Interview with Rex Weiner

Weiner, Rex ; McKiernan, Stephen

2010-03-19

In copyright

2018-03-29

McKiernan Interviews

171:44

McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: Rex Weiner
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: REV
Date of interview: 19 March 2010
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(Start of Interview)

SM (00:00:03):
Testing. 1-2-3 testing. Very good. And again, some of this is basic information. I got a whole lot of questions. The interview itself is some general questions, but a lot of them are questions that I never ask anybody but you, based on your experiences. Rex, the first question I would like to ask is about your upbringing. I read your book, but the only thing I know about you is the great career you have had beyond the Woodstock Census. Could you give me a little update or upbringing? What was your upbringing in New York City? What was your was your life like when you were in elementary school or high school, and your college years before you ever got out to California? Just a little bit about yourself.

RW (00:00:52):
Okay. Born in Brooklyn, East New York, Brownsville. Parents, first and third generation, Russian-Hungarian Jewish. My father was a decorated war hero, Air Force guy who grew up poor in Brooklyn, was in the CCCs, the Civilian Conservation Corps, cutting timber in Idaho in the dark days of the (19)30s. Never finished college. My mom went to Brooklyn College, got a degree, became a teacher. My dad went on to become a journalist, a business journalist. And I have a younger brother, five years younger, who grew up to be an artist, an illustrator, lives in Minneapolis. We lived in Brooklyn up until the 1955. I am a mid-century man, born in 1950, so. We moved upstate about 50 miles north to the farthest reach of the suburbs in a rural area of northern Westchester near Peekskill.

SM (00:02:34):
That is where my grandfather was a minister.

RW (00:02:36):
All right.

SM (00:02:37):
Yeah. My grandfather was a minister in Peekskill from 1936 to 1954.

RW (00:02:44):
So was he around when they threw rocks at the-

SM (00:02:49):
He must have been because he died in 1956. And I was very young. I only remember going there to the church to see my grandmother and grandfather. My dad grew up there. Then he went off to college in World War II. So my dad was not around. He was married and raising kids at that time in Ithaca. So.

RW (00:03:10):
Do you know the story of-

SM (00:03:13):
Bayard Rustin. Not Bayard Rustin, Paul Robeson.

RW (00:03:16):
When Paul Robeson came up and they threw stones at the buses and called them communists and so on. So it was the Hudson River Valley. And from (19)55 to the early (19)60s, that is where I grew up. But went back to the city as soon as I could. I graduated from high school in three years, gained entrance to NYU. And let us see, I guess that is when I got back to the city in 1967. The area where I grew up was just crazy (19)60s suburbs, cars, girls. And before even marijuana made its entrance, for some reason speed and heroin came to town. So I had a friend working in the local pharmacy who got us bottles of all kinds of pills. And so I grew up in a crazy teenage scene doing lots of drugs. And when I went down to the city, I continued doing that.

SM (00:04:37):
At NYU were you an activist student there at the college?

RW (00:04:42):
Yes. I majored in striking and chanting.

SM (00:04:46):
A lot of us did.

RW (00:04:52):
And I sort of hung out with a group of SDS street gang organizers who called themselves Up Against The Wall Motherfucker. And this was in the days when Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were doing the Yippies, and there were the Diggers and all of that stuff. Up Against The Wall Motherfucker was a much tougher brand of things, combining street smarts with the leftist ideology. And so I joined up with them. I mean, there was no joining. You just went and hung out at the forefront.

SM (00:05:31):
What year was that?

RW (00:05:33):
That was 1968.

SM (00:05:40):
Yeah. After what happened at Columbia. Yeah.

RW (00:05:43):
Yeah. And yeah, these guys were out of Columbia. And so we did things like took over the Fillmore East. I think that was the night that Bill Graham got cheese whipped up on stage.

SM (00:05:59):
Oh God.

RW (00:06:00):
We did some crazy stuff. And these were heavy times (19)68, (19)69, (19)70. In (19)70, one of my best friends from my hometown was killed in Vietnam. And I just decided having a student deferment was cowardly. Either you stand up for principal, and become a conscientious objector, or you fight against the war, do something. So I dropped out of NYU after three semesters, much to my parents dismay. I had a professor of Marxism, one of the few classes where I did really well. And I went to him, I said, "So what do I do? Give me my assignment. Oh, communist master." And he said, "Well, there is a group of kids out in Brooklyn who need your help. They are putting out an underground newspaper called the New York Herald Tribune." And basically that paper, that official paper had gone out of business a few years earlier, and these guys just took the title and thought it would be funny to put out a paper called the New York Herald Tribune. It was a high school radical paper, and these were high school kids in their last year at the top high schools in the city, Bronx High School of Science, Stuyvesant. And they were all militant and intellectual and interesting. And I was the oldest guy there, and there were a lot of cute young girls there. So I sort of became their mentor. I took over a storefront on St. Mark's Place, made it headquarters for the group, and then we became somehow affiliated with the White Panthers in Ann Arbor, and John Sinclair became a good friend. And so it was the White Panther headquarters, New York, and we were armed. I grew up with guns and have no hesitation about them. Knives, all this stuff. We had stuff in there. We had tons of dope. I mean, it was just a crazy scene out of high school, kids floating through there. And it was a fun time. We stopped putting out the New York Herald Tribune and joined up, a few of us with the East Village Other, which at that time was the oldest underground newspaper in the city. And I realized, you know, I am a writer. I have always been a writer, and journalism has been in my family for a couple of generations. So we went to the East Village Other and became part of that scene. And I wrote some of my first articles. Actually, my first journalism experience was in the press room of a county newspaper in Mount Kisco called The Patent Trader. I worked in the press room there and watched as the technology went from hot type, that is linotype machines, hot lead slugs, to what they called cold type or offset printing, computerized type setting. And I witnessed a change in technology that has always impressed me. Because when the technology changed from very expensive forms of printing to a technology that anyone could afford, offset printing, that made the underground press possible in this country. And A.J. Liebling famously said, "Freedom of the press belongs only to those who own one." Today with the internet, we all own one. That is terrific. But in the late (19)60s, offset printing was the new technology. It was the internet of its day, and that is what made the so-called Underground Press possible, which started as a political counter-cultural movement. And that is where I found my home. The East Village Other was in its last days, and it folded. These papers were never meant to be a business, but they had served their purpose. And we went on. We took the staff, myself and a colleague named Bob Singer, who's known as on as Honest Bob, and we created a new paper called The New York Ace, and this was the first of what would come to be called the alternative papers. So we were still radical in outlook, embracing the counterculture, but we were also all about the editing and the writing, the design, the layout. So we were among the first to publish writers such as P.J. O'Rourke. And we had great illustrations by some of the great underground cartoonists. We always had a brilliant cover page, sort of an LSD version of the New Yorker perhaps. And in fact, we did a year's worth of issues. Somehow we cajoled John and Yoko, John Lennon and Yoko Ono to underwrite the cost of the paper. They gave us simple page ads, and I guess Apple Records footed the bill. And really, we made our mark. The New York Magazine article that they did on us helped a lot.

SM (00:12:42):
You were really into not only design, but obviously you sound like you were into substance too, combining the quality of the writing with the quality of the look, and the combination of the two brought substance.

RW (00:12:56):
I would not be surprised if we were the only paper of its kind where a copy of Fowler's English Usage and Strunk and White were prominently on every desk.

SM (00:13:07):
Do you have copies of all of them? Did you keep copies of every one?

RW (00:13:12):
Well, yes, we have copies of those. And they are also included in the Bell and Howell microfilm collection, the underground newspaper collection that was really initiated by a friend of mine, Tom Forcade, Thomas King Forcade, who was administrator of the Underground Press Syndicate, which was an organization, a loose organization, of all of the underground paper at the time. It essentially dissolved the copyright between the members so that anybody could reprint from any other member paper. And each paper sent two copies to our office. I also helped administrate the UPS office. And those copies were sent to Bell and Howell. They were microfilmed and put into a collection, which exists to this day.

SM (00:14:15):
When I was at Ohio State University. There was an excellent underground paper there too. I was there in (19)71, (19)72 to (19)76.

RW (00:14:24):
All right.

SM (00:14:26):
They were in the Ohio Union, and I went to Binghamton University. Did your underground papers ever get to any of the state universities in New York state?

RW (00:14:36):
Well, I would not be surprised if people, students passing through New York City picked up a few. We did have subscribers, but whether they got the papers or not.

SM (00:14:51):
I remember... In fact, there is a historic scene in Woodstock where Abbie Hoffman comes on stage, and I think he says, "Free John Sinclair," was not that? And Pete Townshend said, "Get off the stage, or I will club you with my guitar," or something like that. Made him really mad.

RW (00:15:06):
Well, he did hit him.

SM (00:15:07):
Oh, he did hit him. I know he was threatening to do it.

RW (00:15:10):
Now, Abbie was on LSD at the time and suffering from delusions of grandeur. A lot of us at that time, much to our chagrin today, were very almost Calvinistic about the entertainment aspects of our culture. If it was not about politics, if it was not for the benefit of the Black Panthers or some imprisoned colleague, comrade, then it was not really important. I think we would laugh at our... As Dylan said, "I was so much older then, I am younger than that now." But that is how things were. So Abbie at that time at Woodstock decided that this is bullshit. People here are not talking about the issues of the day. And he got up there and got himself hit.

SM (00:16:14):
It is interesting about Abbie too. From what I read about Woodstock for four days is the fact that he was also in charge of the medical area? Somehow he had been given responsibility for people who were sick or had OD'ed on drugs or whatever, that he was very good at that. That he was the man in charge.

RW (00:16:34):
No, he was not in charge of anything. Nobody was in charge of anything.

SM (00:16:40):
But were you there?

RW (00:16:43):
No, I was not there.

SM (00:16:44):
Well, a question I want to ask you is how did you get from New York to California? Because I know in your book, I reread the last couple weeks, Woodstock Census. I read it years ago, but I reread it. But how did you get to California and then what led you to write this book? But most importantly, how did you get to California? And maybe I do not want this to be, as you said in our first conversation, all the stories about and making it all look great. But what are three anecdotes or experiences that you had in California that you would like to share that people might have interest in?

RW (00:17:25):
Okay, so it was the summer before I was due to enter college at NYU. It was the Summer of Love, and I was not going to miss that. 1967 in August, I headed west to San Francisco. I had a beatnik uncle who was living there just off Golden Gate Park. That was my destination. And so I hitchhiked across. I have hitchhiked, I have been back and forth across this country, not lately, but in the old days, in the late (19)60s, early (19)70s, I crisscrossed the country many times. But the first time was in 1967 in August where I headed west and got to San Francisco. My uncle lived just off the Haight. And there I was for the latter half of the Summer of Love when things sort of turned bad, as they say. And yeah, the streets were heavy and there was a lot of speed and a lot of weird shit going up. But I had a good time. But here is an anecdote. So as I am coming into San Francisco, I took a train from Chicago. The train is going slowly across a road crossing, and all the cars were backed up, and we were coming into California. And I saw a long-haired biker waiting for the train to pass. So I shoot him the peace sign, and he shot me back the one-fingered salute. And I realized, "Hey, it ain't all Summer of Love." There I was being a hippie, and he was being a Hell's Angel or whatever he was. In the Haight at that time, there were people handing out free food, the Hare Krishnas. You could go there and get rice and some kind of vegetable stew. The Diggers were handing out kind of spoiled rotten vegetables and fruit and whatever they could scavenge from supermarkets. But I remember eating brown rice for the first time and thinking that this was very exotic. And let us see, went to the Avalon Ballroom, heard the Electric Flag. Prior to that though, I have to say that I had experienced LSD, mushrooms, peyote even. And one of the ways I got to do that was my high school girlfriend and I would skip class, hop in my car and head north to Millbrook, where Tim Leary had his League of Spiritual Discovery ensconced in a huge mansion. And as we pulled in there, this was in (19)66, the sight of this glorious Hudson River Victorian mansion, the facade painted with a sort of Hindu God face. When they say, "It blew my mind," yes, that blew my mind that you could fuck up a house like this in such a glorious manner. And I had a friend of a friend who was living there at Tim Leary's place and sort of allowed us entree. So we did some mushrooms there, my girlfriend and I. Got to know some people there. We went there a few times, and that is where I first met Dr. Timothy Leary. I had read a lot about him. Who had not? Heard a lot about him. But then there he was when I first saw him outside the house, fixing a lawnmower, trying to get it going, and trying to get his son to cut the lawn, just like my old man tried to get me to cut the damn lawn. I thought, "No, this is real life here behind the fame of (19)60s radical." So coming into Haight-Ashbury in the Summer of Love, I had already had some experience with that kind of mind-expanding stuff and some vaguely semi-criminal activities, scoring dope, and bringing and entering and crap like that. Stealing cars, I knew how to do that.

