Interview with Senator Fred Harris

Harris, Fred R., 1930- ; McKiernan, Stephen

Fred Harris is a former Democratic United States Senator elected twice from the state of Oklahoma. Harris received his Bachelor and Law degree from the University of Oklahoma. He won a special election in 1964, succeeding Robert S. Kerr. In 1976, he became a professor of Political Science at the University of New Mexico.

2010-07-01

In copyright

2018-03-29

McKiernan Interviews

144:35

McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: Senator Fred Harris
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: REV
Date of interview: 1 July 2010
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(Start of Interview)

SM (00:00:08):
Testing, one two. Ba, loud. And again, thank you very much. It is an honor to talk to you. Before we even start, I consider you one of those great senators of the senators that I got to know, I think, that were really men of character back in the time when Senator McCarthy and Senator McGovern and Senator Nelson, who I all know or knew. So again, thank you very much.

FH (00:00:40):
[inaudible] well, thank you, Jeff. That is very nice for you to say.

SM (00:00:41):
Yeah. First question I have is, how did your growing up years in Oklahoma make you the person you are today, including where you grew up, your high school and your college and your early political efforts? I say this because I am very impressed with your background because things that stand out in your background include things like human rights. You dealt with the issue of desegregation, caring about the plight of African Americans, women, and Native Americans. So, just a little bit about how you became who you are.

FH (00:01:18):
Well, I grew up in a working class family. By most standards, we were poor, but we did not really feel poor. We would grow a big garden and we raised our own beef and pork and chickens for food, and I grew up in little town where it was not a place where there was a great deal of economic stratification where there are rich people and poor people; we were all fairly alike. I think that was a big help. Went to public schools there in that little town of Walters, Oklahoma. The interesting thing is, I was just back to a class reunion and it was amazing how many out of my class graduated class there in 1948. There were just two of us, I think. A potential majority got a college educations and a significant percentage, advanced degrees. I do not know, but that seems very unusual to me. I think we just all somehow always thought we would go to college, and did, and I did though no one in my family had ever been in college before. When I was a sophomore in high school, I somehow decided I wanted to be a lawyer, but I was not quite sure what a lawyer was. But I did think, I think now looking back on it, that it was sort of involved with being in politics, too, which I was intrigued by very early. About race, I do not know. I grew up in the school and in the county, the town where there were a lot of Comanche Indians. I later married a Comanche Indian woman, LaDonna Crawford, and some of my closest friends then, and that remained true through the years were members of the Comanche Indian Tribe, and I think maybe that gave me a somewhat different perspective than I might otherwise have had in regard to race. I was writing a memoir book not long ago and I was remembering that in a high school speech class, there was one little project where we had to recite some passage from Shakespeare. I chose the Shylock speech about the Jews, but I changed it. I did not really know anything much about Jews then, and I changed it to "negro." For example, as I gave the [inaudible] I said, "If you prick a negro, will he not bleed," and so forth. Where I got all that, I do not know. But ever since I remember, I had a great deal of interest in equality, ethnic and racial equality. Of course, that was something that I got very much involved in both in private life early and when I was practicing law on integration and then in the Oklahoma State Senate where I offered the bill that created the Oklahoma Human Rights Commission and prohibited discrimination in state employment, and then eventually starting right off in the United States Senate, but sort of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. That is a short amount. That is kind of my background.

SM (00:05:54):
Yeah. What really intrigues me about your background is why you became a leader at such a young age. Some people I know... The only other person that was as young as you was Senator Biden, who became a United States Senator in at the age of 29. When I look at your background, and I do not know, I have not studied Vice President Biden, but I know that he was a senator at the age of 30. You both became leaders at a very young age. What was the inspiration there? Did you feel that you were ahead of the time, that you felt you had to play an important role in some of these decisions earlier rather than later?

FH (00:06:36):
Hey, I do not know exactly why, but I do know this. I was always sort of grown, I think. I really enjoyed being around older people and listening to their conversations. It was sort of the practice among the people I grew up with there in Southwestern Oklahoma, and it certainly was true of my own father, that they gave the boys a lot of responsibilities at an early age. That was the way my father was with me and it was, too, of several of my classmates. They treated us more or less like adults and gave us the responsibility. I think that I was considerably more mature than I would have otherwise been. But that was, too, a lot of my high school classmates.

SM (00:07:33):
Do you remember, you have given a lot of important speeches in your life, certainly in the United States Senate, when you were in the State Senate, and maybe even in high school, and even now that you have been a professor for so many years... But do you consider one of your speeches the most favorite of all time? Was there one that you felt dealt with an issue better than anything you had ever dealt with before? What speech stands out?

FH (00:08:04):
I do not know. It is probably obscure kind of a subject outside of New Mexico. But I led the fight in the United States Senate for the return to Taos Indian Pueblo here in New Mexico their 48,006 Blue Lake lands. [inaudible] was not in my home state, but I got very interested in that after talking with the old leaders of the Pueblo. It was a precedent-setting bill that we passed. The tribe had gotten a claim against the federal government, a court of claims that was upheld for the wrongful taking of that land and were going to be compensated for money, but they would not have kept money. They wanted the land back. It was inside of the National Forest at the time. So, it was not in private hands, and we finally got that done. I would say my speaking on the floor of the United States Senate on that circuit was probably something that I am proudest of, though as I said, it is not a thing known much outside of the state here in New Mexico, my adopted state where I have lived now since 1976. Taos Pueblo is such wonderful, generous people, gentle people. They have had I do not know how many different ceremonies where they have thanked me and my then wife, LaDonna Harris, for our help on returning that land to them. That is about to happen again. They are going to have a 40th anniversary celebration this September of 2010 [inaudible] their land returned and again, honoring us.

SM (00:10:22):
Well, that is excellent. Since the project I am working on is, of course, dealing with the boomer generation, and that is those individuals born between 1946 and 1964, and I preface this by saying that many people, one-third of the people I have interviewed, are not boomers; they are older than boomers. Many people that were born, say, around (19)40 to (19)46, many of them consider themselves boomers even though they do not fall into that timeframe. I have had a lot of different people comment on the generation itself. But what I am looking at here is what was America like during the following periods in your eyes? Because you experienced it growing up after the war, after World War II. And of course, you went to college in the early (19)50s, you became a lawyer in the (19)50s and then, of course, you were serving already at that time before you went into the (19)60s into the Senate. But if you, and just your own words, I am looking at the years that boomers have been alive, which means that the oldest boomer now is 64 this year, and the youngest one is 48 this year, if you were to describe the period 1946 to 1960, how would you describe America?

FH (00:11:43):
Well, it was almost a nation. I actually was born in 1930 in the midst of the Depression and Dustbowl days in Oklahoma. I grew up in those years prior to 1946 with people who that...

SM (00:12:20):
Still there?

FH (00:12:22):
...if they had been victims of circumstances beyond their control and that the government had to do something about it, my people who were not active in politics revered Franklin Roosevelt, and I think we grew up thinking that the government could be, it should be your friend. Then came at World War II and the world just radically changed. People moved all from their home place, became very mobile. And that was true of my own family and friends. People scattered and went elsewhere to find jobs and so forth. You had this pent-up consumer demand during the war which suddenly caused enormous economic activity and growth. You had the GI Bill, which provided for those boomer people who would come back from the war, or actually they were earlier than the movement of people that came back from the war, the opportunity for higher education and showed the rest of us, too, that if we would go to school, we could go to college and university, and we did. So, it was just a radical change in American life and the national life about the time these people were born, this boomer generation. I think everybody was growing and developing as the country was, and I think there was just sort of an inevitable optimism as that group was growing up, as was true for me, too, that the possibilities were unlimited, that you could do almost anything you wanted to. It is the kind of thing that the Clintons, one of the boomer generation, used to say, people that played by the rules, worked hard, you could do just about anything you wanted to. I think that was the general feeling of that era.

SM (00:14:59):
Because that is from (19)46 to (19)60. And then we get into the era of 1961 to 1970, which is the Kennedy being elected, and of course we get the Vietnam War. Just your thoughts on that tumultuous decade.

FH (00:15:13):
Well, the Vietnam War of the (19)60s, I think for the first time caused people of that boomer generation, and a lot of rest of us as well, to come to the really shocking and depressing view that the government was not always right. There was a real question whether our leaders could be trusted, and they had gotten into this terrible mess in the war. Then, we sort of papered over, white people had, the terrible fight of the African Americans in particular, Indians, too, and all of that came to the forefront in the (19)60s. We had the terrible riots, which exploded in Black sections in most of America's cities. In the summer of 1967, I was evidently appointed by President Johnson to the President's National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, the [inaudible] commission to report and recommend concerning those terrible events. That was kind of with the war and these horrific conflicts, racial and ethnic conflicts in the country that told us what America was really like, and a lot of us had not thought about it that much. That really sort of destroyed the innocence of the people at that time. I think that made people a lot more distrustful of government, a lot more concern. Maybe there are not any solutions to some of these problems, and made people somewhat more fearful and more self-centered about their own families and their own problems, and less willing, as have been true of that Depression generation, to reach out to others and to cooperate and so forth. The (19)60s was a time of enormous change and rapid depression.

SM (00:18:01):
Where would you place the (19)70s? Because we all remember Kent State and Jackson State in the middle of 1970. Then we get into (19)71. We all know what happened with Watergate and those early years of... A lot of people say, I do not know how you feel about it, that the (19)60s really continued right through about 1973 or (19)74. A lot of people-

FH (00:18:27):
I think that is absolutely true. I think what happened... Back in the (19)50s, we had men all very optimistic and cheerful during the Eisenhower years, that is evidenced by white people and the people in the dominant society. Then the (19)60s really shocked us into a depressing reality, and then with the (19)70s, the beginning of the (19)70s particularly, the events just sort of confirmed the kind of increasing distrust and fearsomeness or fearfulness that had developed in the (19)60s.

SM (00:19:19):
Well, when you get to the end of the (19)70s, Jimmy Carter's ousted from office and Ronald Reagan comes in. Then when you talk about the (19)80s, (19)81 to (19)90, it is really the era of Ronald Reagan and George Bush I. Just your thoughts on the (19)80s and its reaction to the (19)70s.

