158 10 1775 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/c82b1cb1bd4ff5e6741ad60ec5d6984a.jpg f6e9da1d5db50a79f4ded92e4c4c7957 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/590afe30e6582c2956c60e405d5d0b5c.mp3 8e3d34cbd23894b85ec1ea4cd57a7d04 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Audio interviews Title A name given to the resource McKiernan Interviews Description An account of the resource Stephen McKiernan's collection of interviews includes more than two hundred interviews with prominent figures of the 1960s, which were collected between the mid-1990s to 2023 The collection provides narratives of people who were actively involved in or witnessed events in the 1960s, an era which spurred profound cultural and political transformation in the twentieth century. Interviewees include politicians, artists, scholars, musicians, authors, and veterans who delve into the decade’s most prominent issues and events, including the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the anti-war movement, women’s rights, gay rights, segregation, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Hippies, Yippies, and individualism.<br /><br /> <h3>The McKiernan 22</h3> <div>Stephen McKiernan interviewed legends of the 1960s. When asked in 2021 where one should start when sifting through his vast collection, he provided the following list:</div> <ul> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/854">Julian Bond</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1866">Bobby Muller</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1175">Craig McNamara</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/910">Dr. Arthur Levine</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/837">Diane Carlson Evans</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/942">Dr. Ellen Schrecker</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/876">Dr. Lee Edwards</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/841">Peter Coyote</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1233">Dr. Roosevelt Johnson</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/899">Rennie Davis</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1222">Kim Phuc</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/917">George McGovern</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/833">Frank Schaeffer</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/840">Rev. Dr. Frank Forrester Church </a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1240">Dr. Marilyn Young</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/842">James Fallows</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/835">Joseph Lee Galloway</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/911">John Lewis</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/839">Paul Critchlow</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/888">Steve Gunderson</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1159">Charles Kaiser</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/2407">Joseph Lewis</a></li> </ul> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Stephen McKiernan Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In copyright. Template: Simple Audio Player with Transcription This template displays an audio player by Amplitude.js with a scrollable transcription which is loaded from the "Transcription" metadata field. This template displays an audio player with the first attached image file as the 'cover image'. For its audio source, the template looks for the first attached audio file. If additional audio files exist, they should be combined using audio editing software, or a separate Omeka item should be made for each part. Date of Interview 2010-06-29 Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Stephen McKiernan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Michael Barone Language English Biographical Text <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, a historian, and a journalist. Barone was a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics, which is a reference work on Congress and state politics. He received a Bachelor's degree from Harvard College and a Law degree from Yale Law School.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:7047,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;4&quot;:[null,2,5099745],&quot;5&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:[{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:0,&quot;5&quot;:[null,2,0]},{&quot;1&quot;:0,&quot;2&quot;:0,&quot;3&quot;:3},{&quot;1&quot;:1,&quot;2&quot;:0,&quot;4&quot;:1}]},&quot;10&quot;:2,&quot;11&quot;:4,&quot;12&quot;:0,&quot;14&quot;:[null,2,0],&quot;15&quot;:&quot;Arial&quot;}">Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the <em>Washington Examiner</em>, a historian, and a journalist. Barone was a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics, which is a reference work on Congress and state politics. He received a Bachelor's degree from Harvard College and a Law degree from Yale Law School.</span> Digital Publisher Binghamton University Libraries Digital Format audio/mp4 Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data MicroCassette Material Type Sound Interview Format Video or Audio Audio Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 89:54 Keywords <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Political Science; Vietnam War draft; Generational gap; Vietnam War; Baby boom generation; Silent generation; Mainstream media; Nixonland; Native American/ American Indian Movement; Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:3,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;4&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:14281427}}">Political Science; Vietnam War draft; Generational gap; Vietnam War; Baby boom generation; Silent generation; Mainstream media; Nixonland; Native American/American Indian Movement; Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.</span> Subject LCSH Historians; Journalists; Barone, Michael--Interviews Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound, or alternative text from a visual medium McKiernan Interviews Interview with: Michael Barone Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan Transcriber: Benjamin Mehdi So Date of interview: 29 June 2010 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (Start of Interview) 0:03 SM: Testing One, two. Yeah. 0:0:05 MB: I will speak right into it. 0:0:07 SM: And I have to double check to make sure. 0:0:13 MB: Yeah. 0:13 SM: First question I really want to ask is how did you become who you are early in your life or your parents, professors, role models, people to look up to when you were younger? 0:31 MB: Well, I was- guess I recounted that autobiography, that little fragmentary speech to the Bradley Prize you know I was an early reader. My parents were professional people. My father's a doctor. And his father was a doctor, my mother taught school for a while, it was full time. Homemaker and you know, we encourage reading and, you know, my mother claims I was a very early reader, I think she exaggerates, but, you know, trying to recognize letters when I was two. And I think I have just got a mind a brain that is kind of hardwired for-for reading. As I recount there, I was interested in things like statistics, the populations of major cities in 1940, and 1950. So, when I got an encyclopedia that had the 1950 census, when I must have been about six or seven, I was very excited to read this and to make tables and write up things and so forth. I just, you know, clearly had a desire to know these things. I think I tend to sort information out by geography, I would study the Detroit city map, I could recite all the streets, that cross seven mile from Woodward west to five points I was the- we went on a trip to Florida and road trip in the spring of 1951. And at one point, came to a traffic circle on a town in Tennessee or Georgia. And there was a dispute about which road they should take out of my parents that we should take this one, I said, no, you should take that one. And about 12 miles later, they said, we took the wrong one. And I became the family navigator, at that point; and stuff. So, I always want to know where I am. I learned north southeast to west before I learned right and left. And you know, one advantage when I am doing things like my Almanac, American politics is that I tend to sort information that comes my way by geography. So, if I am thinking about Lancaster County, Ohio, you the congressional district, [inaudible], I may remember about the boyhood home of William John Sherman, and stuff from your account of it, I will probably plug that information back and be able to plug that in, because it is sorted out by geography. It is not random. And, you know, I think that is one of the ways we do memory, is not it, we, we, we sort things out. And we have some organizing principle or something. Anyway, that is the way my brain works. So, I was sort of blessed with you know. So, high verbal being hardwired for reading, you know, very nonathletic, so I was terrible at that, wanted to avoid it. My mother made sure I was you know, advanced in school she sent me started sending me to elite private school in the fourth grade. Because she felt the public school was not doing enough for me. And so [crosstalk] so that I could, you know, boy that went on to the boy’s school in seventh through 12th grade. And I was so you know, intellectually very fast tracked or turns out there were lots of smart people there. This was a boarding and day school; I was a day student. We [inaudible] Cranbrook School, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, through a lot of smart people from the Detroit Metro area. I mean, I sometimes like to say that all the schools I went to the public school I went to from kindergarten through third grade Warren E. Bow School in Detroit, always the student body size about a third Jewish. And I always say if you want your kids to get a good education, put them in a school, that is about a third Jewish or more. And, you know, whatever the quality of the teachers, they are going to be a lot of smart kids around, and it will be a fairly-fairly fast track. So, you know, this was, I was always very interested in history. And so, I can sort things by dates. I tend to remember dates. I remember the dates of people's birth because it is easier to remember their eight o'clock back, remember their age later. So, when you mentioned Gene McCarthy, I remember 1916 first election of Congress in 1948, from the fourth district of Minnesota, Ramsey County, and that sort of information comes naturally to me. 5:09 SM: Gaylord Malcom, Wisconsin. Governor. 5:14 MB: Yeah, he was elected in, let us see, elected to senate 1962. I guess elected governor 1958 and (19)60 Pat Lucey succeeded at [inaudible]. Or no, they did they elect a republican governor for a while, yeah, they elected Warren Knowles as the republican governor. And then they went to Lucey one, later, and then stuff. So that was, so, you know, and I just wanted to you know, I wanted to learn more. And I wanted to know, how the world works. So, I want to learn those census figures. I was fascinated Detroit was the fourth largest city in the country in 1940. And then slipped a fifth in 1950 even though it grew, because Chicago, Los Angeles outpaced it, and everything. So, I wanted to know all that stuff. And I wanted to know dates. So, I have memorized, you know, the presidents, vice presidents, kings of England, stuff like that, I guess it is an attempt to want to make sense of the world around you and understand it better. And by having you know, precise geographic locations and dates, you can understand a lot, you know, absolutely cannot stand the whole theme of progressive education, which first goes back to 1920, where you do not want to make kids memorize dates, that is so dull and tedious. How the heck are they are able to understand things if they do not know that the revolution you know, 1776, the Civil War is 1861. No wonder they take tests now where the kids cannot figure out which one comes first. That little mnemonic of remembering four digits, the first of which is almost always won, is pretty easy way to sort information out. And even somebody that does not glass with high verbal aptitude or math aptitude can make sense of it. If you just make them memorize the dates, and if you make them memorize that at a young age, they will have it forever, like they have their times tables. When you I mean, adults do not forget seven times nine- 7:05 SM: When you look at, this is the question- 7:07 MB: If they have to make it up themselves to draw little boxes on the table to remember seven times nine, they are not going to remember it, memorize it- 7:14 SM: You like the way that higher education and the basically how they divided generations, you have got the World War Two, the greatest generation, you got the family generation, you get the boomers, which I am talking about. 07:28 MB: There is a lot to that. 07:30 SM: Your thoughts on how you like the identification of generations based on years, or you do [inaudible]? 7:38 MB: Yeah, I like that. I think, you know, Generations, that book by Neil Howe in the late William Strauss, pretty good book. You know, my first response is, gee, this is gimmicky, but I think they are actually on to something. And one of the things I have noticed in politics, you know, and I have been trying to analyze politics, when I first started off doing that, when I was in my teens, that I had to understand the point of view of people who were a lot older than I am an experienced and lived through many experiences, the 1920s (19)30s, (19)40s, and so forth. Now, I have to find out, and I have to find myself trying to understand people who have not lived through a lot of experiences, I have, and what the world looks like to them. And I think the point of the generations is that it works against the conceit of political science. Political science, you know, drawing from the analogy with the natural sciences, starting the 19th century wants to make generalizations that are always true. And what I find is that you want to- this generation stop being true after a while because people will bring to different experiences, they do not have the identical sort of experience going through. So that for that reason, I think that is the kind of flaw in political science and, you know, some of the lessons that everybody taught when I first started studying politics, the political scientists were teaching them subsequently disproved. You know, the President's party always loses seats in the off your elections. Well, as we sit here today, the President's party gained seats and two out of the last three off your elections. Yeah, well, there is some reason for the rule. You know, basically, the President's party is stuck with the President's program, the out party can adapt to local terrain. But the overall situation is that, you know, I am going to pause to eat for a while and so forth, but I sort of identify as baby boomer generation, even though I was born 1944, two years before the date of if you read the Generations book, they started in 1943 is the birth year, which gives them Newt Gingrich and Bill Bradley. Right. Hey, Tommy Haden was born earlier. Well, and you have got you know, John Kerry who was born in the last day of 1943. Or the last month took the there is something to it because generations teams tend to have the same experience with events and things. You know it is similar at least they confronted the same events and you know like the culture war within the conservative and liberal camps of the baby boom generation responded differently to it. But they, you know, they were they were facing many similar situations. 10:43 SM: We think one of the things that comes out that both early dinners those born between (19)46 and (19)54, are really totally different than the boomers that were born from the (19)55 to (19)64. Because they experienced different things even within the generation. And they [inaudible] went on college campus, when all this stuff was happening either. 11:07 MB: There is something to that. Um, now, Barack, Obama is technically a boomer-based disability or not being a boomer. Yet, I am above the culture wars of the boomer generation. That was the gist of his 2004 convention speech. 11:27 SM: Yeah, people try to identify him as a nation of boomer- 11:33 MB: I think that is part of his appeal. I think that is why he has not around to personal animosity that both Clinton and George W. Bush did. Because each of them happens to have personal characteristics, which struck people on the other side of the cultural divide, as just absolutely loathsome. And Barack Obama does not have those sorts of personal characteristics, in my view. 12:00 SM: The question I ask you right now is when you look at the boomer years 1946-(19)64. And the oldest boomers are now in the age of 64 and the youngest are 48 this year. Please describe, in your own words, the following periods during boomer live- 12:20 MB: [inaudible] One of my favorite things, to say good news is that the baby boomer generation will die out the bad news is that I am going to die about the same time- 12:32 SM: Yeah well, define that period 1946 to 1960, in terms of just a few words, your thoughts on- 12:38 MB: Well, you have got a period of you know, you are in a period of postwar app, once you are in a period where there starts to be a real commercial market for adolescent products, forms of entertainment, you start to get a split between the universal culture of, you know, 1930s, and (19)40s, movies’ 1950s and (19)60s television. And then you get generational niches in popular culture. You get this sort of oppositional sense adversarial sense to society. You have the episode of the military draft in Vietnam, which is technically an egalitarian thing, because-because of all the exceptions to the draft, it was actually go back you will find that fewer sons of members of Congress served in the military in Vietnam did in the Gulf War, or the Iraq war. Mostly worked out very inegalitarian place and you had groups of people worry and are identified as elite people refusing to fight which has vivid contrast with previous generations and most particularly, you know, the World War Two generation. [crosstalk] -generation, a match. See, you get the breakdown of universal cultural institutions of which the military draft does not operate in World War Two. And the years immediately, thereafter, was one. 14:09 SM: James Fallows talked about that in an article he wrote back in 1975, “What Did You Do in the [the Class] War, Daddy?”- 14:16 MB: You are right. 14:18 SM: Which is in the older generation book, and he talks about it in a symposium with Bobby Mahler and James Webb and Gen. Wheeler. If you look at the 1946, right after World War Two, right break through the time the President, we have already talked about it. But before President Kennedy was elected, boomers the oldest boomers are just starting to go into junior high school when President Kennedy comes on board. What were the major events and the business that kind of subconsciously or consciously affected those boomers? 14:55 MB: I think they came out of a society in which you had unusual high confidence in institutions. Bill Schneider and Marni Lipsett wrote a book about the confidence gap and was sort of saying, gee America starting in the (19)70s, or there abouts, late (19)60s loses confidence in institutions is a sort of theme is this is a country that always had confidences in their institutions. I think that is maybe an artifact of the fact that the pollsters did not start answering those questions till about 1950. If you could go back and pull people starting in 1787, or whenever he might have found that lack of confidence in institutions or discontent with them, was the norm rather than the exception. 15:42 SM: Now that was in the (19)60s and the (19)70s. But that is [inaudible] (19)50s, correct? 15:47 MB: Yeah, well. 15:47 SM: Because it was just a- 15:48 MB: We grew up in an America where they had consequences institutions. And they felt free to crash them. Particularly since it was to their advantage to do things like not serve in the military. I am speaking a part of the generation obviously, not the whole of it. 16:05 SM: What made President Kennedy so unique, so to speak, was that speech he gave when he became president resurrection ask not what you are going to do, or you can do for your country? 16:07 MB: Listen, these people got to sign up in the military, including me, right? Yeah. 16:25 SM: James Webb, we met many years before he became senator said that one of the weaknesses of the boomer generation is in this fear of them that speech was hoped to be the inspiration to service and that Peace Corps service or good managers and service to America that serving one country in the military would seem to be the norm after that point. Something try that top, top of the week recommended, this is in 1981. If the weakness was the fact that it is the generation that truly does not understand the meaning of serving one's nation, even though you had a president who inspired you. 17:05 MB: Yeah, I think there is something I think there is a lot to that. You just did not think- I am blaming [inaudible] the people structured the draft that way and gave exemption for college students. You know, this was based on some analogy in a World War One, where the British lost all these Oxford and Cambridge graduates, we, I mean, I have military deferments to all my college years. I went to law school; they gave me a deferment for that. Then they said, we are withdrawing graduate school deferments. But if you have already got one, you can renew it. Why the hell did the government need me to go to law school, but that was public policy and I took advantage of it. Then I got a job as a law clerk, for a federal judge. And I got a different occupational deferment for that. And then they announced they were getting rid of occupational deferments. But if you had one, you could renew it. Same thing, why was it so necessary that I be at a law firm to a federal judge instead of in the military? I mean, I would argue I was better at that than I might have been at something in the military, but from public policy point of view, pretty weak public policy, I sort of felt that way at the time, but I took advantage of these policies. 18:22 SM: When you look at the (19)60s, do you see a difference between the (19)60s and the (19)70s was like, overall? 18:32 MB: Well, the seeds of you know, mixed cultures, adversarial cultures, rejection, lack of confidence in society, which were nurtured by particularly by [inaudible] in the (19)60s then become the common norm in the (19)70s. I mean, Daniel Yankelevits wrote a book called New Rules that really sets that out back in 1981. And I think that is pretty definitive. 18:54 SM: Do You think that is why Carter was elected? They were- 19:03 MB: Well, that is a different question, we were talking about public more or less competence institutions to get a sense of whether you are supportive of or adversarial to the country and stop those attitudes, change. You get losses of confidence and some of its related to public policy failures, Vietnam, stagflation. You know, you have Presidents who are very experienced people, Johnson and Nixon who turned out to be grave disappointments to the public. That means the value of experiences just come by voters. So, they elect a peanut farmer from Georgia without Georgia as President. Then they become discontent with him. Then elect a former movie star far as they do not want to go. Because Reagan has one advantage that he was, unlike most of our current politicians could speak in the language of that universal culture of which he had been a part is a brave person and radio, movies and TV. When the purpose of those cultures was to attract universal audiences, everybody- Reagan just naturally fit into that he was the sort of person who in his personal values and character background, fitted him like a glove. I do not think that language. I think Obama tried to do that in just 2004 speech, but I think that it is hard to access that language for politicians today, maybe the next generations will find it easier. Boomers find it hard Clinton and Bush were never able to do. 20:54 SM: The People that protested five to 10 percent of the activists who were involved in the movements and protested against the war, a lot of them had a problem with President Reagan and President Bush one, because President Reagan really came to power in California based on his battles against the students out there during the student protest movement of (19)64. 21:20 MB: Well, he had a large riot. Right. I mean, you know, the democrats said, we are going to do lots of things for lots of people, and especially for students and blacks. And the students and blacks are rioting. And the taxpayers say what the hell is going on? People are the beneficiaries, and they are rioting. We need to have some exertion of control. And of course, that was an electorate that was tilted towards GI generation and silent generation and all that. They thought this stuff was terrible. So, you know- 21:53 SM: Well, the law I mean- 21:55 MB: I wrote, I wrote a piece in the Harvard Crimson, you can access by the way, any of my pieces of the Harvard Crimson. Yeah, [inaudible] too. It is not a particular friend of mine. He was on the Crimson later. If you look at the Harvard Crimson.com. It has got everything in the paper since 1873, you can access Franklin D, Roosevelt's writing. 22:16 SM: Oh, my God. 22:17 MB: So, you can go back to my columns 1963 through (19)65 and see what I was writing then when I was a liberal, but had some qualms about some aspects of liberalism, or just sort of predicted that Reagan had a chance to win. Fo-for example, in California, which was not the ge- the general perception was his way to the right. This is another Goldwater. He is too, you know, the political scientists were saying he is too extreme. And my conclusion, looking at the data and looking at some special election results was these people are embracing this and they do not like Watson Berkeley. 22:54 SM: Because that people [inaudible] talking about fifty-nine- 22:57 MB: Before that there was the Free Speech Movement in 1965- 23:04 SM: (19)64 [inaudible] Mario Savio- 23:05 MB: Well, that was the initial thing was that Berkeley would not give a permit to people who wanted to campaign for the Johnson Humphrey ticket on campus on Sproul Plaza. Seems pretty harmless in retrospect, but that was there was there was going to be no politics on campus. It is kind of stupid in retrospect, but lots of people at the Goldwater people go there, let everybody go there and have a booth and whatever. 23:29 SM: I think Parker was fired by President Reagan. 23:33 MB: He was born religious. And I was talking about the knowledge base. 23:38 SM: When you look at the (19)80s in terms of the links to boomers, they are now getting older. They are in their (19)40s [inaudible] generation fee, and then in the (19)80s, and the (19)90s with Bill Clinton? 23:53 MB: Well, I think it is one of the things you see, and I guess sort of foresaw this going back to the late (19)70s, late (19)60s, early (19)70s. And, in my experience in the McGovern campaign, you know, if you are looking at who enters politics is sort of the peace movement almost entirely the Democratic Party, not quite entirely. It is affluent people. I mean, I was, you know, I was involved in precinct delegates and Oakland County Democratic Party and the-the working-class towns did not elect PC. They elected union hacks, and sort of party loyalists went back 25 years. And the [inaudible] areas where there were very few Democratic voters at that time, elected peaceniks. A small number of people there that were Democrats were-were away to the left and stuff. And that sort of thing goes on, you know, and that is a harbinger. One of the things we have seen, and it comes most prominent, starting in (19)96 election is the movement of affluent professionals towards the Democratic Party. Based on liberal issues on cultural. This is the liberal half of the baby boomer generation, and they are voting for the democrat on California, they are running for Democrats who are bankrupting the states to enrich the public employee unions. But hey, they cannot bear to have anybody say anything bad about abortions. So, they are going to keep voting against their own immediate financial interest. But more importantly, for a bunch of, you know, greedy hacks who are bankrupting a private sector economy for no good reason- 25:27 SM: When we go into [inaudible] time the first 10 years of this century, President Bush was the first to talk about and we are about a year and a half into President Obama; there has been some writers out there in the past couple of years that have said that a lot of problems in our economy goes back to that boomer generation, that-that-that want it now generation got to have it now. That is the kind of mentality where people get in debt. 26:02 MB: Well, I do not know, it is just boomers, I mean, I think you got a lot of people. You know by this decade, the boomers have been homeowners, you know, for quite a while, my wife, they suddenly went out and bought a home. You know, on a dodgy mortgage. You know you had a period a period of extended low interest rates, this is maybe a product of the successful anti-inflation policies of the Federal Reserve and various administrations, when you have very low interest rates, you got an incentive not to save and you got an incentive to borrow. Right. I mean, that is what the market is suggesting you do. So yeah, I mean, one of the things that is good, I mean, as a general proposition, I think, you know, our method of home finance, over the long run of history has been a good thing. And it has helped people get a stake in society by owning property. You know, you look at 1945, we were a nation of renter's majority renters, we have become a nation of homeowners, that is probably a good thing. We got up to about 65 percent, that worked pretty well, when we got to 69 percent homeowners that fell apart. Well, that should tell us something which is, you know, 65 percent about as high as you want to go. 27:22 SM: That would be a quality, then oftentimes [inaudible] it is hard to talk about 74 million people, but if you were to get the positive or negative qualities. Thank you very much. of the people, you know, are the generation as a whole, can you say? Like, you know, that technology is basically coming from boomers. Technology, talks about the housings of certain things that come out that make this generation look good, as opposed to bad. 27:54 MB: Well, you know, [inaudible] arguments made by a lot of liberals is they are socially, culturally more tolerant. That culturally marked our and there is something to that, you know, if you go back and look at the racial attitudes that Robert Byrd was appealing to at the beginning of his political career, when he moved from Kleagle to state representative, they are not very attractive to us today. They were not very attractive to me in the 1950s, and (19)60s, and so forth. So, you know, I think there is, you know, clearly an improvement there. And when the liberals make that point, they got a good point. You know this generation to self-indulgence, so forth, you can make that argument. I do not know if I want to go through the whole generation and so forth. You know, I think the boomers were the first generation to make their way through life and niche cultures rather than universal culture. We lost the universal popular culture. Just as, we were losing, you know, we lost the universal news cast. Everybody used to watch one of three networks. In my view, they abused their responsibility died by being claiming to be objective, while in fact being fiercely partisan. They got what they deserve. But it is technology as much as anything else that shames that. 29:26 SM: Do you think the media though and the time the boomers were in the (19)60s, we know how important television was the first time that generation or never seen the war on [inaudible]. 29:39 MB: Well, they had seen the violence attended to enforcing legal segregation in the south and part of the genius of Martin Luther King that he had a sense that when people saw this on television, you know, you have got the Birmingham rebellion in (19)63. That is the same year they could go to a half hour newscast. 30:00 SM: Do you think that- 30:06 MB: So, there is some of that, you know, illustrates the unpleasant side a side of achieving progress. I mean, if we had had that kind of you know, Jim Woolsey, he is friend of mine, wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal, I think back in the (19)90s worth looking up. That is how the present press would have reported the D Day landings. 30:27 SM: Oh my god. Yeah. 30:29 MB: And, you know, it would have been the headline would have been [inaudible] resignation. You know, you know, and there were people, you know, we- newspapers made a whole lot of things about, you know, the 1000 deaths in Iraq, 2000 deaths in Iraq. I mean, in D Day, they- I forget the figures. But you know, that 24–36-hour period, you are having multiple people killed every minute. You know, and the public did not see, you know, footage comparable to searching for private Saving Private Ryan yet. At that time, they did get a still photography, almost all newsreels were set in black and white, except for the movie maker, George Stevens did color. But it was censored. And it was by a press that basically said, we want people to think well of this country. We want the good guys to win. The good guys are us. It was a we and they press. 31:33 SM: That for that-that [inaudible] changed in the (19)60s so this- 31:37 MB: The (19)60s changes- 31:39 SM: We were the bad guy and the view of many, I know Bobby Muller dropped [inaudible]. He went off the serve and came back to love this country even after but he then he started seeing the way he was treated in the hospitals and how getting better being treated. Just something wrong here. And then the-the bottom line is that a lot of veterans realize that we are not the good guy. We are the bad guy. 32:08 MB: Well, I do not think we were the bad guys. I- in fact, I was you know opposed to this war after a while and sort of Prudential grounds, but I did not believe we were the bad guys. I mean, I am, I am not ready to have a discussion with anybody about Vietnam, who does not believe that would have been better for the Vietnamese of our side and prevail? Because I think the subsequent history makes that very clear. Because the premier ruse, and wow, these people massacred people, they were a bloody mining dictatorship, you know, the government we were supporting was not perfect, by any means. But it was not like a totalitarian dictatorship. And, yeah, you look at the Vietnamese government today, things are somewhat better in a variety of ways, get started tolerable. They want to be a trade partner with the United States. That is fine. This is, you know, 40, 50 years later. But I think that you have to say that it would have been better for the South Vietnamese if-if our side had prevailed. Now you can then go on to make prudential things about was it worthwhile to do so did we do so in the right way ahead of them better to allow these bad things to happen as we have in history allowed other bad things to happen? I mean, at the end of World War Two, we cooperated with the Soviets by repatriating Russian prisoners of war, sending them on trains, you know, they were clean with their fingers trying to get off and stuff because they knew they would be executed in Russia. They were so we colluded in this process. As a price of winning that war, could we have won the war without the Soviet Union? Not likely, or at least with very much higher casualties and horror in that difficulty? You know, and so forth. I mean, you know, Hitler had not invaded the Soviet Union. You know Britain was already saved, but what about the rest of Europe? What about all this stuff, you know? So, history gives us gives our leaders and ultimately our voters, some tragic choices to make. Churchill goes on. After this, Hitler invades the Soviet Union. And makes a statement is saying, if the devil were to come and fight Hitler, I would at least find myself able to make some favorable reference to hell, in the in the House of Commons. You know, that was, you know, June 22, 1941. That is a very, very big date in history. We have to do that. And, you know, I think in some sense, the boomers are holding their elders to an impossible standard. You have to do something that is purely good. You have to do it perfectly well. And that is not the way history works. That is not the way human societies work. That is not a standard by which our World War Two effort stands up to scrutiny. 35:04 SM: I have one person I interviewed that she actually broke down. I am sorry. But whenever I see that scene in 1975, on April 30, of the helicopter going off the roof. At the very end, I guess Ellsberg [inaudible], knowing the people that could not get on that last helicopter have ever been in last. 35:28 MB: He was going to be tortured and killed. 35:29 SM: Yeah, tortured and killed. And we knew many who had served in the South Vietnamese Army were throwing away their uniforms, hoping that they would not be identified as being on the other side. 35:39 MB: So, it is like putting those [inaudible] Red Army [inaudible], the POW is on the trains. Where we actively did that, and World War Two, we proactively put them on the trains. We could have told Stalin; we are not going to do that. Our leaders had agreed to do that. And we could have well done that agreement. We decided not to because we were not. We did not want to go to war with the Soviet Union right after World War Two, for a lot of good reasons. 36:07 SM: This person said that, right around that same time, President Ford, they tried to ask questions after the helicopter, thank you very much. Yeah, he would not comment. He walked away, he would not comment on the [inaudible]. 36:22 MB: He was pretty upset. 36:26 SM: I do not know if you want to continue here- 36:27 MB: Maybe we should continue downstairs, we will be a little quieter. 36:31 SM: Okay. Say that again. 36:32 MB: The boomers held their elders to a standard of protection. You know, how can you criticize me for smoking pot when you are having a martini every night? I think the boomers continue. Many of them, particularly on the sort of liberal side have a sort of adolescent attitude that they carry far into life. We are going to criticize the old folks. And we do not have any standards, you know, we can go out and get drunk, that is fine. But the old folks have two martinis before dinner, we are going to give them a hard time. And we are going to hold them up to an impossible standard. And at least on the liberal side, and maybe you can make this argument about the conservatives as well. They hold the society up to impossible standards. As I say they do not acknowledge the necessity of making tragic choices, they do not acknowledge the imperfections of human activity and so forth and they-they make these sorts of adolescent criticisms of everybody that become kind of incoherent after a while and you know, um, you have also the-the delight childbearing. I mean, if you got back in, I think it read 1972 Richard Nixon and Wilbur Mills colluded in you know, big increases Social Security checks. The first one arrived October 3 a month before the election (19)72 they put in double colons which had to be changed, they actually heading into the highest inflation period in recent American history, they doubled [inaudible] with everybody. So, the benefits went away, it was a hell lot more than they should have started glitched when you get when you write a big bill. And the- you know, in some ways you can see that is and this is an argument Strauss and how making generations the, the GI generation gets paid off and allows the culture to be dominated by the boomers or the liberal half of the boomers and just sort of seeds cultural leadership and stewardship Johnson and Nixon did not turn out well. So, what the hell we will take our money and run and go off to the Florida retirement community or whatever. And the boomer’s kind of attitudes, including those by people who were actually older than boomers, you know, like the Gary Hart's in politics, the David Halberstam is in journalism. We were actually silent generation people by their own years. Take over institutions like the media, which then became mainstream media becomes very adversarial to the largest society critical of it. And a mainstream media which in the 1950s did not really matter much in the way of a murmur of protest against the legal segregation of the South in the way that it was enforced, often by violence and terror. Did not see fit to make much noise about that. By you know, the 19- by the 1970s, is now vigorously critical of American mores, as racist and is always ready to see racism and stuff, when in fact, the performance of the country in terms of its behavior had hugely improved. I mean, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1964,1965 were hugely effective legislation. You know, the mores of the South changed, I think, very rapidly. The public accommodation section, which is crazy grandpa Kentucky was questioning was hugely successful in the South, I think because basically white Southerners decided that if they have to serve black people in restaurants, well, they should be polite like everybody else and say, y'all come back. And what do you want, sir, ma'am, and so forth. And they just applied the sort of Southern culture of politeness, which is a cultural style that is fairly distinctive. They applied it, which they had always applied to white people, they applied it to black people, too. And, you know, what are we seeing now we are seeing migrations, for example, not very large, but perceptible of black people from Los Angeles, where most people are rude now, to Atlanta, where most people are polite. 40:54 SM: I got a whole bunch of questions here. So, they are going to go through fast and- Newt Gingrich said something in 1994. And actually, George Willis has written several times in some of his commentaries that, that the problems we have in our society today, the problems, the divorce rate, the-the drug culture, the lack of respect for authority, the beginning of the isms, the, you know, bad employees on the boomer generation, (19)60s and (19)70s. And so, the problems we have, in many respects are- 41:37 MB: What the data show is that sort of this these behaviors symbolized by people, you know, living together before getting married, which becomes popular among the elites in the late (19)60s, early (19)70s. The ankle oval, book, new rules published in 1981, documents pretty thoroughly that this becomes widely applicable across the society. By 1981, the (19)70s for most Americans, the (19)70s were that the (19)60s were actually occurred in the 1970s. And what we have seen in subsequent data is, in a number of people have written about this deal, David Brooks has written about a Kay S. Hymowitz, it is in the Manhattan Institute has written about this, this sort of upper half of society by education, income, whatever, is behaving actually, according to the old rules, now. They-they may live together before they get married, they do not have children until they get married, they tend to have lower rates of divorce, they tend to, you know, be pretty stable and steady people. You know, divorce is hugely harmful to, you know, long term lifetime wealth accumulation. I mean, it is just a huge setback. And it is kind of the lower half of society, roughly, that you got these very, and of course, with huge situation when black people, you know, unmarried parenthood, serial divorce, serial marriage, which are, you know, harmful. That, you know, the children who come out of those situations have much worse outcomes than the children that come out of the traditional rule’s thing. And the, you know, divorce is, you know, a way to make the- you know, most people should be able to accumulate, most people in America do accumulate significant wealth in their lifetimes. And I think this continues to be true, despite the financial crisis and so forth, which has put a dent in the nominal wealth of very many people, but I think is not eliminated the path by which most people can assume can well accumulate significant wealth in housing and financial instruments in the course of their lifetime. All these measurements that say, well, most Americans do not have wealth, do not stratified by age, you do not want to have 25 to 30-year-old have wealth, if they do not know how to handle it, they do very poorly with it, as rich people about how they try to train their children to live intelligently with wealth and that screw up their law habits screw up their lives. Rich people spend a lot of time and effort and thought about that, because they know that it can be, you know, a screw up, you know, they can treat it like basketball players or something and you get a lot of bad outcomes there. From this sudden wealth at a young age. If you bet that the affluent people are basically, you are playing by the old rules that the non-affluent, the more vulnerable claimed by the new rules and you know, divorce kills your lifetime wealth accumulation. It takes to one household that has accumulated some wealth and distribute and creates to households with zero wealth. And dad is a [inaudible], you know, that burdens and income and so forth. It is just devastated. 44:48 SM: Sure. Overall, he made references to it, but the counterculture is very well known. There were two classic books that came out around that (19)71, (19)72 timeframe. And it was The Greening of America, by Charles Reich [crosstalk]. And then the second one was The Making of a Counterculture by Theodore Roszak. I do not know if you saw that. 45:07 MB: I am not that familiar that. 45:08 SM: He talked about the different consciousness of [crosstalk], you think of a counterculture as long hair, bell bottoms, communal type of living– 45:21 MB: I saw Charles Reich. He was a teacher at Yale when I was a Yale Law School, I did not take his class or happen to be in his course. You know, and he was a teacher. [audio cuts] Right to welfare in the Constitution, we were going to have judges that were going to say you got a right to a standard of income from the government. Pure lunacy. I remember seeing him one time there was a little branch of [inaudible] on York Street in New Haven, right here Yale Law School. And I remember seeing Charles Reich sitting there, and he was cashing a gift certificate buying a sport coat. I guess his mom had bought him a sport coat or something. No, this is the man that wants to redistribute income, but he is still getting gifts from his gifts from his family. They have an interesting counterculture, is not it? 46:13 SM: I think he is actually living in California right now. 46:15 MB: Yeah. He has been out of public eye for a long time. And that book, I think, is pure lunacy. I mean, well, it basically makes the argument that the problems of production are all solved. We are going to have all live in affluence without any effort, whatever. And now, we can just sit around and groove. I mean, what an adolescent view of life, it is the adolescent is boys’ dope, it was mother's still buying him a sport coat? It is funny that a-a lot of people like that would wear a sport coat. 46:45 SM: You have made a comment to that a lot of the boomers, particularly activists that make up five to 10 percent of that 74 million, many of them did not grow up. And even though they may be 63 years old, they still have not grown up, they may have had a family, they have not grown up, you think a lot of them have not grown up, they still have that? 47:04 MB: Well, I think there is some of that. I mean, I think the sense of being adversarial to a larger society, it comes naturally to many adolescents, because you have got adversarial to your parents after having been nurtured by them. And, you know, seeing them as part of your world is the process of separation. And so, there is something inherently inclines you towards adversarial in adolescence. And I think, you know, in some of their, you know, if you are still voting in California for these ruinous democrats that are destroying the state, enrich in the public employees, because you do not want to have any-any-any restrictions on abortion. Boy, that is a pretty adversarial way of looking at society, in my view. 47:47 SM: When did the (19)60s begin? And when did it end, in your point of view? And what was a watershed moment? 47:51 MB: Well, the (19)60s did not begin until well into the (19)60s. You know, assassination of President Kennedy, I think was, I think that was an important event in reducing competence in America. And of course, it was nobody's fault except the communists that did it. Which of course, if you read James Pearson's book makes the point about how Mrs. Kennedy and the liberals wanted to see Kennedy as having been killed by right wingers and they have constantly nurtured this and they did not like the idea that he was killed by some tacky communists, which was in fact the case. But I think you know, it. It violated the sort of intuitive sense that we had about American history that things turn out well. We-we had seen to wartime, you know, our experiences of presidents dying. We have seen President Lincoln, you see President Roosevelt age, during the course of huge war, you have the Mathew Brady photographs, Americans still know need to be looked at the pictures of Roosevelt during the war and the physical deterioration and so forth in the world. They come to a successful moment of triumph, and then they die, assassinated in Lincoln's case, dies of a cerebral hemorrhage and so forth. This at the moment of victory, roughly, and so forth. And so, there is a sense that things come out well even though the president trial leader tragic, our great leader, tragically dies, that things will come out well, and, you know, Kennedy died did not die in a moment of victory. It was not it was not that narrative did not hold it seems senseless and weird. And, you know, people might have anticipated you know, if he conducted a successful military intervention in Iraq, and then have presided as president over the moon shot and they have been assassinated after that it might have made sense to us. 49:52 SM: Yet do you consider that the watershed moment- 49:55 MB: I think that that becomes a moment where confidence in the society is significantly eroded and the goodness and rightness and the blessedness, if you will of American society since things turn out well for us, as we know that we will pictures more complex. Yeah, I think, and I think then you start getting more adversarial things you would get the elites, you know, the college elites not signing up for Vietnam, but nestling into the academy. You get the Watts riots, you know, Berkeley and the Watt riots (19)64, (19)65, you have a Harlem Riot in (19)64. All this effort to give more to students to get more blacks seems to be resulting in rioting in the streets and stuff and go back and read some of that stuff. It was truly frightening. Now there is this left-wing writer, what is his name, Rick Perlstein that does a history of Nixon and I gave it a somewhat critical- 50:47 SM: Nixonland. 50:49 MB: Yeah, but what Rick does really well, if he goes back and gets the footage of this stuff, and what was appearing on television, in 1967, and (19)68. And it gives you a sense of a country exploding and violence and growing and so forth. So, the (19)60s happen that I mean, I guess if you really had it, you know, the bad year was 1967. And Nelson [inaudible] is to say (19)68 was the worst campaign, year presidential campaign year in American history. I think there is a lot to that. And not just because Hubert Humphrey lost which Nelson supported. But yeah, he was speaking, he was speaking much more generally about that. 51:29 SM: Is there a lean line of demarcation where you see the (19)60s is over, I know you mentioned the (19)60s, or (19)70s, a lot of people- 51:38 MB: Well, it goes into the (19)70s, as he goes into the (19)70s, in the new world sense that behavior of an elite gets transferred to the whole society to a large extent. And, you know, if you go back and look at welfare dependency, crime rates, divorce rates, and stuff like abortion zooms peaks in the early (19)90s, crime peaks in the early (19)90s, late (19)80s, welfare dependency peaks about that time, some of these things are solved by changes in public policy to an important extent. But you have got these hugely negative tracks, all three of those metrics are hugely more negative than the amount after the 1930s, (19)40s and (19)50s, hugely more negative. They go on for a long time for a long generation. And without, you know, everybody just seems to think you cannot do much about it. You know, like, Gandhi had criminologists and these, so you cannot do a lot about crime when you are-when you are oppressing people, like we are oppressing black people, you just have to expect it. You know, this is part of the vibrancy of living in a city that you might get mugged. And hit over the head. 52:43 SM: And I have been, have you-you have ever been mugged? 52:45 MB: No. 52:45 SM: I got mugged in Philly. And the first day I was talking at Thomas Jefferson University, and I was going back from a dance was getting off the topic here. But when I came back, and then the next day, I went and done the work. And two people said bet you they were black, were not they? Yeah, well, they were. But you know, I did not really- 53:05 MB: Well, the uncomfortable fact was that you have, you know, unfortunately, a disproportionate number of black people commit crimes. I mean, that is just black young males, I mean, look at the prison profile and so forth, that some people were in prison, they probably should not be, we should do something about that. But you know, the numbers are there. I mean, it is just obvious. And essentially, I my theory is-is it is a function of why you also saw huge crime rates in Russia after the fall of communism, and bad behaviors, like alcoholism, accidents, and so forth. And a huge rush of crime in the US in post-apartheid South Africa. You know, both of which strike me as true, and you get this in America post success in the Civil Rights revolution. And my-my saying on this is liberated men tend to behave badly. Liberated women are just a pain in the neck. Yeah, when we are in it, men tend to behave badly. Why the black people do not commit more crimes in the south. Because these white people would kill them. They did not beat them up if they did, or if they thought they did. Now, they know some people that had not done this stuff. They thought you had a sort of terror. And you know what, terror does work to reduce crime. It is just not a measure we Americans want to employ. 54:22 SM: What is what are your thoughts? What are your thoughts on the movements that evolved at the end of the (19)60s because the civil rights movement was already well established? It was kind of a role model for all the other movements and certainly the antiwar movement as well. 54:40 MB: That is an example that people always throw back at you, you know, you are saying, are you saying the society is basically decent? What about the civil rights movement? Well, you know- 54:48 SM: Right, and the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement and of course, a lot of the women left the- those movements because of sexism and the women's was one but the question I am really asking here. Yeah, that when you look at the women's movement and organizations like National Organization for Women and [inaudible], you have got the gay and lesbian movement they evolved after Stonewall in (19)69. You have got the environmental movement that really came about Earth Day in 1970. You have got the American Indian Movement that was from (19)69 to (19)73. And we all know about Alcatraz and-and then what happened at Wounded Knee? And then you have the world Indian civil rights movement. 55:25 MB: Well, what is the question? 55:26 SM: The question is, what do you think about those movements in terms of they were supposed to be really empowered in the 1970s. That was their time, they seem to have waned. 55:38 MB: Well, I think each one has a different trajectory. You know the feminist movement gets Roe v. Wade seven to decision and the very gets, you know, you have a lot more women entering the workforce, that is an Yankelevich to that, basically women entering the workforce is a (19)70s phenomenon, which is mostly continued. You have got now in universities and graduate schools, you know, female dominance, numerically. You know, at the same time, you look at millennials, and they are less pro-abortion rights or these pro-abortion than their elders. They have seen the sonograms; abortion does not seem so wonderful and liberating to them. And again, as you know, highwoods points out the upper half strata of women do not get many abortions, very few of them do. And so, what was a huge symbolically important thing, where you had all these gray-haired feminists who are long past menopause, you know, hugely got to have a right to abortion is central to my being. That is just not the case. It seems with most of these younger women now. It is just something that is always been there. It is in the air. It is unremarkable, and actually rather unpleasant. So, they do not particularly like that. Enviro movements, they had huge policy successes in the (19)70s. That, you know, on balance, I mean, the Endangered Species Act was written in a bad way and is really a pain in the ass and the superfund act was crap. The clean air and water acts worked very well, by and large, and managed to do it. My friend, Bill Drayton, in the Carter administration invented what he called the bubble, but it is basically the cap-and-trade idea, or, you know, buying pollution allotments as a way of enforcing clean air and water act and so forth, which the Carter administration which also proceeded on a lot of the economic deregulation getting rid of the New Deal policies that were intended to and did hold up costs. So, in transportation, communication, we squeezed huge amounts across the society, but the environmental movement had a lot of successes there. And, you know, you know, today's enviros will not believe it when you say so and cannot bear to have it set. But our you know; our air and water standards and stuff are hugely cleaner than they were in 1970. I remember going to Los Angeles 1969 could not see the mountains almost any day. Now, you see the mountains almost every day. But I mean, that is just, you know, particulate emission, but well, smog, you know, the stuff is much better. So, they had a lot of success. Over time, I think that, you know, I think they have now become a vested interest. These people executives have $300,000 jobs they are protecting, they send out direct mail that always direct mail always takes the form, the sky is falling, everything will be worse than ever, unless you send in money today. So, we have got crackpot hoaxes, like global warming, which in my opinion, is more or less that where they are bending and cheating and lying about the science, and so forth. Part of this is that a lot of these people have a statist agenda, they want to run everybody's life completely and you have, you know, some of these other environmental causes, you know, we cannot get oil from Arctic National Wildlife, that is a complete crack. I mean, the idea that you are protecting some beautiful resource, I mean, I think of the North Slope, I have seen what that is like you are talking about, you know, prospecting the oil footprint, oil exploration footprint, the size of Dulles Airport, in an area the size of the state of Connecticut. They have got a pretty good record of environmental protection and so forth, and a pretty good culture in the North Slope. That is just stupid. You know why they do that to raise money. They show pictures of the beautiful Brooks Range and the caribou, and they rake in money and they know that the oil companies will always the state of Alaska will always press for that because it is absolutely asinine not to do it and make a profit bias. And so that there will always have this they will be able to bring in the money till they retire, pay off their kids’ tuition, keep that $300,000 rolling in. I think it is one of the most cynical operations the campaign against oil drilling. And why have any political classes been carried just feathering their own nests? 1:00:04 SM: But would you agree, though, that the movement of the (19)70s that we are all unique and fairly strong fighting are different for me, because they were very visible had become somewhat invisible. They become more singular. 1:00:20 MB: Well, enviro– 1:00:21 SM: They do not work together. 1:00:22 MB: No of course they do not work together. I mean, the feminist is now kind of an antique movement, because life is so different from what they were objecting to, and you read this stuff, and some of them, I guess, are very lesbian and do not like man, I do not know much about that, you know. Antiwar movement. Well, the antiwar tilt is still a very important factor in the Democratic Party read the debates on the Gulf War as recent in 1991, on the Iraq War resolution 2002. And you hear people arguing against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, that their arguments make much more sense in terms of Vietnam, than they do in terms of the actual situations we faced in the Gulf War with Iraq. In my judgment, or at least the arguments of a lot of that continued, they have huge influence in the Democratic Party and on public policy there by the environment. As I said, I think it would become a vested interest lobby, more in feathering their own nests, than they are in really improving the environment. And in some cases, in promoting status controls and environment. Gay Rights Movements takes a long time to be successful but has had huge positive changes from their point of view, in public opinion over the last 15 years. I mean, the country's flipped totally on some case, serving openly in the military. This is an issue on which there are huge differences between this over 65 and the under 30s. And, you know, it is one of those issues, you know, the marijuana movement, where now, you know, in 1972, it looked like legalizing marijuana might be the wave of the future, California had a referendum, 33 percent voted for it. And I thought, well, you know, if marijuana you have all these under 30s, who are marijuana users grow up and still be for marijuana, then we are going to eventually see that 33 percent grow to 50 percent or something like that. And that did not happen. And so, one of the interesting questions on these cultural issues is, will the liberal attitudes that young people tend to have on these issues continuously grow old or not? And the answer is on some of them they have and some of them have not. My hunch is on the gay rights issues, they will continue to have these liberal attitudes as they grow older, it is beginning to look that way- 1:02:41 SM: Native American rights, you just do not hear about it anymore. 