Interview with Dr. Mark Lytle

Interview with Dr. Mark Lytle

Lytle, Mark Hamilton ; McKiernan, Stephen

Scholars; College teachers; Bard College; Lytle, Mark Hamilton--Interviews

Mark Hamilton Lytle is a scholar and educator. He received his Bachelor's degree from Cornell University and his Master's degree and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University. He is a professor of History and Environmental Studies, Chair of the American Studies Program at Bard College, and has written many volumes of history and biography.

2010-08-09

In copyright

McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.84a ; McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.84b

2017-03-14

McKiernan Interviews

236:17

McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: Mark Lytle
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: REV
Date of interview: 9 August 2010
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(Start of Interview)

SM (00:00:04):
Testing one, two. In your book, "America's Uncivil Wars: The (19)60s Era from Elvis to the Fall of Richard Nixon," I have several questions. Question number one. You include Elvis, who was in the (19)50s, and then the fall of Nixon was in 1974, so when you are talking about the (19)60s, you are actually talking about part of the (19)50s and part of the (19)70s. Could you explain that?

ML (00:00:34):
Well, it is partly said that the tyranny of the calendar does not really help us unlock historical events and historical trends. And so that scene, the (19)60s narrowly as phenomena of a particular timeframe. I do not think it is as illuminating as to think of the (19)60s as a state of mind and a cultural shift that worked itself out over a long period of time. It was also, for so long, there was the notion of the do not trust anyone over 30. And so, as an emphasis on the (19)60s phenomena as a generational conflict, which I think of as naive. It is not that there was the baby boom generation coming of age, with all of their energy and a certain amount of rebelliousness, but, as I argue in my book, if you look at the people who inspired the children of the (19)60s, they were all born prior to the baby boom, and most of them in the (19)30s, anywhere from David Dellinger, who has turned, who was in his (19)50s in the (19)60s, and Paul McCartney, who is born in the late (19)30s, (19)40s, something like that, and he just turned 70.

SM (00:02:02):
I think he did.

ML (00:02:05):
But in any case, Elvis is another example. Elvis would be in his, I believe he would be in his-

SM (00:02:11):
Late (19)70s.

ML (00:02:13):
Late (19)70s, or even (19)80.

SM (00:02:15):
Yeah.

ML (00:02:15):
Something like that. But I do think that, in the way the (19)60s had a kind of populist, the grassroots sensibility, even though an awful lot of the leaders did have somewhat of elite connections. Elvis is a good example of that grassroots phenomena. So that was actually my purpose of, I know it is sort of the long (19)60s, as opposed to the [inaudible].

SM (00:02:50):
Do you like these terms? Tom Brokaw has just been written writing up the greatest generation. Then you had what they called "the silent generation," which is a short period of time, which is probably the people we're talking about here. They were not so silent. Then we had, of course, the boomer generation, which I am talking about, those born between (19)46 and (19)64. Then you had generation Xers that followed them. And now were into the millennials, who are college students today, who actually have surpassed boomers in numbers.

ML (00:03:24):
Uh huh. Actually, makes sense that they would, although I do not know if there is demographically as bunch of a bulge as the-

SM (00:03:34):
No. Right. Right.

ML (00:03:35):
I think that is one of the differences, the population's much bigger, so the pure numbers do not mean the same thing. I do think that there is generational experience, something that is, each generation has a few formative events who are shared experience, September 11th, or the coming of the Internet. And then, within generations, there are some people who are very much framed by the Internet, and some people it sort of goes by them and maybe it does not affect them until 10 years later. I can remember when I first went on e-mail in the early (19)90s, was because my son had it at college, and it was an easy way to communicate.

SM (00:04:18):
Yes.

ML (00:04:20):
But I had four colleagues at [inaudible] who also had e-mail. So now half the younger generation do not even use e-mail. It is considered to be old foggy stuff.

SM (00:04:32):
Yeah.

ML (00:04:32):
And so, there is a certain amount of that in the (19)60s also, that there were these cultural markers, rock and roll being one good example of it that began as a very much a defining phenomenon. And then, over time, there were a certain number of, part of the cultural elite who began to embrace rock and roll, break down some of the artificial distinctions or hierarchies of genres. So, and I think in that sense, they belatedly got on the bandwagon.

SM (00:05:11):
I think what happens, higher education has this tendency, they want to put everything in little boxes. And so, the boomers of the box from (19)46 to (19)64, because of the large number of people that were born during that timeframe, and certainly the generation Xers and those titles. Howard Straus had written a lot about this. They had the characteristics and so forth. You mentioned something very important before I got to the next question. Todd Gitlin was the first one that said that if you mentioned the word "boomer" one more time, I think we will end the interview. Because he says, "I do not look at it in those terms." He looks at it in terms like you do, about the events, and the fact that the people that experienced the first 10 years of the boomers are totally different than those who, and the second 10 years who were like 10 years old when things were happening. What kind of influence would they have? And one other final point, and then when I interviewed Richie Havens, Richie said, "I was born in," I think, "'41." He says, "I am as boomer as anybody. I am a boomer in mentality," and most of the leaders of the hippies, and the Yippies, and they were all born between (19)40 and (19)45.

ML (00:06:20):
Right. Like Abbie Hoffman.

SM (00:06:21):
Yeah. And Tom Hayden and-

ML (00:06:23):
Jerry Rubin.

SM (00:06:23):
Yeah.

ML (00:06:23):
Those guys.

SM (00:06:24):
That whole group.

ML (00:06:25):
Yeah. No, I think, and one of the things that I do emphasize in my book, but when I anecdotally test this proposition, my wife's two years younger than I am, and yet her experience was quite different from mine, because when I was in college at Cornell, it was still a (19)50s kind of atmosphere, very fraternity centric. We had huge beer bashes and [inaudible] out of "Animal House" on the weekends. And when I came back in the fall of 1967, or the spring of 1968, somewhere in that range of time, everybody was stoned. It was between the summer of (19)67, there was a kind of title change in cultural practice, at least I suspect it happened slightly later on other campuses, but it was like a page turned. And so, I do think that Todd's right about making the distinctions within a very narrow timeframe. I am actually technically not a boomer. I was born in January of 1945, so I consider myself a very front edge. And then also, the demographically this, the baby boom thing's a little bit misleading, because the population uptick began actually in (19)41, (19)42, as prosperity returned. And also, you have the going away babies and whatnot.

SM (00:08:06):
Right.

ML (00:08:06):
So, it was not quite as explosive then. But the demographic trend was upward.

SM (00:08:16):
It is interesting, because you went to Cornell, and I went to Binghamton. And Binghamton banned fraternities, and so the students at Binghamton had to go to Cornell to join a fraternity. And I remember one of my friends, Rich White, whose dad was, I think, the DA of Binghamton, he had to go to, he was a pre-law major, and he had to go over to Cornell, and he was carrying a tiger around campus. I never forget it. And boy, people kind of looked down on him because he was joining a fraternity. We abandoned him there at that particular time.

ML (00:08:47):
Did you ever know a guy named Norman Breyer when you were at Binghamton?

SM (00:08:49):
Norman Breyer, I graduated in (19)70.

ML (00:08:56):
He graduated in (19)70 also, or somewhere around, that is (19)68 or (19)70, maybe (19)68.

SM (00:09:00):
I know Camille Pollier was in-

ML (00:09:02):
Well Norman Breyer lives in Reinbeck. And he is such a character that if you were thinking there is a chance here-

SM (00:09:12):
Well, he might have. I was actually involved in a lot of intermural events, and I went everything. But I-

ML (00:09:19):
I think you were stoned pretty much though.

SM (00:09:24):
It is a great college though, I mean, geez. And this is your interview, but I will never forget, you are exactly right about that 1967, because in 1965-66, (19)66-(19)67, Herb Alpert and The Tijuana Brass, Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons, these were all popular groups. And then The Beatles were coming on too in (19)64, but it was (19)67 where everything changed. Herb Alpert and The Tijuana Brass, they kind of disappeared.

ML (00:09:54):
Still has a singing nun out there, and-

SM (00:09:57):
That is right. One of the things here too, and I just want your clarification on this, everybody I have talked to really believed you, taken off what you said earlier, that period of 1970, (19)71, (19)72, (19)73 is really the (19)60s. So, you cannot even differentiate, well, (19)67, (19)73. The war was coming down at that time, but that was still the (19)60s I would say, wouldn’t you?

ML (00:10:23):
Well, particularly, if you think of it in terms of the role of the war and Vietnam War as a frame for, as the Vietnam War intensifies, so do the (19)60s, or the political upheavals.

SM (00:10:42):
Right.

ML (00:10:42):
Even though I think that the civil rights movement was more of an initially generative, and certainly created the first wave of activists of the Mississippi Freedom summer types, and the veterans who went on to be part of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. But I do think that for many politically conscious college students, the Vietnam War and protesting the Vietnam War was more central, particularly until the draft, the repeal of the draft. So that really is (19)72, (19)73, and could still get people out demonstrating in the (19)70s, with [inaudible].

SM (00:11:32):
Oh yeah. I got a question on that.

ML (00:11:33):
We have talked about defining moments in the (19)60s.

SM (00:11:37):
Yeah, I interviewed Phil Caputo when Phil was in Vietnam early on, around the (19)65 period. But dissent was really starting even then in Vietnam, from what he says in "Rumor of War." And, of course, he was back, and he covered Kent State. And now he has got the book "13 Seconds," but he was actually back to cover it, because he was a Chicago Tribune or whatever when he got back. So, he really talks about what is going on in Vietnam and everything. And what you are talking about is exactly what he talks about too, about everything was going in a different direction. Explain, I think it is very obvious what it is, but some people have not read your book, and when I interview people, some people said, "Well, just read it in the book." Congressman Anderson kept telling me, "Just read it in my book." Well, people do not have your book. It was printed in 1970. I just interviewed him last week in Washington.

ML (00:12:31):
May have lost it.

SM (00:12:35):
And I do not know if you ever saw his book. It is a great book he wrote in 1970. It is a classic book, and if you can get it, it would be great for-

ML (00:12:41):
Is this John Anderson, or?

SM (00:12:42):
Congressman John Anderson. A book he wrote in 1970. It is classic (19)60s stuff. He cannot remember a lot of it, because he is 89 years old now. But it is a very good book. But explain what you mean by the "uncivil wars," because we think of a civil war, and oftentimes, the (19)60s is looked upon as the second Civil War.

ML (00:13:07):
Yeah.

SM (00:13:07):
People say, "Oh no." Your thought, just your definition?

ML (00:13:11):
Well, I am just thinking, in terms of correcting racial injustice, the (19)60s are in, at least a metaphorical sense, a second Civil War. But I stole the concept, to some degree, from I think it is Bill Chase in his book on Greensboro and the sit-in movement and was talking about how oppressive the concept of civility was in an increasingly middle-class country. The idea of drawing negative attention to yourself, much less becoming obstreperous to the point of going to jail suffocated any kind of aggressive political action, civil disobedience of that. So, one of the things that happens in the civil rights movement is once all these middle-class kids started going to jail, and it became a badge of honor rather than a humiliation for their families, it really did shift their mentality, and to some degree, radicalize them, holding onto the term radical. Because if you look at the history of the four civil rights students, I just wrote an essay on for one of our books on the sit-ins in Greensboro and the, four of them went on to do stuff that had, one of them became a corporate executive, and one had a career in the military, and one of them runs some kind of public service agency in Boston. I mean, one has died. But none of them went on to be engaged in civil rights politics after that initial event. But I think that the people in authority also used the idea of civility as a way of suppressing opposition, because it was impolite to question your elders. It was impolite to call the dean a fool, to challenge your, challenge faculty authority and whatnot. So, one of the great, if you look at so many, like Ronald Reagan and others, when they're criticizing, during the (19)60s, smells like, I do not know, dresses like Tarzan, and [inaudible] like Jane, and smells like cheetah, or has hair like Jane, and smells like cheetah. It was sort of an attack on the incivility of, in a way, or the rejection of civility. Or when Mark Rudd gets up on the stage, and tells, says, "Fuck you" to the President of Columbia, nothing could be more uncivil. So, then it, to me, it became really one of the central themes of... Because I see so much of what the (19)60s was really about, was really a fracturing of the, I would never use the term "ruling class," because I do not really believe in that structurally, but of the sort of dominant elite, where it fractured, and the loss of the ability to communicate or to rebuild consensus. And I think that was one of the reasons why it was so strident.

SM (00:17:06):
Do you find it ironic that most universities today, particularly from the (19)90s on, have had civility day?

ML (00:17:13):
I do not know-

SM (00:17:13):
Yeah-yeah. We have it at West Chester University. And it is like when we had Tom Hayden on our campus, and we organized activist days, and we had 2 or 3 days of activist speakers. And Tom Hayden thought that was a joke, because activism is 365 days a year, not 3 days a year, but he appreciated what we were doing, because not many were doing that. But I do not know what Bard has it, but the university I have worked at, they have civility day every year, where they bring in a speaker, or say that we are civil with each other. It is important to be civil, but.

ML (00:17:47):
We actually have a requirement at Bard that has to do with a difference. You have to take a course, at least some course, that deals with cultural, ethnic, racial difference in the course of your career. So that is how we put it in. Bard has a pretty liberal left tolerant filter. In fact, I would say Bard is intolerantly tolerant.

SM (00:18:19):
Do they tolerate conservative people?

ML (00:18:21):
They have a little trouble with that, but if you are eccentric enough, they buy it. They like that. They like eccentricity.

SM (00:18:27):
Was not there a professor that was mad at Dr. [inaudible] this past year, or he got fired, or something?

ML (00:18:32):
Oh yeah, that was [inaudible].

SM (00:18:34):
Yeah, I do not even, I remember reading that in "The Chronicle."

ML (00:18:37):
No, that was a classic kind of, where Joel still lives in the kind of Marxist frame of the (19)60s radicals, and he had become actively sympathetic to the Palestinians, and considered, he was in this sort of Noam Chomsky camp. Prior to that, he had been very outspoken about, he was a Green Party candidate in New York State, so he was against corporate exploitation of the environment. He always believed that the Vietnam War was fought over oil and the South China Sea. And before that, he wrote about civil rights and whatnot. So, he has sort of followed the trajectory of radical politics. And he had been at Bard as the [inaudible] professor of social studies. But over the course of time, he had become more and more remote from the community, and also more, he remained very doctrinaire, and so there was an increasingly fewer students who were interested in what he had to say. And he communicated less and less with his colleagues. So, when the financial crunch hit, turned out he was being paid a rather magnificent salary for being half-time. And I was on the committee, and one of the committees that has to do with hiring and new positions, and the planning and appointments committee. And Dean asked us to review all these faculty positions and say which ones could we live without, where the college had some discretion. His contract was up and decided not to renew it. And it was because he was, it was not because he was a leftist or pro-Palestinian. After all, Bard has created a liberal arts college on the East Bank for Palestinians.

SM (00:20:37):
Right.

ML (00:20:38):
So, there is no one who has put his neck further out on this issue than Leon Botstein. But I think also Joel's feelings were hurt. I mean, even though he, if he would not pretend to be a sentimental guy, I think underneath it all, he is a little bit. And I think if they had been, taken a different tactic with him in severing the relationship, that he might have been a little less upset. And it turned out that to be a tempest with little staying power, and the issue died pretty quickly, I think.

SM (00:21:13):
He had been there how many years?

ML (00:21:15):
Eh, probably 15 maybe, 10 or 15. He got appointed to Bard had been good to Joel.

SM (00:21:21):
He was only part-time too.

ML (00:21:23):
Well, he had been full-time, but we came in, he had been part-time, and had been on leave, and, I mean, hardly ever saw him. So anyway.

SM (00:21:31):
What were the most significant events during the period you described, the events that shaped the era, but also had lasting impact on the lives of boomers and the body Politic? I have, you break your book down into three phases, the phase up to present, from the (19)50s through the assassination of President Kennedy, then you have the period from when Johnson came into power through (19)68, that very tumultuous year, and then you have that period (19)69 to (19)73, so, in those three phases, what, of all the events that took place, what do you feel personally has stayed within the body politics? I say this because, when I interviewed the late Gaylord Nelson, who I know quite well from our leadership on the road trips, and [inaudible] to Westchester twice, he said that the Vietnam permanently affected the body politics forever. And he said 100 years from now, the effect will be in the body politics, it will not necessarily deal with the issue of healing, but. So, your thoughts on what you are talking about?

ML (00:22:51):
Well, I do think, I would say that there is no question that the Vietnam War ultimately destroyed the Cold War consensus. And so, in that sense, that redirected the political dynamics of the country. And to some degree, the Vietnam War absorbed the civil rights protests. I mean, it transferred into the military. But I would say also the assassination of President Kennedy, only because, not because Kennedy was so vital as a president, but because as an icon and a symbol of transformation. Again, he was the first, I think he was the first president born in the 20th century. So, and I also just the way it affected many of us who are these happy-go-lucky children of the suburban era and of the prosperity of the post-war era, and yet we are idealistic, I would say. And my brother, partly in response to the Kennedy magic, joined the Peace Corps. And it is, my brother’s, one of these people who in his heart is a boy scout but is also a cynic. And Kennedy had a little of that quality to himself also. He could appear to be a black scout, but he was kind of cynical.

SM (00:24:39):
Right.

ML (00:24:40):
It also, I think, in a causal way, certainly in having Johnson become president, this is hotly debated, people write about it all the time. I have a graduate student who I adopted when I was at University College Dublin, who is writing a book about Robert Kennedy in Vietnam.

SM (00:25:03):
And you doing it right now?

ML (00:25:07):
Mm-hmm. And he is, I think it is clear that Kennedy would, to me anyway, that Kennedy would not have pursued the same course in Vietnam that Johnson did. I do not think that he would ever have resorted to escalation, or certainly not on the scale that Johnson did. It seems to me Johnson that, there was a side of Johnson where he essentially threw the dice. I do not know that he believed he was gambling at this level, but that he just believed that if the Americans showed up in force, the other side would wilt, and that would be the end of it, and that he would then do his Mekong River Delta Project, and he would pay help [inaudible] off, the way they do in Texas, and that things would work out, because he is willing to give, as well as to receive. And I think Kennedy had been made all the more cynical, because of his experience in the Bay of Pigs, and was much more cynical about the CIA, about the military. And finally, he did not have that hang-up that Johnson had about his, had virility, different kind of hang, he had the Tiger Woods hang-up.

SM (00:26:35):
Oh yeah.

ML (00:26:35):
Predatory hang-up. But I think that Johnson had an experience in Texas politics where you had to be the big enchilada, and it bothered Johnson that he would be seen as a weak sister, or that his mom. And so, I do think that Kennedy would have been a different kind of president, how much they could have held off. Of course, a lot depends on, also on, it is like with a great awakening, or as opposed to the Salem Witch Trials. Some of the historians posit that you have this phenomenon of extraordinary behavior, and you can either choose to stigmatize it, and become frightened by it, and assume that it's the work of the devil, or you can say it is the hand of God, and the spirit is with us, and embrace it. And so that I think that was one of the things that also happened in the (19)60s, is that so many of the people in authority chose to stigmatize the behavior, felt threatened by it, having anesthetized themselves with habituates, and tranquilizers, and alcohol, and what were the drugs of choice of the older generation. They could not see that there was any comparability in the drugs of choice of the (19)60s generation, and chose to criminalize them, and in a sense, declared war. That is again why I call it, partly where the idea of uncivil wars come from. And there were some, lots of exceptions, like a lot of the ministers, who tried to keep the religious vital by tying into this youthful energy and quest for spiritual meaning and moral life and whatnot. But-

SM (00:28:56):
You raise a very good point there about alcoholism, because I saw it in the (19)50s myself, not from my parents here, but friends and so forth. I mean, everyone's drinking. And I will never forget when I interviewed Steve Gaskin, the communal leader who was in San Francisco, and [inaudible] the farm. He said that Janis Joplin committed a sin when she was around the hippies. She drank. Hippies did not drink. They only did drugs.

