-war movement and bad feelings towards people who fought the war. There was some of that. I do not know how much of that surfaced during the war years itself. I am not aware that it did. But in retrospect, there is some of that. But I think that is pretty marginal.

SM (01:39:55):
Musky did not even respond to 1968. I thought students thought he was going to talk about what was happening in the streets of Chicago and the divisions. He did not even mention it. His comment was, and he kind of gave a melodramatic pause, looked like he had a tear in his eye too, and he said, "We have not healed since the Civil War over the issue of race." And then he just simply commented that, and he had just seen the Civil War series with Ken Burns and it had touched him because 430 bows of people had died in that war. Almost an entire generation of men. So that is what he was referring to. The Boomer generation. Do you like the term or is... Do you like the term the Boomer generation?

JL (01:40:40):
No. As a sociologist, no. I think it is kind of meaningless. I think it is too broad. I mean, even the arguments go on about how to date it, right?

SM (01:40:53):
Yeah. It is supposed to be (19)46 to (19)64, but some people do not like Boomers also do not like the Greatest Generation. They do not like Generation X. Millennials...

JL (01:41:06):
I am a sociologist. And one of my favorite sociologists is Karl Mannheim, who wrote a book called "The Problem of Generations." And he wrote that generations are in some sense about chronology and time, but they are also about politics and ideology and culture. And so people born at very different times can be part of the same generation, culturally speaking. And I find that to be a very powerful insight. So young people who were active against the war in the late 1960s had a lot in common with people much older than them who were part of the anti-fascist movement of the 1930s and the 1940s, or who were union organizers in the 1930s. And likewise today as a college professor, occasionally I meet students who are very young. They are in their twenties today, but they strike me as people who would have fit in comfortably with people of my own age. Or we could go out and have dinner tonight, and it would not be as though they are 22 and they are with a bunch of people who are 65. Right? It would be a very free flowing conversation there. So those are some of my thoughts on generations.

SM (01:42:44):
It is interesting that some of the people within the Boomer generation, and I know I do not like, I am starting to not like the term either, but is that they thought they were the most unique generation of history because they felt, and I know this from talking when I was in college, we were going to change the world. We are going to make it better. We are going to end racism, sexism, homophobia, and bring peace. Nothing will ever be the same. That was kind of an attitude. Maybe it was kind of naive, hopeful, what is the term I want to use? But not realistic. So when you hear people within the generation say, we were the most unique, how do you respond to that as a sociologist?

JL (01:43:25):
I do not hear people say that very often.

SM (01:43:27):
I mean, when they were young, did you ever hear anybody?

JL (01:43:30):
No.

SM (01:43:31):
No?

JL (01:43:31):
Not that I remember. No-no-no-no.

SM (01:43:35):
Well, there was that... I went to Bingham tonight, a few students that you were saying about that. What the thing here too is something that Phyllis Schlafly said to me while I interviewed her, and David Horowitz has written about in his books, and that is the troublemakers of the (19)60s, probably making reference to the new left, run today's universities and are in charge of the curriculum. They run the women's studies, the gay studies, the Holocaust studies, the Native American studies, Latin American studies, black Studies, environmental Studies, and Asian American studies. Basically, they run it all. And it is not the way people thought back because they are not conservatives in any way. So just your thoughts on that the troublemakers of the (19)60s run today's universities?

JL (01:44:24):
He might be right that they run all of those programs, but they do not run the universities. I mean that is sort of the whole and part kind of thing. The whole is larger than the sum of the parts. You know what I mean? You got people running all these specific programs. But in some... I mean, again, as a sociologist speaking of this, it might be the very fact that liberals run these programs that insulates the people at the top who really run. There is a compartmentalizing that goes on, a divide and conquer. I think in some ways when it comes down to budgeting and those kinds of things-

SM (01:45:16):
I worked at Westchester and there is only two faculty members that are willing to admit they are conservative, and one of them is very big.

