24 10 1775 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/1c4a974523c5fe82804cc82aa5c9966f.jpg f3a5133899f8375ed144f5ca9c803eb9 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/68ab30d39a0c9811c453ac4259d5525a.mp3 5c17c9db6b0e7f2db8d79d0f6d21162c 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 2009-08-06 Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Stephen McKiernan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed M. Stanton (Medford Stanton) Evans, 1934-2015 Language English Biographical Text <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Medford Stanton Evans was an educator, journalist and author. Stanton was an influential figure behind the modern conservative movement. He received his Bachelor's degree in English from Yale University and his Master's degree in Economics from New York 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}">Medford Stanton Evans was an educator, journalist, and author. Stanton was an influential figure behind the modern conservative movement. He received his Bachelor's degree in English from Yale University and his Master's degree in Economics from New York University.</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;Beat Writers; Communism; The Goldwater Movement; Free Speech Movement; Change agents; Vietnam policies; College students; Activism ;Peace Corps; Conservatives; Trust; Lyndon B. Johnson; The Hollywood Ten; Joseph McCarthy; Richard Nixon; Birch Bayh; FBI surveillance.\n&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:15299,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;4&quot;:[null,2,16119544],&quot;9&quot;:0,&quot;10&quot;:0,&quot;11&quot;:4,&quot;12&quot;:0,&quot;14&quot;:[null,2,3355443],&quot;15&quot;:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;16&quot;:10}">Beat Writers; Communism; The Goldwater Movement; Free Speech Movement; Change agents; liberals; Civil War; Ken Burns; Edmund Muskie; Vietnam policies; College students; Activism; Peace Corps; Voluntarism; Conservatives; Trust; Lyndon B. Johnson; The Hollywood Ten; Joseph McCarthy; Richard Nixon; Birch Bayh; FBI surveillance<br /></span> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 113:29 Subject LCSH Journalists; Authors; Evans, M. Stanton (Medford Stanton), 1934-2015--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: M. Stanton Evans Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan Transcriber: REV Date of interview: 6 August 2009 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (Start of Interview) SM (00:00:03): Again, thank you very much. I will be sending a waiver form too, and you will sign it and then you will see the editing before it is ever. ME (00:00:11): Now, how is this an oral interview subject? Are you just going to publish the interviews, are you making a book from the interviews? SM (00:00:17): Well, no, I am actually making a book from the interviews. I take the picture of each individual in the ambiance, the special moment. That is why I like to interview in person. A few people I have interviewed over the phone, and those people I have met and I have taken their picture, so I can feel comfortable with interview them over the phone. This is an oral history project, but I have written a prologue and an epilogue already and I have written that and it is a lot about me and the magic moments for me as a boomer. This is really for an education for students and for general public to read about the boomer generation, some of the questions I ask. I guess it is also discovery for me, because I remember being in psychology classes. I am trying to still discover who I am as a boomer, and this generation I grew up in, I am fascinated by it. ME (00:01:13): I think your generation is more introspective than mine. SM (00:01:18): Tell you what, I am going to leave this close to you, so speak loud. ME (00:01:22): I will get closer up and closer to you. SM (00:01:25): What? Continue on, right on that note there about the introspective. ME (00:01:29): Well, I am looking, every generation has its own introspection, but our era, the era that is chronicled in this book you have, mine here from long ago, was we were very focused on things outside ourselves. Particularly, I am talking late forties, early (19)50s, I was class of (19)55 college. This was the very height of the coal. Korea was going, and all the McCarthy stuff was going on. There were huge battles being fought, all related to this coal question and the survival of the free world. These are the communists. That riveted our attention and everything we did was kind of, not everything, but a lot of what we did was linked to that. Certainly, in my own case, since this is some of biographical, that was the number one issue for me, as opposed to my intensity for something. That is kind of what I meant by that. SM (00:02:43): Right. When you think of the boomer generation, and again, these are the young people born between, and I think we made a few... ME (00:02:50): After the war, right? SM (00:02:53): Yeah, born right after the war up to 1964. ME (00:02:59): Yeah. That is a 20-year span. SM (00:02:59): Yes. ME (00:02:59): End of the war. SM (00:03:03): Yeah. What are your thoughts? If you look at that group of young people that were in college in the early, they would have graduated beginning in around 1965 from high school, and they would have continued for the next 22 years, basically, graduating from high school, going off to college, and they were involved in all these activities. When you look at the bloomer generation, what would you consider their strengths and weaknesses as a generation of 74 million? I know it is very general, but... ME (00:03:33): Yeah. Well, again, the difference in perspective, and I told you this over the phone, that I had never really thought about these matters so much in generational terms. Certainly, that enters in. There is always the tension between the older people and the younger people. That is just built into the situation. I was much more focused, picking up what we were just talking about a minute ago, on the issue aspect of things. That is, there was not so much how old people were, it is where they stood philosophically. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, in college and just out of college, I was much more focused on aligning myself with other people who thought as I did, as opposed to how old these people were. Some of them were quite old. Some of them were 60, 70 something years old then. Some of them were my age, and some of them were in between. It was much more a question of substance, of philosophy, of policy. Then the generational part of it kind of flowed from the avenue, but the generational thing was then itself divided by that. Of course, you have, and I am sure you know this, you had really on the campuses in the (19)60s, which is this book was written in 1961, before a lot of stuff happened in the (19)60s, you really had two different things going on the campuses. One was just one we have all read about, the SDS, and the new left, and the free speech movement, and all of that glorified in the Ken Kesey novels, and the literature of the times, about all the flower people and so forth and so on. That was sort of all on the left end of things to the degree had any philosophical meaning. Then there were whole other thing on the campuses of the conservative kids, Young Americans for Freedom, the Universal Studies Institute, Young Republicans. I read about those groups in this book, people on this campus way back when. Of course, a lot more happened after that book came up. You really had two different things within the same generation, left versus right. You had all the kids who followed Gene McCarthy, but you had a bunch of other kids who followed Barry Goldwater. These were the forces that were contending for leadership politically and intellectually. Those groups continued fighting through all the intervening years, after the Reagan era, and even into today. That is kind of the way I looked at it. SM (00:07:12): It is interesting. I do this in every interview, one of the first questions centers on commentary made by Newt Gingrich and George Will, who are the most well-known commentators on the boomers in the 1990s. Basically, they would, in every chance they could get, whether it be an article in of a magazine or on television, take a shot at the boomer generation for the breakdown of American society in so many ways, whether it be the breakdown of the American family, the drug culture, the lack of respect for authority, the divisions that really came about that continue today. Do you think their commentary was fair to attack that 74 million boomers? ME (00:07:58): I have to hedge on that a bit, because I am not familiar with what they have said, but based on your paraphrase, I do not agree with that. I do not believe quite apart from you and George, that is another, them personally is another question, I do not believe that the problems that we confront in American society were created by that group of people. They were there long before. There had been a long history of philosophical breakdown in American culture for decades before any of these people were ever born. Bill Buckley's book, God and Man at Yale, came out in 1951. SM (00:08:52): Great book. ME (00:08:53): It is. SM (00:08:54): I have a first edition. ME (00:08:55): I was there when it came out. It is a very, I felt a very accurate indictment of what was then happening in Yale in 1951 or (19)50. That was long before these people ever made the scene. To pin it on them, well, some of them made it worse, some of them continued it, some of them whatever, manifested it, but there are others who opposed it in that same generation. That is the side that I was on, and the opposing side. That was the side that produced Goldwater and Reagan. Not an inconsequential movement that you produced with Ronald Reagan. That is where it came from. That is how I look at it. SM (00:09:50): When you look at that period that you have written about, the McCarthy era, and certainly Buckley back in (19)51, the early boomers were like six, seven years old at that time. It was very, for them to grasp much, but I can still remember as a little boy, watching that Black and white TV on the McCarthy hearings, being on the floor and my mother's in the kitchen, and having him say things to people who were testifying. I am not sure if that is subconsciously, I am not sure if I am one of the millions of baby boomers that were on the floor of the living room as the mother was doing her damn things when it was on television, whether that subconsciously went into boomers in any way in their youth. When you look at boomers, the question I want to ask is, boomers really questioned authority, a lot of them did. Again, maybe only 50 percent, but a lot of them questioned authority and challenged the status quo. That was the area that the beat writers came about. Some people will say the beat writers really had a subconscious or early influence, because they really did not respect authority and they wanted to speak up and be different. I do not know. ME (00:11:01): I remember them very well. I remember Kerouac... SM (00:11:02): Right. ME (00:11:02): Ginsburg and so on. Yeah. SM (00:11:06): Some people even say the (19)60s began with the beats, but what are your thoughts on that (19)50s era that could have had a negative influence on the early elementary school? ME (00:11:17): Well, I think that, I do not know. Again, I guess my approach is so different, it is hard for me to kind of put it in this chronological framework. I see it as a long-playing philosophical battle, cultural battle that way predates the (19)50s. Some of the things that are were said about the (19)60s had been said about the 1920s. The flaming youth, the people who were totally disenchanted because of World War I, that generation, the... SM (00:12:00): Pictures. ME (00:12:13): Yeah, sure. You had all the same, everything that would have been said about the (19)60s had been said about the (19)20s. Then of course, you had the depression in the 1930s. You had a very, very serious problem there with a lot of young people. Communists appeal to younger people at that time because of disillusionment with American institutions. The sweep of it is very, to me, much broader and longer than starting with the boomers. I think they just inherited a lot of stuff. One could argue that it is within that group that some kind of resistance was mounted to these tendencies. Again, I go back to the Goldwater, Reagan, and the Goldwater thing was very much fueled by younger people on the campuses, and who would have been in 1964, in their teens or early twenties. They would be boomers. If you get it from 1945, these people, almost all of them, were born after 1945. They led to the Goldwater movement, which then became the Reagan movement. I know this from being on campus, I took a little bit of a generational approach, but mostly I stressed the opposition within these generations, on either side of the question, which divided the older people and the younger people. I was only 26-7 when I wrote that book. I was certainly at that generation myself. Again, to me, that is what it is about. SM (00:14:06): Yeah, I think a lot of people perceive the early boomer lives, everything really started with a free speech movement or freedom summer, when some of them went south when they could. They were 18 years old, 19 years old. ME (00:14:21): Right. SM (00:14:21): Although the majority of them were, I think most of them were, most of the white participants were Jewish that went south, and a lot of African Americans as well. That whole period, a question I want to ask is whether these movements that came about during this timeframe when the boomers were young, the Civil Rights movement... ME (00:14:47): Let me interrupt you a minute, Steve. You done, Mark? ME (00:14:51): Well, no, I found these. ME (00:14:54): Okay. Do what you can. ME (00:14:56): I can come back. I just have to drop Tina off at work. ME (00:15:00): Okay, why do not want you to do that? I will tell you what, do you have to go right now to drop her off this very second? ME (00:15:05): Well, no, I have five minutes. SM (00:15:09): I will turn this up. You can do whatever you want. My time is your time. It is fine with me, because I am here. ME (00:15:16): Thank you. SM (00:15:20): I think I was, you were responding to my question. What was the question? ME (00:15:24): I do not remember. SM (00:15:24): What was my question? ME (00:15:24): I do not remember. SM (00:15:29): Something, oh, the movements, the different movements. If you look at the bloomer generation, people will define it often as the movements they were involved in. ME (00:15:39): You are talking about free speech movement? SM (00:15:41): Yeah, the Civil Rights movement, the gay and lesbian movement, the women's movement. ME (00:15:45): Yeah. SM (00:15:46): Many of these were offshoots from the Civil Rights movement, the environmental movement, the Native American movement. All these movements came about in the late (19)60s and early (19)70s as offshoots from the Civil Rights movement. They often defined them within this particular generation with the exception of the Civil Rights movement, because it was already pretty strong. Your thoughts on trying to define those movements within this boomer generation? ME (00:16:12): Well, I guess that my big disagreement was all the folks you are talking about. It was very manifest at the time, and has been for the intervening 40 years, was that if you go to what was happening in Berkeley, Mario Savio, all that stuff, the new left, SDS, the Port Huron statement, on and on and on. The people involved in that positioned themselves that they were opposing the establishment, that they were hostile to the reigning orthodoxy of the day. They understood that orthodoxy to be liberal, as did I. They were very critical of liberals, and then I worked with the Liberal Establishment back in 1965. Some of the critiques that were made of the liberals were very stringent from the left, was that conformity and big governments, and centralized power, and executive authority out of control, and many-many things that conservatives had said in the past, many of the left were saying in opposition at Lyndon Johnson or letter to Nixon and so forth. For all I had with those folks was that philosophically speaking, they were not any different from the people they were criticizing. That is, they were, in terms of value theory, they were relativists or agnostic to put a mileage, they were not religiously devout people, except in a few cases, like the [inaudible] or something. Most of them are secular, agnostic people. That was kind of the, or liberal orthodox was also secular. In terms of political and economic action, they started out sounding different, but they were collectives. More power to the government, and more coercion, more welfare, more everything of government, obviously, going on now. This was all the same as the thing they were allegedly opposing, [inaudible] senator, who was secular agnostic collectivist, the very parts Bill Buckley made in God and Man in Yale 14, 15 years before. To me, there was no real likelihood that people of that outlook could do anything substantive to change the problems that we had. They could make them worse. They could commit violence. They could have riots. They could capture school buildings or blow buildings up. They could do things like that. In what way did that change anything for the better? I did not think it did. That was my belief then. I wrote that, I had a book, The Future of Conservatism, in 1968, in which I basically said in that book when I had part of it, what I just said to you. I think the history is one of that. SM (00:19:56): I think I know what you are replying, but I want to hear it from the tape. When the boomers said they were the most, I know I was one of them, and I went to college. Some of my peers felt they were the most unique generation in the history of America. At that particular time, they felt comradeship, in many respects, around different causes, that they were going to be the change agents for the betterment of society. That they were going to racism, sexism, homophobia, end war, bring peace to the world, bring sanity, so to speak. Then as they age, take on leadership roles and their ideals would continue. Your thoughts on the way boomers thought, and again, I am not talking to the entire generation. ME (00:20:48): Yeah. SM (00:20:49): Most people say that 15 percent were involved in activism, but that is a lot of people, 70 some million. Just your thoughts on the feelings that the boomers had then. I think some boomers still think that now, even though they are in positions of responsibility. Just your thoughts on that kind of? ME (00:21:10): My comment would be repeating what I already said. I think your point is well taken, that there is a lot of people, and there certainly were a lot of people, there are a lot of people, who had such attitudes, but they were not the entire generation. That has to be kept in mind. I think that the only thing I remember from tour, I used to spend a lot of time on campuses. I must have been on a couple hundred campuses in the 1960s, debating these people, and trying to work the other side of the street. The one thing I remember very well is I go to a campus, anywhere, University of Illinois, or I think I was in Binghamton, and some point and all that... SM (00:21:54): Right. ME (00:21:54): A lot of schools up in New York. I would ask the same question. I would not only speak, but I would interview, "Talk to me. I would only find out what is going on." I used to write, I would write newspaper article about stuff. SM (00:22:13): Right-right. ME (00:22:17): One of the questions I would always ask, "What is it like? What is going on here in this campus?" He said, "Well, mostly the students are just really apathetic," over and over and over again, and they were. What you really had, and I wrote about this a little bit on campus, was you had a whole bunch of people sort of in the middle, who were just typical college students, trying to get on with their lives, and go to football games, and have dates with good looking girls or vice versa if they were girls, and have fun, and get through college, and get on with their lives. That was it. There were minorities on the sort of either end of this thing who were intensely committed to certain causes, the left being the ones that were most publicized. Part of that was the fact, what I was talking about before, they were publicized because they fitted the mental framework of the people in the media. The media folks themselves, products of the campuses, saw and the new left in the various manifestations of that group. They recognized, this is what young people should be doing. They should be out demonstrating for the environment, or they should be opposing the Vietnam War or whatever. That is what the media themselves thought. Therefore, they catered to these young people who were preaching that doctrine and holding BNs. I remember I spoke at those things, and they were very well publicized. The teach-ins and all that stuff on Vietnam, I remember it all very well. The media recognized that and they amplified it. They communicated. On the other side of it got almost no attention for the conservative kids, doing what they were doing. They were promoting Goldwater and they were later promoting Reagan. That was the neglected part of it, this other side, the other (19)60s. That, of course, the other (19)60s turned out to be, politically speaking, the winning side. Reagan wanted to be president. George McGovern did not. That is the way they would play out. There is an imbalance there and perception, because it has been, I well remember, it was just so typical of this thing, that the day after, I think I am right, the day after the Gingrich republicans had won... SM (00:25:20): (19)94. ME (00:25:23): In (19)94, the control of the Congress, both house and Senate, which had not happened in ever before in 40, 50 years, the Washington Post, I could go back and get this, you could pull it up to the website, like the day after the (19)94 election, had a humongous article and all in the style section about alumni of the SDS, where are they now? Hello? The republicans are sweeping into control of the Congress, and The Washington Post is glorifying former members of the SDS. Well, that is kind of illustrative, what I am drawing it all. The focus is over here, but things are going over here that are ignored until there is two. All of a sudden, where did Goldwater come from? Where did Reagan come from? Where did Gingrich come from? What is going on here? They were utterly mystified by the development, because it did not fit any of their preconceptions. SM (00:26:29): Has the media changed at all since... People remember back in Watergate, that Woodward and Bernstein created that investigative journalist mentality. That was very popular for a while, but now it is not. ME (00:26:46): Well... SM (00:26:46): It seems like it is disappeared. ME (00:26:49): Well, I would have a hard, again, lots of things that happened. That is where I spent my life, of course, in media. I am a media person and in journalism, so this was very riveting. The media changed in so many different ways. It is hard to generalize. You now have all this blogging, and you have got all the internet stuff, and you have got talk radio, and you have got cable TV, a zillion different outlets all competing for the attention of the public, which erodes the power of the few institutions that used to be the major determinants of public debate. They were very, how well I remember on the TV, the three networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS, the big magazines, many of which do not exist anymore, Look, Life, Collier, Saturday Evening Post, these were hugely important, had six, 7 million subscribers apiece, Time, Newsweek, and major newspapers, New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, and others. There is kind of a handful of really big media institutions that basically, they are in control, but they certainly influenced discourse in a very powerful way. That is all changed. Now, there all these different things. You have got stuff, I am sure you have noticed, and it gets a fair amount of attention. Newspapers are virtually going out of business. SM (00:28:44): Yeah, several going bankrupt. ME (00:28:45): Losing money, losing subscribers, including the Washington Post and New York Times. SM (00:28:46): The Inquirer had problems. ME (00:28:46): The Inquirer, you could list them all, Chicago Tribune. SM (00:28:46): The San Francisco Chronicles and all of them. ME (00:28:58): On and on, it is a long list. Same thing with the networks. They are struggling because cable TV has eroded. They are... ME (00:29:03): And because cable TV has eroded their audiences, although they are still by far the largest entities in television, but not the way they used to be. And you have many, many alternatives now that did not exist back in the (19)60s. And the internet and the talk radio and blah-blah-blah, it is such a totally different ballgame. So, it is really hard to get your arms around it as to what it all means, I am not sure what it means. I do believe that the media, by and large, I am not talking about the blockage because of who knows, but by and large there is still a strong tilt to the left. And the reason for this is basically that the personnel of these institutions come out of the colleges. That is where they come from. And so that they are, and particularly the ones that are interested in journalism, and I have taught journalism for a long time, there is a definite tendency to the liberal side and the surveys of media personnel over the years. It is an 80 to 90 percent voting liberal Democrats and very large majorities. I mean, I have not seen anything like that recently, I must admit and work for it. But that internal reflects the campuses where you have majority, the seven to eight to one in favor of the liberal position among faculty. And they are the ones training these young people then going to the media. So, I think that that problem is still out there in a very large way, but I do not really have a lot of hard data to back it up. That is just what my impression is. SM (00:30:56): Check to make sure the... because it is 45 minutes each side and we are doing fine, okay. I have a question that we asked actually, I am not going to mention the politician. I am not sure if I mentioned on the phone when I talked to you, but took a group of students to Washington DC about eight years ago. Came to DC to see a former senator. And the question that I have been asking all of my interviewees is a general question. And it is about the concept of healing within the nation because of all the divisions that took place in the (19)60s, many people have thought that we came close to a second civil war with all the divisions between Black and white. I like your thought on that, but the divisions between Black and white, those who for and against the war, the divisions are pretty strong. And whether we, as a nation have healed from all those divisions at that time in the (19)60s and the (19)70s, some people might say that the divisions continue right into the halls of Congress because they do not get along. But I do not think they got along even when FDR was president. So, your thoughts on this particular issue of healing within the boomer generation, and I say this because I go to Gettysburg a lot and I have studied a lot about the north and south coming together as they got older and some healed, some never did. Some went their graves never healing. And the senator was Senator Musky. We asked him his thoughts on whether we had healed as a nation since 1968, because that was a real rough year and he did not respond right away. And the 14 students would look at each other. And finally he had some tears in his eyes and he mentioned he just got out of the hospital and he had been watching the Ken Burn series on the Civil War. And that he was so touched by the loss of all the men and the loss of maybe an entire generation of children that we really have not healed since the Civil War, let alone the (19)60s. Your thoughts on both two thoughts on what Musky had to say and then secondly, just a general question on healing since the (19)60s and early (19)70s. ME (00:33:09): Well again, I have a different way of looking at it. It is a matter of the lenses that you are wearing. I did not feel even in the (19)60s that the country in general was that divided. But I did think, and I still think is that there were certain people within the country who were intentionally hostile to the traditional values of the country. I think that is still true. I think that goes on. There are people that are just the [inaudible] blame America, that if there is some controversy overseas, we are the villains, we are at fault. There is a lot of that back then. Those demonstrators on the campuses in the (19)60s, and I saw them face to face, were not against war. They were against the United States and they glory in the victory of the Viet Cong. They were pro Viet Cong. So, they were not just against the war, they were against the United States and they were against the effort by the United States to oppose communism. I happen to be pretty much a critic of the Vietnam policies that were followed by Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon. I was never a big fan of any of those policies. But these people, as I said, I went toe to toe with them campus after campus, after campus. I debated and I was at these teachings. I spoke at these teachings. There was an intense hatred of America there. It was not philosophical oppositions of war, violence of the country. But those people did not represent very much. Those people with those attitudes. Praising the Viet Cong, the people that rejoiced in the fall of Saigon, and they did rejoice in them, did not represent the large segment of American society. Never did. And I think that is gone on. I think that is continuing to this day. There are people that sort of ritualistically take a stance like that on any foreign policy question. We saw it very much in the opposition of President Bush. And again, I was no big fan of his. I think he made a lot of mistakes, but just the hatred of him and Cheney and went way beyond just policy disagreement. And it really was sort of an extension of what I remember seeing back in the (19)60s, this Vietnam stuff. I do not think that those attitudes, which however can be very powerful, represented any large percent of the American people. I mean, most Americans even then and now hold to fairly traditional conventional ideas and do not want to see any big revolutions and any kind of violence or any kind of Vietnam type demonstrations, even though they might be upset about the course of policy. And I have certainly have been, but I am not out the streets bringing turn cars over and buildings. And so again, it is my different way of looking. SM (00:37:02): How important were those college students ending that war in Vietnam? ME (00:37:06): Well they were pretty important. There was a synergism of the college students, the college faculties even more so and the media. And of course, the thing that was different then and which was driving a lot of that had nothing at all to do or very little to do with the merits of the Vietnam War, although it had many things longer than I thought. It was the draft. They did not want to be drafted. Once the draft was not there, you do not see that anymore. There is no draft. So the college students are not in danger of being drafted and sent to fight in all these wars. That is a huge difference. And so that was what was driving a lot of it. SM (00:38:01): Would you say that a lot of times people, I am using a general statement here, but that when you think of the young people of that era, you think of activism. The term activism. I am not talking about volunteerism now. I am talking about activism now. Now we have on college campuses now, and we have had since the (19)90s and the (19)80s, (19)90s, massive amount of volunteers. And if you read the literature on higher education, they say when you have greater numbers of volunteerism or a large percentage of volunteerism, that is the sign of a conservative era. I do not know why people say that, but- ME (00:38:35): I do not either. SM (00:38:39): But that volunteerism is when a person commits himself or herself to so many hours a week toward a cause. But when you think of activism, you think of a 24/7. It is part of being, the human being, it is the whole person's life fighting for issues and causes. And so sometimes people will separate that group of people, the Boomers from the Generation Xers and now the Millennials as a totally different group because they were more 24/7 as opposed to today's young people that are two hours a week or mandatory in volunteer work and not really activists. ME (00:39:19): Well usually if someone is [inaudible] I did not really know. This volunteerism thing is big now, right? SM (00:39:25): It has been big for over 20 years. ME (00:39:27): Oh, it shows how much I know, because I was not aware of that. I knew it was out and how big it was. And that is good. I do not think there is anything particularly conservative about it, but [inaudible] volunteer with a Peace Corps or Action or whatever and that might or might not be conservative [inaudible] But if [inaudible] by desire to help other people, that is a good thing. And philosophically, and I would describe it, but the