ML (00:29:30):
Yeah, well they-

SM (00:29:33):
And they were literally upset at her for drinking, because they did not believe in drinking.

ML (00:29:38):
Yeah. Yeah. Well that certainly was true. I mean, alcohol was the drug of the man, and the drug of the uptight, spiritually dead type. So, yeah. No. And that was why it was interesting to me. I grew up in a totally alcohol-driven social world. Parents were both alcoholics to one certain degree, and most of my parents' friends were alcoholics by anybody's standard of it. I mean, it is just that we also were given that mentality that all other drugs led to heroin, which was this almost like mannequin view of the world. And when we found out that it just was not that simple, that it was sort of like, oh. You know?

SM (00:30:55):
Yeah, I can remember, because at [inaudible] Bay, when everybody was-

ML (00:30:59):
Doing drugs.

SM (00:30:59):
But I did not. Now people, they do not believe me, the people that know me, because they thought I was always high on life. I need to get high on drugs. But I will admit, I inhaled.

ML (00:31:12):
Yeah.

SM (00:31:12):
But I did not actually swallow-

ML (00:31:14):
Well, I never took LSD.

SM (00:31:17):
I never got into anything of that stuff.

ML (00:31:18):
I tried a little cocaine once upon a time, and it was good. But it is like, okay, so, I mean, to some degree, I am a little bit like too, I mean, I am a sort of a high energy person, and so I do not need it. I mean, I like to get mellow rather than to get high or get ecstatic.

SM (00:31:40):
See, when I interviewed Paul Krassner, Paul is, when you talk to Paul, he is a very respectful person. Of course, he was the founder of the Yippies, and he knew Abbie real well, and he makes a lot of sense of drugs.

ML (00:31:58):
Mm-hmm.

SM (00:31:59):
And so, my project is not about being a judge of anyone. It is very important to certain people, and it has not affected their lives in any respects, so more power to them. One of the things that, I have talked to a lot of people about the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement and the women's movement, and I talked to a lot of the leaders of the gay and lesbian movement, some of the top people. Have not talked to very many Native American leaders, although I have been trying to, and certainly-

ML (00:32:34):
Unfortunately, an awful lot of those ones from that era died.

SM (00:32:38):
Dennis Banks, which you cannot get ahold of the guy, and I interviewed Paul Chop Smith down at the Native American Museum in Washington, but he is controversial. But the question I am coming up with is, you talked a little bit about the new identity movement, which is the environmental movement, the feminists, the gay and lesbian movement, and Latino and Native American. I would like a little more information about how important the Latino and the Native American movements were. I know about the American Indian movement from (19)69 to (19)73, but you do not hear a whole lot about the La Chicano Latino Movement and the Puerto Rican Movement of the young lords that kind of copied the Black Panther. Just your thoughts on the other movements of the (19)60s?

ML (00:33:27):
I do think that it is probably regional to some degree. That is, if we had lived in the southwest, the Brown Power, Chicano Mexican America, you would have been much more conscious of it. If you are in New York City, Puerto Rican politics would have had a higher profile. I do think, as I said in my book, that the Latino community in America is really diverse communities. You have Cuban community, Puerto Rican community, and- You have Cuban community, the Puerto Rican community, and the Mexican community, and they have very different historic cultural backgrounds, and very weak communication amongst themselves. So, it was hard to coalesce about practically anything. And also, their numbers were not so large then as they are now. And so, I think that it tended to marginalize them a little bit. So, it is a combination of diversity and regionalism. Plus, I think that one of the funny things, the difference is like Cesar Chavez, and he was very Catholic. And I have always believed that the Latin American community has a very conservative side to it, politically, and would be socially conservative, and would to some degree line itself up with some of the (19)70s, (19)80s, evangelical, fundamental, some of their political ...They should be anti-abortion, probably anti-gay to some degree, whatever. But the nativist streak that underlies a lot of conservatives ... Thank you. This is my wife.

SM (00:35:39):
Hi. How you doing? Nice to meet you.

GL (00:35:39):
Nice to meet you.

SM (00:35:44):
Yes. It is going to get in the (19)90s at the end of the day.

ML (00:35:51):
And the same thing with Native Americans. They tend to be in the northeast, even though their reservations and whatnot, they are really isolated. And to some degree that was true around the country except where you had significant Indian populations within the urban areas. But I think that symbolically, they were important in that it was a constant reminder of the sort of attack on WASP dominance. And that was part of the ideas of social justice and civil rights being inclusive as possible. And so that if you kept discovering these things having not been part of your consciousness as you discovered, "Well here is another group that we have abused and misused and-"

SM (00:36:52):
From the get-go too.

ML (00:36:56):
But I could give you a kind of flip side of this. One of the experiences I had when I was in college is that I grew up in an odd circumstance in that I grew up in a totally Jewish neighborhood. There were very few, a couple blocks from where I lived, they were Catholic enclaves and the public school I went to was 80 percent Jewish, 19 percent.

SM (00:37:21):
[inaudible] was 65 when I was there.

ML (00:37:22):
Okay. [inaudible] was 85 percent Jewish at one point, and now it is 15 percent. There were only one or two other Protestant kids in that school that I knew of other than my brothers and sisters and my son. And one of the interesting things was that when throughout the (19)50s, we never heard practically any reference to the Holocaust or the World War II experience, except once in a while you would hear somebody say, "Oh, so and so, that they were in Europe during the war. They died in Europe during the war." But no, I did not ever talk about it with my friends at all. It was just not part of their active conscience that I was aware of. Now also, some of my friend's parents would talk Yiddish to each other when they wanted to talk about things, they would not want us to know about. But when I got to Cornell in the 1960s, there really was what I think of, and I think in some literary circles that this is actually a concept of the Jewish Renaissance of ... One of the things that triggered it. So, talk about formative events in the (19)60s. And actually, in many ways, I think this was one, was the Six Days War.

SM (00:38:44):
Oh yeah, (19)67.

ML (00:38:46):
Yeah. Because I think one of the things that happened is the Israelis showed a kind of military competence and David flinging Goliath that spoke to the feelings of a certain number of people. But I think even more than that, it gave American Jewish kids a reason to think of themselves as Jewish much more actively than they had ever before. One of my experiences that a lot of my Jewish friends went to a private day school in Buffalo, which was WASP dominated. And so, you had to become sort of Waspy within this, not Jewish, but upper middle-class gentry. Gentrification. And at Cornell there was an awful lot of blurring. Although there were enclaves, there were Orthodox Jewish communities at Cornell. And Cornell had a very large student body as well. But that is really began to shift. And then part of it was the emergence of the whole mass generation of Jewish writers of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth subsequently. And it is just a very high cultural profile, plus a lot of our faculty were Jewish in ways that-

GL (00:40:33):
I am going to interrupt you for a second. It was just the electrician and the, Whitaker?

ML (00:40:35):
Yes.

GL (00:40:35):
First name is Wayne.

ML (00:40:35):
Whit.

GL (00:40:35):
Whit.

ML (00:40:35):
We call him.

GL (00:40:35):
[inaudible].

ML (00:40:38):
Yeah, it is Dwayne Whitaker.

GL (00:40:43):
Dwayne Whitaker.

ML (00:40:44):
But he's known as Whit.

SM (00:40:47):
It is interesting that during my interview process, I had not been thinking about this, but when a lot of the people that I have been interviewing have been Jewish and then the people that were the leaders of the free speech movement that went to Freedom Summer, that were the hippies, the yippies. I just put two and two ... They are all Jewish.

ML (00:41:08):
It was a very high profile.

SM (00:41:09):
Yeah, a high proportion of activism. Susan Brown Miller who interviewed was Jewish. She brought it up of some of the ... In women's movement. I got thinking about that. And of course, I think it was Todd.

ML (00:41:29):
Todd [inaudible] is also Jewish.

SM (00:41:30):
Yeah, Todd is Jewish, but so is Mark Rudd. And Mark Rudd said ... There is no question in his book, The Underground, the links between what happened with the Holocaust having an effect upon him that never again. But you speak up and you speak up not necessarily about Jewish issues, but about justice.

ML (00:41:46):
Right. And then I think one of the things is that people started talking about the Holocaust in the late (19)60s. They began to go back and reconnect with their historical experience in a way that was very redefining.

SM (00:42:04):
And the history too, and I will get back to my questions here. We had James Farmer on our campus during the time of the Hymie incident with Jesse Jackson. And James Farmer had always been very close to the Jewish Americans and the Civil rights movement had been an African American. Jewish and African American were together so many times and it was making it look like they were enemies when historically they have been so together. It is amazing. And the conference that was at the Jimmy Carter Center. That was on Charles Corral one Sunday morning where this gentleman said, "Well, I am going to bring back the African American leaders and the Jewish leaders because they are all passing away to document these things at the Carter Center." And so, I saw that in Charles Corral. Then I drove down to Washington DC, went to the Jewish Center there, and I spent two solid days watching the tapes. I just felt I had to watch them. And they gave me a total access. And so, I have taking all these notes down. And so forever in a day, if anybody ever says that the alliance between Jewish and African Americans is a weak one, they do not know what they are talking about. They do not know their history. And that is why history is crucial here. They are more friends than they ever were.

ML (00:43:18):
No, there was question that certainly in the (19)60s, that civil rights consciousness was much more intense among the Jewish kids that I knew than it was anywhere else. It was not exclusive, but it was very disproportionate. And the Jewish students at Cornell tend to be the most liberal, the most activist.

SM (00:43:45):
I am from Ithaca.

ML (00:43:46):
You are?

SM (00:43:48):
Yeah, I am from the Ithaca, Cortland area. I grew up there. My aunt went to Cornell in 1927. My mom was five years old. I remember jumping on her bed the year that Babe Ruth did all those homerooms. And she was older than my mom. And then my cousin Nick, he graduated in Cornell School of Architecture. He married the homecoming queen. He is a successful architect in Boston. I got in there too, to Cornell. But my parents were now well off. And even though I could have lived at home, the tuition and such, I got into Binghamton. They thought it was important for me to go to SUNY Binghamton because it was a little bit farther away and it would not be as expensive. And I was always back because Stuart Park, we did functions with Cornell students a lot. And we were over going, and we brought our girlfriends over to Stuart Park. And that was always the place where the Cornell and Binghamton students’ kind of met. They were friends. A lot of people do not know the relationship between the two schools. And I have never [inaudible] the college students there.

ML (00:44:51):
Anyway, you asked about the defining events. I did write this essay for when I did the contrast with Andy Rotter at Colgate.

SM (00:45:01):
Yeah. How do you spell that name?

ML (00:45:01):
R-O-T-T-E-R.

SM (00:45:08):
Okay.

ML (00:45:09):
And where they were talking about 1968. And so, I was making an argument that you could consider 1964, 1973, to be every bit as transformative as 1968. And then I made another argument that there was actually an event that occurred, although I was torturing the chronology here a little bit, but that is probably the most transformative event of the (19)60s that nobody ever talks about. And that was that in 1968, the State Department announced that America's domestic oil production would peak within the next year and then begin a steady decline. And it began in 1970 that when demand kept rising, but oil production began to fall. And so, the US became more and more dependent on foreign oil resources. Well, we get most of our imported energy from Canada and Mexico coming from the Western hemisphere. But one of the reasons it was so vital is that for the entire 20th century, the United States had always been the country with the reserve capacity. So that when there were disruptions in the international markets, the United States could correct them at least over the short run. So, during World War II, we supplied Britain and the Western allies with a lot of their petroleum resources. I think a statistic was something like 40 percent of all goods shipped overseas during the war. It was petroleum or petroleum byproducts. So, one of the things that happens is that what this had meant is that after 1970, the United States could no longer play that role. We could not control prices and production. Saudi Arabia could. And so, we became dependent on our ties to Saudi Arabia to manage the world energy market. And so, one of the consequences you have in 1973, we are in the OPEC Boycott.

SM (00:47:29):
I was in the lines in Columbus.

ML (00:47:32):
And American middle-class prosperity has never recovered from the recessionary impacts. The middle class has been shrinking, that a lot of the major sectors, say, just think of auto workers as perfect example of this. Their wages have been declining in real terms ever since and their number of jobs has shrunk. So, what had created that sort of prosperous world that was part of the magic of the 1960s really begins to unravel. And then again, if you then project out into the future and think of all of the major war threatening crises or actual war events, you have the Iranian Revolution. You have the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan. You have the first Gulf War and the second Gulf War. You have the constant friction between the Arabs and Israelis. So that for the United States, really in the post-Cold War era, it is the Middle East is our Balkans. And so, one could argue that in the 1960s also, one of the failures of the era was that even while we are focused on Vietnam, was the failure to respond to the growing energy crisis and to think about what it meant to have a society that basically ... It is the preference of the post-war, World War II model was to solve social problems through growing the economy by creating more and more wealth so that even though you were not going to seriously attack income and wealth inequality, you going to improve the standard of living for everybody. And that was essentially what Johnson was doing with a great society. That was part of his trying to revitalize the post-war, World War II Economic Opportunity Acts and the GI Bill and the whole apparatus that came into play after World War II. Johnson was trying to extended out into the future and reached more broadly with it. One of Nixon's most enduring acts in the early seventies was to extend Social Security benefits much more broadly and to put in cost-of-living indexes in the Social Security. So, I think that when we get focused on the political (19)60s, the cultural (19)60s, we sometimes lose track of these sort of deeper forces or determining elements of the world that we have constructed, that we live in.

SM (00:50:37):
I do not think it is doing a very good job for costal living increases.

ML (00:50:41):
Yeah, well that is probably certainly true.

SM (00:50:43):
Yeah, because my dad, when he passed away, he did not have any. Yeah, I do not remember him getting ... He had the same check, the very same amount every year.

ML (00:50:54):
Really?

SM (00:50:55):
Yeah, he died in 2002.

ML (00:50:57):
Yeah, but it was supposed to be indexed to some degree though.

SM (00:51:02):
It was not. They said that from last year, this year there had been no change.

ML (00:51:06):
Well, that may be. They may have frozen the for the time being.

SM (00:51:11):
What are your thoughts on that? This is a very controversial subject because at the very beginning of the Students for Democratic Society, they were a good group. I will admit they were. A lot of people did not like him because they were anti-war, and they protested and all the other things. But then they eventually moved as ... Mark Rudd [inaudible] in his book The Underground. And he is the one member of that particular group that is wrong. The only one that I can remember, Bernadine Dohrn spoke at the Kent State Conference, and I particularly do not care for her. But I know he considers her a sister. But I want your thoughts on, if you feel this was really the end of the movement was when they turned to violence. And that is not only SDS to the weatherman, but there is a question whether the Black Panthers were violent, even though they had the food programs. The Young Lords, the Puerto Rican group, they followed the Black Panthers in many ways. So, what the Black Panthers did, the Young Lords did in the Puerto Rican community. Then you had the American Indian Movement which started out with Alcatraz, which was a very good idea of a consciousness raising with Jane Fonda and so forth. And then he ended up with Wounded Knee and Violence in (19)69. Then you even had a (19)69 Stonewall, which was, it was about time the gay and lesbians’ kind of said, "We have had enough." But there was a lot of violence there at Stonewall too. And there was a lot of violence after Harvey Milk's murder in San Francisco. I was out in the Bay Area back then and I could not believe the violence in downtown San Francisco. They just went after windows and everything else. Just your thoughts about when movements go violence.

ML (00:53:00):
Well, first, I always argue that there was no movement per se, that there never was a kind of umbrella thing, that there were lots of interactive. People often had beat in many camps, that as you beat anti-war and pro civil rights and pro women's rights and smoke dope and whatnot. And so, there were constellations of causes and commitments about the affected people across quite a range. But also, well that every one of the movements, whether it is the anti-war movement, whether it is civil rights, whether it is gay rights, and not, every one of these movements when you look at them have a kind of conservative wing. They have a kind of liberal progressive wing and then they have a radical wing. And one of the arguments I was making in my book is that lots of times what the public sees, but partly because of the way the press both demonizes but also zeroes in on the outrageous so that they are intrigued by some of the outrageous, outlandish things. It is like the burning bras at the Miss America pageant, as we know never happened. But I mean the pageant happened, but the bras did not get burned. And that one of the problems that every movement has is that notice that, how do you find across those divides of conservative, liberal radical, how do you find a common agenda? So, like the feminists for a while settled on equal pay for equal work on abortion rights on ... I do not remember. They are very important. They wanted take care for women. They want to get rid of the barriers making women equal. But then you have got these constant things where the feminists who believe that patriarchy is the handmaiden of capitalism and that it is inherently exploitative. And so as long as you have a capitalist culture, you are going to have female oppression and you are going to have black oppression and you are going to have minority oppression in general. And so, in fact, you cannot, cannot ultimately reference. So, these movements, because one of the things, again, I would argue in a sense, they start looking at the world through an essentialist lens, which is anti-liberal, that liberals always tend to look for the common thing that makes us commonly human. All men are created equal. All people are created equal. Jefferson would have said it. He wrote that a little later. And I think what the radicals tend to argue is that ... There is a wonderful little essay that I use with my students in environmental history, which is about this idea, it is called the Search for Root Causes. And it is about the battle between Joel Cabal. He is one of the participants in this and Murray Bookchin. And then people like Paul Ehrlich and Barry Commoner. They all want to save the environment, but they all want to say, "Is it technology that is to blame? Is it capitalism to blame? Is it patriarchy?" Why is it that human beings are just destroying the natural world around them? And so, the environmental movement, like all these other movements, fractures. And often that many of the participants, and this is often a case where egos are involved or self-promotion gets involved, that they wind up spending more time lacerating each other than they do in fighting their common enemy if they put a degree on who or what that was. I often remember going to rallies and SDS meetings and whatnot. And this partly my peculiar personality, and it's not unrelated to one of the inherent qualities of (19)60s politics that is revived in the Tea Party Movement. And that is the suspicion of authority and also the assumption that people who want to run things or rule things are dangerous, this kind of anarch equality. But I was constantly made aware of the kind of presumptuous of my contemporaries getting up and making these profound moral judgments about other people's behavior and calling for violent overthrow of this, that and the other thing. And I kept sitting there thinking, but the other side, they have got guns and they know how to use them. And violence has been there. It's how they rule. It's by controlling the instruments of violence. You are going up against that. All you are going to do is get a lot of innocent people killed. Because I always believe that the revolution had to be cultural rather than cultural and take place in people's hearts and their heads rather than ... I really do not buy the model of political revolution.

SM (00:59:06):
Everything I have read shows that violence leads you nowhere. And if the experiences of activists in the (19)60s and early seventies is anything for today's young people, they can learn from people like you and me in our age That violence will get you nowhere except for a bad label. People who will not like who you are and what you stand for because of your actions. Also, universities are somewhat afraid, I think, of activism today like it was in the (19)60s. They like volunteerism because that is safe. Activism is a little threatening. But again, if activists are right on top of things, then if activists from the (19)60s are great teachers and role models for young people today, you do not disrupt the classrooms because you do not disrupt someone's education for the sake of a cause. And I think that is something we hopefully learn from.

ML (01:00:04):
Yeah, sometimes you do come up against the problem of civil disobedience. And what Martin Luther King would say, "It is never a good time. There is always a reason not to do it." But at some point, you have too actually. Have to move. But I think in King's case, he paid his dues and he put his body on the line. And some of these, not those middle-class kids, I am speaking my generation get out there. And like I say, are passing, just standing there, passing moral judgment. And they had almost no experience doing anything. Even at the time, I thought this had been presumptuous. And it certainly is not the stuff of which real politics, effective politics has ever constructed. So that I always often found myself walking away from these meetings saying, "This ain't for me." So, I never joined SDS. I mean, I was sympathetic to SDS. And for me, one of the most grueling episodes I ever lived through in the (19)60s is that I got married in 1968, which was a very crazy year, a crazy year. And because I had spent a year after my undergraduate years teaching in Buffalo, and I wound up the year they eliminated the graduate school to ferment for first year graduate students, but not for second year graduate students. So, I was subject to the draft and my parents knew the local draft board and they said, " Your boy, he is high on our list. So, you got to get him into the reserves or something." And my grandmother, who is not this kind of person at all, but she was worried about me, knew somebody who turned out to be very highly ranked in the New York State National Guard and got me in the National Guard. So, I was what I would call a conscientious acceptor, a term that I had stolen.