1:02:43 MB: You know, inherently tragic, you know, I mean, credit, the problem was, what is their solution? Well, tribal autonomy. Well, the tribal governments are not very good. We see, I think the best solution to Aboriginal peoples in the United States is Oklahoma and Alaska. Oklahoma, no reservations, integration. You get along, you are proud of your Indian glide, you make it a payment for something, or other. Alaska the Native Claims Act, Alaska Native Claims Act and Ted Stevens and others put together with which provides certain incomes to people. And what it is enabled them to do, I think, is it, it gives the individuals a choice of where they want to live on the continuum between the Aboriginal lifestyle and the mainstream lifestyle. The core problem with, you know, the autonomy for the reservation and political, political elections and reservations as you get (19)51, (19)49 elections in which the (19)51 steal for four years, and they were thrown out. And then the (19)49 becomes (19)51. And they may steal for four years. And they do not cover and effectively. And it does not give people it does not give people a range of choices of where they want to live on the continuum between the Aboriginal lifestyle and mainstream lifestyle, it tends to cabin in the end. I think, the Aboriginal lifestyle, or some variant there on a dependence lifestyle, which-which people do not do very well. I mean, look at the data. You know, it is tragic. And you have these problems in other countries, too, with how you deal with Aboriginal populations and people with those traditions in a free society. Those are difficult problems to handle. But I think Alaska and Oklahoma have done better than we have done in the reservation cultures. And, you know, the Eisenhower administration that the American Indian would criticize the Eisenhower administration for wanting to, you know, mainstream people. This was oppression, just as in Australia, there is a big move against big protests that were against the policies they had tried to mainstream Aborigines. I think That thrust of policy is the wrong thrust. I think the right thrust is not to cabin people into the Aboriginal lifestyle, but to give a continuum where people have choices, and they can partake of that lifestyle or not. You provide as the Alaska Native Claims Act does some income support for people to do that, they have the mineral rights and so forth. And in 12 native corporations, there is a pooling of the revenue so that there will not be huge windfalls for one over the other like the North Slope. But that is, that is a much better policy solution for Aboriginal rights. And so, I think, you know, the American Indian Movement was a dead-end, I am going to put you under some of those people, because were violent and stuff like that, which is pretty awful. 1:05:45 SM: I know, we are running out of time here. And but just real quick responses to these and then the boomer generation, many of them and still do think they were the most unique generation in American history, because there was this attitude, at least amongst the activists that they were going to change the world bring peace to the world, and racism, sexism, homophobia, there was a spirit of- 1:06:07 MB: Yeah, and a civil rights and revolution happens before they are adults. 1:06:10 SM: Right. But there was a feeling of empowerment. And again, some that are 63 years old still feel that because they are working old age, and they think they can change that too. So, what just a quick response to that. The second part of the question- 1:06:27 MB: It is pretty adolescent stuff, is not it? 1:06:29 SM: Yeah. 1:06:29 MB: That is the response– 1:06:31 SM: Okay. How important were the beats, some people felt that the (19)60s really began with a beat in the (19)50s that Kerouac, Ginsburg, Baldwin, Snyder, fairly Getty, those writer, Leroy Jones, those writers were basically the precursors to the anti-authoritarian. You know, I am not going to be like IMB or Titan mentality that through their writings, a kind of an independence, I am going to do it my way or the highway kind of mentality. 1:06:58 MB: I do not think they were probably very important. I do not think they were very widely read. I do not think mine are important. I mean, it is like, you know, the SDS port here and statement here in 1960 some importance too but I think this was not what inspired masses and masses of people to do things, I think, you know, the personal situations that people encounter, because the draft and things like that have much more effect then reading jack Kerouac are performing across the country. 1:07:28 SM: I interviewed Noam Chomsky and I had an hour with him. And then very difficult took me almost a year to see him. But I had a great time with him. And in one of his first books, which you probably read The American Pwer and the New Mandarins. Dr. Martin Duberman, and other well-known historian states, and Noam Chomsky, in his first books quoted this, about the generation, you recognize the anarchist spirit that lies at the heart of the rebellion of the young. he says Chomsky not only recognizes that but admires it. Your thoughts. 1:08:06 MB: So, you get a celebration of adolescence. And, you know, I found out mom and dad are imperfect and affects their real skunks. Am I not clever? And I am going to be a good person, the whole world, make the whole world better, and everything will be perfect. Now that is about that. What are we talking age 13, 14, 15. It is pretty adolescent stuff. I mean, I think ultimately, you know, if you want to, if you want to govern, if you want to be a responsible leader, if you want to exert positive forces, to contribute in some way to society, through your work, community surface elements, scenery, activities, or whatever else, it is better to start acting. It is better to become an adult than to remain an adolescent– 1:08:51 SM: You got to write an article on it. Yet, I think it is important to because I think a lot of boomers are confused, and I am not even going to go there. But I think a lot of them- 1:09:04 MB: When you are a grandparent, it is a little It is like watching, you know, Mick Jagger up on the stage being a rebellious 19-year-old and he is 66 years old, and- 1:09:11 SM: I think he is 70. 1:09:13 MB: Well, he has got a lot of, well he is actually quite a smart man, but he has got a lot of miles on the odometer, you know? I mean, it is kind of ludicrous, is not that, you know, when we go to these baby boomers, you go to these baby boomer rock concerts, they have a lot of Wolf Trap and stuff like that. And people they are all they are of a certain age. You know, we got these niche cultures like on the satellite radio, you know, got each decade different. You can get your decade and you can find your six different kinds of country music. There is, you know, you have got niches and stuff. So, these people go and watch, you know, 65-year-old watching 65-year-old sing teenage songs. [chuckles] I guess it is sort of wonderful that we have a society that is affluent enough where people get to have a chance like this and in an enjoyment dentistry of remembrance of what it was like to be young and- 1:10:03 SM: A lot of the band members are dead and they have replaced them entirely- 1:10:05 MB: Yeah, on the trajectory of life. Yeah, well, of course, it is a high. It is a high mortality occupation and given their social lives and their private plane traveling plans. 1:10:16 SM: You just you. These are quotes that came from Noam Chomsky, power for its own sake is unjustified power, unless justified is inherently illegitimate. And this is what he was talking about when we talked about the Vietnam War. 1:10:34 MB: I do not think that kind of generality gets you very far in terms of an intelligent critique of public policy. I mean, I think they are-they are serious prudential, there are serious arguments to be had about prudentially whether it was wise for the United States to intervene as it did in Vietnam. And whether, if you thought such an adventure, as well as what should have been done, but I do not think that that sort of generality is sort of, if the guy does not do what I like, he is illegitimate. I think that is kind of the that is the academy thing. Everything is legitimate except my personal preferences. Well, that does not tell us anything, except that you are ready to put people you know, you are ready to run 1984 if you get the chance. Instead, they can just run campus speech codes, and send people to re-education classes and stuff. But– 1:11:24 SM: Do you think that what Phyllis Schlafly said, she said, I interviewed her at the [inaudible] conference, and she said to me that she is still flying how? Yes, he is strong as ever. If she is very, she is not- 1:11:38 MB: She is a really petite woman. She has got a terrific body. She is great. 1:11:39 SM: She is. She has not lost anything up here. And she is sharp, but she gets tired very fast now. So yeah. 1:11:49 MB: Well into her 80s. 1:11:50 SM: Four I think 84 or 85. But she said the troublemakers of the (19)60s now run today's universities. And she and then she was said she was making a reference to the people that run them probably student life people as well as the women's studies programs, the gay studies, Asian studies, Native American studies, Black studies, she was referring to the studies program, do you think that is- 1:12:16 MB: Oh, yeah, I think it is run by the student radical. They are, you know, the descendants. Now the student radicals? I think it is becoming, you know, and I think they have become the most intolerant institutions in our society. Where do you have speech codes in our society? Well, corporate HR departments will tell you, you are not supposed to call people ethnic names and stuff on the workplace and things like that. But the real speech codes that are enforced against people that have the Roth, politically incorrect ideas are on campus, these supposedly havens of free thought, are in fact, the most intolerant part of the society. Your corporate employer does not care if you are Republican or Democrat. universities do. 1:12:58 SM: Oh, yeah, there has been actually, there has been stories of people actually being fired. 1:13:04 MB: Oh, yeah. That happened is that well was one of the things that is happened is that a lot of people like the people here at a lot of people here at AI have just fled the university for more congenial environment, and one where they will not be disfavored. So, you have got people like Chomsky sitting with the powers that legitimate unless it agrees with me have their own little niches of power, you know, there is different studies departments. You know, my sense is that they probably produce some good scholarship here and there. I mean, you know, just made to see Henry Louis Gates in this whole controversy last summer, is my understanding that he has produced some pretty good scholarship and- and has done some worthy work. I think a lot of those people are, do not produce much this worthwhile. You know, that, you know, a lot of it is kind of a scam. But there, I am sure are people in all those things that have produced some scholarship, that is, that is, that is worth serious consideration. You know, it tends to be one sided and so forth. I mean, the stuff I have read of Gates, which is not anything like a large sampling of his work, suggests that he is a fairly clear eyed and non-propagandistic sort of guy that is trying to understand a very different past and to enter sympathetically into the minds of people that are as to how they were behaving, including, you know, some people whose behavior we currently, all of us consider repugnant. That is, you know, that is an interesting thing to do. I think that, you know, a lot of the departments have just become garbage though, have not they? I mean, you have got areas you know, a lot of the English departments you know, this deconstruction stuff, because that is all crap. I mean, I remember a friend of mines daughter was at Wesleyan. She said, you know, these literature crisis, you go there, and they denounce dead white males all day or all our she says I want to read some Shakespeare some Jane Austen. Okay, well, you know, a student that wants to read Shakespeare and Jane Austen. Yeah, that is a pretty worthy motive. And then to be encountered these, these harridans, screaming about the dominance of dead white males and so forth. Boy, that is a pretty lousy educational experience. And it is hard to believe people like that are going to produce any good scholarship. 1:15:35 SM: I think the only got four more points that I have been one of the commentaries, because I have worked in higher ed about 35 years, is that I think the biggest battle today in higher education, the battles have been going on between conservatives and liberals for a long time is between liberals and liberals in the liberal, that can become a friend of a conservative, a liberal that can bring in conservative speakers and understand that it is important that all points of view are listened to and heard, and preparing students for the world they are going to face manage on diversity. 1:16:08 MB: My sense is that is not the case that a lot of university venues and you know, in a sense, it is almost worse, at the knot I suspected is worse at many of the non-elite places. 1:16:19 SM: State universities. 1:16:20 MB: Well, you have got a lot of places where I think you have got some not very smart people left wingers in control. And, you know, if you read the fire, the foundation for individual rights in education, you know, the speech codes and stuff they encounter at some of these colleges you never heard of, are pretty hair raising. And you have to say there is a large amount of stupidity involved. I mean, I used to think when I was growing up those academics were generally smarter than the rest of us. And I have come to think they are- they are not as smart as people in a lot of, you know, the top part of the law profession or something, certainly medical, hard sciences. They are a lot smarter than these left-wing academics, most of them. 1:17:01 MB: I think you and James Fallows agree on the point that you brought up earlier about the elite education back in the Harvard's and the Yale's because, because he felt that the Vietnam War was a class war, because he says so beautifully in his What Did You Do in the War, Daddy, that the voice of Chelsea, the lower income voice from Boston when often fought the war, yet the rich kids who went off to Harvard, not only- 1:17:32 MB: He did not talk quite right about Chelsea, because people from the lowest demographic do not get drafted. But that is, well- 1:17:38 SM: He mentions that. But he talks about the fact that not only they invaded the war, as opposed to protesting the draft, the annoying that they evaded the draft as opposed to protesting. So, he calls it a kind of a class war. Do you really think that Vietnam was more of a class war? 1:17:55 MB: Well, I think I discussed that earlier. Yeah. 1:17:58 SM: Yeah, what one of the things? This is, these are two very important questions that I have tried to raise to every person I have interviewed with starting with Senator McCarthy in 1996. And this may not mean anything to you, but it is something that I have been raising, and that is the fact that students at our campus came up with a question when we took a group to see Senator Muskie in 1995 in his office, they had they these students had not been born in 1968. And so, they saw (19)68 in the (19)60s through their classes, as a time of disruption coming close to a second Civil War, no one getting along with each other, riots in the streets, but (19)68 defined at our two assassinations with the Chicago convention with police and students fighting each other and oppress poles. 1:18:46 MB: We call it the worst eleven years in American history. For exactly those kinds of reasons. 1:18:51 SM: The question that they came up with, they wanted to ask him because he was the democratic vice-presidential candidate is due to all the divisions that were happening in America that time do you feel that the boomer generation, I know that it is very general do You think the boomer generation is going to go with the grave like the Civil War generation, not truly healing from the divisions that they had when they were young, but they carry these into adulthood whether it be for or against the war? 1:19:19 MB: Not fully healing is my answer. Yeah, you know, I think, you know, we saw this period between (19)95 and (20)05, where you have very static reason, political alignment, voting behavior, in large part to focus on to baby boom generation president. So, the two halves are the different parts of it. And his personal characteristics reinforced their identification, you know, I mean, Kennedy was an Irish American, but he looked and acted like a British Lord, or at least most Americans regard him that way. He went against type. Clinton went with type and Bush went with type the liberal baby in the conservative baby but- 1:20:01 SM: What were those types? 1:20:04 MB: Clinton's you know, your positive way of looking at it is articulate in this the negative way a slippery immoral behavior and so forth. George W. Bush's positive way to look at its steadfastness, negative way to look at it stubbornness, the idea of a sort of moralism there is a right and wrong and the ultra-left eyes want to say, oh no, everything is relative nice and clear right or wrong, you know, we let us just talk about it for a while. And Bush is saying now some things are right or wrong and I mean, I think Bush is, right you can argue about which things are right and wrong and where you ought to go to shades of gray, but I think there are, you know, there are some real rights and wrongs you know, George Orwell, you know, thought so, too. And totalitarianism was just wrong. And, you know, so yeah, I think the boomers will continue as I that is my thing. The good news is the baby boomers will die out. The bad news is I will die about the same time. 1:21:11 SM: Do you think the wall Vietnam Memorial, what does it mean to you? Does that help you personally to know that you think is Jan Scruggs says in his book to heal a nation, it was meant to be a nonpolitical entity to help the families and those of those who died and answer why you are having to memorialize them. And it is not to be a political statement. But he also says, we hope it heals the nation. 1:21:36 MB: Well, I think it is interesting, you get five, you know, lots of people go over there and look at it. But the here is the interesting thing, to me is that the final product is a bifurcation. I mean, the complaint was made against that it was non heroic treated, treated soldiers as victims and not as heroes. And so, you get the, you know, the lifelike statues of the GI attendant with it, which is, which, if not heroic, at least, says that they are doers, not victims. And I think one of the problems in America has, you know, the call for change this to some extent, I said, Americans are seeing their military as heroes not victims, as or at least as doers, not victims. I think one of the things that I find unpleasant about valid statement about the class war, which is, you know, reasonably good description, I put it somewhat differently. But he has seen-he has seen people served in the military as victims, and I think that is selling them short. And you know, and he is saying that people who are clever enough, like himself and me, to avoid being victims, so out of the somewhat ashamed of ourselves, which I agree with, and but, you know, perhaps what we ought to be ashamed of, is not having avoided victim status, but have had it been avoided making a positive contribution. 1:23:09 SM: I know that in the symposium that they were involved, and then I am pleased before Senator Webb. And certainly, Bobby Mahler and General Wheeler and the whole group is that that it was when we talk about the generation gap between parents and their kids. But really, the severe problem is between the generation itself prior to having some served in Vietnam sitting next is somebody who graduate from Harvard when I become a lawyer. Put them in a war together, that is where the divisions come from together, that sort of 1:23:41 MB: depends on which subjects you focus on. But yeah, if you bring that up, yeah. 1:23:47 SM: Why did we lose Vietnam? In your opinion? Why do we lose that war? 1:23:54 MB: I think we have poor military strategy. I think we hadou know, I think that I think President Johnson had great military strategy, he did not elicit a winning military strategy out of his military as he should have been read Elliot Cohen and Supreme Command. I think that is good work on that. I think President Nixon had a potentially winning strategy. I mean, read, Lewis thoroughly said good war, that was undercut by Watergate in history, Henry Christian argued by Watergate and by the election of a democratic congress that refused to vote any aid to South Vietnam in 1975. So, I am not sure I agree with whether I agree or not with thoroughly status that Abram’s strategy was essentially a successful strategy. But I think that is a pretty strong argument. So, the answer, to some extent is a failure of leadership in America to produce the result. I mean, it was what George Bush failed at in 2005, (20)04 or (20)05 and (20)06 interactions conceded out in 2007 and (20)08. 1:25:01 SM: Are you supportive of Dr. King's speech in 1967, where he went against the Vietnam War, he was criticized heavily by his own– 1:25:09 MB: I just observed it. 1:25:10 SM: Do you think that is important, schemed of things? 1:25:16 MB: Somewhat, I do not think it was. I really do not know. I did not have strong. I thought it was, you know, my reaction to time was it is not really your issue. 1:25:28 SM: Yeah. 1:25:30 MB: It is interesting. I have been reading about it. I read something about Eisenhower was on Eisenhower and civil rights, and he has King and as a 28-year-old. And this guy, research these documents, his stuff, and it will be fascinating King’s, comments were really quite wise. And he really, he had, he really was a gifted man. 1:25:49 SM: We had James Farmer on our campus. It is totally visually impaired at the time, but he was still strong and very speaker. And he said, the Dr. King that we saw in the church and the Dr. King that we saw at rallies was not the real Dr. King. The real Dr. King was the man who stayed in the room. During when we were talking about the issues, and he was very quiet. He was a quiet man. And he would go get it out of Martin, what do you think? And then he would open up people and have to vote against neutral for a while- 1:26:24 MB: Interesting, the comments he made, you know, he is in the presence of President Eisenhower all these things, and he is 28 years old, and he was during Montgomary, Alabama. And he does very well. It was fascinating, frankly- 1:26:38 SM: I think we are almost done here. 1:26:39 MB: Got to retail and branch refuge was probably terrific. Anyway, yeah, I have got to go. 1:26:44 SM: Yeah, the very last question is, what do you think of lasting legacy will be on this generation will make your best history books are written 50 years from now, or when maybe when the last boomer passed away? 1:27:06 MB: A generation that did not fully live up to its responsibilities. 1:27:14 SM: And those responsibilities would have been? 1:27:24 MB: Lots of different things. And you are asking me to write the book. Right. 1:27:24 MB: And I used to work for you I just leave it at that. 1:27:32 SM: The very last thing is the issue of trust. One of the things that seems to define this generation is they do not trust because they saw leaders that lie so many of them lied to them from Watergate to Eisenhower lying about U-2 on. 1:27:46 MB: I think that is, I think that is an overbreeding for a long moment in history. I think that, you know, already talked to you about the decline in confidence. And the fact that the American that was so confident and believing in its institutions from the 1940s to the mid (19)60s was not unusual America. We had had great success. And we had two great successes that had not really been anticipated, say, circa 1940, which is success in the World War, which most Americans did not want to get into. And, no, it was a pretty terrible war, and the success of post-world economic prosperity, which almost no one anticipated, and so those huge successes that seemed to be produced by men born in the 1880s, and 1890s. 1:28:37 SM: Very good. That would be okay. Thank you. Let us- 1:28:40 MB: We had this country that had the narrative, the Lincoln Roosevelt narrative, where everything turns out well, and even the tragic death of the president comes from moments of great victory. 1:28:55 SM: Actually, one more- 1:28:57 MB: Photographers always say one more. 1:29:01 SM: Very good. 1:29:02 MB: Yeah, that moment of history. And I think, I think that was something. 1:29:05 SM: That was one of the things you know, you learn in political science class, the first thing you learn is that not trusting your government is actually healthy for democracy. So, if you are saying a generation does not trust, then- 1:29:19 MB: Yeah, you have these people, Nixon and Johnson, that were so ex- for Johnson and Nixon that were so experienced and turned out to be great disappointment. So, I think that, you know, the idea that in fact, the idea of not trusting experts, but we are not trusting people in power you know. I think that that is, you know, that is a long, long, decade long feeling rather than something that persists throughout time. 1:29:47 SM: I have been to the store to try to find your book- (End of Interview) Accessibility Copy/Paste below: Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. 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Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Michael Barone Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Barone, Michael ; McKiernan, Stephen Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/wav Subject The topic of the resource Historians; Journalists; Barone, Michael--Interviews Description An account of the resource Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the <em>Washington Examiner</em>, a historian, and a journalist. Barone was a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics, which is a reference work on Congress and state politics. He received a Bachelor's degree from Harvard College and a Law degree from Yale Law School. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010-06-29 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.20 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2017-03-14 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. McKiernan Interviews Extent The size or duration of the resource. 89:54 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/746d3df3989c502202124b667d3d608f.jpg b4ec5dc64ca1cfd47c99ea4d61d6ea59 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/c02f58a4523e578725f8135e19973262.mp3 abbacef87de037a730409f8a11cce370 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Audio interviews Title A name given to the resource McKiernan Interviews Description An account of the resource Stephen McKiernan's collection of interviews includes more than two hundred interviews with prominent figures of the 1960s, which were collected between the mid-1990s to 2023 The collection provides narratives of people who were actively involved in or witnessed events in the 1960s, an era which spurred profound cultural and political transformation in the twentieth century. Interviewees include politicians, artists, scholars, musicians, authors, and veterans who delve into the decade’s most prominent issues and events, including the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the anti-war movement, women’s rights, gay rights, segregation, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Hippies, Yippies, and individualism.<br /><br /> <h3>The McKiernan 22</h3> <div>Stephen McKiernan interviewed legends of the 1960s. When asked in 2021 where one should start when sifting through his vast collection, he provided the following list:</div> <ul> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/854">Julian Bond</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1866">Bobby Muller</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1175">Craig McNamara</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/910">Dr. Arthur Levine</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/837">Diane Carlson Evans</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/942">Dr. Ellen Schrecker</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/876">Dr. Lee Edwards</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/841">Peter Coyote</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1233">Dr. Roosevelt Johnson</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/899">Rennie Davis</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1222">Kim Phuc</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/917">George McGovern</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/833">Frank Schaeffer</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/840">Rev. Dr. Frank Forrester Church </a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1240">Dr. Marilyn Young</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/842">James Fallows</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/835">Joseph Lee Galloway</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/911">John Lewis</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/839">Paul Critchlow</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/888">Steve Gunderson</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1159">Charles Kaiser</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/2407">Joseph Lewis</a></li> </ul> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Stephen McKiernan Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In copyright. Template: Simple Audio Player (Amplitude.js) This template displays an audio player with the first attached image file as the 'cover image'. For its audio source, the template looks for the first attached audio file. If additional audio files exist, they should be combined using audio editing software, or a separate Omeka item should be made for each part. Date of Interview 2010-03-25 Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Stephen McKiernan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Lewis V. Baldwin, 1949- Language English Biographical Text <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Dr. Lewis Baldwin is a historian, author, and scholar. Dr. Lewis is a Professor of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University. He specializes in the history of the Black churches in the United States. Dr. Baldwin received his Ph.D. in American Christianity at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:15105,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;11&quot;:4,&quot;12&quot;:0,&quot;14&quot;:[null,2,0],&quot;15&quot;:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;16&quot;:10}">Dr. Lewis Baldwin is a historian, author, and scholar. Dr. Lewis is a Professor of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University. He specializes in the history of the Black churches in the United States. Dr. Baldwin received his Ph.D. in American Christianity at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.</span> Digital Publisher Binghamton University Libraries Digital Format audio/mp4 Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data 2 Microcassettes Material Type Sound Interview Format Video or Audio Audio Keywords <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Montgomery Bus Boycott; Rosa Parks; Teenage Pregnancy; Individualism; Segregation; Civil Rights Movement; Martin Luther King Jr.; Barack Obama; Black Nationals; Black Veterans; Dorothy Height; Ella Baker; Black Church; Richard Nixon; John F. Kennedy; Elvis Presley; Stevie Wonder; Aretha Franklin; O.J Simpson; Kent State; Jackson State&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:2,&quot;4&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:14281427}}">Montgomery Bus Boycott; Rosa Parks; Teenage Pregnancy; Individualism; Segregation; Civil Rights Movement; Martin Luther King Jr.; Barack Obama; Black Nationals; Black Veterans; Dorothy Height; Ella Baker; Black Church; Richard Nixon; John F. Kennedy; Elvis Presley; Stevie Wonder; Aretha Franklin; O.J Simpson; Kent State; Jackson State</span> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 152:21 Subject LCSH Historians; Authors; Scholars; College teachers; Baldwin, Lewis V., 1949--Interviews Accessibility Copy/Paste below: Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Rights Statement Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Dr. Lewis Baldwin Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Baldwin, Lewis V., 1949- ; McKiernan, Stephen Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/wav Subject The topic of the resource Historians; Authors; Scholars; College teachers; Baldwin, Lewis V., 1949--Interviews Description An account of the resource Dr. Lewis Baldwin is a historian, author, and scholar. Dr. Lewis is a Professor of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University. He specializes in the history of the Black churches in the United States. Dr. Baldwin received his Ph.D. in American Christianity at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010-03-25 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.19a; McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.19b Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2017-03-14 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. McKiernan Interviews Extent The size or duration of the resource. 172:21 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/05a718f47a5e61246fcbd73ad11f5c3e.jpg 101244ed7ce43f2d18df3e769c6cbb70 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/a8e1716992cecb828b5d50455cbf8a32.mp3 54556f28c6abec7b683ab8dfcc8a8ba2 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Audio interviews Title A name given to the resource McKiernan Interviews Description An account of the resource Stephen McKiernan's collection of interviews includes more than two hundred interviews with prominent figures of the 1960s, which were collected between the mid-1990s to 2023 The collection provides narratives of people who were actively involved in or witnessed events in the 1960s, an era which spurred profound cultural and political transformation in the twentieth century. Interviewees include politicians, artists, scholars, musicians, authors, and veterans who delve into the decade’s most prominent issues and events, including the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the anti-war movement, women’s rights, gay rights, segregation, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Hippies, Yippies, and individualism.<br /><br /> <h3>The McKiernan 22</h3> <div>Stephen McKiernan interviewed legends of the 1960s. When asked in 2021 where one should start when sifting through his vast collection, he provided the following list:</div> <ul> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/854">Julian Bond</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1866">Bobby Muller</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1175">Craig McNamara</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/910">Dr. Arthur Levine</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/837">Diane Carlson Evans</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/942">Dr. Ellen Schrecker</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/876">Dr. Lee Edwards</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/841">Peter Coyote</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1233">Dr. Roosevelt Johnson</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/899">Rennie Davis</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1222">Kim Phuc</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/917">George McGovern</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/833">Frank Schaeffer</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/840">Rev. Dr. Frank Forrester Church </a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1240">Dr. Marilyn Young</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/842">James Fallows</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/835">Joseph Lee Galloway</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/911">John Lewis</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/839">Paul Critchlow</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/888">Steve Gunderson</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1159">Charles Kaiser</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/2407">Joseph Lewis</a></li> </ul> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Stephen McKiernan Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In copyright. Template: Simple Audio Player (Amplitude.js) This template displays an audio player with the first attached image file as the 'cover image'. For its audio source, the template looks for the first attached audio file. If additional audio files exist, they should be combined using audio editing software, or a separate Omeka item should be made for each part. Date of Interview 2009-12-01 Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Stephen McKiernan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed John S. Baky Language English Biographical Text John Baky is the Dean of Libraries, Emeritus &amp; Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at La Salle University. <span>He earned his Bachelor’s degree in English literature from Gettysburg College, Master’s degrees from Columbia University and Wesleyan University, and a certificate from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education.&nbsp;</span>Baky was in the Army (1969-1971) and served in Vietnam from 1970-1971 where he received a Bronze Star.&nbsp; In 1980 he joined the library staff at LaSalle University where he founded the Imaginative Representations of the Vietnam War Collection that centered on how the transition of that war played out in the literature. He oversaw one of the most unique Special Collections in the world that oversees 3,500 items that include novels, short stories, comics, photography, poetry, films, music (Bob Dylan Collection is special), videos, TV productions, and graphic arts. Baky, from the outset, had first-hand knowledge of Southeast Asia as a former Army First Lieutenant assigned to the infantry division. Digital Publisher Binghamton University Libraries Digital Format audio/mp4 Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data 2 Microcassettes Material Type Sound Interview Format Video or Audio Audio Keywords <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;John F. Kennedy Inaugural Address; Jungle School; Vietnam War; Veterans; Military Surplus; Students for a Democratic Society; Sexism; Stonewall riots; Richard Nixon; Spiro Agnew; Dwight D. Eisenhower; Robert McNamara; Civil Rights; Benjamin Spock; Jerry Rubin; Gloria Steinem; Daniel Ellsberg&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:2,&quot;4&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:14281427}}">John F. Kennedy Inaugural Address; Jungle School; Vietnam War; Veterans; Military Surplus; Students for a Democratic Society; Sexism; Stonewall riots; Richard Nixon; Spiro Agnew; Dwight D. Eisenhower; Robert McNamara; Civil Rights; Benjamin Spock; Jerry Rubin; Gloria Steinem; Daniel Ellsberg</span> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 150:15 Subject LCSH Librarians; Soldiers; La Salle University; Baky, John S.--Interviews Accessibility Copy/Paste below: Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Rights Statement Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with John Baky Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Baky, John S. ; McKiernan, Stephen Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/wav Subject The topic of the resource Librarians; Soldiers; La Salle University; Baky, John S.--Interviews Description An account of the resource John Baky is the Director of Libraries at La Salle University and the Curator of Rare Book and Manuscript. Baky served in the United States Army from 1969-1971,specifically the Vietnam War. He completed his undergraduate work at Gettysburg College. He received a degree in Library Science from Columbia University and a Master’s Degree in Liberal Arts from Wesleyan University. John Baky is the Dean of Libraries, Emeritus & Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at La Salle University. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in English literature from Gettysburg College, Master’s degrees from Columbia University and Wesleyan University, and a certificate from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. Baky was in the Army (1969-1971) and served in Vietnam from 1970-1971 where he received a Bronze Star.  In 1980 he joined the library staff at LaSalle University where he founded the Imaginative Representations of the Vietnam War Collection that centered on how the transition of that war played out in the literature. He oversaw one of the most unique Special Collections in the world that oversees 3,500 items that include novels, short stories, comics, photography, poetry, films, music (Bob Dylan Collection is special), videos, TV productions, and graphic arts. Baky, from the outset, had first-hand knowledge of Southeast Asia as a former Army First Lieutenant assigned to the infantry division. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009-12-01 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.18a ; McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.18b Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2017-03-14 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. McKiernan Interviews Extent The size or duration of the resource. 150:15 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/3f400c1d25d82b746b81cf07ad20d83b.jpg 5dbcc26e1e34e42395300a3733e0f57e https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/da609577937f41936d7db512b2e12e70.mp3 584dbbc537c7c8ba6871440fdbf5f244 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Audio interviews Title A name given to the resource McKiernan Interviews Description An account of the resource Stephen McKiernan's collection of interviews includes more than two hundred interviews with prominent figures of the 1960s, which were collected between the mid-1990s to 2023 The collection provides narratives of people who were actively involved in or witnessed events in the 1960s, an era which spurred profound cultural and political transformation in the twentieth century. Interviewees include politicians, artists, scholars, musicians, authors, and veterans who delve into the decade’s most prominent issues and events, including the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the anti-war movement, women’s rights, gay rights, segregation, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Hippies, Yippies, and individualism.<br /><br /> <h3>The McKiernan 22</h3> <div>Stephen McKiernan interviewed legends of the 1960s. When asked in 2021 where one should start when sifting through his vast collection, he provided the following list:</div> <ul> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/854">Julian Bond</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1866">Bobby Muller</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1175">Craig McNamara</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/910">Dr. Arthur Levine</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/837">Diane Carlson Evans</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/942">Dr. Ellen Schrecker</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/876">Dr. Lee Edwards</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/841">Peter Coyote</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1233">Dr. Roosevelt Johnson</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/899">Rennie Davis</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1222">Kim Phuc</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/917">George McGovern</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/833">Frank Schaeffer</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/840">Rev. Dr. Frank Forrester Church </a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1240">Dr. Marilyn Young</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/842">James Fallows</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/835">Joseph Lee Galloway</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/911">John Lewis</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/839">Paul Critchlow</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/888">Steve Gunderson</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1159">Charles Kaiser</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/2407">Joseph Lewis</a></li> </ul> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Stephen McKiernan Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In copyright. Template: Simple Audio Player with Transcription This template displays an audio player by Amplitude.js with a scrollable transcription which is loaded from the "Transcription" metadata field. This template displays an audio player with the first attached image file as the 'cover image'. For its audio source, the template looks for the first attached audio file. If additional audio files exist, they should be combined using audio editing software, or a separate Omeka item should be made for each part. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Stephen McKiernan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Bettina Apthker Language English Biographical Text <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Dr. Bettina Apthker is a political activist, radical feminist, academic, and author. As a former member of the Communist Party USA she was active in civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and has worked in developing feminist studies since the late 1970s. Dr. Apthker has a Ph.D. in History of Consciousness from UC Santa Cruz.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:15105,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;11&quot;:4,&quot;12&quot;:0,&quot;14&quot;:[null,2,0],&quot;15&quot;:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;16&quot;:10}">Dr. Bettina Apthker is a political activist, radical feminist, academic, and author. As a former member of the Communist Party USA, she was active in civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s and 1970s and has worked in developing feminist studies since the late 1970s. Dr. Apthker has a Ph.D. in History of Consciousness from UC Santa Cruz.</span> Digital Publisher Binghamton University Libraries Digital Format audio/mp4 Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data MicroCassette Material Type Sound Interview Format Video or Audio Audio Date of Interview ND Keywords <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Protests; UC Berkeley; Free Speech Movement; Communist Party; Civil Rights; Police; Holocaust; WWII; Black Panthers; Weathermen; Feminism; Activism; Contraceptives; Montgomery Bus Boycott; Baby boom generation; Sexism; Equal Rights Amendment; Patriarchy; Women's Suffrage; Equality; McCarthy; Government Corruption; Fear of Activism; Vietnam Memorial; Kent State; Jackson State; Watergate; Summer of Love; Woodstock; 1968; Bobby Kennedy Assassination; Hippies and Yippies; Vietnam Veterans&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:3,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;4&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:14281427}}">Protests; UC Berkeley; Free Speech Movement; Communist Party; Civil Rights; Police; Holocaust; WWII; Black Panthers; Weathermen; Feminism; Activism; Contraceptives; Montgomery Bus Boycott; Baby boom generation; Sexism; Equal Rights Amendment; Patriarchy; Women's Suffrage; Equality; McCarthy; Government Corruption; Fear of Activism; Vietnam Memorial; Kent State; Jackson State; Watergate; Summer of Love; Woodstock; 1968; Bobby Kennedy Assassination; Hippies and Yippies; Vietnam Veterans</span> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 61:26 Subject LCSH Civil rights movements—United States--20th century; Peace movements—United States--20th century; Feminists; Political activists--United States; Apthker, Bettina--Interviews Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound, or alternative text from a visual medium McKiernan Interviews Interview with: Dr. Bettina Apthker Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan Transcriber: Kimberly F Mourao Date of interview: ND -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (Start of Interview) 00:02 SM: Testing, one, two testing. And we can take a break too if you want to. 00:07 BA: Well, actually, I have other things I have to do today so, and since Will Song was late, which you are very gracious in waiting, but- 00:15 SM: Okay, when you think of the (19)60s and the early (19)70s, what is the first thing that comes to your mind? 00:21 BA: Huge crowds of people and protests, demonstrations. 00:25 SM: Can you kind of give a little detail, were you connected to those? 00:30 BA: Yeah. You know, the first thing that I mean, in the, just in the context of this conversation, the, we had very, a week of very dramatic rallies at UC Berkeley, in the climax of the Free Speech Movement, in which I co-lead with Savio. And, and there is this, many moments there. But when I when I think about it, you know, if you asked me what I remember, was, so you probably know this incident, but we had all been arrested, and we had been released, after we had occupied the administration building. And President of the University was Clark Kerr. And he had assembled everybody from the campus at the Greek Theater, it was December 7th. And the objective was to take back control of the university from those of us that had disrupted it, get the faculty on the stage, all the chairs of different committees and everything like that. And he gave a speech. And in his speech, he said, you know, invoke the idea of the university as a center of light and learning. But he did not, he did not concede the major point on freedom of speech, which was why we had sat in in the first place, right. So, when he was done, Mario and myself, and I think it was Art Goldberg got up. And we approached the stage. And Mario, his intention was to make an announcement that the Free Speech Movement will hold its rally on the steps of Sproul Hall, which was our traditional place, the administration building, immediately following and ask everybody to come down there, and we will give our response. And as Mario approach the podium, police officers rushed out from the back of the stage grabbed him by the throat, actually the tie’s tie. And, and, and arrested him, pulled him back away from the microphone. And of course, pandemonium broke out in the, in the theater there were 20,000 people. And Kerr was still on stage. He was in the back looking, he knows it is a mistake, he was looking to shoes, he still had his written notes in his hand, and Art, and I faced the crowd, and it was like, there was going to be a riot. And so, we took up a chant, “let him speak, let him speak,” you know, and the crowd took it up. And then moments later, Mario was released, and he was up, and they turned the microphone back on. And he stood up. And he said, he just said to everybody, “come with us to Sproul Hall where the FSM will hold its rally.” And I think he said, “Let us leave this disastrous place.” So, we all left then. And so, the image in my mind is, there were 20,000, maybe more people in Sproul Hall Plaza immediately following. And so, if you know that Plaza, which you do cause you are from the Bay Area. So, you know, it is huge, and every single space was taken, and they were kids up on the, on the roof of the Student Union Building, across the way and the, I mean, it was called the Bears the, the restaurant, there was a restaurant there too. And there were people on the roof of the restaurant and every, every imaginable thing, we had our microphones set up and we gave a rally to great cheers and so forth. So that is like a moment that I completely identify with that period of, of my life in that period of the (19)60s. 04:26 SM: Would you say that moment more than any other shaped you when you were young? Was there something you did? Well, is there, is there one event that made you who you are even before you got to Berkeley? 04:38 BA: Well, in my case, that is a hard question because I came from such a, you know, my father, my parents were communists, and I came from a radical family already. So, I was already shaped in terms of politics in a certain kind of way. But there is a particular moment that, that was very personally empowering for me. In the, in the fall of protest, and that was October. I think it was October 1. Yes, it was the night of October 1. So, this was the start of the Free Speech Movement. And we had set up tables of the civil rights organizations right in the center of Sproul Plaza. And the police had come, and they had arrested Jack Weinberg, who was sitting at the table for the Congress of Racial Equality. And they brought a police car at 12 noon. I mean, I do not know what they were thinking. And so, everybody was coming out of class. I mean, they were just thousands of people coming out of class and did not know anything, you know. And they arrested Jack, and they put him in this police car, and I was there on the plaza, you know, hundreds and hundreds of other people and somebody shouted, “sit down.” So, we all sat down around the police car. And we prevented them from moving and from arresting Jack. And that is the start of the Free Speech Movement. Well, that night, the night of October 1, what happened was we used the top of the police car as a speaker's podium. And we would take our shoes off, and we climb up onto the roof of the car. And we were shouting- 06:23 SM: There is that picture that David has on the front of the- 06:25 BA: Yeah, yeah, I think it is picture Mario. Well, that night, I got up to speak at the top of the police car. And I had never given a public speech before. It was the first time I had ever given a public, that was, ever said anything in public. And it was in, it was at night, and, and then I would have been able to see people but the TV cam- the TV crews were there, and the lights were in my eyes. So, I could, I could, I could feel the crowd, but I could not see them. So, it was pitch black, and then another light coming in your eyes. And I started to talk with, with what I hoped was considerable, you know, feeling about the issue of freedom of speech. And, and this, this moment, and I invoked the quote from Frederick Douglass. That power concedes nothing without a demand. And when I said those words, and I said, you know where they were from, the crowd roared back as approval. And as they roared back at me, as they roared back at me, I felt this tremendous sense of empowerment. Just a tremendous sense of empowerment. And it was a glorious feeling. So, it was not, I was someone that had not experienced that before. I do not mean that I felt powerful in quite that way. But I mean, I felt human. I felt heard, I had been heard. And if you know something about my personal background, and you have read into it, politics and so forth, you know that that the emotional significance for me, of actually having my voice hurt. And it was a tremendous moment. 08:14 SM: Wow, wow. What, it is interesting that the three people that I am interviewing yesterday, and today are all born 1944. So, I consider you boomers, even though the classification is (19)46. You know, it is really not clear. But when you look at the young people of that era, with the (19)60s and the (19)70s. What would you consider their strengths, some of their weaknesses? 08:46 BA: Well, I cannot, sorry, for my voice. I cannot give an overview. I cannot give an overall estimate. I just know the people that I knew and the people that I knew from the civil rights movement and the Black Panther, I knew people in the Black Panther Party and of course in the Communist Party. So, one of the points I want to make here is that the Berkeley campus itself was it was almost exclusively white. Because this is before affirmative action. If you go to the Berkeley campus, now it is transformed. But there was a total of 100 black students on the Berkeley campus in 1964. Out of 27,500 students. That is something like the statistic, but I knew a lot of African American folks and, and other people from other races because of my political background, because of the political work that I did. So, I just wanted to make that as an observation. And I would say that the people that I knew in my generation, younger and older, some were a little older than me very idealistic, very much informed by World War II and the Holocaust, it is very, very fresh in our minds. In fact, in one of his speeches, Mario actually invoked the Holocaust, in which he talked about the pictures that he saw as a child, and that he cannot understand that the world has not changed as a result of what happens. I think for a lot of us who are Jewish, like myself, the Holocaust, the experience of fascism, the experience of World War II, was very fresh. And, and, and compelled opposition to racism, and, of course, anti-Semitism. But in this country, racism was very, very prevalent, and a tremendous commitment to never allowing that kind of violence to happen again. And they were very strong. If you actually look at those statistics, you will see that a very disproportionate number of the white people that went south in the (19)60s were Jewish. And I think that it comes out of this feeling. So we were, we were white, but we had this, you know, in this country, a Jew can be a white, but a Jew could also be a person of color, depending upon their skin color. Right, there is Jews who are very dark complected, you know, but I am talking about, you know, Jews who were Ashkenazi who were white like myself, but we were not quite white. A little complicated. And you had that awareness. And so, I found my generation to be very, very idealistic. And if there was a weakness, and I think there was a weakness, and it came out of this idealism, that was also a, among some people, tremendous frustration, at the lack of responsiveness of the power structure, which led I think, people to commit very unfortunate acts in the late (19)60s and (19)70s, part of the Weather Underground and Weathermen, and yeah, I did not agree with that. I have never agreed with those forms of violence, you know. So, I do not think that they were they were a relatively small number of people, overall, in terms of who was involved in, and I put the Black Panther Party in a different category, because in terms of the use of self-defense, you know, because although there has been a lot of publicity about the Black Panthers, having guns and all of that, and they did defend themselves with the police. They were constantly, young black people in that period, were constantly under attack, constantly being arrested, harassed shot, as they still are, I mean, it is still going on. So, they were not engaged blowing up buildings or something like that, which is what the Weatherman did. They were, they were very much engaged in trying to defend and protect their communities. I think that was why the Panthers had such a tremendous draw. So, they also had enormous idealism. I see the idealism that too, it just took a different slightly different form. And you think about the in the Panthers, you know, they, especially the women, like Erica Huggins, and, and Kathleen Cleaver and Elaine Brown, they, they ran breakfast for children, they ran freedom schools, they ran health clinics, they provided people with free clothing. In other words, they really tried to do very concrete, compassionate actions in their home communities. It did not get a lot of publicity. You know, if you think about Panthers, everybody thinks guns, you know, they do not think about all this tremendous daily work that- 14:11 SM: Kathleen, I actually been communicating with her down at Emory. She is working on a book right now. I think she is working on a biography. And she has agreed to be interviewed by me, but not until May. Because she has gotten to concentrate on getting the book done. One of the things, one of the criticisms of the, this era, the, the idealistic young people from the (19)60s and (19)70s, is that they have not followed through as they have gotten older. Now, I know you can only give the experiences of your friends, but have you been disappointed in some of your friends that what you saw at Berkeley, one of the things I like about David, David Lance Goines, is he was so committed he did not even go back to Berkeley. And he had not changed one iota. You know, he is an artist, and he is proud of his artwork and everything, but he has not changed, he is still the same guy he was then. Are you pleased with your peers, or are you somewhat disappointed in them? And the second part of the question is this. One of the things that really gets me is when the Newt Gingrich’s of the world or the George Will’s of the world, whenever they get a chance, will take shots at the (19)60s and (19)70s as the reason why we have problems in our society today, with the increasing divorce rate, the drug culture, the lack of respect for authority, the victim culture, you know, all the bad things happened then, and that is why we have problems today and we are going to try to fix them. So that is kind of a two-part question. 