FH (00:19:45):
There has always been two mainstreams, I think, in American life. One, that we are neighbors and neighbors ought to help each other, and we are all in this thing together. And then the other thing has always been lift yourself up by your own bootstraps; do not be going around begging other people to help you. I think the (19)80s, the advent of the Reagan and Bush administration, the thing that became dominant was this idea that you were on your own. Nobody was going to help you; you got to yourself, and quit complaining and protesting. Straighten up, take care of yourself, or you will be sorry.

SM (00:20:45):
Well, what is interesting, Christopher Lasch, the author wrote The Culture of Narcissism, and he wrote that in the late (19)70s, and he said, many of the people that grew up and were formed by the (19)60s and the (19)70s became so into themselves, they did not care about anybody else. They became narcissistic. They cared about a nice car, a beautiful home, just basically narcissism. Do you believe that?

FH (00:21:18):
I think there is some of that. I think there is something to that. With the riots, for example, in the mid-1960s or later, there was, I think, a feeling that... Well, for example, my own father, who [inaudible] and believed in me, when he read about the Carter Report as a result of those riots, the way he saw our report was that it said, "Mr. Harris, you ought to pay more taxes so we can help poor Black people who live in Detroit," and he was thinking to himself, "Wait a minute. I am paying too much taxes myself and we never protested and rioted, and I do not think we ought to condone or reward that kind of disorder." I think that began this idea of distrusting each other and began to erode that feeling that had developed back in Roosevelt years, that government ought to help those who are left fortunate, who cannot to help themselves and that we ought to help each other. Then I think Reagan, and Nixon to some degree, and then later when Reagan got elected as a benefit of that kind of individualistic tendency in the country.

SM (00:23:08):
Dr. King used to always talk in his speeches about "we." Even though he was up there on a platform, he always looked in the audience and says, "You are me, because it is about we. It is not about me." I think the question that always comes up, there is always exceptions to the rule, but whether as a generation as a whole, when you look at the fact that this generation of 74 million, people I have talked to say that only between 5 percent and 15 percent, depending on who you talked to, was really involved in any kind of activism. The 85 percent just went on with their daily lives, but were certainly affected by everything. So-

FH (00:23:49):
President Carter was a disappointment as president. He did not push enough in the right directions, and very early lost his mandate. He became the greatest and best former president we ever had [inaudible]. Bill Clinton I think sort of turned us back toward this idea that we are our brothers' keepers and that we ought to cooperate together, work together. But Clinton, too, he lost the control of the Congress and really pulled his own horns in on the great issues. He lost on some of them like health insurance, and the nation then just moved on more toward this individualistic kind of tendency [inaudible] before [inaudible]

SM (00:25:01):
Right. You remember this, even whether you liked President Reagan's politics or not, he and Tip O'Neill got along quite well. Remember Tippo used to always say, "All politics is local." They used to debate a lot and had tremendous disagreements, but when the day was over, they would shake hands and if they could have, they would go out and have a drink. But it was just a different time. It seems like when Ronald Reagan came in, maybe it is a result of what from LBJ and Richard Nixon and what they did to America and divided the country, that when Reagan and Clinton were in office and even George Bush II, I mean, the divisiveness and the dislike for them as leaders was immense. What has happened between 1980 and 2010, in your opinion? It has been 30 years in the boomers' lives as their middle years going into their now senior citizen status. What has happened to America in the divisiveness, and do you see any links between this divisiveness and unwillingness to work together and if someone said, "Today, if President Obama likes this, then we have got to be against it even though we might like it, but if he is for it, were against it." I mean, where did this all start?

FH (00:26:22):
Well, I think a few things we ought to think about. One is I think the approach, the appeal of progressives in politics and government, it was not very effective because it tended to be preachy and to call on people to do the right thing, for example, in regards to poor people or in regards to Black people because it was the moral thing to do, appeal to the people's morality and sense of the right and wrong. I thought that back then, and I still do, that it was far more appropriate and effective to, and I called this the populism, to appeal to people's self-interest, to say to a person like my dad, "You are not going to be able to live in a society of self-esteem where there is security and stability unless there is some better distribution of the income and power in this country." You may think that problems of poor Black kids down in Mississippi and [inaudible] education which consigns them forever to poverty, or that heavily discriminated against and unable to reach their full potential, you may think that is not your problem. They are off down there in Mississippi or they are up there in Harlem or something. But we are all in this thing together. They do not stay in one place. For example, they may move from Mississippi to New York [inaudible] state. You are going to [inaudible] these kind of things one way or another. As Jesse Jackson was saying at the time, "It is a heck a lot cheaper to get in on the front end, to give people some real opportunity in their education and so forth, than it is to send them off to prison or put them on welfare or whatever." That is the one thing. I think that we could have made a better...

FH (00:29:03):
That is one thing. I think that we could have made a better appeal on the basis of the [inaudible] of everybody rather than just on morality. And the other thing that we should notice is what was happening in the country, and therefore, in the Congress. When I first went to the United States Senate in 1964, there was no Republican member of the Senate from any of the old 11 Confederate states. And I think there are only about two Republican house members from that whole Confederate area. And all that now has changed. The majority of them in both houses are Republicans. In those days, the Democratic party in those states was an all-white racist, highly conservative party. Well, that all began to change with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. So that black people who had been prevented from voting and throughout the south, from as far back as President Wilson's day, suddenly flooded into the voting poll. And they were overwhelmingly Democrats. And the white people fled. And after a little trouble with Strom Thurmond, for example, moved into the Republican ranks. And the same thing was happening all around the country as people, the electorate began to differentiate itself on a long party line based on economic flags. And people working in [inaudible] and below were increasingly Democrat, and the others were Republicans. African Americans and the growing numbers of Hispanics were overwhelmingly Democrat. And they were increasingly different on those who identified themselves as Democrats and those who identified themselves as a Republican on issues. And that was especially true of the party activists, the people who nominate the people of Congress so that the hard right of conservative Democrats in the House and Senate disappeared, and the liberal Republicans in the House and the Senate disappeared, so that we came to have, from the (19)80s on at least, we came to have two parties in each house that were internally homogenous, and therefore, very much unlike the others. All major votes of any conflict became party line votes for a majority of one-party votes against the majority of the other. And very often, nearly all, or sometimes all, of one party voted against nearly all, or all, of the other party. So we have become highly partisan and it has made it extremely difficult to reach any compromise on any major issues.

SM (00:33:05):
I think this was also seen when President Kennedy was elected because he certainly cared about civil rights and the plight of African Americans, but he was a little hesitant knowing that the South was basically southern Democrats, and if he wanted to be reelected, I think there was a concern there. And I like your thoughts on that. But also the fact that on the 1963 March on Washington, when he brought the civil rights leaders into the White House, he was a little hesitant and a little fearful that the march could become a riot. And I know he was concerned about John Lewis's commentary and [inaudible] Randolph told him to really cool it, so to speak. But your thoughts on the... He was a pragmatic politician basically.

FH (00:33:51):
That is right. You take, for example, in the Senate in those days, and when I first went there also, in the Senate, we could not take the position as a party on issues, although we tried a time or two in the Senate talking to do so, because we were split. We had people as liberal as George McGovern, and as conservative as John Stennis and Jim Eastland. And Kennedy was having to deal with that kind of situation, both in the Congress as well as in the country. So as you know, [inaudible] his election back then the first time, he did not want to make a big fight out of civil rights. And the thought was that if he could get reelected, they would begin to pick up that issue after. Johnson who had a great change of heart himself on those kinds of issues, Lyndon Johnson came into office. We had begun to see on television the terrible violent things against black people and the horrible way as many of them were [inaudible], and we would see it on television. And then with the outpouring of sympathy, there was about... on the assassination of President Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson was able, finally, to get a filibuster broken in the Senate and pass and the Civil Rights Act of (19)64, the Voting Rights Act of (19)65. But up until President Kennedy's assassination, I think the view of his administration was that a rising tide lifts all boats. And while we will not single out African Americans to help if we do something for all people, particularly in poverty and so forth, that will automatically help them, which was true of course, but it was not enough.

SM (00:36:23):
When you look at that period from (19)46, actually right through to 2010, who were the role models and people you looked up to the most during this timeframe? People you worked with or people that inspired you. It does not always have to be in politics. And who and which leaders do you feel had the greatest impact on boomers themselves, both good and bad?

FH (00:36:50):
Well, a magazine once said that I was the only person in Washington who could have a breakfast with Lyndon Johnson and lunch with Vice President Hubert Humphrey and dinner with Andrew Robert Kennedy. And that was true, and they all knew that I got along with each one of them. But I was closer to Hubert Humphrey and to Robert Kennedy. Robert Kennedy was my seatmate in the Senate and we lived around the corner from each other in Virginia, and we know each other a lot. [inaudible] work together. And he was, in a way, like me. When I went to the Senate, in the process of becoming himself, he was terribly injured, as you can tell, damaged himself by the defamation of his brother. And he was deepening in his concern about the poor people and about African Americans and others. I liked him in [inaudible]. And then Hubert Humphrey was, of course, the greatest legislator of my generation. And then several others. He was a very well-motivated person who became awfully handicapped by his association with Lyndon Johnson as his vice president, and was very much convened by Johnson, and was put in the terrible position of having to support the Vietnam War until he finally was liberated when he was running for president himself. He almost got... I was together with Senator Walker Mondale, national co-chair of the country campaign for president, and we almost won. The country would have been a much different country had we pulled it out.

SM (00:39:13):
This is important because even in the history books that I have read said that if it had been two more weeks, two more weeks before the election, he would have won, that he was really rising. And even at two or three or a month earlier, he would have showed a difference between Lyndon Johnson and himself, he would have won.