SM (01:02:29):
CA instead of CO.

ML (01:02:31):
Right. And it turns out that when I was at Yale, there was a large cohort of us who had decided that we wanted to go. We had found our calling in life, that we did not want to go to Canada, but we were sure as hell we were going to go to Vietnam. We are just looking for a convenient way out, call it George Bush. And so, I got two or three of my friends into the Connecticut National Guard, got them transferred from New York to Connecticut. And lo and behold comes 1971. And then we have the Bobby Seal trial.

SM (01:03:11):
Oh, I remember that.

ML (01:03:12):
In New Haven. And every radical group, including Jerry Ruben and Abby Hoffman descended on New Haven with the intention to burn the place down and destroy Yale and stick it to the man and whatnot. And we all got called out for this. And so, our friends on campus are all planning demonstrations and political events and whatnot, and we are being told to go and police the streets. And we were traumatized by this because our political sympathies were somewhat divided in that we were sympathetic to the politics and the injustice being done to the Black Panthers. But on the other hand, we were also sympathetic to Yale in that Yale had changed its institutional dynamic dramatically in the (19)60s, changed its whole admissions profile and had become a real progressive academic institution in ways it had never been before. And so, it seemed to me that Yale was really one of the decent forces in the American world. I mean like contemporaries at Yale, Hillary and Bill were there. Clarence Thomas was a student there. There were a whole slew of-

SM (01:04:40):
The mayor of Baltimore was there, Kurt Schmoke. He was a good leader.

ML (01:04:42):
He is a little bit later. He is a little bit later than that. But anyway, we did not get called out for that event. And I tell this story about historical contingency because part of the narrative of what happened in New Haven at that time was that Yale had such incredible connections both in a government through George H. W. Bush, the CIA and this and that. Six of the nine Supreme Court Justices at the time, they had Yale connections. And there was one episode before the event where a shipment of 48 M-16 rifles that were going to a Connecticut Army Reserve post got hijacked. And there was this panic about who has got them. And so, Yale, through one of its connections, asked the mafia people if they had them. And they said, "No, but we know who has got them." And it turned out it was a right-wing paramilitary group of wow who took them.

SM (01:05:54):
Wow!

ML (01:05:55):
I think they assumed that they were going to defend Connecticut against all these communists who were coming in.

SM (01:05:59):
Oh, wow.

ML (01:05:59):
And so, the day of the event, or the day before the event, my wife dropped me off at seven in the morning at the Armory. You take your duffle bag. You are skipping out to the war. And I go in and the first sergeant says, "Oh." I was in OCS at the time. He said, "So you do not have a regular slot, so you do not have to be here." I said, "You have got to be joking. I do not have to be here." So, I rushed out. I called my wife, said, "Come get me. I do not have to be here." So, I go out on the street. I am waiting for her to take me away, and there is an NBC News crew there. And so, they start interviewing me.

SM (01:06:46):
Oh my God.

ML (01:06:48):
And I tell them ... They said, "What do you do when you are not in the [inaudible]?" I said, "I am a graduate student at Yale at like Jean John Chancellor." And all of a sudden out of the building, these guys come running out of the building and physically grab me and drag me back into the building.

SM (01:07:03):
Oh, no.

ML (01:07:04):
And am I worried about my first amendment, right? Not one bit. I am thinking I am going to have to spend four days in this stink hole and this is going to be awful. And also, my wife pulls up again and I said, "Look at those dogs over there. Is not that disgusting?" And grabbed my duffle back and ran out, got in the car. I was not there. And then afterwards, the first sergeant said, "Oh, I forgot what I meant to do. I was going to ask you to go out and collect intelligence for us." Send me out as a spy. Fat chance. But my friends did have to stay there, said that one of the scariest things, they were in the army with a detachment of Connecticut State Police. And the state police were so bloodthirsty. They wanted to get out in the street with crack heads and shoot people. And really... create crackheads and shoot people. Really, show them what it is for. They were morally and politically outraged, but the other thing about historical contingency is that Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, they are all trying to stir the crowd up and get them to tear the place down and whatnot. Partway through this, a bomb went off under the entrance to the skating rink at Yale. It was an Eero Saarinen designed building. Looks like one of the terminals at La Guardia or at JFK. But nothing quite jelled but one of the people who was subsequently when I was assigned to a Connecticut National Guard unit full regular assignment. My platoon, our battalion had been patrolling the streets that day. The platoon I was in, the mortar platoon had a lot of vehicles, so they were driving around doing peripheral, periphery patrols, and crowd observation, and management, and whatnot. The Guard at that time, a lot, a disproportionate number of people were police officers because police were not allowed to have second jobs-

SM (01:09:22):
Oh, wow.

ML (01:09:23):
... because they had to be available at any time. But they were allowed to be in the Guard. So, it was a way to pick up some extra income, so there was this jeep with three guys in it. All the guys had been told that they were not to load their weapons. So of course, they did and one of the things I observed when I went into the company headquarters and whatnot was that almost all the guys in there were packing private handguns. Or just secreting them away in their back and on their-

SM (01:09:54):
Wow.

ML (01:09:56):
... duffels and whatnot because they were afraid, they were going to be out in the street and people are going to start shooting at them.

SM (01:09:59):
Wow.

ML (01:10:00):
They would not be allowed to use their Army weapons so they said, "Damn, if I am going to get shot, I will ..."

SM (01:10:04):
Oh, my God.

ML (01:10:07):
So, these guys are driving along, and this guy is sitting in the back of the jeep. I think with his rifle and his rifle's loaded. As they are driving along, and these are nice Catholic boys from the Naugatuck Valley. All these young women are coming up to them pulling their shirts up and saying, "Would not you like to fuck this, you pig?" These guys are just ... They do not want to be there. They have no interest in being there you know what I mean?

SM (01:10:36):
Yeah.

ML (01:10:37):
All of a sudden, out of the crowd comes this guy wearing Army fatigues, obviously secondhand Army fatigues. He reaches in and he pulls out a gun and points it at the guys in the jeep. The guy in the jeep who is a police officer, has some weapons training turns around, and is about to blow this kid's head off, when the kid says, "Bang, bang. You're dead." It was clear that it was a cap gun and so this guy was a nanosecond from blowing this kid's head off. If he had pulled the trigger, the whole narrative of that weekend in New Haven could have been absolutely different, I mean.

SM (01:11:15):
Unbelievable story. So that was 1960-

ML (01:11:19):
(19)71.

SM (01:11:21):
(19)71? Wow.

ML (01:11:22):
Yeah.

SM (01:11:23):
Can I use the restroom real fast?

ML (01:11:25):
Oh, sure.

SM (01:11:26):
I am going to turn this over. We are halfway through here.

ML (01:11:27):
Okay.

SM (01:11:27):
This tape must be going ... There we go. One of the things that I had mentioned in several of my interviews, the last couple interviews, is that when I look at the 1950s, this is just me now. Three adjectives come out quite clearly for if you use the term boomer, which I do not ... I am really starting to not like the term myself and we will certainly raise this in the book, but if you still do use the term from (19)46 to (19)60, there are things that I remember as a little boy that now, upon reading history and understand history better, I define the (19)50s with these three terms, fear, being naïve, and being very quiet.

ML (01:12:16):
Hmm.

SM (01:12:18):
And let me explain. We all know about McCarthyism, but I see the McCarthyism as a little boy on the floor watching the television set and hearing this man, " Are you or are you not?" I just remember that and the HUAC Committees as well. Then of course, we have COINTELPRO and then we have the threat of nuclear attack. Then this feeling that you needed to shut up because I knew several teachers who were fired because they were communists. One was in my high school. Then of course, the Enemies List that we had from Richard Nixon, which is actually a (19)60s thing. Naïve is because I think (19)50s TV made us naïve with Howdy Doody, Walt Disney, (19)50s Westerns, the John Wayne mentality. Very few Blacks on TV. I think with Amos 'n' Andy, which was slapstick and a six or seven-week Nat King Cole Show and that was about it. When I interviewed Martin Duberman, you never heard anything about gays in the (19)50s.

ML (01:13:24):
No. You did not.

SM (01:13:24):
They were totally hidden and then of course, women were mostly in positions of housewife or teachers, which all my teachers were young, not married yet.

ML (01:13:35):
Right. Actually, wrote an essay about that. Also, it is in After the Fact. We have this chapter that is called, From Rosie to Lucy.

SM (01:13:44):
Oh, I get it.

ML (01:13:44):
Rosie the Riveter to Lucille Ball and the question of the chapter is, that if the theories about cultural conformity in the (19)50s were correct, and they're about the suffocating impact of the media, where did the women of the (19)60s come from?

SM (01:14:04):
Good point. Yeah. The quiet thing was just shut up or lose-your-job type of mentality.

ML (01:14:14):
Well, actually you could relate the quiet thing to the point I was making about civility.

SM (01:14:18):
Right.

ML (01:14:19):
I mean, they are not unrelated notions.

SM (01:14:22):
Yeah. C. Wright Mills' White Collar was a very important book that we read in sociology class. So, your career depended upon promotion. You had to fit in. You could not speak up. Tell me what I want to hear instead of what I need to hear, which is very bad role modeling for leaders today. But your thoughts on whether that is really right on, if those are three good adjectives to describe the (19)50s boomer-

ML (01:14:47):
Well, I think that they certainly define the sort of middle-class, conventional (19)50s as we look back and think about it. But I think when you pry the door open a little bit, you got a somewhat different look in that I would say that in terms of generative-cultural phenomena, the (19)50s were probably more lively than the (19)60s. There was sort of the introduction of modernism into American literature, and architecture, and painting, and certain kinds of music. So that it was a real kind of innovative spirit and there was all kinds of transformative technologies that really began to have a big impact on American life. So that this idea of conformism is more like just sort of reading America as a mourning middle-class society. I mean, that became the real center of gravity of American life. So, I think that and again, you sort of have to, as you said yourself, these things are so determining and so shaping. But where does all the turmoil come from? What caused people suddenly to reject, to stop being quiet, and stop going along to get along, and whatnot? So that was part of the puzzle I said for myself, but I think that this is sort of the accident of history writing history. I started the book on the (19)60s in 1990, 1991 and did not publish it until 2006. In the interim, I put it down a number of times. My publisher lost interest in it. The editor who had signed the book moved and it was clear that he had envisioned this series of books. It was going to be The Home Front During Major Wars and he originally suggested to me that I do the Korean War. I said, "How about I do the (19)60s?" He said, "Fine." But none of those other books ever happened and so mine was just this oddball thing sitting there.

SM (01:17:19):
Glad you got the oddball.

ML (01:17:21):
So eventually that editor went to Oxford, and I switched publishers, so that my publisher was Oxford. Instead, it was McGraw Hill, but in the process, one of the things that happened is that I really began to work intensely on the book again around when I was in Ireland in 2000, 2001. Part of that was also there was the parallel between the Troubles in Ireland, which began with the civil rights upheavals in the United States. Most people in Ireland were very much connected, the Irish part of the sense that the Catholics had in Northern Ireland for-

SM (01:18:02):
In Dublin, yeah.

ML (01:18:02):
... being oppressed and whatnot. The idea of civil disobedience and protest, pardon me, in part came out of mirroring the American experience. But I lost my train of thought there for a second. But the parallel with Ireland got me off the track. Where was I?

SM (01:18:37):
You were talking about the (19)60s, how you are writing your book.

ML (01:18:42):
Oh, yes. That is, it, sorry. So, what happens is that in 2000, 2001, George Bush gets elected, and you have the 1994 conservative landslide in Congress. You have the emergence of the Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reillys of the world and FOX News. This idea that there is this revolutionary conservative movement and you think to yourself, "Well, a lot of these guys cut their teeth in the (19)60s." So, one of the things that I began to realize is that one of the real political revolutions of the (19)60s was really the conservative revolution. It was the Barry Goldwater to Ronald Reagan phenomena, and it was many ways more enduring politically, certainly, than the politics of the left of the 1960s were. Also, many of the divisions that existed then and created a lot of the friction and even some violence never went away. The people remained divided about their political values and there were always issues, drugs, which remained contentious. They got redefined in the (19)80s with the crack cocaine thing. But then, abortion rights stayed out there and also the cultural content of media. These are all issues that stayed on the front burner for a long period of time. So, it was one of the reasons that originally, I had thought about the book that the historical puzzle is, where did the (19)60s come from? We have the placid conformist (19)50s. How did all of a sudden it blow up? Well, there was civil rights and there was the war in Vietnam, but I think it is one of the things that are needed. I do not think I satisfactorily, to my satisfaction developed this in the book, was that it was a religious revival moment, and it was a spirit. A lot of it was spiritual, I mean, you can think of the shtick of Timothy Leary. You could think of him as kind of a barnyard huckster, a [inaudible]-

SM (01:21:11):
Ram Dass.

ML (01:21:11):
Yeah. But these guys were selling smoke and mirrors but in a sort of Aimee Semple McPherson realm, but I do think that there was a profound spiritual yearning because the Jesus freaks and the campus evangelical movement. The reidentification of Jewishness and there was a lot of interspersing with Catholic politics and the era of Vatican II, and of the Berrigan brothers.

SM (01:21:56):
Zen Buddhism was very big. That is Peter Coyote. 35 years is in this.

ML (01:21:58):
But I think that was all part of that. An awful lot of what was going on was this kind of religious sensibility. Again, when you think about the hippies and how self-consciously apolitical, they were. They were not only against alcohol, they were also against political engagement.

SM (01:22:15):
Right.

ML (01:22:15):
And so does trucking. Well, how different was that from the tradition of the evangelicals in the United States? A remarkable number of the hippies did come from socially conservative, Republican middle-class families. So that was one of the things that had I published my book a few years after I started, it would have been a very different book than I wound up writing from the perspective of the Bush years, so.

SM (01:22:45):
Yeah. Those people like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. I think Pat or was it Dobson, Bob?

ML (01:22:51):
Yeah.

SM (01:22:53):
They are major figures in this time frame, Ralph Reed, who is a history professor and very smart, but certainly the epitome of the-

ML (01:23:02):
Well, one of the most intriguing guys is Richard Viguerie.

SM (01:23:05):
Yes-yes.

ML (01:23:07):
So, he is a (19)60s figure.

SM (01:23:12):
It is amazing because that gets into ... I got to make sure the tape goes. It will come to an abrupt end here and then it will ... It seemed like in the (19)50s people went to church. We went to church. Even my friends SUNY Binghamton, most of them are Jewish. At one point, when they got to Binghamton, they even got a synagogue now. As soon as they said, "Goodbye mom and dad." But there is also a lot of experimenting too, because students used to go to ... I went to a synagogue, and I went to a Catholic Church. I was a Methodist and I think that there is a lot of experimenting on the parts of many students just to experience going into a different church. I do not understand it and then there are a lot of people who did not do it at all. They just felt more of an inner peace, something inner and I think that was a lot of the change it seemed like. Religion was very big in the (19)50s and it kind of waned in the (19)60s.

ML (01:24:02):
Right.

SM (01:24:04):
Then we get into the (19)70s and we can look at the Beatles and what happened to them. It happened to a lot of people too.

ML (01:24:12):
Well, I think that it seems to be conventional wisdom now. The (19)50s is that the religion of the (19)50s was much more of a social than a spiritual phenomenon and that is you have an enormously transient population. You moved from one place to another. How are you going to make contact with people who are like you? You join a church, or you join a synagogue. So that you are going to church not because you have a need for faith, or bearing witness, or whatnot. It's because you want to meet people who share your values.

SM (01:24:48):
Right.

ML (01:24:48):
So that was big in the (19)50s and I think what happens in the (19)60s is that a lot of kids who grew up in that kind of what they saw as a kind of spiritually vacuous or emotionally- flat, religious life in the (19)60s were looking for some kind of spiritually transcendent. So, drugs is one. The transcendental notion of LSD that Timothy Leary is selling or the Zen, Eastern religion, or evangelical Christianity. So that the evangelicals do very well, grow a lot. I think the mainstream denominations were shrinking in the (19)60s and continued to shrink in the (19)70s, then you have evangelicals. So, during it, it is just that most of us were virtually unaware of the phenomena. I saw little bits and pieces of it when we visit friends of my parents who lived in Upstate New York, in these small little towns. But you knew about Billy Graham. But you never knew that there was this vast-

SM (01:26:02):
Yeah. Alan Watts wrote a book of Zen. Anyway, Peter Coyote, when I interviewed him said for 35 years, he has been a Zen Buddhist and he said, "I would if it was not for my Zen ..." Zen Buddhism to him is the most important thing in his life. If he cannot take that time to be quiet and reflect during the day. And I said, "Are you meditating?" I had done a little study in Zen Buddhism before I asked him these questions. And he said, "Obviously you do not understand Zen Buddhism. It is not like people tell you. You look at a dot and you try to look at the dot. Close your eyes and not think of anything for 30 minutes. That is not the way it works. You could have your eyes open. You have got to just not think about anything else except spiritual or ..." I do not quite understand it but one of the things here, you discuss the three phases. I would like your response to three events as symbols of what you are saying about the three phases you talk about in your book The Uncivil Wars. Phase one is of course, that period from the 1950s through Elvis, through the assassination of John Kennedy, and to me, values was very important during that time frame. Nothing better than Kennedy's inaugural speech where he said, "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." Then secondly, "We will bear any price, or we will-

ML (01:27:35):
Bear any burden, pay any price.

SM (01:27:37):
... yeah, to guarantee liberty." Of course, a lot of people felt that is the beginning of the Vietnam War. The Cold War mentality continuing through Kennedy that was transferred from Eisenhower. Then of course, the concept of service. Are you really saying this? Is that a good example of what that first phase was all about?

ML (01:28:00):
Well, I guess it is a political marker. If I had to pick something that was a good example of what the first phase was all about, I would be more inclined to look at something like the emergence of popular folk music as being more sort of a cultural phenomenon that anticipates a kind of shifting set of values. There are certain events like the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is certainly defining too because we all sat around thinking, "This is it."

SM (01:28:43):
Oh, yeah. I know what you mean.

ML (01:28:47):
"Sayonara." And it pretty nearly was, so again, it is one of those things. If when you want to find something that is emblematic, I mean it is sort of emblematic of what? So again, I am more inclined to look into the cultural realm.

SM (01:29:04):
Okay.

ML (01:29:05):
So again, it would be things like the introduction of the birth control pill or these things that have unintended consequences or are liberating in some fashion. That was one of the reasons when I constructed the book also, I have a chapter about ... It is a bit of a potpourri, but of cultural literary events like the making of Dr. Strangelove or the publication of The Feminine Mystique. That is when I first wrote about Rachel Carson was because of the impact Silent Spring has in 1962.

SM (01:29:49):
Oh, yes.

ML (01:29:52):
So that is why I guess it would be hard for me to think of a single, encapsulating, to some degree, it is like people said. It would have been the 1964 New York World's Fair-

SM (01:30:14):
And which I went to. The Globe was still there. It used to be outside Shea Stadium. The second phase then is probably cultural too, but one that is really stood out between (19)64 and (19)68, which was when there was so much antagonism between groups. I put the epitome of it was when Senator Abraham Ribicoff was speaking at the Democratic Convention and he is saying to Mayor Daley, "Your gestapo police." or whatever. He is swearing at him. That was the epitome of the-

ML (01:30:47):
It was and one of the ironies of it is that in private, Daley was opposed to the Vietnam War. He thought it was a loser, but he is a loyal Democrat.