JL (01:45:24):
Well, liberal is different than left too.

SM (01:45:27):
Yes.

JL (01:45:27):
That is another thing. I quite commonly say to students when it comes up in classes that the colleges are run by centris, right?

SM (01:45:38):
A la Bill Clinton.

JL (01:45:40):
And it is not. People on the right and people on the left are a minority in the college and university system, and we are tolerated. Both the right and the left are tolerated. The center is quite large, quite powerful. And most administrators, in my view, come out of the center. They are pretty tolerant, which I think is a characteristic of centris, but that is different than left.

SM (01:46:14):
Yeah. Although left could run these programs though.

JL (01:46:18):
Oh, yeah. Oh, yes. Absolutely.

SM (01:46:20):
In your opinion, when did the (19)60s begin and when did it end?

JL (01:46:26):
I do not know if I have anything unique to say about that. Anything that...

SM (01:46:36):
A year, an event that you think started the (19)60s or... And when did it end? Was there a specific event and what was the watershed moment?

JL (01:46:46):
When did it end? On that, the one thing I would say on that is, I do not know. I think it just bled away. I do not know. Those years I lived through self- consciously, quite self-consciously. And I do not know, I would be very reluctant even to try to think about-

SM (01:47:11):
Beginnings and ends?

JL (01:47:12):
Beginnings and ends.

SM (01:47:13):
How about the watershed moment? Is there something that "This is a (19)60s..." Or actually, "This is when Boomers were young." And...

JL (01:47:23):
Yeah...

SM (01:47:26):
Same thing?

JL (01:47:27):
Same thing. And I think that has to do with my biography. I think the way I lived that period of time, I think makes me not a good... I know you are not looking for a source on that, that is not the point. But I did not have the consciousness coming through those periods to think in those kinds of terms.

SM (01:47:53):
How important were The Beats in shaping the attitudes of the (19)60s? Because they were in the (19)50s and they were the group that oftentimes was looked at as the beginning of non-conformity-

JL (01:48:04):
Conformists and the hippies.

SM (01:48:06):
And intellectuals who are not going to be part of the status quo.

JL (01:48:12):
Well, somehow or other they did. The Beats influenced me as a kind of nonconformist intellect. I think my own coming to self-consciousness as an intellectual was influenced. Some of the first poetry I ever read period was Ginsberg, and that is The Beats. And so that is important.

SM (01:48:45):
His poem Howl was banned in 1955 from schools.

JL (01:48:51):
Yeah.

SM (01:48:51):
[inaudible]

JL (01:48:53):
Yeah. And going to City Lights Bookstore and the old Midnight Special Books when it was in Venice.

SM (01:49:06):
I was in the Bay Area for a while and I never went to City Lights. I do not know where the heck I was, but...

JL (01:49:09):
Those were important. Those were kind of pilgrimages for me. Well, when I was in graduate school in Oregon and just kind of beginning to find myself, to me those were "wow" moments.

SM (01:49:23):
Yeah. Ferlinghetti still runs the City Lights Bookstore. It is amazing. He is 92.

JL (01:49:29):
I would like to go there with Hanoi Jane.

SM (01:49:32):
I bet you-you can get there.

JL (01:49:33):
It could be...

SM (01:49:34):
Just, I think all you have to do is contact, because I know that Paul Krassner has been there many times. Do you know Paul?

JL (01:49:44):
I know who he is. I have never met him.

SM (01:49:44):
Yeah, he has led me on to some good interviews. We are getting close to the end here, but this is an important one too. In your own words, describe the America that you see during the times that Boomers have been alive. Now I know, let us just forget the term Boomer, but the generation that grew up after World War II. And as Boomers age, and Boomers are now 64 years old, the oldest ones and 48, the youngest ones. So there is no spring chickens any more within the Boomer generation. And also, they now realize the concept of mortality that they are not going to live forever. But I am just going to mention these years and just give me a few thoughts. Nothing in light, just immediate reaction. 1946 to 1960, what does that mean to you?