FH (00:39:34):
Well as Larry O'Brien, who was the Democratic chair just before me, and then the National Democratic Chair took advocate, has written, and I have too... Humphrey promised him and promised me and Senator Mondale that he was going to break with Johnson on the war and called for unconditional [inaudible] and for de-Americanization of the war so that we could begin to pull out of there. And we had a platform blanket at the Chicago Convention in 1968 to do exactly that. And then Johnson moved in and blocked it. I bet his office did. And Humphrey backed down a little and compromised, which I found very disappointing. But finally late in the campaign, I was with him and helped write the speech he should have given much earlier on Vietnam, breaking with Johnson. And from that moment, we began to go up in the polls. It was not as strong an anti-Vietnam war speech as I wanted, but it was taken by the country and by people like Ted Kennedy as a peace speech. And Humphrey went up in the polls everywhere from that moment. At the very last, he went down to Texas. It was very well received and the polls in Texas showed that we had gone ahead. We went up from there to California for a last night, a national television program, and the field poll, very respected California poll, showed that we pulled even and were still moving. Other polls showed us that we were really coming up, up to that time, for a long time. Humphrey was the only one who thought he could win, and he just kept working at [inaudible]. So we went to bed that night. We flew back from California with Humphrey to Minnesota so he could vote the next morning. And when we went to bed that night in Minnesota, election night, we were pretty well convinced we were going to win it. But turned out we do not win by... they do not win the presidency by the popular vote. You have to think of states that led up to a majority of electoral college. And the next morning when I got up, I started thinking about that. I could see we were not going to make it, and of course we did not. The country would have been a wholly different country if he had been elected and Richard Nixon had not.

SM (00:42:50):
I agree. Let me... Okay, great. Question here. In John Kennedy's speech, " Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country," certainly was a major influence a lot on the young people that... Actually boomers were just going into junior high school at that time. I am one of them. And I mean, that was one heck of a speech. And you all knew it was about the Peace Corps and Vista. And serving in the military, I guess, was maybe not like it was in Korea and World War II, but in the early (19)60s people were still serving. And do you believe the Vietnam War was a class war based on the fact that the large proportion of the minorities, low income people who were white, served, but people that were more educated and were in college and got deferments or hardship cases or went on to grad school and all other reasons for not serving or abated the draft. How would you define that war and the whole concept that really surprises me as James Wood or Senator Webb has said in a book he wrote quite a while back that here was a generation that was inspired by Kennedy to serve, and yet we have so many of the most educated and elite who did not want to serve.

FH (00:44:25):
Well, I think the result, it was people who were in lower economic brackets who did the fighting. There was no press about that mostly, although nobody sat down and [inaudible] on that in advance. But I never was caught up in the Kennedy thing at first because while I could not attend the convention in Los Angeles [inaudible], I had to been a supporter of [inaudible]. I kept hoping that that Stevenson might be able to pull off first nomination. But I did get very excited about the John Kennedy campaign and was a member of the group, an informal group, in my hometown in Oklahoma. So we had to call upon the Baptist preacher and threaten him with campaigning ourselves at church if he continued to speak against Kennedy from the pulpit as he did. And I think he did that as preacher, not so much because Kennedy was a Catholic, although that is what he gave as the reason, but because he was liberal. And so I was very much caught up in the excitement of the campaign. And I do not think we listened clearly to those words about... that were really sort militaristic in a way, in their anti-communism of their breadth. We were just caught up within the thing, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you do for your country." And that was, I think, a great inspiration for people to get involved in public service. I already was. But during that war, I had Robert Kennedy down to Oklahoma one time, and he spoke in the Fieldhouse on the campus of the University of Oklahoma. And he had a question after session, afterwards, that... He was asked at one point, "Do you favor the continuation of the student deferment from the draft?" And he said, "No, I am against that." And they was booing, a lot of booing. And he said, "As long as a person's economic class or income determines whether or not they go to college, which is largely true," he said, "I do not think that there ought be an automatic deferment for college." And then after some other questions and so forth, he said, "Let me ask you all some questions." And he said, "On Vietnam," he said, "how many of you support the position of Senator Eugene McCarthy for an immediate unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam?" Well, there was a smattering of the pause. It was certainly a small minority of the two who agreed with that. "How many of you," he said, "agree with my position that we ought to begin to de-Americanize the war and begin to turn it over, over time, to the Vietnamese?" And again, there were some... it was more applause, but it was still a minority of the students that agreed with that. And then, "How many of you agree with the President Johnson's policy of just sort of continuing to muddle through, doing what we are doing?", and there was more applause but still a distinct minority. And then he said, "How many of you think that we should, as some are suggesting, escalate the war and increase the military involvement and effort?" And there was a huge applause. There was a majority.

SM (00:49:08):
And what year was this?

FH (00:49:10):
It would have probably been about 1967 or somewhere in there, something like that. It was after Robert Kennedy had finally come out against the war, and it was just before I, myself, had finally come out against the war rather late. At any rate, the majority were for escalating the war. And rapidly, just immediately, he said, "How many of you who just now voted to escalate the war also support the student deferment from the draft?" And there was just a gasp in the crowd as people realized what they had just done. And then they break into applause. And I asked him, I said, "Have you done that before?" I asked him afterwards. And he said, "Yeah, I do it everywhere." I said, "Was it different here?" And he said, "No." He said, "It is a minority of students that against to war," but like that Newfield wrote, they are a pathetic minority. They are going be growing. But he said, "The same result, I get everywhere."

SM (00:50:45):
Wow. And of course, after (19)67, (19)68 things really changed.

FH (00:50:48):
Yes, they grew and the percent of people that finally grew into a majority vote in the country... getting out the war.

SM (00:50:59):
And what-what was really amazing, you talk about, you knew Senator McCarthy and Senator Kennedy, and I think there was an extreme dislike between the two. That might be mild. I do not know the whole story. I know when I interviewed Senator McCarthy many years back, the one section that he had kind of hesitated on responding, and he just simply said, "Read it in my book," was when I said what his thoughts were on Bobby Kennedy. Do you feel Senator McCarthy was really upset with him because he decided to run for president after he had told him he was not?

FH (00:51:35):
Yes.

SM (00:51:35):
Is that the main section?

FH (00:51:38):
By the time I knew McCarthy, and he and I were on the Senate Financial Committee together, and I saw him socially too a lot. He was a fairly bitter... He was a very witted person, but his wit was very often sharp and bitter. His first business was against Johnson and also, therefore, Humphrey because Humphrey had sort of dangled the vice presidential nomination back in 1964 in front of McCarthy. And then later, it became clear that he never intended to choose McCarthy; he always intended to choose Humphrey, but had only banded around McCarthy's name like he did Senator Tom Dodd because they were Catholic. And McCarthy was quite bitter about that, and really bitter about Humphrey for that reason too. The Kennedy people, they did not respect McCarthy. They thought, in a way, he was kind of...

SM (00:53:09):
He was what?

FH (00:53:18):
He was...

SM (00:53:18):
Oh, okay.

FH (00:53:20):
He did not really get down him to the trenches and fight like crazy. I do not know if it was true but they thought he was a supporter of the oil companies, for example, on the depletion allowance and on some non-liberal kind of subject like that. I know that they did not think he was the right leader to oppose Johnson and to lead the country on the war and on other issues. And I know that was Robert Kennedy's feeling. But I think that Robert finally decided to run after McCarthy, ran surprisingly well against Johnson in New Hampshire. I think he finally got to see that there was a possibility that this could be done. And there are no questions that, that certainly embittered McCarthy at his... I think he felt, also like Eleanor Roosevelt and others, that John Kennedy was too conservative, and that he and Robert both had been supporters of Joseph McCarthy.

SM (00:54:44):
Right.

FH (00:54:45):
And so there was some of that. But a lot of people felt... A lot of McCarthy's supporters felt that Kennedy was an opportunist, and only after McCarthy showed he might be able to beat Johnson for the Democratic nomination did he finally come in.

SM (00:55:07):
I know that the Clean for Gene group, which was the young people that had their haircut short, and I remember Senator McCarthy really had nothing to do with that. I interviewed the person that was responsible for that. He went along with it, but he was not the guy that told them to cut their hair, but he went along with the people that were advising him. But several of the people that were in the Clean for Gene said they really, when they heard that Kennedy was running, they really would have liked to have switched but feared doing. But I guess the question is, why, after Senator Kennedy, was killed, why he kind of just dwindled, just kind of petered out?

FH (00:55:57):
I think he was really just really very bitter, just generally. And so for example, he would not enjoy Humphrey, and even said then and later publicly some generally good things about Richard Nixon... in a way in support of Humphrey.

SM (00:56:12):
Yeah. The next question, how is your cell phone doing?

FH (00:56:26):
What did you say?

SM (00:56:27):
Is your cell phone still strong?

FH (00:56:29):
Well, hold just a second. I am going to have to... but I will be right back.

SM (00:56:33):
Yep. Okay.

FH (00:56:35):
You mind calling me on this home phone now?

SM (00:56:37):
Yeah. Let me get your phone number.

FH (00:56:49):
It is 5 oh 5-

SM (00:56:49):
505. What is it, 505-

FH (00:56:49):
898...

SM (00:56:49):
What was the last four?

FH (00:56:58):
0860.

SM (00:56:59):
Okay, I got 505-898, and what are the last four?

FH (00:57:00):
0860.

SM (00:57:02):
Okay. I will call you right back. Yep. Okay.

(00:57:08):
I knew because I have interviewed some other people and their cell phones went dead about 45 minutes. My cell phone is actually only good for 45 minutes.

FH (00:57:17):
Well, this is working good here. I live in an adobe house too, and sometimes that does not help the signal. But anyway, we are okay now.

SM (00:57:27):
Okay. Could you discuss a little bit about the anti-war movement? Were the United States Senators at that time, and I am talking really the senators in the (19)60s and early (19)70s, were they sympathetic to the college campus protests? I say this because Nixon was emphatic right around the time of Kent State, where he said that they never affected him or his policies. They can do all the protesting they want. And Johnson, on the other hand, even though he withdrew, he saw Ted in 1968 and he saw what McCarthy did up in New Hampshire.

SM (00:58:03):
1968, and he saw what McCarthy did up in New Hampshire. I think, and correct me if I am wrong, that he was seeing the college students, and what they were saying, and it was a failed policy in the end. So basically, I am saying, how important were the young activists at the time, in shaping the views of Congress?