15:38 BA: Well, the first part, no, I am not at all disappointed in my generation. One of the things that you do not understand when you are young is that you have a life to live, a full life. So, David, for example, goes on to become a great artist. He is a tremendous graphic artist. Jack Weinberg, was the other example. Which is now one of the key leaders of Greenpeace. Very important. Jackie Goldberg, was one of the leaders of the Free Speech Movement, taught school for a long time in Los Angeles, then ran for the school board and ran for the LA City Council then joined the California State Legislature. She did tremendous work, built tremendous coalition of gay, lesbians, blacks. Chicanos, you know, Latino community, made a real coalition and was a very radical progressive person in Sacramento for twenty years. She recently retired. You know, if you look at Mario, even Mario himself, he was very, he was the same guy in terms of his activism, up until the time of his death, which was in (19)96. He was involved in the struggles to protect immigrants, you know, to reform immigration law. He did remedial mathematics teaching at Sonoma State College, in order to help mostly working-class kids of various races to be able to succeed in the university. I continued to be very critical of university hierarchy. And, you know, the politics that existed there, he was also a brilliant physicist. So, you know and say myself, I have taught for thirty years at UC Santa Cruz, I taught a very popular introduction to feminism class that had an annual enrollment of five hundred. And it was a course that my students filmed. So, it is available on DVDs now, but, but my point in talking about it is that it was it was to infuse students with a sense of empowerment, especially women, because I am part of the feminist movement, and activism, and what it means and now I am teaching a class called socialism, I am, excuse me, not socialism, called feminism and social justice. So, but I just started, you know, a new class. And so that is in myself, you know, and everybody. Margot Adler, who was part of the Free Speech Movement, is the, is a leading journalist for NPR. She is the head of the NPR in New York, she published a book many years ago called Drawing Down the Moon, which is a study of Wicca. And in the United States, you know, the resurgence of, of Wicca and the spirituality in that book is still in print. It is like, you know, one of the major texts, very progressive, very important journalists, NPR, as we all know, is plays a critical role. So, when I think of, or Angela Davis, if we want another person, you know, Angela has been out there in the trenches for thirty, thirty-five, forty years. She almost single handedly launched a national, international movement against the prison system. And the way it was set up and was finishing a book on that subject. She taught in the history of consciousness program at UC Santa Cruz, where I am for quite a number of years training graduate students to engage in radical intellectual work. She is, she is one of the she is one of the few recognized public intellectuals in the United States and internationally, you know, as public intellectual. So, I mean, these are examples, we could go on, but these are examples of people- 19:59 SM: So, what the George Will’s, and I do not single them out. But it is very obvious that when you see their writings, they love to take shots at the era. And that the permissiveness, the all the things that I had just mentioned, the drug culture- 20:17 BA: You know, that is also a very stereotypical view of that period. Because what, what the mass media did in a certain kind of way is focus on the drug culture, you know, the so-called permissiveness and free love and all of that. But, you know, try to give a little historical perspective, okay. The changes in sexual behavior had to do with the invention of the pill, which made it possible for women to engage in in sex, premarital sex. Without the continual fear of pregnancy. It is revolutionary, it was revolutionary. Did people get pregnant when they did not intend to? Yes, of course. And then the other thing that happens is the legalization of abortion in 1973. I know we are still fighting about it. But it made it possible for people to engage in sexual union without, you know, guys have been doing it. You know, it is, from a feminist point of view it is very interesting, you understand? Guys have been doing this forever. Guys. I am on tape. So, guys fool around, like, there is no tomorrow, you know, especially young guys. And I mean in, everywhere in the world, as far as I know. And there are no consequences, right? Because they do not get pregnant. So, they can just, you know, have a good time. feel like it is great. And all this sort of stuff they want to, but then, and then you look at, you want to talk about promiscuity, guys are promiscuous. But when women became promiscuous, then we have a promiscuous generation. Why is that? Because there is a double standard. And guys like Wills and these other, you know, these other commentators. That is it. That is really what you are talking about? What happens to the women, that is what they are talking about? They never say that because women are always invisible. But that is really what that movement is about. 22:30 SM: How have you or even Angela, could you know, or how have you been able to deal with the critics like David Horowitz and, and others who label certain individuals, obviously, the experiences you had when you were young, you kept your idealism, your sense of empowerment and your belief system, you kept it, whereas others have given in maybe, and accepted the status quo again. How have you been able to handle the critics like that, you know, and I know David, David used to be in the ramparts I interviewed him for the book too. And he is a real good speaker, he is a real good guy, he changed and everything, but he is really out there. He has got that book on the one-hundred professors- 23:13 BA: I am in it. 23:13 SM: Yeah. And Larry Davidson's on his list from West Chester University, but not in that book, but he has got Larry on his list, along with Bill Hewitt from West Chester, but how do you? How did you and Angela, how do you handle that? 23:28 BA: Well, I cannot speak for Angela, so I am not going to do that. I do not pay much attention to it. That is just nonsense. It is just nonsense. So, I just, you know, I mean, if you look at Horowitz’s book, for example, everything, almost everything he says about me, is, is untrue. It is, I am not saying I do not know whether he lies, whether, whether this is deliberate lies, or whether there is just an incompetence of research. I really do not know. But virtually every so-called facts in the paragraphs about me were wrong. I mean, even basic, innocuous information was wrong. I do not have it here, you know, it is in my office there, I can go, I mean, so I do not pay much attention to it. He was on Fox News not very long ago, and he was attacking me on Fox News. And I came into class the next day, and I told my students, you know, and I get a cheering ovation. I mean, they think it is funny. It is nothing. And most of this is nonsense. And the other thing I would say about it, and whenever I have come under attack, I do not give it much energy. It is, you do not put, do not put energy into it. This is like sort of advice to no energy because that just fuels it. So, he can have whatever viewpoint he wants to have. He has freedom of speech; he can publish whatever he wants. That is his business. I know- 24:56 SM: I know he had a very big problem with the Black Panthers because one of his associates came on our campus. One of the things I want to ask you, when did the (19)60s begin, in your opinion, your view? And when did it end? 25:10 BA: Well, I think the (19)60s in terms of the civil rights movement, myself, and I think it began in the mid (19)50s. With you know, this is always, I am a historian. So, when did something begin? Well- 25:31 SM: I am a history major, political science double major. 25:35 BA: Because then this led to this, and then that led to this, you know, I am saying, but I usually think about it from the point of view of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, in (19)50, you know, the winter of (19)55, (19)56, there is stuff before then. But I usually, I mean, you could go back to the integration schools, you know, Arkansas, Little Rock, you know, you could, maybe, maybe there, but I usually think I will tell you why with the Montgomery Bus Boycott, because that was the first definable visible mass action, mass, you know, hundreds, thousands of people involved. And, and I do want to say that the women, the black women in in Birmingham and Montgomery were the backbone of that movement, because they, they provided the carpools that that arranged for people to get to doctor's appointments and get to work and, you know, provided food, and I mean, they, they were just it was the committee of one hundred. Committee of one-hundred black women. But anyway, I date it from them. Then the first march for integration on Washington was in (19)57. I was on it. There was a second one in (19)58. I was on that, too. And these were, you know, I do not know if there were thousands of people, but there were hundreds of people, we took buses, we camped out- 27:07 SM: Dr. King was in (19)57. 27:09 BA: Yes he was. Yeah. And, and then of course, by (19)60, you have the lunch counters, (19)60, (19)60, (19)61, the Freedom Rides, and then you are off, you know, and then the voter registration is (19)63, (19)64. And I think this is another thing in terms of how people view the (19)60s in the, in the sort of media type view of the (19)60s is they see it as white. But see, the backbone of the (19)60s was black. 27:50 SM: You raise a good point, because the fact that I have met with the individual, three or four interviews ago, said when I when I saw that you were doing something on the boomer generation, I think of boomers as white. And I do not, and then I tried to explain to him that I am trying to get boomers from all ethnic backgrounds, sexual orientations, you name it, and then I understand what you are trying to do now. But when I first see that term, Boomer, I think white and white male. 28:19 BA: Yeah, absolutely. Because that is the dominant media image, you know, that is absolutely right. You know, so that is why I say what I am, you know, what I am saying is, the (19)60s is, is a fundamentally in many ways, a black era. 28:36 SM: When did it end? Was there a was there a watershed moment when you date it. You know a lot of these young people moving on in jobs and careers, and they are still doing great things as leaders of different organizations. But was there something where you thought “it is over”? 28:54 BA: Well, you can mark it from different moments. I mean in the context; I would use is the fierceness of the repression. See, by the time Reagan comes in, as governor, Nixon comes in as President, Hoover, of course COINTELPRO, the mobilization of federal and state authority to crush this movement. It takes it a while to mobilize because it took them by surprise, but the effort to crush them when you think about what COINTELPRO did, you know and the numbers of young black people who were murdered, like Fred Hampton, for example, and Mark Clark in Chicago, I mean it is, or, or Bunchy Carter and John, John Huggins in Los Angeles. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. The deliberate murder, assassinated, they were assassinated. This is horrific. So, the movement took one blow after another. People were arrested. You know, think about Mumia still in jail. You know, Mumia Abu Jamal. It took one blow after another. And then there was a there was an anti-war protest that was inadequate. It was in Washington, DC and an SDS had organized it- 30:34 SM: (19)69. David Hawk, I interviewed him yesterday. 30:37 BA: Yeah, no, there was mass arrests. At that protest, the way I remember it, they released everybody afterwards. But they rounded everybody up, they rounded up thousands of people. And then they, then they did not know what to do with them. And I do not know where they put them, and then they let them go. Because they could not process that many people or do anything about it. Kent State 1970, Jackson State, same time. So, the movement is still I think, you know, there is still momentum, there is still momentum. And then I would mark the end of the movement with Angela Davis's freedom. We won her freedom in (19)72. And then I think the momentum after that is much diminished. Even though even though you have to say, the mobilizations against the war in Vietnam continued until (19)73, When the war ended. 31:36 SM: That is when Vietnam Veterans against the war come and took it over. 31:39 BA: Yeah. So, right. Nixon ends the war in (19)73. So, we are still out there. I was still part of the mobilization committees and things like that. So (19)72, (19)73, Angela’s acquitted on June 4, 1972. You know, and the war ends in (19)73. Right? Remember it is December or something? (19)75. 32:00 SM: (19)75 is when helicopter on the roof on April 30th. The very end. Well, it is interesting. I- 32:09 BA: So that is about when I end the era. 32:11 SM: I know, I know, the whole thing. When I was in my first job with George Jackson, the books and everything. And while I was in California, I actually did a concert in San Quentin Prison, and we broke a janitor by the San Francisco child's fancy, because I know the Bread and Roses group, Joan Baez’s sister had been able to do concert there. But they were really limiting the concerts. And so, I tried. And then finally, within a year, I was able to get in there with the jazz group, and it was one heck of an experience. Machine guns, the loved them, they loved the janitor, there is a rock group that came, and they booed them and threw apples at them and within five minutes, but that whole scene out there, I do remember, I want to, I got two parts here, one of the one of the general questions or one or more specific, and that is the second side. But I want to ask you about the boomer women. That is your age group. And that group that through 1964. Your thoughts on boomer women, all colors, sexual orientation, you name it, because one of the things that I found through studying history is the sexism that took place within the movements, within the anti-war movement, within the civil rights movement. And then I am, now I am even asking more about and now I, when David mixtures says “oh yeah it has been in the gay and lesbian movement. Oh, yeah.” And the Native American movement, the Chicano movement, and there was some of that because I have already spoken to a couple people of Chicano movement the same way. What is it about all these great, these very important movements that evolved in the early or late (19)60s, early (19)70s? And they use the example of civil rights movement. And women were in secondary roles. We all know, the women's movement kind of evolved from there, but is there truth to that. And in your views, what do you think about all these movements? 34:09 BA: Well, men were tremendously sexist. Just tremendously sexist. And they had no clue they were completely clueless. But in fairness, which I have to say, is some of the women you know, consciousness evolved slowly. And in particular conditions and circumstances. So, one of the things you have to acknowledge or you have to say is that Betty Friedan’s book was published in (19)59. I think it was the Feminine Mystique. When Kennedy ran for office, President Kennedy, he wanted Eleanor Roosevelt's endorsement and she said, I will give you your, my endorsement if you promise to establish a Commission on the Status of Women when you become president and investigate the institutional discrimination against women. So, President Kennedy said: Yes, I will do that, she endorsed him. She was the titular head of that commission when he came into office. And it was actually headed by Esther Peterson, who, as you probably know, was in FDR’s cabinet. And Peterson did a thorough study of institutional discrimination against women in housing, employment, education, everything. So, there was a tremendous report came out in (19)62. So, I remember those things. I did not read the Feminine Mystique until later. But I remember Mrs. Roosevelt, and I remember the, you know, the Peterson report, the commission report, I remember all of that. And I remember thinking about it. Because so I, here is what I am trying to say is the men ridiculed any kind of feminists or women centered movement, these are radical progressive men. I remember conferences of SDS, they were awful, they ridiculed, they booed, they hiss, they did not want to hear anything about it, they made jokes about it, and so forth. This was true in the Communist Party, also, except in the Communist Party, there had always been an understanding of the inequality of women in the workplace, equal pay for equal work and that sort of thing. So, there was a, there was a tradition in the communist movement of understanding, discrimination against women. But they saw it as a function of class, class struggle, not as something that had an independent existence. nobody talked about violence against women. We had all experienced it, but nobody talked about it, because it was to the woman's shame. Now. So, I think all these things are true. And if you look at the histories that have been written about the (19)60s by men, and you talked about it, Todd Catlin, and stuff like that. If the women's movement enters those histories at all, it is as a minor point. And they hardly talk about any of the women who were leaders of the movements. It is amazing. It is amazing to me, somebody just published a book on the left, I just got it on my email. And I do not know the name of the book, it must be the History of the Left in the (19)60s and (19)70s and does not mention any of the women's radical organizing that was going on. This is hundreds of pages, and there is no mention of it. 38:09 SM: Even when the Vietnam Memorial was built, Diane Carlson Evans had to fight to get the Women's Memorial. And a lot of people they do not know the battles behind the scenes, where she was called every name in the book, but she will not be, and she was just trying to get the Women’s Memorial. 38:23 BA: Yeah so, so my point is, yes, sexism was very deep and very profound. And it infused everything in all of the movements. And it was true, regardless of racial designation. But there were differences. For example, in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, black women held leadership positions, and lead field projects. white women in SNCC did not, the white women in SNCC were, they did voter registration work, they did dangerous work like that. They did office work, and so forth. They were voter registration workers, but most of the leadership, of course, it was black in general. But, so, black women have not, it was different, it is not that there is not sexism among black men there is, but it has a different history. So, I do not want to just lump everything together. And no, that is not true. Like Ella Baker, for example, Fannie Lou Hamer as another example, they are like key leaders, about civil rights movement, often unsung. Now, now they are known, you know, but there is, there is definitely on the part of men, which is, the women are just invisible. They are just there, but they are invisible. So, and then the other thing I am trying to say is that those of us as women who were involved in these movements, slowly developed the consciousness about sexism. It is not like we had it all at once or something. But because we were involved in freedom struggles for everybody else on the planet, it occurred to us at some point that we did not have very much. And people, you know, women began to talk to each other. And the so-called consciousness raising groups formed, you know, in the late (19)60s and the (19)70s, which were very important, informal groups in which women started actually talk about their own lives. And out of that experience, a feminist theory emerged, which had to do with the idea of there was something called “patriarchy” and it had a history. And there was something called “violence against women” and most women or a very large percentage of women had experienced it. And you know, and we began to define what you know, and then we gobbled up the Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir. You know, these other things, and everybody all of a sudden discovered, Rosa Luxemburg, and what is the other woman? I am trying to. Emma Goldman. You know, and all of a sudden, we are like, Holy smokes, you know, and then there is the suffrage. You know, the saying “you discover your history” is what happened. 41:21 SM: You know Johnnetta Cole who was president of Spelman- 41:23 BA: Yeah, I know Johnnetta quite well. 41:24 SM: She wrote a great book when she was president there. And then there, she talked. And she talked about the women that, from the (19)60s and (19)70s, about the split that took place between the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement, and that Kent State, like there was no students there of color. They were all told not to be there, there was a split happening. I know, at Ohio State when I was there, I saw the split. And so, she talks about that, too. But she also talks about Boomer women, or women as a whole who were black, who were, they wanted to identify more with racism, and not with the, the anti-war, and certainly not with gay and lesbian issues, and she did a tremendous job in that book of describing the conflicts, which I still see today at the university, that we all come together in a time of crisis like 9/11, and we were all standing there. But how many other times do we come together? You know, and because I know African American men who were gay at West Chester, who were afraid to walk across the hall to the gay and lesbian office for fear of being labeled, and it shows that there is still that happening within the community. And I always question what are the boomers gone to who are now reaching sixty-two. And then that particular age and kind of doing what they were doing in the (19)60s, helping these people along, their children and their grandchildren. Do you see that as there is still some conflicts within the boomer African American female community and in the areas of sexual orientation? 43:05 BA: Well yeah because the problem is, you see that. So my first point that I was trying to make to you was just that our own consciousness had to develop. That was where I was going with, my prior comments, now. And then every community was different, you know. So, I mean, there are two kinds of feminists, for example, who are coming out of their own experience in the struggle of Lavasa, you know, on the west coast and in the southwest, so, beginning to react to the sexism that they were experiencing and beginning to talk to each other, because liberation is contagious. Now, the other part of what you are asking about is, there were tremendous contradictions in these movements. For example, white women had almost no experience with race, or racism. Black woman that was what was in their face all the time, it was not that black women were not aware of sexism, especially. I mean, they bore the brunt of violence, especially for white men. So, it was not like they were not aware of it. But they tried to figure out how they were going to unite with black men in order to confront racism. You know, it was very complicated. All I am saying is, it was a complicated struggle. So, it is not a lack of consciousness about sexism. Any more than, I mean, they are perfectly aware of the sexism. And I think, you know, if you think about Ntozake Shange’s play “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide.” That play was a groundbreaking breakthrough play, came out in (19)78. Because it named the violence against women in the black community. And it was a very controversial play and in (19)82 when Alice Walker published “The Color Purple,” a lot of black guys went nuts, attacking her and everything else, but there too she was naming, in that case its incest and, and violence against black women. So, it is not a lack of awareness. It is like, “Where is the priority?” I mean, you are one human being and how many battles can you fight? But white women will completely, almost, almost completely I mean, white women like me who are not but many white, let us put it that way, completely unaware of racism, even women who had been in the south thought “Well, the Klan is racist, but I am not.” You know, not thinking about all their assumptions, you know, it is, these are complicated questions. 45:50 SM: I can remember my first boss, Betty Mensen, after Betty Mensen. She has passed on now, but she the Equal Rights Amendment, why did I say that? I think actually we were, we were halfway through. 46:12 BA: Well, the equal rights amendment was introduced in 1923. Then it gets blocked and blocked and blocked and blocked, it is exactly the same history is suffrage. And another thing that needs to be said, I just want to, I am trying to make a point here, but say that the women's suffrage Okay, we get it in 1920, it was introduced first in about what 1868? Forty- or fifty-year struggle for almost forty years, I think. 46:57 SM: Patriarchy is deep. And men do not want to give up their power and, and privilege. Then say that the suffrage movement, it got intertwined with Southern white Dixiecrats not wanting to extend suffrage at all because they wanted to take it away from black men. So, the major opposition to suffrage, to this to the women's suffrage. The major opposition was from Southern racists, white racists, were trying to prevent it from being passed. So, you needed two thirds of the states, right? Or was it three fourths? Is it two thirds of the state, two thirds, whatever it is to pass it right? So, the last state to endorse women's suffrage and only men are voting, right? So, it is only men in the state legislatures. The last state to pass it is Tennessee. Okay. And it wins by one vote. And who was the guy, this guy named Huberts. I happen to know his history, the guy named Huberts voted for it. And when he was asked by a historian named Eleanor Flexner, “why did you vote for women's suffrage?” He said, “because if I had not, my mother would have killed me.” Now, so the way that women organized the suffrage campaign was, they went to speak to the wives, mothers, daughters of every man in the state legislatures, and then organize the women to pressure the men. That was how they won that campaign. Now, you say the Equal Rights Amendment, right? So that was introduced in (19)23, that was supposed to be a simple constitutional amendment. And it is logjammed at every possible point, it is about patriarchal privilege. That is how I see it. It is about not wanting, not truly wanting equality, because equality is a very deep concept. What would equality mean in a marriage? I mean, if you look at what does equality mean, in a marriage? What does equality mean in the workplace? What does equality mean in education? It is not just you know, if we really believe in equality, then women should have as much to say, as men about everything, the arrangement of human affairs. That is my definition of feminism. Women should have as much to say about everything in the arrangement human affairs, well, that is not true, is it? Who does who is the- who are the architects to design the buildings, who designs the cities, who, who decides allocations if there is going to be allocations for childcare, healthcare, for God's sake, you know, which is going on right now? You know, who is it that takes up the slack when the kids get sick? It is the, it is the women who stay home almost 90 percent, 100 percent of the time. Who takes care of the elderly? I am talking about average families that cannot afford fancy nursing homes. It is the women. Some women have a family, including their husband’s mothers. But a lot of times they cannot stand, moved in because well you cannot put them out. You cannot put them out in the hot in the you know, in the in the desert somewhere, you have to take care of them. So, you say these are very feminist issues, this healthcare things, very feminist issue. But it is always women who take up the slack. It is always women are doing these, performing social services, basically, these are all, this is all interesting. 50:55 SM: Do you think the Equal Rights Amendment will ever be passed. 50:57 BA: I do not know. 50:57 SM: Because I do not see any effort to bring it up again, 51:00 BA: No, it is kind of got dead. After the, there was a big push in (19)70s and then it kind of died, you know, and it, but the opposition to it, you know, the opposition to it is really about the, my point where I was going with this is it is the implications of what equality means. And if you have a constitutional fact like that, then a woman could sue and say, the conditions of my employment are not equal. I am not getting equal pay, then we are talking about economics then we are talking about restructuring the whole economy. No. So all this fluff about the Equal Rights Amendment, like how we got to have unisex toilets and all that, that is just fluff. That is just, that is not really what the issue is. 51:49 SM: Yeah, I see a lot of them on university campuses. 51:51 BA: What? Unisex? Yeah, I mean, you know- 51:54 SM: In the airport and everywhere. I want to read this question. Now, this is two basic issues that I want to deal with here. And one of them is the issue of healing and the other is trust. Qualities that I am not sure, I would like your opinions on, I have to read this. We took a group of students to see Senator Muskie about a year and a half before he died. And we asked this question to him, because the students thought that he was going to respond to the 1968 convention he was at. Do you feel that the boomer generation is still having problems from healing from the divisions that that tore this nation apart in their youth, divisions between black and white, male and female, gay straight, divisions between those who supported the verdict and those who criticize it, division between those who supported the troops and those who did not? Kind of a preface here what did the Wall playing in this process? And do you feel that the boomer generation will go to its grave like the Civil War generation, not truly healing? Am I wrong in thinking this? Or has thirty-five to forty years made this statement “Time heals all wounds” a truth? Basically, what I am saying is, do you think that that generation of students who were at Berkeley in (19)64, the students that went through the (19)60s that at the moratorium in (19)69. And we are talking now about a generation of, I am not even sure they know the exact number of boomers I hear its seventy to seventy-eight million. So, there is, so we are talking about quite a few people here, and probably 15 percent were involved in some sort of- 53:25 BA: I was going to say the vast majority were not involved. 53:26 SM: Yeah, but still 15 percent is a lot. And actually, I am a firm believer that this, that all of them were affected, subconsciously, you could not live through this period without having some sort of a feeling and to share whatever it might be and or come to some sort of revelation later in life that this really did influence me. But your thoughts on whether this is an important thing, or it is just impossible to heal, is healing it problem here in America? Oh, yes, he- 54:00 BA: Oh yes, healing is a problem. We carry our grudges. It is an interesting question. And- 54:15 SM: Let me say that Jim Scruggs wrote the book “To Heal a Nation,” which is his book, I am sure it is probably in here some place, which was “To Heal a Nation” obviously, the Vietnam Memorial was built to help the veterans and certainly their families and the people who died in the war and so forth. It is done a pretty good job. And I have been to the Wall twice. Yeah, I go to the Memorial Day and Veterans Day, have been doing so since (19)94. There is a lot of black ideals on there. I mean, still it helps, but I know a lot of Vietnam vets, I cannot even go there. So, but on to the next statement healing a nation and the question is whether what, what is the Wall done for the nation? And maybe the boomer generation and what and then of course, it is a general question. I asked on healing overall because of all these other divisions. 55:03 BA: Well, my opinion about healing is that it is an individual process. And it has to do with the willingness of individuals. You cannot heal a nation unless individuals heal themselves. Healing begins in the heart. And it really is, it is an individual process, you can create certain conditions that facilitate healing. But and, you know, you can watch, like myself, for example, I try to be very careful about what I say, and to whom I say it and how I say it, and to have what the Buddhists call” right speech.” In other words, not to, I try not to attack, you know, and try to be very careful about anger, you know, very hard, these are hard practices. Building a wall, oh it is fine. I mean, that is not fundamentally where healing happens. In my opinion, healing happens in the individual hearts of people. And it requires intensive work. Nobody can heal you, you must heal yourself. And part of the healing process for each individual is a decision that you are making about the quality of your own life. When you carry anger, when you carry hatred when you carry wounds, you are injuring yourself. And so, the, the ability to, to heal is your own decision. I am an incest survivor, for example. And I write about it in my memoir, and I had to make a decision to forgive my father. 57:23 SM: He is a Big Nicky; I have one of a couple of his books. 57:26 BA: And I had to make that decision. Otherwise, I was going to carry the hatred. The anger, it was more anger was not so, I do not know if it was hatred, but anger, frustration, and other things that it was all part of a constellation of things, because he never saw me as I really was, as I truly was, he only saw me as an extension of himself in my opinion. So, what I said earlier about standing up on top of a police car and making that speech of being heard, that is what I meant. That was a healing moment for me to be heard. Because I was never heard as a child. I was always an extension of my parents. So, what I said had to conform with what they believed, then I could be heard, but then I was not really heard was I? Now, my father helped me to forgive him by asking me to forgive him. So, I had, I was, I was very fortunate in being able to talk to him. I was very fortunate in his response to me, for other people it does not happen that way. But the decision to forgive is your own decision. Now- 58:42 SM: Could you like for example- 58:43 BA: So, you have, so Angela Davis tells an interesting story in public. Very interesting story. When she was a little girl, she was in Birmingham, Alabama. She was one of the, she lived in a, in a home that was called Dynamite Hill. There it was called Dynamite Hill, because there were black families as they moved in the Klan would bomb their homes. So, you know, little kid, right? She was a little kid grows up with feelings about white people. So, she tells the story, I just, she just told that the other day, and remember this the bombing of the Birmingham church. Right and all that, she was, she was a child when that happened. I mean, she remembers it. She remembers bombs going off when she was a little kid, you know, like brushing your teeth in the morning, and she would hear the explosions. So, she told the story. She said the doorbell would ring and she would go to answer the door. And then the person would say, you know, is your mother home or whatever, and she would yell out: Mama, there was a white guy at the door. Or there was a white man at the door, something like that. And her mother would come in and very gently she would say, “Angela, there is a man at the door.” Angela was saying to us, you know, my mother did that. Because my mother did not want me to hate white people. She was teaching me, so, so then but I am just saying, so then that is trying to, you know, in terms of healing here, that was a very important moment that Mrs. Davis was doing for her children, not just Angela, but all of her children, because she had a different consciousness. She was a very radical woman. She was a political activist. She wanted her children to understand that not all white people were enemies. So that so that they would not internalize all that stuff and have to heal from it. See? So, yeah, that is what I am trying to get at there. 1:01:04 SM: It is very well said. Like, I know Alan Canfora at Kent State is trying to meet with some of the guard. Of course, one and finally he met with had passed away of a heart attack. So, I think one of the things is to try to, I guess it is tough for him to be in the room with them, but he is trying to come to terms and, and certainly, 1:01:23 BA: Give me another example- 1:01:24 SM: Senator Muskie said that we had not healed since- (End of Interview) Accessibility Copy/Paste below: Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Description 1 Microcassette Rights Statement Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. 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Title A name given to the resource Interview with Dr. Bettina Apthker Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Apthker, Bettina ; McKiernan, Stephen Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/wav Subject The topic of the resource Civil rights movements—United States--20th century; Peace movements—United States--20th century; Feminists; Political activists--United States; Apthker, Bettina--Interviews Description An account of the resource Dr. Bettina Apthker is a political activist, radical feminist, academic, and author. As a former member of the Communist Party USA she was active in civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960's and 1970's, and has worked in developing feminist studies since the late 1970's. Dr. Apthker has a Ph.D. in History of Consciousness from UC Santa Cruz. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource ND Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.17 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2017-03-14 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. 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Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Audio interviews Title A name given to the resource McKiernan Interviews Description An account of the resource Stephen McKiernan's collection of interviews includes more than two hundred interviews with prominent figures of the 1960s, which were collected between the mid-1990s to 2023 The collection provides narratives of people who were actively involved in or witnessed events in the 1960s, an era which spurred profound cultural and political transformation in the twentieth century. Interviewees include politicians, artists, scholars, musicians, authors, and veterans who delve into the decade’s most prominent issues and events, including the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the anti-war movement, women’s rights, gay rights, segregation, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Hippies, Yippies, and individualism.<br /><br /> <h3>The McKiernan 22</h3> <div>Stephen McKiernan interviewed legends of the 1960s. When asked in 2021 where one should start when sifting through his vast collection, he provided the following list:</div> <ul> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/854">Julian Bond</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1866">Bobby Muller</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1175">Craig McNamara</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/910">Dr. Arthur Levine</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/837">Diane Carlson Evans</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/942">Dr. Ellen Schrecker</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/876">Dr. Lee Edwards</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/841">Peter Coyote</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1233">Dr. Roosevelt Johnson</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/899">Rennie Davis</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1222">Kim Phuc</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/917">George McGovern</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/833">Frank Schaeffer</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/840">Rev. Dr. Frank Forrester Church </a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1240">Dr. Marilyn Young</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/842">James Fallows</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/835">Joseph Lee Galloway</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/911">John Lewis</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/839">Paul Critchlow</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/888">Steve Gunderson</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1159">Charles Kaiser</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/2407">Joseph Lewis</a></li> </ul> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Stephen McKiernan Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In copyright. Template: Simple Audio Player with Transcription This template displays an audio player by Amplitude.js with a scrollable transcription which is loaded from the "Transcription" metadata field. This template displays an audio player with the first attached image file as the 'cover image'. For its audio source, the template looks for the first attached audio file. If additional audio files exist, they should be combined using audio editing software, or a separate Omeka item should be made for each part. Date of Interview 2009-07-09 Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Stephen McKiernan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Elijah Anderson Language English Biographical Text <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Dr. Elijah Anderson is a sociologist, cultural theorist, scholar, and professor of Sociology at Yale University. He specializes in Urban Ethnography. Dr. Anderson received his Ph.D. in Sociology at Northwestern University.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:15105,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;11&quot;:4,&quot;12&quot;:0,&quot;14&quot;:[null,2,0],&quot;15&quot;:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;16&quot;:10}">Dr. Elijah Anderson is a sociologist, cultural theorist, scholar, and the Sterling Professor of Sociology and African-American Studies at Yale University. He specializes in Urban Ethnography. He is the author of several books including his most recent, titled <em>Black in White Space: The Enduring Impact of Color in Everyday Life</em> (2022). His other books include <em>Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City</em> (1999), winner of the Komarovsky Award from the Eastern Sociological Society; <em>Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community</em> (1990), winner of the American Sociological Association’s Robert E. Park Award for the best-published book in the area of Urban Sociology; and the classic sociological work, <em>A Place on the Corner </em>(1978). Dr. Anderson received numerous awards and recognition, including the consultant for the White House, United States Congress, and the National Academy of Science.&nbsp; In 2002, he was awarded the Stockholm Prize in Criminology. Previous to his tenure at Yale University, he was a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Anderson received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Northwestern University.<br /></span> Digital Publisher Binghamton University Libraries Digital Format audio/mp4 Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data MicroCassette Material Type Sound Interview Format Video or Audio Audio Keywords <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Anti-War Movement; Civil Rights Movement; Vietnam Memorial; John F. Kennedy; Deviance; Howard S. Becker; Outsiders—Defining Deviance&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:2,&quot;4&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:14281427}}">Anti-War Movement; Civil Rights Movement; Vietnam Memorial; John F. Kennedy; Deviance; Howard S. Becker; Outsiders—Defining Deviance</span> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 52:43 Subject LCSH Sociologists; College teachers; Yale University; Anderson, Elijah--Interviews Accessibility Copy/Paste below: Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound, or alternative text from a visual medium McKiernan Interviews Interview with: Elijah Anderson Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan Transcriber: REV Date of interview: 9 July 2009 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (Start of Interview) SM (00:02): ... as soon as I get everything ready here. I got to turn the sound up. All right. Can you hear me? EA (00:06): Yeah, I can hear you. SM (00:07): All right. Very good. Pretty nice weather we are having. EA (00:13): Oh, it is. SM (00:15): Considering all that rain we had. EA (00:16): It is not as hot and humid as it usually is this time of year. SM (00:22): First question I would like to ask then ... Again, thank you very much for doing this. When do you think the (19)60s began, in your opinion? And what do you think was the watershed moment for most of the young people from the boomer generation? EA (00:41): Well, I guess it depends on how you think of the (19)60s because, for a lot of people, the (19)60s are thought of as this period of a certain quest for freedom, individualism, that kind of thing, but especially a time of free-thinking people. I know, stereotypically, it is all about relaxing standards and that kind of thing and the so-called deviant people becoming more legitimate, that kind of thing. I mean that is what people like to think. There is a book by a mentor of mine, Howard Becker, and the book is entitled Outsiders. Basically, in this book, what he does is speak about the issue of rules. He tries to account for deviant behavior. Up to this point, scholars have talked about deviance as, again, in an objective kind of way, that mission being that deviant behavior is behavior that goes against society's standards, values, and rules. Basically, given that perspective, it is pretty easy to tell what deviance is and what it is not. What Becker does in his book is raise a lot of questions about that. He comes up with the so-called subjective view of defiance and, basically, this view of deviance says that deviance is whatever powerful people say it is at the time, and to really know deviance, you have to know something about how people react to certain acts and how they then go about labeling people that they consider to be in violation of standards, values, and rules that you care about or that certain people labeling them deviant, that care about them, you see? What he introduced in this book, which was published in 1963, but the source articles were written over a period of time through the late (19)50s, what he points to here is a profound relativity with respect to rulemaking and rule breaking, and I think that, to some extent, his idea was, to some extent, perhaps a manifestation of the period which you are speaking, where people more and more were trying to embrace this kind of relativism and trying to see the other side, trying to put themselves in the place of people who would be thought of as deviant or people who would be castigated, put down, subjected to the whims of the powerful and that kind of thing. What he did was basically he was able to come to appreciate the so-called victims of society and even to underscore the fact that they were not so bad after all, if you know what I mean? But I think this is what you saw more and more in the 1960s with more and more young people raising questions about the status quo, raising questions about the established institutions, especially when those institutions were fomenting and fostering a war that they did not believe in, to go and die in. So, you have every reason, people, to raise up and to rise up, I should say, and raise questions about the system, and this is what people ultimately did in the (19)60s. I do not know if that is what you meant, but- SM (04:55): Yeah. Well, that is beautiful. As a follow-up- EA (04:57): But, to me, that is what the (19)60s kind of represented. SM (05:01): Based on what you just said and what Becker said in his book, The Outsiders, how do you respond? You have heard this over probably the last 15, 20 years from columnists, like George Will, and even politicians, like Newt Gingrich, that they place all the ills of American society and they point right back to that era of the boomer era, whether it be the (19)50s, (19)60s, and (19)70s, for the breakdown of the family, the breakdown of American society, the breakdown of morals, the lack of respect for authority. When Ronald Reagan became president, they praised him for trying to beat these kinds of things. But still, they will write about the boomers in that era in very negative terms. How do you respond to that? EA (05:54): Well, I think basically what you had in the 1950s in America was a strong sense that we lived in a rather homogeneous society, and this society was basically quite Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Of course, this included people who were that way and wanted to be that way, it seemed, even to the point of divesting themselves of their own ethnic particularities instead of joining into this great American way, so to speak. So there was a great and strong pull or a push for people to assimilate, that is to divest themselves of their particularities, whether they be whatever ethnic group, and to really blend in to be a part of this great American way and to contribute, to some extent, to this homogeneity, if not in phenotype, then in values and orientation, so to speak. I think this is what you did have in the Eisenhower era when Blacks and other minority groups basically were pretty much likely to try hard to assimilate, to divest themselves of their own ethnic particularities, and join in the great American way, so to speak. A lot of people, of course, were fine with that. But the (19)60s, I wrote about a kind of license for people to experiment and to move off the plantation, so to speak, and that is what people did. I think that your more conservative commentators react to this with a great alarm, thinking that, well, if people really do go off the plantation, this has implications for the integrity of the plantation itself and the values that uphold that plantation. I think, to some extent, they would be in line with trying to support that ideology that supports the plantation, not to break it down, if you know what I mean, the structures that hold it together, so to speak. SM (08:26): Again, a lot of people that I have interviewed have had a hard time trying to classify boomers over a 20-year period because the early boomers, those born between (19)46 and (19)56, seem to have been more involved than those in the latter part. So, I have had some individuals having a hard time with labels on generations. This is a two-part question. If you were to look at this generation, is there one specific event that you think had the greatest impact on them in those early years, those years between (19)46 and, say, (19)70 or (19)75? And secondly, what is the most important event that affected your life? EA (09:09): Well, I think I could answer maybe both questions with one answer. I mean I think that probably John F. Kennedy's assassination was extremely important for so many of the so-called boomers, but not only his assassination but, not long after that, the assassination of King and Robert Kennedy. These political assassinations, I think, were really very important to the coming of age of boomers and perhaps the rise in a certain ability to question the system and even to embrace a kind of cynicism with respect to the system, I think. This is one of the things that came about for so many of the boomers, a kind of awakening, if you will, of losing one's innocence, so to speak. I think that may be the biggest thing that these assassinations contributed. I think those were probably the major development, so to speak. I am not just talking about one assassination. I am talking about a series of major political assassinations, you see. Even if they were not intended to be political, they became politicized, I am sure, if you will. SM (10:45): If you were to put a couple of adjectives to describe some strengths and weaknesses, you have already mentioned quite a few of them in your opening comments, but just some adjectives to describe the strengths and weaknesses of the boomer generation. EA (10:57): Well, I think probably the biggest thing is just the number of people who were just born after people returned from the war. I think just the number is pretty impressive and certainly provocative to the status quo. Just mere numbers, I think, is very important. I think, with that, faults, so to speak, in the system, you have all kinds of implications for various issues that people are dealing with, whether it is what to do about resettlement after the Great War, or whether it has to do with family life following that, how people live, the suburbanization of people, growing up in the suburbs. At the same time, growing up in the suburbs did not mean that people were leaving behind their racial predilections, so to speak. I think that the racism that we saw that basically undergirded the beginning of this country, not to mention the great Civil War that we had and then Emancipation and then the riots in the cities and then the incorporation process that gave us the Black middle class as we know it and even the split between the Black underclass and the Black middle class that followed thereafter. And yet, many of these people who were the middle class did not enjoy any ability to really live in suburban communities in the same way that their white counterparts lived in these communities before them. In fact, the whole history of this race relations period had to do with the fact that Black people were moving into communities and white people were constantly moving out, and it was almost like a dog chasing its tail, so to speak, getting nowhere fast in terms of really being able to deliberate the problems of race and racism and social place in this country. So I think that, for me anyway, that these are some of the big issues that were at least if not confronted by the boomer, at least these were issues that they were having to deal with, though many abdicated their responsibilities to deal with some of these problems. But at the same time, you have to say that some of these individuals stepped up to the plate, so to speak, and began to fight for social change in a very positive sense. But we have this problem that is really best described as unfinished business, so to speak. SM (14:25): Right. You bring up a very important point because, again, I got a two-part question here. What has been the overall impact of boomers on their kids with respect to carrying on some of their ideals and their activism into the next couple generations? And secondly, along that point, what is your thought regarding these boomers? Have they copped out, most of them? There's obviously many who have stayed with the fight for many particular issues. But did most of them fall by the wayside for the almighty dollar as they grew older EA (15:07): I would not try to judge that. I mean but certainly, there is a lot of work to be done in this country by all people, boomers included. Whether or not the torch has really been passed from one generation to the next in terms of the boomers' responsibility or whatever, I mean that is hard to say because so many of these issues and problems are not so much a function of one generation passing off to another as much as it is an issue of structural forces that beset each succeeding generation, so to speak. That generation then has to deal with what it has to deal with in order to be, and I think this is the biggest issue. When you have a period of quietism, so to speak, you probably get people who are not so energized. When you have a period where people are confronted by exigencies of life that they have no pattern for, no experience in dealing with, then people may well become quite creative, so to speak. So it really is not so much a matter of one generation passing on its values as much as it is one generation having to deal with the exigencies of life that are quite different from the generation and those conditions that preceded them, so to speak. So that is what I would say about this. I would not think that a generation could simply pass its values intact onto another generation without considering the issues and the factors of life that the succeeding generation would have to deal with. I think you would have to consider all that in order to get a good read on that particular generation's ability to cope, so to speak. SM (17:13): How do you respond to some of the young people of that era, when they were young said that we were the most unique generation in American history because we were going to be the change agents for the betterment of society in every way? Of course, young people have idealism. We are going to end racism, sexism, homophobia, and war. But just- EA (17:33): I do not think any generation has any premium on that, so to speak. I mean it is basically up to people to deal with what that we have to deal with. Every generation is unique, really. Every generation is different. I mean no generation has a monopoly on any of these answers, so to speak, to the problems that face mankind up to people to deal with, each and every generation. I would not go so far to say that it is the most unique generation. I think that it is more complicated than that. At the same time, it is really important to appreciate the fact that the generation that faces great challenges certainly have a real set of issues from which they might grow and develop in that a unique generation. But I do not think there is anything intrinsic about a group of people that make them the greatest, so to speak, other than the challenges that they face and the way they responded to those challenges, if you know what I mean? In a sense, out of their hands, if you follow me? It is a matter of how people respond to what is before them. I think that the World War II generation, oftentimes called the greatest generation, but I think you have to look at the challenges that face that generation and subsequent challenges that face the boomers after that, if you follow me, and how they were able or not able to respond to those challenges. That is what I would say. SM (19:30): How important were the college students of that era, I am talking about the (19)60s, early (19)70s again, in ending the war in Vietnam, their influence on policy in America, the pressures they put on universities? But in society, how important, on a scale of, say, one to 10, with 10 being the highest number, where would you place the impact that that protest had in ending the war? EA (19:55): Well, I think that that protest was extremely important for- SM (19:58): Dr. Anderson, could you speak up just a little bit, too? EA (20:00): Yeah. I think that that protest movement was very, very important, but it was not just antiwar. It was also the demonstrations and protests against the racial status quo and the ways in which the movement for civil rights somehow culminated in riots and, ultimately, an incorporation process that brought about greater civil rights not only for Black people, but for all Americans. Also, it paved the way for the emergence of a Black middle class that was no longer so dependent on living in these inner-city communities, but one that was increasingly corporate, so to speak. But I think that we had that situation, which is certainly one that has to be, I think, appreciated. But you also had this group of people who stepped up to the plate and basically demonstrated quite effectively against the war. But they had been previously edified by all the struggles that they witnessed, from civil rights to the cultural nationalism, to ultimately the incorporation process. They were all part of that. Basically, you have them becoming very, very concerned not only about the expression of American power in the world, but they were concerned about their own brothers and sisters being taken away from them and having to fight far off in Asian war. Another piece that is important to this is the fact that we had the draft then, you see, and we did not have the professional army the way we do today. So, the fact that there was a draft basically meant that certain constituencies would be, to some extent, informed and then perhaps active in a way that would call an end to the fighting that they would expect to shore the burden of, so to speak, fighting and dying, you see. That is one thing that we do not have today. We do not have the same political action related to ones that are trying to save one's own blood, so to speak, whether it be your son, your daughter, or yourself or your husband or whoever it was, you see. We do not have the same thing going on today. We have a more professional army. I think that if we had an equal opportunity to be in Iraq or to be in Afghanistan, I think that you would probably see more protests against the war today, you see. But the truth was, back in the Vietnam era, we had more of an equal opportunity for participating in that war. And even then, it was one-sided in terms of the rich and well-to-do versus the poor because the rich and well-to-do oftentimes could get college deferment or whatever or their parents kept them out of harm's way through their political and economic influence, so to speak. So, the burden of it oftentimes fell on the ordinary American more so than the others. But I think that when you have this equal opportunity situation, you are bound to have more protests and you are bound to have political leaders who basically take their decision making a bit more seriously, at least with the consideration of the viewpoint of people who would make up their constituencies, so to speak. SM (24:14): We saw in the late (19)60s, early (19)70s, kind of a split in the antiwar movement where African American students split away from the antiwar movement and, of course, toward what was going on in civil rights here in the United States, and we saw it a lot at Kent State. But I wanted you to comment on Dr. King's [inaudible] Vietnam speech. I think it should be required to