SM (01:30:59):
Yes.

ML (01:31:01):
I would guess it would be a toss-up between the riots in Detroit, and lots of riot. Detroit, Newark. That was one thing and then the march on the Pentagon.
S
M (01:31:22):
Yeah. That was the levitating?

ML (01:31:23):
Yeah. They were going to levitate. It was where Norman Mailer ... I still think Norman Mailer is book Armies of-

SM (01:31:29):
Armies of the, yeah.

ML (01:31:31):
... the Night is one of the best books written in about the 1960s. Norman Mailer drives me crazy. I am being such an egotist and whatnot, but sometimes he is so acutely tuned in. He gets some things, either he gets them right or at least illuminates them in a way that I find really effective. So anyway, I think that there are cluster in more of 1967 events really than (19)68. There is no question that the assassination of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were also importantly transformative. I mean, I think that is when people who believed there was a middle way lost all hope. Thought that the world was going to hell in a handbasket no matter what we tried to do. Some people like Mark Rudd went one way and others just sort of divorced themselves and drew back in other things, but-

SM (01:32:34):
Have you read Underground?

ML (01:32:35):
Underground, his book?

SM (01:32:36):
Yeah.

ML (01:32:36):
It is a good book, yeah. He always annoyed me, so.

SM (01:32:39):
Yeah. Well, I interviewed Daniel Bell. He is 91 years old. I am not sure if he was all there when I was ... He was eating his food and he had a maid ... in his home not far from Harvard Square. He kind of spent all his time blasting Mark Rudd.

ML (01:32:59):
Yeah. Well, you see, I think that Daniel Bell was part of the group that became the neocons and who found the incivility, the crudeness, and what they would have thought the insanity of these people like Mark Rudd were, and how destructive they thought that was. I think also, as Jews who struggled so hard to enter the establishment, to have somebody, have these young, sort of bad-mouth poorly, what he would say poorly educated kids come along and essentially attack the structures of the things that they had fought so hard to become part of, that were profoundly offended.

SM (01:33:47):
Oh, I tell you, when I interviewed Daniel Bell, I really appreciate the hour I had with him, but he got retired very fast because he is up there in years. But he responded about Mark Rudd and then I asked him about books that I thought might have been the most influential. I wanted his thoughts on Charles Reichs Greening of America and Theodore Roszak's The Making of a Counterculture.

ML (01:34:15):
He had nothing but contempt for either.

SM (01:34:16):
He hated them both. He said, "There is no ideas in there. They are nothing. Actually, they are nothing. There is no thinking at all in there." Then I said, "Well, how about Eric Erikson's books and also Kenneth Keniston?" He says, "Those two guys are fakers."

ML (01:34:36):
Right. See, but they were both sociologists and contemporaries of his. I actually knew all of them a little bit at Yale, not well, because they were all around the campus, at least Charlie Reich was and Eric Erikson.

SM (01:34:53):
Keniston?

ML (01:34:58):
Keniston, I think was not he in-

SM (01:35:01):
He was at MIT, I think.

ML (01:35:03):
Maybe he was there. Maybe he was not around, but so it was Eric Erikson. Anyway, it was Bill Coffin was married to ... Was not he married to ...

SM (01:35:21):
They had him on campus too.

ML (01:35:24):
He was married to oh, Erikson's. Was he married to Erikson's sister or something like that, Gretchen?

GL (01:35:36):
Who, what?

ML (01:35:38):
Bill Coffin. Oh, no. No, no. He was married to Arthur Rubinstein's daughter.

SM (01:35:47):
Oh, okay.

GL (01:35:47):
Daughter, yeah.

SM (01:35:48):
On the third phase here, I just said something from my interviews of Vietnam vets that really upset them. It was Nixon's peace with honor in Vietnam and as many Vietnam vets says, "What a joke. Peace with honor after killing all those people and destroying the land?"

ML (01:36:05):
Oh, there is something in a way deeply cynical about it from Nixon's point of view is he wanted to get the U.S. out of the war from 1969 on. But he wanted to do it in a way that would not interfere with his ambition to create that permanent Republican majority. I mean, I think one of the dynamics of the era in a sort of presidential political level was that Kennedy and Johnson both realized that the problems of Korea killed the Democrats in 1952. That part of Kennedy's appeal, as you said before, his Cold Warriorism was a way to take back the national security issue to the Democratic Party. It did lock both of them into a position where they could not give much ground. You could not lose Vietnam, or you could not lose the Dominican Republic, or just the way the Republicans lost Cuba. That is one of the reasons why Kennedy got trapped into the Cuban fiasco was because part of his new frontier was going to be to solve the problems of Eisenhower, to reinvigorate the Cold War. But I think one of the things that make Kennedy different, which ironically, he shared with Ronald Reagan is a profound anxiety about, and distaste for nuclear weapons. I think that is one of the things that guided him throughout the Cuban Missile Crisis. But if there was an event ... To some degree the object of a war is more I think, had more impact than the end of the Vietnam War because it also, it pointed to the kind of structural weakness of the American economy at the time because remember we have been through-

SM (01:38:05):
Yeah, you just told us that.

ML (01:38:05):
... the stagflation crisis.

SM (01:38:07):
Right.

ML (01:38:08):
The economy was really tottering. Inflation was aggressive. I think it was five, 6 percent range by then, so it was one of the major lines of assault against the environmental regulation was the charge that environmentalists were driving. Making the U.S. less competitive and driving up the cost of goods, and creating employment, and whatnot.

SM (01:38:34):
In your own words, please define these time periods since World War II and I always put them down here because these are the years that defined term boomers have been alive. The oldest boomers are now 64 and the youngest are 48. So, there is no spring chickens anymore in the boomer generation. Their youngest are heading toward 50, but I am putting these terms down and it could just be a few words. It does not have to be anything in-depth, but just something that when you define the period. So here is the first one, 1946 to 1960. What does that period mean to you?

ML (01:39:16):
I would just say that it means the Cold War, domestic and foreign, and it means prosperity. Probably the period of the greatest economic growth in the history of the American economy in loan percentage terms, I mean.

SM (01:39:34):
The period 1961 to 1970.

ML (01:39:39):
I would say upheaval.

SM (01:39:41):
Yeah.

ML (01:39:44):
Uncertainty and factionalism.

SM (01:39:51):
1971 to 1980.

ML (01:39:54):
I already labeled that in our textbook as the age of limits.

SM (01:39:59):
Age of limits. 1981 to 1990.

ML (01:40:05):
A conservative moment. The conservative revolution.

SM (01:40:08):
1991 to 2000.

ML (01:40:14):
That one is a little tougher. I would say that is the internet era.

SM (01:40:17):
That is the Bill Clinton era too. 2001 to 2010. Is that 9/11? Is it-

ML (01:40:29):
I would say that this is the beginning of the end. This is the era which the Americans got so far off track and failed so deeply to address the structural weaknesses that it is what I will always hold against George Bush. Did not respond to global warming, did not respond to the energy crisis, misdirected the American response to 2001, and of the World Trade Center bombing, that he just misread. He had no sense of the historical situation of the United States, and he had too much of a Texas mentality because one of the things I suggest that is happened in the United States over the period since the (19)60s and was happening in the (19)60s it became more and more Southern. The popular culture becomes more Southern with NASCAR and country and western. The culture of Bubba and SUVs. Just the shift of population and wealth.

SM (01:41:46):
Even brought us a Southern president, for sure, too.

ML (01:41:50):
Brought us a whole string of them if you think about it. They are all Sunbelt-

SM (01:41:51):
Yeah. Both Clinton, Jimmy Carter-

ML (01:41:54):
Ronald Reagan, they are all Sunbelt presidents. They have been until Barack Obama.

SM (01:42:01):
You even saw that when President Kennedy was in power because he knew-

ML (01:42:03):
He even saw that when President Kennedy was in power, because he knew that the Democrats at the time he became president, the powerful Democrats were for segregation. And when he had to make decisions on whether to allow the march on Washington in (19)63, he was afraid of a riot, possibly, he brought them in. He was fearful that he would lose the Southern Democrats. So, the pragmatic politician that he was, he was a little hesitant at the time. That is why people did not think he really had to push John Kennedy on civil rights at times.

SM (01:42:35):
Oh, absolutely. No, I think that Kennedy and Johnson both knew that that civil rights was going to be the end of the Democratic party of [inaudible]. And persuaded one of the reasons that Johnson was so aggressive about jobs and public programs that were designed for lower income, lower middle class, it was to win back and win new Democrats to make up, to cover the loss that they were going to experience from civil rights. Although, one of the things that apparently, I do not know who has done the work, but that have made a pretty, was convincing to me, argument that the shift in southern politics had less to do with civil rights and more to do with suburbanization in the South. That as the South became more prosperous and whatnot, middle class southerners became Republicans. And they created middle class white institutions, Christian schools and churches and whatnot, that were pretty heavily segregated. So that is been a real trend, that the center of gravity of American life shifted southward.

ML (01:44:03):
Yeah, I would want to just put this for the record in the interview. These are things that really stood out in the (19)50s. And you have already talked about how important you think the (19)50s were, even some respects from the (19)60s, in terms of helping shape the (19)60s. So, I am not taking away from anything you have said, but again, it is getting back to some of the history that people see when they think of the (19)50s as being the groundwork for the future. Obviously, the Cold War, the fear of communists in all walks of life. We all know about the Hollywood [inaudible] movie out recently about one of them. I know that university professors and government employers were fired because of their links. And I know from college and high school, some teachers that were fired. Sputnik in (19)57, because of its importance in terms of the beginnings of a being strong in science and math and the whole business about education, which is real important, we have not talked about. Suburbia. Of course, lots of babies were being born. When we talk about juvenile delinquency, I think in terms of gangs back then, white gangs. Because I grew up in the Cornell, Ithaca area, and I saw gangs. They met at parks, but they were not going to kill people, they were just going to beat people up. Kind of the Jimmy Dean kind of thing. Women were most of the teachers, there were not too many men. Higher ed grew, the knowledge industry, as Clark Hurst said. That capitalism seemed to be revered. And then I say here, black and white, very innocent. But we did have Edward R Murrow, Dave Garaway, and Mike Wallace on TV, so we did have some really good news people. And then I always think of Arthur Godfrey, Steve Allen, the game show, the Breakfast Club. These are the kind of things that people in the (19)50s grew up with. This leads me into my question here. Oftentimes over the past 30 years, we have heard general statements from conservatives like Newt Gingrich, George Will in just about any book he has ever written. Some of his essays. Mike Huckabee today on TV, others, that the reason we had problems in today's world is due to the times in the (19)60s when anything goes i.e., very negative on the family structure, values, the destruction of an America we loved in the post-war era. That is Reagan kind coming into power. And so, what Newt Gingrich, when he came to power in 1994, he made comments about the breakup of the American family, the welfare state that Johnson created, the attack on the system of government, economy, the increasing divorce rate, the ongoing drug culture, the lack of respect for authority, the creation of special interest groups that only state what is in it for me rather than what is in it for us. Your comments on these statements, that even today are being made by people on television, that a lot of the way we are today is negative because of that era.

SM (01:47:22):
Well, one has to ask, how negative are we today, really? How profound is the negativism? I do think the economic downturn has darkened a lot of people's mood and whatnot. But I think to some degree, the media invents these narrative frames as ways of presenting presidential administrations, errors in history and whatnot. And they are fictions. They are organizing fictions that have some truth to them, but do not really accurately describe what's going on. And so, if you were to go back to the (19)60s and say, "Okay. Well, who was it that destroyed," for example, faith and government? Well, they would say, "Well, it was the radicals and the attack on the military during the Vietnam War and whatnot." Well, there was nobody who was more visceral in their attack on the government and governing institutions than the conservatives. And particularly the far-right conservatives, who thought the government was the government of communist conspirators. Accused Eisenhower of being a Commie. And then if you look at the agenda of the Buckley conservatives, part of it was that they wanted to tear down the New Deal and the idea of activist progressive government as a force in their lives. Was a wonderful quote, that some article that was just written in a Massachusetts newspaper by one of his colleagues at Mount Holyoke, where the guy said, he was talking about Tea Party libertarianism, which is a big part of the 1960s, I believe. That is do your own thing in your own time, easy rider mentality. A lot of that is Tea Party-ish. Just leave me alone, man. And this guy drew the analogy, he said, "This rhetoric of anarchic libertarianism and whatnot." He says, "It is great. He said, "It is like if somebody dropped you in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in a rowboat with a couple of oars. You would be free to go any direction you wanted."

ML (01:49:36):
It is interesting, when I interviewed Noam Chomsky, I got an hour with him up at MIT, and we talked about anarchism. Because everything about his life is linked to it. Everything. So how serious was the generation gap between parents and their kids, who were reared after World War II? We had parents obviously born and raised in the Depression. And they were very young as World War II began. So, we had this generation gap that, remember, I do not know if you remember the front cover of Life magazine with a guy with the glasses and the guy, I had the magazine framed, and the father screaming at the son and whatever. And the divisions were obviously many. In The Wounded Generation, the book that came out, I think in 1980, there was a symposium which Phil Caputo, James Fallows, James Webb, several people were in there, and they were talking about the generation gap between their parents and the kids. And what really came out of it was really revealing. That yeah, we all know about the generation gap between the parents. It is well documented. But we do not talk about the real generation gap. The generation gap within the generation, between those who's went to war in Vietnam and came home and served their country, and those who did not serve, who protested against the war, became conscious objectors, particularly those who evaded the draft, as James Fallows admitted he did. And even James Fallows will say that, to evade the draft, and at the same time, not protest against the draft, he said That was wrong, that was wrong. And James Webb, who is now our United States senator, who I am trying to get an interview with, said that really, what we have to think of here is, we talk about the (19)60s generation as a generation of service, that came to the ideas of Kennedy. "Ask not what your country can do for you." So many went into the Peace Corps, many went into Vista, many went to the Vietnam War. But in reality, they are not a generation of service. Because a generation of service will, when your nation calls, you go to war.

SM (01:52:18):
Yeah, but what if the war is on poverty instead of on Vietnam? They are being very simplistic about this. There are wars and there are wars. I think that many people felt they were doing their country a service by protesting the war in Vietnam, which was destructive for the United States, destructive for Vietnam, and was fought on false premises. One of the things, again, that makes, you talk about the veterans talking about [inaudible], when Henry Kissinger wins the Nobel Peace Prize. Or Nixon could have had the peace that they got in 1972, (19)73, they could have gotten it in 1969. He just did not feel like he could deliver it politically and persuade his base well, that he had done the right thing. But part of this is, I think it is the destructiveness of a certain part of the conservative American political mindset, which has been slaying false gods and creating monsters where they do not exist. They have consistently, from the beginnings of the domestic Red Scare, used the Cold War as a political device to attack New Dealism, to attack social democracy, to resist the Civil Rights Movement. And that they created, I believe, their mentality created a sense of division where that was not nearly as serious as they felt. Or many of them, I think, honestly believed this. But I think that the idea, they totally misread the Soviet threat, misread Khrushchev. The threat that the neocons really sold in the late seventies and that Reagan made the cornerstone of the thing, was false. We know the Soviet military buildup was based on a lot of profound corruption and ineptitude. Look what happened to the Soviet army when it got into Afghanistan. This was the army that was supposed to bring us to our knees. I feel like what the conservatives has consistently succeeded in doing is to move the political discourse, move the center in the United States to a place where it should not be. So, for example, the incapacity now to respond in any meaningful way to the energy crisis and global warming. The bankruptcy of the whole process over healthcare. This is one of the things that came out of living in Ireland and living in a social democratic culture for a couple of years. Quality of life in Ireland is every bit as high and higher than it is in the United States. And the materialism is not quite as grandiose, but it is getting there. But you have had this sense in Ireland, the way I always put this, my poor wife hears these things over and over again, but American conservative culture demands losers. There is a need to have somebody to stigmatize, some other by which you can demonstrate your own virtue. I did it. I say, "I am a hard worker, I did this. I am taking care of myself. I am taking care of my family; I am taking care of my community. I am not like these losers, who always want to be on the government doll, who always need a handout and whatnot." But they also are not willing to commit public resources to education, to job protection, to a whole series of things, that often forces people who are on the margin, turns them into losers. So, they do not want to extend jobless benefits, they do not want to put in program, they do not want to do deficit spending for jobs creation and whatnot. Because they do not like the government and they do not believe the government can do a good job. And they keep arguing the private sector, all you have to do is cut taxes. That is just horseshit of the first rank. One of the things that, what is interesting, the Irish are filled with prejudices, as I am sure you know. They are homophobic, they are racists often. They do not get stigmatized for, say, racism because it never was that much of a racial problem. But we saw evidences of it all the time.

ML (01:57:06):
And we know about England too.

SM (01:57:08):
Right. But one of the differences is the Irish are embarrassed by it. They are not proud of it the way Americans often are. And they punish it. Like when bus drivers would treat Africans badly, they would fire them. Or fine them or whatever. But it also, you saw in their healthcare system. Was not terrific, but everybody had it. And they had a parallel system of private insurance, of people who felt they wanted it to pay for it. But you could go to a public facility, and they would have things taken care of. And they were not overmedicated, and they were not over CAT scans and whatnot. And I just feel that one of the reasons, underlying reasons, is that particularly in the conservative Republican community, again, nativism is one of the core values of an awful lot of people, that they resent profoundly the darkening, the Africanizing, the Latinizing of American cultural life and the social life and what. They feel like they are being marginalized in their own country. To some extent, they are, compared to what it was in the (19)50s. That they are romanticizing. But it prevents them from doing, if you take the flip side and say, "Well, how do the Irish suddenly become wealthy?" Well, one of the things they did is they committed themselves to universal education. Anybody in Ireland who wants to go to college and qualifies, goes for free. So, when the companies of the world were looking for a literate, educated, English speaking, technically competent workforce, bingo, they came to Ireland. Now, Ireland is such a small economy, such a niche, it's hard to say that this would work on the grand scale. But I think that it is clear now that in a world where, I cannot remember the statistics, they said if you are one in a million in China, there are a million people just like you. But-

ML (01:59:36):
Yeah, you are probably right with the population.

SM (01:59:36):
Like in India and China, where they are cranking out 300,000 engineers a year and we are turning out 30 to 60,000. And where, now, they are outsourcing legal work. I guess. They are all of these hungry college university, English-speaking people out there who will do the same work for a lot less money. And Americans have to figure out how to maximize their mental resources if that is the future, as far as I see it.

ML (02:00:18):
One of the things that I think has come out of the (19)60s on, I would like your thoughts on this, then I will go to these last three pages here, is that there seems to be... Bill Clinton was often looked upon as a centrist. [inaudible].

SM (02:00:34):
Yeah, mm-hmm.

ML (02:00:35):
He's a Liberal. Even President Obama, when he came in, says he was more, even though they say he is as liberal as you can get [inaudible] the extreme right. Yeah, I think he looks upon himself more in the center as well. But other people look at him differently. There seems to be a fear in America toward those who were on the extreme left or the extreme right, whether it be the new left or the Evangelical Christians. Everybody is okay if they kind of go toward the center. But is not it true, when you talk about people like her, she was not a centrist. Not in the area of the environment, because she was a subversive who did her homework, did her research, got her knowledge. And with knowledge is power and knowledge is a threat. And I think a lot of the people on the new left, some of the writers you talked about, and even the ones on the extreme right, who I do not care for, whether they be, Ralph Reed's a perfect example, because I think he is very well-educated and I think Newt Gingrich is very well-educated. So, they are a group that I think you have to listen to because they have knowledge of power.