JL (01:50:35):
Post-World War II America, riding the wave of victories in World War II and global respect, supremacy, domination, to use kind of pejorative terms, but riding the wave of success and victory.

SM (01:51:05):
1961, this is the period when Kennedy started, to 1970?

JL (01:51:20):
Second wave, new Deal. The New Deal comes into its own.

SM (01:51:33):
1971 to 1980, the (19)70s?

JL (01:51:40):
A retreat, the beginning of the downside.

SM (01:51:48):
Do you also believe that when you define the (19)60s, you really, the first three to four years of the (19)70s are the (19)60s too? Because (19)70, (19)71, and (19)72 and half of (19)73 were still the (19)60s. So just like you cannot put generations, sometimes you cannot put decades.

JL (01:52:07):
Right. No, I would agree with-with that. Although as the war and the anti-war movement began to fade in or decline in importance during those years, the counterculture begins really to come into its own, begins to gain dominance, gain influence.

SM (01:52:38):
How about 1981 to 1990?

JL (01:52:43):
Oh, the retrenchment, pessimism, loss of optimism, reaction.

SM (01:53:01):
Conservatives might say, we are back. That is what Ronald Reagan used to say.

JL (01:53:07):
Yeah.

SM (01:53:08):
And President Bush said the Vietnam syndrome is over. I do not think it was, but when you look at 1991 to 2000, the year of Bush and Clinton, what do you think of in that decade?

JL (01:53:26):
The beginning of a new Cold War against the Arab world, the Islamist world, or some... Yeah, a new war period.

SM (01:53:42):
And then that 2001 to 2010 with George Bush II and now President Obama, that decade?

JL (01:53:54):
The decade of fear.

SM (01:53:54):
Terrorism.

JL (01:53:56):
Terrorism, fear. Yeah.

SM (01:54:00):
Now, terrorism was also part of the (19)80s with taking over of airplanes, and it was kind of evolving. And of course you had the Olympics in 72 where the terrorists came in. So you saw some signs and things were coming. What do you think of Boomers will do in their remaining years? A lot of people think that they are going to change the retirement. They have still got 15 to 20 years left because a lot of them have taken care of themselves. They will live longer, particularly females. Think you expect anything from them? I do not.

JL (01:54:36):
You do not? I do.

SM (01:54:38):
Yeah.

JL (01:54:38):
I expect reforms in healthcare. Elder care. Jane Fonda's new book, new project is on aging. And Fonda has always been on, I do not know, the cutting edge or she has always had a sense of what was going on. And that is not to predict that she is right. Again, that, that is not my point. But Fonda, as a public face of that generation of people and this age group that you are talking about here, I think that that is promising. I kind of bond as a bell weather of where our generation might go.

SM (01:55:40):
It is interesting. Dennis Hopper just passed away. He had that ad on tv, but you guys have got to plan because you are going to live a lot longer. That ad was under quite a time and he was kind of a symbolic of a generation, even though he is a little older and now he has passed on, you do not see the ads anymore. A question on the books of the period, there is three books I wanted to ask you on.

SM (01:56:03):
On the books of the period, there is three books I wanted to ask you on, seeing if they were good books or you read them and they were right on, or a piece of junk, basically. Theodore Roszak's book, The Making of a Counterculture. Did you ever read it and what did you think of it?

JL (01:56:18):
Sure. One of the books that educated me about the counterculture. I read it in graduate school when I was trying to understand the counterculture and what it was. I knew the counterculture through books like that more than I knew through participation in the counterculture.

SM (01:56:40):
How about The Greening of America by Charles Reich?

JL (01:56:43):
Read it.

SM (01:56:45):
Seen to be a classic book.

JL (01:56:47):
Oh, my. Gosh, it is so important for me, but I am at a loss for words to say what that was, because it was so long ago and I have never talked about it. I do not think I have... I have never heard that title.