be read in every college classroom because he was so far ahead of the game. Just your thoughts on the courage of him and that speech and maybe a couple comments on the reaction in America, not only in the civil rights community, but in America as a whole. EA (24:56): Well, I think basically a lot of people thought he was out of line with that speech, in part because they figured that he was really a civil rights leader, not somebody who should put his nose into foreign policy issues. And yet, he said very, very powerfully that, to some extent, the civil rights movement, it was related to this more general struggle for antiwar and peace and that kind of thing. That really disturbed a lot of people, including Lyndon Johnson himself, who had, up to that point, been listening more and more to King, but then, all of a sudden, recoiled. So there was that issue. But I think that, for King, it was a moral issue, that he thought he had a moral obligation to speak out, and he did. SM (26:00): One of the things that I am trying to get at in this process is the healing process. If you will bear with me, I had taken a group of students to see Edmund Muskie about a year before he died. He had just gotten out of the hospital, and he was not feeling very well. It was one of our Leadership on the Road programs, and there were 14 students. We taped it. We were talking about the (19)68 convention and a lot about the divisions in America as a whole. I asked him, "Have we healed at all since 1968 and the Vietnam War?" And he paused for a minute, almost had tears in his eyes. The students were looking at each other, "Why is not he responding?" And then he finally said, "I have been in the hospital for the last couple weeks, and I have been watching Ken Burns' The Civil War." He said, "We have not healed since the Civil War." So, he went on to talking about that particular aspect as opposed to the response since the Vietnam War. My commentary and question is this, with all the divisions that were happening in that (19)60s and (19)70s, the divisions in America, pro-war, antiwar, divisions between Black and white, between those who supported authority and those who were against, between those who supported the troops and those that were against, and all the other divisions, had we healed at all as a ... Do you think the boomer generation has healed at all since that time? EA (27:40): Well, I think that is a very provocative question, to be sure, and it may be a bit opposed as not so much a matter of healing as it is a matter of just simply ignoring the situation and dealing with other fish to fry, so to speak. Today, as we live our lives, we are dealing with economic change of a high order, probably the most important change since the Industrial Revolution, so to speak. As we make this change technologically, moving from manufacturing to service and high technology as a way to organize this economy, there are great numbers of people who are not making a change. So we have a lot on our plate right now today. You see, it's these kinds of issues, these kinds of demands that we have to deal with. But today, that oftentimes takes our attention away from other issues, so to speak, maybe going to preoccupy us and maybe even substitute for healing, so to speak. So, what we have is not so much healing as a scabbing over, so to speak, looking at issues and challenges all the time. It may be that that is the way it is, that nothing has healed completely. But we get new challenges from time to time. So today, we are dealing with this big economic issue, you see. That does not mean that we're done with slavery. It does not mean we're done with the Civil War. It does not mean that we have done with the civil rights movement. It just means that we have a sort of preoccupation with dealing with the present, so to speak, present problems and issues, the trials and tribulations of living our lives. That is what it seems to me. SM (29:43): Well, that is a beautiful answer because the last couple days I have been seeing some of my former students and the frustrations they have of finding a job. I have a friend who graduated from Penn who has been laid off twice in the last year, unbelievable stories. We are in a very-very, very tough economy. I think we're about hitting our 30 minutes here. Do you want to go 15 more minutes? We might be able to finish it. EA (30:13): Okay. SM (30:14): Because when my tape hits, and it has not hit yet, so we have not hit 30 minutes. I wanted to follow up to your response. Have you been to the Wall in Washington? EA (30:25): No, I have not. SM (30:25): I have been there many times. The Wall was built as a nonpolitical entity, mentored healing the wounds of the troops who fought and their families. It is supposed to be nonpolitical. I go down there every year on Memorial Day and Veterans Day, and I cannot help but constantly hearing politics there, even though they do a great job with the Wall stuff. Do you think the Wall has done anything with respect to ... Well, I know it is done a lot for the soldiers and the troops that fought and their families, but those who may have been against the war before the war ... It gets right back to that healing question. Has it done anything beyond just the military? EA (31:05): Well, I think it is not only a symbol of the war and our involvement there, but it is also a very powerful ... SM (31:18): 15 more minutes. Okay, here we go. EA (31:20): Yeah, I think that is basically a matter of it memorializes people who made the supreme sacrifice, and I think that is a very important consideration here. That is probably the most important consideration. It does not necessarily heal, but it is a way to pay homage to people who gave their full measure, so to speak. SM (31:48): In your eyes, when did the Vietnam War end, and what was the major reason that it did end? EA (31:54): Well, I mean that is a complicated piece. But certainly, you look at the pictures, the iconic photographs of the day. The helicopters were taking people from the rooftops of certain buildings there. You realized that even that moment was not going to be the end the war, so to speak, but it is something more than that. It is just not so much a particular moment that you can say it is over kind of thing, but it has to do with, to some extent, the healing process and the way in which the US military and diplomatic corps basically took themselves out of that situation. That does not happen all at one time, but it happens over a period of months and even years, if you follow me? Some people, even though the war would be officially over, would consider the war to still be going on months after the declaration that it is over, if you know what I mean, because people have to adjust and get back to a sense of normalcy and that kind of thing. So, it is not so much a matter of something that is exact and pinpointed, if you follow me, but it is something that goes on and on. I think today, we could certainly say that we're done with all that and we are moving on to something else. Of course, now you have development in those areas where people once were fighting. You have development. You have hotels. You have commerce. You have all kinds of things that really say quite emphatically that it is a new day. You have people from there and people from here who fought in the war, who fought each other, who are now coming back together and discussing issues and discussing their various roles, not so much in anger, but just as a way to communicate with one another and let one another know that the hatchet has been buried, so to speak. I think when you have that kind of a situation, then you can begin to say that it is done and over, if you follow me, no exact moment, no exact time. Although certainly, we have the official administrative definition of the end of the war, so to speak. But even though you had that, things continued to progress, if you follow me, I think. SM (34:31): One of the things about the civil rights movement, and it was such a great mentor and role model to other movements that followed. I would like your thoughts just on the impact that this movement had on, and just general comments, on the women's movement and the Chicano, the Native American movement, certainly the antiwar movement, the gay and lesbian movement, the Earth Day, the environmental movement. A lot of the people that lead these efforts looked back to the role modeling of the civil rights movement. EA (35:05): Oh, of course. Well, you have to understand that the Black situation was and is a special situation in this country. No other group has been brought here in chains and made to work for no wages and then emancipated in the Great War and then still subjected to second class citizenship, segregated in certain communities, discriminated against, hated, despised by people in the way that Black Americans were. So the civil rights movement, the protests for civil rights for Black people, is iconic and was major in so many respects. As people rose up to challenge the system, of course, a lot of people's heads were turning to this great race dealing with this situation of injustice, so to speak. A lot of people paid attention and even got involved, to some extent. It was not just the Blacks who went through this disestablishment, so to speak, and made itself free, but various people worked with Black people that helped to free not only them, but the country from its past, so to speak. But the civil rights movement itself culminated in the riots that happened in the cities around this country, great demand for civil rights and incorporation. Ultimately, what we did, we had the movement from the civil rights movement to the cultural nationalist movement and the riots in the cities. And then you had tremendous violence all over this country. The powers that existed had a real problem on its hands, how to deal with this whole situation in something of a very public kind of way, if you follow me? It tried to do this by putting these problems down by dealing with the revolts or the riots or whatever it was. You have to understand, too, that when this was happening, it was happening during the Cold War, you see, when this country and Russia, or the Soviet Union, were vying for leadership of the world. They were saying to each other, "Well, we have got the better system. We have got the better system." We were looking at the satellite, looking for people to follow them in some of the developing countries that were colored, in fact, looking for leadership from the Soviet Union or from the West. A big issue was who really had the better system in terms of being able to facilitate the development of people of color, to some extent. So given that this country was trying for leadership of the world, they really had a big fly in the ointment with the way that it had historically treated Black people and still treated Black people. You see? So there was a great need for this country to basically step up to the plate and get on the right side with respect to civil rights, you see, because there was a lot at stake. There was leadership of the world at stake, you see. So this is one thing that they had to do, that they had to deal with. When they did this, they engaged and you had this movement, the riots or what have you. They culled it out with violence. But they also worked to incorporate Black people in the system, you see. SM (39:22): [inaudible]- EA (39:25): Through affirmative action, set asides, what have you, they created a new Black middle class, you see, a class that effectively would cull out other people and show that if you work hard, you can be not only meritorious, but you can also have something in this world, you see. So, this was a very important thing because they brought Black people forward, in part, because of all these other issues that were going on at the time, especially the fact that the issues of the wider world, the third world, the developing countries, the developed nations. All those issues were very important to the success of the civil rights movement here that resulted in first class citizenship for Black people, but also, to some extent, an incorporation process that helped Black people to take their place in American society. That struggle is still going on. It is not over. But we have made a lot of progress, for sure. SM (40:39): Do you consider the Black Power movement a negative or a positive in that process? EA (40:45): I think, in some ways, it was bold. There were times when it was highly negative, and times when it was very positive. I think the major thing was that it set the stage for the incorporation process that we saw that basically gave us the Black middle classes that exist today. I think that without the issues that were put on the table in the (19)60s and the (19)70s by the cultural nationalists and by the so-called Black Power movement, that you probably would not have had the degree of incorporation that we have right now today, or even the motivation to incorporate Black people or to have Black people live as first class citizens in this country without that, without protests- SM (41:41): Could you- EA (41:42): ... on the system's institutions, if you will. SM (41:42): Would you be able to comment on, since you are a scholar, if you think there were any books that were very popular at that time that influenced people of all colors, boomers, and then, of course, the impact that the music of the boomer generation has had because that is all you hear on the radio now is music from that period, it just seems that. EA (42:01): I think that if you are going to think about what effect that the boomers in that period, you have to undoubtedly look at the kind of education they were getting during the civil rights movement and during the antiwar movement and the cultural nationalist period and all that. Increasingly, you had these young students, white, Black, whoever, but especially the white middle class, more and more being edified, educated by people who brought a certain sensitivity to the problems of the history of Black people in this country, including the studies of slavery and race relations and that kind of thing. So many of these schools around the country began to incorporate Black studies courses and that kind of thing. All of this gave both Black people and young white people a clearer sense of the history of this country. I think that was very, very important for their understanding, but also the notion of the possibilities for the country itself. I think those things were very, very important to implement. We could go on and on with that. But I think that is- SM (43:19): Any thoughts on the music? EA (43:21): I think those are important. I think also what you began to see as a result of the civil rights movement and the incorporation process was a proliferation of different kinds of music that Blacks were involved in. You began to see the emergence, undoubtedly, of rhythm and blues and blues and jazz and hip hop and rock and all these variations that came about. You began to see the influence of Black singers and performers crossing over, you see. I think that was very, very important. I think that the music of The Beatles was very important. I think Elvis Presley was very important. I think Michael Jackson was very important. All these stars were important for the way in which they helped us to integrate our society, as it were. I think this, to some extent, is a function of the civil rights movement, but also the ways in which we have been able to move toward the diversity and the acceptance of diversity within our country with all of this, the music, the civil rights movement. All that was very, very important in this process, and I think we are all beneficiaries of what happened there. SM (44:41): I have two more questions. One's a question on trust. I can remember being in a college 101 psychology class many years ago, and the professor said in one of the very first classes that ... He was defining the meaning of trust, and he said, "We all have to trust someone in life. If you go through life and you cannot trust people, you probably will not be a success in life." So, I am bringing this question up because all the leaders that a lot of the boomers saw, they were lying to them many, many times, from presidents on down. The students at least that I knew, and many of the boomers, did not trust anybody that was in a leadership role, whether it be a university president, a congressman, a senator, even leaders in the church, corporate leaders, you name it. It is because they had been disappointed so many times by leaders who had lied to them, whether it be President Johnson and the Gulf of Tonkin, in recent years, the things about John Kennedy and maybe being linked to the killings of the two people in Vietnam. President Eisenhower lied on national television about the U-2 incident. Then we had Richard Nixon and Watergate. And then there were just, over and over, things where leaders who were voted in, people wanted to trust them, realized that they could not trust them. The body counts in the Vietnam War, all these things. Just your thoughts on, finally, if these young people cannot trust, what are they passing on to their kids? So just your comments on do we have a problem with trust? EA (46:26): Well, I think trust is very important, for sure. I think that what you see with the major assassinations I mentioned, this period of political assassinations, that really ended the period of innocence for Americans, boomers in particular maybe, but Americans in general. I think this is very, very important. But it was also important not just in terms of people becoming more mature, so to speak, but it also ushered in a kind of cynicism, if you will. I think this was very, very important. I think that we're still living with consequences of that, and it will take time to get that back. But so many people have basically taken leave, abdicated, checked out, so to speak. But now and then, we have a charismatic figure emerge, and then hope is restored. I think that is what we have today with Barack Obama's emergence as the political leader that he is. The jury is still out, of course, whether or not he is going to do all that he has promised to do or whether he is going to have the integrity, ultimately, that we all like to attribute to him. But so far, I think he has been really showing first-rate leadership that basically begins to heal so much that has happened in our past that has made us doubt. So I think the trust issue is always there, and it gets rebuilt with succeeding generations, but most importantly, through acts that we can have faith in, so to speak. SM (48:19): My last question is, when the best history books or sociology books are written 50 years after a period, what do you think people will be saying about the boomer generation with all its complexities, with all its diversity? What will professors in your shoes be saying 50 years from now at Yale in soc classes and history classes about the boomer era, the (19)60s, the (19)70s, and their lives, basically? EA (48:52): Yeah. Well, why do not we hold off on that one for a while? Once we get a sense of how this works out, then I will respond to that. Okay? Give me time to think about that one. SM (49:03): Very good. EA (49:08): So now you have the tape, and you are going to transcribe it? SM (49:11): Yep. I am going to transcribe it probably myself and- EA (49:19): But let me say this. I do not want to make this available until I have had a chance to read it and to edit it, that kind of thing. SM (49:26): Oh, yeah. I am doing that with everybody. In fact, I have not transcribed any. I am doing the transcribing myself on all of them. EA (49:37): I understand. I just want to look because I like to be able to review it and edit it before it is out there, and I would like to respond more fully to certain points you raised. SM (49:48): Yeah. The only other part I could not ask you today is just responses to some of the names of the period. EA (49:55): Yeah. SM (49:56): So anyways ... EA (49:57): But you have your work cut out for you. SM (50:00): Yep. But ... EA (50:00): If you can get this back to me at a certain point, I can deal with it and we can move along. But you raised a lot of good questions, a lot of good issues. I want to commend you for that. SM (50:12): Well, it is my first book. EA (50:13): I was going to ask you. SM (50:16): You know what I want to do in my next book? EA (50:18): What is that? SM (50:18): I want to write about Dr. King and the Vietnam speech. EA (50:23): Well, that sounds good. That sounds good. I mean he was a great man, for sure, great American. I think that a lot of these issues you have been raising today, are just right on, right on the money. SM (50:36): Well, I know Mrs. Bagley. Do you know her? EA (50:38): No. No. SM (50:39): She is the sister of Coretta Scott King. So, I have gotten to know her. She is not well, but she has taken a liking to me. She was upset that I left Westchester. She used to call me. I have not talked to her in a while, but I am going to call her. She can only sit down for 20 minutes because she is not well. I am going to interview her for the book and go from there. But Dr. Anderson, Yale is so lucky to have you. That is all I have to say. EA (51:10): Well, thank you very much. I am glad I am here. I am glad that I am here and able to teach and spread the word and that type of thing. SM (51:21): Yeah. Of course, every one of my interviews is going to have a picture that I have taken of each of the guests, either when I interview them in person, but I have some great shots of you when you were here in Westchester two years ago. EA (51:32): Okay. Well, when you transcribe it, get it to me. And then I will have to edit it and work it out. SM (51:35): Yep. Will do. EA (51:35): Okay. SM (51:36): You have a great weekend coming up, and I hope your wife's arm's better. EA (51:43): Thank you. Thank you. I am looking forward to getting her back to her therapy today. I am going to leave tomorrow, heading to Philly. Then I got to be back Monday because she has got another appointment for therapy. So anyway, well, listen, I am glad we got this done, and I look forward to reading it and responding and editing the whole thing. SM (52:05): Super. EA (52:06): Okay. SM (52:07): You have a great day. EA (52:08): Okay, Steve. SM (52:09): Yep. Can I call you Eli? EA (52:10): Sure, absolutely. SM (52:13): Because I have so much respect for you, I want to call you Dr. Anderson. EA (52:16): I call you Steve. You can call me Eli. SM (52:18): All right, Eli, thank you very much. EA (52:20): I am glad you raised a lot of those questions. I thought they were good questions, and I tried to answer as best I could. SM (52:26): Yeah, they were great answers. EA (52:28): I think some of the points could be elaborated, that kind of thing. So I look forward to seeing the transcript. SM (52:34): Okay. EA (52:34): Take care now. SM (52:34): Yep, you, too. Bye now. EA (52:37): Okay, Steve. Bye. (End of Interview) Description 1 Microcassette Rights Statement Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Dr. Elijah Anderson Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Anderson, Elijah ; McKiernan, Stephen Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/wav Subject The topic of the resource Sociologists; College teachers; Yale University; Anderson, Elijah--Interviews Description An account of the resource Dr. Elijah Anderson is a sociologist, cultural theorist, scholar and professor in Sociology at Yale University, where he specializes in Urban Ethnography. Dr. Anderson received his Ph.D. in Sociology at Northwestern University. Dr. Elijah Anderson is a sociologist, cultural theorist, scholar, and the Sterling Professor of Sociology and African-American Studies at Yale University. He specializes in Urban Ethnography. He is the author of several books including his most recent, titled <em>Black in White Space: The Enduring Impact of Color in Everyday Life</em> (2022). His other books include <em>Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City</em> (1999), winner of the Komarovsky Award from the Eastern Sociological Society; <em>Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community</em> (1990), winner of the American Sociological Association’s Robert E. Park Award for the best-published book in the area of Urban Sociology; and the classic sociological work, <em>A Place on the Corner</em> (1978). Dr. Anderson received numerous awards and recognition, including the consultant for the White House, United States Congress, and the National Academy of Science.&nbsp; In 2002, he was awarded the Stockholm Prize in Criminology. Previous to his tenure at Yale University, he was a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Anderson received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Northwestern University. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009-07-09 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.16 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2017-03-14 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. McKiernan Interviews Extent The size or duration of the resource. 52:43 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/8616eef36db566904fc46f8971bd2ad1.jpg f1d0a292fb2e6c073ce64d5338610411 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/e6c579bc725bd9467d59b577e42b0058.mp3 ac349d42128c3a9a41c8a57755dd1f70 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Audio interviews Title A name given to the resource McKiernan Interviews Description An account of the resource Stephen McKiernan's collection of interviews includes more than two hundred interviews with prominent figures of the 1960s, which were collected between the mid-1990s to 2023 The collection provides narratives of people who were actively involved in or witnessed events in the 1960s, an era which spurred profound cultural and political transformation in the twentieth century. Interviewees include politicians, artists, scholars, musicians, authors, and veterans who delve into the decade’s most prominent issues and events, including the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the anti-war movement, women’s rights, gay rights, segregation, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Hippies, Yippies, and individualism.<br /><br /> <h3>The McKiernan 22</h3> <div>Stephen McKiernan interviewed legends of the 1960s. When asked in 2021 where one should start when sifting through his vast collection, he provided the following list:</div> <ul> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/854">Julian Bond</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1866">Bobby Muller</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1175">Craig McNamara</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/910">Dr. Arthur Levine</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/837">Diane Carlson Evans</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/942">Dr. Ellen Schrecker</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/876">Dr. Lee Edwards</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/841">Peter Coyote</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1233">Dr. Roosevelt Johnson</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/899">Rennie Davis</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1222">Kim Phuc</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/917">George McGovern</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/833">Frank Schaeffer</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/840">Rev. Dr. Frank Forrester Church </a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1240">Dr. Marilyn Young</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/842">James Fallows</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/835">Joseph Lee Galloway</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/911">John Lewis</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/839">Paul Critchlow</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/888">Steve Gunderson</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1159">Charles Kaiser</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/2407">Joseph Lewis</a></li> </ul> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Stephen McKiernan Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In copyright. Template: Simple Audio Player with Transcription This template displays an audio player by Amplitude.js with a scrollable transcription which is loaded from the "Transcription" metadata field. This template displays an audio player with the first attached image file as the 'cover image'. For its audio source, the template looks for the first attached audio file. If additional audio files exist, they should be combined using audio editing software, or a separate Omeka item should be made for each part. Date of Interview 2010-08-04 Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Stephen McKiernan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed John B. Anderson, 1922-2017 Language English Biographical Text <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Dr. John Anderson (1922 - 2017) was a United States Congressman and presidential candidate from Illinois. As a member of the Republican Party, he represented Illinois's 16th congressional district from 1961 through 1981. Anderson had a Law degree from the University of Illinois.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:15105,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;11&quot;:4,&quot;12&quot;:0,&quot;14&quot;:[null,2,0],&quot;15&quot;:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;16&quot;:10}">John Anderson (1922 - 2017) was a United States Congressman and presidential candidate from Illinois. As a member of the Republican Party, he represented Illinois's 16th congressional district from 1961 through 1981. Anderson had a Law degree from the University of Illinois.</span> Digital Publisher Binghamton University Libraries Digital Format audio/mp4 Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data MicroCassette Material Type Sound Interview Format Video or Audio Audio Keywords <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Vietnam; Gulf of Tonkin Resolution; Baby boom generation; Harry S. Truman; Foreign Service; Assassination of John F. Kennedy, Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; Woodstock; Nineteen sixties; Generation Gap; Watergate; Kent State; Jackson State; Vietnam Memorial; Affirmative Action; Chicago 1968; American Foreign Policy.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:3,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;4&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:14281427}}">Vietnam; Gulf of Tonkin Resolution; Baby boom generation; Harry S. Truman; Foreign Service; Assassination of John F. Kennedy, Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; Woodstock; Nineteen sixties; Generation Gap; Watergate; Kent State; Jackson State; Vietnam Memorial; Affirmative Action; Chicago 1968; American Foreign Policy.</span> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 108:03 Subject LCSH Legislators—United States; Presidential candidates—United States; Anderson, John B. (John Bayard), 1922-2017--Interviews Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound, or alternative text from a visual medium McKiernan Interviews Interview with: John Anderson Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan Transcriber: Kimberly F Mourao Date of interview: 3 August 2010 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (Start of Interview) 00:03 SM: Anderson, John Anderson, August 3, 19- not 19. Quick question, so here we go. And I am going to read them to make sure I get these correct. When you sat in that cold weather on January 20, 1961, in front of the Capitol as a new congressman listening to a new president, what was going through your mind when you heard these words: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” from President-elect Kennedy, did you know that he would be an inspiration to a whole new generation of Americans born after World War II? And of course, he ended up being assassinated, but what was it like being there being brand new yourself, and then he was brand new? 00:56 JA: Well, I was going to say, obviously, my feelings involved, my own sense of pride, and accomplishment, and having won the race, and I had been elected to my first of what would become ten terms in the US House. So, I had my own thoughts and what I wanted to do, but it, I have a very distinct memory of being thrilled by what the new president had to say. Even though I was obviously of the opposite party. He struck for me the kind of note that I wanted to hear from, from a new president promising a change. And I have to roll back the tides a little bit. And try to think if there was anything other than the fact that it was fifty years ago. 02:19 SM: Yes. 02:21 JA: And I still, still recall quite vividly the sense of pride that I felt that being a part of the scene, being, being there on the porch, then they, in those days, it was on the east front of the Capitol. Last inaugural, of course, that I attended was Barrack, Barack Obama's and they have long been held on the west front. Not long, but for quite quite a number of inaugurations now, as I recall it. But looking as you do up for the Supreme Court, being a lawyer and having respect for that institution, it was totally a memorable experience. And as I say, it filled me with a sense of genuine excitement and hope that I could be part of the new wave of progress. He was, he was assuring us that he would try to achieve. 03:37 SM: When he gave that speech, when you were listening, did that line, did those two lines of that one line really stand out? Or did, or did you read it? 03:48 JA: Yes, I think it did. Even, even at the time, it resonated very clearly, with the thought that, well, here was a new era that was opening up and a new and young and dynamic president with a real gift, as we all know, to speak and write with eloquence. And feel like he struck, struck a real note of optimism. That was memorable. 04:21 SM: The other lines that come out of there, there are many, but “we will pay any price or bear any burden to guarantee Liberty around the world,” of course a lot of people linked into Vietnam. 04:33 JA: I think. I do not, I do not, of course, that could not foretell the fact that he would turn out to be the first president that would really very appreciably enlarge our presence in Southeast Asia by sending a force of more than battalion strength as I recall it, to South Vietnam, and it was a war that I, like many others finally turned against belatedly when I made a speech during my primary campaign, I think it was a nationally devised, televised debate that was sponsored by the League of Women Voters, which not all but I think, four or five of the people who were contesting as I was for the Republican nomination in 1980. I said that one great-. She asked me: “What mistake have you made years that you serve in Congress and in my 10th term,” of course, and I said, “Well, the worst mistake was to vote for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964,” which was, of course, after Kennedy's death, and Lyndon Johnson had assumed the mantle and had decided, you know, that he had to get the public to be supportive of the effort. And some people indeed suggest that the whole thing that happened there in the Gulf of Tonkin was purposely staged as an incident that would arouse public passion and attract public interest. In any of that I said that the worst mistake I made was to go along. Well, it was virtually a unanimous vote, to go along with the crowd and vote, for what turned out to be a misbegotten campaign to assert our presence in Southeast Asia and ended the ignominious incident of Ellsworth Bunker, the American ambassador, the last American ambassador had to be airlifted off the roof. He was in there in Saigon, along with members of his staff, successful North Vietnamese were storming the gates, and about to take the city. So, I have a very distinct memory of that. 07:41 SM: How would you describe the boomer generation? A lot of people do not like terms, like, I found this out through the process of doing this book, is they do not like terms for generations. Higher education always uses terms because that is how they define groups. Sociologists often defined the same way; boomer generation is those born between (19)46 and 1964. And then, but a lot of the people more in between (19)40 and (19)46 really feel closely associated with that group, because many of them were the leaders and the activists of the era. And so, and of course, those students has experienced in the first wave of the boomers compared to the second wave was totally different the second ten years, because they were so much younger. But my question is, when you look at the time that boomers have been alive, which is has been from 1946, right now to 2010, the oldest Boomer is now sixty-four, and the youngest is now forty-eight. Going on forty-nine is amazing how time flies. And so, I have asked each of the individuals in my last one third of my interviews to define the, the years and what those years meant to each individual, in terms of what was America like. 09:04 JA: The years between 1946 and 1954? 09:06 SM: Yeah, no, yeah. No, (19)64 is the boomers. 09:12 JA: I am sorry, (19)46 to (19)64. 09:15 SM: Is what they call the boomer generation. So, I am asking to you, when you look at these periods, what does it mean? What are these periods mean to you? 1946 to 1960. 09:29 JA: Well, Harry Truman started that period, I guess. Not, he did not start it, but he was a president during that period, I was newly emerged. After the war, I went back and finished my law school education. I was discharged in November, as I recall it of 1945 and then went back for the spring semester in 1946. And got my LLB or JD whatever it was they called it in those days. Somebody told me the other day I have always said I had a Juris Doctor degree and they said, “No, it was really a Bachelor of Laws.” Anyway, it was a law degree, I suppose it is not terribly important, what you call it. So, the period began with my emerging from law school. And being picked up by a law firm, and going to work in Rockford, Illinois, in my hometown, and Boulos. And then by 1948, I had decided that the private practice of law was maybe not really what I wanted to do, I would like to teach. And to do that, I would need a graduate degree. So, I looked around and finally was able to secure a fellowship to attend Harvard Law School and went out to Cambridge and spent (19)48 to (19)49 acquiring my degree, and the only really good offer that I received to teach when I graduated was, I remember out of the University of Montana. And I think the law school was located in Missoula. And it just was not a part of the country that I was attracted to. Particularly. So, I declined that offer. And then I decided to go into private practice, I would try the law again, as a private practitioner, and I had made a living and it was fairly interesting. But in any event, it was kind of the springboard, really for a political career. In my case, I became very friendly with the people in the courthouse. And they included two people that were very dominant. In the Republican Party, the county treasurer and the county assessor. The Norland L. Anderson guys. So, remember their names. And they took me around to the various political functions of the republican party held in that area, and I became friendly with the people in the party. So, when the current man who had been State's Attorney, Matt Weston, decided not to run for reelection, he was involved in some scandal, here and there. But in any event, I decided to throw my hat in the ring. And there were five candidates in the race and really the leading candidate was the first assistant State's Attorney, Jack Buynon, his name was. And when and he had been quite a local hero, he had a winning football team of the State University, University of Illinois, which I had also graduated. But I campaigned hard and shoe leather campaign of going door to door and handing out my literature. And I had a small group of friends that obviously assisted and in a fairly close race, I emerged the winner. And that was really then my springboard again into politics. I served for four years as a state's attorney, and I think I achieved a fairly commendable record of convictions and enforcing the law. And so, when I guess I left something out here, something out here because that was, my term was (19)60. (19)60 to (19)80 and I was state's attorney from (19)56 to (19)60. I left out, I left out the fact that I had a stint in the in the Foreign Service. I took the competitive exams for the Foreign Service, and was offered a foreign service officer post, which was in West Berlin, I did go to West Berlin as a Foreign Service officer, and served for about two and a half years, which is the tour of duty got married. During that time to my wife whose still my wife. Our first child was born in Berlin. Eleanor who now resides abroad, married a man from Holland that she met in New York and has lived for many years, twenty, more than twenty years in the Netherlands, had her over a year ago, this past summer, with her four children who were grown up. But it was after that. That time in Europe that I came back and got into politics. I kind of left that. Oh, I should have mentioned that. And- 16:44 SM: How would you describe the America? When you look at that period (19)46 to- 16:48 JA: I kind of got off your question? 16:51 SM: It is just in a few words; how would you describe the America of (19)46 and 1960? Because that is important. But tell me about you. 16:59 JA: The period between (19)46- 17:01 SM: And 19-, in the period that President Kennedy was elected and how was? What was America like in your thoughts? 17:14 JA: Well, Eisenhower was elected president (19)52. And I remember the celebrated campaign where Harry Truman defeated Thomas E. Dewey. That was (19)48, (19)48 to (19)52. Harry Truman who had succeeded when the presidency when Roosevelt died. Well, it was a, (19)46 to (19)60, (19)52. 18:27 SM: I have not broken down here I have, what was the like to be, live in American (19)46 to (19)60, and then (19)61 to (19)70, (19)71 to (19)80, (19)81 to (19)90, (19)91 to 2000, 2001 to 2010, and these are like periods that boomers have been alive. What would, how would you describe the America in a few words what it was like then? 18:51 JA: Well, it was a time of sort of recovering from the events that preceded that period, namely World War II, returning veterans finding their way again in society, in my case, coming out of the army and going right back to school to finish the one semester that I had to complete, to get my degree and take the bar examination. I am kind of groping around trying to think of how I would describe the period, I was pretty busy building my own life, I think those of us who came out of the army and been away from civilian life or interested in getting back into the flow of normal life. It was during that period that I was really trying to find myself, in a sense, because after a brief period, in the law office, as I have just described for you, I decided to try something else. Try teaching rather than, than the practice of law, as a way of using my legal education as a foundation for a career. Then politics took over with my election. That's that was in (19)56. And you wanted me to spell- 21:20 SM: Well you were fine because you were, you describe the year for you right up until the time you were elected to Congress. 21:26 JA: During that time I was trying to reintegrate with my normal pattern of American life that we had left behind when we went off to the army, and had experiences that would live with us forever, but would be totally different alien from the culture that we were accustomed to, and trying to find our way into another veteran style of living, where we can both enjoy life and at the same time, managed to make a living and create a career that would sustain us. And- 22:16 SM: That was typical what was happening in America that time and- 22:20 JA: Maybe, maybe it was the kind of wandering that I was doing between the law and Foreign Service and politics, process of trying to reintegrate in society and American life that caused me to make some rather abrupt [inaudible] and sharp changes in what I was doing, from being at a law office one evening, one day and then being out, back in the classroom again, and then leaving that to go back into private practice with a partner, whom I had met during my law school days, and then leaving that for a career, which began with the election of State's Attorney, and then to Congress in 1968. 23:21 SM: Most of these- 23:25 JA: Well, it was kind of a, we were trying to find ourselves, find our way. 23:31 SM: Most of these other periods are going to be in part of these other questions that I asked because the periods from the time you were in Congress, what does the assassination of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King say about the America of the 1960s? 23:48 JA: Well, I remember vividly, where I was at the moment that the word arrived of the assassination. We were just assembling to conduct a committee hearing of the government operations committee chaired by an African American congressman from Chicago, Bill Dawson, his name was, and the news filtered over the transom somehow that the President had been shot and the committee, adjourned for the day. And I can remember that I wept I literally, he was a president of another party, but he was the young, youthful, vibrant hope that many of us had for the future. So, it was a searing, searing moment, etched into my memory in a way that I can, I can still remember how wretched I felt that this awful thing, it was a blot on the country's [inaudible] the President had been killed, been assassinated, even though it had happened to several others before him, but to me it was, it was a shocking, shocking- 25:23 SM: Was there a fear? Did you, you and your peers, have a fear that it was the unknown? He, you knew he had been killed, and that President Johnson had been protected, so that he would succeed, but the not knowing of why this happened, and it could it be something bigger than just- 25:44 JA: No, I do not think, I do not think I succumb to any deep conspiracy theory other than feeling the same sense of disbelief and wonderment that anyone could commit such a vile act. But I did not really, there were those who subscribe to a more conspiratorial view of the event. I just thought it was one of those tragic events in history that you cannot explain why it happened or how it happened. But you have to accept and somehow pick yourself up and move on as we did. When Johnson came in, and to his credit, it was he launched the civil rights revolution, which to me was the most important part of my congressional career being a part of the Congress that enacted the Civil Rights Act or- 26:51 SM: Fair housing. Yeah, and- 26:53 JA: Fair Housing Rights Act of (19)65. And I was the deciding vote in the rules committee that brought out the Open Housing Act. 27:01 SM: Yeah, I read that your book. And that was historic. 27:05 JA: I am prouder of that vote than any other action that I took, during the twenty years that I was in Congress, because as I think I probably indicated there, you do not very often in the body of 435 members feel that your vote has been of singular importance and it could not have happened without it. And that bill had to get my vote, the only Republican voting for it, and the rules committee needed to come out so that the floor could then vote on it. And that was the thing that really attracted national attention to me, just one at 435 in that large body, and from then on, the press began to cover me a little bit more intensively. And it probably was responsible for the fact that later I would take the bold step of saying I will leave the Congress, retire after ten terms and run first as a Republican and failing that, then as an independent. 28:20 SM: How about the 1968, which was a terrible year, you wrote about it in your book, but the assassinations of two leaders? What they two months exactly between. 28:33 JA: Martin Luther King. 28:35 SM: In April, April 5. 28:38 JA: Yes, yes. Well, yeah. And as someone who had come to really realize that civil rights had to be the dominant issue of that period, that we had to overcome the legacy of indifference and intolerance, that had locked us in from 1896 and the Supreme Court decision that decided it was perfectly alright to segregate people on a railroad train, and require them, blacks to ride in one car. That separate but equal doctrine which came about that bad decision in 1896 and lasted until the civil rights revolution of the (19)60s. well over a half century later. So, you are right, those two assassinations I think gripped me with a feeling that I wanted to be remembered, if I was to be remembered at all, as having played some part and some role and had a hand in bringing about a reversal of that whole doctrine and pattern of separate but equal and integrating American society basis where you did not draw the color line. 30:36 SM: One of the things here that I have is you served in Congress from (19)61 to (19)80. During these twenty years, the boomer generation went to high school, college, began their careers, many became involved in multiple movements which was really big in the late (19)60s, early (19)70s. Many protests and many went on with their careers, in short, the question I am getting at here is what legislation Congress has passed that had a direct- 31:03 JA: I did not get the rest of that sentence. 31:07 SM: Well, no, in short what legislation in Congress was passed, that had a direct bearing on the boomer generation. And I say this that things that I remember, it was the draft, voting age at eighteen, the Civil Rights Act and voting rights act that you talked about the Open Housing Act- 31:26 JA: Well for me the overriding issue was the civil rights issue, but those other things were important, of course, the eighteen-year-old vote- 31:36 SM: Right, and Roe v. Wade, in (19)73. And the Bakke decision, which was a decision that when I lived in California, that made [inaudible] news so big. And so those are some of the things that happened in the (19)60s and (19)70s. That- 31:53 JA: Well, that was a big issue in and in my life as well, because one of the things that I remember most vividly in one debate that I had, a national debate that I had with Ronald Reagan before League lost sponsorship or was afraid, they would lose sponsorship unless they acceded to the demand of Jimmy Carter, who would not get into a debate with Ronald Reagan and me. He said he would only debate Reagan, he would not, he would not debate with an independent candidate, namely my, myself. And, but in the one debate that I did have with Ronald Reagan, the thing that made headlines, of course, was that I flatly came out in strong favor of a woman's right to choose and indicated my belief that the decisions of the court prior thereto that denied that right were totally wrong. So, the women's movement, particularly to achieve the right that we are describing, the right to choose whether or not to have a child. That was one of the really significant features of that era. 33:38 SM: When you think of the politicians between (19)60 and (19)80. In the Senate and Congress, some of them stood out because of courageous acts. The two senators are against the Vietnam War at the beginning were Wayne Morse of Oregon, and I believe, Senator from Alaska, Ruska? The two of them. But they were, they were way ahead of their time in terms of being against the Vietnam War. And they were criticized heavily for it. I got to know Senator Nelson quite well. And because we brought them to our campus, the founder of Earth Day several times, and we organize the Leadership on the Road program. So, we saw eleven, United States senators. And he talked about the courage of those two, they were kind of ostracized, because they were the only ones for a long time. And then, then you had finally Gaylord Nelson and Fulbright and others going against it. But it is kind of a two-part question. What are yours? What were your thoughts then when those very few politicians were the way ahead of the others in terms of being against this war? And then in 1980, the price that was paid by many of the United States senators by losing their senatorial positions because of their anti-war stand when Ronald Reagan- 34:54 JA: Because of what? You have to speak up a little bit, my hearing is not good. 34:59 SM: In 1980, several senators lost their positions because of their anti-war stand and when President Reagan was elected, and of course, we are talking Gaylord Nelson, Birch Bayh, George McGovern, I think McCarthy was just going to retire, right. But they said he was not going to be able to win. Fulbright was on his way out. So, the major people were kind of out because of their stand against the Vietnam War, because America was changing toward Ronald Reagan. So, your thoughts on the politics in 1980 at that time, and also the courageous stands that these early senators took? 35:41 JA: Well, my thoughts today, obviously, are to salute the memory of all of those men that you have mentioned, for the courage and the foresight and the prescience that they had, that we were in an era where the United States should not be fighting that kind of war. To leap ahead, the one thing that troubles me about the present administration, which I voted for, and totally support, is that I have not agreed with a war in Afghanistan- 36:29 SM: Neither have I. 36:31 JA: And I feel that it is unfortunate that the President made the commitment that he did, to continue, I think that we should be trying to turn that over to an international body like United Nations, I do not think the United States should be fighting that war. Well, I guess I pretty well, given you a clue as to what my thoughts are I, I, in very recent times, I have invited people like McGovern, to come to the campus of the law school, or I have taught for twenty years to come speak to the students, in part because of the admiration I had for them on the stand courageous stands that they took with respect to the war in Vietnam. And I do not want to get away from your topic. I mean, I guess maybe it is because of my feeling that Vietnam should have engrained itself so thoroughly into our minds and our thought processes about the danger of becoming involved in the kind of struggle involved there, that I have carried that over to why I feel strongly as I do, that, our, our idea of trying to build a nation, despite recent statements where I think Obama himself has backed away from the idea of nation building, that that his predecessor, George Bush, Herbert Walker, George W. Bush had, he was really drumming a way out, that we were going to build a new nation and, and Iraq in the process of punishing al Qaeda. There was also nation building. And I do not think that is our task. To just totally believe that we ought to have the kind of global democracy represented by a body like the United Nations that will be in charge of building democracy around the world that ought to be an international cooperative effort. It should not be the job of one single nation, albeit my own country and the most powerful country in the world, to take on its shoulders, the idea of building democracy. I think that ought to be an international project. Well- 39:48 SM: It is almost you know, it's almost as I just wish Eleanor Roosevelt saw it even though she passed away in (19)62. But I wish she, she could have lived another ten, fifteen years because her Universal Declaration of Human Rights and what she first saw as the, is the role the United Nations. I still am a believer in the United Nations. But I think they do an awful lot of dialogue. And they do not do a whole lot of action beyond it. And the last great moment, I think was when Stevenson’s “wait till Hell freezes over.” That was a memory I will never forget because that is when the United Nations was working. I think, even though there were confrontations, the confrontation are in the United Nations. And it is, and that is, I think, what Eleanor Roosevelt dreamed of. I, your book is unbelievable. I, I read it in the past three weeks. And, and I had this book for a long time. You were, you were so right on with about the boomer generation and about the young people I think a lot because you had kids of the age. I love the explanation there when you took your daughter to see a concert, I think it was Arlo Guthrie concert, or you finally went with your daughter, the one that lives in Europe. And it was a great description, because the description you have the experience with your daughter was exactly the (19)60s. It was exactly. And so, I am going to start out by question number one. Here is a quote that you said, and I am going to put these quotes in the book. “What impressed me, however, was that the young man who denounced my views, at Elmer-,” this is at Elmhurst college, this is about generation gap. “What impressed me, however, was that the young man who denounced my views did so without even knowing what they were. If I needed any proof of the generation gap. I found it that day at Elmhurst College,” when that person was shouting you down. See, that is what we always teach young people do not speak unless you have some knowledge. And this is a tremendous quote to me. Could you explain what it was like going on college campuses back then? And whether Elmhurst was fairly typical, or was that just a unique? 42:02 JA: No, I think it was a fairly, a rather unusual incident really. I forget the exact date. 42:13 SM: It was, I think it was, not even sure. But it was in the (19)60s. It was right around the time that the Vietnam War was, probably mid (19)60s, (19)65, (19)66, somewhere around there. 42:29 JA: I remember, just got another little bit hazy about dates around that period. But- 42:39 SM: What was it like going to college campuses though, because you went to a lot of them. Speaking in the (19)60s, what kind of, what kind of, what did you think of that generation you had kids that were that age. 42:52 JA: You are talking about the mid (19)60s? 42:54 SM: Mid (19)60s or all the (19)60s, basically, mid to late (19)60s, early (19)70s? What did you think of those young people that listen to you? Were they listeners? 43:08 JA: Well, when was the, when was the great event up in New York? When they, all the young people got together? 43:23 SM: Woodstock? 1969. 43:26 JA: Yeah, that was toward the end of the decade. I know my own daughter; my own daughter went to Woodstock. 43:35 SM: She did? She admits it. 43:39 JA: Well, I find it hard to really tell you now. How to assess that period. 44:03 SM: You say it here the generation gap, your definition you stated- 44:07 JA: I guess there was a gap between generations. Yes, yes. I found it. I found it a difficult, even though I like to believe that I was a person of progressive views who was capable of changing as the times changed, not in just an accommodative sense but in the sense that I was putting my ear to the ground and could understand and empathize with the feelings of young people who were trying to express themselves and how they felt. But I guess I was just one of many somewhat puzzled parents, when it comes to trying to explain Woodstock. 45:00 SM: Let me refresh, you were writing here that, that you had reasons for the generation gap, and you broke them down. And they were very well thought out. And I have just mentioned them if you want to, let me make sure though this is still going here. You mentioned that one of the things is the change was American religion at that time, change was big. You said that hypocrisy, there was hypocrisy of the older generation. Alienation of the young due to the fact that there, there was so much- 45:35 JA: Yeah, I guess. Yeah. As you read those words, and, and refresh my recollection, I suppose I did. I did feel that young people were rebelling and throwing off the teachings of their elders, and yet they had not put in place of that. Anything to really fill the vacuum that they had created, other than to engage in their kind of fantasy that Woodstock represented. It was it was a puzzling time then. And I guess it still puzzles me, I really do not have a good answer. 46:26 SM: Well, in the in the book, you describe pretty well, the, the generation gap, the heroes were different, there was a decline in adult authority, decline in church authority, there was a decline in a lot of different things. And it certainly were challenging. How important do you feel, you have already mentioned the civil rights movement. But how important was the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement and the women's movement, in shaping this generation and in shaping America, the America not only of then, but now, those are three major movements. 47:03 JA: I think, enormously, enormously important. All of those things that you mentioned, were really, enormously important, in causing us to the kind of country we are today. 47:30 SM: Another quote, again, I am going to read these quotes, just see if you can respond to them. This is a quote on the bitterness of many of the people of that era toward the Vietnam War. “The bitterness and intransigence that we see in so many of our young people today reflects, I believe, the fact that unlike the civil rights movement, the Vietnam peace movement showed no early successors.” And then you also thought that the reason why the young people went toward violence, which is the Weathermen, and maybe the Black Panthers and other groups is that “The lessons seem to be no,” I cannot even read my reading here. “The lesson seemed to be no matter how hard they tried, nothing slowed down the war, so they turned to mobs.” So, they turned to mobs- 48:33 JA: Well, there was a feeling of deepening frustration that events simply plotted on. And one tragedy succeeded another because of their inability to affect the kind of change in policies that would have ended that seemingly endless conflict in Vietnam. And you are right. There were some singular victories in the civil rights struggle, like the passage of the Civil Rights Act of (19)64. And the Voting Rights Act and the Open Housing Act. There was nothing similar to deal with the problems that were engendered by the fact that our politicians and our political leaders with a few exceptions, were we were simply kind of caught in the tide and swept along endlessly in this involvement. Not to get off the track completely. That is why feelings like that are why I feel the way I do about the situation today in in Afghanistan, and our involvement in this war against terror, that lives are being lost. In the papers just a day or two ago, another long, well you were not here, you do not read the Post, the voter drafts of all the young men who have been killed in Vietnam, not in Vietnam, but in- 50:33 SM: Afghanistan. 