SM (02:01:48):
Oh, I think that one of the things that happened is that there was a major shift where, from the New Deal into the (19)60s, most of the ideas about public policy came from the left. If you look at the major academics and whatnot. Now, a lot of those people shifted from the left to the right. And so, they took their intellectual baggage and their energies to the conservative movement. But the conservatives had been the consumer of and generators of ideas in the recent past, and sort of big ideas, more than the liberals are. Now, it does not mean I like those ideas or that I feel that they are constructive or appropriate, but there is a kind of intellectual vitality there. And although I love these things, it is like there are a lot of pretenders also, people who pretend to be [inaudible]. I cannot remember the evangelical from Houston, who is the guru to Marilyn and Dan Quail. And Garry Wills has an essay about it in his book on religion in America. This was from the eighties or nineties; this was a while ago. But he went down to interview the guy. And the guy always claimed, because he was educated in Greek and Latin, that he could read the ancient scriptures and interpret them in ways that were far more powerful and meaningful than the less educated clergy could do. Well, little did he know that Garry Wells is a classist and really can read. He can really read ancient Hebrew and Latin. And Wells, who [inaudible], this guy totally misreads. Does not really have a clue what half this stuff means anyway. But that is a pot shot. But I really feel like, it is obviously a clash ultimately, a clash of values or sensibilities or attitudes. But I just think the European model is a much healthier model for constructing an effective civil society. I think that one of the things that Bush tax cuts and a lot of the economic planning that happened in that era, besides just creating massive mountains of debt, public and private, was to increase the bankruptcy of the middle class or the marginalizing of the middle class, on the presumption that the old Republican notion that the creation of wealth would lead to the creation of wealth. But what you did not anticipate was that these Wall Street geniuses were going to figure out how to create obscene amounts of wealth that was going to be almost all fictional money. Is it going to be things that were purportedly had value, that had no value whatsoever. And I think that the failure to read that was almost criminally negligent. There was a lot of criminality involved. And it was just, when you look at what various regulatory agents [inaudible] you are talking about minerals management or you are talking about the SEC, or you are talking about the Federal Reserve. Here, Allen Greenspan, we now know, turns out to be a fool. That he sat upon it and nurtured and financed, with low interest rates, financed a lot of the subprime mortgage pool. And refused to accept any of the doubters, who could point out with some substance, how really fraudulent a lot of this was and how dangerous these instruments were. 2005, when Hank Paulson shows up as the head of Goldman Sachs, that persuades them to suspend the reserve limits that were on the big New York brokerage firms. And so, they went from 13:1 debt ratios to 35:1 debt ratios.

ML (02:06:47):
A lot of inbreeding in Wall Street and government.

SM (02:06:47):
It actually was not so much inbreeding. There were two crippling things. One was the suspension of Glass-Steagall in 1997, so that commercial banking and investment banking got reintegrated. And the other, it was the thing that happened in the 1980s. This is Michael Lewis, when he wrote Liar's Poker. Well, it happened at Bear Stearns, under, what is his name? Gutfreund. John Gutfreund was the head of Bear Stearns at the time. Or Solomon. It was Solomon. Anyway, Solomon [inaudible]. Took them public. Gretchen's uncle worked for one of the old time, classic New York Wall Street investment firms. They were partnerships. So, when you underwrote a bond or stock offering, it was your money, ultimately. The partners, it was their capital that they were using to make this. What Gutfreund succeeded in doing is the people who ran the brokerage firms, it is the stockholders' money that they are playing with. So, when they award themselves $200 million in bonuses, they are taking it from the stockholders. And they're paying themselves, all they added to this was chutzpah. Maybe a little vision here, a little shenanigans there and whatnot. But they had no downside risk, as became evident when these guys would get $50 million payoffs after having bankrupted their investment firms. And I think that this was partly a process that has got set in motion in the seventies, when the Americans really went to a paper debt economy far more aggressively than ever. That is the world that, remember when you got your first credit card?

ML (02:08:49):
Yeah. When was that? When I got out of grad school. I did not have one in grad school. I did not want one.

SM (02:08:55):
No. And that is what happened to us, like mid to late seventies. And I almost always thought that the thing was a little bit of a devil. I was dangerous. I did not trust it quiet. And Gretchen and I were talking to some friends about this the other day. How what for most of our married life, at the end of the year, when we wanted to do our taxes, we would have a stack this high of canceled checks. Now, we have stacked, we do not even get the cancel checks anymore, just get pictures of them.

ML (02:09:26):
That is right. Yeah. The checks are going to be a thing of the past.

SM (02:09:30):
Right. And actually, they are ending checking in Britain within five years or something like that. Yeah.

ML (02:09:36):
That is what the debit and credit cards are all about.

SM (02:09:38):
Yeah. Well, right. But it is a way of changing how one does business and how one manages one's money and whatnot. But it has made debt just an incidental part of everybody's everyday life. That was certainly not the case in the (19)60s or the (19)50s.

ML (02:10:08):
No. Yeah, it is amazing how... Yeah, nobody had credit cards. But I think they put it [inaudible] you owe so-and-so. There was trust in customers. Put it on layaway. Layaway was a big thing.

SM (02:10:21):
But there was store credit cards or store credit accounts.

ML (02:10:24):
Yeah. Store credit accounts, where you have until so many months to pay it off or whatever. [inaudible].

SM (02:10:28):
But I do think it has been transformational. But in a way, it's sort of unfortunate. I sent one of my friends a check the other day and I said, "I am not sure if it's legal to use non-electronic money anymore."

ML (02:10:43):
Oh my God. Sometimes people say that the only boomer presidents have been Bill Clinton and George Bush II. I call him George Bush the second.

SM (02:10:55):
George, the...

ML (02:10:57):
Yeah. And they say, "Well, it is very obvious they are boomers." What do they mean by that?

SM (02:11:03):
Well, it means they are using that shorthand that they grew up in the sort of go-go prosperity of the (19)50s and that they are part of this generation that sees themselves as better educated, more socially mobile than their parents' generation were. That they went through a time of great opportunities and of material growth, wealth creation and whatnot. And also, they have been part of the generations who's basically its preoccupations have defined the public agenda almost all the way through. In the (19)50s it was about creating schools and housing for the baby boom generation. And the (19)60s was expanding colleges and creating enough space for the baby boom generation. Now it is social security and retirement benefits and pension funds for the baby boom generation. And I think it is partly because they represent a huge market, in so far as markets to determine-

ML (02:12:28):
See, right now, if you stay till (19)66, you can get your full social security. But the majority of people are not dead, they are retiring, and they are getting it ahead of time figuring, "Well, I can get it for so many years. And then if I die." So, the difference would still be, I would still make-

SM (02:12:48):
The actuarial, I think the consensus that I have gotten from people who do not need it but collect it, and others, is that it is best to wait till you are 66.

ML (02:13:00):
Yeah, you get more.

SM (02:13:02):
You get more, but you get even more if you wait till you are 70. I think the difference is between getting, say, I think you get about, I cannot remember what it is now. It is about $2,300 a month, if you are maxed out. But it goes up to $2,900 a month if you retire when you are 70. But the kicker is, that when you do the math in your head, you got to live to be 80 something to make up the difference of income you have let go by-by not collecting. And also, if you continue working, your benefits still go up some, not as much as-

ML (02:13:43):
You can get, I know, because-

SM (02:13:45):
You are paying into social security while you are collecting.

ML (02:13:47):
I am 62 now, so I am collecting it because that is how I... But I took a big cut in what I would get, but-

SM (02:13:56):
But you also collect, you are going to collect it for four years or five years. So, in those five years, I do not know. I am just going to guess there is probably, say you get 1,600 or a month or something like that.

ML (02:14:10):
Yeah. Then you got to take the taxes out.

SM (02:14:11):
Right. No, but I am just saying, so what you are giving, what you are going to give up is $700 a month, say $10,000 a year when you are 66. But you will already have collected 70 or $80,000, so it will take five or six years before it crosses over.

ML (02:14:34):
Yeah, and you got to-

SM (02:14:35):
And you will actually be at a disadvantage.

ML (02:14:37):
Yeah, and you got to live. And if you die, you are-

SM (02:14:40):
Right. It is all gone.

ML (02:14:41):
There is no heir to anything. So, it is like-

SM (02:14:45):
So, I think it is not a bad calculation. And if you need it, you need it.

ML (02:14:50):
Well, I need it [inaudible]. But you can get the $14,300 in earnings if you want to. It does not affect your social security. When you go beyond that, then they take one out of every $2 at that point, and then they, yep.

SM (02:15:04):
Because I think after 66 you can earn as much as you want.

ML (02:15:06):
You can.

SM (02:15:06):
It does not matter.

ML (02:15:10):
This is an important question I have asked everyone. We took a group of students to Washington DC in 1995, part of our leadership on the road programs. Where we met Senator Ed Muskie. Gaylord Nelson organized this meeting for us. He had just gotten out of the hospital, and he was not doing too well, but it was a great meeting. Students came up with some of the questions, and this was one of the questions they came up with. Keeping in mind that none of these students were born in the (19)60s, but they had seen videotapes [inaudible] up and everything. Their question was, due to the divisions that took place in the (19)60s for the boomer generation, the divisions between Black and white, male and female, gay and straight, with all the riots taking place during the (19)60s, they had seen these things, and they had also saw what happened in the 1968 convention where police were clubbing students-

SM (02:16:03):
... convention. So, the police were clubbing students, and there were assassinations that year, and the president resigned, or withdrew from running for president. All the crazy stuff was happening. Do you think the boomer generation, the generation of the (19)60s, the Vietnam generation, is going to go to its grave, like the Civil War generation, not healing? That the divisions were so intense, particularly between Vietnam vets and those who were anti-war, and vice versa. The people that fought for Black rights, because my books about everyone. Someone said when they saw the term "boomer", they thought of white men. But boomers are everybody. They are African American, Latino, gay and straight, Native American. It is everybody. I encouraged students to come up with this question because if you go to Gettysburg, there is a statue there of a man who the last survivor of the Civil War was. He died in 1924. So, the last person who participated in the Civil War died in 1924. Over there, I have been to some symposiums where that generation never healed, obviously. Do you think there is a problem within the Boomer generation? It is like Gaylord Nelson said, "They do not walk around Washington DC with, 'I have not healed' on my sleeve," but do you think there is a permanent split between some of these people, particularly those that were involved as activists, that they are never really getting over the divisions?

ML (02:17:51):
Actually, no. I mean, yes, there is some people who never get a life or whose experience of that time or its impact on their lives is so profound or defining that it frames them forevermore. Then there are also like the Bloody Shirt Generation. They are all kinds of politicians who are going to flog that dead horse forever and ever. But one of the things people forget is that when they held Civil War reunions, they would go to Gettysburg and the Confederates, and the Union guys would all come, and they would camp out together and they would reminisce and whatnot. It was the politicians who kept alive, because the issue of race and segregation in the South and Jim Crow. It was the politicians, I think, who exploited the divisions as a way of seizing power and looting the South to some degree. There are certain issues from the Civil War that have never been reconciled about state's rights, the extent of federalism, the degree to which the federal government can enter into people's lives, create rules and regulations and whatnot. I think those were flaws that were inherent in the original Constitution. The Constitution never took on the problem of race. It created a fiction. It solved the problem. So, I do not think it has to do with the (19)60s so much. So, it is like when somebody interviewed me about the Tea Party phenomena, I think the Tea Party phenomena is a version of populism that comes back over and over again. There is a libertarian sensibility to it. There is an anti-elitist sensibility to it. There is a nativist wing in it. There is a kind of evangelical part of it. But these things are always out there. They are always there. They have been there since almost the founding, but certainly since the 19th century and with immigration, whatnot. And so, one of the things that makes the United States distinct from, although this is also [inaudible] one of the reasons we do not have a social democracy is because we have these much larger racial ethnic divisions. And so, like in Ireland, if somebody says, "Okay, well, I am being taxed for social security." They are thinking, "Well, it is going to go to somebody who is like my mom." Not maybe my mom or maybe my mom is dead, but "It is going to go to somebody who is like me."

SM (02:20:40):
Who needs it.

ML (02:20:40):
Whereas here, people say, "Well, it is going to go to those welfare queens and it's going to go to things. And I do not want that, I do not want that."

SM (02:20:48):
It is a different mentality.

ML (02:20:50):
It is a very different mentality. And I think what happens is that as has happened in Yugoslavia under the Serbian nationalism, that people step in and they exploit these anxieties, these fears of marginalization, these economic uncertainties. And they say, "Okay, if you are a Serb, the only one who is going to take care of you is a Serb. If you are a white middle class male, it is white middle-class males who are going to take care you. Those other guys are trying to pick your pocket and give your money to the undeserving." So back to your question somewhat, the sense that we are hopelessly forever divided. Yeah, Americans are a nation that... The idea of the nation itself is a fiction. It is like Ed Morgan wrote a wonderful little book called Inventing the People. And there is another wonderful book out there, Imagine Nation. It is Benedict Anderson's book about nationalism and national identity.

SM (02:22:10):
Are they recent books?

ML (02:22:12):
Ed Morgan's books about 15 years old, 10 years old. Benedict Anderson's book is from the 1980s. It is called Imagined Communities. But one of the things that Anderson, he was a professor at Cornell, an Irishman, my background. It is the most often cited book in social science literature. Imagined Communities.

SM (02:22:36):
What is his first name?

ML (02:22:37):
Benedict.

SM (02:22:38):
Benedict.

ML (02:22:39):
But one of the purposes of the book, it is a very brief old book. It is like 200 pages, and he is a specialist on Southeast Asia. But one of the ways he put it is, "Why is it that if some guy from California gets kidnapped in South America?" He would not have used this specific, but an example like this, "Why is it that you and I feel aggrieved? We will never meet the guy. We do not live in California. The guy lives 3000 miles away and we are pissed off. What is it that makes us see ourselves as part of the same community?" And he develops some theories in there about that. But one of the things that I argue to my students that creates division is a lot of people live in different cultural space and different cultural time. Some people embrace metro sexualism and multiethnic and multicultural. They live in a world that they do not think it is odd to see somebody who is Japanese with somebody who is Nigerian. It is the world they live in. They both got good jobs. They both love the party. Of course, they are together. Whereas in our generation, if you saw something like that, people would be absolutely agog-

SM (02:23:57):
Guess who is coming to dinner [inaudible].

ML (02:23:59):
But one of my colleagues was saying, she is an African American woman, grew up in the Catskills, and she was down on the subway in New York City in the last 10 years or so and they have got down towards the battery and whatnot. And I think the train was headed to Brooklyn ultimately. And she looked around the car and, in the car, I do not think there was a single white person in the car, but Asians and Africans and Indians and this and that, just this mélange of people, classic New York City. All of sudden the door opens, these four people get on it, and they are wearing satin Ole Miss baseball jackets. And they take one look at this car, one guy turns the other and he says, "Are we in America?"

SM (02:24:49):
Well, that is America.

ML (02:24:53):
Yeah, exactly, it is. And the question is, for them in Mississippi, and this was not a racist... This was not some guy who has called the Klan to attack the car. It was just they had never experienced this. And it is like whenever we are in New York, you just look around yourself and you think, "I live up here in vanilla heaven." But New York, the diversity is so profound. And I think that there are people who embrace that and live in it, are cosmopolitan. And there are people who are frightened to death of it. And they are all Americans. And those divisions, the biggest divisions in the US have always been east versus west and urban versus rural and Protestant versus others. So, those things are still with us, and I think always will be.

SM (02:25:56):
Well, Senator Muskie, he said that... He did not even comment on 1968, was he thought the students... Because he was the nominee. He thought they would talk about the convention. And he said in very simple terms, he did not answer right away. We have this. I had the videotape of this too. He died six months later. And he said, "We have not healed since the Civil War on the issue of race." And he started going and talking about it. And then he said, "We lost 430,000 men." He had just seen the Ken Burns series in the hospital, and it really touched him. Almost an entire generation had been wiped out. The other thing I wanted to ask is the issue of... Well, a couple things. Many members of the boomer generation thought they were the most unique generation in history because they were going to be the change [inaudible] for the betterment of society. They were going to end racism, sexism, homophobia, war, bring peace. Nothing was ever going to be the same again. So, there was a real optimism, a sense of community, a sense of comradery, togetherness, the movements, there seems to be arm and arm. Whereas today, many people think that that arm and arm has now become very special interest. Rarely do they come together except in crises, which we see on university campuses. Do you think this generation was the most unique in its history? And secondly, is one of the major characteristics of this generational a lack of trust, that they just do not trust people because they saw so many government leaders lie?

ML (02:27:30):
Well, Americans have always been [inaudible]. Remember Mr. Finley, Peter Dunn, Mr. Dooley, "Trust everyone, but cut the cards." I think cynicism about public figures and about public life is fairly entrenched. Whether it is the most unique, I think only demographically, only by size. Not in terms of its culture or cultural values. Every generation is unique, just different. I think that one of the ways to get a handle on this, and I think that Thomas Frank, he had a book on advertising-

SM (02:28:19):
Oh, not that one.

ML (02:28:20):
What is the Matter with Kansas?

SM (02:28:22):
Yeah, that is the one.

ML (02:28:25):
He, I think, was really on to something. And I think that what has changed America that makes it seem like... Leads to the world of Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone. The Bowling Alone one. Part of it is just that the shift of women into the workforce, so that a lot of community building that went on in the (19)50s and (19)60s had to do with women who created community organizations, PTAs and this and that. Well, now that women are working full time and whatnot. There is much less time and energy left for civic engagement or even social civic engagement because there are all kinds of organizations and whatnot that are troubled, are struggling to survive, struggling to keep volunteer fire companies that... And the other thing I think that happened is that from the (19)20s into the (19)50s, you really had truly the development of mass media. And that is somewhat uniform, with some exceptions. There were local... Say local newspaper, local radio. But you really did get this creation of a broad mass national culture and mass national institutions like those Hollywood studios and the broadcast networks and big publishing houses. The music industry was dominated by five record companies, that sort of thing. And it is really the advent of cable television and the internet. And also, this is one of those arguments that also James Gilbert made his argument in his book on the (19)50s on juvenile delinquency, that advertisers began to shift away from seeing broad mass audiences to which they wanted to sell Marlboros or Chevrolets or Whirlpool dryers, to demographically fragmented markets. Teen market that you could sell teen products, you could sell Clearasil, or you could sell transistor radios and whatnot. And that increasingly, when growing up as a kid, you knew exactly what your friends watched on television because you had one or two... Now, Ithaca was different to some degree because they had cable television early because there was no transmission into that area. So, they had to bring it in by cable. So, you may have had two-

SM (02:31:15):
We had four. Well, we got Syracuse because my mom liked Kate Russell. Do you remember her?

ML (02:31:21):
Yeah.

SM (02:31:22):
She was on. And then there was Ed Murphy, with Hollywood Matinee on the... But in the (19)50s, they showed a lot of those films during the summertime. But we watched ABC, NBC, CBS. We got cable. We had a cable channel.

ML (02:31:38):
Well, that is what I am saying is that was... Because I remember that in Ithaca when I was a student there, you could sometimes get New York City stations, they would come on the cable. But I think that what has happened is that the market is now heavily fragmented. So, you have programming that is designed for old farts, the news, 60 Minutes. And advertising that is targeted for specific demographics. And so that what the mass media has become factional, meek media. You got 200 plus channels that you can watch so that, you have 500,000 people watching the Food Channel and 500,000 people watching Comedy Central and 500, 000 people watching AMC and maybe have a few million who are watching ABC.

SM (02:32:36):
Then you got the college students watching Family Guy. They do watch it.

ML (02:32:44):
And I think that what means also is that people now get their news from their evangelical station, from Fox News, from PBS, depending on what your prejudices are. So, you can educate your prejudices. You are not forced to negotiate contested space. And so, I think that feeds this sense of self- importance or you can be anything you want to be or have it your way. It is this celebration of self and that every life is a project self-creation in which we underplay the degree to which we are dependent on-

SM (02:33:35):
It is like the [inaudible] now that the advertisement that is geared toward the boomers, it is because they taught the constant retirement. The advertisement is about retirement. Dennis Hopper, before he passed away, was on that ad, "You are going to be different here."