SM (00:22:55):
Obviously. When you mentioned you had met Abbie, you knew Abbie, and you knew and you met Dr. Leary. Are there any other personalities of that period that you actually got to know?

RW (00:23:06):
Well, yeah. I met Abbie when I was at the East Village Other. He would come into the office every now and then. I met Jerry at that time as well. At that point, Tim Leary was in Algiers. He had escaped from prison with the aid of the Weatherman. And I would sometimes pick up the phone and there would be Tim Leary calling from long distance from Algiers collect. And of course, I would accept the charges and hand it over to the editor, Yakov Cohen, who was sort of an advisor to Tim. So Tim and I were to cross paths many times, and I will catch up with that too. But yes, Jerry, I got to know Jerry Rubin. I got to know Abbie. And my association with Tom Forcade brought me closer into all of this. Because Tom, have you heard of him before?

SM (00:24:13):
How do you spell his last name?

RW (00:24:15):
It is F-O-R-C-A-D-E. Thomas King Forcade.

SM (00:24:22):
No. I do not know him.

RW (00:24:23):
Key figure of that time. He went on to become the founder of High Times Magazine, and I was one of the co-founding editors.

SM (00:24:31):
Okay, yes. Because I read that about you.

RW (00:24:35):
But he was instrumental in the whole underground press movement. And he was an antagonist to Abbie and Jerry. He had a much tougher attitude. He was an ex-Air Force guy. He was not afraid of guns either. And he was basically a disruptive element within the counterculture, someone who was not about peace and love, not afraid to get into a fist fight with somebody if he felt strongly about something. And so he and I kind of fell together. And when it was time to create High Times Magazine, he called together a sort of inner circle. I was part of that and was a contributor to High Times up until the time of Tom's death, which was a suicide. Tom was a controversial figure, and I was helping. He had helped Abbie create the publishing structure for Steal This Book. And then they had a dispute, over money of course, and Tom was threatening to sue Abbie. So I was friends with both of them, and I said, "Why go to the establishment legal system where they will both look at you like you are mutants? Why not create our own little arbitration system and work this out?" So you will find an article in the New York Times in 1970, (19)71, something like that, (19)72, where we created a counterculture court. I constituted a jury of their peers, and I served as bailiff handling the evidence and procedures.

SM (00:26:34):
I think I saw this on a YouTube.

RW (00:26:39):
Oh, yes.

SM (00:26:40):
Yeah, I think I saw this. And you were on YouTube talking about this. Yes.

RW (00:26:47):
Yeah, yeah, I am talking about it. Yeah. You saw that there. And there was a New York Times piece, an editorial actually criticizing us for going outside the established legal system, which we were very proud of that criticism. Because actually I had modeled it on the ancient Jewish courts of the Middle Ages of the Sanhedrin. But in any case, at that time, I got to know people like [inaudible] of The Thugs. I played a little music at that time too, had a little sideline. So the recently deceased, Alex Chilton was a good friend of mine. He had nothing to do with the counterculture, but this is the guy who sang biggest hit of Summer of Love. "Give me a ticket for an airplane."

SM (00:27:41):
Oh yes.

RW (00:27:42):
The Box Tops. Alex was a neighbor of mine at that time. I got to know a wide variety of people. Let me see who else? John Sinclair, Abbie, Jerry. I would attend meetings of people at which people like Dave Dellinger would be there, Rennie Davis, people like Leslie Bacon, who was charged with bombing the Capitol, various members of underground organizations who today would be termed domestic terrorists. It was a heady mix of people. At one point, we took over a rock concert that was staged on Randall's Island, just off Manhattan. It was the Young Lords, the White Panthers, Up Against The Wall Motherfuckers, Yippies, a whole coalition of radical groups. And during that concert, yeah, I said hello to Jimi Hendrix, but whether he was enough out of his heroin days to say hello to me, I cannot remember. There he was.

SM (00:29:21):
When I interviewed Richie Havens about two months ago, Richie gave me almost two hours. And Richie said, he said what was unique about Woodstock. Well, we do not know all the story about how he had to keep playing and playing, and he was not scheduled to be the first act. But he said, "What made it so special is that they finally recognized us." And that is what he said. I said, "Please explain that, Richie. They finally." Yeah. Because he said, "I was in the village in the early (19)60s when Bob Dylan was there, and Mary Travers was there, and even little Jimi Hendrix kind of kind of walked in. He had been in the military." But he said, "Finally the country and people were recognizing that the students and the young people of the (19)60s, they were finally being recognized." So that is why he said he thought the (19)60s, I mean, Woodstock was very important. Because the musicians were getting the recognition that they deserved.

RW (00:30:20):
Oh yes, the musicians as well as the audience that followed that music. And there were many kinds of music at Woodstock. I would say that the music is the most important portal through which you can see the movements of those times coming together. And just to diverge a bit into my theoretical stance, but the (19)60s did not spring full-formed from the head of Zeus there. The (19)60s are part of what I call the ongoing-but-interrupted revolution that is essentially what America is all about. And you see that the business of human rights and women's rights and the business of desegregation, African American integration into society, all of these things, you can find their trace elements in the documents of the Founding Fathers who, because of circumstances were not able to instantly create the society that they visioned under the influence of the Enlightenment. But they created a structure... loose, spunky, unruly, chaotic... that would have enough structure, but enough looseness to evolve, but sort of institutionalize these movements. And so over the years, you see the women's suffrage movement. You see the abolitionists. You see even the sort of psychedelic culture, the spiritual elements in William James. All of these things are threads in our society from the beginning, including the communalism. That was the way this country survived its earliest days on the frontier.

SM (00:32:58):
I looked a lot of articles up that you have written, and you have a paragraph in one from a year ago that I think is beautiful. One of the questions that I have been asking all the guests is when Newt Gingrich came into power in (19)94, he always loves to attack the (19)60s generation or the period when boomers were young as a lot of the reasons why we had the problems in our society. And George Will, through his writing throughout the years, will always take shots at that period for breakdown of society, whether it be the divorce rate, or the drug culture, or lack of respect for authority or the beginnings of these different studies programs at universities, political correctness. They blame all this stuff back on then. But then you write, and these are your words, but this was the article you wrote in a year ago talking about Woodstock Consensus. And I would like to expand on this after I just read this: "The truly aberrant behavior belonged to their tormentors, those flag-waving ranks of ideologues, staunch segregationists, rabid commie hunters, and free-speech smothering censors bent on preserving their own quaint period of privilege, even if it meant radical measures. They were the un-Americans, the subversives undermining the principles that make America great, refusing to rise to the challenges set forth by our elite, longhaired founding fathers who created an imperfect union knowing it would be a struggle, but also knowing a day of reckoning must come. And come it did. It was called the (19)60s. And now even Newt is cool with it, speaking out on environmental issues and pushing green conservatism. Welcome to Yasgur's farm, Newty. See you at the hemp store." That is in a nutshell, you wrote. That is beautiful writing.

RW (00:34:56):
Well, thank you very much.

SM (00:34:57):
And really. I mean, I really am into this kind of stuff, and I thought it was so well-written in so few words.

SM (00:35:03):
I really am into this kind of stuff. And I thought it was so well-written in so few words that you hit it right on the target there, because he does make things. I tried to interview him for my book, and I have tried to do it twice, but he was always too busy. And then I hear rumors he may run for president. So.

RW (00:35:16):
Yeah. The thing is, and by the way, I want to give credit to my longtime colleague and co-conspirator Deanne Stillman. She actually looked over the piece, and added that last line about duty.

SM (00:35:30):
Well, I am interviewing her on Monday.

RW (00:35:32):
Correct. So make sure you tell her I give her credit for that.

SM (00:35:35):
Okay. Will do.

RW (00:35:37):
That very witty way to end my essay. But again, to expand on that, I tend to see American history as a continuum. And anyone who says feminism started in the (19)60s does not remember the women's suffrage movement. And even Abigail Adams saying, "Remember the women," all of the feminist occurrence from the earliest days of the Republic. Anyone who says environmentalism and tree-huggers were a product of the (19)60s, does not remember Teddy Roosevelt.

SM (00:36:14):
Oh yeah.

RW (00:36:15):
Remember John Muir. Does not remember all of the great efforts from the beginning to preserve this country instead of the spoil it. Anyone who thinks that the move for spiritual discovery, self-awareness is something born in the (19)60s does not remember that this country was founded by very self-centered people looking for religious freedom and organized as cults, called pilgrims or Quakers or Shakers who lived communally. And certainly the major theme of liberation in our country has belonged to African Americans who have been here longer than most people, have a longer history in this country than most recent immigrants. And their music is what ultimately, from West African chants, to blues, work songs, folk music, eventually rock and roll. This is the music that really, along with blue jeans and Bugs Bunny, this is what really brought down the Berlin Wall and dissolved the Cold War because these are things that everyone responds to. The idea of self-liberation, of joining with others, of the big embrace, and everybody in the world wanted to be part of that.

SM (00:38:35):
Where would you [inaudible]?

RW (00:38:36):
So that is why the music is so important. So when Richie Haven says they recognize this, yes, they certainly did, but it is even bigger than that. Our music, our call to action, to self-liberation, which requires the liberation of others. That was a cry that was heard from Prague during the Velvet Revolution, to Moscow, to Beijing and continues to be the liberating force in the world.

SM (00:39:15):
Where would you place the Native American movement, although it was kind of a (19)69 to (19)73 happening at its strength. And then the gay and lesbian movement, which oftentimes looks to the Civil Rights Movement as its guide and then the Latino Chicano movement because some people will say that movement is fairly new because of the fact that they are fairly recent immigrants. So it is kind of a phenomenon in the second half of the 20th century.

RW (00:39:44):
Yeah, if you look at the styles of the (19)60s, you will see that the trappings of the Native Americans was symbolic of the sort of spiritual, close to the land sensibility that people were cultivating at that time. I think that the biggest influence of the Native American movement has been on the environmental side and on the spiritual side. It is the one true native religion that Americans can look at for inspiration. The other movements have all been rooted in long in history. I live in a Mexican city called Los Angeles, which now also has elements of Central America and South America. Somebody who does not speak Spanish here does not know how to even pronounce the city's name or the names of streets and the Chicano movement and all of the Latin American movements from the Southwest are now spreading throughout the country. So there is not a restaurant in America that does not have a Mexican in the kitchen. Even Italian restaurants. So the thing is that the city, this country's cultural heritage, is one of its treasures. And as this plays through this out is it is we are coming into our own. Those who resisted and keep talking about, we want this country to be what we had when we were kids or our parents had, they are against the current of history. They are on the wrong side. The young people of the (19)60s who really came into their own in the (19)70s are the inheritors of the melting pot, but they were not intent on melting it and creating a sludge. They were interested in really finding and defining what was special about everybody and everybody's heritage. And I think so all of those movements come together.