other thing you are describing, the activism that is the groups I was talking about earlier. Those are the people who are committed, philosophically committed. They are not just partially involved. They are really involved. And so, they are the ones that fight on either end of the spectrum for dominance, in terms of the debate and rhetoric and substance of policy. And I think that is always been the case. Now, I think what has happened recently is a lot of the people that things went in two different directions. All the people from that era back then and now, of course would be in their (19)50s and (19)60s. SM (00:40:53): Yeah. Make sure we are doing okay here. Let is see here, how are we doing? ME (00:41:03): Must be getting done [inaudible]. SM (00:41:03): Should click friend. ME (00:41:10): That the people, alumni of that, all those fights that I was witnessing and in part as a participant in the (19)60s, which is the most intense part of this process that you are talking about, went in two very different ways. And by and large, the more conservative kids went off and one thing that happened is the conservative kids tend to be more oriented toward existing institutions. So, they are looking to make careers of themselves in business or law or medicine or whatever it might be engineering. And so they have very strong vocational orientation. So, they are not going to be out there all the time as activists in the sense that you just defined it. The more leftward kids are not committed to existing institutions. They tend to be much more verbalizers. They tend to be writers, they tend to be speakers, they tend to be the kind of folks that go into media and/or into back into academe. And so you have a buildup on the two sides of this of a very, very strong imbalance to the left on the campuses. And it replenishes itself as more of the people who graduated of that outlook, they tend to come back to the campuses and so what you have now is the tenured people from 40 years ago- SM (00:42:55): I am going to switch the tape. ME (00:42:56): Go ahead. SM (00:42:56): That should have... ME (00:43:08): There is people now who were activists back in the (19)60s who are now professors, much more so than conservatives, have many conservative professors are out there? And the conservatives either went into business or some went into politics. And so you have a lot of people of that generation are Reagan staffers or whatever, work for Republican administrations. And there is a real divide between the philosophical, intellectual, verbalizing people and the more practical everyday people based on these philosophical differences. And I think that is what you have got now in campuses and then that feeds into the media and then it is a self-perpetuating cycle. SM (00:44:04): How did that develop? How did conservative students really develop knowing that the issue of trust is something that seems to be lacking, in my opinion, amongst many voters? Because of what they saw failure in their leaders, lying from their leaders. I say this because we now know about Lyndon Johnson, the Gulf of Tonkin and all the fake numbers that came back that McNamara would announce that young people saw on the Black and white television every night. Of course, Watergate and Richard Nixon and then in the revelations even more recently of President Kennedy and his possible link with the Diem overthrow. And then, of course, Eisenhower had lied on national television about the U2 incident. And then you have got the whole issue of, even in later years, Brown Reagan was hard to tarnish. But the Iran-Contra comes out of there. And they even questioned Gerald Ford that there was a behind the scenes move to pardon President Nixon and it was all- ME (00:45:11): Well he did pardon Nixon. SM (00:45:13): Yeah, he did but the question is you cannot trust him, because now he is pardoning him. There was no trust in any of the leaders. What does this due to a generation of young people that cannot trust? ME (00:45:25): It makes you cynical and but it did not affect just... it affected a lot of conservatives kids too. They did not trust their leaders. You talk about the Kennedy overthrow Diem, I knew about that at the time. There was no secret. And that was just a terrible thing. And of course, it led to this collapse of all kinds of chances of resistance in Vietnam, because there was no leadership, the whole thing just went down the drain. But I knew about that. I wrote about it. I wrote a whole chapter done in a book I wrote in the (19)60s about what happened in Vietnam and how that was done. Well it is pretty hard to have much confidence in the leadership that does something like that. Each of the overthrow and murder of our alleged ally. And I have since found, I have a chapter on my book that they tried to do the same thing to [inaudible] to overthrow him, but that was thwarted but I have the documents that show it. So there was a lot of that kind of stuff going on. That was under Truman, the actions and State Department. They are planning to overthrow [inaudible] in 1950. So, it makes you very cynical and very, very doubtful about the honesty of the people running this country when things like that are going on, and I certainly, Lyndon Johnson, I am a native of Texas and I knew about Lyndon Johnson a long before it became common knowledge. Anybody in Texas knew how he got elected in the first place, 1948 when they stole votes down in Duval and Jim Wells counties and people called it Land Slides Lyndon he was called. And the Caro books. You have read them, Robert Caro biography of Johnson. SM (00:47:30): I read the first one. I did not read the second one. ME (00:47:33): Well it is all pretty negative on Lyndon and it was all basically true. And so that pretty hard to have much confidence in that that and again, Nixon [inaudible] here where he and Kissinger were bludgeoning two in Vietnam to knuckle under has come out in recent tapes. Well how do you have any confidence in people that do stuff like that? So yeah, most of the people I knew and was involved with way back when were pretty much disillusioned with a lot of these. We did not know everything we know now. We knew a lot. We knew about Diem, we knew about that and we were very disillusioned by it. No question. SM (00:48:28): The Boomers who, if they were cognizant again of McCarthy and what was going on in the (19)50s, the red baiting and that whole business. And of course, certain movies have come out in recent years, documentaries on the Hollywood 10 and certainly McCarthy. And then you get the enemies list of Richard Nixon in the (19)60s. And then you have got most recently in George Bush, the Patriot Act, that they all kind of come together, a lack of almost a fear of speaking up. Fear of expressing one's views. And if you do, you are either going to go before a hearing in front of McCarthy for being a communist. Your career is going to be destroyed by Richard Nixon's people for standing up against the Vietnam War. And then of course, Patriot Act, even George Bush. What does this say about America? And this is all during the time that the Boomers have been growing into old age. ME (00:49:29): Well I guess I would have to take everything you just said and go step by step through it, because I do not agree with it. And first of all, the McCarthy thing, I wrote a 600 page book going into these questions. And my brother did not call anybody before for disagreeing with him. I do not know of anybody, maybe a couple of people, but most of the people that he was looking at, and the charges he brought were based on information that came from the FBI about the infiltration of our government by communists and Soviet agents. And this stuff had been covered up. It was denied. And we are getting a lot of this information now from recent disclosures from FBI files. I have hundred thousand page of FBI files downstairs. And that is what my book is mostly based on and these files show that these people McCarthy was pursuing were basically what he said they were. They were not just dissenters from [inaudible] So you got that whole thing. That is a whole big deal itself. Then you get into the Hollywood thing. Those were communists. Now, you may want to argue that so what? But they were not just... people like Dalton Trumbo. SM (00:50:52): Absolutely Trumbo. ME (00:50:54): Albert Maltz. They were Stalinist agents. They were communists. They are clearly so, they had party cards. So again, these are not just dissenters, these are agents of a hostile foreign power and Patriot Act? What the Patriot Act tried to do, and I am not sure what the details of it anymore, [inaudible] We had basically in the (19)70s destroyed all of our intelligence agencies. And prevented the FBI from surveilling terrorists, hostile people in our country who were pouring in here, pretty much without any things to hinder them. They were running all around. SM (00:51:54): Is that because of Richard Nixon and they got tired of the enemies list and they give them a, "We are not going to do that anymore." That kind of mentality? ME (00:52:15): [inaudible] I was on that enemies list, by the way. I personally know it, because I was a conservative dissenter against Nixon. SM (00:52:15): It must be a badge of honor then. ME (00:52:15): Well I took care of us. I was never too worried about being on Richard Nixon's enemies list. But what happened was there was a crusade in the Congress led by Teddy Kennedy, Birch Bayh by who was then senator, the father of the Senators in there now. I knew Birch Bayh, I was in Indiana then. And the Civil Liberties Union to dismantle all our intelligence agents. And their position was that you could not conduct surveillance of somebody unless they were in the act of committing a crime. It was just mere advocacy or mere membership at the time in each party or mere membership in any other group was not itself sufficient to justify being under surveillance by the FBI, so called Levy Guidelines imposed under Gerald Ford. And these guidelines basically put the FBI, and then there was FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, these enactments, that was (19)78, basically put the FBI out of the antiterrorism business. So when people were coming in here to do what happened on September 11th, nobody was minding the store. Every entity that could have done anything about them had been shut down. So, what I have known, all those people had died September 11th, died because of them, so the Patriot Act is an effort to correct that. SM (00:54:04): You are a scholar. What were the books that had the greatest influence on the Boomer generation when they were college students when they were teenagers, college students, and young adults? Because there were a lot of non-non-fiction books written at that period that were directly linked to that generation. Plus, there were a lot of novels written by... and then you had the beat writers from the (19)50s. Are there specific ones that you remember? ME (00:54:36): Well again, you got a divide because there was the left and the right. And I was much more familiar with the right. I know the books that were read by young conservatives, they were pretty much the same for a number of years. I think it has changed now. But one of the books that was most influential, although it was mostly a political book, was the Goldwater book, Conscience of a Conservative. Very widely read and it was readable because it was short. It was not a huge tome and it helped promote Goldwater, but also promoted his ideas. So that was very important. But then there were other books that I remember reading myself when I was in college that were read by these other young folks, the Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk. Ideas have Consequences by Richard Weaver, The Witness by Whittaker Chambers was white is red and so forth. That was on the conservative side, on the other side. I do not know. I know that there were certain writers who were popular for a time being, but I do not know how much influence, I remember there was guy named Paul Goodman, who was very widely [inaudible] and I read a lot of his stuff and some, what he said to say made sense. SM (00:56:05): He was kind of linked to some of the beats too. ME (00:56:07): He was. SM (00:56:07): Some of his writing. ME (00:56:09): There was an overlap. I remember reading Kerouac and I was about that age. Kerouac, if he was still, I guess deceased. SM (00:56:19): Yeah. ME (00:56:19): If he was alive, he would be about my age. I am 75 years old. But back then I remember reading Kerouac, On the Road and those books. And I kind of identified with some of it. There was this libertarian side to it, the hostility to oppressive authority. There was a lot of that on the right, the Libertarians and people that they are still out there. I do not know if you are familiar of the Cato Institute. SM (00:56:52): Oh yes. ME (00:56:52): Well that is where they are coming from. They are very, very libertarian. They are very against big government. They do not like any kind of big government. They would be more, also, they would be sort [inaudible] what you feel about the Patriot Act. I am not, I am Conservative but I am also a libertarian. And I believe in the limited government of free markets and individual liberty. And I consider that an important component of my own philosophy. So, the beats had some appeal for people like me as well as the more left-wing types. SM (00:57:33): A couple of books that were very popular in the late (19)60s was the Making of a Counterculture by Theodore Roszak, which was- ME (00:57:43): I never read that. SM (00:57:44): And then a Greening of America by Charles Reich. ME (00:57:47): I did read that. SM (00:57:49): And of course, Ken Kesey, who you have already mentioned and Wolf and a lot of his novels. ME (00:57:56): Tom Wolfe? SM (00:57:58): Yeah, Tom Wolfe. ME (00:57:59): Who was the right winner though? SM (00:58:01): Yeah. Mailer. Mailer was red. ME (00:58:03): Norman Mailer. SM (00:58:03): Um, Mailer, Mailer was [inaudible]. ME (00:58:03): Oh, Mailer. Of course, he had been out there a long time. He was actually the first. SM (00:58:04): Right. ME (00:58:11): All true, but all those books were out there, and I am sure had their impact. Wolfe is the one that is different because he is still around. SM (00:58:18): Yeah. Kurt Vonnegut is another one. ME (00:58:22): Vonnegut, mm-hmm, from Indianapolis, and Vonnegut's Hardware, I remember that. I was in Indianapolis for many, many years. I guess you remember that? SM (00:58:29): Mm-hmm. ME (00:58:35): And Wolfe, I could detect, even back when, like the Kesey book and the other stuff he wrote, very interesting, Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, and Radical Chic. But you could see that he was an equal opportunity critic to me. He was puncturing. Radical Chic was about Leonard Bernstein. I always remember reading that. It was about this cocktail party being thrown on Park Avenue for the Black Panthers, you know. And he ridiculed them. So you see there was kind of a conservative side to Wolfe that became more and more apparent later, Bonfire of the Vanities, and so forth. And he was very influential. And, of course, The Right Stuff, you read things by Tom Wolfe, you do not see too many people whom he respects, but he respected those guys. SM (00:59:33): Yeah, when you think of the (19)50s and (19)60s, you think of Hugh Hefner, too, and Playboy, because- ME (00:59:34): You certainly do. SM (00:59:38): Oh, my God. That is an important... He evolved during the boomer lives. ME (00:59:43): Well, of course Playboy was popular when I was in college so it predates the [inaudible]. But, yeah, of course the playboy ethic and all of that was just a kind of this erosion of traditional standards where anything goes, and if it feels good, do it, and all of that. And that is contributed to some of our problems, no question. SM (01:00:12): I have a question here again. I have got some names here that I would just like you to respond to, some terms and some personalities, if you do not mind? When you think of the Vietnam Memorial, what does that mean to you? ME (01:00:28): It means a lot of people died in a bloody treadmill war, very sad, very tragic, because it was a war... And I am no military type, I do not know much about it first-hand, but I do remember all of that. It was a war, basically, that was fought without any intention of winning it. And there was [inaudible] Goldwater saying, "Why not victory?" Just saying it was the same thing that happened in Korea under General MacArthur, and so you have a lot of people who died, and it is a very tragic thing. That is what I think of it. SM (01:00:59): Why did the war end, to you? Why did we leave? ME (01:01:18): Because we did not have the will to win, and the Congress was undermining what little that we were doing. I remember all of it very well. That was when you had that whole bunch who were elected in (19)74 who were refusing... And I am no Kissinger fan, believe me, but he was trying to play both ends against the middle, and he needed more aid from the Congress, and they would not give it to him. So, we just bailed out once they [inaudible]. SM (01:01:49): When you think of the (19)60s, again, when these boomers where young, we were always talking about white people, white Americans, but certainly African-Americans was a very crucial part of the (19)60s. ME (01:02:00): It certainly was. SM (01:02:00): In fact, Kent State is very meaningful in many ways, because there were no African-Americans to be seen that day. One was near the... They were kind of escorted away. And what was happening on college campuses is that, in (19)69 and (19)70, there was a split where African-Americans just basically, "We are going to fight for civil rights here in America, and you can go ahead and be against the Vietnam War," even though people were saying the Vietnam War had more people of color serving than there were white Americans. And of course that became famous in speech against the Vietnam War. Just your thoughts, when we are talking about boomers and we are conservative students and liberal students to the left, where do the African-Americans fall into the whole scheme? ME (01:02:49): Well, I think you just stated it very well. I remember seeing, not that I knew a lot about it... I did not and do not. But it was very clear that the impulse of the anti-Vietnam stuff was white kids. You did not see too many Black faces, and I did not see too many Blacks there. They had their own struggle, and that was the civil rights struggle. And so, there is a real division there. I think you summed it up really well. And so there were two different things going on there. And I think that it confuses things to kind of lump it all together, but [inaudible] very different things. SM (01:03:36): Yeah, Tommie Smith and John Carlis with the fists in (19)68 at the Olympics. ME (01:03:41): I remember it well. I remember it well. SM (01:03:43): A couple of other things here? What do you think of when you think of Kent State and Jackson State? ME (01:03:56): I think they were, again, great tragedies. You got to remember that the... Jackson State, I do not remember too well, but Kent State, Neil Young, [inaudible] and Ohio. You had scared kids on both sides of that. The Ohio National Guard kids were not any different than the kids who were demonstrating. They were trying to control a scene that they could not control, and so that was the tragedy of it. And those demonstrations, it is a pretty well-known fact, were calculated to produce things like that. The hard left wanted these confrontations. They wanted police brutality. They wanted violence. They wanted open conflict. They felt that would spark... You go back to the days of rage of all those people, the [inaudible] and on, and on, and on, that is what they were trying to do. They were trying to provoke [inaudible] it is all there. It goes all the way back to the Bolshevik Revolution. That is the way you ratchet up your revolution. You get people out in the street. You have conflict with the police or military, somebody gets hurt or killed, that becomes the pretext for more, and it escalates, and that was its deliberate strategy. Those kids that died at Kent State, they were tragic victims of this process. Now who, in fact, is responsible for it individually? I do not know. That is what I think about it. SM (01:05:38): I know some of the students at Kent State that were involved in that. ME (01:05:38): Very sad, very sad. SM (01:05:53): When you think of Watergate, what does that mean to you? ME (01:05:55): It means- SM (01:05:55): What did that mean to America? ME (01:06:00): I got to tell you, Steve, it was the biggest exercise in hypocrisy I ever saw. Nothing that Nixon was accused of doing had not already been done by Kennedy and Johnson, and you mentioned some of the things earlier. They did everything Nixon was accused of doing, and more. The difference was, they got away with it. SM (01:06:25): And he did not admit. He made it much deeper by not admitting it. ME (01:06:28): Well, Kennedy and Johnson did not admit it, but they were not challenged. SM (01:06:32): Right. ME (01:06:33): There is a book by Victor Laskey called [inaudible]- SM (01:06:36): I think I have that book. What is the name of it? ME (01:06:42): It Did not Start With Watergate, and it delves into all that stuff. I mean, they had, again, I wrote about it in Time, plans to use the Internal Revenue Service to silence their critics, use the Fairness Doctrine to keep people from broadcasting hostile broadcasts, this was Kennedy and Johnson, using the power of the FBI to investigate people they did not like. They did break-ins. They did wiretapping. They [inaudible] rifled his office. They drove him out of the government because he was a dissenter. The list is long. And so, there was not a single thing that Nixon was accused of doing that had not already been done by his predecessors. The difference was that the media, Washington Post in particular, hated Nixon, and a lot of left hated him because of the Hiss case. And, of course, he was not any particular favorite of mine. Like I said, I was on the enemies list. I was chairman, at that time, of the American Conservative Union, and we had supported opposition to Nixon in the 1972 primaries by John Ashbrook. So, I wound up on one of these enemies lists as the chairman of this thing. [inaudible] interviewed me about it, and I was not in the least concerned that I was on list. So I was no big Nixon fan, but the whole Watergate was just a complete exercise in hypocrisy. SM (01:08:25): Obviously, that year, 1968, so many things happened then. Your thoughts on that year, not only with Tommie Smith and what was going on at the Olympics, but the (19)68 Democratic Convention, which led to the Chicago Eight trials, the Chicago police going up against protesters. ME (01:08:39): Mayor Daly. SM (01:08:40): Yeah, even some politicians were arrested, and even, I think, Dan Rather was arrested, or something like that. ME (01:08:46): [inaudible]. SM (01:08:48): And then there were a lot of other things. Of course, Lyndon Johnson withdrew from the race that year, just so much. ME (01:08:55): That is true. Well, yeah. I wrote about it at the time, and I would have to go back and look, but what I remember writing when I used to be was that what was happening in that Chicago convention, it was a culmination of a long series of things, was the crack up of the Democratic coalition. On one side, you have got Mayor Daly and the big city machine politicians who were supporting Humphrey, who was, of course, the surrogate for Lyndon. On the other side, you had the Eugene McCarthy people, you had the [inaudible] Kennedy camp, Bobby Kennedy campaign. And these elements were at each other's throats within the Democratic Party. And that is what that convention showed. And everything that went on there was internal fighting among Democrats is what it was. And that led, of course, to the collapse of the Democratic Party in that year's election and the election of Richard Nixon, with George Wallace getting 11 million votes, or whatever he got, which was quite a [inaudible] because that separated the South, the Old Roosevelt Coalition, it was all these things. It was the big city bosses. It was the left-wing intellectuals. It was the academics. It was the Blacks. It was Southern Democrats. It was everything. There was a coalition of all these people. That all fell apart in (19)68 and that was the main thing, I think, that showed. SM (01:10:43): And Senator McCarthy was the first person I interviewed for this process back when I started this and my parents were ill, and now I am back finishing it up. But I asked the question I wanted him to answer. I asked him, "Why did you drop out?" I just want an answer, because I have read his books and I know he still- ME (01:11:06): What did he say? SM (01:11:08): Oh, he still got very upset when I asked him about Bobby Kennedy. He said, "Read about it in my book." [inaudible]. ME (01:11:12): He did not like Bobby Kennedy. SM (01:11:18): He did not answer me. He did a roundabout. ME (01:11:18): [inaudible]. SM (01:11:20): I think that is the ultimate question. I saw him three times in my life, and that is the one question I think a lot of people want answered, "Why did you drop out?" ME (01:11:30): I do not think he could have won. I think he knew that. But you would know better. SM (01:11:37): It petered out. He was still strong at the convention. He had a lot of people there. He did not want people to be involved in the violent stuff because they were clean-cut. ME (01:11:47): No, clean for Gene. SM (01:11:50): Yeah. ME (01:11:50): I knew Senator McCarthy. [inaudible]. I did not know the other one. I knew this one. SM (01:11:55): Right. ME (01:11:55): And I got to know him a little bit later, let me say. Also, he was very different from his image. He was not a radical person at all, but he was deeply offended by the war, the way it was being conducted. He did not like Lyndon Johnson. He certainly did not like Bobby Kennedy. And I think what you ran into, and you would know better than I if you interviewed him several times, was that Bobby Kennedy, in his view, opportunistically jumped on a bandwagon that Gene McCarthy had created. SM (01:12:31): Yes. And I believe he thought that there was an agreement that he would not do it. And within a matter of less than three weeks’ time, he did it. ME (01:12:39): I think that is what happened. SM (01:12:43): And then he said, "Read about it in my book." I got that on tape, "Read about it in my book." ME (01:12:46): I think you know the answer to your own question. SM (01:12:49): I will go through these real fast. Just your comments on the hippies and yippies? They were two different unique groups? ME (01:12:58): Hippies and yippies? Hippies were part of this whole thing I was talking about earlier. They are flower children, going to San Francisco with a flower in your hair, and all that. And, I do not know, it was kind of a circus. I do not know what it signified of any great importance but it was there. You had a whole bunch of people drifting around smoking dope and thinking that that is the answer to the world's problems, then you have got problems. And we did. And so the yippies were a tougher breed. I saw some of them down in Miami Beach at the (19)72 Democrat convention. They were a little tougher guys, but I am not sure what they signified except they were hard... they were more the activist types. They were not just floating around saying, "Peace and love." They were activists who were trying to do left-wing things. SM (01:14:06): I thought it was interesting that Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were the yippies, and I saw Jerry when he came to Ohio State. ME (01:14:13): I saw Jerry. SM (01:14:13): He was a really good speaker, and they were both very good speakers. One thing that is tragic, and I will put this as a note, probably, someplace in the book, is that Abbie Hoffman committed suicide. ME (01:14:23): Did he? SM (01:14:24): Yeah. He had $2,500 left. He was living in an apartment in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. It is outside Philadelphia. He committed suicide, and in the note, he said, "No one was listening to me anymore." And you know what is really interesting is that the Abbie Hoffman that we saw in the yippies and the Abbie Hoffman that kind of hid all those years, he had changed his look on his face. He had been working to save the Hudson for many, many years. People did not even know who he was. He had to hide his name because he was in hiding. And he came out on the Phil Donahue show, I will never forget that, when I was living in California. He was a man that was totally committed to the cause of saving that river, and people were not listening to him because they kept going back to that earlier period. ME (01:15:14): Yeah, in life, as in the movies, you get typecast. And once you have a strong identity in one thing, it is real hard for people to related to something different. And what you just told me is news to me. But Hoffman and Rubin, I did not know Hoffman. I met Rubin once, and he definitely was a piece of work. I do not remember Hoffman, but Rubin, obviously in some ways, was not serious. He was joking at just anything, craziness. But I guess it all had a serious intent. What exactly it was, I am not sure. SM (01:15:56): They actually debate each other later. ME (01:15:56): Did they? SM (01:15:57): Because he ended up becoming a business man, and Abbie was still Abbie. ME (01:16:05): Well, there you are. SM (01:16:05): A couple of other terms, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, which, actually, they took over the anti-war movement in early (19)70s, they were very powerful? Your thoughts on them? ME (01:16:09): I do not know much about them. Then [inaudible] came out of that. SM (01:16:19): Yeah, but a lot of people in that movement did not like him. ME (01:16:20): Yeah. I gathered that from some discussion [inaudible] but I really do not know a thing about them. SM (01:16:28): Here are some of the names, just quick replies. You have already kind of mentioned about Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, so I do not have to say anything more. Timothy Leary? ME (01:16:35): Yeah, he is out there with the flower people and the LSD and the drugs and tuning in and turning on and dropping out. What can one say? Anything where you get into drug things, it is a little hard to have any rational discourse about it because it is not a rational- SM (01:16:57): Your thoughts on the Black Panthers, which includes Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Cleaver, Angela Davis? That, George Jackson, Norman, the one that was killed in Chicago? Just your thoughts on the Black Panther Party? ME (01:17:17): Well, I think the Panthers were a very serious power. I had run into them on the campuses. They were pretty formidable folks. They would come to my lectures with bandoliers of ammunition, and so on. I remember that. Interesting that Cleaver, Eldridge Cleaver, I do not know about Kathleen, but Eldridge Cleaver seemed very, very disenchanted with the whole left thing. And what disenchanted him was he went to places like Cuba, and he went into Russia, and he hated it. And, towards the end, he became almost a conservative [inaudible]. SM (01:18:01): I remember that. And he also was living on the streets of LA, very sad. His wife is a lawyer, a very successful lawyer at Emory University Law School. ME (01:18:10): Is she down at Emory? SM (01:18:11): Yeah, she is very good. ME (01:18:15): No, that is the sad thing about some of those folks, and Hoffman, that they ended up like that. SM (01:18:21): Yeah, he was shot, you know? ME (01:18:24): Yeah, well, a lot of them died. SM (01:18:26): Yeah, Angela Davis is still going strong, a professor Santa Cruz. ME (01:18:31): Professor at Santa Cruz, right. SM (01:18:33): Yeah, Bobby Seale is writing cookbooks, or something like that. ME (01:18:36): Is he? SM (01:18:38): Yeah, just a quick comment on Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew? ME (01:18:40): I was never a huge fan of Nixon. Initially, I was not of Agnew. But Agnew, contrary to most people in politics, moved from left to right. Usually, particularly in Republicans, it goes the other way. Nixon is a good example. Agnew started out as a Rockefeller person. I do not know if you knew that? SM (01:19:10): No, I did not. ME (01:19:11): He was the Governor or Maryland here. SM (01:19:12): Right. ME (01:19:13): And he sort of identified with the Rockefeller wing of the Party. And that is one reason Nixon picked him was that he thought he had a way of getting Rockefeller without Rockefeller. And but then Agnew sort of blossomed as this right wing critic in the media, something like Pat Buchanan. And I met Agnew once, only once when he was Vice President. I wrote about him in National Review. And I think that he was sort of truly turned in a more right wing direction. And then, of course, he crashed and burned in (19)73 and that stuff caught up with him from Maryland. I do not know the details about that, but I remember that happening. And Nixon, I always felt, was trying to overcome the problems that he created for himself. In his case, he was always trying to reach out more and more to people on the other side. And I am not sure how philosophically-oriented he might have been. I give him top marks for what he did in his case, [inaudible]. For whatever reason, he was crucial in that case. I have been studying that case very carefully in a book that I am working on. And he was never forgiven for