ML (02:33:47):
But it used to be James Whitmore who advertised to the elderly. Now it is the boomers themselves. But yeah, and the advertising, it is sort of like, "Where's the money? Where is the market?" And it is always a question of identifying markets. But now, the biggest demographic is 24 to 45 because they are the highest spending demographic, and they buy big ticket items, cars, and whatnot. Whereas people, when they get over 60, they already have their house, their furniture, their this. They are not consumers in the same way. So, they will buy health insurance, or they will buy a retirement property or something like that. Again, it is the way election campaigns are now run. And it is why the national parties are increasingly irrelevant because there is a local demographic that determines how every congressman's going to run, how every senator is going to run, whatnot. Because they have their peculiar local demographic, which through gerrymandering, they can make exquisitely the way they want it.

SM (02:35:12):
Were there specific books that you felt were important to you, books that you read when you were in high school and college that were very influential and because you liked them, and you read them, and they influenced you?

ML (02:35:33):
There definitely were things like Catcher and Rye, Mark Twain. I tended to like cynical types. I read all the things that other... Lord of the Flies and that generation of literature. But I was interested in history early on and read about the Rise and Fall Reich and read a certain amount about politics.

SM (02:36:01):
And were you a Landmark Books person?

ML (02:36:03):
I was. I read them all. When there were 50, I read them all. And I read Battle of Britain, I read about 12 times.

SM (02:36:09):
By golly, I still have mine. Do you still have yours?

ML (02:36:10):
Yeah.

SM (02:36:12):
Yeah. And how about the Bruce Catton books on the Civil War, which were popular?

ML (02:36:17):
I did not read those. I was never a Civil War buff, though since then I have taught the Civil War [inaudible]. And I am interested in the Civil War as a historical phenomenon. And I also, I think the episode of Ken Burns thing, when they get to Gettysburg and the Gettysburg Address. I get tears in my eyes. Listening to the Gettysburg Address in the context of the battle and whatnot.

SM (02:36:46):
They have redone the building. I go about 10 times a year. I only live an hour and a half away. And I see something every time I go, different times a year. And they would redone where he wrote... Well, he arrived on the train, stayed at this hotel, and [inaudible] paid $3 to look into a room, which was the most ridiculous thing. I refused to do that. Now you go into the hotel. It is really the way it was. He redone it the way Lincoln... Exactly the way it was. Yeah, I just wrote down some books here that the people were influenced on. I had talked about The End of Ideology, because I think Daniel Bell's book was a major piece of literature. And Charles Reich's Greening of America and Roszak's Making of a Counterculture was required reading in our graduate school program.

ML (02:37:32):
But see, I think those were later. A lot depends on when... One of the things I argue in my book also is that there were certain kinds of mildly subversive, or like The Affluent Society or Organization Man.

SM (02:37:50):
White Collar.

ML (02:37:51):
White Collar, C Wright Mills. The people who said to you, "Things are not what they seem," or "There are other ways to think about this, that all is not perfect in the kingdom. And check out the emperor's clothes." And there was a whole string of his and Betty Friedan and Rachel Carson.

SM (02:38:11):
And certainly, the beat writers.

ML (02:38:13):
The beat writers, also. Michael Harrington.

SM (02:38:16):
Oh yeah, the other America.

ML (02:38:18):
And then there was... What is his name? Paul Goodman and so forth. So, there were a whole range of these things out there if one had an appetite for them. And actually, one of the most formative mind shifting moments for me came when I was taking diplomatic history at Cornell from Walter LaFeber.

SM (02:38:39):
He is a good get.

ML (02:38:40):
I think he was a new left historian, a student of Fred Harrington's and William Appleman Williams at Wisconsin. Where you got to the end of the World War II, and we are talking about the decision to drop the atom bomb. And this was the year that Gar Alperovitz published Atomic Diplomacy, which none of us were aware of but Walter LaFeber clearly read it. And he said to us, "People have always thought that the had a bomb was dropped on Japan to end the war quickly, which is what Truman explained." He said, "But in fact, there is serious evidence that indicates that the bomb was dropped on Japan, not to end the war quickly, but to send a message to the Soviet Union." And this was just one of those accepted truisms of Cold War America. It never occurred to you that it was anything but the way it had been always explained to you. And then the idea that there was another way to understand this phenomenon. It was like, "Huh?" It really shook the foundations. And it was not that... I was capable of certain amount of cynicism. It was just that there were just certain building blocks that no one had ever had the courage to publicly attack him and until Alperovitz. Now most of us do not agree with Alperovitz, we think that his case is distorted, et cetera. And there's truth to it. But he certainly changed the debate about the decision to drop the atom bomb.

SM (02:40:20):
What is amazing is one of my last interviews, a person I talked about the first time he became cynical, he said, "It is because I admired Eisenhower. I looked up to him. He was a World War II hero. But I also watched him on television when he said that Gary Powers was not a spy. And then within a week or two later, they had to admit that he was a spy. He lied to me on television and all of a sudden, a light bulb went on."

ML (02:40:51):
Yeah, right. I do think people do have those defining moments where the unthinkable, you see, it is right there in front of you. And that belief is not viable any longer.

SM (02:41:05):
I had these... These were mostly (19)60s books, but the Soul on Ice with Eldridge Cleaver, and certainly... Harold Brown wrote a book that I thought was very influential.

ML (02:41:14):
Love Without Fear. Or that was Norman-

SM (02:41:16):
How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World. Do you remember that book?

ML (02:41:19):
I do not know that I do remember that. This was not Harold Brown who went on to be Secretary of-

SM (02:41:26):
No-no, no-no. The Harold Browne that ran on the... I think it was a Green Party ticket for a while. He was an independent, he passed away.

ML (02:41:34):
I was thinking of Norman O'Brown who wrote a book on love and death or something.

SM (02:41:39):
Yeah, this guy was... He wrote a book, How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World. And then the other one was Dr. David Rubin, What You Need to Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask.

ML (02:41:52):
That was big. And I also included Playboy and Hugh Hefner and Mad Magazine. Mad Magazine was big. It was so irreverent that...

SM (02:42:06):
I still have some old Mad Magazines here.

ML (02:42:08):
Have you ever read, by the way, there is this wonderful book, The Wonderful World of Kavalier and Clay?

SM (02:42:14):
No.

ML (02:42:15):
Michael Chabone, I think his name is.

SM (02:42:17):
No.

ML (02:42:18):
It is such a wonderful read if you like the world of comic books and whatnot.

SM (02:42:21):
Oh, yeah. Well, I have a box of comic books that are from the (19)50s, but most of them are all Westerns. I kept all my Westerns.

ML (02:42:30):
All I can tell you is this is mostly about creating the superheroes and whatnot. But it is a wonderful read. I highly recommend it.

SM (02:42:39):
I am getting down to my last two questions here. This tape goes for about two hours, I think. So, we are getting near the end there. These are some questions about Rachel Carson. Because I just think... I have two other biographies on her, so I want to learn even more about her even from... This is so good. But I just have to say it. You indicate in your book on Rachel Carson that she was different from the outset in many ways. A female scientist where men dominated the profession. She had role models like [inaudible] where money was less important than ideas. Is not her story, like many of the boomer generation who recognized injustice and tried to write it or, like her, saw nature threatened and tried to do something about it, this kind of, what I consider, a selfless as opposed to a selfish reason for doing things? The second thing I say here about Rachel Carson, Rachel Carson was a woman who was aggressive in her style, very obviously she was. And she spoke up at a time when women were supposed to be seen and not heard. A great role model for feminism and the environmental causes that were to follow her life, especially with Earth Day in 1970 and the women's movement that was searching for role models. I think this book, as well as other books, need to be read more by more people because her life has meaning. I have read Silent Spring a long time ago as a book, but I really never read in depth about her as a person. So, I just think she is an unbelievable... She is a one of a kind.

ML (02:44:28):
She is a uniquely talented person. One of the things that you wanted to do, psychologize her, if you look at... She is like Franklin Roosevelt in that she is her mother's special prize.

SM (02:44:45):
You are right. Marian or is it, Maria? I forget.

ML (02:44:49):
Maria Carson.

SM (02:44:50):
Maria, yes. Yeah.

ML (02:44:50):
But this was a case where her mother essentially devoted her life to Rachel. So, in many ways it was confining, but in other ways it was very liberating. And I think that it gave her a sense of specialness all her life. And one of the things I always found remarkable is she never seemed to resent the demands her mother made on her. Although I think they became more extreme as her mother approached the end of her life, and that she was always very satisfied with the living arrangement that they had because it did free her to do her work in a lot of ways. And also, to have somebody who teaches you how to notice, who teaches you how to record and to discriminate and just spends a lot of intimate mental time with you. And I think that it made Rachel Carson different from other kids. I am sure any community she was in, that people always saw her as a little bit over there. Not dangerous, not offensive, not threatening really, but different, very different. But she was comfortable with the difference. So, I do not think she was one of these people who was particularly vulnerable to the potential taunts and jeers of... I do not think she really provoked them, does not seem that she provoked them very much. And I think that this is also somebody who was always basically quite serious. It was not that she did not have a sense of humor, but I think she took the world very seriously and her causes profoundly seriously. And in that sense, she was an extremely private person who in some ways lived a public life. Always that kind of contradiction. But she's somebody who hated public speaking, much preferred to write. And as I say, that is one of the things that intrigued me about her and also daunted me when I took up the book is how do you write a book about somebody who was such an elegant writer, but the person you're writing about is in a sense so much more...?

SM (02:47:28):
Well, you bring up also very important in here because I am a higher ed person about role models and people. You referenced several faculty members, and I had very important faculty members when I was in graduate school too that had an influence on me and pushed me to be better than I could ever be. They had faith in me, and she had people who had faith in her, a couple women, the one at Johns Hopkins, and one was even going to get married, but decided not to get married, her career was more important at that particular juncture. That was a very important role models, because we were talking... She died in (19)62, but we are talking the 1950s here. Is she truly symbolic of many women who were smart, well-informed, well-educated, but because of the attitudes that men had toward women in those days, do not speak up, be seen and not heard, she is the epitome of a role model that... "No-no. We have something to offer."

ML (02:48:31):
There was the occasional person like Paul Brooks, her editor or her boss at the Fish and Wildlife, who recognized her talent and nurtured it and created opportunities for her. But yeah, if you think about the job she had, she was basically an exquisite secretary for all the scientists who were too lazy or too incompetent to write literate reports for the Fish and Wildlife Service. They went to her, and she edited them and published them. And so, she was taking care of their business for them. She ran a small publishing company that served their interests, though she was paid decently for it and whatnot. And within her little realm, she had some authority. But by and large, hers was a service operation, not... And somewhat secondary to the primary purpose of the agency. She did however, being a resourceful person and socially adroit in some ways, she created lots of opportunities to go to visit facilities around the country and develop her network of friends in the science community and whatnot. And so, she was the author of a lot of her own success. I wish I had asked questions when I interviewed Senator Nelson about her because his-

SM (02:50:01):
... about her because his hero or the person he really looked up was Leopold.

ML (02:50:07):
Oh yeah. He is from Wisconsin.

SM (02:50:08):
Yeah.

ML (02:50:10):
[inaudible] a homeboy.

SM (02:50:12):
And of course, during the anniversary this past year, because I interviewed Tia, his daughter.

ML (02:50:20):
Tia Nelson or Tia LaFeber?

SM (02:50:21):
Tia Nelson, a daughter of Gaylord.

ML (02:50:23):
Was that your classmate, Gretchen?

GL (02:50:26):
Who?

ML (02:50:26):
Was it William Proxmire or Gaylord Nelson's daughter who was a classmate of yours in high school? One of them, I am pretty sure you said was.

GL (02:50:36):
Do not remember.

ML (02:50:38):
He is the senator from Wisconsin. I thought it was Gaylord Nelson.

GL (02:50:46):
No, I do not think so.

SM (02:50:48):
Tia said that... This was the big anniversary year of Earth Day.

ML (02:50:54):
Yes, the 40th.

SM (02:50:55):
She was fearful that they were starting to forget Gaylord Nelson, that other people were.

ML (02:51:01):
Some of us remember.

SM (02:51:04):
But I bet you if Gaylord Nelson, if she had been alive, probably he would have picked her to be one of the main speakers at Earth Day.

ML (02:51:11):
Oh, absolutely. She would have been natural for it. And she most certainly would have written another important book in the interim. And actually, there were a whole series of majors. I just happened to read just before you came, I finished a manuscript for University of North Carolina Press, which is sort of a history of DDT in which she obviously figures quite prominently.

SM (02:51:36):
Oh, you are writing a book on it.

ML (02:51:38):
No. This is a book I read the manuscript for the press. Should they publish it or should not they? And one of the things he talks about is the later thing where there was this series of in Michigan, then Wisconsin, and then in Washington of legal battles over the toxicity of DDT and the ability of state or federal agencies to regulate or eliminate it. And so, she certainly would have been very centrally involved in that discussion. It would have interesting to see where she would have gone next.

SM (02:52:20):
How old is she? She was...

ML (02:52:21):
She was 57 when she died.

SM (02:52:23):
Too young. Too young. Too young. I just mentioned here that there is the light bulb thing. Obviously with Rachel Carson your book goes into when her light bulb went off in terms of pesticides and so forth. But Jane Fonda is a very controversial figure within the anti-war movement. And I have had people for and against her, but one of them has said point-blank that she really wanted to get out of the Barbarella mentality. She talked about Vietnam and came back from France because she had a mind, she just was not a body. It was kind of a light bulb there too, and certainly Betty Friedan being the housewife. How did you become who you are? What were your college years like and how did you become professor?

ML (02:53:21):
Well, my interest in history, partly probably the person who most shaped it was my grandmother, who was a professional librarian but always interested in foreign affairs and read history. I was quite close to her. And also, it was just partly I was intrigued by her history, because her father had been in the New York State legislature with Theodore Roosevelt and her husband was, I think he was editor of the Princeton newspaper, yearbook, something, when Woodrow Wilson was president of Princeton. And that is how my mother's family became Democrats. They came from a very Republican world, and they converted to being Democrats because of Wilson's influence. My parents were both heavy readers. But the big thing after that was when I went to... And I always did well in history; I have a memory for it. I read, like you read, the landmark books and was interested in biography and intrigued by the people's life stories and whatnot. And when I was an undergraduate at Cornell, the history department there was fairly young and filled with people who became real luminaries, but who were real teachers and in some ways mensches. David Davis was there, Don Kagan, the [inaudible], was the conservative. He's father of Bobby and Freddy Kagan.

SM (02:55:07):
Wow.

ML (02:55:07):
And good, close personal friend of George Will. But Don was there. And Michael Kammen won the Pulitzer Prize when I was an undergraduate. So did Davis won it. And Walter LaFeber was my advisor.

SM (02:55:26):
He wrote a book on Vietnam, I think. Did not he? I thought he wrote something on...

ML (02:55:29):
LaFeber?

SM (02:55:30):
Yeah.

ML (02:55:30):
He did eventually, but his big book at that time was called The New Empire, and it was sort of the basis for his career, where he revisited the causes of the Spanish American War and argued against the idea of accidental empire. It is really a book about empire by design. But it was about the new colonialism, the non-administrative economic colonialism. Anyway, he is somebody who you develop a kind of hero worship when you are a kid. Well, I admire him as much today as I did when I was an undergraduate. He had enormous influence on me, partly because he was a really wonderful family person. And then at the time, most of the faculty children are crazy. And I thought the price of going into higher education is to have a nutso family. Well, I think a lot of the people who entered into academia in the (19)50s and (19)60s were not tradition, because there was so much expansion that a lot of non-traditional types, Jews and ethnics and whatnot, went into academia. And they were very ambitious. They wanted to be accepted and be as good and better and whatnot. And I think he took a big toll on their family lives. But from Walter LaFeber, I thought you can be politically relevant and engaged but still be an academic and you can be a family person. One of the things that was a characteristic of the (19)60s, it was in my graduating classic at Cornell, of the 25 top ranked liberal arts students, 23 of them, and I was not one of those 25, but all went into non-for-profit career tracks. And I would guess from the 1980s and on, the pattern was reversed. That 23 out of 25 probably went into finance, law, business of some kind. And so, relates to your question you asked earlier about service and whatnot, I do think that there was a sense of wanting to make a difference, of contributing. It did not mean military service. And I am now a powerful, I feel this powerfully, I am not doing much about it, but a real believer in public service. That at some point, whether there probably should be two moments in somebody's life, either when you graduate from high school or when you graduate from college, where you have to do a year of public service. It does not have to be in the military; it could be in the military. It could be in the forest service. It could be health service. It could be Peace Corps. It could be create some [inaudible] job corps where you work, mentor to inner city kids, or you work in retirement communities, or whatever. But for a year you have to be trained to do something useful to help other people.

SM (02:58:45):
Buckley talked about that in his book, Gratitude, William Buckley, which I supported. Of course, students do not want to be told what to do, but I support two years of public service, similar to what happens in Israel. You do not have to go in the military, but I believe you need to give back in some way. And I think we have a president now that if he saw more of that, then it would help them toward their graduate degrees if they want to go on to graduate school and things like this.

ML (02:59:17):
Well, and also, I think it would change people's trajectories. I think a lot of people who just, for the lack of imagination or the lack of exposure, just fall into, "Oh, my father is a lawyer; I will be a lawyer." Or "Bankers make a lot of money; I will be a banker." Or whatever. I think that if you got training in something, you might decide, "I could make a life out of this. I could do this." Not everybody would, but not everyone should. But it would make a huge difference. And I think people would value themselves more than they do.

SM (02:59:54):
Can you list some of the tangible results or deeds of members of the boomer generation? They are 48 to 64. We all know about Bill Gates, we know what he has done, and Steve Jobs. We know they are boomers. But are there boomers that stand out? I only got about 10 minutes here left. And this might end, and I got a little dinky tape in here to end it. Are there boomers that really stand out, that you think really they had lived the idealism of the (19)60s throughout their entire lives?

ML (03:00:26):
Oh, maybe somebody like Paul Farmer.

SM (03:00:29):
Now, who is Paul Farmer?

ML (03:00:35):
Way out in the mountains, the guy who is in Haiti, the doctor in Haiti. There certainly have been a fair number of creative people who left an imprint. Funny the way you have framed the question, are there heroes of sports, heroes of science?

SM (03:01:03):
I did not say anything about sports.

ML (03:01:06):
Well, there have been some sports figures. Well, he was not a baby boomer, so... Oh, he may have been actually, like Curt Flood.

SM (03:01:14):
This is my last question here, so I am going to get to it.

ML (03:01:24):
I have had friends that have gone on to high achievement and people that I know who have lived good life, my older brother. Although he was not a boomer, because he was born in 1940, but he was involved in public education his whole life and always committed to it. There have been academics, like one of my classmates at Yale also. Again, I do not know if he is quite a baby boomer, but Donald Worcester and Bill Cronon as historians have been pioneers in the environmental studies movement, environmental history. So, there are not any, probably when you are gone, I will think six right in a row, particularly impressed with or done great things. A lot of courageous women who have broken a lot of barriers along the way.

SM (03:02:38):
[inaudible] the tape.

ML (03:02:40):
Hillary deserves a lot of credit.

SM (03:02:42):
Oh, definitely.

ML (03:02:43):
What she is accomplished, not without controversy.

SM (03:02:53):
This is getting down to the last question here really before I have a question on a legacy that ends it. Here it is. It is a little takeoff of what I just asked. What personalities between 46 today do you feel had the greatest impact on the generation that came of age after World War II? I broke it down into names, events, and trends. I like your comments. These are the people that I felt were the most important to the boomer generation and they had the greatest impact on. JFK, Martin Luther King, Richard Nixon, Jackie Robinson, Lyndon Johnson, Walt Disney, Hugh Hefner, the Beatles, Elvis and Reagan. Now those are the people that I thought had the greatest impact on the boomer generation.