SM (00:42:36):
I wanted to ask you, I have read the book, and I know that there is lines in there as your ultimate goals and why you did it, but why did you, first off, I do not know how you met Deanne.

RW (00:42:49):
Deanne, she will tell you, she read about me in New York Magazine. She was out in Cleveland or something and said, "Oh, here is a guy saying New York is like Paris in the thirties. I want to go get some of that." So she came and...

SM (00:43:06):
Well-

RW (00:43:07):
Publicity works, man.

SM (00:43:08):
Yeah, I guess it does.

RW (00:43:09):
You [inaudible] man.

SM (00:43:12):
Yeah. You met her and you decided to write this book. I would like to know what your ultimate goal was in this book. You state yourself that you only wanted activists in your survey.

RW (00:43:23):
Well, no-no-no-no. What we wanted was anyone who... In order to do this survey, to find out what the (19)60s meant to people who experienced them, you had to find people who defined themselves as (19)60s people, not necessarily activists, but people who say, "Yeah, that was my time. I experienced it. Let me tell you what it was about." So it was a self-selected audience on purpose. Deanne and I decided to do this book because after the underground press kind of puttered away, we both became journalists at the time of the new journalism, and we were writing for various magazines. I wrote for Penthouse, and I do not know, a lot of magazines. And we were paying attention to the media at that time and noticing that there was a backlash in the media against the (19)60s. People were saying, "Ah, look at Jerry Rubin and Abby Hoffman. They have put on suits and now they are corporate." Or they seem to be saying that because people got older and took on jobs and cut their hair, that somehow the (19)60s had failed. And that was the first wave of conservative undermining of the (19)60s message. They were trying to say that activism cannot succeed, that anyone who tries to push for progress is doomed to failure and using the (19)60s as some sort of example, or the (19)70s. And we thought that that was a very dangerous message. And so we sought to quantify exactly what it was people were talking about when they talked about the "(19)60s."

SM (00:45:41):
Rex [inaudible]. All right, go ahead.

RW (00:45:48):
Yeah, what were the (19)60s? So let us define the terms and then we can debate. So that was what we tried to do with the book to create an entertaining study of what exactly the (19)60s meant to the people who experienced it. So for instance, we had to define what people meant by the 1960s in terms of years. And so according to our survey where we asked in one of the questions in the questionnaires, when did the (19)60s begin for you personally, and when did they end for you personally? And again, we emphasize personal, not the popular idea, but the personal idea. And we also asked for anecdotes describing what it was that made that defined the beginning or the end of the (19)60s. And so the personal, very personal answers added up to really, for most people, the (19)60s did not begin until the late latter half of the decade, (19)67, (19)68, (19)69. And the (19)60s did not end for most people until really well into the (19)70s. So you have these popular media definitions of the (19)60s as being a cut and dry decade from 1960 to 1970, or the media saying, yes, the (19)60s ended without Altamont, that terrible concept. These were media constructs. But for people personally, the (19)60s really opened up late in the time, late in the calendar-defined decade, and continued well past the point that the popular definition of the (19)60s. So we kept coming up with answers like that are reasonable. It is rational, but that is the way it should work. Cause the way the word spread about popular culture in those days was much slower than it is today. [inaudible].

SM (00:48:19):
Interesting about what I am trying to do is I am trying to work on the people that were born between (19)46 and (19)64. Yet during this whole process, the people that lived during that first 10 years are so different than the people that lived in the second 10 years.

RW (00:48:34):
Yeah.

SM (00:48:34):
It is a difference between night and day. Some people do not like labels of generations. I have been finding that out. They do not like boomers, generation X or any of this stuff. So I found a lot of that. And then one of the things too, because one of the criticisms of the boomer generation or the (19)60s generation or Woodstock generation is that really only five to 15 percent of the young people were ever involved in any kind of activism or maybe [inaudible].

RW (00:49:03):
That is one of the things our survey tried to measure. And in terms of what we mean by the (19)60s, a lot of different things are meant. But in terms of the experiential nature of it, it is true that for the most part, the (19)60s meant nothing more than long hair, bell-bottoms, and a certain preference for rock and roll music. And beyond that, a lot of people had never marched in a protest, never participated in drugs or things like that. So the vast majority of people, I would say, in the country, let alone people who define themselves as (19)60s people, really experience the (19)60s by watching TV or reading a newspaper or something. And then later it seemed to them that the country was in turmoil, but they had never been in any sort of tumultuous situation. You see what I mean?

SM (00:50:23):
Yeah.

RW (00:50:24):
And in terms of the actual activist quotient, a very small percentage really organized or hand-lettered a protest sign or physically participated in the activist movement. If they saw a peace march going by and joined in, forever afterwards, well into their (19)50s and (19)60s today, they will say, "Oh yeah, the (19)60s, I was there. I remember that." But maybe they just walked a few blocks with a protest, but that is okay. That is fine. They were part of it. If they actually were part of the Freedom Riders, for instance, that is a very small number of white people, but the influence that they had was tremendous. So a person sitting in some small town in the Midwest who could never hope to participate in these things, but watching those protests on TV could not help but feel part of it somehow, either pro or against it. And so the decade really, it involved people emotionally, but whether it actually involved them physically and personally is a question. And how much, if you were in sympathy with the anti-war movement, but never carried a protest sign, never went on a march, does that still qualify you to be a... Well, I would say it does, if you lived your life in a way that contributed to peace, maybe voting for McGovern, maybe taking a pro-peace stance in an argument with a coworker at the factory. Whatever happened to you in that time sharply defined your identification with it. But what was troubling to Deanne and to me and to a lot of our friends in the late (19)70s was what they call a trope now, a repeated notion in the media that somehow the (19)60s, older, sadder, and wiser, the people of the (19)60s have now joined the "establishment." And everything that they did before was just a youthful whim, which isolates the activism of that time and the real gains of that time from the continuum of American history. And in fact, today, it is a widely held belief that the environment is worth saving. It is a widely held belief that it is not right to discriminate for reasons of race, creed, color, sexual orientation. It is a widely held belief that you can wear whatever you want to wear and not feel like you are ostracized. Many of the widely held beliefs of today that probably young people just think always were there, were hard fought for in the (19)60s and part of a continuum of struggles from the very beginning of this country.

SM (00:54:32):
When you look at, you talk about the late (19)70s, then you are talking about the (19)80s with Ronald Reagan and his very strong stand, we are back, which was really an explanation in his mind that we are going to go back to the way it was in the (19)50s, or respect for authority, spending more money on the military, that kind of an attitude. And then we get into George Bush at the end of the (19)80s. George Bush Senior, says the Vietnam syndrome is over. So there is all these little thoughts, again into Bill Clinton in the (19)90s, and then we have George Bush in the tens. Throughout this period, I think there is still that feeling that some people that are traditionalists and conservatives or have problems with that period, no matter what time in history, will deny exactly what you are just telling me.

RW (00:55:28):
Exactly. The word conservative means to conserve, to preserve something, and radical means something divergent. And so as you pointed out in my essay about the Woodstock Consensus, the consensus in this country is for certain underlying American principles of inclusion. And those who propagate the notion of exclusion are outside the current of American history. They are the true radicals diverging from the ideals that this country was founded upon. So how you can... There is no going back in history. We will not have restricted whites only country clubs anymore. We will not exclude women from the mainstream of American life, whether it be social, cultural, or commercial. These are things that have been ongoing since the beginning and will continue. And you cannot roll that back.

SM (00:56:56):
You say in that same article, I broke it down into sections here, because every single paragraph had something I thought was very important.

RW (00:57:03):
Thank you.

SM (00:57:06):
You say that I, well, second, you say that your respondents were motivated less by ideology than by finding a common cause with like-minded folks, the feeling of not being alone. There was a common spirit. That seems to be a quality found in human nature. And the thing is, and we always tell college students that they join clubs because they have similar interests and people join the Black Student Union because they are African American first. Their issues. I put a but here, because I have interviewed a lot of conservatives too in this process. Were the boomers that identified with the (19)60s weakened by not having more young people who disagreed with them. Since both individualism and community seem at odds, because there was the period in the (19)50s where segregation went to integration. And now on university campuses, we have seen to be going back to self-segregation. It was only through crises that we have seen to bring people together, whether it be 9/11, the Rodney King crisis in the (19)90s, or tragedy of Virginia Tech. These things bring people together because of their common humanity, but then they go back to their small groups. Do you think, and as some of the concerns have told me, these same people who were identified with the (19)60s who may have been activists and maybe not activists, but they identified with that period always talked about tolerance, but it was in effect, they were showing intolerance because as Phyllis Schlafly said to me, you know Phyllis Schlafly, she called them, "The troublemakers of the (19)60s are now running today's universities, and they have no tolerance for established points of view from the past, only their points of view."

RW (00:58:59):
Well, so we should have tolerance for people promoting bigotry. We should have tolerance for people saying society should be segregated. We should have tolerance for people who deny individuals their rights, merely because they happen to see the world a certain way. That is what people like Phyllis Schlafly are doing. And today's Tea Partyers are turning the ideals of the (19)60s upside down in order to impale the promoters of American ideals on their own [inaudible], which is ridiculous. You cannot say... Our society does allow Nazis to march in the street. All right? This is our tolerance, but you cannot restrict the club to exclude black people. If it's a public club. We will not include exclusionist. That is not what America is about. They can stand up on any street corner and say what they want. They can publish their own books, they can have their website, they can do whatever the hell they want, but they cannot exclude the inclusionists and inclusionists exclude. You know what I am saying? I am getting mixed up here, but basically they are saying, "I know I am, but what about you? So are you." It is a high school trick that they are using and they are using it to rewrite history, like Karl Rove in his book. These people are shameless, and basically everything they say is a coded message or exclusionist politics and cultural proclivities. These people hate the fact that America now has a big population of Hispanics who insist on speaking their own language, hate the fact that even though a woman like Phyllis Schlafly is out there as a powerful woman, she would put down a feminist saying, I am not a feminist, but she would not be here if it was not for feminists who fought for the right women to participate in the political process to vote. These are shameless hypocrites who want to deny that America is about inclusion and they just want to preserve their own white skin privilege.

SM (01:02:10):
We have people like David Horowitz and Peter Collier who have written a book called The Destructive Generation. You probably are aware of them. And he was one of the leading writers, both of them, of Ramparts Magazine.

RW (01:02:24):
I know. They did not write that book about the 1920s when there was another great surge of so-called radical movements. These were actually unionists and multiculturalists, Bohemians, they were called in the twenties and in the thirties, the IWW. This country has a long history of troublemakers and troublemaking generations, including the famous Boston Tea Party, which was really... They dressed up like Indians just like the hippies did to protest an authoritarian structure. Today's Tea Partyers, they pretend to adhere to the teachings of Saul Valinski. He would disavow them instantly. Every generation in this country has been a troublemaking generation. It is just that those in power have sought, more or less successfully, to suppress them. And in the (19)60s, you will see the stirrings of it in the (19)50s. You will see the people who... The reason why people long hair for the first time in this country's history was out of style was because if you had a crew cut in the early (19)50s, it proved that you had done military service. And it had been 10 years since anyone had let their hair grow. A crew cut was the common haircut. That was the style. And it seemed to be, at some point people forget the way things used to be.

SM (01:04:19):
Crew cuts and flat tops.