50:35 JA: And it, it does start memories of the frustration that young people must have felt back in that earlier period that you are addressing. 50:49 SM: President Bush. The first President Bush said that the Vietnam syndrome was over, I, I say no, it is not over. I have always felt that way. There seems to be a sensitivity that whenever you bring up the word Vietnam, or the term quagmire, you get out “Oh, do not go back to that again. I mean, you are all you are doing is bringing up past” or “you are nostalgic for the past. It has no relevance to today.” That is frustration on the part of maybe some boomers who have lived through the period and have, they say they moved on, why do not you? But your thoughts on when you bring up Vietnam quagmire, it is, it creates a stir. You sense that still today? Do you do believe the Vietnam syndrome is over? 51:49 JA: Hard question to answer definitively. I- 52:03 SM: We will finish in thirty minutes. You do not ponder anymore on that particular one. But he just said, what did the following events mean to you individually? What does Watergate mean to you? 52:38 JA: Well, it led to the resignation of a president which was a traumatic effect. And yet I think Watergate in a sense had had a purgative and a cleansing effect. That was beneficial, highly, highly beneficial, as far as politics were concerned. And they showed that, it showed the recuperative power of American democracy. I mean, even though we suffered the ignominy and the disgrace really of seeing an elected the highest elected official, forced to resign for all of the reasons that they have gone into by many others and do not need to be repeated. It shows the, the recuperative strength of American democracy that this could survive all of that, and to bring about some of the changes that were clearly necessary. 54:17 SM: What did you think of Nixon's enemies list? 54:21 JA: Did I think what? 54:21 SM: What did you think of Nixon's enemies list? 54:25 JA: Well, it was shocking, was a shocking thing. Really. I was horror-struck. 54:34 SM: Were you on it? 54:36 JA: Well, I do not know whether I was on his list or not. I, I may well have been for the reason that I will always remember a long letter that I wrote to John Ehrlichman, who of course, I will ultimately paid the price of going to jail and being penalized for the role that he played, urging, urging that he counsel the president to come before the American people, this was before the complete denouement occurred about Watergate, and speak honestly and, frankly, and tell everything that he knew. Well, now, in retrospect, Nixon knew that he would be putting his neck in a noose, the fact that I wrote Ehrlichman and told him that that is what he should advise the president to do to come before a joint session of the Congress and honestly, honestly, lay out the facts and his role and the role of his administration, in what had happened. And I never even got an answer to my letter from Ehrlichman, who later went to jail himself, but I have the feeling that maybe Nixon knew the letter had been sent, and Ehrlichman may well have told him about it. And if so, he would have put a check by my name on that, on that list, and he kept of people to watch out for. 56:32 SM: I noticed that Daniel Schorr who just passed away, that he was, he was number four on the list. If he was invited to your, there is a story that he was invited to a White House function, and at the same time, he was number four on the enemies list, so there must be some communication around. What did you think of when Nixon said “peace with honor” in 1973? We, as we were leaving Vietnam, the Paris Peace Talks, “peace with honor,” that upset a lot of Vietnam vets. But your thoughts on when Nixon said, “peace with honor?” We had just, we had just killed almost 3 million Vietnamese. Do you think that was a little- 57:16 JA: Not only that but fought an illegal war in Cambodia. 57:18 SM: Yeah. 57:20 JA: Where no war had ever been declared. Well- 57:28 SM: I am going to turn the-, here we go. 57:33 JA: It was just another cynical effort by Nixon to put a favorable gloss on what had been this continuing tragedy of sending troops and money and incurring a loss of life in Vietnam that we did. It was his, it was the arrogance of power. It was really and others have used that term. It was an expression of the arrogance of power. 58:09 SM: What did you think of the Pentagon Papers? Just Daniel Ellsberg doing what he did? 58:15 JA: Well, I hailed the ultimate resolution of that dispute. And the Supreme Court decision that went with it. Again, I did not, I will always remember whether I put this in the book or not- 58:47 SM: Oh Jesus, it is ok, it is a cell phone, it is my cell phone, it will turn off. 58:53 JA: When Nixon tried to make his comeback in 1968. Well, he did. And- 59:06 SM: Can you hold on one second? We are talking about Pentagon Papers, I think you maybe, you might have finished your-. 59:10 JA: Well, it was just another glaring example, and then of evidence of the kind of intolerance that Nixon displayed toward those who disagreed with him, and his capacity to seek vengeance, and to get even, and all of the things that led to what we just finished discussing before ultimate disgrace. Watergate was of a piece with that kind of mentality that he brought to the presidency. 59:58 SM: What did Kent State and Jackson State mean to you? Obviously, you were, you were halfway through your time in the Congress. And obviously it was on the fourth of May 1970. Right after Nixon gave his nine o'clock speech on the invasion of Cambodia the night before on the 30th. Just your thoughts on that tragedy, and- 1:00:22 JA: Well, it was a shocking, it was a shocking thing, to say the least. And I felt a great deal of personal pain. At the thought, you know, that I had, in a sense, been a part of the scene that that brought about the incident that you just described. It was a, it was a very painful reminder of the fact that we had caused those students in the first place to feel the way they did and the incident that developed, I felt some sense of personal, personal responsibility. 1:01:28 SM: This leads me right into the Wall, which is the Vietnam Memorial. Were you there at the opening in 1982? When they opened the memorial with all the- 1:01:37 JA: No, I was not actually, I was not actually there. I visited the Wall, of course, and I, I do think sometimes since I have been down there. But thinking back to when, when, I went the first time, it was just a very painful reminder of what an awful waste of resources and human life can result from wrong decisions being taken, and what our role in the world should be. And- 1:02:25 SM: Do you think the Wall has done a good job with, for healing the nation on the Vietnam War or is that going too far? Jan Scruggs wrote a book called “To Heal a Nation”- 1:02:35 JA: I think it was belated recognition of it was an effort really to try to, to ease the national conscience over the debt that we owe to those that had to give their lives for what was really a misbegotten enterprise, one that they were forced to make the ultimate sacrifice. And we who were left behind bear some responsibility for what happened. 1:03:15 SM: What is amazing, when you think about of course Mỹ Lai and there were other very bad experiences over in Vietnam, but upon their return, you know, the government had to actually put Vietnam veterans in the affirmative action policy because they were being discriminated against, they could not get jobs. And so, I do not know- 1:03:38 JA: It was a dark, it was a very dark chapter in our national history. Your question, about and the fact you know, that it even came up in that celebrated episode in the campaign against John Kerry- 1:03:56 SM: That is right, in 2004. 1:03:59 JA: To punish him for the fact that he had spoken out against the war. 1:04:09 SM: And then, of course, there is the Vietnam Veterans against the War that became a very strong anti-war group in the early (19)70s. And there was also very strong anti-war movement during the war within the military, that we do not talk about, you know, the alternative newspapers that were at a lot of the bases. What did the Iran hostage crisis in (19)79 mean to you? 1:04:38 JA: That my phone? Well, let me think. 1:04:48 SM: Really cost Jimmy Carter his presidency. 1:04:51 JA: Well, yeah. Ordered desert raid to, you know, rescue the hostages. Well, it was it was just a very early signal, we did not really recognize as such at the time of how vulnerable we were, as far as energy supplies were concerned. And it was the beginning of the end of any hopes that he had of being reelected since- 1:05:40 SM: Then the Berlin Wall coming down because that was a major happening when we consider the Cold War. 1:05:49 JA: Well, I have been, I went to the Berlin Wall, while it was still there on a trip to Europe, particularly having served in the State Department in Berlin, for that period that I mentioned between 1953. A grim reminder of how political division can lead to a kind of obscenity that that wall did to literally divide the city, shut people from one sector off from another sector. 1:06:35 SM: And then Chicago, 1968, you write in depth about- 1:06:39 JA: Chicago in 1968? 1:06:41 SM: Yes, the convention, the Democratic Convention, and the fighting between the police and- 1:06:50 JA: Oh, yes, yes. 1:06:58 SM: I got three quotes here that I want you to respond to. These are quotes from you. And these are, to me they say a lot about America. “The real tragedy of Chicago was not the violence done to bodies in the streets. But the violence done to the hopes and minds of the young people. I speak as an American who, who cherishes the value of participation in American politics.” 1:07:27 JA: I cannot say it any better today than I did then I guess. 1:07:31 SM: Yeah. And then you say in quote, number two, “the lesson of Chicago seems to be: Do not get involved for the system will beat you in the end.” 1:07:42 JA: Or the system will beat you in the end? Is that the way I put it? Well, I think I think if I had some words to take back, I might be, I might modify that. To some extent. It was a little too pessimistic about the permanence that that event had on affecting people's attitudes about participating in democracy and in government, I probably was a bit of an overstatement. 1:08:18 SM: And the third one was “five years ago, in 1965, the response to, to the failures of the American institution was to get in and change it, change it. In 1970, many today are selling out, dropping out. It is not cool to be in that kind of thing.” So, you, were your thoughts on that? You went into the whole description of selling out, throwing out, and dropping out, which really worry you. 1:08:51 JA: Yeah, well maybe I was a little too pessimistic. At the time. I think, frankly, I was in the sense that the election of Obama now in. 1:09:17 SM: 2008. The reason I, early on after reading this book, decided that he was the one that I would like to support and did support in his campaign shows that we, history does have a way of reversing itself and of changing. And some of the deep pessimism that I expressed at that time, I think have been replaced by, were replaced by a renewed hope and belief that government could be truly responsive to the needs of the people. My one, I do not want to be tiresome on the subject, my one fear is that we have not done enough to build. Not democracy in Afghanistan, which I do not think is going to be a successful effort, to build an international institution, which we started to do. And we signed the charter, establishing United Nations, we have not gone far enough and had presidents or sufficiently dedicated to putting the United Nations in a better position to express the will of the world community. And leave it to individual nations to try to build democracy, as we say we are going to try to do in Afghanistan. That ought to be a global effort led by a global institution, not just one nation. 1:11:29 SM: You state something, I will get that. But there is a quote we use here. John Gardner is one of my favorite people. And you actually quote him in your book on page sixty-seven, who at that time, he was chairman of the Urban Coalition. And, and you, you wrote down what he wrote, and I think it is very important here. He had observed that “an important segment of young people has accepted the view that man is naturally good, humane, decent, just and honorable. But that corrupt and wicked institutions have transformed trends transformed the Noble Savage, into a civilized monster, destroy the corrupt institutions, they say, and man's native goodness will flower. There is not anything in history or anthropology to confirm the thesis, though, it survives through the generations.” Any thoughts on that? 1:12:31 JA: Again, I think I would modify what I said then, with the further, that with the further thought that where we have really singularly failed, is to strive with might and main to create an international institution that would be democratic, and would enable us to explicate American foreign policy in a way where it became an international responsibility to bring democracy in nations of the world that are troubled and being beset by civil strife and all that we, we still have too much “go it alone” attitude, with respect to world affairs, have not really yet yielded to the strong impulse, that our principle effort has got to go into building world institutions that will be capable of governing ungovernable areas of the world like Afghanistan, where the Taliban are free to roam and commit their degradations and commit their crimes. We finally signed reluctantly, the World Court treaty, you know, but we have done we have done nothing really, to make that body given the credibility and the enforcement power that would enable a truly World Court to take the place of making the judgments that we want to make unilaterally about how nations should conduct themselves. It ought to be that sense of international responsibility that gets more support from our leaders. Even Obama has not come up to the mark, as far as I am concerned. Yet, he has time. He is only halfway through one term. I hope maybe he will see the virtue of doing that. 1:15:12 SM: He has got the timeline to get out of Afghanistan, but now he was getting the pressures from the military and others. McChrystal- 1:15:21 JA: So many people have to resist those pressures. 1:15:24 SM: McChrystal was one of the main persons that, Petraeus may be the next person who knows, because they believe we cannot leave. I am going to just finish this little segment by saying that, even though you have changed since 1978, you state in your book, and I think it is very important, that you fear the new culture in 1970, due to its effect on participants in social and political life, you felt apathy is more of a threat than revolution, which I think is important point. Because if you know, well who knows, there is always this philosophy, I think Benjamin Barber are very good at this, the former guy, the Walt Whitman Center for Leadership at Rutgers is that the stronger the citizenship, the stronger the nation, when we constantly look to have a strong leader. That is, oftentimes we have weak citizens, it should be the other extreme, we do want a strong leader, but we want strong citizens. And I think this is what you are saying here. And the other final quote on this is something a beautiful quote that you put in here, “I believe our youth would rise to the challenge, for it seems to me that they understand intuitively perhaps better than some of their elders, that they will be, they will find their meaning only through constructive involvement in the problems, needs, hopes and joys of other people.” And I think that is exactly what you just been telling me. And it is very well said in that time going, you took your daughter to an Arlo Guthrie conference or concert, I remember, you mentioned that in this book, I think she was 16 years old. And even though you had a hard time with some of the long hair, and you had a quote in there saying, you know, “barbers have to make a living too.” Yeah, when you put that in there, that is beautiful, because it shows you have a sense of humor. But this quote’s important too. This is a quote from a song that you took from Arlo Guthrie, “it is only by having no self-sat-, status, satisfying grati-,” excuse me, “it’s only by having no self-gratifying goal that you can ever really fulfill yourself.” And that's Arlo Guthrie. So, the message in the music sometimes is very important. Couple questions I have here. When did the (19)60s begin, in your opinion? And when did it end? 1:18:00 JA: When did the (19)60s begin? 1:18:02 SM: Yes. And when did it end? 1:18:05 JA: Well, they really began I think with the election of john F. Kennedy that we have already talked about. It seems to me that that, that it ended the Eisenhower era. And definitely, even though his life was tragically cut short, launched us on, on a new phase, period of American culture, political culture. And when did they end? Was that- 1:18:40 SM: Yeah, what do you think the (19)60s end? 1:18:59 JA: Well, probably, probably with the election of Nixon. 1:19:09 SM: (19)68. 1:19:12 JA: That, that, I think, brought about kind of a different approach. Yeah, I guess I would, I would tie it off with, with the election of Nixon. 1:19:33 SM: Is there a watershed moment during this time that stands out above every other? 1:19:38 JA: Well, for me, it was the civil rights revolution. Yeah, it was the mid (19)60s when we finally, sixty-four and sixty-five. And Open Housing (19)68, that, that to me was the great defining moment of that decade. 1:19:58 SM: Did you ever have a chance to meet and talk to the Big Four, which is Dr. King, Roy Wilkins, James Farmer- Did you have an opportunity to talk to the Big Four, Dr. King, James Farmer- 1:20:13 JA: No, no I never actually had a personal meeting with him much as I admired him. 1:20:20 SM: Any other civil rights leaders that you talked with in any? 1:20:24 JA: Well, our great civil rights leader of my personal circle of friends was the former lead counsel to the civil rights movement, Joseph Rauh. 1:20:42 SM: Oh, yeah. 1:20:45 JA: He was, he was, he became a dear friend of mine. And I revered, there is a Joe Rauh Memorial Lecture Series. Every year someone coming from the DC law school. And I missed the last lecture. Sorry to say, Eric Holder, the new Attorney General delivered the lecture. But Joe Rauh should be remembered in any book that is written about civil rights, and the true meaning of the important events of the decade of the (19)60s. 1:21:30 SM: I am going to put down my batteries might seem to be low here. So let me just turn my, put my batteries in here. Bear with me. I can see you doing okay. It was a gentleman who never got a whole lot of praise. But he is always behind the scenes and he was African American. He worked with in Congress. And he was not a congressman. But he was certainly in- 1:22:04 JA: I cannot think of him either, of course, Joe Rauh was not an African American. To me he was one of motive forces behind the accomplishments in that field that took place in the decade of the (19)60s. 1:22:23 SM: You said one of the problems of the (19)60s was what you call massification. What do you mean by that? 1:22:30 JA: Massification? 1:22:32 SM: Massification. 1:22:33 JA: I am not sure I remember what I had in mind. 1:22:35 SM: That is a whole, you have a whole chapter I do not know what to tell you. 1:22:39 JA: No, that is faded into the ether, I am not sure why. 1:22:47 SM: I know that. That is when you talked about Riesman’s book lonely, the lonely crowd-. Riesman’s book, The Lonely Crowd, David Riesman. And it was part of that feeling that America just was not talking to itself, they were walking by each other. And that was that was part of the massification that there was so much technology and so many new things that because of all these new things, there was no communication. You are just, you are walking by someone on the street. And that is what David Riesman said in his book, The Lonely Crowd, because- 1:23:22 JA: Well probably I just, it goes back to my real preoccupation with the fact that it was not until, toward the end of that decade that we finally completed the trilogy of congressional enactments that we refer to as the civil rights revolution, that we were walking down the street and we did not see people as we should have seen them, suffering from, from prejudice and bias and indignity of that separate but equal doctrine. 1:24:09 JA: Yeah, you talked a little bit about Woodstock and the moratorium also, the moratorium was in (19)69 and Woodstock was (19)69. So, these are two happenings and you felt that Woodstock was not so much to express to decent as to draw human and personal meaning from each other, of being around someone that you- 1:24:32 JA: Yeah, yeah, recall the old saying people like company. They like to know that there are others that share their thoughts and dreams. I think there was that feeling on the part of many young people that they wanted the comfort and the assurance that came from knowing that there were others like them that were grappling with the same kind of uncertainty and indecision and problems that they had. They wanted the, the proof, of the comfort that comes from association with other like-minded persons. 1:25:18 SM: You also said that was similar to what happened the moratorium in (19)69. Where something like four hundred. There is a lot of people there, 400,000 or whatever, at the moratorium and you said it was more commercial than political. It was a coming together out of a deep sense of, I cannot read my writing here. But deep sense of feeling about issues and that was (19)69. And my last quote that I have here, that I am going to incorporate within the rest of the straight questions is your discussion of Vietnam. And because I know this, Vietnam really upset you immensely. And bear with me because I want this in the record too that you wrote this. “We are guilty, not of intentional evil, but of blindness, and specifically of an inability to perceive the difference between a situation such as World War Two, in which American security itself required a foreign military effort, and a situation such as Vietnam, in which a threat to our security was indirect at first, and in which our power should have been employed in an entirely different manner, if at all. 1:26:39 JA: Yeah, well, it goes back to what I have been drawing away at that we should have internationalize that problem, it should not have become a concern. If there were problems in Vietnam, they were the concerns of the world community. They were not simply American concerns that we would deal with unilaterally. There ought to be, the world ought to take responsibility, the world community and we should be a leader in the effort to transcend the idea that every problem around the world is an American problem and is somehow run a militate against our best interests unless we promptly solve a particular nations problems. It goes back to my intensified feeling today. And I had it back as long ago as when those words were written that we have got to become much more globally conscious. And if we do, then we will see that purely national interests have to be submerged in an effort to find international solutions, problems that are not simply our problems, but the problems of humanity and the rest of the world. 1:28:09 SM: Let me- 1:28:09 JA: -walking today. 1:28:12 SM: It is not very nice out there. One person running. And that is about it. In the end, why did we lose the Vietnam War In your opinion? 1:28:27 JA: We lost the Vietnam War. Because we failed to understand that the government that we chose to support, namely, the government of South Vietnam, what it was not representative of the aspirations of the Vietnamese people themselves. It was a construct that favored a few who held positions of power and influence, but it did not look to the national needs of that area, known as Vietnam. And we should have seen that it was not, it was not an appropriate venue for us to try to transport American democracy to a part of the world that clearly preferred the leadership that was provided by another system altogether. And even though they were communists, today, we were living peacefully with Vietnam. I have clothing in my closet that when I turn over the label it is made in Vietnam, we are importing and exporting, carrying on trade and commerce with Vietnam. And we just totally misconceived, what the appropriate role for American policy, foreign policy, should be. We took upon our shoulders, something that did not belong there. And if the world community through a world body, like the United Nations did not want to take over and administer the affairs of those people, that it was not up to us to interfere in the internal decisions that were made by the Vietnamese. 1:30:48 SM: When you, you have kids that are boomers. And when you I have asked this question to everyone, but you cannot generalize an entire generation of seventy-four million people's, which the boomers and actually only between 5 and 10 percent. were involved in any kind of activism within the generation, which is still a couple million, but that means 85 to 90 percent were just went on with their lives, although they were affected psychologically, obviously. What, what are some of the positive qualities or negative qualities you look at the generation? That includes everybody, when we are talking, we are not only talking white, we are talking African American, we are talking Latina, we are talking what generation? Are you talking about? 1:31:34 JA: What generation are you talking about? 1:31:37 SM: Boomer generation. Yeah, just some of the positive qualities and some of the negative qualities that you see. 1:31:47 JA: Oh, I do not know whether I am wise enough to give you a good answer to your question. I suppose the positive qualities of that generation, are that they picked up their lives, those of us like myself, who had fought in a war and gone on and picked up the pieces of their lives and put them back together. I do not know. I do not I do not have a good answer. 1:32:30 SM: How about your kids, your kid’s generation? What do you think about their generation? 1:32:37 JA: Of which generation? 1:32:38 SM: The boomers, the kids that were born after World War II. 1:32:41 JA: that were born after World War II? 1:32:44 SM: Yeah, what are their strengths and weaknesses? As a group? You saw them in so many different ways? And then you raised boomers. 1:33:18 JA: It is almost an impossible question to answer. I really defer to others. I personally do not know. 1:33:27 SM: How do you, 1984 when Newt Gingrich came into power, and actually George Will oftentimes does this in some of his writings, and we see it when Glen, Glenn Beck often times on his TV show and Mike Huckabee on his TV show, they'll blame a lot of the problems we have in our society today on the generation and the era of the (19)60s and (19)70s by saying that the breakdown of the American family, the lack of moral values, the drug culture, the, the divorce rate, the not going to church, you know, the family, stable family unit we saw in the (19)50s, the welfare state, all special interest groups. They only think about themselves and not about others. What do you think of when people make those general attack? 1:34:29 JA: I have a very minimum high regard for people like Glenn Beck, who set themselves up as philosophers who have the capacity and the wisdom to assess any generation. There is anybody that causes me to turn the dial immediately its somebody like that comes on. Their pontifications where they blame one group or another group for the problems of society do not impress me as being very analytical. Their post proper, post hoc, propter hoc kind of reasoning, after the fact, they are trying to tell us. This is what, why things happened as they did. And I do not think their analysis is very credible. 1:35:49 SM: Have we healed as a nation? I am going to get to some, we took a group of students to see-. The question I am asking is regarding the issue of healing, healing. We took a group of students to Washington DC in 1995, to meet Senator Muskie. And the students came up with this question because none of them were alive in 1968. But they had seen the divisions that were happening in America in the (19)60s. And since he was the nominee, they wanted to, the vice-presidential nominee, they wanted to see his thoughts on this question. And the question was due to the divisions in America, in the (19)60s, do you, which was the divisions between black and white, between male and female, between gay and straight, between those who supported the war and those who were against the war, between those who supported the troops and were against the troops. They have seen the bombings, the fires within the cities and the assassinations. Do you think that the boomer generation that was born after World War II was going to go to their grave similar to the Civil War generation not healing? No, 1:36:58 JA: No, I do not think so. I think that is, that is kind of overdrawing that picture, to, to make that kind of blanket condemnation. I do not give it as much basis, much justification. I do not think the people that say things like that are not terribly credible. 1:37:25 SM: The Senator Muskie responded in this way. He said, he did not even respond to 1968. He responded by saying we have not healed since the Civil War, over the issue of race. And that is how he responded to it. And then he went on to talk about people that had died, he had seen the Ken Burns series and all the people that died. So, the students were a little surprised by his commentary, but then he made a lot of sense because he was talking about that ongoing issue of, of race. Trust, you bring up the issue of trust in your book, too. But trust seems to be a quality that or lack of trust, that many of the boomers had toward leaders in any capacity, whether it be a Congressman, lack of trust, whether it be a congressman, a senator or president, president of a university, a head of a corporation, even ministers and rabbis or anybody in position of responsibility they did not trust because they have seen so many of the leaders lie to them? And of course, we are talking Watergate, we are talking golf with Tom McNamara. 1:38:32 JA: That begs the question, what events like Watergate do play on the national conscience, and can be influential, and affect the thinking and self-assessment that people make of their own lives and the lives of the people that they associate with? I am not suggesting that we live in some kind of a vacuum, all of these forces have some interplay, with how we emerge as, as a people as a nation. I am just very hopeful. I am optimistic about the future, even though I get a little bit discouraged. As I already indicated things like the continuing war in Vietnam and our failure to construct international institutions and build respect for the rule of law. So that we do not have to take on tasks that are beyond our capacity as a nation to really assume. I am still an optimist. 1:40:10 SM: How have you changed since writing this book? This book was written in 1970. Yep, it came out in 1970. And it is a really important book of the times it really. 1:40:30 JA: I do not know whether I have become, I become older, have I become wiser? I am not sure. Well, it is hard for me to give you an intelligent assessment of how I have changed, I hope I have become more tolerant of other people and opposing views. And even when I very much disagree, as I frequently do with things that happen. I, I have kind of an optimism that we are going to get over this, and eventually we will find the right path. We will find the right way. So, I still put myself in that category. 1:41:23 SM: When you were very young. We are not we are not talking about your college years. And we are talking about when you were growing up in elementary school, in high school. Who was the greatest influence in your life? 1:41:38 JA: A great influence in my life? 1:41:40 SM: Yeah, who helped shape the person you became? 1:41:44 JA: Oh, my father, I think I admired my father intensely. He was a Swedish immigrant boy who came in (19)15. Lived a very useful life as a, as a merchant, raised a family. Was a good Christian. I guess I can hope for nothing more than that my children would one day look up to me the way I look up to my father. He was he was a great overriding influence in my life. 1:42:28 SM: What are the qualities of leadership that you most admire in a person? 1:42:32 JA: The qualities of leadership? 1:42:34 SM: That you think are important to be a leader. 1:42:36 JA: Well, you have to be able to break from the pack, you have to be able sometimes to disregard conventional thinking. And to know I was put on earth in this time, in this era, given the present circumstances, and it is for me, not simply to accept it, as wrote, the opinions of other people, but to examine them carefully and choose for myself. Whether this is the course that we should now follow. So, it is that independence of thought and action, I think I treasure the most. 1:43:20 SM: One more question here, and then we will be done. Some of the personalities that kind of stand out from the (19)60s, the personalities that stand out from the (19)60s, we often tell young people that if you stand up and speak up, there is a price one pays for that. You do not get assassinated, mostly like you do in other countries or be put in jail. But what were your thoughts on? 1:43:55 JA: I think that’s my phone. My wife got it. We have one down here somewhere. 1:44:05 SM: What did you think of people who believe they stood up for something, but they had a lot of people that did not like them, and I am just going to list them. And then you can just give your thoughts. The Tom Haines’ of the world, the Jane Fonda’s, the Rennie Davis’, the Abbie Hoffman’s, the Jerry Rubin’s, the Angela Davis’, the Benjamin Spock’s. You know, the- 1:44:34 JA: That is a rather mixed breed. I mean, going to the last name first, Dr. Spock. I thought was a rather opinionated person that probably was a little bit, demonstrated our quality of a little too much self-assurance. He has the right answers and the right remedy and the right prescription. The world is constantly changing. And people have become rigid in their thinking. And think that, well, this is the way we do it. This is the way we have always done it. This is the way we should always do it in the future. I kind of drawback, a little wary of people who dispense that kind of advice. I think people have to realize that different voices are needed in different periods of history. And the same message that may ring true today may not be appropriate in the message, depending on changed circumstances tomorrow. That is not to say that there are certain eternal verities, I believe in the Ten Commandments after all. And as a Christian, I accept the Gospels as the translation of your kind of religious faith and doctrine that I should continue to have, no matter what happens. But that aside, I think the capacity of the greatness of this country has resided in its capacity for change, to realize that what may have been an appropriate thing to do, and an appropriate approach in this era is not necessarily the key to open the door to tomorrow. Where different circumstances may require an entirely different approach. I hope that does not sound wishy washy, I do not think it is, it is just the changing times, and changing circumstances can and should lead to changed attitudes. That is progress. Without that you are stuck on a treadmill, and just kind of going around and around and around. And nothing ever does change. I do not believe in that limited view of our capacity, either individually or as a nation to deal with our problem. We ought to be constantly willing to turn over new ideas, examine new approaches. And if there is one problem the Republican party has today, I think it is extreme conservatism is, they claim to have views that might have been appropriate some prior period, but certainly are not an adequate prescription for tomorrow. (End of Interview) Accessibility Copy/Paste below: Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Description 1 Microcassette Rights Statement Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with John Anderson Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Anderson, John B. (John Bayard), 1922-2017 ; McKiernan, Stephen Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/wav Subject The topic of the resource Legislators—United States; Presidential candidates—United States; Anderson, John B. (John Bayard), 1922-2017--Interviews Description An account of the resource Dr. John Anderson (1922 - 2017 ) was a United States Congressman and presidential candidate from Illinois. As a member of the Republican Party, he represented Illinois's 16th congressional district from 1961 through 1981. Anderson had a law degree from the University of Illinois. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010-08-04 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.15 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2017-03-14 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. McKiernan Interviews Extent The size or duration of the resource. 108:03 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/2346829a59430b280601739ac04ca54f.jpg a7de9fa6b396d16fc0908ed434bfd1dc https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/7f34de1b4e77bd47fe8729e357998745.mp3 be54ec1b9aa3acd930edad7338922dc3 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Audio interviews Title A name given to the resource McKiernan Interviews Description An account of the resource Stephen McKiernan's collection of interviews includes more than two hundred interviews with prominent figures of the 1960s, which were collected between the mid-1990s to 2023 The collection provides narratives of people who were actively involved in or witnessed events in the 1960s, an era which spurred profound cultural and political transformation in the twentieth century. Interviewees include politicians, artists, scholars, musicians, authors, and veterans who delve into the decade’s most prominent issues and events, including the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the anti-war movement, women’s rights, gay rights, segregation, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Hippies, Yippies, and individualism.<br /><br /> <h3>The McKiernan 22</h3> <div>Stephen McKiernan interviewed legends of the 1960s. When asked in 2021 where one should start when sifting through his vast collection, he provided the following list:</div> <ul> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/854">Julian Bond</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1866">Bobby Muller</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1175">Craig McNamara</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/910">Dr. Arthur Levine</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/837">Diane Carlson Evans</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/942">Dr. Ellen Schrecker</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/876">Dr. Lee Edwards</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/841">Peter Coyote</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1233">Dr. Roosevelt Johnson</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/899">Rennie Davis</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1222">Kim Phuc</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/917">George McGovern</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/833">Frank Schaeffer</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/840">Rev. Dr. Frank Forrester Church </a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1240">Dr. Marilyn Young</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/842">James Fallows</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/835">Joseph Lee Galloway</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/911">John Lewis</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/839">Paul Critchlow</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/888">Steve Gunderson</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1159">Charles Kaiser</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/2407">Joseph Lewis</a></li> </ul> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Stephen McKiernan Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In copyright. Template: Simple Audio Player with Transcription This template displays an audio player by Amplitude.js with a scrollable transcription which is loaded from the "Transcription" metadata field. This template displays an audio player with the first attached image file as the 'cover image'. For its audio source, the template looks for the first attached audio file. If additional audio files exist, they should be combined using audio editing software, or a separate Omeka item should be made for each part. Date of Interview 2003-12-10 Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Stephen McKiernan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Sheldon Hackney Language English Biographical Text <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Francis Sheldon Hackney (1933 - 2013) was a scholar, author and a professor of U.S. History at the University of Pennsylvania. He earned his PhD. in American History at Yale University. After earning his Ph.D., Hackney served in the Navy for five years.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:15105,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;11&quot;:4,&quot;12&quot;:0,&quot;14&quot;:[null,2,0],&quot;15&quot;:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;16&quot;:10}">Francis Sheldon Hackney (1933 - 2013) was a scholar, author, and professor. He earned his PhD. in American History at Yale University. After earning his Ph.D., Hackney served in the Navy for five years. He was the former President of Tulane University and the University of Pennsylvania</span> Digital Publisher Binghamton University Libraries Digital Format audio/mp4 Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data 1 Microcassette Material Type Sound Interview Format Video or Audio Audio Keywords <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Civil Rights Movement; Montgomery Bus Boycott; University o Michigan; Anti-War Movement; Gay and Lesbian Rights Movement; Cambodian incursion; Kent State; Ronald Reagan; Women's Rights Movement; Conservatives&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:2,&quot;4&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:14281427}}">Civil Rights Movement; Montgomery Bus Boycott; University of Michigan; Anti-War Movement; Gay and Lesbian Rights Movement; Cambodian incursion; Kent State; Ronald Reagan; Women's Rights Movement; Conservatives</span> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 83:46 Subject LCSH Authors; College teachers; History--United States; University of Pennsylvania; Sailors; Hackney, Sheldon, 1933-2013--Interviews Accessibility Copy/Paste below: Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Rights Statement Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly. Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound, or alternative text from a visual medium McKiernan Interviews Interview with: Francis Sheldon Hackney Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan Transcriber: REV Date of interview: 10 December 2003 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (Start of Interview) SM (00:00:05): Into my first question, and this is working, I know it is. When you think of the (19)60s and the (19)70s, what is the first thing that comes to your mind? SH (00:00:17): The civil rights movement actually, because that is where my primary interests lay at that time and now, but I lived through the period, so I have a very complicated idea about it. And I have been teaching a course on the 1960s for the last 25 years, so I know it both as a participant and as a professional observer. SM (00:00:45): What was that very first experience as a participant when you went from an observer to a participant in that movement? Do you remember the very first time? SH (00:00:55): Well, I was a participant first, I think, because I was born and grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. For reasons that I have never been able to figure out I emerged as a southern white liberal who thought that segregation was just wrong. And that happened to me when I was in the eighth grade, actually, when I suddenly began thinking about race prompted by nothing. I was a Methodist then, and I think my religious training had something to do with it, but I cannot be sure. So I was conscious of the racial situation in the south. All the way through college I was the liberal of my group in a way, all the way through college, and then married a woman who came from a family that was quite active in various ways. The Durrs from Montgomery, Virginia Foster Durr was- SM (00:02:15): Oh yeah, there is a brand-new book now, The Letters. I just bought that this weekend. SH (00:02:17): Oh, good for you, yes. SM (00:02:18): I did buy it, yes. SH (00:02:20): Oh, super. Well, she is my mother-in-law, actually. SM (00:02:24): Oh, wow. SH (00:02:24): Freedom Writer. SM (00:02:25): Oh yes. SH (00:02:26): I got married. I mean, I met my wife when I was still in college and before the Montgomery bus boycott started. So I was aware of the Montgomery bus boycott all the way through it, though I was also in the Navy then. She and I got married and I went through the Navy and came out of the Navy in 1961 and went to graduate school. The civil rights movement was already raging, and I was sympathetic to it, of course. Now, I went to Yale, the graduate school, so that did not set me apart from people at Yale where the standard opinion would have been sympathetic to the civil rights movement. But in that sense, I was already engaged in the (19)60s, not that I did anything terribly heroic, but I was a participant before anything else. I do remember the first anti-war meeting that I went to in the spring of 1965 when Johnson was escalating the war in Vietnam and the University of Michigan had a sit-in protest. And that caught on, the notion of a big sit-in to protest the war or to teach about the war actually it was. Well, there was one at Yale several weeks later, two or three weeks later, and I went to that. I remember there was even someone there from the University of Michigan to bring greetings from the academic community of the University of Michigan. And then it was along, it went all night at Yale and there were pro-war people there as well. And in fact, I did not become actively anti-war until good bit later actually. I was slow. SM (00:04:39): When you look at the movements, obviously the civil rights movement is the one that you were involved in, had the greatest impact on your life. What are your thoughts when historians or commentators talk about all the movements, that it was the civil rights movement, that was the model for the anti-war movement, the women's movement, your thoughts on those other movements and linkage with the civil rights movement? SH (00:05:02): Well, the civil rights movement did provide the paradigm for the others, both in the tactics that were used and also to an extent on the goals, if you will. I mean, the women's movement quite consciously copied some of the rhetoric and tactics of the civil rights movement, but as did the other social justice movements as well, [inaudible]. Not so much the Disabilities Movement, but others, the gay and lesbian rights movement, which really starts late in the (19)60s, but also comes in the wake of, into the atmosphere that had been prepared by the civil rights movement and the war movement as well. SM (00:05:56): When you look at, and I am looking at the boomer generation, and sometimes it is hard to define, a lot of people put parameters, they put anybody going between (19)46 and (19)64, and some say between (19)42 and (19)60. But when you look at the civil rights movement, how important were the boomers in that movement? Knowing that people like Dr. King, they were a little older and some of the civil rights leaders were a little older, but how important were they in civil rights itself, in the movement, whether it be college students, or? SH (00:06:29): It was, the civil rights movement changes several times. It began, if you think of it beginning as I do in the Montgomery bus boycott as a mass movement, the Brown decision was in (19)54. So December (19)55 Rosa Parks stands up for justice by sitting down, as they say. And the Montgomery bus boycott was basically a middle class movement. I mean, it was the whole black community of Montgomery that was mobilized for that. Same might be said for the Little Rock school integration crisis that came out of a lawsuit. It was a very orderly NAACP process that located the kids, sort of trained them about how to.... Brought the suit, got the federal court to order their admission into Central High and then followed those kids all the way through. Things changed then. That is as to say that the boomers did not have anything to do with this. The civil rights movement was coming anyway, right? But things changed with the sit-in movement in early 1960, because those young men and women at North Carolina A&T were from the boomer generation, and they had come along at a period when the black community was much more assertive about itself, where the experiences of World War II had had their effect. And African Americans in general were improving their position in American life, and as we know, improvement breeds ambition to improve. There is this escalating expectation, and I think the city movement begins that, and then when younger blacks and whites come to the fore and begin as the arrowhead of the movement, if you will, but they are out on the front lines. So the boomers take over in the (19)60s. SM (00:08:52): Leading into a question, in recent years, if you go back to even (19)94 when Newt Gingrich came to power, and of course he is out now, and also George Will always likes to do his digs whenever he gets a chance. Some of the commentators talk about the boomer generation and the reasons for the breakdown of American society, but some of the values that these young people had, their involvement with drugs, obviously the sexual revolution, the counter culture mentality, lack of respect for authority, your thoughts on the attacks on this generation? SH (00:09:29): Well, it is interesting, because we are still living in a politics that has been fashioned as a reaction to the 1960s basically. And if you look at those aspects of the (19)60s that were making for change in American life, the social justice movements, all of them, the counterculture in particular, those were profoundly upsetting to a lot of Americans. And it is easy to dismiss, especially the counterculture, but the young people in general was simply pursuing sex, drugs and rock and roll in the (19)60s. But I think that is simplistic and does not get at the essence. My own attitude toward the (19)60s is that it contained both a very hopeful, bright upper side, if you will. The social justice movements in particular, the bringing African Americans into the mainstream of American life, providing justice a bit for the disabled and for minority groups and protecting the rights of women as never before. All of that changed America fundamentally. And we will never revert to the way things were in the (19)60s when there was only one imagined America, and that was a white Anglo person. We were most much more pluralistic now in our thinking and in our actuality. The counterculture is somewhat different. I think it is more mixed. The counterculture has its roots in the 1950s in the Beat generation and the challenge to middle class American suburban values, if you will. Because those values were stultifying. Well, I think in a way they were. The counterculture is the first movement I know of that consciously identifies their enemy as not a class or a group, but as the values of society itself. The counterculture is saying, "These middle-class values are stultifying limiting, and we have got to, if we are going to be free, we need to overthrow and live by, overthrow those middle-class values and live by a different set of values." I mean, I am making it sound prettier than it was, but I think that is what they were saying. And they imagined liberty for them than being able to choose what values to live by, which is really quite radical. SM (00:12:30): During that timeframe, when you look at the boomer generation, if you had to look at those years, anywhere between 60 and 70 million people were born and can be categorized from the beginning of the boomers in (19)46 to (19)64. These same individuals that attacked that generation always to say that the only 15 percent really were really activist- SH (00:12:51): That is actually true. SM (00:12:52): ...involved in things. And by using that, even those numbers are pretty high. Only 15 percent was involved. Your thoughts when they used that? That only 15 percent of that group was ever involved or cared about anything. SH (00:13:06): That is true, absolutely true. There is this study of Harvard graduates in 1969 or (19)70 in which the pollster asked Harvard students to identify themselves along the political spectrum, 75 percent said that they were much more conservative than the typical Harvard student. Think about that a minute. Which means that the mood was set by the small minority that were active and that were out in front doing things that were different. They got the media coverage, they moved the culture, basically. Those 85 percent who did not demonstrate, did not even sign a petition, were still sympathetic to the 15 percent that were more active, but were more passive about their sympathy. At times of crisis, for instance, I am thinking here of the spring of 1970 when the Cambodian incursion occurred and campuses everywhere exploded. That gives you some notion of the campus mood. But even though very small percent of people had been active in the annual movement statistically on college campuses, when that happened and those small numbers organized a mass meeting, the whole campus showed up. It was not that the 15 percent was forcing the others, it was that it is just the passive and more aggressive. SM (00:14:51): When you look at, especially when you look at student development and how when you look at students, sometimes they develop at different stages. Their leadership may not come out when they are in college, but it may be in their late 20s. Has there anything ever really been done in that 85 percent with a respect to how that era affected their subconscious? SH (00:15:15): Good question. SM (00:15:15): So that they have gone on in their lives and they may not have been involved during that period, but certainly in their later lives those experiences played a part and they came forth? We always believe that students. SH (00:15:27): I were not aware of a study, but that is really a good question. My guess is I think, I can assume that the implication of your question, my guess is that the people who live through the (19)60s on a college campus probably were easily engaged by social issues later in their lives, or had their values set a little bit differently. SM (00:16:00): If you were to look at that generation again, and we are concentrating in on this boomer group, their greatest strengths, some of their greatest characteristics, and their weakest characteristics? SH (00:16:13): Well, the greatest characteristics is they had a social conscience if you take the generation as a whole. That whether this is not genetic certainly, but it is just that when that group happened to hit college age, it meant that universities were growing rapidly, very rapidly. It was a heady period on college campuses in general. And so they were there and more easily mobilized as college students always are. And they responded because the (19)50s, this was a reaction against the quintastic (19)50s, and the (19)50s of course were a reaction against World War II and the Depression. People wanted to live more subtle lives that had a bit more material wellbeing to them. And the (19)60s were a reaction against that in the direction of being more socially involved and creating a society in which everyone could lead a more fulfilling life. Social conscience, I would say, is the leading characteristic on the upside. More creativity. Start an accident, that music- SM (00:17:48): Oh yes. SH (00:17:49): I mean, of the (19)60s, it is quite remarkable that it is still played, and college students today is still familiar with that music. That is 40 years ago. SM (00:17:57): Simon and Garfunkel performed last night at the inspector, filling next door, and two of our administrators went and they said it was packed with boomers. They were all in their 40s. It was like, and then when they did that Bridge Over Troubled Water, Coming Home To America and Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio. In fact, Tom [inaudible], director [inaudible] said he almost had tears in his eyes. Because it was bringing back memories of a trip he took, Coming Back To America, that song there. And he was involved in a very serious issue with his family at that time, and he was at Alfred University, and I thought it was interesting. It all came back. That song brought everything back and tears came like it did 30 years ago. SH (00:18:48): Yeah. SM (00:18:49): Unbelievable. SH (00:18:51): Oh, it really is. Well, it is interesting that in my seminar I gets a good sense of how today's students think of the (19)60s and how they view it. And there was a time in the (19)80s when students were rather nostalgic for the (19)60s, because that was a time when it must have been great to be a college student. Things that is where the focus of the world was. Television were watching what was happening on college campuses. Also, it is a new experimentation going on, real sense of excitement. They thought, "Why could not things be like that now in the early (19)80s?" Well, today's students see the (19)60s as not very attractive, because sex, drugs and rock and roll get you into trouble. And if you are interested in a career, you can get off track awfully easily with all these distractions and with movements and marches. Those students of the (19)60s looked pretty bedraggled. They did not bathe all that much or did not cut their hair, so it is quite a reversal then. And it is not that they are unsympathetic, because the values, especially the women, it is interesting, women students now, if you ask whether they are feminists, they will say, "Absolutely not, I am not a feminist." Then you talk a bit more and you will find that they intend to have a career. They know about the women's movement of the (19)60s and (19)70s. They appreciate what that women's movement did for them, but they do not want to be known as feminist. They appreciate, they want the rights that were earned. They want equal pay for equal work. They want careers to be open to them, but they do not want to be identified as radicals. It is really quite remarkable. SM (00:21:00): Could you comment on the social consciousness was the main positive? What was, in your eyes, the main negative? SH (00:21:06): I think self-indulgence, without a doubt, just self-indulgence. In two senses. One, if you come to see middle class values as imprisoning and stultifying and you want to open up life to all of its possibilities, it is very easy to tell yourself that LSD is going to do it. And it is very easy to tell yourself, "If I lie around and take drugs and drink booze and do everything else that feels good, that I am really part of the revolutionary movement." When actually what you are doing is indulging yourself just and not doing anybody any good, much less yourself. The other self-indulgence that is there is really responsible for causing those social justice movements to fragment at the end of the (19)60s and disappear. And that is, the sense that this is a revolutionary moment and we are the revolutionary vanguard and we are going to bring off the revolution, and therefore violence is okay, and uncivil behavior is okay. Treating other people badly is okay because they are not likely to be in the revolutionary vanguard. That is kind of political self-indulgence, pseudo revolutionary self-deception. SM (00:22:40): One of the slogans from that period, I can remember the Peter Max poster that was very popular when I was a grad student in Ohio State, and I had it on my door and people always talked about it. We had even talks about it in my room, "You do your thing, I will do mine. If by chance we should come together, it will be beautiful." SH (00:23:02): Right-right, yes. SM (00:23:06): And when I see Peter Max now with all the millions that he has made and all of his paintings, Peter Max has become quite of an entrepreneur off of this. But he would be interesting in terms of his comments. SH (00:23:20): Well, the other, sort of the irony, the same vein, the irony of the music of the (19)60s, which is closely identified with protest movements. There is Bob Dylan with consciously political lyrics to his songs, but the music in general is part of this (19)60s feeling of, do your own thing, live for the moment, spontaneity, do not recognize any constraints. Of course, the music groups that were making that music and identifying with the forces of change were practicing 18 hours a day, were rigorously disciplined, were engaged in a catalyst economic activity, and were making tons of money by all of their effort and work. So, I do not know whether that is [inaudible], but it is quite interesting. SM (00:24:21): And we will look at the Grateful Dead and the impact that they have had ongoing. In 1970, I get back because this is your interview, but I just want to make a comment. In 1970, I was a senior SUNY Binghamton, and the night of April 30th I broke my arm and almost had an amputated, that was in a serious accident, and I was graduating on May 17th. And so that was the night of the Cambodia speech that President Nixon gave at nine o'clock, and I was in the operating room for five hours. Then I was in the hospital for nine straight days