ML (03:03:47):
And do you mean outside of the context of the (19)60s? You mean in the entire post-war era?

SM (03:03:56):
Yeah, both good and bad.

ML (03:03:57):
Okay. Nobody mentioned Jim Morris. I am joking.

SM (03:03:58):
Yeah, I know.

ML (03:04:03):
I am joking about that. I would have to say that there have been some writers, certainly. I think of people like Barry Commoner.

SM (03:04:13):
Okay.

ML (03:04:15):
Ralph Nader.

SM (03:04:17):
Let me-

ML (03:04:25):
... coming up behind us. But then we have got to be careful that we are looking through a clear windshield and we see the road ahead as well. That is best I could put it.

SM (03:04:37):
The free speech movement in 1964, which was at Berkeley in (19)64, (19)65 was the precursor to many things that filed on university campuses in the late (19)60s. But keeping in mind that the free speech movement also was linked to Freedom Summer when many of those students who were down, a lot of them, Jewish, white Jewish students, and Catholic students, and Catholic priests, and African Americans who went south and came back to college campuses, and Berkeley was one of them. And of course, their whole free speech movement was about ideas and challenged the corporate mentality. And that, from one thing to the next, and freedom of speech is important, and liberty is important, because I know you are a man who loves liberty. And liberty is what it is all about, and freedom of speech is a very important part of it. And I think when you talk about what you talked about-about Chicago in (19)68, I think what you are saying is that it was sad that there was confrontation there, but that freedom of speech should always be guaranteed no matter what. And that liberty is why we are all here. I hope what you are saying is that liberty, some things, like you talked about the Republican Party, they are doing things that from the past they should be reinventing themselves or whatever, but liberty is forever. And so, whenever freedom of speech is denied, we need to be out there guaranteeing that it continues. Are there any thoughts you have on this generation that grew up after World War II? They are now 64 years old; they are going into senior citizen status right now. They probably will change it. But any thoughts of how the history books will write about this period in terms of-

ML (03:06:39):
Well, Tom Brokaw has already written about the Greatest Generation. You are wanting me to look ahead beyond that, I guess. And somehow, I have the feeling that they are going to do all right. I am not a purveyor of doom and gloom.

SM (03:07:01):
Good.

ML (03:07:02):
I do not think the world is going to end tomorrow if somebody's political program is not adopted in haec verba, in all particulars. I think we will find a way. I have great reverence and respect for the capacity of the free American spirit. Sometimes it lags a bit, takes some time to catch up, but I think our freedoms will endure.

SM (03:07:40):
You were in Congress in probably one of the most exciting times in American history, the (19)60s and seventies. To me, they were exciting times. Because you even talk about the constant of change, which is what the boomer generation wanted, but a lot of the people in politics were doing the very same thing. Just from the going to work every day and working with other congressmen, senators and having people come in that cared about civil rights and all the other issues that we were facing in America at the time. You talked about the moment you are most proud of, which was the 1968 law that was passed. You obviously talked to a lot of people. Give me a feel, because when we are talking about boomer times, we're also talking about congressional times. (19)60 to (19)80 was the key time when young people were growing and evolving from that generation. And you were in Congress at the time. What was it like? Who were your best cohorts? Who did you love working with?

ML (03:08:54):
Mo Udall.

SM (03:08:55):
Oh, what a great man.

ML (03:08:56):
Mo Udall from Arizona was my bosom friend, and I wish he had won the nomination and been elected president in 1976, because then I would not have had to run in 1980. He would have been running for his second term, and I would have been supporting him. So, I think that good men and good women are going to arise as the need occurs that will keep us on the path that we should be on. I just have a great feeling of confidence in the capacity of the American system for renewal and for a new generation to provide the kind of leadership that is needed. I am not one who believes our best days are behind us. I think that they still lie ahead.

SM (03:10:07):
And Mo Udall was your best friend then?

ML (03:10:09):
Yes, he was. Head and shoulders above anyone else.

SM (03:10:14):
He was a good man. No question about it. I think his brother just passed.

ML (03:10:20):
Well, it has been great talking to you.

SM (03:10:21):
Yep. Thank you very much. Let me take four more pictures and then I will go.

ML (03:10:23):
Yeah, that is right. You have got to take some at the end.

SM (03:10:24):
Yep.

ML (03:10:28):
I did not even look to see whether my hair was combed very well.

SM (03:10:32):
You are fine.

ML (03:10:32):
I hope it is.

SM (03:10:34):
You are fine.

ML (03:10:34):
And I am sitting here in my stocking feet and my leisure clothing.

SM (03:10:43):
You still talk to any former congressmen now, that you worked with?

ML (03:10:48):
Well, occasionally.

SM (03:10:59):
Was not there one, a powerful one? Phil Burton from California.

ML (03:11:03):
Oh, Phil, yes.

SM (03:11:05):
He's still alive, I think. He was a powerful congressman. And then of course there was Ron Dellums.

ML (03:11:12):
I am not sure that Phil is still alive. I think he has gone.

SM (03:11:15):
Oh, is he? There is Ron Dellums, who is now the mayor of Oakland.

ML (03:11:20):
Yes, I remember him.

SM (03:11:20):
All right.

ML (03:11:24):
All right, well, can I just sit here and look at you?

SM (03:11:27):
Yep. I am going to have one last picture in front of your books, because I always like to take pictures. Bear with me as this focuses here. Ready? Sit.

ML (03:11:38):
All right?

SM (03:11:40):
And one more from here, then two by your books, and then we are done.

ML (03:11:43):
All right.

SM (03:11:47):
And then I guess two over here with your books.

ML (03:11:49):
Do you want me standing over there?

SM (03:11:51):
Yep. Is that your congressional, did you have that in Congress?

ML (03:11:58):
What?

SM (03:11:59):
This at your desk.

ML (03:12:02):
That was given to me while I was in Congress, yeah. I cannot remember who gave it to me.

SM (03:12:07):
All right.

ML (03:12:09):
I have got another one over here. Mary. Yeah, I guess it is the same thing. You want me here?

SM (03:12:16):
Yep.

ML (03:12:18):
All right.

SM (03:12:18):
You are not allowed to take anything away from Congress?

ML (03:12:21):
No.

SM (03:12:21):
You cannot take your chair and all desks have to go back?

ML (03:12:25):
The desk? No, I bought that.

SM (03:12:28):
That is your congressional desk?

ML (03:12:29):
You are allowed to buy your desk. That is a congressional desk.

SM (03:12:31):
That will be my last shot, you at your congressional desk.

ML (03:12:34):
All right.

SM (03:12:34):
So, this is the desk to used when you were in Congress?

ML (03:12:37):
Oh yeah. That is from my office from my 20 years.

SM (03:12:40):
My gosh. It is nice.

ML (03:12:43):
It is a little untidy right at the moment.

SM (03:12:46):
Well, that is pretty tidy to me.

ML (03:12:48):
All right.

SM (03:12:49):
In fact, I think this is one of your books right here. That is the one. I have that book.

ML (03:12:54):
All right.

SM (03:12:56):
Okay.

ML (03:13:01):
I definitely agree that people, even though I am not totally sympathetic to them, but people like Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan had a heavy political footprint, but there have been people like Steven Spielberg or more of John Lucas have been creative. Steve Jobs. I know they are people in there. Stewart Brand.

SM (03:13:39):
The Whole Earth Catalog.

ML (03:13:40):
But he created Wired magazine also and has been continually active and generating ideas and connecting people from interesting walks of life. There are obviously some of the people like Sabin and Salk. And I have forgotten the guy who did the birth control pill.

SM (03:14:04):
Sanger?

ML (03:14:05):
No. There was some guy who was at, I think, the clinic in Worcester or whatnot who developed the birth control pill. I cannot remember who it was, but there is some person who is centrally identified with it, although it has been a variety. Obviously, someone like John Wood, the realm of sports, at least as a role model. Or Vince Lombardi, a different era.

SM (03:14:44):
I have not been doing any sports business related to this, although [inaudible] Jackie Robinson and Curt Flood and Muhammad Ali.

ML (03:14:52):
Muhammad Ali was a big deal. He was in many ways, embodied a lot of the (19)60s characteristics. I would say Barack Obama recently. I was amazed how politically re-energized many of my friends became, my contemporaries, who got interested in politics in a way that they either never had been or had not been for 30 or 40 years. And I think that they found in him a sensibility that, partly it is because he just embodies the idea of merit. Now, it is a very privileged kind of merit. He is well-educated from beginning to end, and he is the essence of professionalism in a way, but with charisma. A professional with charisma. I used to like to think that Barack Obama and Tiger Woods were similar and that they were the best at whoever did what they do, except now we know Tiger Woods is-

SM (03:16:08):
Falling apart.

ML (03:16:09):
Deeply corrupt. And so, the analogy is not all that flattering any longer.

SM (03:16:16):
His wife got a certain lot of money. How many millions? But the events that shaped the boomers more than any other events, I just listed these. And again, you can add or subtract, just terms. Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the three assassinations: JFK, MLK, and Bobby Kennedy, the Chicago Convention of (19)68, Kent State, the McCarthy hearings, the Free Speech Movement, the Vietnam Memorial opening in 1982, the Civil Rights Acts of (19)54, (19)64, (19)65, and (19)68, Watergate, the Berlin Wall coming down, the hostage crisis in Iran, the communism falling all over the world, and 9/11. Those are the events that I consider to be the... And I did not say Yom Kippur War, which I should have.

ML (03:17:19):
They are also, they are events of several different orders. They are like apples and oranges in a way when you think about them. Some of them are public political events and some of them are cultural events or whatnot. A lot, again, depends. That is why if I made the argument that it is about something to do with demographics or some tipping point in an argument I made about the decline of US oil production, something like that. You already did Sputnik. I think that was a biggie. I think that there have been some cultural moments that are like The Graduate. I would say The Graduate probably had more impact than, say, The Greening of America or any of those books, because it had a much broader, wider public audience.

SM (03:18:34):
Plastics. Have you thought about plastics?

ML (03:18:42):
A cute moment. I think that that was either Buck Henry or Terry Southern wrote that line. I am not sure.

SM (03:18:51):
I do not know. It is a great line. That was 1967, and he was 29 years old. Dustin Hoffman was no youngster when he did that.

ML (03:19:01):
No, actually he was in his thirties. I think he was 32. But you know what the age difference between Mrs. Robinson and Ben Braddock really was?

SM (03:19:11):
Oh, probably only about two years.

ML (03:19:13):
It was six years or seven years. She was 38 or 39.

SM (03:19:17):
And he was 32?

ML (03:19:18):
He was 32 or something like that.

SM (03:19:20):
I never could figure out why she married Mel Brooks.

ML (03:19:23):
Well, she is a nice Italian girl. Mel Brooks has got to be one of the funniest guys there is.

SM (03:19:30):
Yeah. That was quite a marriage.

ML (03:19:32):
But they stayed married, I think.

SM (03:19:34):
Yeah, they did. And then course she passed away. The movies obviously that come out are certainly Easy Rider and Zabriskie Point was another one that I remember. Or Bob, Carol, Ted and Alice.

ML (03:19:48):
Although I think that the movies that really had it, Bonnie and Clyde, have had more impact. Because I think that one of the things that happens culturally in the late (19)60s and seventies and affects movies, but more broadly American culture, is the conflation of pornographic sexual and pornographic violence. And that is really what Bonnie and Clyde was about. It was sort of the pornography of violence in which the eroticism of the most erotic moment, in a way, is that balletic death at the end of the movie. There is another version of it in The Wild Bunch, which comes out shortly afterwards, which is Sam Peckinpah. It is where, I like to point out to my students, if you watch a Busby Berkeley movie in the 1930s, there will be these moments, the [inaudible] will be marching towards the camera. The camera will be down low, and the shot will be from low to the high. And they are coming at you, and the camera is focused almost on their crotches. And you start to get a little embarrassed. Should I be looking at this? Is not this getting a little too intimate? And then the person turns away; it cuts away. So, you had this certain confidence that the camera would never let you see more than you should see. In the 1940s and (19)50s, you watch a lot of the westerns, and somebody gets shot, you do not see blood on the wall. They collapse. They get shot; they die. But what happens in these movies is the camera lingers over the scene, and then you think to yourself, "I am watching this, and I am fascinated." I am also repulsed, and I am shocked, but I am watching. There is a certain voyeurism involved in it, just as there is with pornography. And I think that this is one of the things that you see as a consistent trend. So, if you think of a movie like Pulp Fiction in the nineties, where it has now become comedic, where the same things happen. And it is like John Travolta accidentally blows the kid's head off in the backseat of the car, and kid is spattered all over the car and whatnot. And it is sort of like, "Holy shit, why do we do that? How do we fix this?" And I think that that was one of those shifts in the cultural sensibility, which is one of the things that conservatives, and particularly evangelical conservatives, what they are most offended about, is the pornographic elements in contemporary culture. The rules are gone, the censorship is gone, and it has gotten into television. It was already in publishing, in books. So how do you protect your world?

SM (03:22:53):
I know that people were upset with the play Hair, and because I am in Columbus, the nuns were protesting in front of the theater downtown as we walked in, saying we were all going to hell for going to see Hair because of nudity that was shown in there. So, Jesus Christ, Superstar, Hair, and a lot of the other movies or plays were interesting. And certainly, the movie Taxi Driver too, which was, "Are you talking to me?" That kind of the psyche of the Vietnam veteran coming back and the Vietnam movies.

ML (03:23:27):
And again, also this dystopian, pathological world. There is a certain kind of psychological disarrangement in the (19)50s, and a lot of it has to do with Freudianism and madness. But this has to do with a kind of profound pathology.

SM (03:23:46):
And Coming Home and Klute with Jane Fonda. That was her big role. She won the Academy Award. The last thing is trends. I had already talked about events and names. Trends to me, the Beat Generation and the (19)50s... trends to me, the Beat Generation now, the (19)50s, and it seems like Ginsberg went through it all. You could see him everywhere. The counterculture, the communal movement, the alternative religions that we talked about, and certainly LSD and Leary. Those are the kind of trends that I saw that developed. I do not know if there is any more that you...

ML (03:24:28):
Well, part of it is just different order of trend. There is this way in which capitalism and technology are very restless, and where broadcast technologies are redefined, where the internet emerges in the late (19)60s. ARPANET was created in the late (19)60s, where there is this endless flood of consumer technologies. There is a wonderful book, by the way, which I have out there. It is called The Way We Were.

SM (03:25:08):
I saw this movie. I saw the movie.

ML (03:25:10):
But this is a book, I have forgotten her... The woman who wrote sounded like Roberta Kleinfeld or something. But it is just an almanac of events from the mid-(19)50s through the mid-seventies. Each year, it tells you the big events of the years, new technologies, new terms, sports firsts, movie firsts television firsts, the top hit songs of the year. It is this catalog of stuff. And you go back, and you look at it, "Well, this is the year that Pop Tarts were created. This is the year that the term walk became popular." Or whatever. It is sort of like-

SM (03:25:49):
The Walkman.

ML (03:25:50):
And one of the things you are amazed at is the varieties of new cultural references and whatnot. The term WASP becomes popular in 1968.

SM (03:25:59):
Do you know what the number one hit was in America the week that John Kennedy was killed?

ML (03:26:05):
I shudder to think.

SM (03:26:06):
(singing)

ML (03:26:10):
It was the Singing Nun?

SM (03:26:10):
Yes, it was.

ML (03:26:11):
Yeah.

SM (03:26:13):
Because there was a song, you have to go into YouTube, there was a song that was from the... I forget the name of the group. It was the first two days of that week, but then Dominique came in on Wednesday, he was killed Friday, so the number one hit changed, and it was the Singing Nun.

ML (03:26:38):
There are trends. I guess the biggest trends I would say in the (19)60s really was the shift of the American cultural center of gravity, South and West. And also, demographics, the population moves as well. It becomes so that you have booming populations in the Carolinas and Florida and Texas, Arizona, California.

SM (03:27:03):
You see the shift of what it was like in the late (19)40s and (19)50s, then you go into the (19)60s, then you see with Reagan, the desire to go back to the (19)50s again, because Reagan came to... I interviewed Ed Meese. I booked an interviewed him for an hour in Washington, and I only talked to him, not about his years with Reagan in the White House, I wanted to talk about his years in California under the governor.

ML (03:27:27):
Well, because he was Attorney General, was not he?

SM (03:27:27):
Yeah, and he was-

ML (03:27:27):
In California?

SM (03:27:30):
Yeah, he is the guy that oversaw People's Park.

ML (03:27:32):
Oh, right, yeah.

SM (03:27:32):
He is the guy, and he was also the assistant DA in Oakland at the time... Excuse me, Alameda County, when the free speech movement was happening, so he was dealing with that too, but he was not dealing... He was not reporting to Reagan. He was reporting to someone else, but Reagan heard about him during the free speech movement (19)64, (19)65.

ML (03:27:56):
Oh, this is the kind of guy he likes-

SM (03:27:56):
And that is the kind of guy he would like. And I will tell you a story at the very end here, about him and another person. I know I said this was the last thing, but this is just quick one or two word, just quick responses to these words. These are all people from the (19)60s or events in the (19)60s. You do not have to go into any elaborate...

ML (03:28:18):
This is a free association.

SM (03:28:19):
Free association. Alcatraz?

ML (03:28:25):
Indian takeover.

SM (03:28:27):
Anita Bryant?

ML (03:28:29):
Orange juice and homophobia.

SM (03:28:33):
Hard hats versus long hairs on Wall Street.

ML (03:28:37):
Yes. John Lindsay and the beating up... Or the war protests.

SM (03:28:44):
University response to student protests nationwide?

ML (03:28:49):
How can we shut them up?

SM (03:28:50):
Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg.

ML (03:28:53):
A shock.

SM (03:28:57):
Watts.

ML (03:28:59):
Disturbing.

SM (03:29:00):
Earth Day?

ML (03:29:02):
Earth Day? Hopeful.

SM (03:29:04):
Ford pardons Nixon?

ML (03:29:07):
Politically necessary, politically unfortunate.

SM (03:29:13):
Nixon's Cambodia speech?

ML (03:29:17):
Final, desperate effort.

SM (03:29:19):
Chicago Eight or Seven Trial?

ML (03:29:23):
Farce.

SM (03:29:27):
Hippies?

ML (03:29:29):
Hippies were kind of naive saints.

SM (03:29:31):
Yippies?

ML (03:29:31):
Yippies? Cynics.

SM (03:29:31):
FDS?

ML (03:29:40):
Flawed.

SM (03:29:42):
The Weathermen?

ML (03:29:44):
Dangerous.

SM (03:29:46):
Cesar Chavez.

ML (03:29:47):
A secular saint.

SM (03:29:53):
Muhammad Ali?

ML (03:29:55):
Admirable.

SM (03:29:56):
Jackie Robinson?

ML (03:29:59):
Equally admirable.

SM (03:30:00):
Curt Flood?

ML (03:30:02):
Somebody I have great respect for.

SM (03:30:05):
I met him. He was the Oakland A's. He was at a game.

ML (03:30:08):
Yeah.

SM (03:30:09):
Got him to sign a thing I had. It is a-

ML (03:30:11):
One of my students at Bard wrote his senior project about Curt Flood and free agency.

SM (03:30:16):
But did he get Kurt Flood's book? Did he read his book?

ML (03:30:20):
I think he read his book. I do not think he ever met... I do not know if he ever got to meet Kurt Flood.

SM (03:30:22):
He died so young. He was 50. He was the same age Jackie Robinson... 51, 52?

ML (03:30:28):
Yeah, yeah.

SM (03:30:30):
Benjamin Spock.

ML (03:30:31):
Benjamin Spock? Patrician.

SM (03:30:37):
Henry Kissinger?

ML (03:30:38):
A criminal.