RW (01:04:21):
Yes. Well, flat tops. And anyone with long hair in the (19)50s was looked at as a weirdo or sexual pervert. But they forget that when you see a picture of General Custer, for instance, one of the great heroes, so-called, but he had long hair right down to his shoulders. Most of American history men had long hair. So why was there such a big fuss about long hair? Well, that is what it was.

SM (01:04:54):
In your opinion, because you asked the question to over a thousand people back in (19)77, (19)78, (19)79. When did the (19)60s begin in your opinion? And when did the (19)60s end in your opinion?

RW (01:05:10):
Well, again, if you are asking when did it begin for me personally, that is one thing.

SM (01:05:15):
Yeah, That is what I am after. You personally.

RW (01:05:24):
In 1959, when I was nine years old, I went to California for the first time with my parents. Went to Disneyland a year after it had opened and went surfing. It was a summer vacation, but my beatnik uncle was already out here having a good time. He picked us up at the airport in a Cadillac convertible with the top down and took us to our hotel. And then at some point during our time in LA, he took us to go visit a friend of his up in Topanga Canyon. Have you ever heard of Topanga Canyon?

SM (01:06:08):
Nope. I lived in the Bay Area. I did not live in the...

RW (01:06:12):
All right. Well, Topanga Canyon is just before Malibu. It is a-

SM (01:06:16):
Well, I know where Malibu is.

RW (01:06:21):
[inaudible] of the city where a lot of Bohemians went to live, and it is a beautiful area. But he had a friend there named Bob Dewitt, and Bob Dewitt, he lived... You had to cross a bridge over a creek. You parked up the road, and you crossed this bridge. And he had this shack, a sort of rambling shack. And he had three or four daughters running around barefoot, kind of ragged and dirty. And he had a beard and he was a potter. He made ceramics, pottery, and he was a hippie before there was the word hippie. He was a beatnik without calling himself that. He just lived a sort of free lifestyle. And I was just blown. I thought, this is how, I thought this was fun. I saw the young girls running around barefoot, not caring about anything, and that is a cool way to live. I said, "I want to live like that." And so I would say that would be the beginning of it. But the other part of that beginning was that after we left there, my dad made some cutting remark about Bob Dewitt-less.

SM (01:07:43):
Yeah.

RW (01:07:47):
Bob Dewitt-less, he says, putting him down. Well, as it turns out, years later, I found out that Bob Dewitt-less was not so weightless. He actually slowly acquired much of the land in Topanga Canyon, which grew in value immensely over the years. And he was able to sell off that land and buy himself a nice spread in Hawaii and lived a very nice life. But the point is, I experienced both a counterculture that was apart from the nine to five commuter life that my dad had constructed for himself and for us, as well as the backlash against it, which was a kind of envy, a kind of jealousy, a kind of bitterness that here was a life that my father and others like him had fought for during the war. And it seemed that people like this beatnik in Topanga Canyon were throwing that away or somehow casting doubt upon its values. And really in this country, that is where the (19)60s begins and ends. The people who wish they could live a life that is freer and hate, the ones who are able to do that, because it really undermines the value of their spiritual and cultural real estate. Their belief system is cast into doubt. So someone who says, "Your country club life is not for me. It is worthless. And it is even wrong because you do not admit certain kinds of people." People who believed in that strongly, who fought.

RW (01:10:02):
Believed in that strongly who fought during the war to attain that measure of success. Sure, they felt threatened, they felt offended, and they felt angry because somewhere deep down they knew that they had lost something. That the promise of the good life that they had fought for and believed in, and maybe on that island in the Pacific, or the Battle of the Bulge, or on the beaches of Normandy, that promise never was fulfilled, and never could be fulfilled personally unless all of society's promise was fulfilled. So how could you be a happy person in the suburbs watching TV in 1956 or (19)60 and watching black Americans being hosed down and bitten by these dogs? How could you feel secure in your own life if you knew that a part of society was not able to enjoy the freedoms that you yourself... There was a hypocrisy. People knew it. And how they reacted to it marked by the beginning of the (19)60s or the end of the (19)60s for them personally. Because either they got involved and did something about it or they did not or they fought against it. At the end of the (19)60s, they either realized some measure of self-liberation, but they did not.

SM (01:11:54):
That is a great answer by the way. And I know this has been a very difficult question for others because we were talking 78 million boomers here that were born between (19)46 and 1964. And I just read this recently, that there are now more millennials than there ever were boomers. There is almost 81 million millennials. So the boomer generation is no longer the largest generation in history, and that is a little shocking to some boomers. But is there any weight from the people that you know, and it is only based on your experiences now, because like I mentioned, there were 78 million, might all have different stories, of what you would consider positive qualities or negative qualities within the people that you knew that were defined by the (19)60s?

RW (01:12:49):
Can you rephrase that?

SM (01:12:51):
Yeah, if there are some negative qualities that you saw in some of your fellow boomers and some of the positive qualities you saw in the boomers.

RW (01:13:03):
I do not think any of the positives or the negatives are specific to the generation. If you want to talk about self-destructiveness, certainly we can talk about the drugs and suicidal behavior that many people in the (19)60s fell to. But then you would have to look at the same thing in any generation, drinking themselves to death, driving too fast, or behaving in an unhealthy manner. Even smoking cigarettes, which was so common in this country in the thirties, (19)40s, and (19)50s. That is pretty self-destructive, we know now. And the millennials too have their own self-destructive bent, beginning with Kurt Cobain, who was not a (19)60s person, would not identify I think with anything hippy. There are enough rock stars, and actors, celebrities of today's generation who are falling prey to self-destruct behavior.

SM (01:14:34):
Some of the people that really stand out from the (19)60s or for the boomer generation. I remember when Phil Oaks committed suicide and I was just shocked by it because he wrote those great songs. He was very committed to the end of the war, and then he did himself in.

RW (01:14:54):
Well, today we know more about bipolar conditions. Abbie Hoffman.

SM (01:15:00):
Yes, and that was sad.

RW (01:15:02):
Was very much prey to that. And my friend Tom Forcade was heavily bipolar and he also fell prey to that. But then you get somebody like Heath Ledger.

SM (01:15:13):
Yes.

RW (01:15:14):
And there are several musical stars who in the past few years have been self-destructive as well. So I do not see it quite that way. In terms of positives, those two are attributes. There was a certain... Because there was a prevailing notion of a party going on, if you will, there is more of us. We were all linked. And whenever there was the idea of let us do something together to improve the world, you were more likely to be joined in that effort than ever before. In the (19)50s, the theme of the (19)50s was alienation. You read J D Salinger. That is the way it was before the (19)60s. Angry, alone, weird. You thought you were the only one who thought like that. You thought you were the only one who felt like that. In the (19)60s, people felt freer to share their emotions and feelings and to join together in those. And that continues to this day. Saw the outpouring of expression and the money for Haiti, for We Are The World. All of these things were born in the show of numbers, the show of hands at Woodstock. So when Richie Havens says they recognize us, yes, they recognize, we all recognize one another. And what had once been a lonely identity, and it was the rage in the (19)50s to... What was it? The Lonely Society?

SM (01:17:19):
Yeah. It was The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman.

RW (01:17:22):
Yes, The Lonely Crowd. The theme of alienation gave way to a theme of a celebration of like interests. And that continues to this day. Today, no one will tell you that they were part of the crowd in high school. Today everybody says, "Oh, I was a weirdo in high school." Right?

SM (01:17:48):
Yeah.

RW (01:17:51):
Everybody is a non-conformist today and that is a good thing. We recognize our individuality, but at the same time, we recognize our unity as individuals and we are not afraid to join together as weirdos and idiosyncratic beings in common cause for something that is obviously important. So I can tell you that my mom, when she organized a cooperative kindergarten in our small town in upstate New York, she was labeled a communist and her car vandalized, including with anti-Semitic expressions. That would never happen today. Everything is cooperative. Everything is collaborative.

SM (01:18:47):
And I know that Phyllis Schlafly, when I interviewed her, we were talking. Somehow, we got under the environmental movement and she said, "Yes, they are all former communists."

RW (01:19:01):
The United States is a former communist country because it was started by communalists. So these labels are so meaningless. People like her, they would rather divide people into categories than to find what unites us. And if there is anything that unites the United States of America, it is our national parks are the first. There were never national parks in the entire world until we created them. And our recognition that the environment is a sacred treasure and a national heritage. Does she want to say that that is a communist idea?

SM (01:19:52):
It was just a quick response to a different movement. She did not go into any detail. I spoke to her, she was very nice. She has always been nice and she gave me the time.

RW (01:20:00):
Well, they are all very nice. But they do not realize the toxic nature of what they say. So in other words, Theodore Roosevelt was a communist for starting our national park system. These are deeply dividing, divisive terms. There has never been a left in this country in the same way that there has been a communist movement in Europe, a socialist movement. There has never been a right in this country in the same way that there has been a fascist movement in Germany and other places.

SM (01:20:40):
I can remember reading some place that critics... I like Teddy Roosevelt, I learned a lot from him, great quotes on leadership. But he was heavily criticized for killing animals in Africa. And until you found out more in-depth information as to why he was killing those animals, because we did not have zoos then and museums. And he was sending the bodies back to be used in museums. So he was not just killing them for the mere fact of killing them. He was killing them for educational reasons. People love animals. I can understand where they are coming from, but they do not tell the whole story about why he was doing it.

RW (01:21:23):
Yes, and the thing of it is those were different times. But certainly he was thinking in a direction that has benefited the country. And I think we need to abandon these notions of left and right, think in more five-dimensional. There are people who are following major themes in American history as described, as posed in the original founding father's documents, and those who are trying, digging in their heels and trying to slow that sort of thing. I think if you view current issues like healthcare and education and even taxes within the context of all of American history, I think it is quite clear that anything that embraces people and their welfare is where we need to go one way or the other. There are people in this country who say that taxes are an invasion of privacy and a violation of individual freedom. And I would hope that they never use a highway, never turn on a water faucet using the public water system, never use electricity, never use a telephone, never use anything that requires the cooperation of large numbers of people across state lines. Because if they do not want to pay for that stuff, call an ambulance, a cop, check into a hospital, if they do not want to use that stuff, that is fine. But do not deny others the right to. Taxes, you might say that is a socialist idea, but it is an idea that everyone contributes according to their... People are not debating these things within the context of America. They are debating it in terms of what is left and what is right, and that is not an accurate construct for debates to take place.

SM (01:24:06):
Did you have a generation gap with your parents? You already told me about that experience with the beat in California when you were very young. But did you have a real strong gap with your mom and dad during that time? And secondly, this is a general question, but obviously you are a dad and you are a boomer dad and you are raising kids. Have boomers been very good parents or even grandparents with respect to sharing what it was like then? The learning lessons that were important for the boomers, have they shared them with their kids? Because the question I ask as a person who has been in higher ed for over 30 years, obviously I do not see the activism we saw back then and-

RW (01:24:54):
That is a mistake. Again, that is one of the things. We never got to put that in our book, but we did want to. One of the themes of the end of the (19)70s about the (19)60s was that activism is over. Activism is more widespread today than ever in the (19)60s. And it has to do with not just the narrow definition of radical activism, but activism of all kinds, whether it is protesting campus budget cutbacks, or bunch of moms uniting to get a streetlight at a dangerous intersection, or collecting money for any particular cause, or volunteering to help nonprofits. This is much more widespread today and nobody thinks a moment about it. In the (19)50s, in the post-war period, anyone carrying a picket sign was automatically labeled a subversive because of the McCarthyistic nature of those times. People, they do not think twice about protesting or organizing to accomplish something, whatever it might be. So activism is one of those principles of the (19)60s that was anchored in all the previous years of American history that was dormant in the (19)50s and now is part of the fabric of our society. In any case, my son who is 21 and a college student and a rock and roll drummer and a very smart kid with his own idiosyncratic way, who knows what he and his crowd are going to be up to? But he recognizes, he has taken the time to go through my record collection so that he understands that the music of today is rooted in the music of previous generation. He is not like us. I thought the Rolling Stones, all that music, that that was theirs, they invented that. And then when I got down to it, I realized, "Oh my god, they are doing songs by Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf." And then where do they get their music? We had to discover it because that history had been suppressed. Today that is commonly acknowledged and much more accessible.