SM (01:57:05):
Those two books are very influential to me too, and they were powerful.

JL (01:57:09):
But I do not remember how and why.

SM (01:57:11):
They were required in grad school to read. I interviewed Daniel Bell, the great associate from Harvard, and I asked him about these two books. He said, "They are terrible books. They do not have any ideas in them," because he is... Then I asked him, "Well, how about Eric Erickson's books?" because they are also very good, and the one... Oh, come on, Steve. Kenneth Keniston. He said Kenneth Keniston's books-

JL (01:57:38):
Youth and Rebellion.

SM (01:57:43):
Yeah, those were good. They were good. And then the other one was The Culture of Narcissism, which a lot of people... Christopher Lasch.

JL (01:57:49):
Yes. Yes-yes-yes.

SM (01:57:50):
That is where a lot of the Boomers were heading or whatever.

JL (01:57:53):
A lot where they were heading, uh-huh. All these are...

SM (01:58:00):
I am down to my last... Do you have five minutes more?

JL (01:58:04):
Sure.

SM (01:58:07):
These are just real fast responses to... This is what I did yesterday with Dr. Baxendale. And quick, real fast responses. What do you think of these people, or this? What do you think about The Wall, the Vietnam Memorial? Just a quick...

JL (01:58:23):
Do not like it, did not like it. Did not like it, do not like it.

SM (01:58:30):
In what way in particular do not you like it?

JL (01:58:33):
It evokes wrong feelings. It makes Vietnam veterans the victims of the war and shifts the sentiments away from the Vietnamese as being victims of our aggression. That is it.

SM (01:58:59):
What do you think of Kent State and Jackson State?

JL (01:59:06):
One thing I have never been clear on is whether they belong in the same sentence. I just do not know, because I do not know... Jackson State, I have never quite been able to get a fix on what that was about.

SM (01:59:19):
10 days later [inaudible]-

JL (01:59:20):
10 days later. Was it?

SM (01:59:23):
Yeah, it was.

JL (01:59:25):
Somewhat...

SM (01:59:28):
At Kent State, they have made an effort to make sure that when they could do their remembrance, that they conclude them both and they bring speakers in from both. Because it was a loss no one... Whenever I talk about Kent State, so predominantly white campus and black campus, they did not talk about it. There was also Orangeburg too, earlier on.

JL (01:59:45):
I wrote a large piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education this spring. I do not know if you saw this-

SM (01:59:49):
No, I did not.

JL (01:59:49):
...if you know about that. Yeah, it was the cover. It was a cover story. There was the weekly insert.

SM (01:59:59):
Oh, yes, I know. I know.

JL (02:00:00):
It is very good. And my piece was the cover piece, April 26th edition, I think, of it.

SM (02:00:09):
And what was that on?

JL (02:00:09):
On Kent State.

SM (02:00:11):
Oh, really?

JL (02:00:12):
Yeah. The title of it is The Times, They Changed. The point of it was why is there so much quiescence on American campuses today, 40 years after Kent State? And what I was saying, it was not the students. It was not the students, it was the times. Sociologically. You know what I am saying? The times made the students then. The times today are making the students now.

SM (02:00:46):
Very good point.

JL (02:00:47):
With an emphasis on the management of higher education, the administration of higher education, and the proliferation of a lot of those programs that you mentioned is part of that. A lot of those programs came out of that time period. And the effect of a lot of those programs is a cooling out effect. It is to say would be activists, "Here, you have got your program, you have got your budget, you have got your offices, now get to work." And that has worked. And the thing that is worked better than any is study abroad programs.

SM (02:01:33):
No, they are good. Yeah, I know. Every student I know is doing it. Every student, for at least one semester, and I wish I had done it.

JL (02:01:41):
Usually their junior year. But it completely fractures campus politics. It completely fractures political organization on campus.

SM (02:01:52):
As well as the amount of work they have to do to survive. They got to work so they do not have time for other things.