FH (00:58:21):
I think they were quite important. As I mentioned, Jack Newfield wrote a book, he was a columnist for the Village Voice, he wrote a book called I think, the Prophetic Minority. So his idea was the people particularly the students who were protesting against the war, were a minority to start with. But they were a prophetic bunch of minority, they were going to become a majority. I think that is exactly what happened. Very early right away in the Senate there were a lot of people, Robert Kennedy was one, and so was Ted Kennedy, and George McGovern, and Gaylord Nelson, and some others who I think began to react to that. I think McCarthy came to it late, but for example, I came to it late, but even before I changed my public position, about before, I was busy with the current commission, which is a full-time job in regards to riot. I sort of suspected be to focusing on this before. My daughter, Catherine Harris, now Catherine Harris [inaudible]. She was a student at Harvard and [inaudible] a protest.

SM (01:00:09):
Hello? Hello?

FH (01:00:16):
The effect of those student activists against the war, was especially pronounced when members of Congress had some contact from their own family members, student family members, or directly without the students. And that was certainly true in my case, my daughter Catherine Harris, that was a Harvard student and she came down one weekend with a group of other Harvard students, to take part in an anti-war protest, in Washington DC. This group camped out at our house in McLean, Virginia. The next morning it was just really was very moving to me, as I watched them prepare for their riot, I mean for their protest. They were worried about a police riot, they were worried about getting beat up. So they pinned to their clothes, their contact information, their names, and phone numbers, and so forth. They tapped to their wrist some gauze that had Vaseline on it, that they were going to use. How they knew how to do all this? I do not know. They were going to use in case they got into tear gas. Here they then bravely marched off, these kids to take part in this anti-war protest.

SM (01:02:09):
Wow.

FH (01:02:21):
I found that in just overwhelmingly moving. I think there must have been a lot of other situations like that, where members of Congress saw the same thing. In addition to the public protests, both all that had begun to work.

SM (01:02:23):
As a person who was heavily involved in the campaign of (19)68, began the campaign of Senator Humphrey. Chicago in 1968, was like the epitome of all the tragedies that happened that year. From Dr. King's assassination, Bobby's assassination happened early in the year. President Johnson announces he was not going to run, and there were some riots going on. Just everybody knew that something was going to happen in Chicago, and it did. What are your thoughts as, what were your thoughts then, as a person who was an elected leader in Congress? Secondly, as a person who was helping the campaign to see these students and police going at each other, and there were even skirmishes inside, with some of the newsmen being arrested, I remember Dan Rather was arrested, or he was taken away. It was unbelievable.

FH (01:03:26):
Well, 1968 was just a horrible year for America. Not only that situation, and the convention, and struggle. Also, the earlier assassination of Robert Kennedy, and then the later assassination of Dr. King. Walter Mondale and I, as I said, we were co-chairs with the Humphrey campaign and brought in Mario Bryan, to sort of spearhead it, prior to the convention. We, Mondale and I, started seeing what was likely to happen in Chicago, went to the Attorney General Ramsey Park. That Johnson had sort of put in charge of planning for the convention, Lyndon Johnson had, and we asked him to change the location of the convention to Miami. That was our only other choice, because the Republicans were planning on having their convention in Miami. So the logistics would work on a sort of price basis, and we told Ramsey Park what our concerns were about their Chicago situation, and Mayor Daley, and so forth, the planned protest. He did not agree, I am sure he was protecting something, those feelings, something obligated to Mayor Daley. So we could not get it changed, and our worst fears were realized. We not only had those huge protests against the war and against the auction, but we had all sorts of strikes, communication strikes, [inaudible] strikes. The city was just in a mess, and one scene that was indelible in my mind, backstage of convent watching on closed circuit television, because a lot of it was not on television. My daughter Catherine, and my son Brian, and I, sitting in tears watching the clubbing of these kids and all that. I went out once and rescued a paraplegic Vietnam veteran Tommy Frazier, in his wheelchair up against the hotel where we were, [inaudible] good police cut him into the hotel. Way up on the-the top floors of our hotel, the tear gas came all the way up there. So, it was just a horrible thing, then when the Humphrey.

SM (01:06:57):
That me again? Hello? What is going on here? What is going on here? At the end of the Chicago convention there?

FH (01:07:00):
Yeah, I left the convention after we had had Howard Kennedy's vaccination and then we had all terrible, well Humphrey backed down temporarily on the anti-Vietnam war flank, and we did not get that speech until later. Then the horrible, what the Citizen Commission called, the police riot in Chicago, at the convention. I left there very dispirited and depressed, and I did not get involved again in the campaign until much later, when Larry O'Brien, by then partly my doing I was in on asking him, had become the chairman of the Democratic Party. He asked me, he called me and asked me, to join Humphrey's plane. To be sure that the speech he was-was going to give on national television out of Po Lake, would be a strong enough anti-war speech. So I got back in his campaign then, but that is a horrible year.

SM (01:08:07):
Yeah. One other thing too I just wanted to mention here, is about Martin Luther King's speech against the Vietnam War. Did that surprise you? Or you thought it was appropriate too, because he was criticized heavily, within the civil rights community?

FH (01:08:26):
Well, I thought it was a justified thing. It was quite logical with what else he was saying, but I did not really focus that much on it at the time. I was very much involved with the current commission on Civil Rights, and the anti-poverty program like we recommended.

SM (01:08:58):
What are your thoughts on all those movements that evolved in the late (19)60s, and early (19)70s? We had the women's movement that many people say evolved because of the sexism that was prevalent within the civil rights and anti-war movements. Of course they went on to form the National Organization for Women, and other groups. Again, we talked briefly about the Native American movement, but the period 1969, to (19)73, was a very strong period with Alcatraz in (19)69, and Wounded Knee in (19)73. Of course, you had the environmental movement with Earth Day in 1970, you had Stonewall in (19)69, that was linked to the gay and lesbian movement, kind of inspired it. Then at the very same time within the civil rights movement, during these mid to late (19)60s, you had the more of a black power mentality. Where you had Malcolm X challenging Bayard Rustin. Or Stokely Carmichael challenging Dr. King. Concept of, say some people thought nonviolence going to violence. So that you had, what you had in the early (19)60s, were people like Dr. King, James Farmer, Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, John Lewis, and Robert Moses or Bob Moses. Then in the later (19)60s, you have Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Cleaver, H. Rap Brown, Huey Newton, Bobby Seal, Angela Davis, Fred Hampton, a whole different type of a mentality. I know I am giving an awful lot here, what are your thoughts on these movements that evolved in that period? Because the (19)70s, seemed to be the period where a lot of them really gained strength. Then when the (19)80s came, and they kind of seemed to go separate?

FH (01:10:44):
In 1965, I made a trip with Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana, down to in the number of Latin American countries. In one, in Peru, in Lima in it they had the oldest university in this hemisphere, San Marcos University, there in Lima. And found that it was closed down, that the activist students had taken over the campus and they closed down the university. We both thought to ourselves, well that is very interesting that students here and elsewhere in the world have become very active, and we do not see that at home. Well it is just a matter of, wait a minute and you would. The same thing was true, the civil rights movement, I think, began to show people that you have got to stand up and not just beg for what is yours and rightfully yours, but you have got to demand it. We saw that with the student population then, we saw it with women. Frantz Fanon had written that, "Oppressed people," and studies showed this was absolutely true, "Come to have the same, hold the same bad areas about themselves, that the dominant society has." We will not really work, and we are not reliable, or women cannot be managers, and just that. "How you get out of that," he wrote, "Was confrontation." I think, he believed violence. I think it is true, it takes confrontation for people to change their self-image. I think what changed, or the main thing that changed for example, in regard to African Americans in the country, after 200 years. Was that they came to view themselves differently, and they came to feel that they had to stand up. In the process of standing up to authority, they became different people. That is what happened I think with students, with the African-Americans, then with Indians, Indians and Hispanics for example, women profited from the African-American example, but without so much of the terrible violence being practiced against African-Americans. I was very much involved together with my then wife, LaDonna Harris. With people like Gloria Stein, and Betty Friedan, and others formation of the national organization for Women, of Women, the National Organization of Women. And the Women's Democratic talk and so forth. I was involved with them when they eventually ringed around the capital building in action against, the protest against the Vietnam War. I saw that Betty Friedan was quite right, that the old [inaudible] concept, that women had to change their consciousness. They had to begin to change the way they thought about themselves, and that is what had happened in all these groups. So that for example, the success that African-Americans had eventually, in changing the laws and practices. Came as a result of their own effort.

SM (01:15:13):
I know the environmental movement in Earth Day in 1970, Gaylord Nelson, he met with the anti-war group to make sure he was not stepping on their toes. Because they had just had the moratorium in (19)69, and they used to teach in. So even that movement at the very beginning, Senator Nelson was, I am glad he was honored this year at the 40th anniversary, because he is the man that made it all happen.

FH (01:15:44):
Absolutely. He was truly a visionary in regard to that, and the poor people were really that conscious of it. That is a movement too, as your question indicates that benefited from the example of the African-American correction.

SM (01:16:03):
Just a thought, because you have seen this today being a professor on universities, the movements became so special interest. One of the critics, the critics today, the conservative critics say that all these movements, and throw the gay and lesbian movement in there too.

FH (01:16:16):
Yeah.

SM (01:16:17):
Became so special interest, that there seems to be no unity today. In the very beginning they were working together, you could see them at protests, but now they seem to be more insular. Am I correct? This is a perception I have. Do you think that groups have become more insular, and they were not working with the other groups anymore, they were all just doing their own thing?

FH (01:16:42):
Well maybe that is probably true. I do not know. I think that the main problem is, it is both an advancement and a retreat in a way, is that all over the country, I do not care what city you go in, you find all sorts of really successful, vigorous local citizen effort of various kinds. Whether it is against banks redlining poor areas, or black areas. Or against some utility raising freight unjustly, or whatever. In every community in this country, there are those kinds of efforts going on. It is just amazing, and quite successfully in the local community. My friend Jim Hightower.

SM (01:17:36):
Oh, yeah, the journalist.

FH (01:17:38):
Yeah, and a great text to the populist, but he says, and this is the thing we had to fight to do this when I ran for president, is that many of these people, they are willing to work in a place giving out the free food to poor people, but they somehow do not see that you have got to get active in politics in order to change things. So that there will not be so many poor and hungry people, and Hightower feels, and worked for this. That if you could get those people like that, all they seeing their common interests and understanding that if they did not get active in politics and work together, they would be adjusted in principle majority. I think that is a tremendous populous challenge, and one that Hightower is working on, and that I also talk about.