SM (01:27:56):
One of the things you mentioned early on here is the words. When you define the (19)60s generation, we use the words us and we, feeling a [inaudible], a camaraderie, a sense of community and ideas, ideals, shared experiences. But in later years, and Christopher Lasch wrote The Culture Of Narcissism, which was a very popular book in the (19)80s, actually it was the late-(19)70s. He said that us and we went into me. And so what was we became so into themselves, it was like the religious experiences of the (19)60s, what happened after the war ended, and then with the increase in violence, and that people burned out, they went into an inner spirituality where they believed in not necessarily a god but someone.

RW (01:28:57):
I will tell you, there are these generalities of burnouts and what a generation is doing at any one time. Let me change my- Very good. People make these statements, these generalities about what any particular generation is doing at any one time. One thing that you can say for sure is that people are born, they are young, they grow older, and they die. And along the way, people tend to follow certain paths. And statistically across a large population of people, you could say that a generation tends to act in one way or another. Certainly when you are young and in college and have no family obligations or job obligations, you can take the time to be an activist and protest and be somewhat reckless in your life. Certainly as you grow older and have to get a job, you will be more restricted in your activities. And as you grow even older, you will cut down on even more reckless behavior. And you may even start to look askance at such behavior in younger people. These are common human traits and behavioral tendencies. And it is not uncommon for people as they grow older to start questioning things and to seek spiritual answers. And America is nothing if not a religious country, or a spiritual country rather. And so naturally, as they entered their thirties, the generation that was most populous during the (19)60s tended to question and look for spiritual answers, which is part and parcel of the spiritual search that was part of the (19)60s counterculture, the Harry Krishnas. Look at The Beatles going to India, transcendental meditation. These are mainstream currents of every human life and very much part of American life. Spiritualism, the quest for spiritual answers, you can read that all through the literature, beginning all the way back to Nathaniel Hawthorne questioning the religious principles of his time. There was a huge spiritual movement in this country, spiritualist in the late-1880s and early-1900s with Madame Blavatsky and a lot of hucksters trying to contact the spirit mediums and so on. This has always been an American trait. So to narrow, to take the telescope and turn it around and focus so narrowly is at once a mistake, but it is also very correct. Yes, people tend to become more spiritually inclined as they grow older. So what? So what does that mean? They are selfish? Does it mean that the (19)60s never happened? That activism not only was a failure but was wrong? No. These things continue along with the spiritual quest. And it is not as if what is happening today invalidates what happened yesterday. What it does do is provide people like Christopher Lasch with a book topic that they can sell and go on talk shows and do interviews about. The (19)60s provided a lot of fuel for the popular definers of the age. Everyone wanted to define the age in which we live. Meanwhile, people live normal lives. They go through phases. And nobody says that because they are the way they are in their (19)50s, that somehow that makes their lives when they were 20 and 30 somehow invalid.

SM (01:34:00):
You make good points. And one of the things too is the kids of the boomers, because the first kids were the generation Xers. They were born after (19)65. And they overall did not get along very well with boomers in many ways. But they were the ones being attacked as being the yuppies. Remember? They were trying to make lots of money before they turned 30 on Wall Street. So what kind of parents were the boomers if they raised these kids who became yuppies?

RW (01:34:31):
These are easy terms to throw around and easy ideas, flap upside somebody's head. But in fact, because we enjoyed the affluence of the post-war period, what does that mean about our parents who struggled through the thirties and the warriors of the (19)40s? Did it invalidate who they were or what they did? They fought so that we could enjoy peace and comfort. And why hold it against us that we did? In fact, the notion that somehow we took for granted what had been hard fought, hard won is contrary to what actually happened, which is that the young people in the (19)60s were not satisfied with the situation. And they did try to extend their peace and prosperity to other people. And that should make people sit up and take notice. Yes, the greatest generation to call fought for our freedom, but is not it equally as great that the next generation was not content to sit and be satisfied with that wealth and prosperity and that peace, that instead be agitated? We became troublemakers in order to share what we had with everyone because it was not... There was a saying, "None of us are free unless all of us are free." And certainly as a young person traveling in the South in 1966, as I did with a friend of mine. We stole a car and headed south to go visit a guy I had met the previous summer who said he lived in New Orleans. He had some good pot. So me and my friend, we skipped school one day, stole a car, took his brother-in-law's credit card, and headed for New Orleans. Go visit our friend Pino and get some good dope. So we head down there to New Orleans, driving through the South in 1966. In about this time, springtime, when the red earth of Georgia was just breaking open and you could smell the Mississippi delta. We arrived in New Orleans, we go to the address that Pino had given me, and it is this little shotgun shack down in the Lower Ninth Ward. Woman answers the front door, sees these two white kids. And she was kind of coffee-colored. We said, "Hey, is Pino home?" And she said, "Oh, sorry. Pino is in the parish county jail." So we said, "Oh, we will go visit him." And we went and bought a carton of cigarettes because that is what prisoners like. And we went to the parish county jail and there was a sign outside that said white visiting hours so-and-so, colored visiting hours so-and-so. Well, I had never thought of this guy Pino as white or colored or what. I could not tell what she was. I know now she was Creole. But we were so ashamed and embarrassed to have to ask somebody if our friend was white or colored and which visiting hours that... My friend and I, we went over to the banks of the Mississippi, sat there, smoked a few cigarettes. And without a word, we got up, jumped into our stolen car and headed back north, defeated by a situation that we had no knowledge of, no part in. And no way to do anything about it because we were 16 years old in a stolen car and wondering what this was all about. And of course, in ensuing years we learned very quickly. And some of us tried to do something about it. But the point is that we witnessed a time in this country that was very different from now. And the way things are now are directly a result of people who were not satisfied with the way things were in 1960s and did something about it. Whether I did it or somebody else did, it does not matter. Somebody did something about it. And I am so proud to have been born at that time. I can sit here now and say I wept openly when an African American was elected president. Said to myself, like so many others, "I never thought I would live to see this day." And quite frankly, if a lightning bolt had come down and struck me dead at that time, I would have died with a smile on my face because I have lived to see the realization of much that was only distantly promised and so difficult to imagine becoming a reality. And today, my son and his friends enjoy this stuff and so they should. And if they want to continue to struggle with all of the issues that are remaining, and there are quite a few, then that is fine.

SM (01:40:54):
Yeah, it is interesting that we have African American-

RW (01:40:56):
That is my favorite story of the (19)60s by the way.

SM (01:40:59):
You see, that is a magic moment, Rex. That is what I mean, these things that come out in an interview. I am not saying I am going to use it for the book. It will be in the interview, but on the book title. But see, that is what I meant. Things that I did not expect that may have come out in interviews. I cannot believe some of the things that have come out in my interviews. And I have only had one person in 100, you are my 142nd person, and only one person said, "You better not put that in print." And that was a person who is very close to the Kennedy Family. And he admitted that he could not stand Bobby. And he says, "I cannot have Ethel know that."

RW (01:41:47):
My dad wrote speeches for Bobby Kennedy. And he could not stand him either because he finally met him and thought he was a jerk. Put that in the book.

SM (01:41:56):
Yeah, he changed that. The last couple of years, he was different than he was early on. You are a boomer. And as a boomer, just looking at a decade, you do not have to give me any in depth explanation, but boomers are now into their (19)60s. And they have lived through the (19)50s, (19)60s, (19)70s, (19)80s, (19)90s, and what we call the tens, the Bush, and now Obama. If you were to go from the (19)50s and for each of these decades, just a few words as a boomer, what do you think of these decades? You do not have to go into any depth of what they mean. But if you were just coming in from outer space or something like that and you wanted to tell someone in a few words what the (19)50s was, what the (19)60s was, what the (19)70s was, what would they be?

RW (01:42:51):
Well, I would say that the (19)50s, the country was locked in a post-traumatic stress syndrome after the war, struggling to emerge. The (19)60s, we emerged and realized we needed more therapy and treated ourselves to a good time and a worthy time. (19)70s, we matured, paid attention to the demands of maturity. The (19)80s, we indulged ourselves in our success at every level. (19)90s, we got a little tired. And we continue to lapse into senility. But in everyone's life cycle, there are predictable phases. And all of them have been very predictable considering the circumstances. And looking at the times that we have been through, through the lens of knowledge that we have now about what happens after wars to people, what happens to people who are oppressed, what happens to people who emerge from difficult situations and are allowed to indulge themselves, what happens then. These are all predictable phases for most people. But within that, there are times, extraordinary times when.

RW (01:45:02):
...times, extraordinary times when people show great courage and are emboldened to acts of bravery because they see everyone around them being supportive or there is a necessity for it. And I think the (19)60s were a time when all of the previous currents of American history came together at the same time that we enjoyed enough comfort and security to be able to turn ourselves to the task of the unfinished revolution that America started with.

SM (01:45:59):
In your book, you talk about in a section there about the heroes. Some of the people that are certainly defined who they are by their time in the (19)60s with names of people from the (19)60s and the (19)70s. I found as a college administrator since probably around the late (19)80s before I left a year ago, is that many of the Generation X students and Millennial students do not pick well known personalities, politicians, musicians, they pick their family members, they picked their father, their mother, their uncle, their aunt, a teacher, a minister. Have you found this to be true?

RW (01:46:47):
Well, yes.

SM (01:46:47):
Somehow heroes have changed from those that were in the news to people who are not known.

RW (01:46:54):
That is an interesting aspect. I do not know who my son's heroes are. And certainly they do not hold them up to such a high degree as we did. But I think in the (19)60s, the personality posters, having a poster of Che Guevara or Malcolm X on your dorm room wall, a poster of Bob Dylan, it was a way we had to sort of overcompensate for a lack of definition of who we were and what was going on. The (19)50s tended to enforce conformity and reduce the individual's profile in society. Perhaps as a reaction to the grotesque hero worship of the warriors. When having a picture of Hitler on the wall was compulsory or picture of Mussolini. So in the (19)60s, we sought to define ourselves by personalities like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez music and JFK as well, Bobby. Right now, I think people have won the right to be their own heroes, to not have such iconic beacons of selfhood. I mean, it would be embarrassing today to have a picture of Bob Dylan on your wall or Kurt Cobain, or God knows. I mean, my son would never do anything like that. He and his friends, they are their own heroes. They are heroic every day of their lives. We won the right for them to do that. So now they can be non-conformists like everybody else, and they define themselves.

SM (01:49:15):
What term do you feel best defines the Boomer generation? Because you use Woodstock census, and then you have Woodstock consensus. And of course there is many terms for this generation, Vietnam generation, the Woodstock generation, the protest generation, the love generation, the movement generation. The list goes on and on.

RW (01:49:37):
Yeah. I would-

SM (01:49:37):
Which one do you feel most comfortable with?