JL (02:01:58):
Do not have time for other things. So all of that is in there.

SM (02:02:02):
A few more and then we are done. I find it interesting that the women nurses that were murdered in 1989 up in Canada, that the Women's Center will now have annual events just about on every campus in remembrance of those female students, think 11 or 12, yet universities have never remembered Kent State, ever. And they tried to not remember it at Kent State, but now it is [inaudible] you go back. And the [inaudible] University, the (19)60s was the homecoming theme a year ago. And I would have nothing to do with it, because I was there. They were making it look like everything was happy, rock and roll. And yeah, there is a lot of good, happy remembering times, but I think they were taking away from the serious parts of that particular thing.

JL (02:02:51):
Last...

SM (02:02:52):
Go ahead.

JL (02:02:53):
Well, last summer at this time, (20)09, 40th anniversaries of Woodstock were all over the US News media. Everybody was talking about Woodstock and, "Were your parents at Woodstock?" Huge big deal. What, three months later, 40th anniversary of the October moratorium. Not a word. Not a word. November moratorium of (19)69. Not a word. Very little leading up to Kent State, 40th anniversary of Kent State. There was not much. Kent State came very close, the 40th anniversary came very close to going with no attention.

SM (02:03:43):
See, I have been there the last four years at the events, and if it was not for the [inaudible] of the world and the people pushing on that student organization, which is about 15 people...

JL (02:03:53):
The piece I started to write on Kent State was, I was going to start out with Woodstock and compare 40th...


SM (02:04:00):
Most of my interviews have been long because of... Anyway.

JL (02:04:15):
Yeah.

SM (02:04:18):
How much time do you have?

JL (02:04:19):
I really should... As quickly as possible, we should wrap up.

SM (02:04:22):
Just real fast, just say one or two words. Free speech movement.

JL (02:04:32):
Well, very, very important as a run-up to the anti-war movement.

SM (02:04:44):
Freedom Summer.

JL (02:04:45):
I was not part of it. I knew it was happening.

SM (02:04:55):
Seemed to be a great education vehicle for many of the activists down the road. The Montgomery Bus Boycott, which is Dr. King's big thing that he came to prominence. Any thoughts on Emmett Till?

JL (02:05:08):
These are all things, the civil rights movement. I knew about it through the news, but did not have any involvement in it.

SM (02:05:15):
The March on Washington (19)63?

JL (02:05:17):
No.

SM (02:05:18):
How about 1968 as a year? What are your thoughts on the year?

JL (02:05:22):
Oh, well, I got drafted. I got drafted in 1968. My dad died in 1968. 1968 was a keystone year, a watershed year for me.

SM (02:05:33):
These other events, Chicago Eight trial, the Gulf of Tonkin... Well, that was (19)64. And Tet, which was a major-

JL (02:05:42):
Well, I got drafted because of Tet. I started paying attention probably with Tet that year.

SM (02:05:50):
These are two things that we are not very proud of as Americans, and that is My Lei and Attica. Just your comments on those two.

JL (02:06:00):
Attica, I followed quite closely. It was shortly after I got home from Vietnam, I am thinking, right? Was 1970, (19)71?

SM (02:06:10):
Yeah. And that is Governor Rockefeller.

JL (02:06:12):
Yeah. Yeah. Also, I was in graduate school, and what was then known as the Radical Criminology movement was quite powerful, on the West Coast anyway, because of the crim school in Berkeley. And so I started following criminology issues and crime issues quite a lot. My Lei was important because I had been to Vietnam and [inaudible]-

SM (02:06:48):
Clicking all day long here. This the last. Yeah, that is the last on that one. Okay, good. He has done. I am retiring him. I will not go over any more of these. There is quite a few. You can see I have quite a few here, and I am not going to go over these. The last question is when the best history books and sociology books are written when the Boomer generation has passed on. I say this because I drive to Gettysburg 10 times a year. I go to the battlefield to understand what it was like for that tremendous loss of what war's all about. And they have a statue there of the last man who participated in the Civil War. He died in 1924. I always sit there and I say, "Geez, the last person who was in the Civil War died in 1924." The books are carrying the message on. So the question I am asking, what will be the legacy of this generation that grew up after World War II in the history books, once they are long gone?