that by the left to this day, and I think he was trying to make up for that in some of things he did. Of course, he was very ambitious. He wanted to be President, became President. And it was always this balancing, and that is what I did not like. SM (01:20:53): Eugene McCarthy? Just quick thoughts on him, and George McGovern? ME (01:21:05): I knew both of them. I personally liked both of them. Gene McCarthy, I just happened to meet. We shared a dais together at some meeting back in the 70s, and I enjoyed chatting with him. I thought he was a very interesting and intelligent person, very different from almost anybody else in American politics that I have known, but liked him. And I supported him in (19)68 being a Republican. Senator McGovern, I debated in 1973. We had a great debate in Indianapolis at Butler University, 3,000 people. SM (01:21:53): Wow. ME (01:21:55): And I liked him. I do not know if he liked be. I thought he was a well-meaning man, a man of principle, principles I did not necessarily agree with, who maybe himself went through some changes later, and I do not know that. But I found he was an amiable fellow and I liked him. SM (01:22:24): He was a World War Two hero and he never talked about it. ME (01:22:25): He was. He was. SM (01:22:27): 28 missions over Europe. ME (01:22:28): Right. That is right. SM (01:22:30): I think he got a Purple Heart for that, and he never talked about it. ME (01:22:32): No, he did not. SM (01:22:33): He was a humble person. ME (01:22:34): He was. SM (01:22:34): John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, LBJ? The three of them, just quick comments? Just your thoughts? ME (01:22:47): The Kennedys are very, very different from their image. They were, essentially, conservative. And I would just point out to you, you were talking about Joe McCarthy, they were friends with Joe McCarthy. SM (01:22:48): Right. ME (01:22:48): And Bobby Kennedy worked for Joe, [inaudible]. And old man Kennedy, Joe Kennedy was McCarthy's [inaudible]. SM (01:22:48): And he dated Sargent Shriver's wife at one time. ME (01:23:22): Yes, Eunice. He did. And there are many interconnections there, McCarthy and the Kennedys. And Kennedy's people were very much of the ilk of conservative, Catholic Democrats. And Jack Kennedy did a mixture of things in his very short time as president, some you would not know. Some of the things he did were [inaudible] tax cuts, were used by the late Jack Kemp to justify the Reagan tax cuts, supply side stuff under Jack Kennedy back in the early (19)60s. And he had all the anti-Communist rhetoric and the Cold War-type posture. But then he had other people around him like Schlessinger and Sorensen. Certainly Sorensen had a very different outlook. So, again, a balancing act. They are all kind of doing things. Bobby, I think, was a much tougher customer, and maybe more calculating. And I think that is what Gene McCarthy did not like. But, again, if you look at the way Bobby Kennedy ran in (19)68, he was running on, basically, a conservative campaign. "We got to get away from big government," is what he was saying. "We need reforms, decentralization of tariffs," talking about stuff like that. But, of course, he was shot down in June of (19)68, so that was the end of that. But they were very different from the image of this Camelot stuff. SM (01:25:12): Your thoughts, quick at the end, McNamara, who just passed away? ME (01:25:20): I never cared for McNamara. I did not know much about him. I thought that the whole approach to the war, which he later repudiated- SM (01:25:32): In retrospect, yeah. ME (01:25:34): Yeah, it was wrong. All this body count stuff. And, of course, you look at it logically, and I am not military expert at all [inaudible], but if you have a war in which you are not trying to win, where you are just trying not to lose, and you do not really try to take strategic objectives... In other words, they are not trying to go out and take Hanoi. They were not trying to do that. SM (01:25:57): Is this the new one? You can continue, okay. ME (01:25:57): Well, again, remind me what we were talking about? SM (01:26:17): You were talking about McNamara. ME (01:26:19): Yeah. You look at the situation there... Getting back to World War Two there was a lot of, "So, today we captured whatever. We crossed the Rhine. We are now on the outskirts of Berlin." That is the way you measured what was happening in that war. Vietnam was not like that. No advancing through, taking Hanoi, or whatever. So how do you measure who is winning and who's losing? The answer is how many people you have killed, and that is where the body count. ME (01:27:03): ... answering how many people you have killed, and that is where the body count came from. I remember even McNamara was [inaudible]. He was seemingly very warm and very [inaudible] as secretary. SM (01:27:12): In my interview with Senator McCarthy, which in retrospect had just come out within six months after I interviewed him, he said it was a bunch of garbage. He was furious at him. ME (01:27:20): Oh, McNamara. SM (01:27:22): Yeah, at McNamara. Because he goes off in (19)67 to go to Aspen and ski, when he left in (19)67. He knew years before that this was a failure, and he should have told President Johnson and really been strong with him. ME (01:27:36): Well, J. McCarthy would have known a lot more about it than I do. SM (01:27:42): A couple other names here. George Wallace, thoughts on him? ME (01:27:45): Wallace was a major factor in what we were talking about earlier, the collapse of the Democratic Coalition, that and the Roosevelt Coalition. That had depended on holding the South. The solid South always meant solidly democratic. Thanks to Wallace, although it had been eroding before, by (19)68 that was no longer the case. And the whole nature of our politics changed because the South was uncoupled from the Democratic Party. Now, if you look at the majorities, most of the people are Republicans. By far, the largest number of their senators are from down there, in the South. Two Republican senators from Mississippi, two from Texas, two are from Georgia, two from South Carolina and so on. Well, prior to 1968 that was almost inconceivable. And now it is just wall-to-wall Republicans all over the place in the South. That was a huge change in American politics, and Wallace was a major factor in that. SM (01:29:07): Of course, he was gunned down as well. ME (01:29:10): (19)72 election. SM (01:29:12): During that- ME (01:29:12): Right out here in Laurel, Maryland. Right here. SM (01:29:15): Your thoughts on the Berrigan Brothers, Daniel and Philip? ME (01:29:18): Do not know much about them. They were just part of that whole mix. That is all I remember. SM (01:29:22): What about Dr. Benjamin Spock? ME (01:29:24): Same thing. I did not pay a lot of attention to those people. They were there, they were being promoted, but I did not spend a lot of time studying what they were doing. SM (01:29:34): How about Tom Hayden? ME (01:29:36): Same thing. Hayden, of course, he and I were kind of on opposite sides from the beginning. Port Huron Statement, SDS, I was [inaudible] statement. SM (01:29:48): Did you ever debate him at all? ME (01:29:49): Never met him. No. I debated a bunch of those people. Clark Kissinger and... but never Hayden. SM (01:29:56): What did you think of that Chicago Eight trial that had Bobby Seale and Rennie Davis, and Dave Dellinger, and that whole group? ME (01:30:05): Well, [inaudible] the same. Joe Hoffman. SM (01:30:06): Julius Hoffman. Right. ME (01:30:13): Yeah. That was just more of that strategy, provoke, provoke, violence, provoke oppression, and then that becomes a pretext for more protest. SM (01:30:19): What about the women leaders like Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug, and Betty Friedan. How important would you look at that era? ME (01:30:27): They were pretty darn important. SM (01:30:27): How important were they? ME (01:30:38): They were important. Not in a good way, from my standpoint. What they did was that they were part of this sort of process by which protest against the liberal establishment was always to be more left than the establishment. So that you had a situation where people of my persuasion were protesting against big government and that oppression and so forth and so on, and therefore we need more freedom. All of a sudden comes the feminists saying, with all this oppression we need more regulation. We need to do something to stop people from being oppressive to women, so they sort of... It was sort of a jiu-jitsu effect there of turning the protest thing in a more leftward direction. And that was what I thought mainly about that. I did not follow it very closely. It was kind of hard not to know about it, because it was everywhere. SM (01:31:36): Right. ME (01:31:36): But that is about all I have to say about it. SM (01:31:36): Getting down to the final one here. There is just a couple names. The importance of Tet. How important was Tet? ME (01:31:48): Very important. SM (01:31:49): (19)68. Because that is... ME (01:31:53): Very important. What happened was, and I am sure you know this as well as I, there was actually military defeat for the North Vietnamese, was portrayed the opposite by Walter Cronkite and others as this terrible defeat for the Americans. And that psychology was what it meant, [inaudible] defeat. And really started the negativism. That was also in (19)68. SM (01:32:21): That was early (19)68, yes. ME (01:32:30): But again, there was a guy named Peter Braestrup. I do not know if you know about Peter Braestrup. He wrote a book called the Big Story. His book, you might want to get it. Published by [inaudible]. He was The Washington Post correspondent in Saigon at the time of Tet. SM (01:32:44): Name of the book? ME (01:32:44): Big Story. SM (01:32:44): Okay. ME (01:32:50): And he, Peter, I knew Peter slightly, later, shows it in great detail. And he shows how the media took what was basically a Communist defeat and turned it into a Communist win. And he was a correspondent for The Washington Post. SM (01:33:07): Mm-hmm. ME (01:33:12): So it was huge. It was very decisive in terms of that war, because that war was shit from the beginning. And I, again, I have not studied it carefully, and I had not even thought about it in years. Was a liberal war. It was a war from the beginning under Kennedy and then Johnson fought. McNamara. Dean, Russ, all these people. It was a liberal establishmentarian fight. The best and the brightest [inaudible], who thought they knew what was good for Vietnam. And what was good for Vietnam was to overthrow Diem and get a different government in there that would be more democratic, and so they did that. They overthrew him. And I think McNamara, to his credit, was opposed to that, but Russ was there. And Russ, he had been involved in the previous thing over [inaudible] Chiang Kai‐shek. He knew all about overthrowing our allies. And that whole thing, all that presumption is a good example of why people became very disenchanted with American foreign policy, this idea that it is up to us to go around the world setting it right, everything that is wrong. Is not going to work, for one thing, and it leads to all kinds of wars and problems, and you see that continuing even Iraq and all of that. It is the same mindset. SM (01:34:54): Two thoughts on your response, one of them is things that I have read is that Eisenhower encouraged Kennedy not to get out of Vietnam, and that the actual day of the inauguration, [inaudible] at the White House, before they got into the cars, he was talking to Eisenhower in the White House about Vietnam, trying to get his thoughts on it. Secondly, in Sorensen's recent book, which I read, which I think is pretty good, he is a great writer, he claims that Kennedy wanted the overthrow, but he did not want the murder, and that Kennedy was furious when he found out about the killing. ME (01:35:31): You would have a hard time overthrow without a murder. SM (01:35:34): Yeah. They were supposed to be escorted out of the country to France, that is what Kennedy thought, supposedly. ME (01:35:39): Well, when you have a coup d'etat, the military, little hard to fine tune it. You have got people that know, military guys, that Diem, for all his faults, probably is a more popular leader than they were. Nobody elected them to anything. SM (01:36:01): Mm-hmm. ME (01:36:04): So get rid of him. And they killed him and his brother. So Kennedy had that blood on his hands. [inaudible] "I just wanted a coup, but not to kill him," so that is hard to do. SM (01:36:19): Three more names and then I have one final question. Daniel Ellsberg. ME (01:36:26): Well, it is funny, I read the Pentagon Papers. Why in the world... I am no supporter of Ellsberg. Why the Nixon administration went to the mat to protect those papers, I will never know. They were basically showing how Kennedy and Johnson had screwed up. That is what they showed. And why in the world would the U.S. Government go to the mat... the Nixon government, go to the mat to hold those back, I did not understand. And that is about all I have to remember there. SM (01:37:04): The thing I always remember growing up was the big four, the civil rights leaders and Martin Luther King, Wilkins, Whitney Young, James Farmer. Your thoughts on them as leaders of that time, particularly Dr. King and that group, that foursome. ME (01:37:20): Well, I think he did not want to [inaudible]. SM (01:37:28): He found Farmer. ME (01:37:30): Yeah. Cole. SM (01:37:33): Kissick, I think. ME (01:37:34): Oh, Kissick, [inaudible]. Yeah. SM (01:37:34): [inaudible] Yeah. ME (01:37:37): I did not know a lot about those people. Certainly, Dr. King was a tremendously charismatic leader. There were all kinds of internal things there. I do not know if you have read David Garrow's book about- SM (01:37:50): Yeah, I- ME (01:37:52): Between King and the Kennedys. And all this to-do about the wiretapping of Dr. King that was authorized by Bobby Kennedy. SM (01:37:59): Yeah. [inaudible] ME (01:38:00): And with the approval of Jack Kennedy. So very different from this mythology of all these heroes together, working with civil rights. Here is President Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy authorizing this, and they tried to get King to get rid of a couple of people in his entourage. One of them was a guy named Stanley Levison, and the other one was Hunter Pitts O'Dell. They were both commies. They were known commies, so Garrow says, and I think he i's right. And that is why they authorized a wiretap. And King had told them... They took him to the White House, in the Rose Garden, "Get rid of these people. They are bad. They are trying to corrupt the civil rights movement." And King said that he would, but he did not. And so that is why that was going on. Well, that is very different from the standard story about Dr. King and the Kennedys, and Bobby, and civil rights, and they are all in it together. Dion singing you got Abraham, Martin and John, All of that. The reality is quite- SM (01:39:17): I think it is pretty confusing too as to who was the one that encouraged President Kennedy to call the Kings to try to get Dr. King out of jail, because I read Sargent Shriver's book, and supposedly he is involved with getting the credit. I have read that Bobby Kennedy was somewhat involved. But I think the true hero of this is Harris Walker, because I believe it was Harris Walker who- ME (01:39:39): [inaudible] SM (01:39:40): And I know Senator Walker, and he is such a humble man that he would probably take the back seat to... He is the man. ME (01:39:47): Would not had a [inaudible]. SM (01:39:48): Yeah. ME (01:39:50): And Kennedy, he had a political [inaudible]. SM (01:39:51): Right. He was pragmatic. Yeah. Barry Goldwater. ME (01:39:57): Well, I knew Senator Goldwater somewhat, and I was a supporter of his, but he was an unusual person also. And he was very much his own man. He went his own way. He did things that I thought were not wise. I remember sitting in my living room, must have been 1960, what, September of 1964, in Indianapolis. And I am hearing a report that Goldwater had gone to Tennessee and attacked TVA. Was this smart to do this? And then he went to St. Petersburg in Florida and criticized Social Security. So he is going around almost deliberately provoking these constituencies, when he already has enough problems to keep him busy. But it was just his nature. He was a very independent person. And of course, I guess if he had not been very independent, he would not have made the race, because he never had a prayer from the beginning. He knew that. We all knew it. And he was a very courageous man. But he was his own man. He went his own way. Not always the way that I personally would have advised. SM (01:41:21): Two final things, and then the [inaudible] question. The Cambodian invasion of 1970 which ended up [inaudible] Kent State, [inaudible] the country erupting. There were rumors that we had already been in there, and yet [inaudible]. Nixon's speech at nine o'clock on the night of April 30th, 1970 was historic to me, because it set a chain up. Was it necessary to go into Cambodia? ME (01:41:50): Well, again, my knowledge of it is very remote, but basically what I recall is that the North Vietnamese were using that as a sanctuary. SM (01:41:58): Yes. ME (01:42:01): So that was one of the problems in the whole war was that they had these sanctuaries where they could retreat and they were safe. This started in Korea, where [inaudible] get back close to [inaudible], they were safe. And I think, as I remember, the Cambodian government was in favor of what Nixon did. So, the notion that we were invading Cambodia, we were not. We were just trying to stop the North Vietnamese from using it as a raft to invade South Vietnam. But that is about it. I do not really know much more about it. SM (01:42:42): The last question I have, and that is just about the music, the culture of the era. The movies, the rock music, Motown, folk music, social message. I interviewed Peter Seeger from the [inaudible]. ME (01:42:57): Pete Seeger? SM (01:42:59): Yep. Pete was raised by his father to say that making a name for yourself is not what the music is about. It is about making sure that the people- ME (01:43:08): [inaudible] song of Pete Seeger. SM (01:43:09): Well, this is actually Pete Seeger. ME (01:43:11): The Pete Seeger. SM (01:43:12): The Pete Seeger. ME (01:43:12): The man. SM (01:43:13): Yeah, the man. I interviewed him a week ago in Topeka, New York. ME (01:43:16): How old is he now? SM (01:43:16): He is 90. ME (01:43:16): Yeah. SM (01:43:21): But he is still sharp as a... He forgets. He is very forgetful, but when you get him in a room, he is like an encyclopedia. He does not forget things when he is not distracted. And he was taught by his father that the purpose of the music is for people to remember the words so they continue to sing the music. It is not so much that we are remembered as the musicians, it is that the music itself is remembered because of the messages, the social messages. ME (01:43:47): Well, certainly, Seeger, that was what he did. Those people were very skillful with it. And I am sort of an anomaly, because I liked a lot of the music. I am a big pop music fan. SM (01:44:03): Right. ME (01:44:06): So, I remember the (19)60s music very well, and I remember all the different... not everything, but I remember lots of different strains in it, and people who did it. There were a lot of things going on in the (19)60s music that really had nothing to do with revolution. I saw in the paper the other day, maybe a week ago, that Gordon Waller had died. Gordon Waller was Gordon to Peter and Gordon. SM (01:44:29): Oh, that is right. Yes. ME (01:44:39): And he was 60-something. Well, that music had nothing to do with... A World Without Love and Lady Godiva, those were Peter and Gordon songs. I loved those songs. Just good music. They did not really have a lot of social significance, at least that I am used to. But then you think of all the Dylan stuff and... And Dylan is another person who is, I think, in reality, is very different from his image. Dylan, there is an undercurrent in Dylan, had this very negative attitude towards some of these hippy types. And when you think... Do you remember his songs, and one is called- SM (01:45:16): Rolling Stone, I know. ME (01:45:17): Right. And How Does It Feel. I mean, think of that. Think what that song says. To be young, [inaudible], like a rolling stone. It is a very hostile type song. And then Positively 4th Street. These songs are not peace and love, they are very putting down people that he thinks are pretentious. And they are definitely people on that side. And some of this has come out in Dylan recently. I have not paid a lot of attention to Dylan. I was never a big fan of Dylan, but he wrote some really good stuff. Different. Different from what the conventional image is. So to me, that music, some of it is just good music. I like it to this day. SM (01:46:08): Yeah. Of course, folk music of that era, well, you had Pete Seeger, who was about 50 then, at the time that all this is happening, but then you have got Arlo Guthrie, and you got- ME (01:46:19): Guthrie. Woody Guthrie. SM (01:46:21): Joan Baez. ME (01:46:22): Woody before all of them. SM (01:46:23): Then you got Joan Baez and Tom Paxton, and- ME (01:46:26): All of that. SM (01:46:27): David Bromberg. Cohen. The list goes on and on. Judy Collins. Joni Mitchell. But a lot of them had the social messages. I get back to the fact that when the criticism of the generation has a lot to do with their mores and their values, there is a lot of values in this music, because a lot of the words come out. And even as you head into the 1970s, Black music is changing, because Marvin Gaye is doing What's Going On, and making criticism what is going on in the inner-city and... So, it is Black, it is white, it is folk, it is everything. And then of course, you go back to Elvis back in the (19)50s, which is against the modern trend. They could not even show his... That was the year of- ME (01:47:14): The Ed Sullivan Show. SM (01:47:16): And the question is, when people like that went on TV and young Boomers saw them, I mean, what are they hiding here? I mean, come on, man. ME (01:47:24): Well, music is Dionysian really, the desire to express yourself, maybe to destroy things if they are in your way. Music, rock and roll music, has a lot of that in it, there is no question of that. And of course it has the sexual themes, and sometimes the drug themes. But a lot of it is just music is music, and some of it is good and some of it is not so good. I mean, it just depends on... To me, a song like, well, let is go back to Dylan. We were just talking about some of the stuff he wrote. I thought it was pretty good. Pretty darn good music, but some of it I did not like. I did not like everything he wrote. And sometimes I thought his message was very harsh, very negative, but he was a talent. And so, some of it I like, some I did not. And so that would be true of many of these people. I would take somebody even like... You mentioned Arlo Guthrie. I thought The City of New Orleans was a great song. That is just a tremendous song. SM (01:48:41): Alice's Restaurant. ME (01:48:43): Alice's Restaurant. SM (01:48:44): Yeah. ME (01:48:46): But City of New Orleans is a wonderful song, really powerful. And it has... I do not know, what is the significance of it? It is a lament for the fading away of the railroads, and I can totally identify with that. My grandfather was an engineer on the Illinois Central, as you might have [inaudible] in The City of New Orleans line. And I think he might have been on the City of New Orleans. It ran from Chicago down to New Orleans. I think that is just a fabulous song and I can listen to it anytime. SM (01:49:27): The music of that era also, you think that Elvis was an American, but The Beatles were English, and the British invasion just changed American music. ME (01:49:33): Huge. Huge. SM (01:49:34): And of course, folk was here. ME (01:49:36): Well, Peter and Gordon were British. They were both British. SM (01:49:38): Cannot forget the jazz of the (19)50s, that we never really talk much about. That influenced some of the Black entertainers in Motown in (19)60s, and just so much here. When the best history books are written in 50 years after event, what do you think historians will say about the Boomer generation? I know we are talking about... I know you have already given your comments about the- [inaudible] ME (01:49:58): I think- SM (01:49:59): That we must be very inclusive of both conservative and liberal students. When we get beyond 50, as the Boomers pass away, what will they say about this era? The (19)60s, to me, ended in 1973 too. Because a lot of people think the (19)60s were really (19)63 to (19)73, because when streaking started happening on college campuses it was (19)73, and I will never forget Ohio State. Worked Ohio University my first year, they did come on up here... A friend of mine said, "The (19)60s are over." I said, "What do you mean?" "They are streaking. It is over." ME (01:50:39): You were at Ohio University? SM (01:50:40): I worked at Ohio University in Lancaster Campus from (19)72 to (19)76 in my first job. And they had actually purged the students out of Ohio University when I got there from 18,000 to 13,500 campus, and the branch campus were kind of saving the university as backup now, but they were afraid to send their kids off to that liberal Ohio University, which was much more liberal than Ohio State or even Kent State. ME (01:51:08): Yeah. Yeah. I was on many a campus in Ohio in my day. [inaudible] Antioch. SM (01:51:16): Oh, yes. ME (01:51:16): [inaudible] SM (01:51:17): Oh, yeah. ME (01:51:18): They got a liberal campus. SM (01:51:19): Ohio State? ME (01:51:20): Oh, many times Ohio State. SM (01:51:23): You were probably in Mershon, were not you? Were you going to Mershon Auditorium, or... ME (01:51:26): I could not tell you. SM (01:51:27): Yeah. Sykes Union had big spaces there. ME (01:51:27): Ohio Wesleyan. SM (01:51:27): Yep. ME (01:51:32): In Delaware, Ohio. SM (01:51:35): Denison University. ME (01:51:36): Yeah, I have been to Denison many times. Miami. SM (01:51:38): Capital University in Columbus. ME (01:51:40): Not there. SM (01:51:44): Wayne State. That was a Black school. ME (01:51:46): Yeah. Wright State. SM (01:51:47): Yep. Yep. ME (01:51:48): Youngstown. SM (01:51:49): Miami of Ohio. ME (01:51:51): Many times. SM (01:51:53): Yeah. ME (01:51:53): I was always- SM (01:51:55): Bowling Green. ME (01:51:55): Bowling Green. SM (01:51:56): Dayton. ME (01:51:57): Dayton, yep. SM (01:51:58): Yep. ME (01:51:59): All of them. Every one of them. SM (01:51:59): Cleveland State? ME (01:52:00): Not Cleveland State. I do not think. SM (01:52:03): University of Akron? ME (01:52:04): I think I did Akron. SM (01:52:05): Yeah. When the best books are written, what do you think they are going to say? What do you think, if they define the era? ME (01:52:13): Depends on who writes the books. I think that looking back on what happened in the 40 years from 19... 50 years. 1945 to 1990, that if you wanted to sum up what that generation did, it was pretty good. I would not knock it. That was the generation that brought about the fall of Communism. Something I never thought I would live to see. That happened. That was done by people at that age cohort, of course, it is a big cohort, it is huge, [inaudible] so many people [inaudible]. But that is not too bad. So I would tip my hat. SM (01:53:19): To the Boomers. ME (01:53:19): Yeah. SM (01:53:22): Thank you very much. ME (01:53:23): Thank you, Steve. I know you want me to sign this again. I will do it. SM (01:53:26): Yeah, want you to sign that. (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 Medford Stanton Evans Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Evans, M. Stanton (Medford Stanton), 1934-2015 ; McKiernan, Stephen Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/wav Subject The topic of the resource Journalists; Authors; Evans, M. Stanton (Medford Stanton), 1934-2015--Interviews Description An account of the resource Medford Stanton Evans was an educator, journalist and author. Stanton was an influential figure behind the modern conservative movement. He received his B.A. in English from Yale University and his masters degree in Economics from New York 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 2009-08-06 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.10.2016.48a ; McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.48b 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. 113:29 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/9662014448d3709b06841781fe91bb95.jpg 073d4396748bf6d302300527ad5ddca7 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/50390d6b654343b5dd0a4abf5ed8646a.mp3 7ec9a8c11da0672b738894a4bb0ad957 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 2010-08-16 Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Stephen Mckiernan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Sara M. (Sara Margaret) Evans, 1943- Language English Biographical Text <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Dr. Sara M. Evans is a Professor Emeritus in History at the University of Minnesota. She has helped the university become a center for Women's History and Women's Studies, showing how women's lives impacted society. Dr. Evans earned her Bachelor's degree and Master's degree from Duke University and received her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:4995,&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;15&quot;:&quot;Arial&quot;}">Dr. Sara M. Evans is a Professor Emeritus in History at the University of Minnesota. She has helped the university become a center for Women's History and Women's Studies, showing how women's lives impacted society. Dr. Evans earned her Bachelor's degree and Master's degree from Duke University and received her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina.</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.) 92:32 Keywords <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Anti-war movement; Baby boom generation; McCarthy hearing; Middle class; Second-wave feminism; Betty Friedan; Ronald Reagan; Family values; Third-wave feminism; Rebecca Walker; University studies programs; Environmental Studies; Women in the nineteen-fifties.&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;:13228792}}">Anti-war movement; Baby boom generation; McCarthy hearing; Middle class; Second-wave feminism; Betty Friedan; Ronald Reagan; Family values; Third-wave feminism; Rebecca Walker; University studies programs; Environmental Studies; Women in the nineteen-fifties.