RW (01:49:39):
Yeah. Well, let us start with what I would reject. I would reject the protest generation because there was more protest in this country going on in the twenties and thirties than any other time. And certainly if you go back to civil war days, there were anti-draft protests, riots. This country has a tradition of protest and it did not start in the (19)60s. So I would reject that. I am happy with Woodstock generation because it is true that it was emblematic of our unity, our counter-cultural sensibility. The music was extremely important as a unifying factor and as a way of recognizing the contribution of African-American culture to our society. I think the Woodstock generation is apropos, but Boomer is slightly derogatory, baby boom. Yes. We were all a product of the peace and prosperity and therefore the fertile activities of our parents following the war. It is a common occurrence after war for a society of experience of a wide increased birth incidents because, hey, the soldiers are home. So was there a boom boomer generation after the First World War? Probably. So it does pay tribute to our accomplishments or activities. Because really the number of people who participated in the (19)60s as opposed to those who identify with it, those are two different things. I would say that I would hate to really define it literally. I am much more interested in those who identify with the American... Those who identify the (19)60s with American mainstream currents, historical currents. I am much more interested in them. And I am also interested in those who resisted those currents then and continue dangerously to resist them now.

SM (01:52:30):
So you would not have a problem with the Vietnam generation then?

RW (01:52:34):
Well, that is difficult because then you are calling into question your participation as either someone who served in the military during that time or somehow served in the anti-war movement at that time. That is a much more controversial and divisive way to define our generation. Certainly in Vietnam, there is a Vietnam generation and people seem to forget that.

SM (01:53:18):
Yeah, I am actually interviewing the top scholar in America at Harvard, June 10th. She teaches Vietnamese history and I am getting it from her side.

RW (01:53:30):
But what I want to know is what about the people who spit on the little black kids who tried to integrate schools in Mississippi and Alabama? What about the people who beat up the freedom rider? What about the people who excluded blacks from their country clubs? What about the people who sought to exclude hippies with long hair from what about the principals and teachers who threw kids out of school for having a Beatle haircut? Where are those people today? Are they listening to a muzak version of the times they are changing as they go up the elevator? Are they confessing to the fact that they really, during the (19)60s resisted and hated hippies and long hairs? [inaudible] confess to that today because they are the traitors. They are the ones who betrayed this country by not following the ideals and principles that the country is founded on.

SM (01:54:45):
This leads right into the... There is two big issues here that I have tried to do with each interview. One is whether we as a nation have a problem with healing. And I have gotten many, many different responses to this. Let me preface this by saying that I took a group of students to Washington DC about maybe 12 years ago. Senator Edmund Muskie was retirement and he was not feeling very well. He was working in some sort of law firm. And I got this meeting due to Gaylord Nelson, a friend of his former senator from Wisconsin. In fact, I am interviewing his daughter tomorrow on the phone. But the question was that our students asked him is, do you think that we are having a problem with healing from all the divisions that took place in the (19)60s, the division between black and white, between those who supported the war, those were against the war and all the other divisions that we saw throughout that timeframe, or as some people say, "Time heals all wounds," that we really do not have a problem with healing in this nation. And Muskie responded in this way. Everybody thought he was going to talk about 1968 and all the clubbing of the students and the police and the brutality in the divisions of the country and the assassinations and everything else. He did not even mention it. His response was simple. He said, "I just got out of the hospital. I saw the Ken Burns Civil War series," and he said, "We have not healed as a nation since the Civil War." And then he went on for 10 minutes to talk about why.

RW (01:56:23):
Yes, I was going to give the same answer. It has taken 100 years to recover from that. And we still find people who say the South should have won the war, and they fly the old Dixie and sing the song. And they are unrepentant and refuse to see the reality of what happened then. And we may not ever outlive that, but it is true. And then you also think, I think if you see things from the African-American point of view, people tell them, "Get over it. Slavery is over. The civil rights movement is over. Get over it." And then you realize that the Jewish people have been talking about their time in slavery in Egypt for over 3000 years and have not forgotten that. These are deeply traumatic wounds that take a long time to heal.

SM (01:57:38):
Yeah. Well, I bring up... The Vietnam memorial's done a pretty good job of trying to heal the veterans and their families. Although I go to the wall and boy, they still have a lot of healing. And then I have often... Some person asks, "Are you just basically talking about those who were against the war and those who fought in the war? Because I can answer that question." Some would say. And I have often wondered, when boomers who did, were in the end anti-war movement, go to the wall and the young kids ask them, "Dad, what did you do in the war?" And whether they say anything or they were against the war. I think about these kinds of things. And you just made a very important statement with all those people who kicked students out of classes, who the Bull Connors of the world who put hoses on African Americans and beat them up. Like John Lewis to me, is one of the heroes of America because he took it and never fought back. He just got beat up. Your thoughts? Do we have a problem as a nation with healing?

RW (01:58:45):
Well, yes. And this goes to another theme of mine that I will expand on in some other venue. But I do believe that we are a nation that lives comfortably under illusions and delusions of who we are and our denial of the great sin of the genocide of Native Americans. Our denial of these things, of the crimes that we have committed does not allow us to heal. No one wants to talk about the roots of 9/11 in the overthrow of Mosaddegh in Iran in the (19)50s, the first democratically elected government in that part of the world. Our CIA overthrew him. And no wonder they hate our guts. Our overthrow of democratically elected governments in South America because our corporations needed to maintain their share of profits from those places. We have committed huge crimes as a nation meanwhile denying that these things are crimes. And even today, people were telling Obama not to go around the world apologizing. Well, it would do us good if we did, but it would do us more good if we admitted to the truths of our history and repented. Now I am a badass motherfucker and I would love to see a truth and reconciliation committee set up. It will never happen and probably divide the country even worse. But I am really pissed off at those people and I do not think they are ever repent, and I do not think they will ever be sorry. And I think the Phyllis Schlafly's of the world continued to lie to themselves and everyone else about who we are as a people and who they are as people. Phyllis Schlafly, does not she have a gay son?

SM (02:00:57):
I think she does.

RW (02:00:58):
Yeah. I mean this miserable cunt, I would slap her upside the head physically if I saw her. That is who I am. But it is probably a bad thing to do, the wrong thing to do. But people have committed crimes in this country that have gone unpunished and they walk around today and I just wonder what is inside their heads.

SM (02:01:27):
Rex, you are really bringing something up here and maybe you ought to pursue it because I would certainly support you on it about the... Because we have seen in the last maybe 10, 15 years, some of those people that were let off Scott free for the atrocities they committed in the South are now being brought to justice and being put in prison even if they are 75, 85 years old.

RW (02:01:50):
Well, yeah.

SM (02:01:51):
Part of it is happening, particularly the ones that killed Goodman, Schwerner and Cheney. I think they have been brought to justice, and I am not sure if they ever found the ones that blew up the church. I do not think they ever found them. But you raise a good point. But I am a firm believer that they are going to... If you believe in the power above, they are going to pay a heavy price in the power above.

RW (02:02:17):
Well, that is good to know. And I am with you on that. But I am thinking even the quieter crimes, the people who in their everyday behavior denied justice to somebody or some people or participated in the mobs that harassed or blocked civil rights or just behaved in a way that restricted someone else's freedom and liberty that was in a way, traumatic for that other person. So the principal of the school who threw a student out because he insisted on having long hair or had a poster of Bob Dylan on his wall or something.

SM (02:03:03):
I am a firm believer as a nation we have a lot of soul searching to do because things have come out since World War II regarding the Nazis and how some of the... We are not talking about the leadership, but we are talking about the underlings who committed some of the most worse atrocities in the world, worse than Eichman were brought into the United States and went on to live comfortable lives. And the government knew they were here and there were their information for whatever. There is a lot of hypocrisy going on here, and it is very disturbing. Another question is the issue of trust. The boomers have often, and the (19)60s generation, the boomers is not a very trusting generation for obvious reasons, because they saw leaders lie constantly, whether it be LBJ and the Gulf of Tonkin or Watergate with Richard Nixon. Certainly nobody trusted Ford at the point that he was going to pardon Richard Nixon, even though they said he healed a nation by doing so. And then you had issues with the U-2, with Eisenhower lying on black and white TV and a lot of experience, the lies that McNamara gave to the American people about the escalating numbers, all the things. And I can see why many boomers did not trust their leaders, but you experienced it as I did. Boomers did not seem to trust anybody in a position of leadership, whether it be a rabbi, a priest, a minister, a university president, a corporate leader, anyone who was a leader. Just your response on that. And as a political science person, I was a history political science major, and we were taught early on that not having trust is actually a good quality to have because it means dissent is alive and well. So just your thoughts on the boomers or the (19)60s generation just did not trust people?

RW (02:05:10):
Well, yes. I think there had been a tremendous betrayal of trust in the years leading up to the (19)60s. And there was the reality of what we were experiencing diverged from what the leaders were saying. And the famous credibility gap of the Johnson years epitomized what was going on. But this is not to say that JFK did not lie to us or that he was not similarly under some illusion or in the control of powers that continued to manipulate our history to their benefit while mouthing patriotic platitudes. I do believe that there is a secret history of the country that has yet to be acknowledged. Our victimization of not only our own citizens at home, but of other countries, other people's economies. And this may never be acknowledged. And given that circumstance, I continue to define myself... How should I say it? It is what I identify with about the (19)60s is the willingness to resort to methods, unconventional methods, shall we say, to either protest or force a change. And I reserve my right and my resources and my experience to take that with me to the grave if necessary, but certainly to impart that to the rest of the world and say, as we said back then, if it comes to it, let us pick up the gun. And I am not afraid of that. It would be a terrible thing. But there are forces still alive in this country, part of the secret history of the country that want to turn the clock back, but they cannot do it. And that is what makes them so dangerous.

SM (02:08:16):
So as someone who may be different from you, I mean, your stand is correct in what you believe, but the fact that Students for Democratic Society went downhill after they started committing violence, even Mark Rudd said it is the greatest mistake he ever made in his life. Bernadine Dohrn has not made that admission. And then the American Indian Movement, they even realized when they started going violent at Wounded Knee, that was a big, big mistake. The gay and lesbian movement, when the Harvey Milk was murdered in (19)78, they committed violence. They regret the violence that happened two or three days later. The protest was okay, but the violence never went any... And of course, the Black Panthers and the Black Power-

RW (02:09:05):
It is all very regrettable and it is a terrible thing and people do get hurt, and when it is happening all around you, it is terrifying. I just happen to be in San Francisco during the protests when the sentence came down in the Harvey Milk.

SM (02:09:28):
Yeah, I lived out there. I lived in Burlingame.

RW (02:09:30):
All right. Well, I was there with my friend Paul Krasner and a bunch of-

SM (02:09:34):
Oh, I have read... He is a good writer.

RW (02:09:37):
You should be in touch with Paul. He would be a good interview for [inaudible].

SM (02:09:40):
I do not even know how to get ahold of him.

RW (02:09:43):
I set one of the police cars on fire during that time, just because I could. And I will admit it now. Come and get me motherfuckers.

SM (02:09:50):
Oh my golly, I know the chief. No, only kidding.

RW (02:09:55):
You know what I mean? I just think that one of the things about America that is very American is it is violent nature and that is something we cannot deny. And I was never a peace and love hippie. I was a... What can I tell you? But in any case, I think that just as the NRA says, we all have a right to go around armed. I say, yeah, and I want to be armed against you guys because you are the ones who are the craziest with your crazy ideas. I mean, you never really hear of left-wingers shooting places up. It is always people with strange, strange sort of... I do not know.

SM (02:10:57):
What other things here? We only got about 10 more... You have gone way overboard with me and I want to thank you.

RW (02:11:02):
All right.