JL (02:07:59):
I think it is going to be a positive legacy. It is going to be positive. I think the legacy will be building on the best of what came out of the Greatest Generation.

SM (02:08:19):
Yeah, it is interesting because we are the kids of the Greatest Generation.

JL (02:08:23):
Yeah. Yeah. I think the Boomer generation might be the best and most important product of the Greatest Generation.

SM (02:08:32):
It is interesting because you told me already how important your parents were, and I know how important my parents were. So when we are critical of the (19)50s for all the things we have discussed about the things behind the scenes that were happening, I do not blame my parents. My parents did everything in their lives to give me the happiness and health, and devoted their lives to their kids. Do you feel the same way?

JL (02:09:00):
Well, see, I do not think I have said along the way, in fact, I maybe sort of implied that I... In fact, I said the (19)50s for me was a time of hope and promise and optimism. That was my (19)50s.

SM (02:09:19):
And that was my (19)50s.

JL (02:09:23):
I think because of my parents, and they were products of the thirties and the forties. So I think that is where I am. That is where I am. I know that my (19)50s was not everybody's (19)50s, right?

SM (02:09:43):
Yeah. Certainly African-Americans and certainly women, in some respects, although some women did have a happy 1950s because they were expected to be mothers. And very few, they ended up being teachers, but they all were expecting to be married by a certain age and raise kids. They did not think of other things until all these movements happened, and a lot of the people in the (19)50s really did not start thinking about these things until the (19)60s. But I do not think they ever blamed their parents, in most respects. Well, thank you very much. When I go to the Vietnam Memorial, and I have gone now since 1994 in honor of Lewis Puller, the one thing about...

Speaker 3 (02:10:24):
Hey.

SM (02:10:26):
Hey, how you doing?

Speaker 3 (02:10:26):
All right. Hey. Hi, Jerry.

JL (02:10:28):
Hi.

SM (02:10:29):
Let me see now. The people they dislike the most are still Jane Fonda, because you see the stickers they sell about Jane Fonda, the decals that they wear on their clothes. They did do not like McNamara, because a couple times I have been to The Wall and they had actually had McNamara's book there with bullet holes through it. And they did not like Bill Clinton.

JL (02:10:56):
They are not going to do that to my book.

SM (02:11:00):
No. And they did not like Bill Clinton when he came there. There was some booing, some of them booing because he did not... So there was that kind of thing. There is still that strong animosity toward Jane Fonda, and Lewis Puller and Jan Scruggs, and I think the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund have done a great job in terms of trying to do their best to heal from the divisions in America by bringing Bill Clinton to The Wall and bringing some others. I often ask the vets if they brought Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden, what kind of reception they would get, although probably they would not do it, number one. If McNamara was alive, would he ever have had the courage to go there now, just to protect them? But I do not know if you have any other thoughts on anything I was saying or...

JL (02:11:57):
The only thought is that it is... I thought where you were maybe leading with this, is why do people like this hang on? I think it is a lost war phenomenon. It is what happens after a war is lost. People have a hard time letting go of it. They want it to come out differently. Lifton would be the one to talk about sort of collective trauma. So cultural expressions come from that and the people who then are held responsible for the loss of the war are not let go of in those memories. Those things hang on. They become hang-ups, in a sense, and people cannot get beyond those. And World War I, it is not quite like Vietnam, but the outcome of it is not conclusive like World War II is. First of all, it is not a very popular war in the United States, World War I. A lot of dissent.

SM (02:13:15):
Very short too.