SM (03:30:41):
Robert McNamara.

ML (03:30:45):
Unfortunate.

SM (03:30:47):
Dwight Eisenhower?

ML (03:30:49):
Avuncular.

SM (03:30:51):
Harry Truman?

ML (03:30:53):
Over his head.

SM (03:30:55):
John Kennedy?

ML (03:30:58):
Admirable, but corrupt.

SM (03:31:01):
Lyndon Johnson?

ML (03:31:03):
Egotist.

SM (03:31:04):
Hubert Humphrey?

ML (03:31:06):
A weak-kneed liberal.

SM (03:31:10):
Richard Nixon?

ML (03:31:11):
A Black Irishman.

SM (03:31:17):
Spiro Agnew?

ML (03:31:19):
A crook.

SM (03:31:21):
Eleanor Roosevelt?

ML (03:31:23):
An admirable woman.

SM (03:31:27):
The United Nations?

ML (03:31:29):
In over its head.

SM (03:31:31):
Robert Kennedy?

ML (03:31:33):
Robert Kennedy? Combative.

SM (03:31:35):
Eugene McCarthy?

ML (03:31:37):
Lazy.

SM (03:31:39):
George McGovern?

ML (03:31:41):
Well-intentioned.

SM (03:31:43):
Geraldine Ferraro?

ML (03:31:45):
A person before her time.

SM (03:31:50):
Angela Davis?

ML (03:31:52):
A striking figure.

SM (03:31:56):
George Jackson?

ML (03:31:58):
George Jackson? An unlikely hero, I guess.

SM (03:32:05):
Tom Hayden.

ML (03:32:06):
Tom Hayden? Embodied the inability of moral consistency in politics.

SM (03:32:17):
Jane Fonda?

ML (03:32:19):
Jane Fonda? An idealist.

SM (03:32:22):
Bobby Seale.

ML (03:32:23):
Bobby Seale? He was complicated. I met him.

SM (03:32:29):
That is all I need. How about Stokely Carmichael?

ML (03:32:32):
He was very charismatic.

SM (03:32:35):
Huey Newton?

ML (03:32:36):
Huey Newton was a fraud.

SM (03:32:38):
Eldridge Cleaver?

ML (03:32:40):
A little less of a fraud.

SM (03:32:42):
Kathleen Cleaver?

ML (03:32:44):
I do not know Kathleen Cleaver well enough to...

SM (03:32:46):
H. Rap Brown?

ML (03:32:48):
H. Rap Brown was also a bad dude.

SM (03:32:53):
Yeah. His brother came to a conference we did. George Wallace?

ML (03:32:56):
George Wallace was slicker than Willie.

SM (03:33:00):
Barry Goldwater?

ML (03:33:05):
Righteous figure, I guess.

SM (03:33:09):
William Buckley?

ML (03:33:11):
A glib intellectual.

SM (03:33:14):
Thurgood Marshall?

ML (03:33:17):
A man who earned his stripes.

SM (03:33:19):
Ronald Reagan?

ML (03:33:20):
A man who was not as bad as I thought.

SM (03:33:24):
George Bush, the first.

ML (03:33:28):
A solid public servant.

SM (03:33:32):
Bill Clinton?

ML (03:33:33):
Bill Clinton is a morally flawed human being.

SM (03:33:38):
Bush II?

ML (03:33:39):
A man who is profoundly over his head.

SM (03:33:42):
And Obama?

ML (03:33:45):
Person with the best qualities to be president who has ever been president.

SM (03:33:49):
Gloria Steinem?

ML (03:33:51):
A very interesting conversion, I guess.

SM (03:33:57):
Bella Abzug?

ML (03:33:59):
She was florid, shall we say?

SM (03:34:02):
Betty Friedan?

ML (03:34:06):
She was another person who is quietly subversive.

SM (03:34:11):
Jimmy Carter?

ML (03:34:13):
A righteous populist.

SM (03:34:14):
AIDS?

ML (03:34:17):
AIDS is tragic.

SM (03:34:21):
Let us see here. The hostage crisis?

ML (03:34:25):
Hostage crisis was... I do not know, it was humiliation, I guess.

SM (03:34:35):
Stonewall?

ML (03:34:36):
Stonewall? Liberation.

SM (03:34:39):
And then the POW?

ML (03:34:45):
POW? I would have to say that was a phony issue.

SM (03:34:48):
Okay. The Ho Chi Minh?

ML (03:34:53):
A Vietnamese nationalist.

SM (03:34:56):
General Ky?

ML (03:34:58):
A kleptocrat.

SM (03:35:01):
President Thieu?

ML (03:35:03):
Another kleptocrat.

SM (03:35:05):
And Wayne Westmoreland?

ML (03:35:07):
He looked like a general but was not.

SM (03:35:10):
And Dennis Banks?

ML (03:35:11):
Dennis Banks? Let us say-

SM (03:35:14):
The Native American Movement.

ML (03:35:15):
I know, I was trying to capture him as a tragic hero, I guess.

SM (03:35:23):
And Harvey Milk?

ML (03:35:24):
Another tragic hero.

SM (03:35:27):
And the last three here is, I have put these on... This ends at, what does the wall mean to you? The Vietnam Memorial? You have probably been to the wall. When you-

ML (03:35:38):
I have. I wrote a little piece about that also, actually, about-

SM (03:35:43):
Did you go to the wall?

ML (03:35:44):
I have been. Yeah, I think it is one of the most powerful and effective pieces of memorialization. I just think that we had an interesting experience out in Seattle, of going to see an installed exhibit of Maya Lin's work. And she is one of these people that has the ability to redefine space. She is a genius. We actually have a portrait of her [inaudible]-

SM (03:36:19):
Yeah, there is a sculpture at Yale too, was not there?

ML (03:36:22):
Yeah. She is a Yale graduate, but-

SM (03:36:26):
What was your experience when feeling, because you were... This is part of your life too, and your wife as well. When you went to the wall, what was the feeling? What was going through your mind when you saw it for that first time?

ML (03:36:42):
I felt that what it did was, instead of focusing our remembrance on the war, it focuses our remembrance on the people who died in the war. It made the war about them, which it should be. The memory of it, since the war is so hard to remember, that making the soldiers the subject, rather than some heroic or nationalist image, the way the second sculpture, to me is, it represents all that is wrong about the wars.

SM (03:37:21):
The three-man statue?

ML (03:37:22):
Yeah, it is too artificial. It is too contrived. Whereas I think what she did was that she found a way to our hearts.

SM (03:37:34):
They say that the three-man statue is always overlooking the wall now, and the Women's Memorial is very important for the women as well.

ML (03:37:42):
Yeah, but those were political gestures, I think, more than they were... They do not have the kind of innovative way of...

SM (03:37:55):
What did Kent State and Jackson State mean to you? May 4th, 1970, to me, is one of the... November 22, 1963, obviously, but for anybody in that first wave of boomers, May 4th, 1970, is another one. And then 10 days later, Jackson State.

ML (03:38:13):
Oh yeah, no, those things were truly stunning. I went to a series of public gatherings on the Yale campus, where people were trying to make sense out of it. In some ways, it seemed to be just one more step towards, we are at war with ourselves. It is one of the refrains that we picked up from Vietnam. Who is the friend and who is the enemy? And it seems like it was emblematic of a gulf that had... Or wrenching a rift in America that had grown too wide to bridge. Turns out it was not altogether the case, but that was how we felt at the time. Kent State, yeah, if it had been Wisconsin or if it had been Berkeley or Yale even, it would have still been tragic, but it would make more sense. One of the things that always struck me is the people who were in the guard were not that different from the students who were on the campus.

SM (03:39:28):
Yes, you are right. Same age.

ML (03:39:29):
Yeah.

SM (03:39:30):
Watergate. What did Watergate mean to you?

ML (03:39:33):
Watergate was some of the most absolutely intriguing political theater I have ever witnessed. I think the ultimate moment of Watergate was when you could not believe... It is like one revelation after the other and you say, "Cannot get any nuttier than this. You cannot believe it." Suddenly it turned out that Spiro Agnew was resigning, because he was taking bribes in the White House. I thought, this is melodrama becomes farce.

SM (03:40:05):
Do you think John Dean was kind of a hero on this? Because a lot of people thought he was a culprit in the beginning, but he was the beginning of what they call the... And Ellsberg, the same thing. They were the tattletale people that-

ML (03:40:21):
Yeah, right, and being a snitch is always frowned on in America. They did make On the Waterfront to help us explore that terrain, but I do not think that Dean has quite the moral fiber to be heroic, but I do think that he shows the capacity for self-reflection and for reinvention in a constructive way, and so I admire him for having pulled himself together. I think partly it is hard to distinguish how much of what he did was to save his own skin and how much of it was that he was morally offended by what was going on around him. I think it was a little of both and I think over time, the latter, the moral offense, took over from the self-serving side of it. I think Daniel Ellsberg was truly troubled. Ellsberg had been in the war when it was like that.

SM (03:41:17):
Yeah, he had been a Marine too.

ML (03:41:20):
He had done the dirty. He had been there. And I think that Ellsberg, again, was somebody who ultimately just became morally burdened. And actually, one of the things that I was curious about that event is that the Pentagon Papers were not a problem for Nixon, they were a problem for Johnson, who was not quite dead then, but was about to be dead around the time. Oh, actually he might have been dead by the time they came out.

SM (03:41:50):
I remember the day he died-

ML (03:41:51):
He died in (19)72.

SM (03:41:53):
... in (19)72 was the same day something else happened.

ML (03:41:55):
I think it was the day they signed the Paris Peace Accords.

SM (03:41:58):
I think you are right. Yes, that is right. Nixon made a reference to the death of the President in a speech, yes-yes.

ML (03:42:06):
I do not know.

SM (03:42:10):
In your opinion, when did the (19)60s begin and when did it end, and what was the watershed moment?

ML (03:42:14):
I still would argue partly that they begin sometime in the mid to late-(19)50s. I think, for a variety of reasons, again, some of the cultural reasons, that the groundwork for the (19)60s... Because I think that what you needed first was a process of delegitimization. Somebody, I think Robert Darton, did a similar study where they discovered that pornographic representation of establishment figures increases on the eve of political revolutions. It is sort of like the delegitimizing of... Mockery of... First, you have to destroy authority before you can overturn it. I think that was one of the things that happened. That black comedy, for example, black humor of the Dr. Strangelove types was, we took the strategic air command, which had this image of technical and vulnerability and of space age candoism, and turned it into this rip-snorting nuthouse, so that you never could look at this Curtis LeMay and the Strategic Air Command the same way again.

SM (03:43:31):
That was Andy Devine, was not it, that was on the missile, going-

ML (03:43:34):
No, that was Slim Pickens.

SM (03:43:35):
Oh, Slim Pickens, okay. [inaudible]-

ML (03:43:36):
You have got the wrong... Andy Devine was a regular, both the Roy Rogers Show and in John Ford movies.

SM (03:43:47):
When did the (19)60s end?

ML (03:43:50):
I would still argue, I have not shifted, even though I do not think there is a specific moment, but the coincidence of Watergate and the end of the Vietnam War, the end of the draft, the end of around (19)73, (19)74, the turning off the fuel supply, so that there's nothing to keep the fires burning as hot or bright as they had.

SM (03:44:20):
Was Vietnam a watershed moment? Just the ongoing from (19)59 to (19)75?

ML (03:44:25):
Well, we did not even know from Vietnam until about 1962- 3, somewhere in that. We still did not think about it even until the Gulf of Tonkin. That was the first time we really thought about it.

SM (03:44:38):
(19)64, yeah.

ML (03:44:38):
And I think people stopped thinking actively about it as the Vietnamization of the war, and one of the interesting things... The point that Phillip Epstein pointed out a long time ago, when he was talking about the distortions of news, but right around the time that the Peace Talks started in (19)68, (19)69, the news media stopped actively photographing the war and shifted their attention to the peace talks. Even though the war was far more violent from 1968 on, you saw much less of it, so it was not a constant reminder. Every so often, there would be an eruption of protest or an eruption, like Kent State would happen, or a Cambodian incursion would happen. Then things would gear up again, but then they would fade again. I do not think it was the same time.

SM (03:45:40):
Is there one watershed moment that you can define, or just...

ML (03:45:44):
Yeah, I met my wife at the [inaudible]-

SM (03:45:45):
Okay, I got that on record.

ML (03:45:53):
No, I would say, probably in terms of just emblematic experiences, probably the first time I smoked dope, that was sort of crossing a line.

SM (03:46:07):
You are the second person that is said that. The first one was the professor of history and political science at the University of Delaware, Dr. Smith. Do you know him? He wrote a book on Vietnam.

ML (03:46:16):
I do not know him personally.

SM (03:46:18):
Yeah, he is really good. He is a top political scientist. He was heading to become a priest. He was at the... I do not know what church it was, and a friend of his came by accident with his brother, and they said, "Hey, you want to try a..." He said, "No, I am going to be a priest." "Oh, come on." They went into the church and went up into the steeple someplace and he is smoking... Anyways, that was a very important moment for him.

ML (03:46:47):
I think the only reason I would say it-it was not that anything so unusual happened or anything. I enjoyed the experience. I was at a party at Johns Hopkins visiting at friend, and Johns Hopkins is a pretty straitlaced place. This was the fall, I think, the fall of 1967, something like that. But I think what it was is that once you crossed over to the world of dope, that you were willing to do things that were illegal. And also, you deepened your identification with the anti-authority, anti-establishment mentality. It was a kind of, I guess, what I would say, it was like an initiation ritual.

SM (03:47:41):
The Vietnam War, it ended. In your reason, why did it end? Some people say it ended because when body bags start coming home, when Middle America saw their sons coming home, they said, "It is time to end this war." And most of them were White. Now, we are not talking about the African Americans now, we are talking about the White... Others think that Kent State was the magic moment, that it is all over from there.

ML (03:48:06):
In 1967, when McNamara resigned, he knew the war was lost. Johnson could not persuade himself to wrap himself around that realization. He was too politically invested. It was too much his war. And Nixon was very cynical about it. Nixon knew the war was a loser. He wanted to get out as soon as he became president. He just wanted to get out on his own terms. I think that the war... And the war did not end. In many ways, the war did not end, certainly did not end in (19)72, it did not end in (19)73. It sort of ended in (19)75, but there was still violence galore going on. And so, it is when did the America's Vietnam end, is what [inaudible]-

SM (03:49:02):
Yeah, the American War, as opposed to the Vietnam War. Two more associations real fast. Timothy Leary. I did not get your

ML (03:49:11):
Huckster.

SM (03:49:11):
And the last one is the Free Speech Movement, (19)64, (19)65, of Berkeley with Mario Savio and Bettina Aptheker in that group.

ML (03:49:19):
I would say, transformative.

SM (03:49:22):
Very last question, and I swear to this, and your wife can verify this now, I have been here a long time; the best history books are written usually 50 years after an event. A lot of the best World War II books are 50 years after. I remember Stephen Ambrose being interviewed, and he talked all about this. The best history books are history, sociology, whatever books are written after the last boomer has passed away, the last Civil War, and I am sure we will be able to document that someday down the road, in the census. What do you think historians who were not alive, or sociologists who were not alive when all these things happened, will say about this generation and this period? The 74 million that... What do they say about it?

ML (03:50:15):
I think they're going to say that around the Vietnam War era and around the failure of this generation to come to grips with some of the fundamental contradictions in American history, some of the big ones being environmental, actually, that this was the beginning of the decline of the American Empire, a little bit in this period. Whether they will specifically say it was the Vietnam War era or the Bush era, one of the two, but they are going to mark this as the decline of American hegemony and new age globalization, a different kind of globalization. That is what I think.

SM (03:51:03):
What is really interesting about President Obama here, he has stated outright that he does not want to be identified with the (19)60s generation or the boomer generation. Of course, he is a boomer. He is only two years old, but-

ML (03:51:17):
He is the tag end of the-

SM (03:51:18):
Yeah, but his biggest critics say he is the reincarnation of the baby boomer generation. They say he is the most liberal president we have had since Roosevelt.

ML (03:51:27):
Yeah, but the-

SM (03:51:28):
Here, we got a president who does not want to be identified with it. He has so many people in his administration that are some of the leaders of the (19)60s in that particular respect. Most of them are brought up in the (19)60s, and yet he is being criticized for being the...

ML (03:51:48):
Yeah, but who is doing the criticizing?

SM (03:51:50):
Well, the conservatives.

ML (03:51:54):
Because I do not see him as the most liberal. I see him as a Rooseveltian pragmatist. He is somebody, he will take what the times will give him. He has an agenda that is liberal, it is social-democratic, but he also inherited an agenda that demanded social democracy, because the privatization of America bankrupted it. That is what Bush accomplished. We are going to have public services, we are not going to pay for them, and where we need regulation and controls, we are not going to have them, and he created financial economic anarchy. I think that Obama, part of the success that I measure, it is one of the reasons that I think Theodore Roosevelt stands out somewhat, is that he created political movement more theatrically. It was not like the outcomes were there to be grabbed, it took real presidential manipulation, management and whatnot to achieve some of the things that he did. I think that Franklin Roosevelt was less successful in that regard, that he had a potentially more opportunity to seize than he had the temperament to seize. That is, he could have been far more progressive and liberal than he was, but he was really... He had some very conservative side as well. I think that that Barack Obama is more disciplined and intelligent than any president who's ever been... Modern president; I cannot compare them to Jefferson or Lincoln or whatnot, but in the end, it almost does not matter, because it's how you play the hand you're dealt. George Bush was headed to oblivion in a one turn presidency until September 11th came along, and then when the country needed a cheerleader, man, he was golden. Then he got a cheerleading opportunity, and lacking an agenda, but wanting to be in charge and being around all of these ideologues and dark visionaries, he went right down the toilet.

SM (03:54:09):
Yeah. I tell you, President Obama, in the (19)60s, families were split and torn apart. Well, even my family, my brother's a diehard, cannot stand Obama, I cannot understand it. He knows it upsets me, yet he still sends it. Everything is about getting him out in the next four years, or the next two years or whatever, and it bugs me. He prefaces it by saying that... And this will not be on the tape, but that it is... I am not doing this because he's Black, I just do not like... I was taught in graduate school, I will not say this to my brother, because my advisor was Dr. Johnson. He was at Johns Hopkins University, and he said that whenever you hear somebody saying, "Well, I am not doing something, because my best friends are..." Or "It's not because he's female or male." You do not say that, just say it. You do not need to-

ML (03:55:10):
Preface it, yeah.

SM (03:55:11):
Yeah, if you do not like the guy, just say you do not like the guy.

ML (03:55:14):
Right, right. No, and I think that part of the reasons people do not like him is not because he is Black, it is because they feel diminished by him. They feel he is too good.

SM (03:55:26):
I think he is very good.

ML (03:55:27):
He is too smart.

SM (03:55:28):
Oh, I agree.

ML (03:55:28):
They do not trust him, because they think he is going to outsmart them and whatnot.

SM (03:55:33):
Just like her.

ML (03:55:34):
Yeah.

SM (03:55:35):
What we teach students and what you probably do in the classroom, and that is what another lesson that the (19)60s activist can teach young people. You do not just do things based on pure emotion. You study, you research, you understand your point of view, and also you study the other side.

ML (03:55:52):
That is what the conservatives under George Bush refused to do because, as they said, "While the liberals are studying and coming up with good policy proposal, we are changing the agenda. Reality is what we say it is. It is not what it is, it is what we say it is."

SM (03:56:08):
Is there any question I did not ask that you thought I was going to ask? I think I have asked a million.

ML (03:56:13):
If there was, I have forgotten.

(End of Interview)

2010-08-09

Stephen McKiernan

Mark Hamilton Lytle

236:17

English

Binghamton University Libraries

audio/mp4

Sound

2 Microcassettes

Audio

Scholars; College teachers; Bard College; Lytle, Mark Hamilton--Interviews

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