</span> Subject LCSH College teachers; Evans, Sara M. (Sara Margaret), 1943--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: Sara Evans Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan Transcriber: REV Date of interview: 16 August 2010 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (Start of Interview) SM (00:00:04): Testing one, two. All right, let me get going here. I have got my sheet free. The first question I have is, who were your role models growing up? The teachers or the parents, the leaders that helped you become the person you are? I follow that up, also, as part of the question that I asked Dr. Baxandall when I interviewed her up in Massachusetts about a week ago. If you were in a packed house of 500 female college students today, and one of the students stood up and asked you to name three or four events in your life that made you who you are, the person you are today, what would those events be? It is kind of a combination, two-part question. SE (00:01:03): Well, the role models, when I was a child, I certainly have to talk about my parents. Because my father was a Methodist minister in South Carolina, and my parents were the only white people I knew who thought segregation was wrong, and I grew up in the segregated South. SM (00:01:32): Oh, wow. SE (00:01:33): That is very fundamental to who I became. My mother told me when I was, I do not know, about second grade, "They are going to teach you in school that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War, but it is." That is probably far and away the most important. I loved school. I had a number of teachers that I adored. I remember my fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Holler, and I am not sure I can name any other one, but I had a number of teachers that I cared about very much. I always thought I wanted to be a teacher. SM (00:02:32): Right. SE (00:02:32): It is what I turned out to be. I wanted to teach every grade I was in except eighth grade and that is because, it is not because of the teachers, because the kids. I thought that that would be very hard. SM (00:02:45): Right. SE (00:02:45): I think I will stop at that for role models and- SM (00:02:56): Are there any specific- SE (00:02:58): Go ahead. SM (00:03:00): Events in your life besides the role models, who helped shape you? SE (00:03:07): Sure. There's no question that the civil rights movement changed the world I lived in and, certainly, changed my life. I can think all the way back to 1954 when I asked my students to think about some time when they became aware that history matters. And I say, 'I will tell you mine." I was on the playground and we were arguing about who should have won the war. Then, of course, I made them figure out what war and it is the Civil War. It is a playground in Columbia, South Carolina, and it is about 1954. The fact is, we were arguing about Brown versus the Board of Education. SM (00:04:00): Right. SE (00:04:01): That was what was really going on. So growing up in segregation in the (19)50s meant that the civil rights movement was both, was just a huge relief in a way and an opportunity to act on values I was raised with. I started college in 1962 and became active in the movement there in Durham, North Carolina, soon thereafter. I, also, another important event or experience was that in the summer of 1964, I went to Africa as a... It was after my sophomore year in college. There was a program called Operation Crossroads Africa. I do not think I had ever been out of the country. I went to Africa in an interracial group of college students, my first interracial experience, really, and laid bricks in a country that received its independence the summer that we were there, the little country of Malawi. We even got to be in the stadium and watched the British flag come down and the Malawi flag go up. That summer changed my view of the world because I saw the United States from outside. I discovered colonialism. I began to understand the impact of our country on the rest of the world. For several years, anyway, focused on African studies in my academic life. It framed when I began the next year to think about the war in Vietnam. I thought very differently about it because of having had that experience, so that was pretty fundamental. SM (00:06:23): I wrote this question up that I have asked probably the last 12 people I have interviewed. Since I am writing a book on the boomers, a lot of people have had a problem with defining the boomers. SE (00:06:35): Right. SM (00:06:36): Because the textbooks say it is anyone born between (19)46 and (19)64. But so many of the people that were the leaders of the anti-war movement were born between 1938 and 1945. SE (00:06:52): Right. SM (00:06:52): Many have told me, that I have interviewed have said, "Steve, you have got to think a little different here because the first half of the boomer generation, yes, they were really impacted. But a 10-year-old in the second half?" So I am just dealing with what higher ed defines as generations- SE (00:07:13): Right. SM (00:07:13): And what sociologists have been saying. But the question I am coming up with here deals with the (19)50s. I have a couple questions here. To boomers, and correct me if I am wrong, grew up very naïve. They learned that the meaning of fear stood for being quiet, obeying orders, do not question authority. So I came up with three qualities here that I feel defined boomers in the 1950s. The concept that there was fear, there was a sense of being quiet and there was a sense of being naive. Then the (19)60s and (19)70s came, it was just the opposite. There were lots of injustices and people spoke up. They challenged authority and certainly the students did. So they had to deal with these issues from the (19)50s that they grew up with. Whether it be the McCarthy hearings, the Cold War, the bomb, obviously, injustices in the South, the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Am I on target here? I read your book, Personal Politics. It's one of the best books I have ever read, in fact. SE (00:08:25): Thank you. SM (00:08:27): I got it right in front of me. Actually, I destroyed it underlining it but I got to get another copy. It is a tremendous book. SE (00:08:35): Thank you. SM (00:08:36): But are those three qualities really what the boomer generation when they were young lived through in the (19)50s? I am not just talking white people. I am talking about African American, gay and straight, you name it. SE (00:08:53): Well, I think it is really hard to apply something like those qualities completely across the board. I was born in 1943, by the way, so I am in that earlier group. I always tell my students that the uptick in fertility took place a lot sooner than 1946. So I do not think the boomer generation should be counted just from (19)46, but that is a different issue. Fear. Let us talk about that one just a little bit. Certainly, I was aware that there was a danger of atomic war, for example. On the other hand, I think African Americans in the rural south lived in a kind of perpetual fear that is not really about the decade of the (19)50s. It is about centuries of suppression. So those things are very different and their links to time are somewhat different. On the other hand, I would say a lot of people think of the (19)50s as a time of tremendous optimism. Think about Happy Days, that movie, that TV series. A lot of Americans became middle class for the first time. We had been through a depression and then a war. Now people were beginning to have a life of material wealth and opportunities to seek higher education, to own automobiles or refrigerators, or use telephones, watch television. All of those things were becoming a part of ordinary American life, so there is an optimism in the 1950s that linked, also, to the Cold War ideology, "We are the best. We are the most wonderful. Look at us." The Cold War both had produced fear because of war. We had come out of a war and now war seemed threatened all the time. This sense of, "We are the best and we are only getting better and we will win." It was all modulated with that. The naivete of many in my generation was linked to that sense of well-being that gets shattered as we discover. I cannot say that I feel participating in this because I grew up in the segregated South, and I grew up knowing that something was deeply unjust about American society. But I think there were many in my generation in other parts of the country who did grow up with the sense that all is well and getting better, until they discovered that children go to bed hungry in this best of all possible societies. The civil rights movement brought segregation and the brutal suppression of segregation to their television screen. Then the Vietnam War, of course, brought others. Your themes are not, I would not say they are completely wrong but, like any stereotype, you need to push them a little bit because they are never going to fit perfectly. SM (00:13:25): The second wave is something you have written about in one of your latest books. What are the major second wave accomplishments, in your opinion? What are the failures or maybe things that were not achieved in the second wave, so far? SE (00:13:46): Well, the second wave, certainly, in many ways, created a revolution in American life. We can look at that on many dimensions. It made a lot of legal changes, of course, so that it is no longer legal to pay women less than men for the same work. It is no longer legal to advertise jobs as men only or women only. It is no longer legal for professional schools, medical schools, law schools, and graduate schools that have quotas and only admit 5 percent women. It is no longer legal to prevent women from serving on juries. That whole edifice of legal discrimination fell apart in the late (19)60s and in the 1970s, mostly in the early part of the 1970s. It is also no longer the case that women are expected to stay home through their adult lives and care for children and tend to the house. Now, that was never a reality for very large numbers of women no matter what. But it was a cultural ideal that was lived out mostly in the middle and upper middle classes. That the revolution of women's labor force participation was not caused by the women's movement, but it interacted with it. In some ways, it was a cause of the women's movement because all those women were running into barriers, discrimination, finding only dead-end jobs. Only women only work available to them. Younger women with higher education who sensed potential in themselves would be discouraged, or not admitted to school, or whatever, so there was an interactive effect there. But in the aftermath of that movement, women and men participate in the labor force on an almost equal basis in terms of numbers. There are many ways in which that movement did not... I think I want to credit it with creating a revolution and also notice that it is far from achieving the goals that it set for itself, which was genuine equality between men and women in American society. There are many ways in which it is far more equal than it used to be, but we still have, in many ways, a double standard. There is discrimination still but it's much more subtle, much more subtle. It is important that we had a woman run for president in 2008 who could have won. That is the first time. We have had women run for president many times but this was a new one. I think it is a real marker that Hillary could have won. SM (00:17:41): I think she is going to run again down the road. SE (00:17:44): She might, she might. We will see. There are a lot of built-in attitudes that I have been distressed to see the sort of casual sexism that was rampant in my childhood, some of that is back. I do not know if you look at movies and that sort of thing, they certainly are better than they used to, but there is still a lot of those themes are there. I think what we did not do was change the way society regards family. Even though families have changed, we offer no support for single-parent family. It is... When it was married couples raising children, women still do more than half, although, at least it is not 90 percent. But they still do more than half of the work of caring for children and families and households. Our labor force offers very few breaks for people who want combined meaningful work and child rearing. There are other countries, particularly in Europe, that have gone much further down this path. We do not offer paid childcare leave. We do not offer them for men, as well as women, except in some places six weeks. But that is not what we need. We make it very hard for people to deal with ill children. We create this competition between these two arenas that are both essential for the future of our society. So you have people hiring nannies that are... People with really high paying jobs, hiring nannies and hardly ever get to see their children. People with really low paying jobs find it very difficult to find decent childcare and children end up in not very healthy situations. SM (00:20:26): When you look at the, I am going to use the years the boomers have been alive, of course, they have been alive since 1946 through today, and the oldest is now 64 years old, and the youngest is 48 going on 49, so there are no spring chickens anymore within this generation. I think they finally realized that maybe, like a lot of generations, that they are mortal. SE (00:20:53): That may be what? SM (00:20:56): That they are mortal. That they- SE (00:20:59): Hello? SM (00:20:59): Are you still there? Can you hear me? SE (00:21:05): Hello? Are you there? SM (00:21:06): Yes, I am here. SE (00:21:09): I think I lost you for a second. SM (00:21:11): Can you still hear me? SE (00:21:13): Yes, I can. SM (00:21:13): Okay. Yeah. SE (00:21:16): You need to know that my telephone works through my wireless. SM (00:21:21): Okay. SE (00:21:22): Because I am in a very remote place, so every now and then it blinks out. SM (00:21:26): Okay. All right. I do have your number if it does disconnect us. What was it like, and you can just give a few examples or just explain it briefly. What was it like being a female during these different periods that boomers have been alive? You did a great job in your book, Personal Politics, about explaining about the young women who were being reared in the 1950s, seeing their moms go to work- SE (00:21:59): Right. SM (00:22:01): And so forth. So they saw some of the experiences that their mothers had to go through. It helped shape them, too, that it was not going to be easy for many of them. SE (00:22:11): Right. SM (00:22:12): But what was it like being a woman in the United States from 1946 to 1960? I am breaking these down according to timeframes, from that time at the end of World War II- SE (00:22:24): Right. SM (00:22:25): Until the time John Kennedy became president? SE (00:22:28): Okay, well, I am assuming you are asking me about my experience as opposed to- SM (00:22:32): Yes-yes. SE (00:22:37): I was born at the end of 1943, so I do not have a lot of memories of (19)46. But the main thing I would tell you is that I had a mother with a college degree and the passion of a scientist, who should have been a scientist, who never thought she had that choice. So I grew up aware of my mother's frustrated potential and anger and depression. I think that really did shape me in some important ways. I did not want to end up in that situation. When I read in 1963, this is outside your timeframe, but when I read Betty Friedan's book, a light bulb went on like, oh, I do not have to make that choice. But I think in the (19)50s, girls in the middle class, which I certainly was, the way we thought about our future was not, what are you going to be when you grow up? When I was really little, I was going to be a nurse because kids did ask that question. SE (00:24:03): I was going to be a nurse, because kids did ask that question or asked that question. But in high school, what I recall is conversations among girls about who would you like to marry? Would you like to be the wife of a lawyer, a doctor, a minister? Those kinds of... It was being the wife of and not being those, not having those professions ourselves, that was presented as how to think about yourself in the future. SM (00:24:38): How about that period? You already talked about Betty Friedan's book that came out in (19)63, but the period 1961 to 1970. SE (00:24:49): Well, that is when things got really revolutionary, and you almost have to talk about that year by year, because it is different year by year. Certainly this mobilization of women is beginning by the mid (19)60s, and with the presidential commissions on women and so forth. I read Betty Friedan in college because one of my professors told me to read it. And at that point, I decided along Betty Friedan's prescription that I could be several woman. I would have a career and I would have a family too and it would not even be hard. But it was in 1967 that I landed in a women's liberation group. And from that moment on, became a very active feminist, and saw the need to transform American society and the way it defined gender and gender roles. SM (00:26:03): How about that period, 1971 to 1980? SE (00:26:10): Well, again, I am really reluctant to just slap labels on decades like that, because they changed so much from beginning to end. The high point of the women's movement in terms of mobilization was the mid (19)70s, just in terms of sheer numbers and actions and so forth. The high point of legislative change was about 1972 to (19)74, in terms of legal transformations. I think young women, coming of age then, and you need to talk to them, because I was moving from my late twenties into my thirties at that point, in graduate school. But for younger women, I think there was a sense of, the sky is limit. Everything is opening up. SM (00:27:13): Then you get into that Ronald Reagan era, from (19)81 to (19)90. SE (00:27:21): Right. Well, and that was a time of tremendous backlash. The backlash got going in the (19)70s, the anti-ERA movement, for example. And I actually think it is important to remember that some women growing up in the (19)60s and in the (19)70s were living lives that were not so different from the women growing up in the (19)50s. There were places in America, from suburbs, from small towns, that were not touched as deeply or thoroughly or whatever. So changes, change always has a ragged quality to it. It is certainly far from uniform. And in the (19)80s, you have, on the one hand, Reagan and all the talk about family values and people openly saying that women should go back home and take care of the kids and be women again. And on the other hand, you have women entering all these professions in massive numbers, because now they have been able to go to medical school and law school and get MBAs in the (19)70s. And so the change is still going on and even Ronald Reagan appointed Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court. SM (00:28:56): That is right. Then we get into the (19)90s, which is the time of Bill Clinton. SE (00:29:04): Right. And I think there is a resurgence of feminism in a new generation. In the early (19)90s, they called themselves the third wave. One of their leaders is Rebecca Walker, the daughter of Alice Walker. SM (00:29:18): We had her at our school. SE (00:29:18): You what? SM (00:29:23): We brought her to this university. She spoke at our school. SE (00:29:27): Oh, great. Yeah, she is quite charismatic. She is quite wonderful. And also, I think in the (19)80s and (19)90s, more and more women and men were discovering how hard it is to live these new lives and have families, and some of the pressure of that is beginning to be felt. SM (00:29:56): And then we- SE (00:29:57): But I would say by the (19)90s, the women's movement and younger generations were less divided by race. Not to say that race was not still really important, but Rebecca's a good example of a new language of talking about race that begins to be possible. I apologize for the fact that there is another phone here, a landline. Can I? SM (00:30:27): Yep. SE (00:30:28): Do you mind if I pick it up? SM (00:30:29): Nope, go ahead, just go ahead. SE (00:30:31): Okay. SM (00:30:31): All right. That is fine. All right. SE (00:30:35): Chuck, are you there? Are you on the phone? So I hang up? Good. Okay. (00:30:44): Okay. Sorry. I am in a very small cabin. SM (00:30:47): Okay. That is all right. Then we got the last 10 years, which is George Bush and now President Obama. Where was everything stand in that decade? SE (00:31:01): Well, when you say everything, what are you talking about? [inaudible] lose the thread here. SM (00:31:09): Well, what is it like being a female today, really? SE (00:31:13): Okay. Yes. Yes. Well, and I think for young women today, it is very confusing. They have an immense number of choices, and they know it. They also know that they are often very hard choices. In some ways, I feel like young women today feel something like that old pressure of family or career. They no longer have the illusion that it will be easy to do both. They expect they will do both, and they will have to do both, but they do not see it as something that is going to be a piece of cake. SM (00:31:57): I have two nieces that are going through it right now. SE (00:32:00): Yeah. No, I think it is very hard. On the one hand, the sky's the limit. On the other hand, you may not be able to ever get there. SM (00:32:11): Right. One of the things that is interested, and I have been asking each of my guests recently, is the difference between mainstream feminism and radical feminism. And it seems to me that oftentimes, when people define mainstream feminism, they say that is liberal. But that radical feminism is like the new left that led the anti-war movement in the (19)60s. And it seems to me that it is always the new left or the more extremes that gets things done. Your thoughts on the difference between the two and defining them? SE (00:32:49): Well, if you read, obviously, Personal Politics is about the origins of radical feminism. And I notice that liberal feminism is being created at the same moment, but I do not go into that. I am completely unwilling to say one does things more or better than the other. And the reason is, I think they need each other. I think this is true of many social movements, that when the radicals raise the questions in a far more fundamental way and set out to show the world how deep change is possible, the liberals who are saying things that in the previous context would have been considered wildly unthinkably radical, suddenly look moderate and are able to accomplish things. My last book, called Tidal Wave, which is a sequel to Personal Politics, covers from (19)68 into the beginnings of the 21st century. And I look at these two streams, I argue that, by the mid (19)70s, you really cannot draw a line between them easily. There is a spectrum, but not a bifurcation, but that they influenced each other enormously. The radicals, lots of people joined the more liberal organizations because they went looking for a radical movement and they could not find it because it was so decentralized, and they landed in the other movement, but they radicalized it. And I do think legal changes matter. I think it matters that we have an equal pay act and that we have Title IX, which [inaudible] in women's participation in sports. I think the Equal Credit Act matters. So the fact that we got, and Roe versus Wade, for goodness sake. But the person who argued Roe versus Wade came out of a consciousness raising group in Austin, Texas. It was part of the radical movement. But what she did was the way the liberal movement functioned. SM (00:35:14): That is Sarah Weddington, correct? SE (00:35:17): Exactly. So I am going to resist that either-or kind of question. SM (00:35:27): Okay. Yeah. One of the things that is very important, and my very first boss at Ohio University was one of the leaders of the ERA movement in Ohio. And I know Dr. Mensen was very disappointed when it did not pass. I remember being in the office next to her when the final vote came in and I think she was crying, and it is a long story, because she had worked two years on this. But why did it fail? And I also interviewed Phyllis Schlafly in Washington about four months ago. Yeah, I interviewed her for an hour, and I interviewed David Horowitz on the phone. And both of them have said this. They say that the troublemakers of the (19)60s and the (19)70s, which are probably the new left or whatever, now run the universities and they control what is taught. And they were making reference to women's studies, black studies, gay and lesbian studies, environmental studies, all the studies movements. Your thoughts on their criticism, the studies programs in the universities, whether there's truth to that. And secondly, why did the ERA fail? SE (00:36:35): Okay. Those are really two different questions. The ERA failed in part because the most important things it was going to accomplish were already accomplished in the legal changes that did take place in the (19)70s. And so on one level, in the end, it was not as devastating to lose it as it would have been 20 years earlier when all that discriminatory stuff was still on the books. But it also failed, I think, because people found change in gender roles very frightening. And people like Phyllis Schlafly played on those ears. And it was similar to how frightening voting, the idea of women voting was in the 19th century. And all of that change which was happening to people and they were participating in it, was also scary, and I think there was a lot of demagoguery, and Phyllis Schlafly was the leader of it, talking about why should people be worried about single sex bathrooms, we're going to say, or they made up things that they said the law would do, but they also said women might have to participate in combat in the armed forces. Well, we have got that and we do not have the ERA. The ERA was not going to make it happen, but it was happening and people were not easy about that. And I think there were also women in more traditional roles, and there's a very good book on this by Jane De Hart and Don Mathews about the Equal Rights Amendment in North Carolina. And what they found were that women who were opposed, it was not only men who were opposed, for sure, but women who were opposed shared a deep distrust of men with the people who advocated it and said, "We need legal equality, because you cannot trust them to treat us right no matter what." But they were in traditional roles and still very dependent on men. And their fear was that if men are not forced to play their traditional roles, they will abandon them. And their fear was that if women and men are treated equally in the public arena, in the workplace, and everywhere else, men will say, "I will not support my family. You have got to go out and work." Or they will get divorced and refuse to pay alimony. Or they will simply abandon their family. And their view was really that men have to be coerced to take care of their families, and women are vulnerable, and they were afraid that equality would mean that women would be abandoned, so. And that is really about how deeply uneasy some of these changes made many people feel. So that is one question. Now, remind me again of what your other one was, because- SM (00:40:15): Well, the other one was just- SE (00:40:17): Oh, about the studies sequence. SM (00:40:19): Yeah, Phyllis Schlafly basically said the troublemakers of the (19)60s and (19)70s now run the university's studies programs. SE (00:40:30): Well, that is a right wing attack that is... I could name a number of writers who have made those charges. It certainly is true that the social movements of the (19)60s and (19)70s ask questions that could not be answered within the framework of traditional discipline. And there's an intellectual transformation that follows from that. I have been very involved in women's studies. I wrote women's history and taught women's history. When I was in school, there was no such thing as women's history. And you did not learn about women in any class that you took, because they were considered to be outside of history. So asking the question about where are the women and what are they doing was an intellectual transformation. The same thing with black history. When I was in school, I was taught very little about what life was like for slaves. In fact, in South Carolina, it was assumed that slaves were probably pretty happy. But even in college, we did not know anything about what life was like for enslaved people. But when people started asking about that, there's an amazing amount there to be covered about how enslaved people created a culture from many parts of Africa, speaking different languages, created African American culture and music and religion and family structures and so forth. So I think those studies programs, in fact, were very, very important in bringing previously unthought about and fundamental issues into our intellectual discourse. It's simply not... It is true that a lot of us... I was an activist in the women's movement. I wanted to know, what shoulders do we stand on? Have people like us, i.e. females, ever changed history the way we want to do it, or is it true that women never have made any history? And I felt we needed to know our history, not romanticized, but just to know, as part of the movement. And that drove me into graduate school. And lots of people like me did that. But the implication that our scholarship is purely ideological, that we do not in fact do real research and hold ourselves to rigorous standards, is the right-wing position, that I think is wrong and dangerous. And if you want to say environmental studies, then you are discounting all the environmental science of the last half century. And those are the same people who say there is no global warming, if they want to say environmental studies is a left-wing plot. SM (00:44:08): One of the other points, and I had an hour with her, she was at the CPAC conference, and she was very tired, so I think I got a really quality 30 minutes from her, even though she was there for an hour. And we talked a little bit about whether women in the (19)50s, the parents of boomer women, were fulfilled or were unfulfilled as mothers and housewives, and many not even working. And it was her belief that many were fulfilled, that being a mother and taking care of kids was the duty. And so for the women's movement to say that there is a lot of unfulfilled women who never had a chance to speak their thoughts, just raise the kids and so forth, any thoughts on that? SE (00:45:02): Well, I had a mother who was not fulfilled, so that was my personal experience, a group of one. I suggest that you read a book by Elaine Tyler May called Homeward Bound. SM (00:45:16): Homeward Bound. SE (00:45:18): Yes. A very, very important book about the family in the Cold War era and she has data on this that is really important, and I think anecdotally, you will get people telling you everything. Based on what I know from Elaine May's work and other scholars, I would say, and then packing back to my own experience, I would say, in the first place, of course there were some women who were happy doing that, but that does not tell you that they were all happy doing that. The flood, if you go and read the letters written to Betty Friedan after The Feminine Mystique came out, you would be deluged with thousands and thousands of women writing to say to her, "Thank you, thank you, thank you. I did not think anybody else felt this way." And if you look at the numbers of women who go to graduate school, once the barriers are lifted, and the number of women in the (19)60s, there was a big movement in the (19)60s to create opportunities for women to return to college. And that was very, very successful, called the Continuing Education for Women movement. Huge numbers of women wanted to go back, finish degrees and find something else to do with their lives. Maybe they enjoyed staying home, but then they wanted to do something else. And finally, I have to say for Phyllis Schlafly, so why did she have a career? Her own life does not fit that. SM (00:47:07): Yeah, I have heard that before. She has been a lawyer, created the Eagle Forum and speaks all over the country, and- SE (00:47:15): Right, so she said women should have a role that she never chose to have. SM (00:47:22): One of the things about the second wave movement, I remember reading Johnetta Cole's book, several years back, Sister President, that she wrote about her experiences. And this leads me into this question, has the second wave of the women's movement been all inclusive with respect to women of color, women with different sexual orientations? Because I have read quite a bit from other authors that, even Johnetta Cole said, there was pressure within the African-American community to identify as a black person first and then as a woman second, and then she identified with both, but it was very- SM (00:48:03): And then she identified with both, but it was very difficult for... SE (00:48:08): Well, I think that is true, and I would ask you to please read Tidal Wave because that is a major theme of Tidal Wave. My history of the Second Wave, and it's a functioning part of timing. The Women's Movement started at the same time that the Black Power Movement was in full force. And what seems to me is when you tell this story, on the one hand you have to notice black women and women of color were always there. They started women's groups within all those other movements, which were pretty separated in the late (19)60s and early (19)70s. But there were women's liberation committees that raised issues within the Latino movement, with the Chicano movement and the Asian American movement and the Black movement. There were separate organizations, often of women of color, raising very similar issues and often in very similar ways and similar language. But it was a time of such racial polarization that it was very difficult for women to talk across racial minds successfully. And there was tremendous pressure within each of those groups to identify first with their group and then secondly with your gender. So that was true. I would say that the liberal wing of the Women's Movement was more successful, even there, it was not easy, but there were women of color in the leadership from the beginning of the National Organization for Women and of the National Women's Political Caucus. So it is important to notice that, and I discussed it in some detail in Tidal Wave. SM (00:50:18): Do you also include the Native American women? SE (00:50:22): Yes. SM (00:50:25): When did the (19)60s begin, in your opinion? And when did it end? And what do you feel was the watershed moment? This is just you personally. SE (00:50:35): Well, I would begin it with the sit-ins in 1960, although it is not hard to push it back to the Montgomery bus boycott since the marker for me is really civil rights. And I am not quite sure how to end it. I would push it well into the (19)70s. But even then, when you try to create a category like that, the early (19)60s and the late (19)60s, (19)70s are also very different times. The early years, the Civil Rights Movement, the Kennedy years, the creation of the Peace Corps, and then the Anti-War Movement and the race riots that happened, and the increasing violence and turmoil is a very different era. SM (00:51:37): Did The Beats have an influence on women? SE (00:51:42): The Beatniks in the (19)50s? SM (00:51:44): Yes, The Beats, because many people have told me they believe that the (19)60s began with the beats because they were anti-authoritarian. They lived their lives. They did not care what other people thought. SE (00:51:58): Oh, I think so. I was not living where they were very permanent. But I am sure that is true. They were extremely sexist, and at the same time, they were very anti-authoritarian and into breaking all the rules. So they are forerunners of the new left. They are very... Are you there? SM (00:52:28): Yes. I am here. SE (00:52:28): They are very sort of nihilistic and they represent some of that side of the (19)50s that says the world is going to blow itself up and recognizing that racism is rampant and so forth, and not feeling very hopeful that any of that can be changed. And the New Left comes along, picks up on a lot of those themes, but says, "Well, hey, we can change it." SM (00:53:06): I know that one person I interviewed said that he identified