and I made out fine and went to my graduation and everything. And Bruce Deering was our president and the great philosopher, but I missed a concert that was at SUNY Binghamton, which was the Grateful Dead in the brand-new gymnasium on May 2nd, 1970. SH (00:25:08): Right in the middle of all this? SM (00:25:11): Right in the middle. It was after the invasion, after the bombing of Cambodia. And it was two days before Kent State on May 4th, and I was not there. And you cannot buy that tape, except through the Grateful Dead website. And a student brought this to my attention and the Grateful Dead considered this one of their top five concerts of all time- SH (00:25:35): Wow. SM (00:25:35): ...because of the intensity of the audience in the new gym. And I graduated in that gym only 15 days later. Well, you bring up the invasion there and everything that happened and the violence, because that was happening in Binghamton too. Could you talk your thoughts on how important the anti-war movement, particularly the college students, the anti-war movement was not ending the war in Vietnam. SH (00:26:03): Controversy was subject. I have asked my students the same thing and I get various answers, each of which has good rationale behind it. I think that it did have an effect, especially after the Tet Offensive when the credibility gap was so evident and the mainstream public opinion began to turn against the war. It was another year before majority of Americans were telling posters that they were anti-war. But it was, the anti-war sentiment went up into the 40-percentile range right after Tet in the spring of (19)68, (19)68 was the turning point. The phenomenon that I find extremely interesting is that as the public was... And I do not think, it is not just Tet in the credibility yet, I do not think the public would have reacted that way if there had not been already a constant anti-war movement that was reminding people that the war might be a bad thing, might be wrong. It was not just that it was on television. It was that there was an opposition group there constantly saying, "We should not be there," for a range of reasons. When it then becomes clear that our leaders had been lying to us, then the public reacts very strongly. Now, the interesting thing is that as the public began to agree with the anti-war protestors, the antagonism toward those protestors also went up. That is the public did not tell themselves, "You are right. I am going to agree with you." They said, "I am anti-war and I do not like those anti-war protestors either." And that divides the country in a very interesting way. Seems true about the urban riots that were going on in that period as well. Urban riots, oddly enough made the public feel that something had to be done, that there were injustices in the urban centers of the country that could not be tolerated and that the population would not tolerate in that circumstance. And we could not go on having major riots in urban centers every summer. At the same time this is the origin of the law and order movement basically. I mean, one of Nixon's big campaign slogans in the 1968 is Law and Order. Because the public both was prepared for social policies, public policies that would address the complaints of the rioters. They were also wanting to repress the rioters at the same time. It was the same sort of dichotomous reaction, simultaneously dichotomous reaction. "I am going to do something to respond to your complaints, but I am going to put you in jail as well." SM (00:29:34): When the best history books, I got a lot of, I am going around here, but when the best history books are written on the boomer generation, and oftentimes the best history is you as a historian know that oftentimes the best history books are 50 years after an event. Some of the best books on World War II are coming out now. And so hence, 25 years from now when books are being written on the boomer generation in the (19)60s, what do you think they are going to say? How are the historians going to define the boomers and that generation in that period? SH (00:30:07): If you take the boomer generation to begin to make its effect in the (19)60s when they got to college, then I think there are two things that will be said. One is that in 1960s it was a watershed in American history. It really did change America fundamentally, shifted the values. The Immigration Act of 1965 was a response to the new consciousness of the 1960s. Immigration Act did away with the National Quota system and allowed a much more diverse immigration into the country. That is when Latin Americans and Asian Americans began to arrive in much greater numbers. Now, we are a much more diverse society than we were in the 1950s, and we are a society that has pluralism as one of our guiding tenets now, in a way that was not true in the (19)50s or before, fundamentally changed. The Civil rights movement fundamentally changed both the public policy and American attitudes towards discrimination. In all sorts of ways the (19)60s really do mark a new beginning. And since there was a conservative reaction against all those changes, we are still living with the politics that was created by the conservative reaction. I mean, the new conservative movement, both the neocons but also the religious right and the current conservative hegemony in the United States begins as a reaction against the (19)60s, so we are still living with the (19)60s in a way. Because the new conservatism has its agenda undoing the (19)60s, if that makes sense, so we are still living with it. SM (00:32:18): What are your thoughts as to why? Because the conservative or the people to the right know that if they really go toe to toe with liberals that they will lose? That they always have to go back to find the Achilles heel within the, and that is really a symptom of the whole body? So, they are going to try to destroy it in any way they can? SH (00:32:42): And they do it kind of surreptitiously in a way. Because if you simply look at, this is what give you a data, if you will. If you look at the policy positions of Ronald Reagan on social issues all the way through the (19)80s when he was president, there was a majority of Americans who was against all of them basically. Yet he prevailed basically. And the same thing is true now. I will make a partisan remark because it makes the point, and I am not sure I believe all this. But the Medicare Act that was just passed amid great fanfare yesterday probably is the first step in dismantling Medicare. But it is sold as a great step forward, makes it much more complicated, makes it somewhat privatized. But this is what the conservative movement has learned over the last 30 years is that if you go frontally against policy positions that are liberal, you lose, because most Americans agree with those liberal policy positions. So, you find ways to chip away that are not noticed basically, or can be camouflaged in some way. Now, that sounds partisan, but actually you find some conservatives who say that. David Brooks, for instance, a conservative I have a lot of respect for, says that the building up of these think tanks, conservative think tanks from the (19)70s, (19)80s and (19)90s has given the conservatives not only a lot of intellectual depth to what they are doing, but some very intelligent ways of dismantling or attacking the liberal positions. SM (00:34:58): I interviewed Dr. Lee Edwards down at the Heritage Foundation, and he teaches a course on the (19)60s as well, and at the Catholic University. And in there he wants to make sure that the conservative movement against the Vietnam War is also known. SH (00:35:13): It is interesting. SM (00:35:14): Because there has been a couple books, or at least one really top book, I think at Rutgers University Press that has really gone into detail about how the conservative students of the (19)60s were against the war, and they have been excluded a lot in a lot of the history books, so Pete brought that up and talked about it. And I do not know if there is any thoughts you have because of whether that group has been excluded? SH (00:35:39): Well, not really excluded, but his feeling that they had been excluded is an example of a conservative reaction. But it is interesting, this is a good example of how a position that claims support across the ideological spectrum and across the class spectrum is seen by conservatives who have the other position who are against it. Is illegitimate, I am not saying this well. But the anti-war movement, there was a very strong Catholic anti-war movement. The Berrigan brothers- SM (00:36:21): Oh yeah. SH (00:36:21): ...for goodness sake, were out there way out in front of everybody, just as the Catholic Worker Movement has been there. So, the anti-war movement was much more complex than the pro-Viet Cong stereotype that is pasted on it by the current day conservatives, if you will. There are other examples of the same sort of thing. The women's movement really irritates a lot of conservatives. But if you ask, I mean, you take a poll of American women and they support all of the fundamental elements of women's rights, even if they do not want to be identified as a feminist. SM (00:37:19): You were given the qualities, the strengths and weaknesses of the boomers, how would you feel about a generation of students? And I can remember being college campuses and my peers saying this, "That we are the most unique generation in American history. We are going to be the change agent for the betterment of society. We are going to end racism, sexism, homophobia, bring peace to the world. Money is going to be secondary to serving others." This was an attitude that a lot of the young people had at that time. Your thoughts on that kind of an attitude that they had then, and whether in their personal lives they really have fulfilled this as they have gotten older? Because in a Fortune 500 magazine article about in the last two years, again, it was a way of attacking the boomer generation is that some of the wealthiest people are boomers and it goes on and on. And in reality they fell in just like their parents, trying to make money and get ahead in the world and serving others became very secondary. Is that true? SH (00:38:30): Yes. SM (00:38:30): Okay. SH (00:38:33): In a word, all right? Hubris might be used. But I think this goes back to the 15 percent, 85 percent split. Those sympathetic 85 percent folks were always headed toward a normal life and a career. They just had these ideals that they also wanted to honor along the way. So, it is no surprise that they reverted to middle class ways and values. One thing that I wanted to say earlier was that the boomers are so powerful, not only by creating the (19)60s, but they are a huge market. So, you track them through their lifecycle, and you will find American tastes changing in response to the demand, if you will, of the boomers wherever they are in the lifecycle. It is such a huge market that manufacturers and advertisers focus on them. When they get to be middle-aged, in their 40s and 50s and luxury goods go up, they are selling these huge gas governed vehicles, because that is what the boomers want. They move to suburbia, so you have got all sorts of things catering to suburbanites. Everywhere now they are on the verge of retirement. And Medicare is going to be a huge fight, because the boomers are going to catch on and will insist on. SM (00:40:19): Do you feel that they will change old age- SH (00:40:21): Yes, they would. SM (00:40:24): That development? It is interesting whether the boomers are going to retire in a way that their parents may have retired. By the retirement meaning they are going off and taking trips and moving to Florida and that kind of stuff. Will they really never retire? They may retire from their job, but they will always be giving back to society in private. I am sure we do not know that, the answer to that yet, but- SH (00:40:48): We are taking from society. SM (00:40:48): We are taking from, I am kind of wondering. SH (00:40:53): Opportunity. Well, no, that is a really good question, because retirement may change. SM (00:41:00): One of the issues of this whole thing was the Vietnam Veterans Memorial has become a very important symbol for healing within the Vietnam veteran population and certainly within the families of Vietnam vets. And Jan Scruggs wrote the book To Heal a Nation, which is this entity being a non-political entity, just paying tribute to those who served and caring about those who served. Your thoughts on whether this nation has healed since the (19)60s? I know you have brought up the divisions between conservatives and liberals in the political arena, but the overall healing process from the tremendous divisions of that war did in this society. I preface this by saying that some of the people that I have interviewed thought that we were near a second civil war at certain times with the riots, especially in the late (19)60s and early (19)70s, and then started to wane in -73. But just your thoughts on that? SH (00:41:57): Well, there is still wounds there that have not healed. If you think about, what did Newt Gingrich say about the Clintons in 1992 when they were running for office? He called them the counter cultural McGovernics, which is to say they are right out of, they are tainted with communism and right out of the (19)60s with no values at all. And they probably voted for McGovern, as indeed they did. So, if it was useful in (19)92 to invoke, to taint the Clintons with that aura of being countercultural- SM (00:42:42): Try this here. Okay, just called slow. SH (00:42:49): Then I think the (19)60s are still alive. The other place to look is in the lessons of the Vietnam War are still very much on our minds and in our military policy, so we worry about that all the time. But we just violated one of the biggest lessons of the Vietnam War is to have an exit strategy. SM (00:43:13): Healing, that wall was, I think in (19)82 when it was supposed to heal the generation. I do not know if you have ever thought about this, probably had, as a person who teaches the (19)60s, when people go down to that wall, especially those who are against the war, the feelings that must go through their mind. SH (00:43:32): Well, I give you my own experience. I was in Washington for a higher education meeting sometime in the three or four years after it was up. Had never seen it, had sort of seen pictures, but they do not give you a good notion of it. And I am a jogger, or was then, so I went out for my morning run and ran down, going to the mall, and actually stumbled across it. I did not know where it was, and just suddenly I was there in front of it. And I was moved to tears. I just thought it was so effective, and all those names of people who gave their lives. For the nation, actually, in my opinion that was the wrong war. We had no national interest in being there. There was no way to win it. We should not have been there. But those folks who went were doing their patriotic duty. And I think I would have done the same thing in that age. And for me, as an old sort of anti-war person, it was, I think, doubly effective, because I saw the tragedy and sadness of it all. And I respected all those names that were there. I also loved the way it is done. And the fact that the two arms of the wall point to the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument is as if to say, "This is the nation." The meaning of the nation is captured in the symbols that are involved in this association between the Vietnam Memorial Wall and the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. SM (00:45:34): Beautiful observation, because when you talk about your observation and how when you were running and you came to the wall, I interviewed Tom Hayden who was under campus a couple weeks back, and it was hard to get an interview with, he was on the way to the airport. But the most prophetic comment he made during that entire 35-minute interview was the fact that he looked at, it is the way he looked at the wall. He looked at on it as like that is the casket. That the wall coming together with the grass on top, the grass over the casket, and the wall comes together like this, and that is the body within the casket. And of course, all the people who served. So he looked upon it like a cemetery. SH (00:46:25): Yeah, I do not think that is right. SM (00:46:31): That is the way Tom looked at it. But I thought that was a prophetic statement from him, because he had been, and of course he did not regret anything he ever did- SH (00:46:39): Yeah, that is true. SM (00:46:40): ...in the anti-war movement. SH (00:46:42): Well, let me, one other observation about the wall. His reaction gets the juices going a bit, but if you walk along the wall, you are walking into it, but you also walk out of it, and both are correct. And the other thing is, if you stand in front of the wall, there are two ways to focus your eyes. You could look at the names which are etched in the wall, but then if you shift your focus a little bit to the wall, you are looking into the wall as a mirror. First you see the names, and then you realize that you are also looking at yourself, looking at the names which connects the individual onlooker to the names and what they mean. SM (00:47:36): Your thoughts on boomer generation or kids, and whether- SH (00:47:41): The children of the- SM (00:47:42): The children of boomers, which obviously is Generation X, and actually a few of the kids who had kids later in life with a current group. Just your thoughts on the concept of empowerment, because one of the concepts that I do not see, and I am just, this is my prejudice, it is just me, is I do not see a sense of empowerment among students. Not only it either desire to have power or even if they were able to have power, how to use it. And just the whole concept of whether parents have actually sat down with their kids and talked to them about this era and that your voice counts, that you are empowered. SH (00:48:23): I think you are right. The parents have not done that. It is interesting, and in my seminar, I hear so often from students who go back and talk to their parents. These are fairly recent students, because the parents of the students I have gotten now in for the last five years have lived through the (19)60s on a college campus generally. My students go back and talk to their parents and they come back and report that they, first, it was fulfilling. It was wonderful to talk to your parents about something that you can share and that the parents have the experience and the kids have, it is kind of the knowledge, the book knowledge, so it brings them together. But the students report that they learn things about their parents that they had never heard before, never knew before. I think the parents have not talked to their students very much about what they did and where were you during the war, dad, sort of thing. And I think that you are right, maybe they should have. And the other observation about current day students, I think you are right as well. Their goals seem to be much more private, personal. They do have a vague sense of wanting to be of service to society. That they do want to give, but it is generally, they do not want to change the world so much as to do a little good in it while they are pursuing their own careers. SM (00:50:25): The issue of trust is something that really did have an effect on students of the (19)60s, and even all young people in the (19)60s. As a college student and for other people I have talked to, look at what happened with Lyndon Johnson, the Gulf of Tonkin. I know what has been written about it. McNamara, the numbers game during the Vietnam War. You can even go back to Eisenhower and the U2 incident, and standing before the American public and lying. You can talk to how much was President Kennedy involved in the killing of Diem? And then of course, Richard Nixon, the Enemies List. SH (00:51:13): I am no crook. SM (00:51:16): I am no crook. The whole issue of trust in leaders that has been written about were, boomers did not trust any leader, whether they were in the White House or the head of a church. But how, did they pass this on to their kids, and do today's young people trust? Is this one of the weaknesses of our society, a lack of trust in anyone who is in a position of leader? And you would know more than anyone being a university president, not because you are a university president, but because you are a leader. Just a leader. SH (00:51:50): This is the point of attack for a lot of conservatives. Now, the worst thing about the (19)60s, the argument is that the (19)60s taught America to distrust authority. Not that authority is always right, but you do have orderly procedures in society for making decisions and you have to have leaders, people who have a bit more authority than others, who get things done for the community. That was certainly true. I mean, their analysis, the (19)60s is absolutely right, the (19)60s was anti-authority. It was the anti-leadership virus, as some have called it. That does not seem to have lasted. I think you are absolutely right in that you can see a kind of atomization of society since the (19)60s. It started in the (19)60s, and you could actually trace it in public opinion polls to today that people are less engaged in their communities in various ways. This is the Bowling Alone argument issue. SM (00:53:05): Oh, yeah, following- SH (00:53:07): Putnam's book and what has come out of it. And I think he had something right, whether he made the argument in the most convincing way, and I think he was on to something. There is this disaggregation of society, gated communities, suburbs. We are increasingly segregated by class, as well as by ethnicity and race. And there is less that brings us together as whole communities to solve problems. I think that is a problem for us. And it is in the wake of the (19)60s that that has developed. SM (00:53:53): You would not agree though with the conservatives that the boomers are responsible for this, and so they continue to use that. When in reality, some of the people today who are leadership roles, you cannot trust because of the things they do. SH (00:54:09): I wish, I mean, part of me says, "I wish the public was a bit more suspicious of the leaders." But there is no evidence that Clinton, they certainly distrusted. But there was a huge campaign to get the public to do that. Reagan did not suffer from it. The first President Bush did not suffer from it. Carter did not suffer from it. He made other- SM (00:54:33): How about President Bush? Students that you see every day here at Penn, do they trust this president? SH (00:54:42): I think it would be better to say they do not distrust him. They do not see any reason not to think what he is saying is, I mean, they are not outraged by him, which I think in the (19)60s, if President Bush, if the students in the (19)60s were on the campus today, they would be marching and ridiculing and pointing out the problems. SM (00:55:10): I think you mentioned this earlier in the interview, but if you could say it again, when did the (19)60s begin? What was the magic moment, very magic, you think the (19)60s began? SH (00:55:21): Well, I will have two answers. In general, they began for me with the Brown decision in 1954, because the civil rights movement set the paradigm for the whole (19)60s. And they end with Nixon's resignation, because even though we still were involved in Vietnam for another year, it was a minimum involvement and the fate was already filled, basically. So, it is Nixon's resignation that ends an era. And the (19)70s are spent trying to put the country back together, not only from the (19)60s, but from Watergate, which also destroyed trust in authority. That is one answer. I think that is the right answer. But the way people generally think about the (19)60s is the sex, drugs, and rock and roll and radicalism and unkempt students, I think begins with the sit-in movement in 1960. And because that is also the time when the Students for Democratic Society is being formed, 1961. Tom Hayden you mentioned was the leader of that, and they were aware of the sit-in movement and the civil rights movement in the south, so they are modeling themselves a bit after the civil rights movement. But that is the first sort of organized general attack on American society as a whole. SM (00:56:55): You had mentioned some of the simplistic approaches people use to describe things. One that comes on more and more is the fact that the (19)60s began with the assassination of John Kennedy. And 1963, because really the first three years were like the (19)50s when Kennedy was the first president. And I interviewed Marilyn Young down in New York City, and she said the (19)60s began with the Beat generation. SH (00:57:21): Well- SM (00:57:22): And she talked about that, because of they were different. SH (00:57:29): I think there is an argument. SM (00:57:29): And she said it is the (19)50s. It is those bad groups. SH (00:57:30): If you take that view that it starts with the Brown decision, you get the Beats because that is when they are getting going as well. In fact, that is the year, when was On the Road published? That is about then. (19)56. SM (00:57:45): (19)57, I think (19)56, (19)57. SH (00:57:47): Yeah, you are right. SM (00:57:49): I basically am going to the next part of my interview, which is basically just listing... How are we doing time wise? SH (00:57:55): [inaudible] now. SM (00:57:58): I am just going to list some names for, I am going to do the second slide here, because this is pretty well done. Thing that I did not ask you- SH (00:58:13): No, this has been a working conversation. SM (00:58:15): Yeah- SH (00:58:16): You are into this. SM (00:58:17): Well, I am really into it, but I want to give back to society and I want to do a really good book. And I am doing a 100 interviews. Someone said, "Why a 100?" I am doing a 100. SH (00:58:27): Yeah, thanks for [inaudible]. SM (00:58:30): If you could just respond to these names with a few comments, and I will start right with Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda. SH (00:58:36): Oh, well, gee, I have some respect for, Tom Hayden is the founding member of the Students for Democratic Society, which had a democratic focus to it. The Port Huron Statement laid out a critique of America in the 1950s basically that needed to be made. They belonged to a wing of the 1960s that I did not belong to, the going to... I was against the war, but I was never pro-Viet Cong. And so I think pitching the anti-war rhetoric in terms of being pro-North Vietnam or pro-Viet Cong or pro-communist, I thought was wrong both technically and substantively. SM (00:59:42): When Lewis Fuller, before he passed away, he was one of the ones responsible for getting Bill Clinton to the wall, when we came, and I think James Crux for that too. Bringing some people, doing the best they could to heal. And he was pretty open to a lot of ideas. I did not know if it would have been interesting if he had stayed alive, if McNamara might have been invited, or even a Jane Fonda or a Tom Hayden would be. And I have gotten to know so many Vietnam vets now, and I have gotten to talk to them, that the two people that they would never want at the wall are McNamara and Fonda, it is just the hatred against them. In fact, I will get back to the interview, but I have been to the Vietnam Memorial for the last 10 years Memorial Day and Veterans Day. And three times, in retrospect the book has been placed at the wall with bullets through it. SH (01:00:39): You talk about which book? SM (01:00:41): In Retrospect, the McNamara. And I have pictures of it one year, it is three times over 10 years, but it is probably the same person doing it. But they take the book and they put bullets through it, and then they leave it at the wall, so it is pretty strong. SH (01:00:54): Yeah, I understand that. SM (01:00:56): The black power individuals, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Angela Davis, those [inaudible]- SH (01:01:02): Oh, the Black Panther people? SM (01:01:03): Yep. SH (01:01:05): I will answer about black power. I think black power destroyed the civil rights movement basically. And was, for America was the wrong answer at the wrong time. The Black Panthers, I would not go so far as to adopt the conservative critique, which is that the Panthers were hustled. But I guess they were accepted by the black community as their champions, some black communities as the champions of the black community. And they were doing some good things in the communities. I thought they developed into a revolutionary class-oriented movement, they did not include me. SM (01:01:57): How about the Yippies, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and the whole Yippie group? SH (01:02:01): Entertaining. And they were effective in making Americans think about the issues that were before the country at that time. SM (01:02:12): Any thoughts, when you talk about beyond the Yippies, when you look at Abbie Hoffman's life and when he died in Bucks County with a note, when he committed suicide, "No one is listening to me anymore." SH (01:02:24): Yeah, sad. SM (01:02:24): Is that- SH (01:02:26): Well, it indicates that he was hooked on celebrity, but that celebrity is a failing of American society. We are radically equalitarian, except we love celebrities. And if you get used to it, if you get hooked on celebrity, then you are like coming down, I guess. I have never been high. SM (01:02:50): How about Daniel and Philip Berger? I have interviewed Daniel for this project, Philip and Daniel Berger. SH (01:02:55): You just have to admire their devotion to their principles. And those are not my tactics, but those are men of conscience, and they live by their conscience. SM (01:03:10): How about Dr. Benjamin Spock? SH (01:03:12): Oh, the man who created the (19)60s? SM (01:03:16): With his baby book. SH (01:03:20): I guess that was raised out of stock, though. SM (01:03:23): I have his first edition of that book. I found it in a used bookstore and I could not believe it was first edition- SH (01:03:30): Oh, I have not really thought about him. I do not think that is fair to accuse him of raising the Boomers wrong. And I see him as a sympathetic figure. I mean, he joined the anti-war movement and used his celebrity for a good purpose. SM (01:03:48): How about Daniel Ellsberg? SH (01:03:51): Oh, I think Ellsberg did the country a huge service when he wrote the Pentagon Papers to light, so I have got respect for him as well. I think he is one of the good ones. SM (01:04:09): But the politicians of the year, I will start with certainly Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. SH (01:04:14): Well, it depends on which Malcolm X you are talking about. The later Malcolm X I admire, that is the Malcolm X who solve the problems of the world with human problems rather than racial problems. This is after he went to Mecca and became less of a race conscious critic of America and more of a human rights leader in a way. And his story is compelling, his life story. And indeed, the book, the autobiography of Malcolm X, is one of the great documents of American letters. Martin Luther King I have, even despite the personal flaws I have understanding admiration for the great man, one of the great figures of the 20th century. SM (01:05:10): What do you think of his stand on the Vietnam War? SH (01:05:12): Principled. That is people, especially people within the civil rights movement with the thought of King as being that bold enough and not radical to accommodating, because he was doing business with the White House, for goodness's sake, which was a no-no for real radicals. But his stance on the war, even Stokely Carmichael admired. And I thought it was, as everything he did in public was a principled stance and took a lot of guts because it caused him a lot of status, a lot of position in American life. SM (01:05:52): Your thoughts of that really? Of the blank leadership that included Dr. King, James Farmer, Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, and of course, John Lewis? SH (01:06:00): John Lewis statute, a special affection for, I think he is a man of just unyielding integrity, who is stuck by his principles all the way through, even though it got him tossed out of SNCC. And we will see, the metaphor here is that Stokely Carmichael ousted John Lewis in a coup, in 1966 it was. And Carmichael became the chairman of SNCC. Two years later, one year later Carmichael left. Two years later SNCC did not exist anymore. John Lewis is now a member of Congress. There you are. SM (01:06:45): Stokely went off to Africa, I think, died of cancer. SH (01:06:47): Exactly. SM (01:06:48): Changed his name and everything else. The politicians, Lyndon Johnson. SH (01:06:54): Tragic figure, both a great man on the upside and on the downside, man of gargantuan appetites. SM (01:07:02): Hubert Humphrey. SH (01:07:04): Sad figure, because he was the man of great principal. And as vice president he had to compromise that principle. And I think it crushed him. SM (01:07:16): Barry Goldwater. SH (01:07:18): I am not among those who think that he is a person of integrity and therefore one should have affection for him. I just think he was a retrovirus. SM (01:07:35): Richard Nixon. SH (01:07:36): An evil man. SM (01:07:37): [inaudible]. SH (01:07:43): A crook. SM (01:07:46): And Jerry Ford. SH (01:07:48): Oh, a decent man who tried to bring America together and did the right thing. I thought his partnering of Nixon was the right thing to do, and that probably caused him any chance of going further in public life. SM (01:08:01): And Ronald Reagan. SH (01:08:03): Oh, I have trouble with Ronald Reagan, because I recognized that he was a strong and effective president, yet I think his policies were bad for America. SM (01:08:15): How about his role as the governor of California? SH (01:08:18): I do not know enough about that. He fired Clark Kerr who just died. And I thought, I think Kerr is one of the great figures of higher education in America, so I know I have a bit of trouble. They said, I had two opinions about Reagan. SM (01:08:33): John F. Kennedy. SH (01:08:38): I am not captured by the Camelot myth entirely, though I think he came to be committed to civil rights. He was not originally, and it was not until 1963, probably that. But he became committed to doing something about the status of blacks, even though he had been saying the right thing all along. He was fundamentally interested in foreign policy. That is where he spent his time, and he did extremely well there. But if you test for leadership is recognizing the most pressing problems of your organization at your time, and then mobilizing support to identifying also a solution, something to be done about it, and then mobilizing support for that solution. He fails on the domestic side until quite late in a way that Lyndon Johnson, of course, succeeded on the domestic side and then was the masters on the international side. SM (01:09:34): Bobby Kennedy. SH (01:09:35): I was a Kennedy supporter in 1968, rather than a McCarthy supporter, because I thought Bobby Kennedy had grown, had become passionately committed to civil rights and social justice, and had the toughness to win the nomination and the election. SM (01:10:04): People from the, actually, I want to say Robert McNamara too, because you have got to mention that name in the (19)60s. SH (01:10:09): I see. McNamara, see is a tragic figure also, who was, and his tragic flaw was his commitment to rational analysis of policy. And it led him into thinking that the war could be fought by the numbers and that we were winning. I do not know what to think about the fact that he understood that we were losing and could not win, and resigned and said nothing about it until 30 years later. SM (01:10:41): Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem and some of the women leaders, the early- SH (01:10:45): Oh. SM (01:10:46): The women's movement. SH (01:10:48): Heroic or heriotic, or whatever the term is for their time. I think they mobilized and created a movement that made changes in American life that needed to be made. SM (01:11:01): Muhammad Ali. SH (01:11:08): Oh. Actually, you have got to admire Muhammad Ali. He had principles, and he became a Muslim and he lived by those principles that he adopted. It cost him dearly in money and in fame as well. And he was not only a great boxer, he was a great entertainer, but he was a great boxer. Just a great boxer. SM (01:11:33): Speaking, he was out for at least two years, not three. SH (01:11:40): At the peak of his career. And those careers are not very long anyway. SM (01:11:41): George McGovern. SH (01:11:44): Oh, I would like to think well of him. He was not a good candidate in (19)72, though I certainly voted for him. But gee, I think he was on the right side, but did not have the wherewithal to bring leadership to the Democratic Party. SM (01:12:10): Eugene McCarthy. SH (01:12:13): The opposite figure. But it is pretty much the same. I thought you have to admire him for stepping forward in this fall of 1967 and agreeing to challenge the sitting Democratic, the president of his own party. That took guts and commitment, but he was always a bit mystical and witty. It was not clear that he really wanted to be president. Even some of his close supporters, his campaign workers say that he kind of quit in the summer of (19)68 before the convention, quit running, because he wanted to bring a message to the people, which he did, but he did not really want to win presidency badly enough to do what needed to be done. SM (01:13:05): You did not mention the music of the (19)60s. When you think of Janice Chaplin, Jimmy Hendricks, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Simon and Garfunkel, Baez, The Folk Singers, Phil Ochs, goes on and on. Arlo Guthrie, what do you- SH (01:13:20): Amazing. SM (01:13:20): When you think of, I mean the list goes on and on and on and on and on. SH (01:13:25): Just so much talent. SM (01:13:26): How important was that to an era? We hear about the big band being the music of the World War II generation. SH (01:13:32): Yeah, I think it was huge. Even though a lot of the lyrics coming out of the folk music, the lyrics are not necessarily specifically political, but there is something community building and even subversive in all that music, even though the Beatles were rather consciously non-revolutionary. I mean, we do not want to make a revolution. So whereas the Stones of course were their opposite numbers. If you look at the lyrics that they were singing, they were going in different directions. But if you look at their music and its effect on the audience, they were both making for a generation that differentiated itself from those that went before, so it made your boomer generation that music. SM (01:14:32): I have to mention one of the Beatles, John Lennon, because he was killed in 1980 and he was like one of the tops on Richard Nixon's enemies list. Just your thoughts on John Lennon separate from all the other Beatles. Just him as a person? SH (01:14:47): He is interesting. And he grew more than the other Beatles, I think, during his fame, and that is very hard to do when you are caught up in ... Their career as a group was relatively short. But he was a first-rate musician with an inquiring mind that led him in quite different directions from the other Beatles. And you got to admire that. And maybe Nixon was right. He was the most dangerous one because he was thinking. SM (01:15:19): He wanted him out of the country so bad. SH (01:15:21): Yeah. SM (01:15:22): I remember the Dick Cavett show when he was on there with Yoko Ono, is just a classic hour interview. And that is what Nixon was trying to get rid of. I am going to end the interview with a couple just terms from that era, just your thoughts on them? SDS. SH (01:15:38): Students for a Democratic Society, the Radical Wing of the movement outside the civil rights movement. A very small cadre of activists who made more change than their numbers would have predicted so you have got to think that they were brave. I did not agree with everything they did. SM (01:16:03): How about the Weatherman? SH (01:16:06): I think they were terrible. They were a part of that self-deluding, pseudo revolutionary group that did the American left a huge disservice by thinking that violence could work in America. SM (01:16:24): The communes. SH (01:16:26): Some of those were brave experiments in an alternative way of living. America has been the host country for a huge number of utopias, utopian communities. Intentional communities they came to be called in the 19th century and in the 20th century. None of them lasted very long, but the [inaudible] being an example of one that lasted longer. If you think of the Mormons as one of those utopias, you could say they lasted longer. But those experimental intentional communities are quite useful for democracy, because they try out ideas. SM (01:17:07): Counterculture. SH (01:17:10): Upside and downside. It is a good thing to challenge accepted values and to try to stretch the limits of individual freedom, which they did. It is a bad thing to think you can do that by self-indulgence of all kinds. SM (01:17:35): Let me get down there, Chicago Eight. SH (01:17:38): Oh they were, I am glad they were. Well, that is a more complicated thing, because they did go to Chicago with the intention of creating a ruckus, though they became the victims of a police riot more than the other way around. So, I was, again, the history is correct to see them as more heroic than what would be the opposite turn, the villain of the peace. SM (01:18:18): Yeah, that 1968 year was quite a year with the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King and the Republican and the Democratic conventions. SH (01:18:29): Yeah. And the Tet Offensive. SM (01:18:29): Yes. SH (01:18:29): And all that. SM (01:18:30): If you were to pick a year that you think was the most, what was, I would not say most violent, but they had the greatest impact on America during the... Would (19)68 be that year? SH (01:18:39): (19)68 would be it beyond a question, yeah. SM (01:18:43): Kent State. SH (01:18:44): Tragedy that maybe caused America to stop and think a bit more carefully about what the war was doing to the society. So, those deaths may not have been in vain. SM (01:19:00): Chris Jackson State. You always have to include that in there too. SH (01:19:03): Same stuff. SM (01:19:04): Because they died a couple weeks later. And last but not least are just some of the figures that were linked to the war itself. The leaders of Vietnam, which was General Q and General Cao Kỳ. They are part of the (19)60s, the Vietnam leadership. Just your thoughts on them? SH (01:19:20): Oh. Well, they were corrupt and autocratic and that is why there was no way we could win the war, because we did not... The South Vietnamese society could not have been democratized in the same way. SM (01:19:40): And I cannot end the interview without talking about the space program. You talk about the (19)60s and- SH (01:19:44): The upside of- SM (01:19:45): The upside of the (19)60s. Could you talk about space program and a few more of the upsides? SH (01:19:53): Well, it is ironic. There is so many other things happening in the (19)60s that are unambiguously wonderful. I like the landing on the moon, the space program in general. Art was, the music we have already talked about. But classical music also was, contemporary music was terrific in the (19)60s. Art was also going through a revolution. Some great figures emerged in the (19)60s. The economy was doing extremely well. So, this was a time of huge prosperity. In fact, it is probably true that the (19)60s could not have happened, except in a period of great prosperity. Have always thought that the college students who did get involved in movements and protests of various kinds could do so because they assumed that their future was going to be secure. That America was great and the economy was going to grow and they were going to be educated and they could always do very well. So they could take time out. SM (01:21:10): And they will not read about it being put in jail, being on their record and affecting them getting a job, whereas today- SH (01:21:17): Yeah, that you- SM (01:21:18): No way am I going to do that. SH (01:21:20): Yeah, exactly right, wow. SM (01:21:23): I think that is about it. There was one other term here, I think. Yeah, I guess the other thing is Watergate. Yeah, just Watergate itself? SH (01:21:34): Watergate did not really surprise me because that was suspicious of Nixon all along. It depressed me though, because in one way it depressed me, because the thought that someone who was elected President of the United States and gathered people around him was capable of such subversion of basic values. On the other hand, the system worked, did not it? I mean, we found him out and Republicans and Democrats together drove him from office. That is pretty good. SM (01:22:14): In closing, is there anything that I did not mention or ask that you thought I was going to ask today before the interview started? SH (01:22:20): No, I think if you would send me a transcript of this, I will just give it to my (19)60 [inaudible]. SM (01:22:27): Great. This was very good. I guess- SH (01:22:31): I enjoyed it, I must say. SM (01:22:32): Yeah, thank you very much and if you could, as I could do with closing everything, you would just state your name, and the day, and your title, and- SH (01:22:42): Oh. SM (01:22:43): Because- SH (01:22:43): I am Sheldon Hackney, I am a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. And this is December the 10th. SM (01:22:53): December 10th, 2003. And the interviewer has been Steve McKiernan. Thank you. Dr. Hackney, could you comment on Earth Day in 1970? SH (01:23:05): The first Earth Day is another one of those things that started in the (19)60s that is evidence of a new consciousness that is dawning there and a new emphasis on saving the world for future generations. I think it is totally admirable. SM (01:23:24): Do you think that that is still happening today, or is it falling on the back burner? SH (01:23:26): Environmental movement is still there, but it is much more sedate. And I am afraid it is not in the front of our consciousness. I mean, all of our environmental regulations are being stripped of their power at the moment and nobody is saying much. SM (01:23:41): Thank you. (End of Interview) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Dr. Francis Sheldon Hackney Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Hackney, Sheldon, 1933-2013 ; McKiernan, Stephen Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/wav Subject The topic of the resource Authors; College teachers; History--United States; University of Pennsylvania; Sailors; Hackney, Sheldon, 1933-2013--Interviews Description An account of the resource Francis Sheldon Hackney (1933 - 2013) was a scholar, author and a professor of U.S. History at the University of Pennsylvania. He earned his PhD. in American History at Yale University. Hackney served in the Navy for five years, after earning his PhD. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003-12-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.14 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2017-03-14 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. McKiernan Interviews Extent The size or duration of the resource. 83:46 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/570210515a5dbbff1849665079a019c2.jpg ba3ae7be0d22a3c18f064646b5313221 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/f2d643a7eaeb9ace249ed52777f49cf4.mp3 ca2fac9da842b2308b8d7349d3bedde9 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Audio interviews Title A name given to the resource McKiernan Interviews Description An account of the resource Stephen McKiernan's collection of interviews includes more than two hundred interviews with prominent figures of the 1960s, which were collected between the mid-1990s to 2023 The collection provides narratives of people who were actively involved in or witnessed events in the 1960s, an era which spurred profound cultural and political transformation in the twentieth century. Interviewees include politicians, artists, scholars, musicians, authors, and veterans who delve into the decade’s most prominent issues and events, including the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the anti-war movement, women’s rights, gay rights, segregation, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Hippies, Yippies, and individualism.<br /><br /> <h3>The McKiernan 22</h3> <div>Stephen McKiernan interviewed legends of the 1960s. When asked in 2021 where one should start when sifting through his vast collection, he provided the following list:</div> <ul> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/854">Julian Bond</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1866">Bobby Muller</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1175">Craig McNamara</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/910">Dr. Arthur Levine</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/837">Diane Carlson Evans</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/942">Dr. Ellen Schrecker</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/876">Dr. Lee Edwards</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/841">Peter Coyote</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1233">Dr. Roosevelt Johnson</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/899">Rennie Davis</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1222">Kim Phuc</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/917">George McGovern</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/833">Frank Schaeffer</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/840">Rev. Dr. Frank Forrester Church </a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1240">Dr. Marilyn Young</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/842">James Fallows</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/835">Joseph Lee Galloway</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/911">John Lewis</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/839">Paul Critchlow</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/888">Steve Gunderson</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1159">Charles Kaiser</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/2407">Joseph Lewis</a></li> </ul> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Stephen McKiernan Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In copyright. Template: Simple Audio Player with Transcription This template displays an audio player by Amplitude.js with a scrollable transcription which is loaded from the "Transcription" metadata field. This template displays an audio player with the first attached image file as the 'cover image'. For its audio source, the template looks for the first attached audio file. If additional audio files exist, they should be combined using audio editing software, or a separate Omeka item should be made for each part. Date of Interview 2009-11-06 Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Stephen McKiernan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed David Harris Language English Biographical Text <span>David Victor Harris is a journalist, author, and activist. He was a leading opponent of the draft during the Vietnam War, which began during his college days at Stanford University. As a young college student, he became involved in the Civil Rights Movement where he joined students from all over the country in the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee's (SNCC) 1964 voter registration campaign in Mississippi. In 1966, he became president of the Stanford University student body, and as a leading critic of the draft, he formed a group called the Resistance. Harris was </span><span>the first person arrested for refusing to register for the draft in </span><span>1968. In his later years, Harris has received journalistic praise for his non-fiction books on his experiences in the sixties and seventies along with other books connected to personalities or issues in those times.<br /><br />Harris died from lung cancer at his home in Mill Valley on February 6, 2023, at the age of 76.<br /></span> Digital Publisher Binghamton University Libraries Digital Format audio/mp4 Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data 1 Microcassette Material Type Sound Interview Format Video or Audio Audio Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 86:58 Keywords <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Role models; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; Assassination of John F. Kennedy; Cold War; Nuclear warfare; Saigon; Army reserve; Mason-Dixon line; Civil War; Slavery; Women's Rights Movement.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:3,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;4&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:14281427}}">Role models; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; Assassination of John F. Kennedy; Cold War; Nuclear warfare; Saigon; Army reserve; Mason-Dixon line; Civil War; Slavery; Women's Rights Movement.</span> Subject LCSH Journalists; Authors; Political activists--United States; Harris, David, 1946--Interviews Accessibility Copy/Paste below: Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Rights Statement Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly. Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound, or alternative text from a visual medium McKiernan Interviews Interview with: David Victor Harris Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan Transcriber: REV Date of interview: 6 November 2009 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (Start of Interview) SM (00:00:04): Good. Are you ready to go? DH (00:00:07): I am ready. SM (00:00:10): Okay. When you think of the (19)60s and the early (19)70s, what is the first thing that comes to your mind? DH (00:00:18): Well, it is too much territory to really have a specific thing that comes to my mind, but being out there on the edge, as far as the feeling, I guess. SM (00:00:37): Is there a specific event when you were young, because you are the front edge of the boomer generation, as they define it, from 1946 to (19)64? DH (00:00:47): Pretty close to the first. SM (00:00:50): Yeah. And actually, I think some people are eligible for social security this year. DH (00:00:56): I was born in February of (19)46. So right there at the start of the curve. SM (00:01:03): What was it in your particular life, at what point in your life did you know that you had to speak up about something, whether it be in high school? Because a lot of people never had the courage to speak up, and they always followed authority, but was there one specific incident, the first time that you knew you had to speak up about an issue? DH (00:01:26): Oh, I suppose when I attended a public meeting during the fall of my freshman year at Standford, where they were recruiting volunteers to go down to Mississippi and help the-the Mississippi Project, fall of (19)63. At that point, I heard a call. I did not go to Mississippi right at that moment, but within a year I was in Mississippi. SM (00:01:55): Yeah. Talk a little bit about that experience in the South, and being around those other young people who had the same caring attitude that you had. Did you feel that they were a rare breed within the boomer generation? DH (00:02:12): Well, certainly. I mean, at the time, Mississippi was an extraordinarily influential moment for the entire generation, and certainly for me. I think you are absolutely right when you describe it as a caring response. There really was not an ideology at that point. People were there because they thought Black people had the right to vote without being lynched. I mean, it was as simple as that. It was really a value based proposition, far more than it was a politics based proposition. And I felt like, when I went to Mississippi, that I was participating in the great adventure of our time, and I did not want to miss it. SM (00:03:07): When you were young also, who would you consider to be your, this might be an overused term, role models or people that inspired you? But most importantly, someone who may have been older, who believed in you? DH (00:03:22): It is a different category. As a political figure, given when I started out in the Mississippi Project, the man was Bob [inaudible]. And to this day, I still have enormous respect for that. And he was slightly older than me, but I had no contact with him. I would follow fish to the circles that he read from afar. I thought he was enormously captivating, and a lot of what I first learned about organizing, just came from listening to him. And so, I would list him as a big influence. The older people who had faith in me, from my experience, were teachers. I had three teachers that I would put in that category. One, who I [inaudible] from in high school, one from my freshman year at Stanford, and one from my sophomore year on. Those were the big persons that supplied me not only with the intellect stuff, but... SM (00:04:57): You want to list those names, just for the record? DH (00:04:59): Sure. Well, in high school was a man named Alan Amond, who taught the honors humanities program and world history at Fresno High School, which was a three-year-high school. And I took his world history course my first year at high school, and I was in his honors humanity class [inaudible] and it was one of these five... English and history. It was a big deal at Fresno. And Amond was a guy who had been, during the great Red Scare, had inspectors from school board sitting in classrooms, monitoring what he said [inaudible], and that is what he was, Quaker. But in any case, he rooted all things in me. And then my freshman year at Stanford, a man named Richard Grafton, was instructor in our [inaudible] history of Western civilization, freshman fourth. And he was also the faculty president of [inaudible] and he has been a lifelong friend. And yeah, really hope he makes the transition to president. SM (00:06:30): And the third? DH (00:06:32): Pardon? SM (00:06:33): Was there a third? DH (00:06:33): A guy named Charles Breckmyer. SM (00:06:35): Okay. DH (00:06:35): He was in the poly-sci department at Stanford, and ran the special honors program in social processes. SM (00:06:39): Very good. DH (00:06:39): I studied with him the last years at Stanford. SM (00:06:51): You have seen this over the years, particularly in the 90s, Newt Gingrich would oftentimes, especially when the Republicans came into power in (19)94, Newt had a lot of comments about the (19)60s generation and the boomers. And George Willis, whenever he gets a chance, he gets a shot at writing about him as well, and really cutting him in many different ways, in a negative way. What are your thoughts on critics of the boomer generation, who say that all the problems that are currently happening in our society today, with the breakdown of the American family, the differences between people of color, the confrontational victim type mentality, be blaming this generation for all of the excesses, the drugs? And just your thoughts on this criticism. DH (00:07:45): Well I mean, I think they are way off the mark. I think quite the contrary. As far as I am concerned, saved the country from itself, at a time when it desperately needs. America has become a far better fight by virtue of our country. The problem here, was not our country. My question to a lot of these guys is what are you so goddamn upset about? What exactly is it that make you describe us as a syndrome? And I think the fact of the matter is, is that we exposed the way of doing business in the United States that contradicted everything the United States is supposed to stand for. And that they do not think that citizens ought to have the power to do that, and we did it. And come on, we are the ones that put the end to desegregation. And we stopped a war in which more than two million people were killed for no good reason. And none of these critics of us, have come up with a good reason for having done all that stuff. Not yet. Not after all these years, they have not come up with something. We stood up in the face of power when somebody had to do that, because we were engaging in wholesale madness, and that was immoral. For my generation, you have to remember, the formative intellectual experience was the Holocaust and the aftermath of the West judgment of Nazi Germany, and the Nuremberg prescient. And the intellectual issue when I was a freshman in Stanford, was framed by Hannah Arendt. SM (00:09:34): Oh, yes. DH (00:09:34): A philosopher who wrote a book called Eichmann in Jerusalem, which was supposedly an account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann after, and hiding in Argentina, and whisked away by the Israelis [inaudible] And the basic question that grabbed all of us in all that, was not, "What do you do about the Germans?" That they were clearly evil and had to be addressed to set. The issue was, "What do you do if you are a German?" And I think my generation spent a lifetime trying to answer that question. And I think that a number of us answered the bell when somebody in the country had to do so. And so obviously, I think the critics [inaudible] which continued to do so. And I would remind you, that these were largely guys who got through this entire period of history without having to pay any price. Say what you will about my position, I did not hide behind anything. I ended up in... Spent most of 20 months in prison in a maximum security institution. Four months in isolation cell. I paid my price, and I know my veteran friends paid their price. And where was Newt Gingrich's price in all this? How did he escape that, and how can he stand back now and call on us to endorse more innocent killing? Come on. By all the basic rules of the (19)60s, he passed, or failed to pass the debt. He did not stand up for what he supposedly was for. Fine, you like the war? Go fight it. They all had that option, and none of them took it. And so for me, a lot of that is just bullshit. SM (00:11:55): David, you raised a great point, because you paid a price. And if you remember, Dr. King would always say, when he was alive, that, "There is a price one has to pay for your beliefs." And he paid it by going to jail and everything. And a lot of people that had his side, he would say that, "Well, you may go to jail for this. You may have to stand up for what you believe in, and then pay a price." Do you feel that the boomer generation understood that there is a price one has to pay for standing up, and maybe this is why so few did in their adulthood? Your thoughts on some of your peers who may have, when they were young, stood up, but have not stood up since? And then the majority that may have never stood up. DH (00:12:47): Well, I think what to say about the generation, is that we were all, at the very least, witnesses to people paying prices. It is impossible to go through that historical experience without having encountered that information. There was just too much was being played out in too many places. And I am not in a business to make judgment about people's responses during the (19)60s, but I set out to be in a position so that when I got to 63 years old, I can look back on it and feel good about what I did, and I do. And I did something, and that shaped me for the rest of my life, and I am good with that. I am glad. But I do think the lesson we ought to have learned in all this, is that democracy goes no further than the citizenry will take it. And you believe in something, you have to act on it. [inaudible] is what you do. So either Andy up, or you are not a player, as far as I am concerned. I think that failure, on the part of America, to maintain that kind of intensity about their democracy, is one of the reasons we have got the load of band that we have got. SM (00:14:28): Is there one specific event that you think may have had the greatest impact on this boomer generation? DH (00:14:34): I think the most seminal and formative, was the assassination of John Kennedy. That turned the world on... For me, that is the day that [inaudible] SM (00:15:01): Do you feel that... When did the (19)60s begin, and when did it end? DH (00:15:06): Well, it ended, as far as I am concerned, there are two possible end dates. One is 1973 [inaudible] and one is 1975, when [inaudible] was evacuated, and Saigon fell for inmates. In the beginning, I think... I would begin the (19)60s maybe with the emulation of Buddhist Monk in Saigon, somewhere in [inaudible] kind of the Jeremiah, or teller of things to come. Unbelievable event coming from a place nobody imagined much about, would tell us all what was coming. SM (00:16:16): What was it about the 1950s? Because a lot of times, when we look at the boomer generation, we concentrate on the (19)60s and the (19)70s, and when they were in high school and college, and early adulthood and their twenties. What about those (19)50s? What role did that did? What was happening in the world at that time, shaped their lives? Because when you look at the... And I am only about a year younger than you are, and when I look at the (19)50s, I know we went through the fear of a nuclear attack all the time, and we heard all about the Cold War and the nuclear bomb destroying us all in one shot. But as children, we grew up watching Howdy Doody, Hop Along Cassidy, all the Westerns. We learned that Native Americans were always the bad guy. Mickey Mouse Club. It seemed like there was a lot of happiness going on in America, and whether it was hiding the bad things, we all knew what was going on in the South, what was going on with African Americans. And the civil rights movement was happening at that time. But what about the (19)50s, and its shaping of the psyche of this group of young people, that as they went into the (19)60s, everything changed? DH (00:17:34): Well, I was born two aspects of the (19)50s. And one is, I do not know that I would describe it as a lot of happiness going all around. There was a lot of formulaic living going on. I mean, remember, this is... America in 1956, the country with no options. So if you were a young man growing up in Fresno, California, who I was, who had a choice in John Wayne or John Wayne or John Wayne. It was a remarkably singular culture. And so part of the [inaudible] exploded out of my generation, was just the desire for options, that we had to go out and make ourselves. There was not just one way to live, and that there were lots of ways to live. Some people had lived thousands of different ways. And to continue to participate in a culture which assumed that there was only one way to live, was an enormous mistake. And I think that was the breakout. And there was that inner hook for a long time. People wanted something more. And I think the second thing, was the degree to which our generation believed in the (19)50s. My experience was, most people I was in the movement with, were people who got A's in high school. These were not people who did not buy in. These were people who bought in enormously. We believed that America would never go halfway around the world, to kill people to no good reason. No. I mean, that was an article of faith. I grew up watching people [inaudible] on television. My father was off in the army reserve the entire time I was a child, and my brother was a captain in the second air force, so I bought in. When I was in the fourth grade, I wanted to go to West Point. When I was in the eighth grade, I wanted to be an FBI agent. And I think my experience proved the entire generation. And it was the process of discovering that the bill of goods you had been sold, was a bill of good. We had been told, and believed, and placed our faith in an America that did not exist. I mean, for me, then I crossed the Mason Dixon line on my way to Mississippi, and saw my first black entrance and white entrance, and all that rigmarole certification. It was just, I mean, instantly clear to me that I had been fucking lied to. And I was somebody in my generation who had more contact with black people than almost all my peers, because my father had coached a little league baseball team on the black side of Fresno. Black Fresno, just anywhere West of that. And my father coached a team over there, and I went over for the baseball. And one of three whites. So I at least had a working relationship with black peers, though limited, but far more extensive than by other people [inaudible]- SM (00:21:16): Do you feel... Yes. Again, I am only a year younger than you, and I can remember when my dad won a trip to Florida. We went three straight years in (19)57, (19)58, (19)59, in April. Took two weeks off in school. And I remember, I lived up in the Ithaca Cortland area, and we all had nice homes, nice streets and everything. Then as we drove farther and farther South, we drove on these two-lane highways, that the roads that were... I saw all the poverty. I saw a different America, and it was kind of shocking to me. It was shocking. And so I am talking about, we were given a bill of goods. Do you think that many of these boomers had this false sense of security? And then when they got into the (19)60s, the reality of what America truly is, really hit them in the face, and that is why they wanted to make it better? DH (00:22:11): I think everybody that went through the (19)60s, had eye-opening experiences. I mean, of all different sorts, but they all amounted to seeing an angle on life, and on America, that we had never imagined growing up. SM (00:22:33): What if you were to list some of the strengths and weaknesses of the generation, some characteristics and qualities that you admire and maybe do not admire, what would they be? DH (00:22:43): Oh, well I think that we possessed courage and openness. SM (00:22:55): And David, could you speak up just a little bit too? Thanks. DH (00:23:06): I think on the list, on the plus list, I would put courage and openness, altruism, imagination, sincerity, curiosity. Negative list, I would put... Well, one of the things I would put, would be narcissism as an episodic piece. I think [inaudible] people got enamored. SM (00:24:21): Yeah. A lot of the boomers felt that they were the most unique generation in American history. I am sure you have heard this before. Some of my peers who were boomers, still feel they are. Your thoughts on just an attitude that many of the young people back in the (19)60s and (19)70s had, that they were the most unique, because they were going to change the world and make it better. No other generation ever did. And then some attitudes as they have grown older. DH (00:24:48): Well, I do not recall at the time, being caught up in making historical judgments about the generation. To me, that was part of overlay. SM (00:25:07): How important were the boomers in all the movements? We are going to get in a little bit more about the anti-war movement, and of course the civil rights movement was really happening as boomers were becoming in their late teens and twenties. But how important were the boomers in all of these movements, as it really came to fruition in the late (19)60s, early (19)70s, and have been ongoing today? And I say not... We are talking about the women's movement, the environmental movement and the Native American, Chicano, gay and lesbian movements. Just your thoughts on the issue of movements, and how important this generation was in their creation. DH (00:25:48): Well, I think it is one of our signatures. SM (00:25:56): Want to go into any detail? DH (00:25:57): Well, we were all tested by the notion of organizing. And organizing was one of the things people did in 1960, out of those that organized. But to me, the word boomer, is one of the things that defined the 1960s. For the entire time, I was part of [inaudible] state of political opposition, that at the beginning, had entered the civil rights. And full wide crane of uprising. So yeah, I think that... I suppose, if I try to look to how that inherited, the thirties were, of course, a big movement time as well. And that was our current generation. SM (00:27:20): There was obviously a very big generation gap going on at the time between boomers and their parents, the World War II generation. Your thoughts on the impact that the boomer generation has had on their kids, and their grandkids. And we are now dealing with two generations beyond the boomers. We had the generation Xers, that seemed to really have a problem with boomers, in many ways. I worked on university campuses, and we actually had programs where we brought them together. And then the millennials, which are currently today's students, seem to be very close to their parents, and there does not seem to be any generation gap at all. Just your thoughts on the generation gap at that time, and the impact that boomers have had on the lives of their kids and grandkids, if any. DH (00:28:09): Well, certainly I pulled things on my parents, as I was going to. And there was a generation gap on some level. It was a transition between worlds. So I felt bad. I did not feel it in much of a personal sense, although my father begged me not to do what I was going to do about that. [inaudible] taking on the government was easy, the hard part was telling your parents. SM (00:29:02): How about the influence that, what have boomers done with their kids? I am basically leaning toward the issue of activism, and whether they are... DH (00:29:12): Well, I have kids. One, who is currently 40, and one is currently 26 [inaudible] And while both of them have good politics that they care about [inaudible] neither of them became political organizers. Son is 40, my daughter is 26. SM (00:29:36): David, could you speak up just a little bit too, so I can catch? Okay. DH (00:29:54): Anyway, both my kids got good politics, but they did not become organizers and had no interest in it. And in fact, my daughter kind chose not to, kind of feeling it out for a while. SM (00:30:14): What do you think would be the lasting legacy of the boomers? They are now starting to reach senior citizen status, and so they got a lot of years left to have an impact on America. But what do you think history books will say about that era and that time, and that generation? DH (00:30:33): Well, I can only say what I think they ought to say, which is, I think they ought to give us credit for significant things. Not all of the same. First, is the end of segregation. For our generation, it was an enormous accomplishment that [inaudible]- SM (00:31:06): David, you are being cut off. DH (00:31:08): And has meant, I think more, to the shape of modern America than almost anything else. Second, I think that we opened up the university in ways that it was not before. Are now far and more open and original and imaginative way they approach learning, than they ever were at our time. And I think that was largely because of criticism that those... That era brought challenges to it. Third thing, I think that we gave America options. Certainly, if you look around us today, there are 400 television channels. They were all upstairs on my TV. Where we had basically three television options, they were now enormous. And we introduced the notion of spirituality, the notion of insight, of enlightenment, of a different kind of cultural approach that was responsible for making the lives of everyday Americans far more rich, fulfilling than they ever would have been otherwise. Fourth thing we did is, at a moment of the greatest challenge, the ethos of our democracy and one of the greatest abuses of power ever conducted by an American government, namely the Vietnam War, and something that stands out in our history as an obvious war crime, again, that, we stood up and stopped. Three enormous assumptions. And in so doing, changed the relationship between government and citizenry forever. Hey, that is a lot. That is a hell of a lot. And most of that was done before we were 30 years old. So there is something special about that, our particular relationship. But it was a generational thing, and that was not our choice. That was the society, defined by the fact that the only people who were ever asked, who were ever forced to pay a price for that war that demolished out generation, were all under 26. They were not going into anybody else's neighborhood, grabbing people and cocooning them into the military. I think that is a defining experience for the entire time. SM (00:34:29): That is interesting, David. I like your thoughts on this. When people of my age and your age talk about the Vietnam War in a college environment, with the current administrators or current students, it is as if... All we are trying to do, is we are nostalgic and we can never forget the times have changed, and let us move on, kind of an attitude. And what is interesting is, a lot of the people that run today's universities, are boomers who may have not been activists in their time, but they know what happened in those times and may fear the rise of activism again, on university campuses. I have experienced this at all the universities I have worked at. Move on. That was part of history, but it was not now. But just your thoughts on that kind of an attitude that seems to be prevalent in America today, that when they criticize- DH (00:35:27): The [inaudible] is that... The implicit assumption there, is that somehow caring about the lives lived by your fellow human being, involving yourself, trying to minimize suffering, somehow a commodity that limited a certain period of history. Come on. These are what the culture called eternal truth, when we were practicing them. And I think... I am sure nobody is trying to make the (19)60s happen all over again. Good God, no. I had enough of the (19)60s when I was in the (19)60s. The real point is, how to take those values that motivated us then, that motivated people for hundreds of thousands of years of history, and how to take those and act them out in ways that address the dilemmas facing us as a people, and a civilization. God. What we need to have happen now, is addressing a far different kind of phenomenon. We are about to lose the planet. Civilization is about to flop, and somebody has to be able to step out and start making a sacrifice. It will be required for this to survive in anything we recognize today, as meaningful. All of it is talked over the horizon, but there are serious scientists who are saying things like, by the end of this century, the Earth's population will have been reduced from 9 billion to 1 billion, as a function of climate. Well, I do not know whether that is accurate or not. Maybe he only got it half right, but that is still... I mean, try and visualize half the people in your neighborhood are not alive anymore. That is catastrophic. SM (00:37:32): Wow. DH (00:37:33): And we are staring down the barrel of that, and paying no attention to it at all. The enemy here, is denial. SM (00:37:42): Yeah. It is interesting, because when you bring that up, and when people talk about Al Gore now, they talk about all the money he is making. I read about it. Oh, he is flying an airplane. He is not living his principles. They find any way they possibly can, to destroy an individual who may be trying to put his name out there to try to save the universe, or for a cause. They always try to find the Achilles tendon and the person who is making a plea, or being different than others in their thinking. DH (00:38:14): And I think it is also a function of a larger thing. Whatever political, whatever [inaudible] And that happened left, right, and sideways. SM (00:38:37): Right. This next question I want to ask, really deals with the issue of healing within the nation. Jan Scruggs, who was the founder of the Vietnam Memorial, wrote a book on, to heal a nation. That was the title of his book, When the Wall was Built. I am going to read this question to make sure I get it all correct, so that you hear it. Do you feel boomers are still having a problem from healing from the divisions that tore the nation apart in their youth? Division between black and white, divisions between those who support authority and those who do not, division between those who supported the tropes and those who did not. You hear that all the time today. Of course, what roles the wall played in... And I know it has played a lot with veterans, but I am not sure if it was done much for the rest of the nation. And do you feel that the boomer generation will go to their grave, like many in the civil war generation, not truly healing from these divisions? Am I wrong in thinking this? Or has 40 years made the statement, time heals all wounds, the truth? DH (00:39:46): No, I think there is all kinds of outstanding accounts in this war that we have managed to sweep under the rug, by labeling it as a mistake. Mistake is a genius way to talk about it, because it can be a mistake, because it violated [inaudible] precedent, or it can be a mistake [inaudible] when we had the chance. It covers everything, and allows us to kind of fluff it off without ever taking moral responsibility for what happened, and about ever going through the exercise of trying talk to each other about what exactly did happen. And so I think there is lots of stuff out there. We let ourselves off, and not digest the experience. So there has never been a format for us to talk about it, except these kind shots fired off from the right wing every now and then, about the syndrome. There is no serious discussion about the war and what communications of it were. And so that means all the divisions are still out there. SM (00:41:21): I can remember, during Reagan's presidency, his whole effort was to bring America back to what it used to be. And then when George Bush Sr. became president, he was the one that proclaimed that the Vietnam syndrome is over. DH (00:41:34): Well I mean, Reagan was certainly frustrated. [inaudible] So there was one war we saved the country from. I think that, certainly George Bush Sr. [inaudible] I mean, what really happened there, was not about any syndrome being recovered from. Really here, it was the kind of balance of power in the society, in which the forces of the military were being held at bay by the experience of Vietnam War. And I think, certainly that those forces got empowered by George Bush Sr. And he did not make the mistake of trying to extend them in place [inaudible] But his son, I think is absolute triumph of that kind of [inaudible] And I think that filter is going to become increasingly correct, by virtue of the forces. It is how it should be. SM (00:43:17): Dave, let me change the side of my tape here. Hold on one second. DH (00:43:20): Sure. SM (00:43:31): All right, we are back. It is kind of a follow-up to that question on the healing. I took a group of students, about five, maybe six years ago, to Washington DC, before Senator Musky died. And he had just gotten out of the hospital, and these 14 students were some of the best student leaders on our campus. And we had a whole series of questions that we had picked to ask him. And many of them wanted to ask this question about the healing from the 1968 convention, because they had seen it on black and white tape and everything. And they wanted to know if we had healed as a nation from that. And we were waiting. And he had just gotten out of the hospital and he had been watching Ken Burns series on the Civil War. And when we asked the question, he kind of almost gave us a minute of total silence, and it was obviously a very emotional question for him. And then he finally answered, "We have not healed since the Civil War." And then he went on for about a 15-minute lecture on the Civil War and how the divisions in America at that time, were still part of the American scene. He was very upset for the loss of life, that over 400,000 people had died in that war, and was almost an entire generation of children that would never be born because of brother fighting against brother. Just your thoughts on that, as a person who was young in the early (19)60s, who went South and saw some of these terrible things of injustice in America in the 1960s. But if you go to Gettysburg, you still see a lot of things left at the tombstones. I go there four or five times a year, out of curiosity, just to see what is left. And on the confederate sides, there is still a love for the Confederacy. So just your thoughts on that. DH (00:45:26): Well, obviously that Civil War did not get resolved, because I was a 19-year old in order to try and clear that up again. That bondage has not ceased exist. And I resist strongly, the description of the Civil War, simply as brother fighting against brothers. Certainly that happened [inaudible] but not some random act where brothers felt they had to fight each other. This was because one set of people insisted on the right to buy and sell other people, as though they were cattle. That is why there was a Civil War. That is why 400,000 people died. And I consider it tantamount... I have been to South Carolina, where they fly that fucking stars and bars. As far as I am concerned, it is like walking in and seeing a swastika flag. SM (00:46:34): Yeah, you are right. DH (00:46:37): This is slavery we are talking about here. There is no great romantic Southern life. And I certainly feel that most retrograde parts of America are in the old Confederacy. And I am sure they do admire it, and I think that is much to the detriment of the country and the species of humanity. And I have a lot of friends South, who I certainly would not put in a lump with them, but that is what it was about. And let us not glorify this thing here. They have enough perspective to know now, just how obscene the jury segregation was, how much... We talked about terrorists. I mean, terrorists are people who walk into somebody's house, drag them out in the street and lynch them, because they are black. That is terrorism. And all those states South of the Mason-Dixon line, and a whole bunch of other ones who are not South, they try and nourish that and glamorize that. And they can go down to all the racetracks they want, with their stars and bars, but it does not make it any different than what it was. SM (00:48:07): Yeah. That is what is always intrigued me about when I go to Gettysburg, because I see so many cars from the South, and I know they love America and everything. But I drive on both sides, and the majority of the statues and monuments are on the Northern side. But it is the Southern side where things are left, and I am amazed there is still something going on here. And I think we know, even with President Obama in the White House, that we still got a long way to go in this country. DH (00:48:42): Well, it is not the jury segregation anymore. We have come a long way. But absolutely, I think that there are a lot of people still in the country, who cannot accept the notion that people who are not white, are just as valuable and just as important as people who are not. SM (00:49:03): One of the qualities... Another other big issue, beyond healing, is the issue of trust. There were so many leaders that lied to us when we were young, and of course, the leaders have lied probably throughout our history. But we all remember Eisenhower lying about the U2 incident on national television. We know about the Gulf and Tonkin with LBJ. We know about Watergate and all the lies and the enemies lists and everything that Nixon did. I have even read in recent years, about Kennedy and Vietnam, even though Sorenson's recent book basically states that he had nothing to do with the coup there. He encouraged the coup, but he did not want them to die. But still, there has been so many lies that come through, just about all the presidents. Just your thoughts on the shaping of the boomers as a not very trustful generation, and whether they have passed this quality of lack of trust onto their kids and their grandchildren. And I preface this question with one other item. I can remember being in... I went to Binghamton University, (19)66 to (19)70. And I can remember in my intro class in psychology, the professor saying to us in a lecture on trust, that if you cannot trust, you will not be a success in life. You have got to be able to trust somebody. Trust is a very important quality in a human being. Just your thoughts on whether maybe a quality within the boomer generation, is that they do not trust. DH (00:50:37): Well, I would not make that generalization. I think it is not that people lost their capacity to trust, it just became quite clear that, that trust was not an automatic. Issue is not whether we are willing to trust government, and somehow become a character flaw that cannot get around the issue of the process. No. I think what has happened, is what the process of trust is doing to trust. You do not get trust, simply because you have got a majority of people who would show up on November, the first Tuesday in November, in your congressional district. Simply because you do that, does not give some kind of automatic way over what the country is supposed to be. And they cannot simply hand over power. There is some things that you do not trust anybody, other than yourself, but that you have to trust yourself. So I would define it a little differently than that. I do not feel like I am not a successful person, but I think once burned... How many times do you have to go through that process, before you assume that it has a given, and not the other. So how many times do you have to be lied to before you start worrying that people are doing? I mean, I think it is a totally rational position, not the incapacity to trust. Trust each other [inaudible] some of my closest friends from those days. SM (00:52:39): As a history political science major, which I was years ago, I can remember that trust being a quality that... Not trusting your government is actually a good quality, because it keeps them on their toes. So that kind of feeling. I got a question here, because you are a great writer, by the way. DH (00:52:58): Thank you. SM (00:52:58): You are a great writer. I first came upon your writing when I bought the book Goliath, way back when it first came out. And then of one of your recent books, Our War. And of course Dreams, the one on Allard Lowenstein. Yeah, great books. And I wanted to ask a question on these three books. How do the three books, combined in your own unique way, define the boomer generation in their times, when you were young? Everyone has quality. And to me, when I have read them... And I have to reread your, Dreams Die Hard, because I read it years ago. But when I lived... Actually, I lived out in California, and I lived in Berlingame from (19)76 to (19)83. And I remember I bought the book, I think it was (19)82 when it came out. So I brought it there, and I read it there. And of course, I had Goliath already. But those books are really classics. They-they should be required reading, to me, in the classroom, some of them. Just your thoughts on how all three of them kind of define your generation. DH (00:54:12): Well, I think that they certainly... first, thanks for all the kind words. I feel that they are all great books, and I think they should be required reading. And each of them was, for me, an attempt at different times, and in different ways, to come terms with what that experience was. And so Goliath was obviously contemporaneous. That was me writing from the middle of it all. Basically, I wrote the book in the last three months before I went to prison. And Dreams Die Hard was a book that I could not-not write, when I got a phone call saying that Dennis Sweeny had shot Allard K. It was like, oh, God. SM (00:55:20): Yeah. DH (00:55:21): There was a kind of triangle, a life triangle there, between me and [inaudible] I write for a living, and there is no way I could pass that one off. And I felt the kind of obligation to do so, that it should come to this so many years later, needed an explanation. Only explanation was to go back to where it all started. And Our War was a kind of conscious effort, at age 50, to look backwards at the war that had defined my life, and try to talk about it as clearly as I could. And I think all of them framed part of the kind of overlap play, part of that experience of the generation. Absolutely. SM (00:56:19): Do you feel... I would like your thoughts on today's university. You made a comment on it, and I want you to respond to something that I feel very strongly about. And that is, that universities today, whether they be state universities or Ivy League schools or community colleges, or technical schools, I do not care where it is, are afraid of activism. They propose and love volunteerism, they love... And most students are in volunteer activities. But I have always felt that activism is the step beyond volunteerism. Activism is 24/7, whereas volunteerism may be a requirement, or doing something once a week or once every two weeks. And I say this, because we had an activist series at our campus, and Tom Hayden came, and we had the Bergen Brothers and we had a really good series. And people above us, said that this is not what our university's about, and encouraged us to stop the activist lecture series. From that point on, I figured there is something going on here. And I started thinking that maybe today's universities are run by boomers, or young people that are younger than boomers, that are afraid of a revival of what could happen again on university campuses, which is protests against the Afghan War, or any kind of an issue. They are afraid of them, of bringing back memories of disruption of classes and the university shutting down, students asking more questions than they should be asking. As Tom said when he was on our campus, understanding the difference between empowerment and power, and the students were shocked, but the administrator’s kind of said, oh, he should not have said that. And so just your thoughts on the universities today, and whether they fear activism. DH (00:58:17): Well, I think volunteerism, first, is an admirable activity. I probably would not want to come down against it, but I think that activism, I associate with more, rather than exercising altruism. It was obviously a good thing to do. It was really an attempt to exercise power, which is a very different kind of thing. And anybody who is in power, is going to have problems with the people who think that, that power ought to be shared out. Nobody likes to give it up. And I think certainly that most... I assume, amongst college administrators, there is this boogeyman, which is the 1960s. [inaudible] authority of college administrators, which shall never before. And the modern university has become increasingly incorporated. And so I think everything gets determined on the basis, largely, of how it is going to affect fundraising. And retired political organizers are not doing great a source of funding for- SM (00:59:35): Yeah, you are darn right. DH (00:59:45): And so I think it is a character of the modern university. And on one hand, it has become a far better and more responsive institution, in that it has opened its intellectual horizon in ways... Were not the case when I was... I mean, nowadays [inaudible] can basically write their own majors, on any subject they can make a case on. God, you would kill for that in my era. That was one of the things I spent hours with administrators, screaming back and forth about it, disagreeing back and forth, when I was student body resident at Stanford. And hey, when I got elected, part of my platform was equal rights for men and women students. SM (01:00:35): Go into that a little bit. Tell me a little bit about your student experience at Stanford. DH (01:00:38): Well, I was there as far as Stanford pushed to open itself to the middle class, to take a leap from finishing school for California [inaudible] to Harvard and West. And to do that, they made an opening for the middle class [inaudible] For example, at my high school in Fresno, California, public high school in Fresno, they took seven members of my graduating class. That is unheard of. You never heard of people going to Stanford the year before that. All of a sudden, they started opening up. I was part of it, had the scholarship on there. And I felt that the university at the time, was a real high bound kind of institution. My election as student body president of Stanford, was remarkable on many fronts. First of all, I did not want to run for president, and someone approached me to run for president, saying I had all these things about education [inaudible] why do not I run for student body president? [inaudible] they gave me a guarantee that I would not get more than 500 votes. And we went out and talked about student regulations, about the University of Scholars. And there were [inaudible] administrators and faculty [inaudible] And cooperation for Vietnam, to get the legalization of marijuana in there. But we had a whole list of things, and right at the top, was the rights for students. Woman stayed out all night, and men stayed out all night. [inaudible] And so I ran for student body president, I talked about some stuff, and if I had won the election in Berkeley, nobody would have noticed. But a place like Stanford, from conservative, for someone... They called me radical, was what I was called, in work shirt and Levis, vest mock, barrel in my ear. If I could feel like Stanford National News. And I spent the next year having discussions with faculty administrators who were bizarre, to say the least. I can remember in the discussion with a group of faculty administrators, [inaudible] five faculty, five students all met. And we started arguing about women having the same rights as men. Essentially, the English department... And basically said, "Hey, if we do this, do not start having sex." And I said, I am sorry to tell you this, but that horse is already out of the barn. It happened. But can you imagine that discussion today? SM (01:05:10): Geez. Oh my gosh. DH (01:05:13): We have learned something. But by and large, the issue of empowerment and who are the legitimate members of the community, and how should their interest represented the decision making, has basically progressed not one width. Lots more options available, but students still do not make great choices. SM (01:05:45): David, what were the books that students were reading when you were a college student, and maybe in the early part of the movement too? Were there books written by authors that really influenced you and some of your peers? DH (01:06:01): Yeah, it is funny. I mentioned Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem. Well, for entertainment, we all read Fonica. SM (01:06:14): Right. DH (01:06:14): And Richard Brodigan, he had a lot of [inaudible] civilization. Yeah [inaudible]- SM (01:06:14): Yeah. DH (01:06:14): A big one for me, and a lot of people I knew, was also Gandhi, an autobiography. SM (01:07:20): Do you remember the books, the Greening of America, by Charles Reich, and The Making of a Counterculture, by Theodore Roszak? DH (01:07:26): I remember Theodore Roszak's book, and that was [inaudible] around the time. Greening of America was never a book that... SM (01:07:42): Right. DH (01:07:42): If I recall, right at the end of the 1960s. SM (01:07:49): Yep. DH (01:07:50): Oh, Paul Goodman [inaudible] SM (01:07:53): Oh yeah, that is a big one. Yep. Who were the favorite musicians, and how would you define how music defined the boomer generation, or vice versa? Because when we are talking about the music of this period, we are not only talking about rock and folk, we are talking about the Motown sound. They are all kind of combined here. But when you think of the (19)60s and you think of the boomer generation, who are the musicians that you most admired, and you think had the greatest impact on the generation? DH (01:08:29): Well, there is one, hands down. [inaudible] Dylan was a poet at the time. Not like that. SM (01:08:37): Who was that now? DH (01:08:41): Bob Dylan. SM (01:08:41): Oh, yeah. DH (01:08:42): And he was poet at the time. And so what he came close to... Influence that Dylan had on everything. All of us have grown up in [inaudible] The first concert I ever went to see was when Ray Charles came to Fresno. And part of the identification people had with black people, was the music and all the big [inaudible] SM (01:09:41): Yeah. I tell you. Was there a rock group that was your favorite? DH (01:09:45): Well, there was... I love the Beatles. How could I not? They were phenomenal. And I was on more intimate terms with the San Francisco band. And so when I was a freshman at Stanford, [inaudible] right off campus, and [inaudible] and one of his regular acts was this Jerry Garcia. SM (01:10:28): Oh, yeah. DH (01:10:29): Then became Warlock [inaudible] and then became the Grateful Death. SM (01:10:43): Yeah. DH (01:10:43): And when I ran for student body president, we had a rock concert, a local stamp stand, and to get the amplifiers speakers that we needed to do the concert [inaudible] SM (01:11:00): Oh my gosh. Great slicks. Yep. DH (01:11:05): That was all done. That was 1966, for that stupid, going to San Francisco with a flower in your hair song. SM (01:11:16): That is Lee Hazelwood. DH (01:11:19): Haight-Ashbury got discovered. SM (01:11:20): Right. DH (01:11:21): And that little episode got [inaudible] But before that [inaudible] when I got into it, in my first kind of... At the same time I was listening Bo Diddley, I was also listening to Joan Baez. SM (01:11:50): Yeah, of course, you were married to her. Yep. DH (01:11:52): Yeah. SM (01:11:54): Yeah, I got a lot of her albums. DH (01:11:58): Yeah. So all the music passed through me, but Bob Dylan was the man. I mean, he is the only guy who I was waiting. SM (01:12:12): What was really interesting, is that three weeks ago, my brother went to physical therapy over in Bucks County, and I just accompanied him. And I am sitting out in the hallway, and there is this old couple, older couple, they were in their (19)80s, that came in. And the gentleman walked right in, and I got to talking to the lady, and I was wearing a Kent State shirt. And she started talking about Kent State in 1970. And then she said, "Oh, by the way, my son was married to Grace Slick." I did a triple flip. Her son was married to Grace Slick for I think 11 years. And he was the sound person for that particular group. And now, I guess he is the sound person for a hotel in Atlantic City and the Wacovia Center here in Philadelphia. But he was the first husband of Grace Slick. What a small world. She said, "Oh, Grace was so nice. We had her over to dinner." So it is a very small world at times. You have obviously been to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, when you saw it for the first time, what feelings were going through your mind? DH (01:13:27): Say that again. SM (01:13:28): The Vietnam Memorial in Washington, what impact really, has that had on healing the nation, in your thoughts? And secondly, what was the impact when you first saw it for the first time, that it had on you? DH (01:13:43): Well, I do not think it healed anything, but the first step towards healing is recognition of what the experience was. And I think it is a remarkable memorial for that. Recognizing had a kind of fundamental [inaudible] I consider it beautiful, and extraordinarily impressive. SM (01:14:19): What does Kent State and Jackson State mean to you? DH (01:14:24): Well, probably less than they do to most people, because I was in the isolation cell block when Kent State happens. So word of it... And things like the Cambodia demonstrations and [inaudible] they were remote. SM (01:14:54): How about Watergate? And then when I say these terms, the influence you think they had on the boomer generation, you personally, but mostly the boomer generation. DH (01:15:07): Well, Watergate was enormous. And the experience of it, whether it impacted or not, is another question. But the experience of it, was that we had finally won one. [inaudible] And I was up, dealing with... Of course, tried for war crimes. And Henry Kissinger was one of the worst people ever. SM (01:15:38): How about Woodstock? DH (01:15:42): Another one of those really remote things to which I have become associated, basically because when my wife, in her song on Woodstock, dedicated to me off in prison. And that made... That cut made the movie. So to me, Woodstock was so far off, not a particular interest. SM (01:16:07): How about the year 1968? DH (01:16:09): The year (19)68? Well, I was here when things started to come apart. And that is when they really... Of course, dominated by the [inaudible] Particularly, Martin Luther King. SM (01:16:31): When you think of these two terms, what do you think of the hippies and the yippies? DH (01:16:39): Well, hippies, I think of Haight-Ashbury, and the first time I walked down Haight-Ashbury in late [inaudible] So that is what I think of hippies. Yippies, I think [inaudible] SM (01:17:00): Right. Students for Democratic society and the weatherman. DH (01:17:08): Well, I always have big feelings about SDS, on the one hand. And SDS is kind of an umbrella organization that was different at every campus [inaudible] But a lot of the SDS national organizers who operated in California at the time, had a real problem. [inaudible] So I have an unmixed feeling about the weathermen. SM (01:17:52): Could you speak up again, David? Because I cannot hear you very good. DH (01:17:54): The weatherman, I do not have mixed feelings about the weatherman. My feelings about them are very clear. I think the guys' full of shit. That they distorted the movement, and they represent... The worst part of that is, I resent them being somehow a symbol of any sort of the movement. It had nothing to do with it. SM (01:18:26): Yeah. Yeah, I know President Obama is getting criticized because of Bill Ayers and the links to him. The Vietnam veterans against the war? DH (01:18:37): Well, I organized with the PVA After I get out of prison, to put together several projects. One of our partners. I had a lot of close friends. SM (01:18:55): The Richard Nixon's enemies list. DH (01:19:02): Pitiful. SM (01:19:05): I have had some actual... A couple interviewees who said, "I am honored to have been on it." DH (01:19:09): Fine. SM (01:19:15): The last part of the interview is just responding to some of the personalities of the period. DH (01:19:21): Okay. SM (01:19:21): And some of the terms. Your thoughts on Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. DH (01:19:28): Abbie Hoffman was one of the funniest guys I ever met, and I thought he was the real deal. Jerry Rubin, con-artist, phony. SM (01:19:39): Timothy Leary. DH (01:19:41): Another con-artist [inaudible] SM (01:19:57): How about Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern? DH (01:20:04): Well, I think they are both terribly flawed, but in the right place. SM (01:20:12): John Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy. DH (01:20:17): Well, John Kennedy was my childhood, so associated with him. And Bobby Kennedy, I associated with 1968. SM (01:20:30): How about Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew? DH (01:20:38): Despicable pairing. SM (01:20:42): How about the Black Panthers? Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Kay Leever, Angela Davis, that group. DH (01:20:51): Well, I have the advantage, having covered them as a journalist, when I started working [inaudible 01:21:03] and I think that they were also phonys. And not that they could back up some of what they did [inaudible] Yeah, so I am not a fan of the black panthers. SM (01:21:30): How about Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey? DH (01:21:35): Well, I think of Lyndon Johnson as a big mistake, with a capital M. Hubert Humphrey [inaudible] SM (01:21:48): Robert McNamara. DH (01:21:50): Tragic guy, on the one hand. [inaudible] But having said that, my other feeling [inaudible] SM (01:22:08): I did not quite get that last sentence. DH (01:22:23): A lot of kids went off to dive, because he did not speak up at the time. SM (01:22:27): Yep. George Wallace and Ronald Reagan. DH (01:22:34): Well, George Wallace [inaudible] Ronald Reagan, second coming of [inaudible] SM (01:22:51): How about Dr. Benjamin Spock and Daniel Ellsberg? DH (01:22:56): Well, I knew both of the guys, and I think both of them were right on, and both of them were played incredibly [inaudible] in turning the country around. Take my hat off to them. SM (01:23:14): Daniel and Phillip Berrigan. DH (01:23:15): [inaudible] SM (01:23:16): What about Barry Goldwater? DH (01:23:27): Looking back on him from this point, he seemed like such a benign conservative, that I wish [inaudible] SM (01:23:35): What about Dwight Eisenhower? DH (01:23:35): Everybody's daddy. SM (01:23:42): And then the other two presidents, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. DH (01:23:48): Well, the last one was a loser from the get-go, and first one became more of a loser [inaudible] become a big winner as an expert. SM (01:24:05): How about the women leaders? Gloria Steinem, Bella Abk, Betty Friedan, leaders of the Women's Movement. DH (01:24:18): [inaudible] Yeah, of course. SM (01:24:22): Yeah. Couple other terms from that period, because they were important to youth. Tet. DH (01:24:30): Well, great moment. Revelation. SM (01:24:46): How about people like Walter Cronkite and the news media at the time? How important were they to the boomers? DH (01:24:55): Well, Walter Cronkite, of course, had all the information. [inaudible] As for the rest of them, they learned as they went along. By the time it came, printing [inaudible] SM (01:25:30): How important were the college students in ending the Vietnam War, and what do you think was the number one reason? I know the helicopters went off in 1975, and for all intents and purposes, in 1973, we were out of there. But what was the ultimate reason why the Vietnam War ended? DH (01:25:56): Because it became impossible to continue. That is why it did not. The combination of public sentiment and military collapse. Remember, [inaudible] one out of four were killed. [inaudible] SM (01:26:26): Right. DH (01:26:26): [inaudible] SM (01:26:50): If you were before an audience of college students today, and I am sure you probably still go out and speak. (End of Interview) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with David Victor Harris Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Harris, David, 1946- ; McKiernan, Stephen Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/wav Subject The topic of the resource Journalists; Authors; Political activists--United States; Harris, David, 1946--Interviews Description An account of the resource David Victor Harris is a journalist, author, and activist. He was an anti-war activist and the first person arrested for refusing to register for the draft in the late 1960's. He was the student government president at Stanford University. David Victor Harris is a journalist, author, and activist. He was a leading opponent of the draft during the Vietnam War, which began during his college days at Stanford University. As a young college student, he became involved in the Civil Rights Movement where he joined students from all over the country in the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee's (SNCC) 1964 voter registration campaign in Mississippi. In 1966, he became president of the Stanford University student body, and as a leading critic of the draft, he formed a group called the Resistance. Harris was the first person arrested for refusing to register for the draft in 1968. In his later years, Harris has received journalistic praise for his non-fiction books on his experiences in the sixties and seventies along with other books connected to personalities or issues in those times. Harris died from lung cancer at his home in Mill Valley on February 6, 2023, at the age of 76. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009-11-06 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.13 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2017-03-14 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. McKiernan Interviews Extent The size or duration of the resource. 86:58 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/90356e6ae8f586727376c878129bf626.jpg f8bdcf5336537ff3a1a07e3a39962950 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/bc72c418a7971e7fe9789d0c0a5e85a8.mp3 0c648814fe737a76adf1256d789c7592 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Audio interviews Title A name given to the resource McKiernan Interviews Description An account of the resource Stephen McKiernan's collection of interviews includes more than two hundred interviews with prominent figures of the 1960s, which were collected between the mid-1990s to 2023 The collection provides narratives of people who were actively involved in or witnessed events in the 1960s, an era which spurred profound cultural and political transformation in the twentieth century. Interviewees include politicians, artists, scholars, musicians, authors, and veterans who delve into the decade’s most prominent issues and events, including the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the anti-war movement, women’s rights, gay rights, segregation, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Hippies, Yippies, and individualism.<br /><br /> <h3>The McKiernan 22</h3> <div>Stephen McKiernan interviewed legends of the 1960s. When asked in 2021 where one should start when sifting through his vast collection, he provided the following list:</div> <ul> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/854">Julian Bond</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1866">Bobby Muller</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1175">Craig McNamara</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/910">Dr. Arthur Levine</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/837">Diane Carlson Evans</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/942">Dr. Ellen Schrecker</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/876">Dr. Lee Edwards</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/841">Peter Coyote</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1233">Dr. Roosevelt Johnson</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/899">Rennie Davis</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1222">Kim Phuc</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/917">George McGovern</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/833">Frank Schaeffer</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/840">Rev. Dr. Frank Forrester Church </a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1240">Dr. Marilyn Young</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/842">James Fallows</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/835">Joseph Lee Galloway</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/911">John Lewis</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/839">Paul Critchlow</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/888">Steve Gunderson</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1159">Charles Kaiser</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/2407">Joseph Lewis</a></li> </ul> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Stephen McKiernan Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In copyright. Template: Simple Audio Player (Amplitude.js) This template displays an audio player with the first attached image file as the 'cover image'. For its audio source, the template looks for the first attached audio file. If additional audio files exist, they should be combined using audio editing software, or a separate Omeka item should be made for each part. Date of Interview 2010-06-29 Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Steven McKiernan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed James M. Fallows Language English Biographical Text <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;James Mackenzie Fallows is a writer, editor, columnist, and journalist. His writing pieces have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, New Yorker, Slate, and many others. He has been a professor visiting several universities in the U.S and China. In addition, he wrote ten books and received the 1983 National Book Award. He studied at Harvard University for his Bachelor's degree in 1970 and Queen's College, Oxford for economic development.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:15105,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;11&quot;:4,&quot;12&quot;:0,&quot;14&quot;:[null,2,0],&quot;15&quot;:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;16&quot;:10}">James Mackenzie Fallows is a writer, editor, columnist, and journalist. His writing pieces have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, New Yorker, Slate, and many others. He has been a professor visiting several universities in the U.S and China. In addition, he wrote ten books and received the 1983 National Book Award. He studied at Harvard University for his Bachelor's degree in 1970 and Queen's College, Oxford for economic development.</span> Digital Publisher Binghamton University Libraries Digital Format audio/mp4 Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data 1 Microcassette Material Type Sound Interview Format Video or Audio Audio Keywords <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Family structure; 1960's; Baby boom generation; Racial Issues; Civil War; Watergate; Gulf and Tonkin Resolution; The War in Afganistan; Iraq War; Martin Luther King Jr.; Student protest&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:2,&quot;4&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:14281427}}">Family structure; 1960s; Baby boom generation; Racial Issues; Civil War; Watergate; Gulf of Tonkin Resolution; The War in Afganistan; Iraq War; Martin Luther King Jr.; Student protest</span> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 46:08 Subject LCSH Authors; Editors; Journalists; College teachers; Fallows, James M.--Interviews Accessibility Copy/Paste below: Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Rights Statement Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with James Mackenzie Fallows Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Fallows, James M. ; McKiernan, Stephen Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/wav Subject The topic of the resource Authors; Editors; Journalists; College teachers; Fallows, James M.--Interviews Description An account of the resource James Mackenzie Fallows is a writer, editor, columnist, and journalist. His writing pieces have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, New Yorker, and Slate, among others. He has been a professor visiting several universities in the U.S and China. In addition, he wrote ten books and received the 1983 National Book Award. He studied at Harvard University for his B.A., 1970 and Queen's College, Oxford for economic development. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010-06-29 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.12 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2017-03-01 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. McKiernan Interviews Extent The size or duration of the resource. 46:08 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/ed9b9f39b8458eec0f12ff50d5b7fd07.jpg af3555387f2ee7602fd77eb78b1e9bd4 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/22258b27b9ddea79791638bc75048364.mp3 0bd5b5fcb4e2263c4fe87e8602e90697 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Audio interviews Title A name given to the resource McKiernan Interviews Description An account of the resource Stephen McKiernan's collection of interviews includes more than two hundred interviews with prominent figures of the 1960s, which were collected between the mid-1990s to 2023 The collection provides narratives of people who were actively involved in or witnessed events in the 1960s, an era which spurred profound cultural and political transformation in the twentieth century. Interviewees include politicians, artists, scholars, musicians, authors, and veterans who delve into the decade’s most prominent issues and events, including the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the anti-war movement, women’s rights, gay rights, segregation, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Hippies, Yippies, and individualism.<br /><br /> <h3>The McKiernan 22</h3> <div>Stephen McKiernan interviewed legends of the 1960s. When asked in 2021 where one should start when sifting through his vast collection, he provided the following list:</div> <ul> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/854">Julian Bond</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1866">Bobby Muller</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1175">Craig McNamara</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/910">Dr. Arthur Levine</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/837">Diane Carlson Evans</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/942">Dr. Ellen Schrecker</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/876">Dr. Lee Edwards</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/841">Peter Coyote</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1233">Dr. Roosevelt Johnson</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/899">Rennie Davis</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1222">Kim Phuc</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/917">George McGovern</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/833">Frank Schaeffer</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/840">Rev. Dr. Frank Forrester Church </a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1240">Dr. Marilyn Young</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/842">James Fallows</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/835">Joseph Lee Galloway</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/911">John Lewis</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/839">Paul Critchlow</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/888">Steve Gunderson</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1159">Charles Kaiser</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/2407">Joseph Lewis</a></li> </ul> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Stephen McKiernan Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In copyright. Template: Simple Audio Player with Transcription This template displays an audio player by Amplitude.js with a scrollable transcription which is loaded from the "Transcription" metadata field. This template displays an audio player with the first attached image file as the 'cover image'. For its audio source, the template looks for the first attached audio file. If additional audio files exist, they should be combined using audio editing software, or a separate Omeka item should be made for each part. Date of Interview 2010-07-22 Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Stephen McKiernan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Peter Coyote Language English Biographical Text <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Peter Coyote is an author, actor, director, screenwriter, and activist. Coyote is also a narrator for his own films and for a plethora of other events including the 2002 Winter Olympics and various Historic films. He graduated from Grinnell College with a Bachelor's degree in English Literature and attended California State University for a Master's degree in Creative Writing.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:7043,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;4&quot;:[null,2,5099745],&quot;10&quot;:2,&quot;11&quot;:4,&quot;12&quot;:0,&quot;14&quot;:[null,2,0],&quot;15&quot;:&quot;Arial&quot;}">Peter Coyote is an author, actor, director, screenwriter, and activist. Coyote is also a narrator for his own films and for a plethora of other events including the 2002 Winter Olympics and various Historic films. He graduated from Grinnell College with a Bachelor's degree in English Literature and attended California State University for a Master's degree in Creative Writing.</span> Digital Publisher Binghamton University Libraries Digital Format audio/mp4 Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data MicroCassette Material Type Sound Interview Format Video or Audio Audio Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 84:26 Keywords <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;The New American Poetry 1945-60; Folk music; Beats generation; Bohemian; Jazz music; Rock music; Guerilla theater; Baby boom generation; Counterculture; Richard Nixon; Civil Rights; Diggers.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:3,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;4&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:14281427}}">The New American Poetry 1945-60; Folk music; Beat generation; Bohemian; Jazz music; Rock music; Guerilla theater; Baby boom generation; Counterculture; Richard Nixon; Civil Rights; Diggers.