SM (01:18:45):
When you ran for president in (19)72, and (19)76, what did you learn most about America, that maybe surprised you before you ran? And, what did you learn about young people, that you did not know?

FH (01:18:57):
Just about what I said, I will give you an example. One time I went to Hattiesburg, Mississippi and I have put together a tremendous rally. This was in (19)76, (19)72 really, I did not run for president, so much as I jogged. I did not ever enter in, I did not ever, was not able to raise money and get the kind of people that had already signed up with for government. (19)76, I really ran for president. Anyway, I put together this meeting down there which is sort of a metaphor for the whole campaign, and what I learned. There were a lot of African Americans in the crowd, a lot of Choctaw Indians, from nearby reservation. A lot of what I jokingly called, but truthfully called my redneck kin folks, my dad's people all came from Mississippi. I told that group when I got up to talk I said, I was in Minnesota last night, and I told them I was on my way to Hattiesburg, Mississippi and that I was going to put together here the darnedest, the best I could say, the best political rally anybody ever saw, or the damnedest race riot. One or the other. Everybody laughed sort of nervously and so forth. I said, my feeling is you do not have to love each other, I wish you would. All you have to do is recognize that you have common interests and that if you get yourself together, you are a majority in this country. I said, I came down here when I was 12 years old and stayed where the great aunt, who had an elderly black couple come and clean her house all day, washed all the sheets, and aired all the mattresses and everything, washed down the walls of this pine house. She paid them with a jar of end green beans, and a bucket of ribbon cane syrup for their daily work. I am sure she did not realize, that that was one of the causes for the fact that a lot of folks were working for 25 cents an hour. Afterwards I had a great uncle come up me, he had tears in his eyes, and he called me Freddy and he said, "Freddy, I have been waiting all my life to hear somebody talk like that." I think that is the kind of thing that was in the country, we talked to people about their own self-interest that would work. For example, I spoke that same year in Akron, Ohio, where most of the people in the audience were rubber workers. Somebody asked me a question about gay rights and I said, "I think the government has got enough to do, without worrying about what people are doing in the privacy of their own homes." It did not fit in the flow. I said, I really thought it was true. Like George Wallace said at the time, "You be to get the hay down where the goats can get at it."

SM (01:22:53):
Let me change my tape.

FH (01:22:53):
I think it is the McGovern, are you ready?

SM (01:23:04):
Yep, I am ready.

FH (01:23:05):
I thought at the time, that if McGovern could talk that way and couch these matters, in terms of the death interest of his listeners. He could have put that thing together. Instead what Nixon was able to do, and then later Reagan, was to appeal to people's concerns, and fears, and so forth. That trumped what would have been sensible off on economic.

SM (01:23:49):
Both you and your wife LaDonna, have been involved with Native American issues all of your lives.

FH (01:23:54):
Yeah.

SM (01:23:55):
Where is the movement today? I have read some books on the, that the Native American movement was actually pretty strong even in the (19)50s, and the (19)60s. Then of course, then the American Indian movement came about. What were the successes of the 1960s, and (19)70s, with respect to Native American issues? Your thoughts on the American Indian movement, which people say it was only four years from (19)69, to (19)73. It started where they overtook Alcatraz, and then it ended with the violence at Wounded Knee. When you think of the American Indian movement, I think of Dennis Banks, there is one other person I forget his name now, there is two that come to the forefront.

FH (01:24:39):
Yeah.

SM (01:24:41):
Just your thought about that?

FH (01:24:43):
Dennis I thought was, he was a very sensible and steady person, not a kind of wild radical. But I did not agree with a lot of Roseanne people, or lot of the SDS student people. Violence as a tactic, I think that was actually wrong. I often heard people advocating, in those days, violence as a tactic. Who themselves, would not be found within 100 miles of the actual violence. They sort of this thing, let you and him fight. I thought that violence was often hurting people, and was inhumane therefore, and that it was impractical. That you could not beat the government, or those with power. Because, they wind up having a hell of a lot more guns than you got. That set us back somewhat I think, people who advocated or used violence, on a whole range of those issues. It was the more activists, and really very strong and big activists, my former wife Ladonna, who actually accomplished it. What happened with Indian movement, is they were successful. We were able to write into the laws all sorts of provisions for self-determination, for Indians to run their own programs, to run their own schools, and to run their own governments. Princeton governments, courts, Indian courts and so forth, and that is the situation today. There is still, of course those that have not been able to, or were not able to set up casinos, gambling casinos, are still struggling economically. It is pretty interesting that Indians who for a long time were victimized by black people, are now making money off of them.

SM (01:27:01):
Yeah, that that is right.

FH (01:27:01):
I do not like gang.

FH (01:27:01):
... making money off of them.

SM (01:27:01):
Yeah, that is right.

FH (01:27:03):
I do not like gambling, but it has provided a way by which tribes have been able to [inaudible] their governments and their economies, and also to preserve their traditions and ancient ways.

SM (01:27:20):
When I think of the last 20 or 30 years in terms of writers, of course, you think of Dee Brown and I think of Mr. Alexie, Sherman Alexie-

FH (01:27:30):
[inaudible] yeah.

SM (01:27:30):
...who was another great writer, and Vine Deloria.

FH (01:27:35):
Yeah, Vine.

SM (01:27:36):
But then there was also Ward Churchill, who has become very controversial.

FH (01:27:40):
Well, I do not think he is Indian, really.

SM (01:27:42):
Yeah, I do not know what your thoughts are. He has written a lot about the Native Americans. As a lawyer, what were the most significant laws that were passed after World War II during this time frame between (19)46 and 2010? We are talking about the years that boomers have been alive. I have asked this question and I started out by saying that I think Roe v. Wade in (19)73 and certainly the Brown vs. Board of Education (19)54 and the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, (19)64, (19)65, are those the four that really stand out in terms of impact on America, as well as even I could say impact on the generation?

FH (01:28:25):
And I think they are symbolic of a lot of other laws, and I think because a lot of them fit in with what we came to call self-determination for American Indians. It gives people more control over their own lives and knocked down the barriers that kept them from becoming what they want to become.

SM (01:28:52):
Are there any laws that you would like to add to that you think were very important, particularly for this generation that is now between the age of the 48 and 64?

FH (01:29:03):
Well, one important development was we moved toward, but in a fairly meager way, more of federal aid to education. And we need to do a great deal more in that respect, for smaller classrooms and better prepared teachers and so forth. And also a huge hole in our social fabric was the lack of any kind of national health program. And we have made a major step in the right direction there with Obama. Obama's election I think was really historic. And I think that while for the short run, the Republicans are able to delay and block a lot of what he is going to do and wants to do and said he would do, they are increasingly marginalizing themselves, I think. I mean, if you look at the demographic between number of Hispanics and African Americans, the greater progressive activism of students and all of that, I think makes things look pretty bad for the future for the Republicans, but we are going to win out more issues-

SM (01:30:41):
So the criticism of President Obama and some of the politicians of the left... I just interviewed a person a couple days ago. Why does he, and why does the left, and why did the liberals always think that they know better what to do about my life than I do?

FH (01:30:57):
I think that is a serious claim. That is simply not true. All of the things that Obama ran on and that he was pushing are supported by a majority of the people in the country [inaudible]. And he, after all, was elected.

SM (01:31:16):
Right. The Kerner Commission, you mentioned it earlier, but I want to talk about it now, which is the National Advisory Council on Civil Disorders. Why did LBJ form the committee? What were their findings? What were the main reasons for the riots? And was this a change? I guess I cannot read the file. Did this have anything to do about this change between what we called nonviolent protests, the Ghandian type of attitude that King professed, and the more violent protests that was actually happening in our cities?

FH (01:31:57):
Well, we had had a terrible riot in Watts, in the Black section of Los Angeles, in 1965. And we thought that was kind of an isolated thing, but it turned out to be a harbinger of things to come. We had some more of that in (19)66, but not a whole lot. And then terrible explosions in the Black sections of nearly every city in the summer of 1967, and caused enormous concern and fear. I got the Walter Mondale to co-author a resolution in the Senate to create a blue ribbon citizen commission to look into the causes and prevention of such a riot. And I had the resolution sent to my subcommittee that I chaired, the subcommittee on government research. And we held hearings. We had Daniel Patrick Moynihan, not yet in the Senate, and Whitney Young headed the National Open League as witnesses and [inaudible] about it. And then it occurred to me after a day or so that we did not have to wait until Congress passed the law and created that commission, but that the president could do it himself. So I got the majority leader, Mike Mansfield, to say he would bring it up with Johnson at his meeting that night with the president, and also talked with Douglass Cater on the president's staff, and suggested that he do that. And then it was announced that he was going to make a publicly televised speech doing that. And he called me just before his speech and he said, "I am going to appoint you to that commission that you have been talking about, and I am going to put you on it." And incidentally, he said, "I want you to remember" ... Well, first he said, "I do not want you to be like some of your colleagues and I appoint them to things and they never show up." And I said, "Well, I will show up. I will work at it." Another thing, he said, "Fred, I want you to remember you are a junction man." I said, "Yes, sir, I am a junction man." And he said, "If you forget it," he said, "I will take my pocket knife and cut your Peter off." There were some people were back in my living room, we were going to watch this thing on television. And I came back, they knew I was talking to president. They said, "What did he say? What did he say?" And I said, "Well, some of it was kind of personal."

SM (01:35:07):
Yeah, I heard he used to have meetings in his bathroom [inaudible].

FH (01:35:11):
Oh, yeah.

SM (01:35:12):
And then of course, we met with Senator Fulbright when I was working at the university. And Senator Fulbright, when he went against Johnson, Johnson told him, "You will never be invited ever again to the White House." He never was, never invited to a dinner, nothing. There was a complete break.