JL (02:13:16):
It is short. A lot of dissent. And then 12 years or so after the end of the war, you got the Depression, and World War I veterans are still looking for their bonus pay and so forth. That all gets scuttled by the Hoover administration, so you have veterans marching on... So their sense of themselves as veterans and the controversy surrounding that, the controversy surrounding the war, the nature of the war, then causes them to think about what they did in the war, what happened to them in the war. And then, 10 years after the war, they are still living their lives as veterans yet, because they are looking for the bonus payments and so forth. So there is a messy post-war period after World War I, not after World War II, but it is pretty cut and dried.

SM (02:14:24):
GI Bill.

JL (02:14:24):
War is over, people come home, the GI Bill. The country moves on. America into its glory days. Vietnam, again, the post-war legacy of Vietnam, very much more like World War I. It is messy.

SM (02:14:40):
Then you had the blip of the Korean War, some people say the lost war, and they did not get a whole lot either.

JL (02:14:49):
Well, Korea sort of gets subsumed, I think, in World War II culture. People are still looking at World War II movies and watching Victory at Sea on television.

SM (02:15:11):
Victory at Sea. That is another thing that you grew up in as Boomers.

JL (02:15:14):
Boy, we sure did.

SM (02:15:15):
[inaudible] television, and that guy with a voice and...

JL (02:15:20):
All right, I got [inaudible]-

SM (02:15:21):
I am going to take four more pictures and you are out of here. I know you probably do not like taking a picture of your book, but I am going to... And then I have a mannequin of Jane Fonda. I am going to bring it out here. Sorry. There we go. Get that closer in there. You going to talk to Jane at all? Do you talk to her at all?

JL (02:15:45):
No. No, I do not.

SM (02:15:47):
There you go. Ready.

JL (02:15:51):
Have emailed a little bit.

SM (02:15:54):
Here we go. I am going to take a picture right here. Right at one. Two. And the last one but not least. Ready? Three.

JL (02:16:06):
This is for the before and after?

SM (02:16:08):
Yeah. You look a little more tired. Ready. That is it. Very good.

JL (02:16:15):
All right.

SM (02:16:19):
Well, thank you very much. Pleasure meeting you.

JL (02:16:21):
My pleasure.

SM (02:16:23):
I hope you do another myth book. Are you thinking of doing another myth book?

JL (02:16:29):
I am not. No. I am thinking of doing whatever I can to make this book successful still and get out of it everything that can be gotten out of it. One idea that some theaters are interested in, I have got one planned now and two others, the Fonda films that I use in this book, the idea would be a mini-series, maybe done over one long weekend or over a few weekends, and then me talk about why I think those films work the way they do in the culture, the way I write about them in the book here. There is two or three theaters, small community independent theaters, that are interested in doing that. So it is things like that that I want to do before I move on to something else.

SM (02:17:27):
Ever thought of going out with Jane? I mean, maybe do two or three... She probably charges an arm and a leg, but she is so rich she does not need the money. But going to a place like the Ritz Theater in Philadelphia. The Ritz Theater is the one, The Most Dangerous Man In America, which was the film on Daniel Ellsberg.

JL (02:17:46):
Great film.

SM (02:17:46):
The William Kunstler movie that the daughter came and spoke at the Ritz Theater in Philly. I know there is also a really good theater at Kent State, which is the Kent State Theater, which is really... This kind of stuff would go over well there, because they have a big following from the remembrance and everything.

JL (02:18:06):
I would love to. Any chance that I could have to do something programmatically with Fonda and the book and films I think is just a terrific idea. I think what it needs is a venue.