Neil Cassidy. He is the number one Beat because all the books that were written were basically studies about him. And of course, he became one of the Mary Pranksters. But his attitude toward women was basically conquests. SE (00:53:29): Right. And that is why I have trouble with a lot of those folks. SM (00:53:35): One of the well-known facts that you bring up in your book, Personal Politics, but also, it has been historically documented, is that the sexism that was rampant in the Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-War Movement drove many of the New Left women that were affiliated with those groups into the Women's Movement in the late (19)60s and early (19)70s. So now I have some questions that are directly related to your book, Personal Politics. The people who have studied post-World War II activism know that sexism was rampant in the movements I just mentioned. My question is, how bad was it? SE (00:54:13): Well, I would say it was not as bad as in the rest of American society. And I think it is really important to notice that the Women's Movement did not happen in a place where women were treated much worse than they had ever been treated. But rather in a movement that advocated equality but did not treat women equally. And it is that contradiction that women ran into. But they had opportunities to do things, to change history, to go to jail, to stand up for what they believed, to risk their lives, to teach in Freedom School, to take on responsibility for organizing communities. And I think it is the later part of the New Left Act, it became a really massive movement that some of the sexism of the counterculture was much more raw, [inaudible] but the New Left offered women an opportunity to grow and develop leadership. And it also periodically reenacted the sexism that was fundamental to American culture. No surprise. It is not that they were worse, it was that they had not completely transcended everything they had been raised with. And the contradiction is what drove women to name it and act on it. SM (00:55:48): You do a tremendous job in this book. I have read the Free Speech Movement. There is a lot of books on that. And a lot of the students that were involved in that movement, were also in Freedom Summer in (19)64, and many of them were even in down south in the (19)61 (19)62 period. And I have interviewed at least six people who were involved in Freedom Summer and male and female. But can you explain, I know, but this is for the people they are going to read this, how important was the student non-violent coordinating committee with respect to not only the Civil Rights movement, but the Women's Movement? And you also in the book do a great job in one section of talking not only about the SNCC, but you talk about the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Congress on Racial Equality. These are all major groups that were linked to that movement in the (19)50s and (19)60s and beyond. And you talk a little bit about the sexism within those organizations where women were, and you talk a little bit about that. SE (00:57:00): Well, I am not going to be able to tell you any more than I already wrote, but the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee was one of the most innovative and radical parts of the Civil Rights Movement. It was on the ground and the scariest parts of the South all over the place. And it often does not get its due when civil rights stories are being told. And the focus is on the big leader, Martin Luther King. It was the place where women found the most equality within the Civil Rights Movement, where they learned the most leadership capacities. And it was the organization that gave women an ideology about living out your value in your daily life. That the idea of the beloved community that we were going to enact among ourselves, the values we were trying to bring about in society. And, it really was fundamental to the origins of the Women's Liberation Movement. It gave them a set of ideas, a deeply egalitarian ideology. It gave them a set of strategies and tactics, consciousness raising, and the technique traces directly back to the way people talked to each other in SNCC and spoke from their hearts and tried to reach consensus and not leave anybody behind. So I think that organization was really fundamentally important. SM (00:59:00): What is interesting here also is when you look at the March on Washington 1963 with Dr. King, and you see the background of all the people around him. The only females you see are Dorothy Height, who is over to the right. And I know Mahalia Jackson, she sang, but it was all Men. So there is a perception out there, and I think you really correct it in your book that women, they were really secondary in the Civil Rights movement. They just were not there. And- SE (00:59:44): A lot of research since then to show, if you look at the Civil Rights Movement on the ground, the things I said that I wrote when I was writing that in the mid to late (19)70s, there is a huge amount more detail about it available now. Because in local communities, women were the leaders. They were towering figures. And SNCC offered role models of older women who risked their lives for what they believed in. And it was in the local communities, those women, they called the Mamas that were so powerful. And if you look at SCLC, what you get is a hierarchical organization in which the top leaders are all black ministers. But there were people like Dorothy Height who is pretty wonderful. SM (01:00:46): You talk about the major role played by white women in the South, and certainly African American women as well to end segregation. And they were involved in voting registration drives and so forth. Could you talk a little bit about what it was like being a white woman during Freedom Summer or any of the voter registration drives throughout the early (19)60s down there? Because I do not think a lot of people realize it, many of these people came back to college campuses and actually were the leaders, and several of them were as the Free Speech Movement. Just talk about- SE (01:01:20): So like Joe Freeman, for example? SM (01:01:27): Yes. Just your thoughts on the women that were involved in with SNCC. SE (01:01:35): Well, again, this makes me uncomfortable because I have written it all, and I would love you to quote from my book too. SM (01:01:43): Well, yes, I have got quotes that I am going to bring up here next, but I- SE (01:01:50): But I do think for many white women, it was stepping outside of the roles that they were expected to fulfill way outside. And when they went south, they found themselves in a movement where there were these powerful black women who became role models, who taught them a different way to be women and a more assertive and self-respecting way to be women. It was for both [inaudible]. SM (01:02:29): With me. All right. SE (01:02:34): And I do not have a whole lot longer, so. I know you planned 90 minutes. SM (01:02:43): We got 27 minutes. SE (01:02:45): I will try. Anyway, I would say for middle class college kids, black and white, male and female, going into the Southern Civil Rights Movement was a searing experience and [inaudible] and committed them, no matter what happened next, to be engaged with making the world a better place. I doubt many students came out of that experience and went back to their old lives as if nothing had happened. For black students, of course, it would have all sorts of other transforming dimensions. But for white students and for white women, it was such a step outside of their traditional roles that many of them came back to their campuses and were prepared. They felt able to lead. They were prepared to question authority. They were prepared to take public stands. And so the students who went south show up in the leadership of the New Left all over the country and the Anti-War Movement, and then the Women's Movement, and they became the leadership. SM (01:04:23): I have two quotes here from the book which are excellent. The first quote is, "These women recognize from the very beginning of their involvement in the movement that they, like their male associates, were at war with their own culture." And the second one is the, "Thus within a movement, young white women have the necessary to forge a new sense of themselves to redefine the meaning of being a woman quite apart from the [inaudible] image they had inherited." And then the third- SE (01:05:01): Do not agree with that. SM (01:05:03): ... One I have here is, "The next generation daughters of the (19)50s grew up with a knowledge that they were identifying roles should be those of wife and mother. But they knew they would probably have a job at some point. They saw mothers with double duty." SE (01:05:19): Great. SM (01:05:19): So any other thoughts on that or that is good? SE (01:05:26): No, I think that is true. SM (01:05:30): Then I have another one that I do want you to respond to. It is on the bottom of page 11. Let us see here, you have got, "The straight jacket of domestic idea to challenge it openly would be too frightening in a rapidly changing world clouded with threat of nuclear warfare and the early bush fires of racial discontent and urban decay, where corporate behemoths trained their bureaucrat into interchangeable parts, fewer ready to face the unnerving necessity of reassessing the cultural definitions of femaleness and maleness." So. SE (01:06:13): And I am in some ways saying the background of what I was saying earlier about how scary it was, how fundamental the changes the Women's Movement was demanding were. And there was great resistance to raising the issue. And once it was raised, there was a big backlash in the (19)70s. And that is because it is pretty fundamental. Our identities as women and men are pretty fundamental to who we think we are in the world. And so if anybody wants to tamper with that and change it, people get upset. SM (01:07:00): You also stated a beautiful quote which is, "Bureaucracy suppressed demotion and passion training its members into interchangeable parts. Bureaucratic values emphasize female traits of cooperation, passivity and security, getting along, being well-liked between new goals." SE (01:07:20): And what I am arguing there in [inaudible] is that men were taking on roles that the qualities demanded of them were things the culture labeled females. And so there is an uneasiness already. Things are shifting in ways. So how do men prove their manhood anymore when they are being placed in these kind of settings to work? So when women start saying, "We want in too," or "We want equal chair," or "We want the right to do this and that and the other." For men, it is like, "Well, so what is left?" How will we know? SM (01:08:06): You bring up also, and other people have mentioned that the election of John Kennedy showed many people that change is good. And of course, change is one of the definitions of the (19)60s. And certainly John Kennedy was a much younger person. So that is true. And you also bring up the fact that McCarthyism was an attitude that many people were afraid of which is to root out subversion from within. And so there was a fear. That is where I get into the fear again of- SE (01:08:39): You are right. McCarthyism did make many, many people afraid. Afraid to advocate change. SM (01:08:46): When President Kennedy asked Eleanor Roosevelt to head the commission on the status of women, I believe that was in 1961. She died in (19)62. SE (01:08:54): Yes. SM (01:08:54): Was he dead serious on that or did Eleanor Roosevelt pressure him to do it because Eleanor had problems with him before supporting him to be president? SE (01:09:13): Well, I do not think it was a top priority for him. I think it was a bone that he threw to the women, but he needed women's support. And there was concern within the Democratic Party about pressure for the Equal Rights Amendment. So one of the ways that he was persuaded to do this was that people like Eleanor Roosevelt who were opposed to the Equal Rights Amendment, on the grounds, said it would undo protective legislation that her generation had won to protect women workers. So they wanted to have a commission that would say, "We do not need that." What happened, of course, was something altogether different because that commission uncovered the depth of discrimination against women. And so when they did have one committee that said, "We really do not need an equal rights amendment." That stands somehow at odds with all the other things that they did. SM (01:10:22): One other quote I have here that I would like to, if there is any further comments, I think it is another great quote. "Furthermore, having grown up in an era that commoditized sexual intimidation while it reasserted repressive norms, they found themselves living in the ambiguous frontiers of sexual freedom and self-control opened up by the birth control pill. Such contradictions left young, educated women in the (19)60s dry tinder for the spark of revolt." SE (01:10:51): Yes. Well, that early chapter argues basically that a Women's Movement was going to happen. It was almost over-determined. There were too many contradictory pressures. It is almost like tectonic plate crushing against each other and something has to give. SM (01:11:18): The couple of people you talk about in the book, Stokely Carmichael joked in (19)64 that the only position for women was prone. And I have read about that for a long time in a lot of other books. What did the women at that time think of that? And was he just joking or was he dead serious? SE (01:11:42): He was not dead serious. And you can read many other people's descriptions of Stokely Carmichael as being one of the people in SNCC who treated women equally. So it's the implication that he was one of the most macho people around is unfair. It was a joke. It- SE (01:12:03): People around is unfair. It was a joke. It was made at the end of a very long, contentious conference, late at night. It was a joke about the sexual relations that had happened frequently within the Civil Rights movement. It is a movement of young people. And what is important about that quote to me is certainly not to vilify Stokely Carmichael, but to notice that the quote when he said that the people around him just laughed. They were tired. They realized yeah, there was a lot of sex that went around. But when other people reported that quote, and it bounced through the movement on a rumor mill, huge numbers of women heard that quote. And to them, it named the sexism that they had experienced in the movement. It is really not about Stokely, it is about how those words resonated with lots of women who had been active in the movement. So in personal politics, I talk about it some, how I had a hard time tracking down someone who talked to me about that quote, but I heard the quote from many people who were not there, many, many people. And that is what I think is really important is not what Stokely really meant, which was basically, there's been a lot of sex around here. But what it meant to people who heard it. SM (01:13:58): Casey Hayden and Mary King wrote a position paper that women were treated as second class citizens, just as African Americans were treated in the nation at large. How important was that document? Because I think there has been reference that it reveals the origins of the modern feminist movement. SE (01:14:20): Yeah, it was one of the very, very first articulations of the issue of women in relation to the Civil Rights movement. It is the opening shot that you can trace straight from there through a series of other documents to the beginning of the women's movement. So it was very, very important. SM (01:14:50): One other quote, this is from someone else, Belinda Rubbalet, and her quote is, "Feminism did not evolve from the sexist treatment within SNCC, but from the organization liberating philosophy and open structure that fostered challenges to authority." SE (01:15:07): I think that is fair. What I have been trying to say is it took both. I think she is right. That is the most fundamental, but then there was some sexism, and it's that contradiction of the movement that offered this idea of equality, this very liberating idea and this open possibility to take on leadership roles. And then within that context, when traditional American sexism showed up from time to time as it did, as it could not-not have, women had ideas and tools with which to react to it. SM (01:16:01): Yeah. One of the things about that particular comment is also linked to the students for Democratic society, because the participatory democracy, remember Tom Hayden, when he came to our campus, talked about participatory democracy and seems like SNCC was the epitome of participatory democracy. SE (01:16:21): It was the epitome of participatory democracy. And SBS took a lot of those ideas from SNCC. SM (01:16:24): You also mentioned, I read some place that you thought the 14th Amendment was a slap in the face because it only gave African American men the right to vote. SE (01:16:36): No, I did not say that. SM (01:16:37): Oh, okay. SE (01:16:38): It did. It was experienced by the women who had been active in the abolition movement and the Women's Rights Movement in the 1850s and (19)60s, they experienced it as a slap in the face because it put the word male into the constitution. Some of those women said, "Look, we do not like it, but this is all we can get right now. And it's more important to give Black men the vote than to insist on getting everything." But it raised the issue of voting to the forefront in the women's rights movement in the 19th century, from that point on, focused on the right to vote as its key issue. SM (01:17:38): Well, I am down to my final three questions, if that is okay. SE (01:17:42): Oh, good. SM (01:17:44): Because I am going to do the hour and a half. It's been one hour and 17 minutes, and I am going to keep it to one 30. SE (01:17:49): All right. SM (01:17:50): So we got 13 minutes. I took a group of students in 1995 to Washington DC as part of our leadership on the road programs, and we met Senator Muskie. And the students I took, helped me develop some questions to ask him. And one of them was about the issue of healing within the nation and within the generation. The question was this, because they had seen, they knew he was the vice-presidential candidate in (19)68, and they knew about Chicago. They had seen what happened in Chicago that year and the assassinations that year. And the question was this, due to all the divisions that were taking place in the boomers' generation when they were younger, do you think that they are going to go to their graves like the Civil War generation, not truly healing due to the divisions between Black and white, male and female, gay and straight, those who were for the war against the war, those who supported the troops or were against the troops? Do you think they are going to go to their grave not healing? And just your thoughts on the whole issue of healing. SE (01:19:03): Yeah, I actually do not think so. And of course you have to again say people are different, some people may go to their grave not healed because they want to hang on to their anger for reasons that are theirs. But I would not say that that is true of a generation at all. I think that there are lots of connections across racial lines within our generation that 45 years ago would have been difficult to sustain. I think that there's certainly men and women in our generation have engaged in deep debates about what it means to be men and women and have come to various kinds of resolutions about that. I think separatism, except for a few people who hang onto it, separatism, is not where people are pulling away and refusing to talk to those who are different. And I think most of us, and here, I will just speak personally because I do not really want to speak for my generation, but I personally feel grateful for having been able to live through the things I lived through. And there was a time that was very divisive and fairly painful because of that. But I do not feel I am stuck in that place at all. And the people that I know in my generation are not either. SM (01:20:46): I know that Senator Muskie in his response, made no reference to anything in the (19)60s, nothing, not even (19)68 convention. He looked up at the students after about 30 minutes, it looked like he had a tear in his eye. And he said, "We have not healed since the Civil War due to the issue of race." And he went on to talk about that in detail and the loss of life during the Civil War, because he had just seen the Ken Burn series. SE (01:21:16): Oh, that is interesting. That is really interesting. Well, I do think that there are a huge amount of unhealed things in American society, but then we're not talking about a particular generation. And if you look at the immigration debate right now, we have got a lot of some of the same awful stuff going on. SM (01:21:42): My next to last question is a question dealing with, I have talked to many feminists and I talked to one prominent feminist at her home in New York City about six weeks ago. I will not mention her name, but she likes the National Organization for Women. But she says she is disappointed in it because of the fact that if you walk into their headquarters now, the only things you are going to see as far as pickup materials, this is the first perception you have when you walk into an office. They have literature there dealing with abortion, literature dealing with the pill, and I think literature dealing with AIDS. And her comment was, "Those are all important issues, but there is a lot more issues for women than that." And she felt that that they have been hung up on those three issues. SE (01:22:39): And I do not have enough inside information about NOW to make a statement about them and their priorities as an organization. And I certainly think that there is reasons in Tidal Wave, I really wrestled with why the body was so important in the second wave of feminism, and you are lifting up issues that are about that. Also, domestic violence and so forth. But I would agree that we have a huge range of issues, and it is going to take a new generation to articulate a new focus based on their lived experience. Because I think people in our generation, we know what we experienced, but the world has changed in so many ways that we need new generations to clarify where are the flashpoints for them. SM (01:23:43): The plan of question here is the issue of trust. One of the qualities that has often been defined within the boomer generation, and that really includes the entire generation, even the activists, I have read this in books, it is just they are not a very trusting generation. They have not been trusting from the get-go, particularly with respect to the leaders that represent them in government. And as a result of the lies that many of them have seen and the disappointments that they have had in their leaders from the time they were young, right into their twenties and thirties. And they saw Lyndon Johnson, and they knew that the Gulf of Tonkin was a lie. They saw Watergate with Richard Nixon. They were questions about President Kennedy's policy on Vietnam. And anybody who was a student, particularly in the first 10 years of the boomer generation, knew that Eisenhower was the first one that lied on national television about the U2 incident. And I had interviewed one person who said that I believe in leaders. And certainly I always believed in Ike until he did that. And everything changed. So we know from history that many of the people in the (19)60s and (19)70s, the people on college campuses did not trust university presidents. They did not trust their religious leaders in the churches and synagogues. They did not trust anybody in corporate leadership. They did not trust anybody in the leadership responsibilities. So the question I am asking, do you believe that that is a negative or a positive within the generation? And I add one other note. The reason why I asked this question, I was in a Psychology 101 class at Binghamton University in my freshman year, and the professors talked for an hour about the importance of trust. And its basic premise was, if you cannot trust, you will never be a success in life. Yet seems like a lot of the movements that came because we did not trust. Women did not trust men; the anti-war women did not trust the leaders in Washington. You got all the movements, so just whether it's good or bad? SE (01:26:03): Oh boy, I need to pull your question apart again. You have got a lot of specifics that are true. People learn to distrust leaders who were not trustworthy. You end up with Watergate. But the issue, I am not quite sure about the framing of your issue, because you are saying, here is a generation that discovered as leaders were not trustworthy, did that condemn them to never being a success? SM (01:26:40): Well, that was a professor saying that, but I am just – SE (01:26:44): I think what it does is put a burden on us to build a democracy in which we in fact do hold our leaders accountable in such a way that we do trust them. And that is a long-term change that we need to work to bring about. And that requires a lot more engagement at the grassroots level. All those ideals about participatory democracy and so forth. Some are not realizable on a large scale, but they create some values that are very important to figure out ways to bring about. And they are pretty, are plenty of people that came in my generation out of the (19)60s as community organizers working at the grassroots level, doing the kind of things that Barack Obama later did. And so that is not just about a negative attitude saying, "Authority is bad," or you that you cannot trust anyone over 30. Well, most of us are maybe double 30. So, problem. But it does raise a question of how do you create a society in which you have leaders that you do trust? Not because you hand off to them responsibility and do not pay attention, but because you are engaged with them and they are accountable to you. SM (01:28:17): Since I have two minutes, so can I ask one more? SE (01:28:23): Okay. SM (01:28:24): And that is the last question. SE (01:28:25): I am making coffee in the background. So you are just going to hear little [inaudible]. SM (01:28:28): That is okay. What do you think the legacy will be of the generation that grew up after World War II when the history books are written 50, 75 years after they are gone? What will historians and... SE (01:28:46): I do not know. I do not know. I am a historian, and that guessing about the future is something that I have a tough time with because I really do not know. I do think it is a demographic bump. It had a particular shared experience as a cohort or some sub cohorts within it, was involved in massive changes in American society. But I think there is a lot more that we need to know about what comes after, before we can make those judgements. SM (01:29:24): You are right, because we are just talking about boomers. SE (01:29:28): We are in the middle of it still. SM (01:29:29): Yeah. We are in the middle and they can change a lot of things. And the one thing I did not mention when I was talking about healing, and that is the fact, how is the Vietnam Memorial itself, I am sure you have been there – SE (01:29:42): Oh, it is very powerful. SM (01:29:43): Yeah. When Jan Scruggs wrote the book To Heal a Nation, his goal was not only to heal the veterans and their families, but hopefully to heal the nation from that war. What do you think that is done with respect to the healing process, not only for vets and anti-war people, but the nation as a whole? SE (01:30:01): Well, again, I do not have any data on the nation as a whole. I can tell you my own personal experience of that memorial was extremely powerful. And I have talked about it with my students often when I talk about the Vietnam War and how it tore this country of par. And then talk about that beautiful place, which is like a scar and it names the names and it is a place of mourning and grief, and people leave their wreaths and they leave teddy bears and whatever. It honors without glorifying. And I find that very, very profound. SM (01:30:46): And of course, Diane Carlson Evans did a tremendous job making sure the Women's Memorial was there. SE (01:30:52): Right. SM (01:30:53): And she had to go before Congress, and she had to deal with a lot of issues that women have had to face their whole lives through the hearings. SE (01:31:00): Exactly. SM (01:31:00): Was there any question I did not ask that you thought I was going to ask? SE (01:31:04): No, I was not quite sure what your trajectory was, but I will be very interested. When do you think you are going to finish this book? SM (01:31:15): Well, the interviews are going to end at the end of September, and then I am going to be hibernating for about six months and transcribing all of them myself. SE (01:31:24): Wow. SM (01:31:24): I am not going to – SE (01:31:24): That is a lot of work. I know. I have done. SM (01:31:26): Yeah, because I do not trust anybody else. Peter Goldman, who I have gotten to know who wrote the book on Malcolm X said he has had nothing but bad experiences handing off transcripts, even when they were covered by grants, he says, "I end up doing them all over again because of the mistakes that are made." SE (01:31:42): Oh. SM (01:31:43): So anyways, I am hoping that next year it will be done and then I am finishing, like I said, I am going to need two pictures of you though. SE (01:31:55): Okay. SM (01:31:56): And I do not know if you can mail them to my home address or I can email you just two. SE (01:32:02): What kinds of pictures? SM (01:32:03): Just – SE (01:32:04): Why do not you send me an email telling me what you're looking for? I can send them to you on email. SM (01:32:08): Okay. I will. SE (01:32:11): So that would be the best way to do it. SM (01:32:13): Well, thank you very much. SE (01:32:14): You are very welcome. SM (01:32:15): And you have a great day. SE (01:32:15): All right. SM (01:32:15): Bye now. SE (01:32:15): Bye. (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. Sara M. Evans Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Evans, Sara M. (Sara Margaret), 1943- ; McKiernan, Stephen Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/wav Description An account of the resource Dr. Sara M. Evans is a Professor Emeritus in History at the University of Minnesota. She has helped the university become a center for Women's History and Women's Studies, showing how women's lives impacted society. Dr. Evans earned her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts from Duke University and received her PhD from the University of North Carolina. 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 2010-08-16 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.10.2016.49 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. 92:32 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/b89a5d08a08954b62c4d47fe0e16ab26.jpg 03198c17fb2c2298098fe26085eb78bc https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/1c8cdbc11084b50b1d1bb92ce849cdeb.mp3 1cc31cdc9881cea5c8f258e6596492b8 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 2011-02-09 Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Stephen McKiernan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Bob Fass, 1933- Language English Biographical Text <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Bob Fass, a native of Brooklyn, NY, is a radio broadcaster in New York for over 50 years. After college, he joined the U.S. Army. In the 1960s, he helped to create a free-form radio on his program, Radio Unnameable. During his career, Fass interviewed many cultural figures about numerous topics. He has a Bachelor's degree from Syracuse University and his radio show is still on air. You can tune in every Thursday night from midnight until 3:00 am.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:13057,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;11&quot;:4,&quot;12&quot;:0,&quot;15&quot;:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;16&quot;:10}">Bob Fass (June 29, 1933 – April 24, 2021), a native of Brooklyn, NY, was a radio broadcaster in New York for over 50 years. After college, he joined the U.S. Army. In the 1960s, he helped to create a free-form radio on his program, <em>Radio Unnameable</em>. During his career, Fass interviewed many cultural figures about numerous topics. He had a Bachelor's degree from Syracuse University and his radio show was on the air until his death.&nbsp;</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;Theater; Nina Simone; Hippies; Yippies; Black Power; Julius Lester; Sexual revolution; Birth control pill; Counterculture; Generation gap; Jim Webb; Baby boom generation; Voting; Radio show; Musicians; Bob Dylan; Gulley Jimson; WBAI; WFMU; The Horse's Mouth.&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;:13228792}}">Theater; Nina Simone; Hippies; Yippies; Black Power; Julius Lester; Sexual revolution; Birth control pill; Counterculture; Generation gap; Jim Webb; Baby boom generation; Voting; Radio show; Musicians; Bob Dylan; Gulley Jimson; WBAI; WFMU; The Horse's Mouth.