FH (01:35:32):
Well, we started ... we had just a wonderful staff, David Ginsberg, who just died lately, [inaudible] lawyer, was our executive director, and put together a terrific staff. And we authorized a lot of academic studies and surveys, and then we divided into teams. John Lindsay, the mayor of New York, and I were one team. And we went to various places in the country where there had been riots. And John and I, for example, went to Cincinnati and Milwaukee and just spent the day walking around talking to people. And then we held interminable hearings. I got a room in the Capitol building where we met most of the time. Sometimes we met in the Indian Treaty Room, in the Executive Office Building. And we met days and days and days and days and days. And this was a commission written report. In these hearings, we had witnesses from J. Edgar Hoover to Martin Luther King, and lot in between. And we eventually voted line by line on every word that went into that report. What we found was that... well, the most famous words of course in the report were that America was moving toward two societies, one white, one Black, separate and unequal. And what most people cannot understand is that racism, white racism, is very much involved in what is happening in the ghettos or where people live with inferior schools, no transportation, no jobs or virtually no jobs. Jobs have moved out of the central city and gone to the suburbs or disappeared altogether, gone overseas. And so we recommended vigorous enforcement of the recently passed civil rights laws and massive new federal programs, particularly around jobs, but also the training and education and so forth. We know that a member of the commission leaked to Johnson the idea, I mean we learned later, "That this report," they said to him, "condones riots, and they do not have a good word to say about you." All of that was quite wrong. But our idea was that we would ask Johnson to continue our commission in operation for an extra six months so that we could lobby for and push for our findings for recommendations. And we set up already an official meeting where he would receive the report and so forth. But he canceled that. He would not see us, and he would not agree to have the commission's life extended. There were... both Hubert Humphrey, the vice president, for example, and Willard Wirtz, the Secretary of Labor, and others, who did endorse our findings. Willard Wirtz [inaudible] in the commission, in the words of the great American philosopher Pogo, has said that "We have met the enemy and he is us."

SM (01:39:22):
Golly.

FH (01:39:22):
And Robert Kennedy strongly supported our findings and recommendations and was involved in the Senate hearings where we appeared and [inaudible] the paperback edition of our report, which the New York Times published, was a bestseller, runaway bestseller, amazingly. And we made progress, America [inaudible] of race and poverty for about a decade after the report. But with the advent of the Reagan administration, that progress stopped and we began to go backwards.

SM (01:40:09):
I was reading one of your interviews that you did in 2008 on the web, and I love a quote here that the interviewer said, you remember this. You said in your announcement speech in 1972 something along the lines of, "A lot of people cannot believe America has ever been to the moon because they doubt the credibility of government." That is a classic quote. And then something else here, what you said in this interview that actually I think you have already talked about it, but I want to put it on record here. You said in response to the question to this interviewer, "No, no. Starting with the Vietnam War and with Richard Nixon, we have never recovered from the great skepticism of government. I think the skepticism about government is generally pretty healthy, but I do not like the aspect of it which came out of the Ronald Reagan years; the government cannot do anything right and everything you try turns out badly and so forth. I wish we had a little bit more skepticism of the military than we do, but it is going to be a while before we build back the sort of confidence in the government that we once had." I think that is beautiful.

FH (01:41:18):
That is absolutely true. I think it is true that one of the worst things that come out of the Reagan administration was that government cannot do anything right and that everything we tried, for example, even with a New Deal, failed. That is not true. Virtually everything we tried worked. We just quit trying it or we did not try it enough. And we began to move back toward doing something about all these problems with the election of Bill Clinton, but then we went the other way again with the eight years of George W. Bush.

SM (01:41:59):
Did-

FH (01:42:00):
[inaudible] a very heartening thing that Obama was elected, saying all the things that I believe in.

SM (01:42:09):
I interviewed Phyllis Schlafly, who I think is single-handedly responsible for the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendments.

FH (01:42:16):
That is right.

SM (01:42:17):
But do you believe ... And this is what she said. She said that she believes that the troublemakers of the (19)60s now run today's universities. And she says they have taken over women's studies, Black studies, Asian studies, Native American studies, environmental studies, Chicano studies, GLBT studies. She was mainly referring to women's studies, but the reference was there toward all of them. Do you believe that?

FH (01:42:42):
Well, she and her fellow right-wingers, they are always critical nowadays of universities and academia generally, because they say, "They need more balance than they need more Republican hired as teachers," and so forth. But it should occur to them, I think, that what most professors believe, they believe because it is correct and it is the sensible position, and that theirs is the more selfish and the incorrect position.

SM (01:43:24):
This is a university question, because you are a professor and have been one since the late (19)70s. And I spent 30- some years in higher ed. But what did universities of the (19)60s and (19)70s teach the universities of the (19)80s and beyond? Did they learn about the importance of student empowerment as opposed to student power? Or are they afraid that it could happen again, what happened in the (19)60s, more controls? What I have seen in some universities is they are trying to get more controls again over students. Students today are so busy, they do not have time to protest or even to be active, although they get involved in volunteer work. And even on college campuses today, space is allocated for protests. They just cannot go anywhere. They can only have a little dinky space on campus. And I know if I was a student, I would be fighting that, but-

FH (01:44:17):
I think there is a distinction in that respect between the faculty and the administration. I have found administration really nervous about any kind of student activism. It worries them. But faculty, I do not think tend to feel that way. They are closer to the students. And on students, I worry about these students being too serious and too intent on getting themselves credentialed with their college and university education. And up until the Obama election, I found them not willing to be active in politics, rather disdainful of politics, and back starting with Reagan, more reflective of their parents' conservative views than is today the case. Now but even then, and especially now, what I have found for years, many years, is that there is an extremely high percentage of students who were involved in some kind of service activity. And a lot of them also began to, I was glad to see, get involved in politics, with the campaign of Obama. I am worried about them, just as I am worried about a lot of progressives who supported Obama, that they were becoming sort of disappointed and disillusioned that everything he advocated and they thought they were fighting for by supporting him cannot be done right away. A lot of them did not realize what an intransigent bunch the Republicans are in Congress, and how the archaic rules of the Senate allow a minority to block [inaudible] majority, and just became disgusted with the long fight over health insurance and so forth, health reform. So I do not know what is going to happen, just a lot of those are not going to be active, I am afraid, in the 2010 Congressional race. We always lose seats, the president's party loses seats in the years after the election. And how many depends primarily on the condition of the economy. So we are going to lose seats. I am worried about disillusion rather than about the economy as to how many we lose.

SM (01:47:08):
One of the things that as a professor who has taught students from... You have probably taught three generations of students now-

FH (01:47:14):
Yeah.

SM (01:47:15):
...the boomers, the Generation Xers that actually were born between 1965 and 1982, and then you have got the millennials that are in college right now-

FH (01:47:25):
[inaudible]

SM (01:47:26):
...with the Generation Ys now being in elementary school.

FH (01:47:30):
That is right.

SM (01:47:30):
And I do not know if you sensed this when you were teaching in the (19)80s, but there seemed to be friction between Generation X and the boomers. We had panels on this, and I do not know if it was just our campus, or my observation is just my observation, but they seemed to have two reactions to the boomer generation. One is they are sick of hearing about the nostalgia, about what it was like then, with all the protests and activities and all the rock and all the music and all this stuff, or they have a feeling, "Gee, I wish I lived then, because you had causes that were important to you. We have nothing." And that was the Generation Xers. We are not talking millennials now. Did you sense that at all?

FH (01:48:17):
Well, I do not know. Here is my overall feelings [inaudible]. When I first started teaching back in 1976 at the University of New Mexico, we still had quite a few older professors who were still having trouble with affirmative action. My chairman said to me one time... We were talking about women, "We ought have more women on our faculty," is what I was saying. And he said, "You know what? I think we ought to just hire people on the basis of qualifications," with sort of the [inaudible] implied idea that if we gave special attention to hiring Black people and women, we were reducing the quality of the people we hired. But all of that has changed quite a bit. But what I found today is that white kids and Black kids really have no idea of how it used to be. And it embarrasses Black kids a little bit in my class when I talk about segregated water fountains, even. In Oklahoma, there was a law that Blacks and whites could not play chess together. And then much more bitter things like killings and lynchings and bombings, and so forth. It was a shock to people to really hear that from a person who lived it and knows it. And from young women, I used to hear this, it is getting a little better, I think, used to hear a lot of them saying, "Well, I think women ought to be able to go to law school and to med school and all right. And I think they ought to have equal pay for equal work, but I am not a feminist. I am not one of those feminists." But just by definition you are [inaudible] believe in those things.

SM (01:50:28):
Right.

FH (01:50:31):
But I think a lot of young people simply think, "Well the way things are now is the way they always have been and the way they were going to be." And it takes sort of eternal vigilance, as Abraham Lincoln said.

SM (01:50:49):
With your kids, did you have a generation gap? I can remember there is a LIFE magazine cover that showed the face of a student wearing sunglasses. I have it framed. And it shows the father and a son arguing. Was the generation gap... was it pretty strong then? And then I followed this up with an interview I had a couple days ago with James Fallows. You probably know him.

FH (01:51:16):
Yeah.

SM (01:51:18):
And I was reading something in a book, I am not sure if he said it, but there was a discussion where the generation gap was not that bad between parents and students. The generation gap is really between those who went to the Vietnam War and those who did not. The real gap is within the generation in between those who served in war and those who protested the war or evaded the draft or service. So the history books say the generation gap is pretty strong.

FH (01:51:50):
I think it was, probably, but it narrowed because of the kids, just like my daughter being against the Vietnam War before I came out against it, and what influence her own example and feelings had on me. Or even smoking, my youngest daughter as a little girl saying, "Daddy, why do you keep smoking?" Or on something even more mundane than that, you threw down the piece of trash or something: "Oh, daddy, you want to see beauty, you have got to leave beauty," straight off the television. So I think there was a generation gap. A bigger gap for a good while was an economic class gap. For example, my dad, [inaudible] farmer in southwest Oklahoma, and my son, he had hair... my son had the hair no longer than the Beatles. But at the time we thought that was long. And my dad would always make it a point to say to my son, "You look like a girl with that long hair." But eventually, and it was not too long after that, you see these country and Western stars out in Nashville with long hair and mustaches and so forth. So things began to change, but there was, I think, an economic class gap on these social issues. And perhaps to some degree there still is.

SM (01:53:45):
And also, you think there was that generational gap too between those who fought and those who did not?

FH (01:53:49):
I suppose that is true. And I think if there was resentment on the part of those who went to Vietnam against those who did not, that would be understandable, because here were people going to college and having a good time and doing all right, while these other people went off to the war. I never heard of what you now hear sometimes people say, that people were disdainful of the Vietnam veterans when they came home, or spit on them, or whatever. I never knew of any such thing as that.