</span> Subject LCSH Authors; Motion picture producers and directors; Screenwriters; Political activists--United States; Coyote, Peter--Interviews Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound, or alternative text from a visual medium McKiernan Interviews Interview with: Peter Coyote Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan Transcriber: Benjamin Mehdi So Date of interview: 22 July 2010 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (Start of Interview) 00:04 SM: First question I want to ask is, you were still, you are recognized as one of the most well-known counterculture leaders in the late (19)60s and (19)70s. And I have several questions linked to that. Why did the counterculture and the activist boomers linked to the multiple movements of the time not succeed in changing society for the better? One of the things that even I recognized when I was a college student is that many of the boomers thought they were going to change the world for the better they were going to end war, bring peace, end racism, sexism, homophobia, all the isms that were just going to make the world a better place to live and save the environment and actually truly make a difference in the world to. I do not think they did that. What is your thoughts on the counterculture? 01:03 PC: Well, first of all, let- 01:10 SM: Please speak up to- 01:13 PC: Let us dismiss the idea that I was anyone's leader. I was part of an anarchic gang that did not recognize leaders, tried to be authentic, and we tried to follow our own counsel. So, I can speak as that I cannot really speak as elite. But the counterculture aspirations they talk about, were simply part of a long line of American reform. I mean, there has been reforming as long as there has been America. And while it is true, that the counterculture failed, and all of its political goals, it succeeded in every single one of its cultural goals. And by that, I mean, we did not end war, we did not end racism, we did not end imperialism, and capitalism, that, fair enough. I can also say that there is no place in America, you cannot go today and buy organic food, find a women’s movement finding in for metal movement, find alternative medical movements, find alternative spiritual practices, yoga, Siddhanta, [inaudible] Buddhism, you name it. So those were all direct outgrowth of the six that we succeeded in that so far beyond our wildest dreams. That was changes have become ubiquitous and invisible. And it is my belief, actually the culture, Trumps politics, that in the long run the way people live every day, Trump their ideas about political system? So, I do not, I do not chalk this all up as a failure by any means. Now, your question was, why did we fail? Well, failed for a number of reasons. One is that the idea of a counterculture in itself is a failure. It condemns you to mark formation. And we as being members of counterculture, we missed the opportunity to organize and gage relationship with a lot of people who did not want their kids around long hair and drugs and free sex, and all sorts of wholesale experiment. They just wanted a fair deal out of the economy out of this. And we missed those people. So today, if I were going to create a radical magazine, you know, I would never have I would never have a marijuana leaf or anything countercultural on it at all, I would make it look this like time in life. So that is one reason we fail. The other reason we fail is that we brought all of the problems of growing up in the (19)50s with us, just because we thought that we were against a lot of the mistakes that are fake that our parents made did not mean that we are absolved from the consequences. In other words, if you think that your parents were sexually repressive, and you decide that the cure to that problem is sexual license and absolute freedom. Well, you have created a whole bunch of problems. Have not really ever really solved any just shifted from the left and the right. And thirdly, because we were concentrating on great revolutionary goals, we were not concentrating so much on kind of interpersonal dialogue and requirements that are needed to live together. So, we did not have very developed vocabularies of interpersonal relationship. You know, if I wake up in the morning, and I like to wash my face in a clean sink, and you do not care if it is a greasy pit where you wash your hands after you have just dismantled an engine, there is no revolutionary philosophy I can, I can write, as a cause for authority as to why you should clean the sink. So things like that. And then finally, the emergence of children created pressure, all of our ideas that were not fully thought out, or were not, you know, humanly sound and the communal system per se, fell apart. But that is not to say that we traded in our values for our beliefs. We are still connected as family. My daughter and her children share friends that she grew up with, are now mothers, very self-consciously a part of that world and its history. So we look this like everybody else today with that thing. That means we can all work, but do not the culture and myriad places do not buy, what we do with our lives is immediately translated by other people. So that is the long answer. But I think it is a pretty complete answer. 06:50 SM: Yeah, I have asked a lot of people that I have interviewed, particularly in the last half of people I have interviewed to define the term counterculture, a lot of people have come up with different terms. But what-what most of them have said, it is more than just being different from the mainstream. My basically, what my question is, is counterculture culture, more than being different from the mainstream, having long hair, wearing bell bottoms and colorful clothes, taking drugs, living in communes, having sex with multiple partners, of course, the pill played a part of that, where religion went to new spirituality, and where one does not have to go to church and a feeling of more meditation than before. Are those all the definitions and what the counterculture was? Or is it much more? 07:39 PC: Well, they are not definitions, their descriptions. I think the short thing to answer was, for those of us who felt that the system of the United States and capitalism was crumbling over internal contradiction, we were going to try to create a parallel structure and parallel institutions that would offer people refuge, I guess the thing fell apart. So do that we had to do a lot of experiments. We did not know how to live. We did not know what rules were worth following and what were not. I mean, a law is in agreement with a stop sign up on the street corner. But if people do not honor it, it is not a law. So, we began looking at everything that created a system that we did not like the system based on profit and private property, enhanced by racism, turning the planet and some fodder for profit. We did not like it. So we began to try to invent one from whole cloth and you make a lot of mistakes when you reinvent the wheel. 08:51 SM: Around that time in the (19)70s, when you were out there in California with the San Francisco Mime Troupe, which I saw, and I thought they were great. I lived in the Bay Area from (19)76 to (19)83. So I know about Golden Gate Park and I missed San Francisco so bad. I may end up moving back up there one day, but one of the things about that particular time while I was in graduate school, there were several books that came out and I-I want to know what books may have influenced you. The two books that I am referring to that were very popular in college campuses around (19)69 to (19)73 was Charles Reich's Greening of America. And the making of a counterculture by Theodore Roszac. And I want to know if you have ever read either one of those two? 09:36 PC: No, I never read either one of those two books that the books that I read that really kind of turned me around. One was called life against death by Norman O. Brown. One was the entire Don Juan series by Carlos Castaneda. The other was called the Three Pillars of Zen by Philip Kapleau. And what was Alan Watts Famous? 10:08 SM: Well, he did a book called Zen. Yeah, I have that. 10:13 PC: Those were the books that most influenced me. 10:17 SM: Did you read any of the beat writings to from the mid (19)50s on? 10:20 PC: Lots of it. when I was in college, my bible was a book called New American poetry 1945 to 1960, edited by Donald Allen, published by Grove Press, and me and my friends just ate that book up. And one of the reasons I came to San Francisco was to study poetry with Robert Duncan, University of San Francisco's creative writing department. 10:52 SM: What is what role did the beats play in shaping the or being the precursors of the of the (19)60s? I say this because there is a question that I will be asking you later, you do not have to answer it now is, when did the (19)60s begin? And I have only had two people that told me that they felt the (19)60s began with the beats, your thoughts on how important the beat writers were. And of course, Ginsburg goes through the entire era from the-the whole period, he goes right up to the very end, where some of the other ones have passed on, very early. But what role did they play in shaping the attitudes of not only maybe many members of the counterculture, but many members in the new left, and the activist students of the (19)60s and (19)70s? 11:42 PC: Well, you know, when the when the Beats were coming up, I was a young man, I was 12, 13 years old. And it was I was starting to get interested to then folk music. And folk music was one of the vehicles that kind of took you off the bourbon sidewalk and into the kind of trackless wilderness of Bohemia. You started hearing music that sounded more authentic voices, stories, histories that were more authentic. And when you got out there, like Greenwich Village and Washington Square Park, and the place where music was being made. You also met older, Bohemians, and Beatnik. And you got turned on to literature. So, these guys were the first kind of formative adult, other than jazz musicians I would ever meet, who were kind of guides and intellectual mentors. So they were very, very important. And, I mean, preeminent among them, for me is Gary Snyder. Yes, who was not only remained one of my closest friends to this day, but also kind of informal Zen teacher and a mentor and a whole number of ways. Same for Michael McClure. Same Lou Welt was my roommate, Gregory Corso was a later roommate. Wow. Ellen Ginsburg was a friend. So these guys were, you know, sort of the first. First representatives of wisdom that I ran into. 13:25 SM: Do-do you, a word that is very important. Oftentimes, when you talk about people and what they do, and the perceptions that other people have of them, the perception that I have always felt is they were truly genuine. It was not a putt on. It was, it was a real engine just to make publicity. That was who they were it would you agree with that? 13:45 PC: Oh, without a doubt. I mean, anybody who would guess that this was all a canard for publicity, is really reflecting their own shabbiness of character. These people were making trenching and deep and the observed critiques of the culture, which was beginning to be corporatized and standardized. And there was there was a lot to criticize. 14:14 SM: One of the things I always ask of each guest is, how did you become who you are? I read your whole background. I know your whole biography. I have read the book. And- 14:25 PC: You read on book you read the story of how I became Peter Coyote. 14:29 SM: But I mean in in your own voice. [chuckles] The basic question I am asking is, what were the greatest influences in your life in your life’s path that if you were to look at from the day you were born till today, are there two or three or four major happenings that really shaped you with respect to who you are? 14:55 PC: Well, yeah, one of which was being raised by a black woman, from the time I was two until I was about 13. And she and her friend’s kind of took over our house, my mother had a nervous breakdown, she was unable to care for me. My father was away working. And this very brilliant young woman just kind of took over the household in a very beneficent way, gave me safety and structure and by traveling with her friend, and I got a whole look at a nonwhite world. Saved me from being a white man, I mean I am Caucasian, but I am not a white [inaudible] men. And so that was a huge introduction to kind of, you know, the life of people who were invisible to disenfranchise, I witnessed, you know, 100s of little insults and things that I would never have seen if she had not been like, my mother, and I was not so observant of watching the way people treated her. So that was a huge and formative influence. We are still close day. I am writing a book about her. I talk to her all the time. 16:18 SM: Oh, when that is coming out? 16:22 PC: I do not know. I am still writing. Okay. So there was that the second one was meeting the world of jazz musician, through a bass player named Buddy Jones, who was Charlie Parker's roommate for three years in Kansas City. And buddy with became a close friend of my dad, and he brought all of these great musicians to our house to play up in the country, out calm and do Sims and Irby green and Bob Dorough and just lots of them. And buddy became and I met these people and saw them when I was about eight or nine years old. And they were the first adults I have ever seen who loved what they did. I knew right then that that is what I want. I did not have the talent to become a jazz musician, which is what I would do if I had any ability to do that. There is nothing else I would rather do. But running around with Buddy, and he took me to hear Billy holidays last concert in (19)92. He introduced me to Miles Davis when I was in, wow. traveled around took me to it. I spent all of my birthdays at the half note, a club in New York on Spring Street. From the Time I was about 12 to 18 when I left home. And, you know, I heard everybody heard Charlie Mingus John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, not only that, heard him with a guy who knew how to listen. That was a huge introduction into the life of an artist. And then, there were a lot of political people in my family. A lot of communists and socialists and left wingers. My dad used to play chess with Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy, the editors of the Monthly Review. My mother's cousin, Irving Adler was the first man fired in the New York City public school system for being a communist. My mother was the secretary of the Englewood Urban League. And so I grew up in this rich broth of political debate and dialogue. My dad was a capitalist. And so some combination of sort of growing up under the tutelage of black people and hearing learning white political theory. I would say were the two formative and also something about the community of outsiders, which is what jazz musicians were in those days. That kind of formed my whole worldview. 19:12 SM: That is interesting. I am a big jazz fan. My brother in law just passed away and he was a jazz performer in the Bay Area for quite a few years before he moved back East. They played with a group called they actually performed at Henry's at the top in San Francisco, which was they were Casey and Angel and Craig was the drummer and the whole mess of the jazz guys came out to San Francisco in (19)73, (19)74. And then they many of them are still out there, Ray Lockley, King Koi whole group of them. 19:43 PC: Well, I used to be a drummer, I studied drums with Cozy Cole- Was a great jazz drummer in the (19)40s (19)50s, Big Band drummer. 19:53 SM: You know, they always you know, what they always say yeah, Peter about jazz musicians, is they-they grew beyond rock they had the experience of rock, a lot of them did. And then they went on to the next phase, which was jazz, which was improvisation and really the ability to be creative and to be your own person. And I am, it is- 20:13 PC: Oh, I mean, these guys were there before there was rock. Mm hmm. You know, I mean, they began, you know, these guys were out there in the (19)30s and (19)40s. They these were just world class artists. And, you know, data they are not they do not owe their genesis to rock and roll, right? I am so tired of the self-importance of rock and roll like a cute. 20:38 SM: Yeah, one of the things in San Francisco Mime Troupe is historic. And you were one of the not only directed it, but one of the leaders of the group. One of the questions I want to ask is about the whole issue of guerrilla theater, how important I do not know a whole lot about it. But when I was in college guerrilla theater was very important on college campuses, because out of nowhere, she would see these people come into the student union. And they would talk and do these little skits about the Vietnam War or civil rights, or, you know, what was happening in the world. And they come you never knew they were coming, and then they just leave. And I did not know how much how important the San Francisco Mime Troupe may have been in being the inspiration for these things on college campuses of Do you know? 21:26 PC: I think they were; I think the word guerrilla theater was coined in the San Francisco mime Troupe. And, you know, we, what can I say we were revolutionary Theatre Company. And we were trying to invent modes of performance and places to perform that were appropriate to what we were talking about. 21:48 SM: What-what was the actual goal was it to inspire people to think, beyond their everyday lives to make changes, or, you know- 22:00 PC: I have changed my thinking about that. But when we were younger, I think that we were following as re-found edict that the artist is the antenna of the race. That leads to a kind of arrogance. In other words, we thought we knew what was going on, it was our job to tell everybody else. But if you look at that for even five minutes, that that does not hold up. The truth is that everybody knew what was going on. They sense that it comes up on the planet itself. And the artists are the ones who can articulate. But if the audience has done not know what was going on, they would not find what you did funny or amusing or entertaining. They would not understand it. So, what they appreciate why they clap, and holler is because you are articulating something they feel but they cannot put words. So, you know, but I think our job was to try to explain issues clearly. Break them down into kind of bytes of understanding so that they would be they can be analyzed clearly. And hopefully that that would lead people to action. 23:16 SM: Do you think that the-the so-called status quo in San Francisco there is- remember reading there your book or some of the information I saw on the web that the artist liberation from that was very important around the time San Francisco Minecraft was trying to perform, or being prevented from performing at various locations that it was a threat to the status quo? And that was why there was such resistance. 23:43 PC: Oh, I suppose so. I mean, everything. I mean, I had to laugh. Years later, when I read about how paranoid Richard Nixon was about the counterculture. You know, we could not have overthrown a-a frosty free. Our intention was that, and I guess paranoid people take that, seriously. Yeah, we were, we were fighting the status quo. And they resisted with what they had available. The police- 24:18 SM: What I really liked about the mime troop and the gorilla theater in the Bay Area that she talked about and were part of is the fact that people could see it, and he did not have to have money. And in living in the Bay Area and going to theater there. I know how expensive it is and to be able to have artists who understand the people and that a lot of people do not have the money to go see these very expensive plays or, or entertainment acts. It was really way ahead of its time. 24:50 PC: Yeah, well, I mean, that was part and parcel of going to where the people were right. And it was also something essentially honest because if-if people do not like you, they are not going to pay. 25:05 SM: Right. Quick question now Grinnell College is a very prestigious school. I am a- my whole career has been in higher ed. And I am curious as to how you picked it. 25:16 PC: I did not pick it. I, I sort of was told by my guidance counselor that I was going to go there. I had already been in jail for trying to bring a lot of marijuana across the border. And you know, I thought I was going to go to Harvard or reed or one of these photos. And she said, no-no-no, I think I think you will go to Grinnell, and it turned out to have been an inspired choice for me. I did really well. 25:47 SM: You were President of Student Government. Yeah. And then what is really impressive is the experience you had in Washington where that organizing those massive protests that was, I think you had and just mailing out all the literature about it and think you had about 25,000 people there. Could you talk a little bit about this first mass demonstration and President Kennedy's response, and you are meeting the President? And I believe it was some forget the guy's name, McGeorge Bundy. 26:20 PC: Yeah, it was getting a little ahead. So, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, we thought the, we thought the world was going to end. And a bunch of us thought that banning college and class was counterproductive. And so, we organized a group of 12 people to go to Washington to do a three-day hunger strike and protest the resumption of nuclear testing and support Kennedy's geese rate. And we were pretty skillful about that. And so we got there, and Kennedy was in Phoenix. But he saw us on the sidewalk, supporting his peace race, and he gave instructions that we were to be invited in. And it was the first time in the history of the White House that any picketers had ever been invited in White Mountain, and that made national headlines. So because of that, we mimeograph those headlines, we duplicated those headlines. And we sent them around to every college in the United States. And it was after that, that the first student demonstration in Washington took place in February, I think of (19)63. So, they were different events. And I cannot, I cannot fully say that we created that. But I can say that we were certainly a part of it. And it was certainly a big kick off to the student movement. 28:17 SM: What was it like being on a college campus between 1960 and (19)64? This was kind of before all the-the anti-war movement was started in the (19)66, (19)67 was a kind of dead at Grinnell except for these activities you were involved in? 28:35 PC: Well, no there was a lot of stuff going on. And but you know, you have to distinguish sort of between before November 1963, and after November because once Kennedy was killed, suddenly there was a whole new whole new climate feeling. Things got really serious. But there was lots of political ferment. I cannot say it was dull. No, we were doing lots of political stuff. And there were student convention, you know, political conventions. Matter of fact, in sort of protest of the war at Bucknell college students’ convention. Kennedy was president Then and I actually got the convention to not nominate him. Going to nominate Hubert Humphrey, good at politic, and the dean of the college, put his foot down and intervene. Not going to be the only college in the United States that insult the sitting president. So that was sort of a political lesson right there about how much power it has. 29:59 SM: Do you remember exactly where you were? When you heard John Kennedy was assassinated? Could you explain? 30:11 PC: Yeah I do. I was going to lunch in one and the women's dorm at Grinnell at the name of the dorm but and a woman came running out to come here, listen. And I went in and started listening to the radio with her. And we heard about it. 30:33 SM: Were you like a lot of the people just watch TV that whole weekend? Yeah. You see how it is all shot? Yep. So many people did. Thanks. I want to, I asked a couple of people. Can you remember the two announcers that were present? One was NBC and one was CBS and they both passed on. Do you remember who? 30:53 PC: I mean, I have I have all that on tape. I do not. I do not remember who they were. But I remember their tan suit for you know, yep, I was serious at all. Look, and they were smoking. Interesting. 31:09 SM: What I am getting back to you lived in a commune for a while in the Bay Area, you had a specific community were involved in what were the pluses of living in the commune? And what were the negatives? And I guess that is the question. 31:24 PC: Well, the pluses of living in a commune were-were and remain that. It was cheaper, that you had many more people to divide up the rent. So you needed to make less money. And it was also fun. That was like being in a big, like in a dorm with all your friends. 31:51 SM: What was a typical day like, I would like to do that. Were you responsible each week of preparing certain number of meals, what duties you had been able to stay there? 32:01 PC: Well, nothing really, people kind of did what they wanted. It was not too later that that things have to get a little more organized when children came along. But at that time, we just needed a place to crash and sleep. 32:21 SM: You went on the road with a show called the minstrel show civil rights and cracker. 32:26 PC: Civil Rights in a cracker-cracker barrel. 32:30 SM: What was the message of the play? Why did people react negatively? And why was it banned is several colleges. 32:39 PC: Well, we were arrested, it was closed, because it was basically it was basically a look at race relations from a black revolutionary perspective. And it was also very funny and very battle logical and race was a very charged issue, and they could we made it easy for them to, you know, get distracted by talking about the-the dirty jokes and the foul language. But the real reason people were upset was because of the kind of political point of view basically came right out of Malcolm X's book. 33:25 SM: I mean, the autobiography of Malcolm X. Yeah. Look, college, you know, did the students book you and then they were told that you had you could not arrive, or you could not show up or what? 33:37 PC: Well, it depends where you are talking about in many places that happened. That happened in Canada where we were arrested. Some students turned to us in for laughing in the-the bathroom, they assumed we were on drugs. And we were not, and the police came, and they say, they searched our luggage, and they found some old marijuana seed, in the sock in the base of somebody's shoe, one of our technical guys. And they arrested him and the school canceled the show, and we held a big rally. And we pointed out that we have been hired by the students up this pool. And in the middle of that rally, they came in and pull the plug on the microphone and arrested two of the faculty members who were sitting on stage supporting us, I guess, because they had beards. We overlooked the six-foot six-inch, one eyed black guy and a six foot long stocking cap sitting next to them. We had to run away and get out of there and because we needed to make money to get on to the next gig and we were arrested and there was a long story. its told pretty clearly in my book. Yeah, and- 34:57 SM: Yeah, well what is, what is amazing thing is that being an administrator has worked on college campuses for over 30 years. Even in recent years there has been people where universities have done that, not to your groups like u but for speakers. And a whole battle over freedom of speech and the rights of students to bring a speaker still goes on and on. So what does the word digger mean? 35:27 PC: Well, the diggers were a seventeenth century group started by English pamphlets here called Gerard when family w y m f t l n e y. And they were a protest for when the it 18, I think it was Oliver Cromwell. Yeah, no, that was Cromwell was seventeenth century. 35:56 SM: Please speak up. 35:57 PC: I am trying to remember when Oliver Cromwell, what century he was. I said seventeenth century but yeah, he was just he was seventeenth century. Anyway. So what happened was the king of England took over the common where people graze their sheep. And King wanted to raise his own sheep or his woolen mill, his new woolen mill. So, they took the people's land and the people fought back on this guy [inaudible]. And they were the first people to take a position against private property. And they were called the diggers, because every morning they were seen bearing burying their dead. So we named ourselves after them. And the diggers were our kind of anarchist alternative to, you know, young communists and socialists, we-we did not want to be, you know, artists performing plays about heroic bus drivers and elevator operators. We wanted to live in a culture where we could be authentic. And we did not want to be subjugated from you know, centralized ideology. So, we created this movement. And when we did everything without money, we did everything anonymously, figuring that if you were not getting either rich or famous from it, you probably meant it. 37:40 SM: Yeah, it was. It was free medical care; I think in the summer (19)67. Because the Summer of Love, very historic event in Golden Gate Park and actually in the whole San Francisco area was, was big. And I know you had the free medical care and free housing free food for the runaways. 37:59 PC: Yeah, we fed about 600 people a day in the in the park. Wow. And we had lots of people at our free medical-medical clinic. It was pretty interesting time. 38:13 SM: Now the, in your own words, the Summer of Love, Scott McKenzie, that song that came out? Are you going to you know that one out? Are you going to San Francisco. I mean, a lot of people did not go out to San Francisco when they heard that song. Or it was an inspiration. But can you define what, whose idea was the summer of love? And then the second this in the 68th? the summer solstice, it was kind of a follow up the second year. Well, whose ideas were they in? What were they? 38:43 PC: The first idea like the be in, and you know, the Summer of Love, these were kind of ideas of what were called the hip merchant, but the hate independent propriety. And they were always trying to put this lovey-lovey spin on things. You know, that everybody, okay, and meanwhile, cops were coming in and kicking the shit out of the kids, in their doorways, and we were just not buying. So it was sort of their idea. And then the diggers came in. And we-we put up a bunch of we did the summer solstice. And our purpose was to, you know, create events that had a bigger frame, where the sun itself was the frame. He became quite famous for putting on events where kind of, you know, there was no violence. Nobody got hurt. When in fact, I think be in was turned out to be a great and surprising thing. And I think they were probably righter than we were that there was but the learned by seeing how many of us there were. But there was a lot of tension between the diggers and the-the Haight Ashbury merchants, because we felt that they were, they just wanted to, you know, change the facade on the office storefront, they had 88 inches of powder. And that was what they wanted to maintain, and they fell, you know, hash pipe. We did not think that was particularly relevant. 40:35 SM: Yeah, one of the things about that particular period is this, he talked about the Summer of Love the summer solstice, and all the things that the kind of the diggers did, there was no violence. It was all about more love and peace. But then- 40:54 PC: No-no it was not about love, it was just about if you create a frame where people are equal. For instance, this is what we warned them about our outcome, we told them what was going to happen at Alcamo. It cannot, it cannot come into a free community, and put up a stage and say, these guys are more important than those guys does not work. So, when they first came to us, the Grateful Dead wanted Peterburgs. And I to design a show for the Rolling Stones. And we said, you know, sorry, the Rolling Stones are not the occasion for a show, we will put up six stages in Golden Gate Park, and they can have one of them. And we will create an event that will celebrate, you know, something more important than local, celebrity. So what we did was we created these planetary events like the solstice or the equinox, which are not manmade, they are events under which everyone is equal. And within that frame, you can do whatever you want, and you are just expressing yourself authentically. It is not creating a hierarchical status, where the guys on stage are the most important than the guys who get closest to the state are most important. And you are basically replicating the status hierarchies of the society. 42:19 SM: That is very well put, because if you go on to the web, you see the Grateful Dead performing at one of your free events, well, on the streets, and it was very organized, and people were just walking by. And- 42:31 PC: it was before the record companies came in and started spreading around all this money they were just the guys in the neighborhood. So yes, of course they played. 42:42 SM: One of the things we need to talk about the real bit beyond what we are talking about here about the antiwar movement is that the antiwar movement at that particular time was pretty peaceful until we got into the latter part of the (19)60s, early (19)70s When SDS went toward the weathermen. And then why other people had problems with the Black Panther Party thinking they were violent as well, and the Young Bloods and the Latina communities, especially in Philadelphia, and in Newark, your thoughts on just that whole concept of, you know, Malcolm X, we have had a lot of, in my interviews, a lot of people had different feelings toward him, because of his words, by any means necessary, and so you can interpret any way you want. But some people think it is more well, by any means necessary means violence. I am not so sure if he meant that because I saw him in a debate with Buckley over in England, and I do not think he meant that. But your thoughts on when the movement went violent? 43:42 PC: Well, wait a minute. The movement? I mean, antiwar. Yeah, that that statement has so much push it. I do not know where America has been a violent country since its inception. 44:00 SM: Hold on a second. Let me change. Go Right ahead, I am back. 44:12 PC: It was founded in genocide. Let us just start with the eradication of 2 million indigenous people. Bounty still being paid in 1920 on that spoke about the 500 million buffalo that were wiped out. Let us talk about slavery as entry after Britain as made it illegal. Let us talk about let us talk about exploitation and enslavement all over the Third World. So then, when a cup a bunch of college kids who are morally outraged that we invade a third world country, and conscript them to go kill people who are not harming them are ignored long enough that they begin to fight back, you call that violence. We live in a climate of violence. And nobody talked about, you know, the 5000 lynchings that were going on of black people. But when Malcolm X stands up and says, by any means necessary, suddenly the niggers are getting violent. I mean, it is just insulting. It is insulting. White people can hang niggers from a tree. But let a black man pick up a gun. And the whole white world goes crazy. A black president is speaking. And you have got white guys walking around outside his speech, carrying guns, fully loaded weapon. And nobody is doing anything. Can you imagine what would have happened if it was a white president, and black guys were out there carrying their guns. So, if the movement got violent, it is because they got tired of having to shift kicked out of them being ignored, having murders created in their name and not being listened to. But they existed in and were trained by a climate of violence. So, to pretend if there is anybody in America, whose wealth is not based on violence, even if that violence is invisible, backed up by cop with truncheons, backed up with soldiers in the Third World, backed up with soldiers all over the world siphoning wealth off for America to pretend that we are not participating in the violence is an act of self-delusion and hypocrisy. 46:43 SM: Very good response. Thank you. When you look at the period of the boomers have been alive, and of course, the period boomers are defined as people born between 1946 and 1964. And I preface this by saying that many of the people I have interviewed 1/3 were born before 1946. Yeah, and many other people from (19)40 to (19)46. Have a, have an attitude that we are really boomers ourselves. And Richie Havens told me that, but in your own words, could you describe the years the boomers have been alive, based on what it means to be? Excuse me? Just these years, what they mean to you as a person? The years that the boomers have been alive from (19)46 to 2010. The first period is between 1946 in 1960, what did it mean, to be alive in that time? 47:50 PC: I mean, it is my entire life, but my life me. I do not know, it is everything. It is not a very good question. 47:59 SM: Well, the question I am trying to get at as I am breaking down periods of what, what, what it was like to be alive during these periods of time? 48:08 PC: You know, 1940 to (19)46, I was a little boy 1946, to about 1953. I was pre-adolescent. Starting at my adolescence, I started to become political started to listen to different music. But I mean, I just do not know how to. I just do not know how to grab that question. Yeah, it is just life, life is always just life, but it is always the same, but it always has the same elements that are recycled. [inaudible] percent 10 perfect free. Falling in love the first time, you know, having children getting married, growing old, dying. Political mischief. I mean, I just do not know how to answer your question. 48:58 SM: Yeah, I think that was what he was getting at. And the question is the difference between the (19)50s, the (19)60s, the (19)70s, and the (19)80s. As a generation what they- 49:06 PC: I do not pay up? Yeah. Really? looking at it from the outside. 49:15 SM: How do you respond to the critics that say that a lot of American problems today go right back to the (19)60s and (19)70s. And- 49:23 PC: They are too stupid to respond. Why and, you know, those people thought Bill Clinton was eight. Like trying to have a debate with a moron. What America's problems do not have anything to do with free market capitalism. They do not have anything to do with the post Roosevelt. Betrayal of labor. They do not have anything to do with the communist witch hunt. They do not have anything to do with the Treaty of Detroit and the disenfranchisement of working people is- are too stupid to pay up. 50:02 SM: I know that (19)94 when Newt Gingrich, when the Republicans came to power, he made some pretty strong statements against the (19)60s generation. And I know that George-George Will has oftentimes in his writings really likes to take jabs at the end whenever you can. And there is he could not read any of his books. And now I have an essay in there about it. George Will- 50:26 PC: Oh, he is another one is another niche for the CIA. These guys are unprincipled opportunists. They are people who are in the lifeboat beating at the people in the water with the oars. Why listen to them? 50:42 SM: Now, it is the other point of view. So I just get responses. 50:46 PC: Other point of view, there are 500 points of view. They pretend they are the other point of view, what they are is a center, right pro corporate capitalist point of view. I understand it to my bone marrow, I do not need to listen to them. 51:02 SM: when did the (19)60s begin in your-your viewpoint? 51:08 PC: I would say around (19) 56. Maybe. I would say like the middle of the decade. 51:17 SM: And when do you when did it end? 51:22 PC: Well, for me, it ended about (19)77. Maybe. 51:32 SM: Is there what was the watershed moment? 51:36 PC: Well, for me, it was losing the lamb that my come in was on my father died. The land was easy for debt. The you know, we could not we could not keep it up. And so suddenly, for the first time in a long time I was I was living alone is the nuclear family. 52:02 SM: I mentioned that the boomer generation is defined by educators and because I am from higher education, and they always have to look at generations. Whether it be the boomer generation, Generation X, the millennials. Tom Brokaw called the World War II generation, the greatest generation, but and this is kind of a general question. But the way I want to ask it is based on the people that you knew worked with, in many different capacities, the boomer generation, what are your thoughts on this generation in terms of maybe some qualities you think were some of their strengths and maybe some of their weaknesses? 52:51 PC: I do not pay any attention to this term, right? I think it is meaningless, But I would say that the strength of this group were that they grew up in a kind of economic security well of wealth after World War II, and it afforded them a kind of platform, and security in which to be experimental and buy things out. They grew up at a time where the adolescent culture was just emerging and becoming its own independent event. That gave them a kind of autonomy and freedom. Culture had not been reduced to quite a homogenized math as it is today. Rebellion has not been quite so effectively coopted. I would say the weaknesses were that, like, sort of all young people you think you are smarter than you are. You think that you know everything, and you think they are going to live forever? And you do not take care of your bodies. Those are their weakness. 54:32 SM: The term generation gap was very common in the (19)60s and (19)70s, between parents and their children. Did you have a generation gap with your parents? 54:44 PC: Oh, yeah, I really did. You know, in most cultures in the world, there is no such thing as adolescence. That kids when they become at puberty, they are taken out of the house of their parents. The girls are raised by the aunt. And the boys are raised by their uncle. And they do that because they have got real critical life skills they need to trim, and they cannot run the risk of, you know, Oedipal tension, stopping the kids from learning this stuff. So a young boy becomes the lowest status guy in the men's group, he gets this tools. And all of his imitative group energy, as an adolescent is focused on the adult, figures out who he wants to be like, who we want to imitate the who he does not. But in the kind of post war boom. Adolescents had their own spending money, they had their freedom, they had no responsibility, they were sort of kept out of the job market. So, they did not compete with returning soldiers and adults and unions. And they developed their own kind of culture. And it turned out to be a huge motive force and a capitalist economy. They had lots of disposable income. So huge that it, it determined the shape of the entire culture. So, it is sort of run today by people between 14 and 30 least run in terms of peaking their disposable income and their money and trying to get them to buy your product. The early new phenomenon. 56:31 SM: I interviewed a Vietnam veteran a couple of weeks ago, a well-known Vietnam veteran. And when I asked him this question about the generation gap between him and his parents, he immediately said, people talk too much about the differences between fam between moms and dads and their kids. But he felt very strongly that the generation gap within the boomer generation was between those who went to war, and served in Vietnam and those who protested, but mostly those who avoided the draft. So he was saying that the generation gap was really within the generation itself, your thoughts on that? 57:12 PC: Well, he is entitled to his opinion. And you know, if you felt it was immoral, if you felt that America had invaded another country, without provocation or cause, and you felt that it was a moral to go to their country, and so people, you would not call that just because somebody is in the armed forces. And just because they are following order, does not really make it service. And it does not exempt them from moral judgement. I was shot in the United States, I was beaten in the United States. So, I was also taking care of soldiers and we were passing out, only draft guards, the people on the free store and leave their uniforms and disappear out of the street. So I have a lot of respect for the military. And I got a lot of respect for people who served. But, you know, from my point of view, it was and remains an immoral war, we killed 3 million people trying to, we defoliated, the Plain of Jars in Cambodia. And we sent home young men with ghosts, and post-traumatic stress syndrome, and wounds that have lasted them the rest of their life. And they did it for them, you know, the Cold War ambitions of a bunch of old men. So let us not put more of a spin on it. then there is 58:55 SM: What do you feel established religion waned in the eyes of many boomers in the (19)60s and early (19)70s. And why was spirituality so important? To these same people, but in different ways. 59:06 PC: That established religion has become a handmaiden of the state. And it had separated itself from through spirituality. People had a hunger that they were seeking to satisfy. 59:23 SM: You in things I have read Zen Buddhism is very important to you. 59:29 PC: Yes, I have been I am an ordained Buddhist, and training now to be a teacher. I have been a Zen Buddhist for 38 years and I take this thing seriously. And, you know, less of religion than it is a way of living your life and practicing your life practicing kindness, compassion. I have never reached the bottom and unlike Judaism or policy ism or Islam, or always good to their own members and not so good everyone else who does not does not leave anybody out that like that. 1:00:13 SM: You feel in these 38 years, like it is really made you a more gives you peace of mind, meditation, I have a couple nephews are really in the meditation, they said that they cannot meditate they be well, they would be sick. So, they-they make sure they have an hour of meditation each day and they try to think about nothing except just to meditate the Zen, this has really changed your life in so many ways. 1:00:43 PC: First of all, that is not the way that we understand. You know, I probably be killing people, if I was not Buddhist. What being a Buddhist is, is basically studying the self? And, as great teacher Logan said, study the self, by forgetting I just I cannot think of another way to express fully what being human is by taking some time every day, and sitting still and checking in the- what is happening in my body and my mind. We are not trying to stop. We are just trying to detach from them enough, even, but not be jerked around by the mind is a gland using thought. When you meditate enough, it will go down on its own, but try to stop your thought of fanatic. So most people are afraid to build a very radical practice. But when you do that, it puts you in touch with what is really going on with your life. And your life is not so separate from the rest of creation. 1:02:15 SM: There is two examples that I think that most of the boomer generation saw, particularly in the late (19)60s and early (19)70s. One was on college campuses, and the other was just in the news, the Beatles and how they be changed so much. And when they went to, I guess, forget the person that they went to over in India, then the Allen Ginsberg traveling through a lot of college campuses, and she came to three campuses in my area, Ohio State, and he just chanted the entire two hours he was in the room and one heck of an experience it was a spiritual happening is what it was. 1:02:57 PC: Yeah. Well, he was he was introducing people to spirituality. 1:03:05 SM: One, one question supporting them asked everyone is- 1:03:09 PC: I am starting to get tired. 1:03:12 SM: Okay, yeah. What? I have about 20 more minutes, is that okay? 1:03:17 PC: Let me just look at my calendar. Well, let us see how quickly we can get I have an appointment at one o'clock. Let us see how fast we can get through this. 1:03:29 SM: Okay, you are- one of the questions. The advanced everyone, that group of our students took a trip to Washington, DC in the mid (19)90s. We went to see Senator Edmund Muskie. And the students came up with this question after seeing films on the (19)60s and particularly in 1968. They said the question they wanted to ask the senator was based on all the protests that were happening in Chicago in (19)68. And the question went like this, due to all the divisions that were happening in America at that time between those who supported the war and those who were against the war, those who supported the troops and those who did not, between black and white, male and female, gay and straight, and then they also brought up the-the riots that were happening in the cities. Do you feel that the boomer generation is going to go to its grave, like the Civil War generation did not truly healing due to the tremendous divisions that took place at the time that they were young? And a lot of these issues and they thought he was going to answer based on the crisis in Chicago in 1968, but he did not answer that-that way. But I want to get your response to this whole issue of healing. If you think this is an issue? 1:04:55 PC: Well, there has been a fracture in American life No, there have been those people who want unfettered access and liberty to do whatever they want to have been those who think that the government should be a mediating influence for Berna [inaudible]. And that fracture has been in America since the founding fathers. It exists today between, you know, are conservatives and liberals are big boulders, and so they represent points of view, but they are never going to go away. So, I am not sure that America has any more fractures than it ever was. I mean, they started a civil war, to protect slavery. How fractured was that? So, you know, I think that we call unresolved arguments fractured. But that was assuming that it was hold. It was never hold. America was created by millions of indentured servants came over here, and owed their employers, seven years of their labor. You know, there is a, there is a guy named doubt, wrote a book called The Twisted Dream, which marked the history of America. And it is eye opening to read. Because, you know, if you were paid somebody stick it over here, you had his labor, seven years, to build your barns and your mills and your greeneries and your dams, and amass you all this wealth. And when it came to vote, who are you going to vote for? So, I do not think that anything that involves human beings is ever old. I think human beings are always fractured and independent, even when they ascribe to some great overarching political philosophy, just looked at religion, look at the way religion fragmented in the face of the Enlightenment, and suddenly had, you know, Calvinism and Methodism and press theory and they are just all reflections of different points of view on any given issue. And that is what human beings do. That is what the world is. So, I do not know, it is worse now than it ever was. I do not know. 1:07:31 SM: Senator muskie did not even respond about the (19)60s in 1968. His responses that we have not healed since the Civil War due to race, the issue of race and then he said, he actually died six months later, he was not well, and we were lucky to have the meeting. And he said he had just gotten out of the hospital, and he had seen the Ken Burns series, how we lost 430,000 people almost lost the entire generation of men. Back then, particularly in the south, so he says the issue of race, and he did not even talk about (19)68. 1:08:06 PC: Yeah, well, I think race is the big one. I agree with him on that. You know, I think a lot of what you are seeing today is the kind of panic of previously privileged white men realize that they are being submerged under a kind of new lotto tide and they are freaked out about it, because I am sure they imagine all these people of color plotting some hideous revenge on them for their persistency. 1:08:36 SM: What does the Vietnam Memorial mean to you because it has played – it has certainly played a role in healing men in the Vietnam vets and their families and lost loved ones. But when Jan Scruggs wrote the book to heal a nation not only was his goal when not only was the walls’ goal to heal the veterans but to play a part, even a small part and healing the nation from this terrible war. Your thoughts? Have you been to the wall? 1:09:05 PC: Yeah, so indescribably sad. It is so beautiful. You know, I am one of those people that thinks that the way you support the group is not the sentiment of a stupid war. And my heart goes out to each and every one of those people who serve both the survivors, those that fell, you know, nobody survives a war. The way they went in, they come back scarred, they come back having seen extremes of human behavior, they come back having done things that nobody should ever have to do. And for those of us who can see it, beforehand, we are out there on the streets shouting and screaming and people think it is about politics. But it is about the soldiers I mean, you look at Afghanistan and Iraq today, what is it? One half of 1 percent of the people are making these blood sacrifices, so the rest of us can shop. It is fucking hideous. It is obscene. See, you know, and people think you want to get the troops out of there, you are against the group. I want these kids to come home with their arms and legs and their brains and their, you know, passion and their generosity and their hopefulness. They do not even know why they are there. Yeah. So, you know, healed we did not make the wars. But people that resist the wars. Yeah, we are one side of a fracture, I suppose. But do not blame me. 1:10:52 SM: In your in your view. and I am getting a lot of different opinions on this. Why did we lose the Vietnam War and, and wha- and George Bush, the first said in 1989, the Vietnam syndrome is over? Which is this war still with us as a nation, in mind and spirit? 1:11:14 PC: Well, I think, you know, I think the Korean War, morphed into the Vietnamese War which morphed into the Iraq War, which morphed into the Afghanistan war, they were all in the service of an empire They were all in the service of bracketing or protecting wealth to bring home for the mother country. So, I do not know that Vietnam is still an issue except among those who fought in it. But the underlying issue of empire and policies which you know, bombed the wealth of other people, they are still, they are still operating. And I think the reason we lost the I think the reason we lost the, or, because we had someplace else to go, most people had nowhere else. So they would never quit. And that is why we are not going to beat the Afghans. They have no place else to go, where they live. And they will fight and they will die there forever. And eventually, the body count will get high enough that Americans will say. 1:12:25 SM: that we. Yeah, this is a two-part question. It can be sure. What can we learn from the (19)60s in the (19)70s? And secondly, what is the responsibility of the artist? And what role should they all artists play in times of crisis? And I, I prefaced the second question, part of the question, based on the fact that in recent years, entertainers had been attacked, as you know, your entertainer should keep your mouth shut and just entertain. And as if entertainers do not are not a part of the American citizenry. That guess the first part, what do we learn from the (19)60s and (19)70s? 1:13:07 PC: Well, let me just let me talk about it is the height of hypocrisy. You know, there are huge industries which are dedicated to everything that entertainers do. They are a magazine devoted to who their fucking where they shop, how they decorate their home, everything, except should they open their mouth about a political opinion? They are herded back onto the ranch. Now, why do you think the simplest answer to that would be is because their real function is as marketing brands. And when they venture an opinion, they divide the consumer base. You know, if they say Democrat, you are going to lose the Republic. If you say Republicans, you are going to lose the Democrats. And so everybody is using and harnessing the charisma of celebrities to sell ship. But God forbid that the celebrity should harness their own courage to talk about something that so, you know, that, that the two edged sword if I have the charisma to sell, or to be exploited by other people, I should certainly have the ability to exploit it and use it myself. So, there is that and what was the other part. 1:14:42 SM: Of just what-what did we learn overall from the (19)60s in the (19)70s? Nothing. Okay. You made replicating. 1:14:51 PC: The same mistakes in 2010 that we that we made in the (19)70s. 1:15:00 SM: You made reference that you have a problem with the term the boomer generation, and I am telling you I have a problem. 1:15:05 PC: With it-it just does not describe anything to me. 1:15:11 SM: Well, I am finding from the majority of the people I have interviewed that they do not like, they do not like generations being labeled. 1:15:18 PC: That well, we did not make it up. It is going to with some media term, right? We did not call ourselves hippies either. 1:15:26 SM: One of the qualities of the counterculture is that money is not important, or at least I. And in a lot of the in the question is, and again, another criticism of the boomer generation, not so much the counterculture, but the boomer generation is that, well, some of the wealthiest people are now our boomers who had were idealists, and now have gone on to make a lot of money. So, they are no different than any other generation. How, how credible is the fact that that is one of the qualities of the counterculture is that money was not important. 1:16:04 PC: Well, it is hard to live in America without-without money. So, but it just stuff, it was not important. It just was not going to be our organizing. 1:16:24 SM: I-I-I know you are tired. And are there? I have other questions here. But I will ask you. Are there any questions? I did not ask you that I thought I was going to that you thought it was going to. The last question I have is what do you think the lasting legacy will be the-the best history books are often written 50 years after an event 50 years after World War II, the best books came out. But I think good books are coming out every year on any every topic, but it is the thought that what do you think? The historians the sociologists, the writers will say once the last Boomer has passed away, what do you what do you think they will say about this generation that that was that grew up after World War II? 1:17:24 PC: Something stupid. Something stupid, you can count on it. I mean, I do not know what they will say, I do not care what they say I am, I collect my letters, along with Barry Snyder, along with Michael McClure, along with a bunch of people, I give them to the University of California, hopefully to give original sources a future historian, you know, so that my generation and my time is not defined by other people. Not an original observation to say that history is written by the winners. So, we have tried to create a body of literature and stuff that would at least describe the world the way we saw it the way it felt. That is all I do. 1:18:27 SM: You have any final thoughts you want to say on anything? On the boomer generation? 1:18:32 PC: Yeah, I do not know. I mean, you have asked really good questions. I do not mean to be cranky with I am sorry. 1:18:38 SM: Well, no, Peter, that was exactly because you have a passion. I can hear it in your voice. 1:18:47 PC: And I guess what I feel is that one of the reasons I became a Buddhist is because the endless debate and discussion does not seem to lead any does not seem to lead to wisdom does not seem to lead to anything but opinions. Borrow. And I would rather day make a sandwich for a hungry person. And debate hunger. I would rather take in an orphan and wash them and debate federal policy about orphan just where I have come to in my life. 1:19:32 SM: And you notice I have not asked one question about your years in Hollywood and all your movies. So I appreciate that. Because you a re much more your every year of what is the word, I want to use your if you lose quite a life, that ss all I have to say. Well, thanks and-and I will keep I will keep you updated on where I am at. interviewing 200 people. I will be transcribing all the interviews. Wow. I am doing it myself between September and April and then you will get a copy of the I guess I will send it to your assistant. You will have a chance to read it and make sure it is okay get the approval to printed I am going to need two pictures of you for the top of it. 1:20:24 PC: Let me give you, my email. 1:20:25 SM: Okay hold on one second let me write this down. Okay. 1:20:31 PC: It is Peter at W D like David 1:20:38 SM: [inaudible] You said Peter at WD light. 1:20:46 PC: W, D be like David. Okay. Yep, P like Peter R like Richard. Oh, D like david.com It stands for Wild Dogs Production. Okay. So that is my email. If you send me an email I can email you back a photo or something. 1:21:08 SM: Very good. Well, thank you very much Peter. 1:21:12 PC: Thank you very much. 1:21:13 SM: You have a great day. Thanks a lot. Night. (End of Interview) Accessibility Copy/Paste below: Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Description 1 Microcassette Rights Statement Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Peter Coyote Description An account of the resource Peter Coyote is an author, actor, director, screenwriter, and activist. Coyote is also a narrator for not only his own films, but for a plethora of other events including the 2002 Winter Olympics and various Historic films. He graduated from Grinnell College with a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and attended California State University for a Master's Degree in Creative Writing. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Coyote, Peter ; McKiernan, Stephen Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/wav Subject The topic of the resource Authors; Motion picture producers and directors; Screenwriters; Political activists--United States; Coyote, Peter--Interviews Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010-07-22 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.11 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2017-03-01 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. McKiernan Interviews Extent The size or duration of the resource. 84:26