SM (02:11:03):
Time wise. Trauma is something.... I am very lucky. I am going to have an interview with Robert J. Lifton in July. He has written a lot of books on trauma, certainly amongst the Vietnam veterans. I am going to ask him about trauma regarding the boomer generation and a lot of the people on the other side as well. But you have already talked about all generations in American history have gone through trauma. Certainly when Lincoln was killed back in the Civil War as the North was getting so close to winning that war, and they won the war, but we went through so much with Kennedy and the other Kennedy and King and the riots, and then the Vietnam. (19)68 looked like the country's going apart, Kent State and Jackson State. Then in the (19)80s, we had the AIDS crisis where the president did not even care as probably half of the male population that were gay may have passed away. Certainly what happened with Harvey Milk and Moscone in (19)78 and John Monon in 1980? The only reason I bring these up is that whenever there seems to be some sort of hope or people who lead, who conspire, people that hope reigns eternal, that good things can come through persistence and hard work and believing in justice and equality and no man or woman is better than anybody else. And then there is murder or there is something. And of course, I always live by the philosophy like Dr. King is, you may kill dreamer, but you cannot kill the dream. That is the way I have lived my life. And I think if you asked any of these people that died, they would say the same thing. But I have often wondered, and maybe you and I are on the same wavelength as boomers. I have wondered what my fellow generation, I think about these things, what this trauma has done to them personally in their lives. And it is thinking beyond yourself kind of mentality. It is trauma, just your comments on trauma.

RW (02:13:16):
Yes. Well, there was the trauma of the Second World War that was inflicted upon our parents after the trauma of the Depression. And so we came into a world of traumatized Americans. They tried to shield us from that in the hopes that we would never experience anything like it. But the greatest generation created the Vietnam War. So there we had to go through it again and in a worse manner because some went and some did not. And it was just a completely traumatic time. The war alone just overshadowed everything. And I could not have the education that my parents struggled to provide for me because my own conscience would not allow it. So think about that kind of trauma. All of society was afflicted by matters of conscience there. The Civil Rights Movement or the Vietnam War, or so many of the issues of the time, we were traumatized by having our conscience provoked. We were forced to feel, forced to think instead of sinking into comfort and peace and comfort. Let me... All right, go right ahead.

SM (02:15:26):
So I think being forced to act as a matter of conscious being forced to feel and think these things felt traumatic because it was our right not to be afflicted by these things, I think.

RW (02:15:45):
The pictures often say of a million words. When you think of, I would say the first 30 years of boomers lives, (19)50s, (19)60s, and (19)70s, maybe the early (19)80s, what are the pictures, the photographs that were either on fronts of magazines or within magazines or may have been shown on TV that really, if someone had never read a history book of this period, but looked at these pictures, they would understand?

SM (02:16:14):
They do not understand?

RW (02:16:16):
No, they would understand.

SM (02:16:18):
The pictures give meaning to the period.

RW (02:16:21):
Well, the photo from Kent State of the young woman kneeling, that shows the extent to which white people went to protest the war. Any of the photos from My Lai or any of the war photos of the terror, of the young men of fighting for what they believed in or thought they believed in. Certainly the photos from the Civil Rights movement, certainly the photo of the Great Mall during the Civil Rights... When Martin Luther King gathered everybody together in Washington. The photo of John F. Kennedy and his kids, which epitomized the ideal, the glamour to which we aspired, to be graceful under pressure, to have a great vision, to believe in ideals. These were things that he sort of epitomized. And never for a moment did you look at JFK's family and think that these were uninvolved people. He was the essence of activism and the essence of the interrupted revolution.

SM (02:18:16):
Two other pictures that I think stood out were the athletes at the (19)68 Olympics, which is Carlos and Tommy Smith with their Black Power fists.

RW (02:18:26):
Yes, there is certainly that.

SM (02:18:28):
And then the Vietnamese girl in running down who had just been burned, Kim Phuc, that was another one too.

RW (02:18:35):
Sure. And we forget that that (19)68 was a time all over the world where youth politics and culture were united. And in Paris, I had friends who participated in the street demonstrations there, and the great slogan in French to translate this, "The more I make revolution, the more I want to make love." To me, that was a very French interpretation of what we were all very much about. And certainly the photo of Woodstock and so many people gathered together there, naked smoking dope, sharing bottles of wine. These are all-

SM (02:19:28):
Yeah, that one picture of the two hugging each other with a blanket around them when it was raining, that was a classic one. And certainly the pictures of planet Earth by the astronauts. That was another one that is-

RW (02:19:41):
Right. And there is a photo that was on the cover of Life Magazine of a couple ecstatically dancing. The guy in that photo was a guy named Bantusi, who I have known for since probably 1970.

SM (02:20:00):
Wow.

RW (02:20:01):
And we continued to meet-

SM (02:20:03):
Wow.

RW (02:20:03):
We continued to meet up from time to time, but I was privileged to get to know people like Abbie Hoffman and to participate in events that were in the sort of electric current of the moment, riots and demonstrations. I played my own very small role in these things. I felt it was the least I could do considering others of my generation-

SM (02:20:42):
The-

RW (02:20:43):
...Were risking their lives in some far-off jungle. But I never wanted to get to the age that I am in now and not be able to say, "Yes, I took part in that and I believed in what I was doing."

SM (02:21:00):
You stood for something.

RW (02:21:01):
I am pretty happy With all of it.

SM (02:21:02):
Yeah. You stood for something.

RW (02:21:03):
Yeah.

SM (02:21:04):
Yeah. The slogans from that period, and I have mentioned this, I did not mention it in the first half of my interviews, but I have since, particularly since I left the university. I felt there were three personal slogans that really defined the Boomer generation. Then a couple of people led me on to maybe two or three more. I felt that Malcolm X saying, "By any means necessary," symbolized the more radical elements within that period. Then you had Bobby Kennedy taking the Henry David Thoreau quote, "Some men see things as they are and ask why. I see things that never were and ask why not," which symbolizes an activist, the more questioning role that people had in all those different movements. Then you had a Peter Max statement from his posters that were very popular on college campuses in the late (19)60s and early (19)70s. This was actually hanging on my door at Ohio State. It said, "You do your thing, I will do mine. If by chance we should come together, it will be beautiful." Which symbolizes a hippie mentality.

RW (02:22:11):
Yeah.

SM (02:22:11):
Someone said to me, "We cannot forget, we shall overcome," because that symbolized the civil rights movement and what was going on. And then the only other two that have been mentioned are John Kennedy's, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." And then of course the Leary's, "Tune in, turn on and drop out."

RW (02:22:29):
Yeah.

SM (02:22:30):
Are there any that you have that I did not mention that really inspired you that I am missing here?

RW (02:22:38):
Well, I just want to say that the Peter Max thing sucks because there were people doing their thing that did not allow me or other people to do their thing. So hippie ethics was a bunch of bullshit. I would have to think about that one.

SM (02:23:06):
Okay. That is pretty inclusive I would say. I only have-

RW (02:23:11):
I do kind of like Che Guevara's thing about, "At the risk of seeming ridiculous, I would like to say that every true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love." I like that. It is sentimental and tough at the same time. That is how I like to see that time.

SM (02:23:47):
By you saying that, I want to recommend a book to you. I do not know if you are ever into Bertrand Russell.

RW (02:23:52):
Oh yeah.

SM (02:23:53):
Okay. Well, his biography, when I interviewed David Mixner, I asked him, "What was your legacy? What would you like your legacy to be?" He said, "Read the opening paragraph in Bertrand Russell's book, his biography, and that is all I have to say." Try to get it. It is great because when that man old age lived a life where I wanted to make a difference, and what he said about, and he brought in the concept of love is one of the three things that he wanted to be remembered for. One of the things that we are getting down toward the end here, and thanks again for going overboard. The sexual revolution, your section on it, I thought it was great.

RW (02:24:41):
Thanks.

SM (02:24:44):
One question I wanted to ask you, have you kept in touch with any of these 1000 and so people?

RW (02:24:49):
No, not really. We keep all of the original questionnaires somewhere and we are holding onto this stuff.

SM (02:24:56):
I wonder how many of these people are still alive?

RW (02:24:59):
Well, I wonder, I am still alive, but..

SM (02:25:04):
The question I am asking, dealing with sexual revolution of the (19)60s and the (19)70s, particularly in the (19)70s, that even though a lot of the things happened in the late (19)60s, a lot of people look at the sexual revolution as that early (19)70s period. I have always felt that the (19)60s ended in (19)73. I think, because when the war ended and everything, I cannot see much of a difference between 1967 and (19)72. But the question is the AIDS crisis, which was the biggest crisis of the (19)80s and the loss of so many people, and certainly in the San Francisco area, in New York. I have made sure in the book process that I have interviewed gay and lesbians, I have interviewed African-Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, the only group I feel guilty on is Asian-Americans, but they really did not... It is the boat people, I am trying to get to interview some of them. But do you think that the sexual revolution led to the AIDS crisis?

RW (02:26:06):
Well, in our book Woodstock Census, we came to the conclusion that the sexual revolution was a lot of noise, but no real substance. It was not that people were fucking more or climbing into bed with strangers any more than in any other time. What was really at the root of the seeming wildness of it was that women were coming into their own and people were having the very unusual and sort of wild experience, guys mainly, of having a woman call the shots, having women controlling the sexual situation and being more frank and honest about their bodies and themselves to quote a book title. The women themselves becoming empowered to the point that it altered forever the relationship that men have traditionally had with women in this country from the beginning. That affects everything from the way women dress at work to their earning power, to their role in the home and to their roles in bed. That is what the sexual revolution was really about. Your question goes to the left or the right or above or below the real substance of what it was. It was not an increased licentiousness that made the (19)60s seem so sexually free. It was really the empowerment of women through the women's movement that made everything seem so radically new and sometimes pretty wild.

SM (02:28:20):
Very good. I got a quick question here about your career because I-

RW (02:28:26):
I have got a question about my career too, God damn it.

SM (02:28:29):
Well, your writing career is amazing, your work with Variety and of course High Times, and I did not even know about the underground newspapers. How did your writing career lead you into writing movie and TV scripts? The key question I have here is do your books and your plays and your scripts, are they linked to a sort... I cannot read my writing here. Is there some sort of a message or meaning that is some way connected to the times when you were young? Do you try to put messages in all of your work?

RW (02:29:09):
I really wish that that were true. If it is, I may not know it. I think I work to keep working is basically... I write to keep writing. That is my personal motivation. The piece of writing that took me from New York to California, to Los Angeles is an exercise in fiction called The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, which is purely a literary exercise in sort of detective noir writing. It seems to have no relationship to my activism or my (19)60s sensibility whatsoever. That has led me, at the time I wrote it, I was sort of at odds. I did not know what direction I was going in, what I was doing. I wrote that and became editor of Swank, the magazine for men, for a year.

SM (02:30:29):
Wow.

RW (02:30:30):
Got a call from Hollywood saying, "Let us make a movie based on these big stories." They did not make the movie for about 10 years, but in the meantime, I did a stint writing for Miami Vice, writing a few other things. The one movie that does contain political activism is one I did called Forgotten Prisoners, the Amnesty Files, which is based on the true stories from the files of Amnesty International and had their official imprimatur.

SM (02:31:04):
Ron Silver was in that, right?

RW (02:31:06):
Yeah.

SM (02:31:07):
And he passed away this last year, I believe.

RW (02:31:09):
Yeah, and Hector Elizondo, but the director is Robert Greenwald, who continues to be an activist director. That is the one piece of movie business work. The Miami Vice episode I did is related to my expertise developed during the High Times days of the underworld of marijuana smuggling. There is that. I would say, on the one hand, I regret not having a constant politically involved writing career. On the other hand, that could be very restrictive, and I am very pleased that I have been able to do widely divergent pieces that I have done, even if it does not have the sort of consistency that I would prefer my career to be defined by.

SM (02:32:14):
When you think of the (19)60s and the Boomers, throughout your life, what were the best movies that really defined the times when Boomers were young, and also any books that you read that really influenced you during that time, and any artist or artwork, because most people really are limited in terms of art and what they know about the era, even if they grew up in it. They know about Andy Warhol and they know about Peter Max and Lichtenstein, but they do not know a whole lot others.