</span> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 223:03 Subject LCSH Radio broadcasters; Soldiers; Fass, Bob, 1933--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 Bob Fass Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Fass, Bob, 1933- ; McKiernan, Stephen Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/wav Subject The topic of the resource Radio broadcasters; Soldiers; Fass, Bob, 1933--Interviews Description An account of the resource <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Bob Fass, a native of Brooklyn, NY, is a radio broadcaster in New York for over 50 years. After college, he joined the U.S. Army. In the 1960s, he helped to create a free-form radio on his program, Radio Unnameable. During his career, Fass interviewed many cultural figures about numerous topics. He has a Bachelor's degree from Syracuse University and his radio show is still on air. You can tune in every Thursday night from midnight until 3:00 am.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:13057,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;11&quot;:4,&quot;12&quot;:0,&quot;15&quot;:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;16&quot;:10}">Bob Fass (June 29, 1933 – April 24, 2021), a native of Brooklyn, NY, was a radio broadcaster in New York for over 50 years. After college, he joined the U.S. Army. In the 1960s, he helped to create a free-form radio on his program, <em>Radio Unnameable</em>. During his career, Fass interviewed many cultural figures about numerous topics. He had a Bachelor's degree from Syracuse University and his radio show was on the air until his death.&nbsp;</span> 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 2011-02-09 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.10.2016.50a ; McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.50b 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. 223:03 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/170dd7969ba33a631ded4eeb72cc0ee6.jpg bad2da628bdcdb8f605698446383d94a https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/b479aa5fba4ab241b6b90166a6ffe6a3.mp3 30b8f7a08b8319ea585c7c932d786244 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 ND Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Stephen McKiernan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed John Filo Language English Biographical Text <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;John Filo is a photographer who took the picture of the 1970 Kent State shootings, in which a 14 year old girl grieves over the body of a dead young man. This picture won him the Pulitzer prize. He is now a photography director for CBS in NY.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:13057,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;11&quot;:4,&quot;12&quot;:0,&quot;15&quot;:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;16&quot;:10}">John Filo is a photographer who took the picture of the 1970 Kent State shootings, in which a 14-year-old girl grieves over the body of a dead young man. This picture won him the Pulitzer Prize. He is now a photography director for CBS in NY.</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;Vietnam War; Vietnam memorial; Baby boom generation; Communism; Vietnam Veterans; Jane Fonda; Timothy Leary; Lyndon B. Johnson; Black Power; Tommie Smith; George Wallace; Benjamin Spock.&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;:13228792}}">Vietnam War; Vietnam memorial; Baby boom generation; Communism; Vietnam Veterans; Jane Fonda; Timothy Leary; Lyndon B. Johnson; Black Power; Tommie Smith; George Wallace; Benjamin Spock.</span> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 27:48 Subject LCSH Photographers; Kent State Shootings, Kent, Ohio, 1970; Awards—United States; Filo, John--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: John Filo Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan Transcriber: REV Date of interview: Not Dated --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (Start of Interview) SM (00:03): Okay, go right ahead. JF (00:04): But screen token, everyone was appalled. Everyone was appalled that young people get their news from the Daily Show, the Colbert Report, or listen to the late-night talk people, and they were joking sarcasm, with the powers that be. But, you go and watch it. And you go, they speak way more truth, than they speak comedy and that what maybe is why it is funny. SM (00:33): Right. A couple final quick questions here. Why in your opinion, did the Vietnam War end? JF (00:41): Why did it end? SM (00:41): Yes. JF (00:45): I think people were just tired of it. I mean, why it ended is, there was no good reason to continue it. I mean, it was a civil war going on in that country that we were trying to get involved with. At some point, they realized, communists were not going to get in votes and canoe on over. SM (01:08): Do you think- JF (01:09): See, I mean, I was brought up on that domino effect- SM (01:11): Right. Yep. Yep. JF (01:12): ... in grade school. Well, if you let this country fall, then this country was going to fall, then this country was going to fall and this country was going to fall. But at the same time, communism was losing its influence too, in the world. I do not know. Why it ended? All I know is I was glad it ended. It took too long to end. SM (01:35): Do you feel college students played an important part? If you were to pick between one of these two, college students and protests on college campuses or Middle America, when they finally realized the war was not worth it because their sons and daughters were coming home in caskets. JF (01:53): Well, I do not know so much in caskets, but you had many, once again, I think it is many different levels. Six people, a long time to get a change going on. They do not want to hear it from just one voice. But I think, did you have that friendly fire book? SM (02:14): Yes. JF (02:14): Out about the same time. SM (02:16): Yes. JF (02:18): There were scandalous stories about the bodies that were coming back. Some of them were filled with, in the thoracic cavity, being filled with drugs. There was a drug ring. And there was all kind of nasty little, it was not a generational story anymore. It was just like, and so if we win, what happens? We have an air base closer to... And then again, it is like, you have these submarines patrolling the seas, communist and US. They could wipe out the earth how many times over. It gets to a point where it is just like, okay. And there were leaders long before Kennedy that said, could never get into ground war in Asia. It is an old military thing, we said that. SM (03:18): Has the wall itself in Washington D.C., which I know you visited. How important has that been toward healing the boomer generation? Or is it mostly just the vets and their families? JF (03:32): I think it affects all of us at certain times. But I never understood. But I know there were people that did it, but when I never understood this part, people I knew, I do not think anyone was ever upset at a soldier that they were seeing. You hear the stories. I came back and I was spit upon, as a killer of Vietnamese babies. Where I came from, I think everyone had compassion for the soldier. I think we were all realizing that the soldier was just part of the bigger problem. I mean, because under orders you were drafted, you had to go. And I think this war in Iraq, could have been over too, had there been a draft. But what they have done is send people back, three and four times. SM (04:22): How important has music been in the lives of Boomers and in your eyes, who are the artists you feel shaped the generation, including the songs that had the greatest impact? JF (04:34): Yeah, music was very important. Music was sort of like the thing you could interpret and listen to. And there were still obviously different styles, but I think it all started, for me, I think it started with the folk movement, bodied finally by Bob Dylan. And then you had your other songs, other rock bands that brew against war, killing. I mean, that was a big part of that music of that generation. SM (05:11): When you look at some of the musicians, whether it be Joan Baez or Bob Dylan, Phil Oaks, Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, they were popular on college campuses and also because they were activists. So there was that mentality, and they lived their whole lives that way they can continue. Some have passed on and some continue. Richie Havens that whole group. A last question before the general things is, when the best history books are written, and what do you think the lasting legacy of the boomer generation will be? JF (05:50): Well, I do not know. SM (05:50): And that is probably 50 years, after the boomer generation is in their eighties. JF (06:00): I do not know. I honestly do not know. I cannot think of any other generation, other than the roaring (19)20s that you remember having an influence on culture so much. I honestly do not know. I have not really given that much thought. I would think that the fact that it did help America, I mean, it is a very historic time. From coming up through the Civil Rights Movement and wars will somehow always be with us, it seems like, in some small or large aspect. It will not be on that scale that Great Wars were, but it seems to me. But I think within the generation of seeing civil rights and ending with a black president and some shifts that are not yet determined. SM (07:09): And he is still considered a boomer. He is a young boomer. And then of course Bill Clinton was a boomer and so was George Bush. JF (07:16): I mean, I think, that is what it takes. There was a quote somewhere, when [inaudible] Kennedy, [inaudible] or was it Martin Luther. Someone says, how long do you think it would take for America to have a viable black candidate? And I think the quote was back in the six- 40 years. SM (07:43): I think it was Dr. King. JF (07:43): Dr. King. SM (07:44): I think it was Dr. King. So you might have said, in one of his speeches. JF (07:47): 40 years. SM (07:47): Yeah, and it might have been- JF (07:47): It is almost pathetic, almost. SM (07:57): Yeah. I am going to mention just some names here and just get quick responses. Your thoughts on these people, these are personalities from the era. Tom Hayden? JF (08:06): All right. He was a West Coast leader and then became politician. I do not have any comments. SM (08:09): Jane Fonda? JF (08:19): Jane always liked acting and same things. I think she was misused too by the... SM (08:27): Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, the hippies? JF (08:30): Yeah. Yeah. I think they sort of took it the other way. Took it to the other side. SM (08:36): Timothy Leary? JF (08:39): Yeah. No way. Yeah. These are people I did not... You would look at and you would go, wow. SM (08:46): Okay. How about Richard Nixon? JF (08:48): You would go wow there too. I mean, I remember him involved in, what was it? Was not there a big scandal in the (19)50s? They found the film in the pumpkin. SM (08:57): Yeah, Checkers. JF (08:59): Checkers. SM (09:00): He had to give his Checkers speech. I am not sure if Checkers is up there in heaven with him. How about Spiro Agnew? JF (09:13): Yeah, battering A bombs of, they get to visit. Yeah, there it is. You are a typical politician. SM (09:16): Yep. JF (09:16): Do not be looking at me, criticizing, even though I am doing something totally illegal. SM (09:21): Eugene McCarthy? JF (09:24): Another leader. SM (09:28): And George McGovern? JF (09:30): George McGovern, same way. World War II veteran. Who heard young voices. I mean, yeah, just could not get it together. He was a real generational candidate. SM (09:53): John Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy? JF (09:53): Yeah. As I get older, my feelings are more with Bobby. John, I was too young with. Definitely Bobby, I think. SM (10:02): Lyndon Johnson? JF (10:04): I am sorry. SM (10:04): Lyndon Johnson? JF (10:05): I Know. I think that man, considering his background, I think he did a lot of great things for the country. I mean, that whole great society, is not so much that, but his homework and the civil rights. A surprising person, as far as I am concerned. I would have guessed him to be so mainline politically. So non-controversial. SM (10:31): How about Robert McNamara? JF (10:43): Well, there we go. Yeah. How many years later, apologized. SM (10:44): Mm-hmm. How about the black power, the term black power and the people like Kiwi Newton, Bobby Seal, Eldridge Cleaver, that group? JF (10:52): Well, I think, from being a white person, I think we needed these people to be like, they were pointers. Wow. These people have a lot of, [inaudible] hate. But then you had to, they used to made you find out the reason why. You had to look at the condition of [inaudible]. SM (11:17): And as a fact, and as a photographer, you are the only person I am asking this to. What was your thought of that Tommy Smith picture with him fist raised and John Carlos? JF (11:26): I thought it was a great photo. I thought it was a great photo, it was a very rogue photo. That is the point. They knew the consequences. They knew that they were going to be severely criticized, not ostracized. I think they were. SM (11:45): Yeah. We had Tommy on the campus and I think he knew what was coming, by doing it. George Wallace? JF (11:55): Another drum beater. Oh, wow. I remember, I even met Orville Faubus. SM (12:05): You did? JF (12:05): One on one. He was one of the nice guys. And then you realize, I was not going to let them come into Little Rock. SM (12:14): How about Ronald Reagan? JF (12:15): I do not know. He was a great communicator. SM (12:15): Danielle Ellsberg? JF (12:15): There is another one standing up for [inaudible] rights, right? SM (12:15): Yep. Benjamin Spock? JF (12:35): I got to meet him too and spend some time with him. SM (12:37): Oh, you are lucky. JF (12:38): He is a guy that changed a lot of attitudes, changed a lot of thinking, and boy he got blanks against the war. Just destruction. Longshoreman held up his sailboat delivery and, oh my God. SM (12:56): How about the Berrigan- JF (12:57): Could meet a nicer man. SM (12:59): Phillip and Daniel Berrigan? JF (13:10): Same thing. Had to do what they had to do. SM (13:10): And then some of the women leaders, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan? JF (13:15): Fantastic. What a great thing. What a great thing, pointing out sexism stuff. You just do not realize all this was going on, in the (19)50s. SM (13:34): Barry Goldwater? JF (13:38): Do not remember him. Just, little too conservative. SM (13:45): These are just some of the terms that boomers will remember as they grew up. Tet, T-E-T. You know what Tet was? JF (13:51): Yeah. SM (13:53): What is your thoughts on Tet? JF (13:55): Tet Offensive? SM (13:55): Yes. JF (13:55): Yeah. SM (13:55): That was (19)68. JF (13:58): Wow. Well, that is when a lot of the, are you thinking that is when a lot of the people that were for the war started thinking, "Oh, I do not know"? SM (14:08): It was around that timeframe. JF (14:09): Yeah. SM (14:10): Watergate? JF (14:15): Yeah. That is what you said. Boy, those guys are just power crazy. They probably have the election long ago, but they are going to make sure. SM (14:23): Hippies? JF (14:23): Yeah, hippies were, they are fun. SM (14:30): And how about the yippies? JF (14:32): Oh, the yippies were even stranger. The hippies, they actually believe what they did for a little while. SM (14:39): How about the counterculture? That term, the counterculture? JF (14:44): Yeah. That sort of, you realize you did not have to, I think at a time it had to be known as a counterculture, but then they realized, for you to change thing, you had to be sort of absorbed in the mainstream with countercultures dots. But by saying counterculture, it is sort of, it puts you in another uniform. Like being a hippie or being a yippie. You realize if you are going to make changes, you got sort of dress like them. SM (15:15): Students For Democratic? JF (15:17): I was more impressed with boomers that did go to bat, put on a three-piece suit, go and argue. SM (15:24): What were your favorite clothes of the counterculture? JF (15:27): Favorite clothes? SM (15:28): Yeah. JF (15:29): I do not- SM (15:29): Is there something that stuck out? Everybody heard about the [inaudible] jacket early on. JF (15:33): Well, my favorite or favorite to wear? SM (15:36): No, just the favorite clothes that you liked. JF (15:38): Oh, I think I was impressed with the, since I never had any hips, I was always impressed with hip-huggers and flair pants. And I said, "Man, I must look really cool if I put them on and look like some circus clown." Because I did not have thin legs, thin body to where fashion, the fashion hung. All I did was flare pants pointed to my flaws. SM (16:11): Woodstock? JF (16:13): Yeah. I never went, but it was the idea of it. I was like, wow, you are going to go, it sounds miserable. SM (16:21): Well, a lot of people cleanly were there, that probably were not. JF (16:23): I know. I know. It is like, what is his name, scored his hundred-point game. The NBA. It is like Kent State too. It is like how many people said they were there? SM (16:44): Oh, that is true. That is true. Vietnam veterans against the war? JF (16:44): All right. Yeah. I think they have probably achieved a lot more than anyone gives them credit for. Especially when, you actually had decorated heroes. SM (16:56): Were there any books of the era that stood out amongst any others? Any written books? JF (17:03): Wow. I am trying to think what was... You mean the sort of went pop or sort of- SM (17:12): It could be authors or people who wrote. JF (17:17): All I remember is the new, I mean, everyone read Tolkien, but then Castaneda came along on a separate reality and the native Mexican drug, American kind of drugs off the land kind of thing. Yeah. SM (17:34): How about the favorite movies of the era? JF (17:44): Oh, geez. There was a lot of movies I think it was, that made nothing, what was it? Living at the Ridge or Plaza or something. SM (17:56): There was The Graduate, which was a big one. JF (17:57): So The Graduate. Yeah, it was a... SM (18:00): Midnight Cowboy and that whole group. JF (18:02): Right. SM (18:05): See, anything else here? I have John Dean down here too, only because he was part of the Watergate group. He is the guy that spilled the beans, supposedly. I guess that is about it. I cannot... Oh, communes? JF (18:19): Communes. Yeah. That was just like, yeah, I knew people that went to a few and they go, "Man, it just turned into, it always turns into ugly human center." It seemed like. I mean, I am amazed that some people put out for years. And then someone told me, there are still a few in existence, I do not know if it is going on. SM (18:46): Yeah, I think George Bush is in charge of one. The only thing I am going to mention in terms of the books that were very popular, the two are, Greening of America, if you remember that book? Which was Charles Reich and then the Making of a Counterculture by Theodore Roszak. And then Tom Wolf was a big, popular guy during that period too. I guess he still is. Are there any questions that you thought I was going to ask and did not ask? JF (19:22): Not really. Not really. SM (19:23): Nope. And what do you think the lasting legacy at Kent State will be? JF (19:30): Why? SM (19:32): Okay. JF (19:33): I do not know. That sort of needs a guarded, it almost needs a guarded position. I guess, it is whatever groups want have define it as, but I think the legacy for me is that, is there a way to have free speech in this country and in a time of maybe disapproval, without it ever coming to violence? SM (20:04): Mm-hmm. As a person like myself who just worked almost 30 years in higher ed. By the way, I just retired. JF (20:15): Wow. SM (20:15): I had retired to write my book and then I am going back to work because I put this off. I took early retirement so that I could finish this book and then write it and then go back and do the things I want to do, beyond. I forget what I was going to ask here, the final question. Oh no, I lost my train of thought. JF (20:35): Keep going. That happens to me too. SM (20:35): Golly. It was a final- JF (20:40): I mean, you could call me in a couple days and I will say I should have never said that. I should have said that. SM (20:43): Yeah. Well, the question I was going to ask is this, because it goes back to the activism. I think universities, this is just Steve McKiernan I am thinking of writing about it because I have firsthand experiences, not only myself, but others that have worked at other universities. I think there is a fear of activism on university campuses and I am not meaning volunteerism because I think the administrators who are running universities today are mostly boomers. Or down the road will be the children of boomers. And there is a fear of, they will have the memories of what happened in the (19)60s and they will always be out there supporting it and saying they support it. But there is much more controls and fear. Your thoughts on that? Because today's parents, when they send their kids to college, do not want disruption of their sons or daughter's education because they are paying good money and they want their sons and daughters to get a degree. And so there is a fear of disruption and if disruption happens, I will take my son or daughter away. So I do not know. JF (21:44): Yeah, I mean it is, I remember going to all these universities with my daughter. She just finished her freshman year at UMass Amherst and it is like everyone talks about her class. In four years, these will be the people that help you get jobs. And in other words, there was a big strong commitment that you get on this conveyor belt and you are going to get off it in four years. And you are all going to get on it right now and you are all going to get off of it in four years. There is no, well, if it takes you five. The packages are all same. There is your junior year abroad, there is this and there is that, and there is there, go do this in Central America or something. Yeah. There was no room for question of self-discovery thing. Hit your wagon up and we will on hit you in four years. SM (22:54): Yeah. Because in the (19)60s, the boomers, there was a questioning about the IBM mentality of it. And now that does not seem to be, I do not know. JF (23:01): No, there does not seem to be any matter of fact. No one can promise them anything. That is the other thing. There is research grants for government work maybe. And that is about it. And I mean, I am talking to people that are graduating from Columbia, that pay big money to graduate, go to the journalism school. And I am saying, that is great. Now you are going to take a job that pays half that, it cost you to get the degree. Yeah. There is all sorts of free adjustment that have to be made. Now all of a sudden science and the engineering is back in good grace. But on the other hand, I am still, what do we do for a plumber and what are we doing? I mean, I am not saying whatever, but here is my daughter and I said, "What did you just signed up for?" Psychology, but I think I want to move into environmental science. SM (24:10): Yeah. One thing today's college students do not do is, they do not question the money that is coming in or going out from the university. They do not even know what is going in and coming out. So whereas a lot of the students in my era, you are era, questioned that. JF (24:22): Yeah. Absolutely. SM (24:24): I had spoken to Mary when she was at Kent State and last time, and I promised to send her pictures that I took, not as nice as yours, but I sent her the pictures and she was going to interview me, but she has not correspondence since she got my pictures. So maybe she does not want to be a part of the project after all. She is a very private person. JF (24:48): [inaudible] but she always sort of works through. Have you talked to Gregory Payne? SM (24:54): Who? JF (24:55): In Emerson University. He is the one that sort of got it together the first time and she sort of uses him as a sounding board. SM (25:03): What is his name? JF (25:04): Dr. Gregory Payne. P-A-Y-N-E. SM (25:09): Okay. JF (25:09): And he showed up at Kenny. He looked like- SM (25:12): Oh, he said the fitting blonde hair. JF (25:12): Yeah. SM (25:17): Yeah. Well see, when I saw her, she gave me her email and I emailed her. She wanted my pictures and then she said, "I will probably do the interview." And then I sent the pictures and she would not even respond if she got the pictures. So I do not know. JF (25:29): I do not know what is going on. SM (25:33): Yeah, but anyways. Well that is it. JF (25:34): Okay. SM (25:35): Thank you. JF (25:37): So if there is any more questions, just call me back or let me know. SM (25:39): Will do. Well, I interviewed Alan, when he was on our campus many years ago, but I got to, I have never really finished my interview with him. So I might interview him. I would like to interview his sister, Chick. JF (25:50): Yeah. Oh, Chick is great too. SM (25:50): Yeah. But Mr. [inaudible], I am going to call you John. JF (25:55): Yeah. SM (25:55): Thank you very much. That picture was a very important part of my life. And I know you have probably heard that from a lot of people, but that picture touched the lives of college students that you do not even know and you will never know. So you need to know how important that picture was in my life because I went into higher education as a career because of what was happening at Kent State and other universities. So thank you for being the great photographer that you are. And I want to thank you again for the time you spent today answering my questions. I am meeting with a professor, up in [inaudible] college, to be able to help me with the transcribing of all these. So you will sort see the transcription before it is ever going to print. JF (26:39): Okay. But you saying on a different day I might have different answers too. It just seems like, as I get older, I am affected by what is going on around you now. You know what I mean? SM (26:48): Yeah. Well that whole thing of the (19)60s and (19)70s always affected my life. JF (26:53): Oh, yeah. SM (26:54): Well to the day I go to my grave. JF (26:58): Throw up. I mean, you actually questioned us already. I can imagine growing up in the (19)50s and... SM (27:00): Oh, yes. JF (27:03): I am sorry. I am not saying that was a bad time to grow up, but it was just, there was so much that was just accepted. SM (27:08): Yep. Yet during that very same period, our parents loved us so much. JF (27:14): Great. SM (27:14): And they wanted to give us so much. And sometimes I go back and say, "Geez, those were, not knowing what was going on in the world and being innocent as an elementary school kid." Probably like you were. JF (27:27): Yeah. SM (27:27): You had great memories being with your parents. So anyways. Well you have a great day. JF (27:34): All right Scott. And call back me anytime you got any other- SM (27:36): Steve. JF (27:37): If I failed to answer them. SM (27:38): Yep. JF (27:39): Okay. SM (27:40): Thanks a lot. Bye. JF (27:42): Take care. Bye. Good luck. SM (27:42): Yep, thanks. (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 John Filo Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Filo, John ; McKiernan, Stephen Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/wav Subject The topic of the resource Photographers; Kent State Shootings, Kent, Ohio, 1970; Awards—United States; Filo, John--Interviews Description An account of the resource John Filo is a photographer who took the picture of the 1970 Kent State shootings, in which a 14 year old girl grieves over the body of a dead young man. This picture won him the Pulitzer prize. He is now a photography director for CBS in NY. 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 Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.51 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. 27:48 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/1f04ded7dd5330a1bc263a204320e220.jpg bca0f11ffca39d132e5411e14d810949 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/c9afb1ec0b0eafa9985b6aa4ae998780.mp3 65268b98da9b0d3527a5b2690a01f0cb 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 2010-12-13 Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Stephen McKiernan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Richard Flacks Language English Biographical Text <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Dr. Richard Flacks is an academic, social activist and Emeritus Professor of Sociology at University of California-Santa Barbara. He is the author of Making History: The American Left and the American Mind and Beyond the Barricades. Dr. Flacks has a Ph.D. from University of Michigan.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:13057,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;11&quot;:4,&quot;12&quot;:0,&quot;15&quot;:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;16&quot;:10}">Dr. Richard Flacks is an academic, social activist and Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of California-Santa Barbara. He is the author of <em>Making History: The American Left and the American Mind</em> and <em>Beyond the Barricades</em>. Dr. Flacks has a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.