SM (01:54:34):
Yeah. That leads me into my next question. Bear with me as I read this little information here on the Vietnam veteran, because I have gotten to know them quite well, a lot of them. And I pay my respects to the people who served this nation. I have gone to the Vietnam Memorial every year since 1994 on Memorial Day and Veterans Day to pay respects to Lewis Puller, who wrote Fortunate Son. But this is the question here: was the My Lai incident and others like it, including those scenes... I remember there was many scenes on television where Vietnam vets were using their lighters to burn down villages. Do you think that these were the main reasons why vets were treated so poorly upon their return to America, this kind of baby killer image? Secondly, from the veterans I have talked to, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legions, did not want them in as their members, even though they run the organization now. And I worked on a university campus in my very first job, and they were treated so poorly that affirmative action became... they were put into affirmative action plans, which now included hiring Vietnam vets. There seemed to be a hostility on the home front that had been against the policies of the government, but I did not sense that people disliked the vets. They disliked the government that sent them to Vietnam. So there was a lot [inaudible] -

SM (01:56:03):
...the symptoms of Vietnam. So there was a lot going on here. And my final thing, when I throw this in here, is that people who did serve, and came back, also oftentimes had bad experiences at health centers and in hospitals. They had served, like Kennedy had asked them to, but they were not treated well, even in the hospitals. And you can sense this over the years of battles over Agent Orange and post-traumatic stress disorder, which now for all Vietnam vets is recognized as a problem, but it took 20-some years, "Prove that you became stressful and have anxiety due to your experiences." So there was a lot happening here. And I do not know what your perceptions are of Vietnam vets, but just in reaction to what I just said here.

FH (01:56:54):
Well, I never knew of that kind of mistreatment of Vietnam veterans by people back home. But I do know this, even now we have had problems with the Veterans Administration operating in a bureaucratic way. Just like insurance companies try to pull their losses down, and their payments down, I think the Vietnam... I mean the Veterans people, even now, have been much too strict and rigid in recognizing legitimate veteran claims in regard to health and so forth. But I never saw that. I saw the other thing in Oklahoma, where particularly early, until fairly late in the war, where a majority of Americans were for Johnson, and Johnson's war policy on the Vietnam War. When I was beginning changing in the other direction. I remember, for example, I was holding town meetings around the state shortly after the My Lai incident became known, and I had a sheriff and his wife in one meeting, and I think they were drinking a little bit too, so they were pretty vociferous and forceful in the way they talked, but they just thought it was terrible. I said, "Well, now wait a minute, we are going to find out more about the facts, but you do not believe that our people ought to be shooting women, and children, and the innocent non-combatants and so forth, do you?" And they both said, "Hell, they are going to grow up, and they are the enemy, and they ought not to be around there if they are not part of the Viet Cong and supporting them." I heard that kind of stuff a lot, until very late in the war. But I never did see, maybe it is because it was Oklahoma, I never did see the anti-vet.

SM (01:59:09):
Did you have a chance to work with any Native American vets who talked about their experiences? Because even... Again, I read too much. And, again, it is only based on what you have read, and what people have told you, it may not always be fact. But that Native American Vietnam veterans were also felt put upon when they served over there, because they were automatically put on point, because the discrimination there was, well, they are Native American, and they must be great leaders, in terms of being heads of units or whatever. And so a lot of them died, because they were put on as the front of their units there.

FH (01:59:51):
Well, I never was aware of that, and I had not heard it. What I noticed always among American Indians, a very proud tradition of serving in the military and-

SM (02:00:10):
Yes, that is true.

FH (02:00:11):
A warrior tradition. And they are much honored in the tribe and at home. We never had a powwow, or any kind of thing like that, in Oklahoma, during or after that war, that it did not start off with some kind of tribute to the veterans and-

SM (02:00:31):
Good. Well, that is good news.

FH (02:00:33):
Yeah.

SM (02:00:33):
I think that is true, they are very proud. But sometimes it upset them that they used qualities that they thought they possessed, and it cost many, many lives in Vietnam.

FH (02:00:48):
Yeah. I just do not know about that.

SM (02:00:51):
Yeah. Well, we are getting toward the end here. I got a few more questions here. There has been some commentaries too where general statements are made about blaming the generation, or that period of the (19)60s and (19)70s for the problems we have in our society today. Issues like the drug culture, the welfare state, big law government versus small government, the creation of the isms, the divorce rate, all these things, the family is important. So that period of the (19)60s and the (19)70s is oftentimes condemned by many, probably on the right, more conservatives, as opposed to liberals. Do you believe that?

FH (02:01:35):
Well, I think there were just millions of people who, as I was growing up and entering into politics and so forth, who were living lives of quiet desperation, and, well, they decided not to be quiet anymore. Much to their credit. They changed America. They have changed the way they thought about themselves. They developed a much better and stronger self-image in the process. And they changed us too. And they changed society much for the better. So I think that is one of the proud results of the (19)60s, is America is much closer to its ideal than it has ever been in history.

SM (02:02:26):
I know you cannot generalize on 74 million people, because that is how many there were. And some people will not even respond to this, except based on personal experience of people they knew, but are there any positive or negative qualities that you can place on the generation? And when I say generation, I am meaning everyone. This project that I am involved in here, it is not just about white men and women, it is about African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, gay and lesbian. It is not so much about Asian culture, because we do not hear a whole lot about that during this timeframe. But how do you respond to that?

FH (02:03:06):
I think that they are much more aware of the world, and how it worked, and of their place in it. And they are more self-confident than was true of generations before them. I talked to, in the old days, I talked to people like my uncles who went off World War II, and they did not know anything about the world, and they had no self-confidence. They felt like victims. The times were hard, and they had a hard time finding a job that was worth a damn and so forth. I think most people today have a much stronger feeling about things like that than the people-

SM (02:04:01):
In your opinion, when did the (19)60s begin, and when did it end, and what was the watershed moment?

FH (02:04:08):
Well, I think the watershed moment probably was with the election of John Kennedy. He was the of that post-war generation himself, and he said the torch passed to a new generation of Americans. And this was a different crowd. I entered the University of Oklahoma in 1948. And a lot of people that were in college with me then, or just before me, were veterans. And they were the kind of people who were not going to take that shit anymore. It used to be, I understood, the hazing of freshman, and all that kind of stuff, and people were ordered around and so forth. And these were people that just were not going to stand for it. And it rubbed off on the rest of us. So I think when John Kennedy came in, in 1960, that tendency was accelerated.

SM (02:05:18):
So the beginning was when Kennedy came in, and the watershed moment. When did it end?

FH (02:05:25):
Well, I do not think it has ended. I think it has been renewed with Obama. We backslid during the Reagan, and Bush, and the second Bush times, to some degree. But, still, I think people just, they will not stand for being held down and pushed around anymore. And I think that is all for the good. And that is true of people who are right-wingers too, they do not want the government telling them what to do.

SM (02:05:58):
That is the Tea Party movement that is going on now.

FH (02:06:01):
That is right. People see, they know... I think the Tea Party movement... People see all these changes in the country, for God's sake a Black getting elected President of the United States, and things are changing, and the world seems as dangerous, and I think they just are very fearful, and unhappy, and angry. And the kind of remedies they talk about do not fit with what the fears are. For example, they say stop raising our taxes, and Obama's taxing us. Well, there is recent studies that show that our combined tax burden now for individuals, their state, local, and federal, is the lowest since the 1950s. But people's perception is, "Well, they just keep taxing us, telling us what to do and so forth." There is just a lot of that. But nobody... I never got elected by a unanimous vote. There has always been a lot of people that are dragging along their thinking, and frame it, and I suppose that is always going to be true. We have to, I think, do our best, as Obama has tried, to reach out to them, and fill their fears, and appeal to their self-interest in doing the right thing. But some of them we just are not going to get.

SM (02:07:45):
...We are here too. Because I got... And your answers are just fantastic. Vietnam... In the university, being in there for so many years, two words that seem to really stir people up when we are dealing with foreign policy on any particular issue, if you mention the word Vietnam, or you mention the word quagmire.

FH (02:08:10):
Yes.

SM (02:08:11):
I can remember, during the Gulf War, when Vietnam vets were coming out saying that they were against the war, a lot of them. Of course, then it kind of waned, it did not last very long. We lost some lives. But certainly the Iraq war, and where we are in Afghanistan right now, and I know it upsets... Many of them are Boomers. They get tired. They say this has nothing to do with Vietnam, and has nothing to do with the quagmire. They do not like going back to that period, because I think, whether it stirs up memories they want to forget, or they want to have amnesia, or... What I am getting at here is that when President Reagan came into power, he said, "We are back." It was kind of a feeling that we are back. And then President Bush number one said the Vietnam syndrome is over. And my feeling about this is that... President Reagan said we were going to have a strong military again. The military fell apart in Vietnam, now we are going to build it up again, and have a strong military, and we are going to bring values back. Our values are gone. And then Bush saying this Vietnam syndrome was over, saying we do not have to talk about it anymore. It is a different world. Your thoughts on those kinds of attitudes by those two presidents?

FH (02:09:27):
Well, the thing, to me, that Republicans began, especially with Reagan, to talk about, we got to get back to family values. Here was Reagan, he never went to church. He had a dysfunctional family, but was talking about family values. Or Phyllis Schlafly, she is against the women working and so on, and that is all she has ever done.

SM (02:09:56):
Or Newt Gingrich talking about values, and he is running around with a woman while his wife is fighting cancer.

FH (02:10:03):
Absolutely. All of that seems awfully hypocritical to me. But I think that over time America rejects elitist warmongers like Henry Kissinger, and Dick Cheney, and George W. Bush, and rejects their idea that it is just terrible that people have gotten involved in making foreign policy and national security policy, because it puts too much limits. Democracy has a hell of a time on the world stage, because the people limit what they can do. I think that is a damn good thing. I think I am for a populist of foreign and national security politicians. It has limits on what they can do, because the two worst things a government can do to us is tax us and kill us, or send us to get killed. I would like to have a lot of popular restriction on that. It is, I think, very difficult for a democracy like America to be involved in a long war, because people began to question, as they are now with Afghanistan, saying, "What the hell are we doing? Is this in the interest of our people?" And they begin to say, "Wait a minute, we ought to get out of this. We got a lot of problems here at home we ought to be dealing with, instead of this. Are not we killing a whole lot of innocent people in the process?" I think that is a good development. They will let you do it for a while, but over the long pull, they are going to begin to ask a lot of questions. Just as this Afghan war has become unpopular now. That really irritates the elitists, who some I have mentioned, like Henry Kissinger, and George Bush, and Dick Cheney and so forth, but I think it is good for America to speak.