RW (02:32:47):
[inaudible]

SM (02:32:47):
[inaudible] the ones that had the most meaning to you?

RW (02:32:53):
Yes. Well, I would use the literature of the (19)50s and early (19)60s, the beat literature, Kerouac, Ginsburg, going back even further to Kenneth Rexroth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. These were the true literary lights of our time of the (19)60s. I mean, certainly Philip Roth captures beautifully the sensibility of the (19)50s and (19)60s. Norman Mailer, who I was very pleased to meet and hang around with, and Mailer's son, John Buffalo is a good friend of mine now, so I am very happy about that. The iconic writers, such as, what is his name? Tom Wolf, Pynchon and so on. Everyone has their favorites. Even cowgirls Get the Blues. That writer. These books inspired people and freed them from the restraints that they thought that they were alone and thinking that way. So those were all good things.

SM (02:34:19):
Did you read The Greening of America by Charles Reich?

RW (02:34:22):
No. Those are the books that I would flip through it and say, "Oh my God, how tedious." You would get the idea just from the review what his point was. At that time, you did not really need his examples. He had a point, and these were all pointing in the same direction that America was trying to free itself of past strictures. In terms of movies, the great movies of the (19)60s really came about in the (19)70s. You had Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces, and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. I did meet Kesey as well. There was a great outpouring of popular literature in the (19)60s that I do not see today, which is regrettable, but it is all happening on the internet now. To discover an author and to pass that dogeared paperback copy of Salinger to somebody was a way of turning somebody. It was like handing them a joint. It literally changed people's lives to read some of those books or to see some of those movies. The usual pantheon of literature and art, I do believe that the most radical artists of the times were in music like Bob Dylan, for instance, was true. Even though he evolved from so many familiar sources, he really did change the paradigm of what it meant to be a popular artist and to go through phases and to have an impact on people's lives. But also, Andy Warhol, I would say, was one of the most radical artists of that period. He really had an impact on the way people did everything and many these are commonly accepted themes and methods, but in their time, they were so truly, truly radical in the sense that they diverged completely from any tradition, turned things on their heads in a way that made us see differently. I think he was probably the iconic artist, the visual artist of the time.

SM (02:37:16):
Where would you put movies like The Graduate, Bob & Carroll & Ted &Alice? The Sterile Cuckoo was another one.

RW (02:37:26):
Well, here is the thing. Since I have come to Hollywood and gotten to know the movie business inside and out, I know how Hollywood works, and I know that the people who made those movies and who allowed studios to finance them and distribute and market them, were all seizing upon what they saw as an audience for these ideas that were in the media, in the news, on TV. They were really looking to sensationalize or capitalize on these. They were looking to sell tickets, and there were ways that people could participate in the (19)60s without actually being in an orgy or actually being alienated or feeling only a little alienated. They could identify with Dustin Hoffman in the Graduate and yet not have to go through what that character-

SM (02:38:35):
Yeah, I think I learned a lot about post-traumatic stress disorder and a lot of things that happened in Vietnam vets through Taxi Driver.

RW (02:38:44):
Yeah.

SM (02:38:44):
Then of course you have criticisms of Apocalypse Now and...

RW (02:38:49):
Yes, well, you notice that these movies came about in the early to mid (19)70s, and that is the time lag. If you decide that something that happened in the news today is worth making a movie about, that movie will not come out for at least two years. It takes a long time for a movie to get made and for everybody who's there to say no to finally say yes. The (19)60s in cinema did not happen until the mid (19)70s. That is just the way Hollywood works. People forget that in the (19)60s, you had the Rock Hudson, Doris Day movies and a lot of crap out there that did not really reflect what was going on, just an attempt to capitalize on the surface material.

SM (02:39:50):
I got three more questions. I am not going to ask this section, because we have gone really long here. That is all the names and personalities and terms. I am not going to go into that. I only wanted you to respond to two, and that is, what does the Vietnam Memorial mean to you personally? Secondly, what did the tragedy at Kent State and Jackson State mean to you? Those two.

RW (02:40:17):
Okay, well, I will take the latter. Kent State and Jackson State, I was in the streets at that time and they tore the cover off and allowed me to engage in the closest thing I could say to domestic terrorism. I mean, I was out there in the streets battling cops hand to hand and throwing the tear gas canisters back at them and breaking windows and setting things on fire. Those things meant that the array of official violence facing us required more than just peaceful protests. And that is what it meant to me, rightly or wrongly, and sorry if I heard anybody, but fuck it. And then the first one, what was the first one again?

SM (02:41:14):
Vietnam Memorial.

RW (02:41:16):
Okay. Well, to tell you the truth, I have not been to Washington DC since the protest days.

SM (02:41:23):
Okay.

RW (02:41:24):
I just have no reason to go. I never liked Washington DC. I cannot bring myself yet to go see the memorial, but I will probably one of these days. At the same time, my son, when he was in middle school, he and his class went to Washington DC on a class trip and I sat him down and told him the story of my high school best friend and gave him the name. I said, look at it, when you go to the wall, look it up and do a rubbing and bring it back. He took it seriously and went there and he brought back my friend's name from the wall.

SM (02:42:13):
What is your friend's name?

RW (02:42:15):
His name was Cuall K Lawrence.

SM (02:42:18):
Okay.

RW (02:42:19):
C-U-A-L-L K Lawrence.

SM (02:42:22):
How did he die?

RW (02:42:24):
Well, let us keep talking a bit, because I will tell you.

SM (02:42:39):
Yeah.

RW (02:42:41):
But there is a phrase that they use.

SM (02:42:44):
What year did he die?

RW (02:42:46):
What is that?

SM (02:42:47):
What year did he die?

RW (02:42:48):
I will tell you in a minute. But-

SM (02:42:52):
He was your best friend in high school?

RW (02:42:54):
Yes.

SM (02:42:55):
Did he go right into the army after school or the Marines?

RW (02:43:00):
Yeah. Well, there was a period of time when we all just went off into different directions and he ended up... Let us see here, wait a minute, here we go. Hang on. Private First Class, 8th Cavalry, 1st Cav Division. November, 1970.

SM (02:43:45):
Wow.

RW (02:43:47):
And he was said to have died from... Let us see. Non-hostile, died of other causes, ground casualty. The casual detail was accidental self-destruction.

SM (02:44:10):
So like, yeah, maybe bomb went off or, yeah. Or else it could have been friendly fire. Well, no, who knows? There is a lot of terms they use.

RW (02:44:23):
Accidental self-destruction was often used for people who shot up too much dope, or God knows what he did. Just maybe.

SM (02:44:34):
Did you go to his funeral?

RW (02:44:37):
No, I did not. As soon as I heard this, I went down to the city and just, that is when pretty much everything started falling in place as far as my activism.

SM (02:44:53):
When the best history books are written about the Boomer generation, the (19)60s generation, the Vietnam generation, that is those individuals born after the war and through the period I mentioned. After the boomers have passed on, the 78 million are no longer on this planet, what do you think the historians and sociologists are going to say about them? Because they obviously did not live during the time, but what do you think they will say about that period and about that generation?

RW (02:45:29):
Well, what do we say about the generation that fought the Civil War? What do we say about the 1920s? Oh, the roaring (19)20s. These things get simplified over time, boiled down into a phrase or an idea. I think the (19)60s will always be known as a time of turmoil and a time of testing and a time of triumph when it comes to the basic movements, the basic goals that we went for at that time. So civil rights, did we win on that? Yes. Women's rights? Yes. We won on that. Ending the war. Well, the war did finally end, whether we ended it or not, but a lot of effort went into ending it, not as a successful ending, but an ending that had to be brought about. I think that the simplification is those troubles, the term tumultuous (19)60s and the subhead is a time of protest, and hopefully they will conclude that the victories were won more than were lost.

SM (02:47:01):
That is really amazing that when you think about young people today in college, how little history they know, not only about the time that we live, but in any time. Let us hope that the quality of teaching changes, so that is not the case after the Boomer generation is gone. My very last question here is, what is the one thing you want to do in your life that you have not done yet that could be linked to your time, to the Woodstock generation, or just because you want to do something different? Is there something you want to do that you have not done?

RW (02:47:53):
Well, there are a couple of girlfriends I would like to see again, but only if they look the same. I think that I have been very lucky in being able to travel the world, and I have been to all kinds of places and done so many things and been witness to more history than anyone could ever want.

SM (02:48:28):
Is there one question that you thought I was going to ask that I did not?

RW (02:48:32):
That is the one question I was wondering if you would ask.

SM (02:48:35):
What is that?

RW (02:48:37):
"Is there one question?"

SM (02:48:39):
Oh, okay.

RW (02:48:39):
That blew your mind, man.

SM (02:48:43):
Yeah. Well, Rex, thank you very much. I will be interviewing Deanne. I think it is Monday.

RW (02:48:52):
Good.

SM (02:48:52):
I am calling her in the afternoon. And if there is anybody that you think of that you would think would be good for this project, you mentioned Paul Krassner, but I think he is almost impossible to get ahold of.

RW (02:49:05):
I call him all the time. I will send you his email. You can talk to him.

SM (02:49:09):
Yeah. If there is anybody else, you mentioned one other name, I forget what it was. You mentioned another name here. You have known, you said for years, and he was in that picture.

RW (02:49:19):
Oh yeah. Well, he will just give you a bunch of hippie bullshit.

SM (02:49:23):
Is there anybody else? Well, you think about it.

RW (02:49:27):
Did you interview Rennie Davis, by the way?

SM (02:49:29):
Oh, yeah. I interviewed him.

RW (02:49:30):
What's he got say, is he still with the 13-year-old guru?

SM (02:49:34):
Oh, no, was he with a 13-year-old girl?

RW (02:49:38):
That never came up?

SM (02:49:39):
No.

RW (02:49:41):
Are you fucking kidding me? You better, you better. Yeah. You are not doing your homework here. He-

SM (02:49:44):
No, he is with an older woman now that writes. He was very successful in the corporate world or technology, and he made a lot of money that way. He is into spirituality and he is very good at that.

RW (02:50:01):
Well, at the height of the sort of-

SM (02:50:06):
This should be off the record, I should not be taping this, should I?

RW (02:50:09):
No, you can.

SM (02:50:09):
Okay.

RW (02:50:11):
He very famously became a spokesman for the guru, Maharaji.

SM (02:50:15):
I remember that. Yep.

RW (02:50:16):
Known in our circles as the 13-year-old fat bastard. He totally left the activist world, sort of renounced it and became part of this cult.

SM (02:50:35):
Well, I knew that.

RW (02:50:36):
Oh, okay. Well, so that is-

SM (02:50:38):
I thought he was having an affair with a 13-year-old or something like that.

RW (02:50:41):
No-no.

SM (02:50:41):
Okay.

RW (02:50:44):
Guru Maharaji, who lives in Malibu now, has a helicopter and a private jet and is a pain in the ass to his neighbor.

SM (02:50:51):
Yeah, Rennie, even the person he lives with, I do not know the whole story. I know she is also a very good speaker. I forget her name. He was traveling around the country giving speaking engagements on spirituality. He is really good at it. He is in demand everywhere. So he is driving all over campus with her and they do presentations together and individually. He was very successful in technology for a while, I guess. Then he sold his company, and I guess he is fairly well-to-do.

RW (02:51:29):
Oh, good for him. But one of the few survivors of the Chicago trial.

SM (02:51:38):
Yeah. He and Tom Hayden.

RW (02:51:41):
Right.

SM (02:51:41):
And I tried.

(End of Interview)

2010-03-19

Stephen McKiernan

Rex Weiner

171:44

English

Binghamton University Libraries

audio/mp4

Sound

Audio

Authors; Editors; Publishers; Journalists; Weiner, Rex--Interviews

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