</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;Teacher unionism; McCarthy period; Red Diaper Baby; Brooklyn College in the nineteen fifties; Cuban missile crisis; Port Huron; Nineteen sixties; Baby boom generation; Student activists; Women's 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;:13228792}}">Teacher unionism; McCarthy period; Red Diaper Baby; Brooklyn College in the nineteen fifties; Cuban missile crisis; Port Huron; Nineteen sixties; Baby boom generation; Student activists; Women's movement</span> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 161:24 Subject LCSH Political activists--United States; College teachers; Sociologists; University of California, Santa Barbara; Flacks, Richard--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: Richard Flacks Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan Transcriber: REV Date of interview: 13 December 2010 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (Start of Interview) SM (00:00:04): Testing one, two. My first question is how did you become who you are as a person? Could you give me a little bit of background on your growing up years before you went off to graduate school at Michigan? What I have- RF (00:00:25): I was born in Brooklyn, New York of parents who themselves were left wing folks. They were both New York City school teachers, very active in pioneering teacher unionism and community work in... My mother worked in black community [inaudible] she taught school there, first grade. And they were both... And Brooklyn, in the years I was growing up, World War II and after, was a pretty progressive left wing environment, generally in terms of where people's political identifications were. And there was a widespread left wing culture in New York. I went to children's camps that were interracial and progressive, and most of my parents friends were of similar mind. But then came the McCarthy period, and my parents were among a couple hundred teachers who were purged [inaudible] their alleged political affiliations from the schools. And that was part of this much broader climate in the country, of course, the political repression that I experienced from the time I was about 12 years old on, this was very significant part of my sense. SM (00:02:16): How did your parents... Because I have talked to quite a few other people too, that had similar experiences being labeled red diaper babies, but the question is, as a young person growing up as a child or young teenager, how did your parents... Did they sit down with you and tried to explain why this was happening? RF (00:02:36): McCarthy, period? SM (00:02:37): Yeah, yes. RF (00:02:39): Well, they did not need to... I was attentive enough and aware enough, and I did not need a lot of sitting down and explaining. I got it from an early time, and, of course... And I attended public meetings where people who were dissenters from the McCarthy atmosphere would speak. I mean, it was just very much a part of my life and it did not just, me and my parents sitting down. I mean, I must have asked them a lot of questions all through my childhood. But by the time of the... And in fact, the place that probably I got the most sense of awareness about all this was in the camp that I went to where a lot of the kids have families going through similar kinds of things. So there was a great deal of discussion and exchange about that. SM (00:03:52): What were your undergraduate college years like before you went off to Michigan? RF (00:03:57): I went to Brooklyn College, which is now part of the city university, precollege. And that was at the height of the (19)50s, sort of red scare. I was politically active, I joined the Young Democrats and became president of the Young Democrats. And I was part of a little group of more lefty kids who met and discussed things. But generally, when the Young Democrats and other groups try to get students to just signed petitions, for example, about civil rights issues, very mainstream seeming issues, well supporting a law to federal law against the poll tax, would they [inaudible]. Kids would say, "My mother told me when I get to college, do not sign anything. I will get into trouble in the future." There was a lot of that feeling among students. SM (00:05:10): One of the things about the (19)50s, before we get into the (19)60s is the (19)50s is always kind of labeled as a quiet time on university campuses. Although there was a lot of activism, obviously in the Civil Rights Movement. RF (00:05:26): Well, the civil right... In (19)55 and (195)6 was the Montgomery Bus Boycott, there were other things. A woman named Autherine Lucy tried to get into the University of Alabama. That was a major event that I remember. And yes, in fact, all through the (19)50s in college, you were aware that there was a kind of subterranean, bohemian, counter-cultural process going on for a lot of young people. Identification with beat poets and the jazz and folk music cultures, and New York was filled with those kinds of opportunities for college kids to go to and be part of. And so even though there was this miasma of political withdrawal, on one hand, there certainly was this cultural rebellion that you could immediately sense if you were a college student. And there were incidents, Brooklyn College was a particularly repressive college. The president of Brooklyn, Harry Gideon, was famous for having been brought to Brooklyn College in the early... Or I think it was in the, yeah early (19)50s, to clean it up from the communist influence on the student body. He literally abolished student government and set up a censorship regime over the student paper. Every year that I was there, by the end of the year, the student editors had resigned because of the restrictions being placed on them. And so there was a contingent of students even then at Brooklyn who were... And in the years, I was there, (19)54 to (19)58 were increasingly antagonistic to the administration and staging events. The most interesting sort of collective action that I remember, talking to you right now was when at the time that McCarthy was going to be censored, [inaudible] by the [inaudible], and there was a national movement called the Green Feather Movement. I do not know if you have ever heard of this. SM (00:08:11): No. RF (00:08:11): And all it was wearing a button with a green feather on it. Now, the root of that was that in Indiana, there was a move in the state legislature to ban Robin Hood because Robin Hood stole from the rich gave to the poor, he was clearly a communist. SM (00:08:28): Oh yeah. RF (00:08:31): So people started to wear these buttons, and it was almost like this feeling, well, yeah, we have been underground in our feelings, now this is a way to express it. And though by the time I was ready to graduate, I felt there was a loosening of, in many ways, of the atmosphere on... Even at Brooklyn College in terms of questioning. And in fact, there was a march on Washington, a couple of them called Youth March on Washington for integration that acquired Rustin. SM (00:09:10): Oh, yes. RF (00:09:12): That, and these were just small compared to later things, 20,000 people maybe went. But I remember going on one of those. So yeah, the more you can dig into it, the more you realize that there was a lot of permit, I would put that. SM (00:09:36): Right. In fact, there is a picture of Dr. King, I think in 1957 at the Lincoln Memorial. RF (00:09:41): Yeah. SM (00:09:42): Everybody thinks of (19)63, the March on Washington, but there was one previous, and of course by- RF (00:09:47): Yeah well, and Rustin got practice in staging those events because for 63, which he led to [inaudible], so yeah. SM (00:09:59): You know he is from Westchester? RF (00:10:02): Okay. SM (00:10:03): Yeah, and we did a national tribute to him in 1999 on our campus. So we had a lot... He is a historic figure from our area. One of the things, the Beats, it is interesting when I ask some of the people that I have interviewed, when did the (19)60s begin? Several individuals said that it really began with the Beats because they were anti-authoritarian, kind of did their own thing, they were very independent minded. They were a lot different, and of course, a lot of people think they were all secluded in New York City and San Francisco. So how could they really have that much of an influence? Kerouac and Ginsburg and [inaudible] Getty, and their- RF (00:10:49): Yeah, but they were featured. The big mass media in that era were magazines like Life Magazine and I remember that Life Magazine covered the Beats. And once that happens... And by the way, the same thing happened in (19)65 with SDS when Life did a big spread on it and we had never been heard of before. So once Life... In those in those years, Life and Look Magazines gave that kind of big pictorial display, these things were on the cultural map for a lot of people in middle of there, between the coast, so to speak. And I think I remember feeling to some extent, indeed that the Beats were something of a media hype. Because if you grew up in New York, you were aware that there was a much longer tradition of Bohemian cultural expression in Greenwich Village and so on and so on. We were attracted to going to the village on weekends and stuff, not just because of the Beats, but they were just the visible... In a way you could say the Beats nationalized Greenwich Village, made it national whereas [inaudible] they really were. But there were elements of what they were into Eastern religion so forth that were not fully in the awareness of a lot of... I knew. SM (00:12:39): The mains in the television tried to portray the Beats in a very humorous way with Maynard G. Krebs, remember that? RF (00:12:47): Well, there was a lot of that, yeah. And by the way, it is not just... I think music was a more important subcultural, and always has been, subcultural center than simply so called Beat... I mean, the jazz on the one hand and folk music on the other, there were two big overlapping circles of people who were orienting to this music because... And away from commercialized mass culture music during the (19)50s. And music because it was played in clubs and other social venues, people congregated around it. And that, I have always felt was crucial for what happened in creating a student movement was that there was this subculture around folk music, particularly. SM (00:13:58): Yeah. When you think of the Greenwich Village, you still think of Bob Dylan. RF (00:14:02): Yeah. SM (00:14:03): And you think of- RF (00:14:06): [inaudible] and many others of his type. It was interesting that a whole bunch of young troubadours emerged all at the same time, and they all went to Greenwich Village, that is where they... When they wanted to begin a career, because there were a bunch of small clubs there that they could be booked into and do record labels right there. It was like a little nexus for creating this. SM (00:14:38): Then you had some of the great comedians come out of there too, with Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce. They were certainly different, and they were from that kind of period too. RF (00:14:49): And all of that was the mix that I remember in my college year. And that is the (19)50s, yeah. SM (00:14:57): Now, talk about your college years at Michigan. I did some reading on... I have quite a few of your books, by the way. RF (00:15:05): Well, that is nice. SM (00:15:06): And I even have your book that you... One of the very early books, I was able to get ahold of that and read it. But talk about your college years at Michigan and your links to Tom Hayden. I know Tom, I have interviewed him twice. We brought him to our campus and he is unbelievable person as a human being and an intellect. And I can see how he influenced people like you. But you were a graduate student, but talk about Michigan a little bit. RF (00:15:34): Well, I went to Ann Arbor to study social psychology in 1958, graduated Brooklyn. At that time, there were three others of us who went at the same time, the Michigan Psych Department and Social Psychology program, were the... If you were interested in that topic and that subject, that was the place to go. So we were very lucky, the feeling that we had gotten into Michigan Social Psychology. And social psychology, I just add is an interesting discipline, whose roots to a great extent were in intellectuals who were German refugee intellectuals who were escaping from Hitler and wanted to understand how the German population, which was supposed to be so culturally advanced, could have fallen under Hitler's sway and so forth. That is the social psychology, that is part of what got me interested in that kind of topic. So anyway, but I had graduated from college in 58 with the feeling that I wanted to be in academia because there was no political future. I was a political guy, but I did not see any way to express that vocationally or in life terms, and that I was very good academically, and that is where I could maybe have more a chance to understand the world and express myself. I did not think politics was possible in the United States anymore. And if change in the world were to happen, it would be happening from third world revolutionary movements and things like that. But I did not really expect anything to the left in this country to happen. And in Ann Arbor, interesting by the way, this bohemian thread that I was talking about in New York was very evident in Ann Arbor, but somehow felt pressure, it felt... And it was actually more political for the kinds of expressions people were making. And there was the underground film community. There was the same kind of coffee house book music world, of course, there were artists and poets, and this is when we first got there. And the thing that crystallized so much in the (19)60s, I believe this is crucial, that when the students sat in, in Greensboro in North Carolina, February 1st, 1960, it was immediately efforts in Ann Arbor and a lot of other college towns to do sympathy demonstrations, picketing the Woolworths stores in those towns, and telling people to boycott Woolworths as long as segregation persisted in the South, in those same stores in the South. And so people came to these pickets, let us say 100 people picketing the Woolworths store on Stage Street in Ann Arbor. And most of them did not know each other. I mean, we did not know each other before we got there. Somehow by word of mouth, I do not even remember how the word went out that this was something to do. And so what you are seeing there is this interesting moment where people are making public statement, which most of them had not done about their political belief and in the presence of other people with like-mind who they had not met before. This was a formula that sociologists can write almost about how a social movement can begin is where you have this collective self-mutual discovery of common ground, common grievance, common... And what is beautiful about this issue of segregation as a force for change is that it presents a target that is so clear and so morally right, that people could... And that you can see how it can be overcome. That is very important in the social movement that you take action that might really make it different, not just express yourself symbolically. And that was all present when you got together on a picket line at Woolworths in Ann Arbor in February 1960, that was a moment. And so from then on, there was even before SDS, various kinds of... Mostly turned out to be... Well, not mostly, it was a combination of civil rights activism and peace activism was going on there, and that was true really all over the country, but it was certainly evident in Ann Arbor. Small groups of people, it was not ever felt, I do not think you ever felt in that period that you could really reach and change the behavior of most students. Matter of fact, in (19)62, with the Cuban Missile Crisis, a bunch of us staged a march and we were met of protest. No, it was not the Cuban missile... It was the Cuban... It was the Bay of Pigs invasion. That is what it was. SM (00:21:51): (19)61, yeah. RF (00:21:55): And all these fraternity kids came out with fines, Bob Havana and screaming at us. I may be mixing up something that might have even been about Vietnam. But anyway, it does not... The point is there that there was the sense... Most of the students, undergraduates were Republican, Midwestern Republican. We were different. And there were a lot of graduate student types, probably in the pro civil rights peace world. As well as, I am going to say another thing about Ann Arbor, and this may have been typical of other places, is a sizable Quaker community that was always very peace oriented and wanting to promote pacifist activism. And several faculty, including the great economist, Kenneth Boulding was a leader of that. And then at the same time, and my wife was part of this because we had gotten married, shortly after graduate school. And she came out in 1960 and she was going to City College, got finished in 60, or came out. Anyway, she was part of this group Women's Strike for Peace, which is somewhat forgotten, but important early development in the (19)60s movement history. And they were mothers and wives, not undergraduate women at all, who were trying to do creative activity to promote opposition to the arms race and pro-peace activity. And that became a loose national organization that a number of Ann Arbor women, including my wife, were active in. So these are the elements even before SDS came on the scene. As you know, Hayden was the editor of the Michigan Daily. SM (00:24:23): Yes. RF (00:24:23): Well, let me... I am not going to give you a good chronology. I do not have any in front of me to remember all this. So I will be more general about it. The story is well known, Al Haber, whose father was a big professor at Michigan who was politically. Just a little bit older than... He was a little even older than I was and in (19)60, I was 22. So in (19)62 I was [inaudible]. 62 in [inaudible] I was 24, so that is a few years older. Hayden was only... Well, he was 22 [inaudible 00:25:07], yeah, I guess. Anyway, Al started... He was based, he lived in Ann Arbor, so that is made Ann Arbor in the future, an important part of the SDS history. Al went to New York to recreate this organization, which became the student lead for industrial democracy, which became SDS and he began to recruit other people around the country, students, into this formation. Very innovative, brilliant idea, really had turned out to be, but at the time, no one was sure of anything. I had never heard of it. In Ann Arbor, I had never heard of it until I got... Some people started... Hayden was editing the Michigan Daily, very impressive articles that he wrote about an emerging student movement. And I think he himself said later he was trying to create the movement through his worth, I mean knowing... In other words, if you write these long descriptive, emotionally powerful pieces describing students on the march, you are creating an awareness that this might be possible. No one had been thinking really of a student movement, or not very many people until... And I do not think he alone was thinking about it, but it was an emerging idea more than a reality in (19)61, (19)62. Anyway, there was a student party, political party on campus called Voice. And that too was parallel that some of the other big universities, a lefty political party at Berkeley, it was called Slate. SM (00:27:12): Yes. RF (00:27:13): And then University of Chicago, there was another one, [inaudible] Madison, a few examples of this. And those were local, they were not tied to any actual group, but Al Haber saw that he could recruit the leaders of Voice into this SDS. And so when the planning for Port Huron starting to get going, and Tom wrote this draft of what became Port Huron [inaudible], that is when I was first exposed to the fact that this was happening. I had other friends who knew Tom before I did, introduced us a little. So I began... Yep, he was a... You may find him impressive now, but he was even more impressive as a 21 [inaudible]. Brilliant speaker, brilliant writer. And for those New York, Jewish, rusty kids, red diaper babies, here is a guy who did not have that background. He grew up in a very conservative Catholic community in Detroit and came out of there. And that is significant. If you have the view, which I did that well, the left wing in America's going to be really isolated in these pockets of distinctive cultural pocket like the New York Jewish world or Union World of San Francisco, Bohemian Union World. And it will not reach out beyond that. There is little traditions of leftism around America, but it will not become a force. And suddenly you are seeing people like Hayden who coming out of nowhere, so to speak, with a very sharp, critical awareness, a new, fresh way of thinking about what it meant to be on the left. You left. And so that captured me immediately, as soon as I read this draft of [inaudible], this is what I have been wanting and would never believe could happen. So I decided to go to Port Huron. This is part of my story, I do not know how much you want. Is this a personal story or? SM (00:29:38): Yeah, it is a personal story because it is part of the (19)60s. And this is important, and I even had a question here. Why was Port Huron picked to be this- RF (00:29:47): I mean that is sort of well known, I mean they were looking... Among the connections that Al had made was with a young woman named Sharon Jeffrey, who was one of the leaders of the Voice party is Michigan. Her mother was Mildred Jeffrey, who was Walter Reuther UAW- SM (00:30:05): Oh, yes. RF (00:30:08): Was a right-hand woman. She was a very powerful, well-known figure in Michigan politics and in the Union. And so I guess that Millie Jeffery just suggested you could use the Port Huron camp or whatever it was called that the BUAW owned up there for the meeting and it [inaudible]. So that was a great resource, you felt like perfect for... I do not know if they even charged... Let us just do it. Yeah, so it was that UAW connection was very important and I think has lessons for today. The UAW... We need a new student movement. I may be getting ahead of my story, and UAW is willing to sponsor SDS without knowing what that would mean. In other words, they took a risk politically in backing these upstart students with not only Port Huron, they gave some money to things like that. So anyway, where were we? So yeah, here I was a red diaper baby and SBS required for membership that you sign a statement saying that you were not part of the communists, basically. Which I was not, but I hated, and I was... Many of us red diaper babies hated that kind of loyalty statement. And I was not sure how we would be received, my wife went with me, given our background. So I went there. There was a left wing paper at the time called the National Guardian, which I had a lot of friendship connections with some people there. And I said, "Well, let me cover the Port Huron meeting for the Guardian." And I will go Port Huron under that rubric, not knowing whether I was able to or willing to join the organization, so to speak. So when we got there, we realized that there was... One of the key things about the meeting was going to be to overturn that loyalty oath and really transform the organization's identity. Not to be pro-communist, but to denounce this kind of Cold War categorizations that was- RF (00:33:03): ... kind of Cold War categorizations that was killing the left, really, that kind of Cold War thinking. So almost immediately we got to Port Huron I knew I was part of this, and incidentally did write pieces for The Guardian, which they did not want to publish. They did not publish, because they did not trust SDS. "Well, it is still social democratic part of the league for industrial democracy. They were red baiters and so on." Even though I tried to explain that this was something new, the Guardian editors did not buy that story right away and they did not care what I thought so that was an interesting... The part of the left that I had identified with up to them was The Guardian and the magazine Monthly Review. These were independent Marxist oriented publications. They were not Communist Party publications, but they were not anti-communist in the Cold War then. So I liked those. But neither magazine understood SDS at the beginning. They just did not get the idea of a New Left until later. Is that important? I do not know. Anyway, so that is how we got there. We very involved in the discussions there. I helped the right, or I wrote the redraft, matter of fact, of the communist statement in the Port Huron statements, the passages about communism and anti-communism. Not to make them less anti-communist, but I actually thought Tom was too soft on the communist [inaudible] when he had written the original draft. So we were very involved at that point. I always take credit of being one of the founders of SDS, that is part of my identity that I was at that founding meeting and I actually helped conceive what the organization was to be along with, of course, a dozen other people. SM (00:35:42): How important was President Kennedy's inaugural speech on some of the students at Michigan? "Ask not what your country can do for you as what you can do for your country." Because when he campaigned in (19)60 and of course then he won, and then in (19)61 he gave in his inaugural those words that did inspire a lot of people. Of course the Peace Corps meeting that took place outside of the University of Michigan library- RF (00:36:08): Well, let me tell you the exact- SM (00:36:09): Yeah. RF (00:36:11): And the anniversary of that is just been, so- SM (00:36:14): Right. RF (00:36:15): Yeah, that was during the presidential campaign. He was scheduled to come, not the library, the Michigan Union, the student union, he was to appear on the steps there. People waited for hours. He was late, like 2:00 AM as I recall, thousands of kids waiting there. In that speech he says, "Would not you like to serve your country giving aid to people in Ghana?" I forget the exact words, but he was posing almost the idea that instead of military service, there would be this other option. Immediately a guy named Al Guskin, who had been my roommate before we both got married when we first got to Ann Arbor, he was another Brooklyn College guy, Al and a few others, formed a group right away that next day, I think, to support the Kennedy idea. They went to see Kennedy at another campaign stop, I think, a few, couple weeks later to say, "We are behind this, we want to work for it." Some people say that Peace Corps would not have gelled as an idea where it not for the fact that there was this spontaneous student response to it in Ann Arbor that pretty much spread pretty quickly, I think, around the country. A matter of fact, that is how I met Hayden is because Guskin reached out to the editor of the student paper Tom Hayden, and then Al starts telling me, "There is this guy, Hayden, you have got to meet him." Anyway, the SDS people were not in love with Kennedy at all. I would say the psychology of that moment was, on the one hand, yes, we have the first president born in the 20th century. There is a fresh feeling of a turning point in history, but it was as much the sit-ins in the South and the civil rights uprising than as Kennedy. Kennedy was the more conservative, a lot of the liberal young wanted Adlai Stevenson to be the Democratic nominee in (19)60. That was a completely impossible idea. But Kennedy was not considered the darling of liberal Democrat at all. By the time of SDS, there had been the Cuban invasion. There had been a big acceleration of the arms race under Kennedy, big reinvestment in military. By the way, can I take a little bit of a diversion here? SM (00:39:25): Yes. RF (00:39:25): I remembered another important thing that was going on in Michigan. There was an academic center called the Center for Study of Conflict Resolution, which was essentially a peace research center that a number of my mentors, faculty types, were involved with. I got a research job there. Actually, my wife also worked there in a clerical capacity. The reason I am bringing it up is because that center sponsored a number of really significant to me, formative academic type conferences on the arms race and disarmament issues. I learned a tremendous amount at that time about what policy debates were inside the administration, some of the key players. So McNamara came from Ann Arbor, Secretary of Defense. So there was a connection intellectually and even personally between the Ann Arbor faculty that were concerned with arms issues and Kennedy administration, but they were not favoring Kennedy. There was a feeling, McNamara was a target of their anger, and then later McNamara wrote and talked a lot about how he had so much contributed to the acceleration of the arms race, missile race, and that rather than praising himself, he thought they had made a terrible move at that point. So those of us involved with the SDS development, we were very conscious of this about Kennedy. Plus on the civil rights side, there was a tendency in the Kennedy administration, a strong tendency, to try to dampen down the civil rights movement. Bobby met with a bunch of African American intellectuals, James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, and I do not know who else was in the room. There was a shouting match. They were saying, "You are not doing anything much to support." That was a real issue for us, failure of the Justice Department to really defend the civil rights workers who were being jailed in the South. Instead, what the Kennedys were promoting was the idea to stop the civil disobedience campaign and start voter registration in the South. There was a lot of money generated through foundations to get the civil rights movement to promote voter registration rather than direct action. This turned out to be actually a good thing historically, but it was the appearance to those of us who identified with SNCC, we were very connected with SNCC, that the Kennedy administration was certainly not providing the kind of support that the Constitution seemed to mandate that they do. Now, the dynamic, if you look back on this period, the very recalcitrance of the Kennedy administration helped the movement grow. Again, one of these things that you can really figure out after the fact how a movement can merge. If you have an administration in Washington that says, "Civil rights is a profoundly moral correct path," and then they failed to fulfill their rhetoric with adequate action, that is a framework for grassroots action. At least at that time it was. So I am saying there was ambiguity, and the Kennedy you are talking about, and the sacrifice, "Ask not what you can do for your country," seemed to some of us, maybe, we did not use this term then, but an imperial message, not a message promoting service in the sense that we meant it. Now I have to add that when Kennedy made a famous speech June (19)63 promoting detente with the Soviet Union, there were things he was moving toward before he was murdered that were very much more on line with what we had been hoping for. So it was complicated. It is funny how people now are attacking Obama from the left, and they sort of [inaudible] Kennedy as Obama has, I have read people saying, "he has betrayed the Democratic Party's principals." And they hold up Kennedy as well as FDR, as exemplars of this. By no means, from the point of view of the equivalent lefties back in the early (19)60s, Kennedy did not look good from that point of view. But he did create space and the worst moment was the Cuban missile crisis. I can describe how significant in SDS history and in Ann Arbor. You do not mind me rambling like this? SM (00:45:43): I have a couple specific questions about the 60 people who met, but if you have some comments on the Cuban missile crisis- RF (00:45:52): Let me just finish the Cuban thing. SM (00:45:54): Yep. RF (00:45:55): Tom Hayden had traveled in the South after he graduated for a year and then became SDS president, married Casey Hayden. They moved back to Ann Arbor and lived in a house which had a basement, which unfortunately for their marriage but fortunately for SDS, we converted the basement into a headquarters for SDS in Ann Arbor. It was not just for locality. It had a lot of outreach beyond that and had a mimeo machine there, and we had a lot of meetings and so on and so forth. Well, when the Cuban missile crisis began, a bunch of us gathered there for a lot of time there making calls around the country. It was an important moment for reaching student activists at a number of other schools who we had not met yet. SDS had not met, let us say the Harvard Peace activists, like Todd Gitlin, calling them up. "What are you doing? How are you responding?" Creating by phone, a national network of people who were trying to figure out what to do in response to this missile crisis. In fact, there was a march on Washington pretty spontaneously organized that week, and we all went to Washington on that Saturday. When the crisis reached a head, we thought when we were marching that there was going to be a nuclear war. We actually- SM (00:47:44): Wow. RF (00:47:45): Because I. F. Stone had given a speech to the assembled people there, and he said, "I hate to say this, but I cannot see any way out. This might be the end of human history." People were screaming. Yet two hours later, the Russian ships had turned around and the crisis eased, which was [inaudible] liberating moment of my life. So my point being that Cuban Missile Crisis for the SDS group fitting in Ann Arbor was formative in terms of our opposition to the Kennedy administration and to the war machine as we find it then and so forth. So anyway, go ahead. SM (00:48:44): Yeah, there were 60 people that met at Port Huron- RF (00:48:49): Approximately. SM (00:48:50): ... to hash out the statement you and Tom were involved in writing. Who were the 60? I know about you and Tom and I know about Al Haber, but who were the 60? Just briefly, what was their composition, male, female? RF (00:49:07): It is hard to generalize. Hayden and Haber had gone to the National Student Association meetings. I do not know where the one was prior to Port Huron, but those were national conventions of student government leaders that were very important in that period for the student world in the US. The NSA meetings provided opportunities for debates among political groups, for tables with literature and for recruitment. So a number of the people at Port Huron were either editors of major... Like Robb Burlage was there, Robb was- SM (00:49:56): How do you spell that name? RF (00:49:58): University of Texas student paper. There were guys from Madison who were head of student government. So one type of person at Port Huron were very successful student government or student organizational leaders from different campuses. Paul Booth, he had come from Swarthmore. I do not know what he was, president of the student body or something significant as a worker there. So that was one group. The second contingent, and that was not really a contingent, but it was a type of person who was there. Then there was a group from New York, there is a guy named Steve Max who became a full-time SDS organizer and who to this day is one of the leading mentors and theorists of community organizing in America. But Steve was a young red diaper baby in New York, and he had created a little organization in New York, local group, not connected to SDS, but they decided to affiliate with SDS so several of their members came to Port Huron. I forget the name of his group, but it became a New York chapter of SDS, probably right before the Port Huron. Somehow there were other people, I do not know exactly where some of the other people that I can think of. Oh, there was several SNCC leaders. There was Chuck McDew, who was the national head of SNCC, I believe at that time. And a guy named Tim Jenkins, who was an African American guy who was a very active in NSA. I think he might have been an empowered person. I do not know what has become of him. There was Casey Hayden and Bob. There was a very well-known white southern SNCC activist who was there, and I am blanking on his name right now. There was a woman, Maria Varela, she came from a Catholic college and has later became Maria Varela. She is one of the most revered leaders of Latino or Mexican American community organizing now in New Mexico. That is been where she has been for years, ever since Port Huron. But she was there as a young college person. So there was interesting to us from New York background, was a kind of liberal Christian, both Protestant and Catholic, element at Port Huron who had been mobilized by the Civil Rights movement, but were part of things like YWCA or the other liberal Christian formations in the South and Midwest. So if you remember what I said before that it was important to meet people who were not from our background, who were identifying with the left, Port Huron was paradise. All of these young people who came, they were not red [inaudible]. SM (00:54:14): Were most of the men or how many women were- RF (00:54:16): No, I would say- SM (00:54:18): About 50/50. RF (00:54:18): Yeah. SM (00:54:18): Good. Now what has become of most of them? You have made reference to some have gone on to some excellent careers, Steve Max and the Latino leader who's in New Mexico. But there is a lot of perceptions that people have written about activists of the (19)60s, that there are a few that stayed the course like Tom Hayden and obviously you and your teaching and so forth, but the majority did not. They went on any other generation? RF (00:54:50): Well, I have written a whole book on this before. SM (00:54:51): Yeah, I know. RF (00:54:54): Okay. But the people of Port Huron, I do not think... Well, there may be a few that we have lost complete track of that I do not know where they are. But I would say none of them became mainstream American. They remained true to some important part of the identity they were forming at that time. So Paul Booth, he is one of the most respected labor leaders in America. He is vice