SM (02:18:21):
I know Dr. Greene. I only got to know him because of my dad before he died, was an athlete there. And Dr. Greene is the main historian at Cazenovia College. Got a book coming out on the (19)60s. Now he is kind of a conservative guy. But I am trying to talk to them about where I am going to donate all my stuff, my archives and stuff. And in my parents' honor. Everything is for my parents, because I love them desperately. He is bringing in James Kunen, who wrote The Strawberry Statement. So I could talk to him, because he does the interviews. So you might be a good person to come in and talk about Hanoi Jane. If I was still working at the universities, I would probably be bringing you in in a minute, but I am not there anymore. So I might mention your name to Dr. Greene in August. I am going to be up there just before Labor Day. And I am interviewing Minnie Bruce Pratt. I do not know if you know her. She is at Syracuse University, a distinguished professor. I am interviewing her and then I am going to go over there. But there is a lot about this, and I think the way you write this, it really can appeal to young people. And movies, doing it through the movies is how a lot of young people... Today we did a movie series and we discussed what the movie meant. And we get people there. We link to the academic classroom. So I think there is a lot here. And she reinvents herself many times in her life, and she also has an unbelievable sense of humor. I have seen her on TV. She is a very serious person when it gets to politics, but I am telling you, she also has a great sense of humor.

JL (02:20:10):
Yeah. I saw the serious side of her, the time that I spent with her. A real no bullshit kind of person.

SM (02:20:20):
What is amazing is that relationship with Tom Hayden. I can understand the Ted Turner one. I can understand the vet, Roger Vadim. I do not understand the Tom Hayden one. Tom Hayden, historically, everybody respects him as an activist and a great writer, assertive and everything, but he has not good with women. I have had several people say that they admire him as an activist and what he has done with his life, but in terms of how he treats women, it is not good.

JL (02:20:51):
Turns out his, I think, still current wife, Barbara is her name... I met Barbara when Barbara was in high school in Vancouver, British Columbia, when I was up there, mini tour with my first book, One Union In Wood, on the wood products industry. I had interviewed a then older guy up there. It is kind of serendipitous now, but she was there in this bar where I was with these other folks. A couple years ago, I was back in Vancouver for a memorial service for this older guy, and Hayden came to that with Barbara. And she said to me, she said, "I bet you do not remember me, do you?" And I said, "No." And then she told me where we had met.

SM (02:21:55):
Oh, my God.

JL (02:21:56):
And I had a great time with Hayden.

SM (02:21:58):
Oh, he is great, and he is great to talk to.

JL (02:22:01):
He is so [inaudible].

SM (02:22:03):
He sits down like this and... That is the Hayden that I like to remember. That is the one I always want to remember.

JL (02:22:10):
I just love the guy.

SM (02:22:12):
Yeah. I guess he is just struck some of the women the wrong way. And I am not saying that Fonda criticism, but some of the feminists have known some of the things he has done. So they do not consider him a, what is that word, a big supporter of women, I guess, in the long run.

JL (02:22:37):
All right, my friend.

SM (02:22:39):
All right.

JL (02:22:39):
Got to go.

SM (02:22:39):
All right. Thank you.

JL (02:22:40):
Do you get a break before your next interview?

SM (02:22:42):
Yeah, I think it is at two o'clock, with Dr. [inaudible]. I have his... What time is it?

JL (02:22:46):
[inaudible].

SM (02:22:48):
Oh yeah, half hour. Okay, great talking.

JL (02:22:50):
All right, good talking to you.

SM (02:22:51):
Yep. Have a safe trip back.

JL (02:22:53):
Thank you. Thank you.

SM (02:22:54):
And I will be emailing you, and maybe we can have a three-way conversation with Jane Fonda.

JL (02:23:02):
I am going to be... Well, I am not sure actually. I may be in Philadelphia [inaudible].

SM (02:23:12):
If you are, let me know, because I am working on the book. I will be hibernating then, doing transcribing and...

JL (02:23:16):
Maybe get together.

SM (02:23:16):
Yeah.

JL (02:23:16):
Okay. All right. Bye.

SM (02:23:16):
Bye. Have a good day.

(End of Interview)

2010-07-30

Stephen McKiernan

Jerry Lembcke, 1943-

144:35

English

Binghamton University Libraries

audio/mp4

Sound

Audio

College teachers; Sociologists; Lembcke, Jerry, 1943--Interviews

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