SM (02:12:10):
This is a question I have asked everybody that is been involved in my interviews, even way back to Senator McCarthy back in 1996. That is a question of healing. I used to take students to Washington DC. I got to know Senator Nelson when we brought him to our campus twice for Earth Day events. And after his first speech, I said I was trying to get ahold of Senator Fulbright. I knew he had a stroke, but he had not said yes, or had not said no, to meeting our students. And finally Senator Nelson said, when he was here, "I will contact him. I will get him over to the Wilderness Society." So it began the first of nine senator visits, where Senator Nelson gave us almost two and a half hours with each of these unbelievable people. And the question, when we went to see Senator Muskie, he had just gotten out of the hospital, he was not feeling well, and he had just seen the Ken Burn series on the Civil War, which had really touched him. But the students came up with this question, and this is the question... Due to all the divisions that took place in America in the 1960s and (19)70s, divisions between Black and white, between male and female, between gay and straight, those who supported the war, those who were against the war, those who supported the troops, and were against the troops... Then they brought up the riots in the cities that they had seen in the (19)60s. These were all people who were not born at the time. Do you feel that the Boomer generation that experienced all these terrible events are going to go to their graves... That includes not only the activists, but those 85 percent who were not activists, they were going to go to their graves not healing from a lot of these divisions that were part of their lives? Like the people in the Civil War never healed. That was the question. Do you think we have, as a nation, and particularly the Boomer generation of 74 million, that there is a problem with healing?

FH (02:14:14):
I think most are healing, and will heal, but we are always going to have a minority of people, just like in the South, who still want to complain about the war between the states as they call it. And there is a lot of people who, they do not like to say it aloud these days, but who are worried about women getting out of their place, and the pushy African Americans, and these longhaired kids that are not so longhaired anymore, but that are much too activist and independent. There is always going to be people like that. But I think there is healing. And I think Obama's election showed it.

SM (02:15:11):
Yeah. I think Senator Nelson mentioned that, he said, "People do not walk around Washington DC with a lack of healing on their sleeves." But he said it permanently affected the body politic.

FH (02:15:25):
Yeah.

SM (02:15:26):
And Senator Muskie did not even comment, because the students wanted... They thought they had a golden opportunity, here was the man that was picked at the last minute to be Humphrey's running mate.

FH (02:15:35):
Yes.

SM (02:15:35):
And he did not even comment on 1968. He looked up and he... Actually, he is pretty emotional about it. He looked up and he said, "We have not healed since the Civil War over the issue of race." And then he went on to talk about that. Never even mentioned 1968, which meant the divisions go back to the Civil War. So that was a pretty interesting experience.

FH (02:15:58):
The decision came down to me and Muskie, did you know that?

SM (02:16:01):
Yes.

FH (02:16:01):
Yeah.

SM (02:16:02):
Yeah, I knew that. Well, actually I have read that in books. I read a lot of history. I read your book too, many years ago, but I was rereading it again, and did you feel, right to the last minute, you were going to be the person?

FH (02:16:20):
Well, he had us up to his hotel room, and each in an adjoining bedroom, at the last, and each of us did not know the other was in an adjoining bedroom. But he came in and talked to me awhile. And then he would say, "I will be right back." Do not know where he is going, but it later turned out he was going across the hall into the bedroom with Muskie.

SM (02:16:48):
Oh my gosh.

FH (02:16:56):
And then he came back again, we talked some more. Did I know anything that he should know that might make it difficult for him to choose me and whatever? Then he went across the hall. And then he came back. The last time he came back, had tears in his eyes. We were very close friends. He had tears in his eyes. Humphrey was very emotional. And he said, "Fred, I am going to have to choose the younger man." And so I said, "Well, if that is your decision, I will nominate." And he said, "Will you?" And I said, "Yes." He said, "Will you go with me to tell him?" I said, "Yes." I did not know where we were going, but we walked across the hall, opened the door, walked in there, there was a bunch of people just standing by the bureau over in the corner. And Humphrey said what is probably the longest sentence I have ever heard, he said, "Ed, shake hands with the man who is going nominate you."

SM (02:17:49):
That is a great anecdote.

FH (02:17:52):
And I did nominate him. I was the one who nominated him.

SM (02:17:57):
I heard that ... I did not know him that well, but I heard he had a temper at times.

FH (02:18:03):
Oh yeah.

SM (02:18:03):
But, oh my God, the students loved him. He was so good with the students. You could tell he loved students.

FH (02:18:09):
You mean Muskie or Humphrey?

SM (02:18:12):
No, I am talking about Muskie.

FH (02:18:14):
Yes, Muskie, that is true, both. Yeah. See, I told you that though, because what Humphrey gave in his reason, which was a good way to say it properly too, because it did not indicate he saw any fault in me.

SM (02:18:33):
Was not it because you were too young?

FH (02:18:35):
Yeah, that is what he said.

SM (02:18:36):
You were 37 years old.

FH (02:18:37):
Yeah. He said, "Fred, I am going to have to choose the younger man." That is why I told you that anecdote, because that is the reason he gave, and I think maybe that was the main reason.

SM (02:18:51):
Yep.

FH (02:18:52):
He later told somebody that he thought he and I were too... I do not know how he... That Muskie seemed stable compared to me and him. We were both very enthusiastic and so forth. I think the age thing was an indication, sort of, of how he felt about it.

SM (02:19:21):
One of the qualities, that may be a good quality, but I would like your thoughts, is that this generation is often looked upon as the generation that does not trust people, because so many of the leaders lie to them, whether it be Watergate, Nixon, the Gulf of Tonkin with Johnson, even President Eisenhower lying on TV, that we found out later about U-2. There were questions about Kennedy and his knowledge of the overthrow of the Diem regime, although I do not believe President Kennedy ever wanted him killed, but he just wanted him sent off to France or whatever. And, of course, McNamara and the numbers game that was really not really true. Do you think-

FH (02:20:02):
Well, I think that is absolutely true. There has always been, I think, a very healthy skepticism about the government. I have thought there was too much of it, but I see the justification for it.

SM (02:20:24):
Yeah.

FH (02:20:27):
When people say, "Well, we lowered your taxes," well there is a minority of people, the teabaggers and ... who do not believe it. Or say this health thing is going be good for you.

SM (02:20:43):
When I first started asking this question on trust, I did it because I remember a Psychology 101 class that I took in college, and I graduated in 1970 from undergrad, and it was basically the professor saying, "If you cannot trust people, then you will not be a success in life. Trust is a very important quality you must possess." And so I said, "Well, if my generation did not trust anybody, and they are passing this on to their kids and grandkids, that is not good." But then you take Political Science 101, and it says basically that... Because I was a history political science major just like you as an undergrad. And I learned that trust shows that democracy is alive and well, that dissent is part of our society, so lacking trust is a good quality.

FH (02:21:30):
You bet. I think so too. We went through the (19)50s, where we were too satisfied, and did not ask enough questions, and so things got worse. Well, I am sorry, but I am going to have to... They were waving to me here, I have got to take off.

SM (02:21:46):
Can I ask one last question?

FH (02:21:47):
Yeah, you bet.

SM (02:21:48):
What do you think the lasting legacy will be of this generation when they pass on? The best history books are often written 50 years after an event, like the best ones of World War II are being written now. What do you think the sociologists and historians will say after the last Boomer has passed away? Kind of like what they do over in Gettysburg, when the last Civil War soldier died, they have a statue to him over there, he died in 1924. But what do you think they will be saying about this generation that grew up after World War II overall?

FH (02:22:34):
I think they were more self-confident, and more concerned about others, in addition to themselves.

SM (02:22:50):
Well, very good. Well, Senator, thank you very much.

FH (02:22:53):
All right.

SM (02:22:53):
I do not know, you have mentioned your wife, or your former wife, she would be great.

FH (02:22:58):
Yeah.

SM (02:22:59):
How would I get ahold of her?

FH (02:23:02):
LaDonna Harris, and I do not have it right in front of me here the... Well, let us see, if you hold on a second, I can find it.

SM (02:23:09):
Either that, or you can email it to me.

FH (02:23:11):
Yeah. She is in... Well, I will just tell you. Hold on a second. I will look it up. She lives here in Albuquerque. I have been remarried for nearly 30 years. But let me just, if you hold on just a second here, I will look on my Blackberry, and I will tell you what...

SM (02:23:30):
If she has an email or...

FH (02:23:35):
Yeah, her email is AIO, that is the name of the organization which she heads, Americans for Indian Opportunities, aio@aio.org.

SM (02:23:52):
Aio.org. And the last question, how would I get ahold of Senator Mondale?

FH (02:23:57):
I do not know. Somebody just talked to him the other day, and sent me greetings. He is up in Minnesota, but I will be darned if I-

SM (02:24:07):
Yeah, I want to try to get ahold of him. And also Geraldine Ferraro is another one, but she is in New York. Senator, thank you very, very much.

FH (02:24:15):
All right.

SM (02:24:16):
I will keep you updated on everything. You will see the transcripts. I will need your picture though.

FH (02:24:21):
Okay.

SM (02:24:22):
But I will email you on that.

FH (02:24:24):
All right.

SM (02:24:25):
You have a great day.

FH (02:24:26):
All right. Thanks a million.

SM (02:24:27):
And thanks for serving our country, because you did a great job.

FH (02:24:30):
Well, thank you. That is very generous of you. Thank you.

SM (02:24:33):
Yep. Bye now.

(End of Interview)

2010-07-01

Stephen McKiernan

Fred R. Harris, 1930-

144:35

English

Binghamton University Libraries

audio/mp4

Sound

Audio

Legislators—United States--Oklahoma; College teachers; Harris, Fred R., 1930--Interviews

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