president of the AFSCME. SM (00:55:27): I interviewed his wife a week ago, Heather. RF (00:55:32): She was one of my students, by the way, university of Chicago. And Burlage is a healthcare policy and political activist in New York. Some people have had very visible careers. Well, Bob Ross is vice president of SDS then, he was from Ann Arbor. He is a well-known sociology professor in Massachusetts. I guess a number of people ended up in sort of academic framework. I do not have the whole list of folks, but I do not- SM (00:56:25): Well ever since we all know that when Ronald Reagan came to power in 1980, a lot of history books have been written that say that the last 30-plus years in America has really been defined by the right. That right has really dominated our politics. RF (00:56:47): Okay, well I have a lot to say on that. SM (00:56:51): And the New Left, they are there, but they are not as powerful as the right. RF (00:56:59): Well, they do not say that. Well, I do not know that there has been much good history writing from my point of view about, not just from the time of Reagan, but the (19)70s are a very important decade, and that decade in which feminism, environmentalism, gay liberation really became important forces in American life. Those are not (19)60s movements, those are (19)70s by and large. Many of the people who were active in the New Left were the foundational, catalytic figures in those movements in the (19)70s, the new social movement, came out of that activism that people went on after the (19)60s and after the resolution of the war issue and the Vietnam issue and the civil rights issues, people move into other domains with their activism. The thing that got most publicity was sort of identity politics. I have always felt that that was a mistake to just simply say the (19)70s was about identity politics. Feminism is not simply identity politics. Gay liberation is not simply that. Then you did have not only environmental movement nationally, but a tremendous array of local activism. This has been my experience and my wife's experience, we moved to this town in 1969 and we have been here for all those years since. We are leaders of this community in promoting environmental and social justice politics. The whole town is transformed. It is not the town we moved into, which was conservative, potentially right wing dominated community. I mean, if you look at California alone, you could not make a story out of the right wing dominance. The Republican Party right now in California is virtually the power of the Latino and other immigrant communities politically as voting block in terms of new leadership, tremendous labor movement here with many former New Leftists in the labor movement as leaders, big political force. It is the only state where the labor movement has been growing actually in terms of percentage of population. I do not want to overstate, but the point I would make is, and is California isolated? No, I think there are many, many towns and regions where after the (19)60s a political movement toward the left is the real story. You look at a state like Oregon, a city like Portland, the state of Washington, similar dynamic go on there. What happened is that a lot of the (19)60s counter culturally influenced young people, moved to certain neighborhoods, certain towns, college towns in particular, but other towns, and became politically potent, and the odd thing that I cannot explain sitting here very well is that the national politics moved rightward and a lot of that was fed as a kind of backlash against the [inaudible]. If you look at national voting patterns of white people- SM (01:01:06): Can you hold on one second? RF (01:01:07): ... they are far right wing. SM (01:01:08): I have to change my tape here. Hold on a second. RF (01:01:08): Okay. SM (01:01:08): Other than that, it is cold. RF (01:01:08): Terrible weather in the Midwest. SM (01:01:22): Yeah. All right, I am back. RF (01:01:24): Anyway, what I start to say is, yeah, the national politics has shifted. The Republicans have tended to dominate since Reagan, as you have said, although there have been important episodes of [inaudible]. But to me it is a far more range and complicated, even nationally. I mean, Obama was elected president, nobody thought that could happen. But not by white people. The white vote, especially white male vote, is far to the right. That is, to me, the biggest shift in consciousness towards right occurred among white male, middle class, working class voters, the so-called Reagan Democrat vote, which was part of the New Deal Coalition, and then has broken away. It is understandable if you add together the civil rights and Black movement reaction against that or feeling threatened by it, feeling threatened by feminism and by economic decline in the loss of manufacturing economy, those things help explain why large numbers of white men in particular decide they were conservative and wanting to protect what they were losing. I think that that is, but that means that they are reacting against something that they see as real, which is that there is a rising tide on the other side. SM (01:03:18): One of the- RF (01:03:18): The very thing the Republicans in California are dead because they tried to play an anti-immigrant politics. That has united Asian-American, Latino voters, and that accounts for a lot of what has happened in California. I am sure the anti-immigrant vote policy proposal, those ideas appeal to a certain significant number of white folks in the state, but they do not have the capacity to mobilize even a sizable minority of the vote at this point. SM (01:03:54): One of the questions I have asked everyone is a takeoff of what we were saying, talking about Ronald Reagan and the backlash. The right or the conservatives have said that most of the problems we have in America today begin in the (19)60s and (19)70s when Boomers were identified as the reason for the breakup of the American family unit, the reason why we have a divorce rate, the drug culture, the illicit sexual mores, the welfare state where everybody wants a handout, a lack of respect for authority in law and order, a "I want it" mentality with no discipline financially. Some of them even criticize for the financial crisis we are in. And a culture where victimization takes center stage in many of the (19)60s and (19)70s involvement groups. Your thoughts. Again, Newt Gingrich has made comments in (19)94 about this when Republicans came to power, and George Will writes about it a lot in his books. RF (01:05:02): Oh, yeah. Yeah. SM (01:05:03): And certainly Huckabee and Glenn Beck and all this. RF (01:05:07): Well, I have thought a lot about that. The point I would make in response is A) the consumer economy that grew up after World War II, many people were saying promoted values that ran counter to traditional. This has nothing to do with social movement to the (19)60s. This has a lot to do with the promotion of values of consumption and what you were saying, sort of immediate gratification and the idea of simply focusing on hedonism and pleasure counter to what used to be called the Protestant ethics. That story was written about in the (19)50s that was happening to this country. And in many ways... RF (01:06:03): ...that was happening to this country. In many ways, the (19)60s counterculture was a rebellion against that, against consumer values, against materialism for a more spiritual way of life. Now, the thing that people in the counterculture did not quite get when they were in the early stages is that the counterculture could become part of the consumer culture. It could transform and translate many of the practices of the counterculture into commodities for promotion, whether it is water beds or drugs themselves. As a sociologist, I would say some of what we call the counterculture and the youth rebellion, and I have written about this, is not about an organized effort by people to challenge the status quo. It is about more like symptoms of the loss of meaning that people felt because the Protestant ethic was so out of phase with the kind of economy, kind of social order that was growing up after World War II, looking for new values, looking for ways of life, feeling [inaudible] in a disrupted moral order. Now, the second answer I would give is the highest rates of everything you said, divorce, alcoholism, whatever else you mentioned, drug use method, methadone use, is in the reddest areas of the country, the most conservative areas of the country. I wish people would face this. There is a sense to that, but it is not about the damage in the (19)60s, it is about the damaged lives that a failing economy creates. It is about the difficulty of traditional religious institutions and generally institutions to manage the kind of social change that is created by mass media, by the consumer economy, and by the degree of mobility, physical mobility that people have to have undergone. I mean, just the fact that people have moved so much in order to find work or to find a reasonable life. Highest rates of divorce, that is what I was [inaudible] in those areas. So to me, the anti-authority aspect of the (19)60s has a lot to do with the Vietnam War, I felt. If you wage a war like that with a conscript army and people come to realize that the whole war is a lie and they are being asked to die, forced to die, fight and die on that, you have done a great deal of damage to people's trust and certainly a lot of events of the (19)60s challenged priority. But to me, the sad part of the post (19)60s era in terms of the new left is that many of the ideas that people in the new left have had about how to restructure America have gotten lost in... I mean, take the idea of participatory democracy, which is a central theme of the [inaudible] statement. I still think people struggle on their community level for voice. What that phrase refers to really is the impulse people have to want to have a say in decisions that affect them, that are being made in the political world, but also in the economic world. This is still going ... you see this all the time, almost every day, in our town, that people are challenging... it is not challenging authority for the sake of challenging authority. They are saying, "You are acting without hearing us." Yet there are not people very visibly now on the national political scene proposing ways that our institutions can be restructured so that voice could be more easily gotten by average people. I still think that if a political movement or leadership came along or trying to articulate that, they would make an impact. But because of the Reagan revolution and post Reagan era, a lot of the new leftists ended up defending things we were criticizing, the welfare state. We acted on the assumption that the welfare state was permanent and that what needed to happen is to make it democratic and responsive and not bureaucratic. That was an example of the central part of our story, what we were trying to say. We believe in decentralized governance, but if you are going to where communities have more voice, but if you are going to basically prevent the adequate funding of institutions that people depend on, that takes priority over how people are going to be able to organize their local life to have more voice. In other words, in the post Reagan period, people have been more defensive on the left of the existing definition. People now, and I am very critical of contemporary left because they think their main job is to defend government. I would say their main job is to defend democracy. But it is very hard not to be in the position of defending government when you have a political force on the right that wants to stop government from functioning. You see what I am saying? SM (01:13:31): Yes-yes. RF (01:13:35): In the absence of government, we are going to get a corporate dictatorship. We are pretty far along in that. SM (01:13:40): Many Boomers felt that they were the most unique generation in American history. A lot of young people on college campuses, I know on my campus they felt that way, and they were going to better everything. They were going to show other generations caring about others is what it is all about. They were believing in ending war and bringing peace, ending racism, sexism, homophobia, protecting in the environment. How would you rate this efforts 40 years hence? Discuss what you see as the gap between expectations and the hopes of the Boomer activist. RF (01:14:23): Well, I am kind of have to say that I always criticize the generational model. I think that is almost a trap because it is saying the change comes from a particular age group or a particular generational cohort, which makes only limited ... there is truth in it, but it is limited truth. In order for the changes to happen, you have to have cross-generational alliances coalition that young people have to reach out to older people. I think that the generational mission idea really did not last all that long. What is a Boomer? I do not even know anymore how you define it. SM (01:15:25): It is those born between (19)46 and (19)64. RF (01:15:29): I know, but that is one definition. I have seen others that are less broad or more broad or whatever. You can easily debunk that by pointing out that all those people that you just defined were very different from each other. There is quite a lot of political diversity and so forth. That is one side of it. On the other hand, I always have, and I have written about this, that people who were in college or influenced by the movements and who were adolescent in the time, let us say, between (19)67 and (19)70, that little period, that had a tremendous impact. When you have millions of people, kids stopping school and going on strike after [inaudible] and all that, it has an effect on many of those people's sense of who they are. I do not think we have had a good effort to document the full fate of that generation. The book I wrote with Jack Whelan is about people up to 20 years after they graduated, 1970, we have had 20 years [inaudible]. What has happened to those people. I could suggest that some numbers of people who have been more corporate than they thought they would be nevertheless have a side of them that think, "Well, I ought to be giving back" or "I want to retire from this rap race and start doing something more creative." In other words, what is not documented is the degree to which people from that era have continued to try with their lives to make some kind of difference along the lines that you were talking about you. Another way of looking at it is now look at the college campuses, the faculty and administration, people who are on the senior level who are controlling things are the (19)60s generation. Well, that has not produced a whole new type of education. There is many-many-many things about the higher education now that are better or more wonderful than anything back then. But on the other hand, in terms of what you were talking about, in terms of issues about race and gender and sexuality, the campuses are quite a different place. The University of California, which is the one place I know best, many of the dreams of the (19)60s students are now taken for granted as the way the university operates in terms of the diversity of the student body and the diversity of faculty. It is still a long way to go to have fully mesh with American demography, but it is very-very different, and even the curriculum... What I am trying to say is, on the one hand, there has been more ... I think a lot of the change that actually happened we take for granted now and do not recognize which it is. But on the other hand, the limit to that change have not been studied either. What made it not possible to move as far as this or that? You would have thought by now that marijuana would be legal if you were back in 1970. Well, certainly in 40 years you would have thought that the US would be in a different modality internationally, that there would be a real ... we have a tremendously greater questioning of war policy and military policy now than we ever had prior to Vietnam [inaudible] very clear. We do not have a draft, but we still are thinking we are the global superpower that should be the global superpower and so on and so forth. I would have said in the early (19)70s, "Oh, by 40 years from now we might well have corporations run with a lot of internal democracy where workers would have voice in their workplace, where the corporation would be a different kind of governance institution." But I do not think that that has come to pass, although there are examples of that all over the place. But the dominant form remains. What I am trying to say is we do not have a good ... Maybe I will end up doing some of this writing, but one could write a very interesting history of the last 40 years by asking what happened to these dreams and what were the ... the story is not that the dreams failed. In what ways did they not fail, in what ways did they fail and why? Not just describing it, but trying to understand the reason. That would tell you a lot about this country. SM (01:21:44): In your opinion, when did the (19)60s begin, when did it end, and what was the watershed moment? RF (01:21:53): I would say it makes sense to begin then with Rosa Park was not going to the back of the bus, which is exactly 55 years ago next week. You could say the end of the Vietnam War probably is a good marking point because ... yeah, if you want to think about it that way. It is really a 20-year period. But in some way, and I would put a little hedge on that because when Carter was president, a number of the (19)60s people were in that administration and there were things begun like vista programs and other community organizing effort where people have not documented this well. There was a lot going on in the Carter period that was promising along ... if you were a (19)60s person like me, well, what is going on in the Carter time? SM (01:23:06): Sam Brown. That is right. RF (01:23:08): Sam Brown is a great case. So it may be that you should really end the (19)60s with Reagan's election, but you could end it with McGovern's defeat. These are arbitrary constructions and you learn something from each of these [inaudible]. SM (01:23:36): How about the watershed moment? RF (01:23:38): Watershed, well, I am not sure what you mean by watershed. One watershed I have mentioned is the sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina in February 1960. Because if you really think about those actions, very simple, four guys sit in at a lunch counter where they are not supposed to be, boom. But what flowed from that and the form of that action really has repeated in certain ways throughout the decade, direct action, not waiting. These four guys did not try to persuade a lot of people to end segregation. They broke through. They also had a network of transmission of their actions through their own communication, but also through the mass media. Well, that is the same pattern of spreading innovation in the (19)60s, the Double Parallel Act. The innovators communicate outward, but so do the mass media spread in various ways, positive and distorted, know what they are doing. That to me would be a crucial watershed. There is another watershed, it is sort of obvious, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. SM (01:24:56): Right, and I got a question on that later on. RF (01:24:59): That is the first mass uprising of college students, and so obviously a lot was [inaudible]. SM (01:25:10): There were a lot of books that influenced members of the Boomer generation, the (19)60s generation that came out in the late (19)60s and (19)70s, and I want your thoughts just briefly. I am going to list them here; do you think these were important books and whether you rate them as really kind of describing the period in the generation. The books I always think of are Charles Reich, the Greening of America, Theodore Roszak, the Making of a Counterculture. Then you had later on Michael Medved's book, Whatever Happened to the Class of (19)65? You had Eric Erickson's book on the academy in descent, Michael Harrington on the Other America. You had Kenneth Kennison's Youth in Descent, Harry Edwards book, Black Students, which really define activists and revolutionaries and militants. Then you had Clark Kerr's Uses of the university. How important were they to you in explaining the America of the (19)60s and (19)70s? RF (01:26:13): Okay, well, I think Reich and Roszak are books that explained ... they make an effort to explain to a wider public what they think is happening, what the authors think is happening in the youth world and the counterculture. Greening of America was the best example of that popularization effort. I mean, he really... and when you read it now, it is almost possible to read because it is so silly, in my opinion. But that review... cut that out, that is not that important. But it was a sign. Here is what Reich's book meant to me, that there was an important tendency in the older, elite generation to try to understand the student movement and the protests and the counterculture rather than suppress it. Remember, his book came out about the time of Nixon and Agnew and so forth. I mean, in my judgment, it was important that there was this other elite tendency that says, "Wait a minute, these are our kids. These are our children. You are going to create a tremendous upheaval in America if you keep trying to repress them." It is not that the book prevented the repression, but it did provide another way of looking at things that I think was very helpful to a lot of old parents and older, elite, people in authority how to think about this thing. Roszak probably helped some of the counterculture people with their own sense of who they were, in a way probably more influential within the counterculture than ... Reich's book was not really read [inaudible]. Now, let us see what other. Clark Kerr's book was very important because it was used as a symbol by Mario Savio and other people in the free speech movement to define what it was they were up against, multiversity. Kerr gave them a framework. Oddly enough, he even predicted that there would be student unrest in the multiversity. So it is a bit unfair, I think, to some extent to Kerr's ... although the way he acted as president of the university sort of reinforced what they thought the book was about. Let us see, you mentioned- SM (01:29:20): I had the Harry Edwards Black- RF (01:29:21): Harry Edwards, I do not think that was an important ... I mean it is Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice was a very important book in defining Black consciousness on a sort of mass scale. SM (01:29:34): Michael Harrington's The Other- RF (01:29:35): Wait a minute, and the Frantz Fanon Wretched of the Earth. SM (01:29:42): Oh, yes. RF (01:29:43): But Michael Harrington, The Other America, that was a genuinely significant piece of social reporting because it did force onto the national stage the question of poverty, and it allowed Kennedy and then [inaudible] Johnson to ... well, it encouraged this poverty policy framework that was really significant in defining what the welfare state would ... how it would evolve. It was not just Harrington's book. It was, again ... Reich's book appeared in the New Yorker, so the Other America was written up by Dwight McDonald in the New Yorker and that writeup [inaudible] pretty far. All of these books are significant as classroom texts as well, but probably not in the (19)60s so much as [inaudible], although probably Other America- SM (01:30:45): Eric Erickson had written several on the [inaudible]. RF (01:30:49): Erickson is a totally different character. I mean, he influenced me tremendously, as a social psychologist, and Gandhi's Truth, Young Man Luther, but also, he wrote a book on identity, per se. It is very clarifying work on youth consciousness. But a more influential book in the early (19)60s was Growing Up Absurd by Paul Goodman. SM (01:31:27): Oh yes-yes. RF (01:31:33): Do not forget that. He has been forgotten, but he was a very significant... SM (01:31:35): You mentioned that people like Saul Alinsky, Paul Goodman, C. Wright Mills were very influential in many student leaders in the (19)60s. RF (01:31:43): Absolutely. SM (01:31:44): In fact, Tom Hayden wrote a book on C. Wright Mills. Who were they and why were they a big influence, those three? RF (01:31:51): Well, for different reasons, but Goodman and Mills were both intellectuals who did not buy into the standard interpretations of the world and especially the Cold War, and both were strong critics of militarism, they were strong critics of corporate power, and they both were pointing in a new direction for the left. They were not using Marxist language, they were using really pragmatist, philosophical pragmatist framework a lot, and they both provided ingredients for what we [inaudible] by our participatory democracy. Their work is really worth the reading now, but at the time it was... when I read Mills in college, it was a completely different way of looking at things from any other sociology or political science books that we were asked to read. The teachers that I had were dismissive of it, of The Power Elite anyway. To some extent, my intellectual life from that point on was trying to show that their dismissal of this was ... I was breaking out of that. The ways I thought were conventional at the time in my learning. Alinsky was not so much as a writer, as a... but he provided a model of community organizing, which later was taken up by SPS in economic .... in so-called [inaudible] projects in northern urban community organizing projects that SPS was involved in, and the war on poverty, neighborhood organizing effort came out of the war on poverty where ... So Alinsky showed that community organization was not just for social work purposes, but for political power, and that has remained. We have a president now who learned at that school. SM (01:34:32): As a sociologist, a lot of people do not like the term Boomer generation, I will tell you that right up front and they do not like the greatest generation, the Millennials and all the other titles that are given to groups. But when you look at the period, though, that is defined as Boomers, those from 1946 to today, the oldest Boomers are 64 this year and the youngest are 49. In just a few words, you have already mentioned throughout the interview, but I have broken it down to six different periods when Boomers have been alive. Just a couple words to describe the period, the period 1946 to 1960. RF (01:35:10): Well, that was the period in terms of life cycle. Obviously, this was the adolescent period or the growing up and adolescence of the earliest Boomers. But that was the period of the seeming... the post-war so-called conformity era. In many ways, everyone understood of that age, when the (19)50s was going on, that we were rebelling against that time of our lives when the country was seemingly so [inaudible]. It was the time when suburbia developed, when the automobile became primary, when television emerged, and as well as the Cold War and anti [inaudible], the Red Scare. SM (01:36:13): The period (19)61 to (19)70. RF (01:36:13): Well, that is the period of creativity politically, culturally, that generation helped to... was in the forefront of. Margaret Mead wrote a book, I forget the title, but where she argued, rather fascinating argument, that most traditional societies, old people teach the young, and in a modern society age is not necessarily defined how knowledge is transmitted. But in the kind of society that was emerging, the young teach the old and that is because of something about the rapidity of social change is such that the old people do not understand what is going on, but young people more intuitively grasp it. SM (01:37:08): I think that book is Culture and Commitment. RF (01:37:08): Okay, that is. SM (01:37:08): I read it quite a few years ago. RF (01:37:20): So the (19)60s was that time. I do not think she was right about the trend because I do not think that continued to be quite so much to the case. That is a good question too. Why was she right and wrong about that? I do not know. But the point is, in the (19)60s was a time when the young were leading the rest of society in terms of cultural outlook. SM (01:37:49): The period 1971 to 1980. RF (01:37:55): Well, as I have said that time when there was a large amount of political innovation and experimentation as well as religious and spiritual experimentation. People were trying to redefine their lives and a lot of these things that we think of as (19)60s effects were really happening in the (19)70s. SM (01:38:19): The period 1981 to 1990. RF (01:38:24): Well, you could call that the Reagan era, when a lot of the established ideas about welfare state and about America's role of the world were coming into question and pre-market ideology seemed to be ascended. But I also make it the time when, on a more local level, a lot of... on a more local level. A lot of local power structures that had been dominant for generations were disappearing in the communities around the country and new political forces. SM (01:39:18): How about that period 1991 to 2000? RF (01:39:24): Well, I do not know that you can make simple... This is the post-communist era, and that is important. Maybe that is the most important thing about it. SM (01:39:36): And then the 2001 to 2000 now (20)11. RF (01:39:42): Well, it may be too early to figure it out, but one thing that it will be remembered for is the time of America's evident decline as a superpower. SM (01:39:58): Why did we lose the Vietnam War, in your opinion? RF (01:40:02): I do not think it was winnable. In fact, about a year ago we visited Vietnam. SM (01:40:09): Oh, you did? Oh, wow. I am going there next summer. RF (01:40:13): I highly recommend it, very fascinating experience. We just went on a little Smithsonian-led tour with a couple dozen people. But I remember feeling almost from the beginning of the tour that it is obvious now to me why we could not win the Vietnam War. I mean, the Vietnamese people have a lot to do with it. They have a history of hundreds and hundreds of years of being occupied by other powers, of having a tremendous capacity for adaptation to hardship and resiliency. We went down the Mekong River and spent a few days there and realized how could they have possibly thought the US could take over in this jungle area where people were well-organized and historically prepared to hold onto their lives there. I do not mean to romanticize the Vietnamese, but it just seemed like the height... And people, even during the war, in the earliest part of the war, understood some people just... What was going on in Vietnam was, if anything, a kind of civil war. But really, the great majority of people were opposed to the US-imposed regime, not just the US presence. And whether or not they identified as communist, they all identified as nationalist. The communist leadership, Ho Chi Minh, was the nationalist leadership. You see that now, and I am willing to bet when you go there, you will see this thing I am talking about. It is a little hard to... SM (01:42:11): I am actually going with vets. RF (01:42:11): Are you a vet? SM (01:42:18): No, I am not a vet, but I have worked very closely with Vietnam vets. I got to know Louis Poer quite well. RF (01:42:24): And they have made a lot. I have other friends who went under those kinds of [inaudible 01:42:32] and they had a very rich [inaudible]. SM (01:42:35): You were a... RF (01:42:37): I think we lost the war because it was even understood by military people before we entered Vietnam Amendment that winning a land war in Asia was not something you could do. And B, especially these people who were already well schooled in resisting foreign intervention. SM (01:43:02): You were a key member of the early SDS as you discussed. And what are your thoughts on the SDS members who took the group in a more violent direction, the Weathermen. And then as a kind of a sidelight here, how about groups like the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, and the members of AIM who took their cause in a more violent and radical direction too in the early (19)70s? RF (01:43:32): Well, I was very-very dismayed by the Weathermen development, but basically the core group of Weathermen were people who, here is how I would put the... They came from typically privileged backgrounds. They were not just upper middle class. They came from elite background by and large. And their first impulses politically were pacifist service in many cases. They wanted to work in situations where they would be helping poor people and so forth. They experienced this guilt over their privilege. Why did they turn violent? Because they became very disillusioned in their experience with service and poverty and pacifism. And in terms of whether they could have effects that way. Their elite background made them feel this arrogant belief that they had... They did not question their right to make history as individuals. They had a lot of sense of potency because where they came from class terms, and this combined with guilt can be creative, but it can also be very self-destructive. And I think in many ways, I am speaking as a social psychologist, there was a kind of suicidal element that this guilt element of their consciousness. The other thing that was fatal to their thinking was that they formed these tight, cohesive, closed social groups that meant they could not allow each other to question where they were going. They punished each other for deviations from the line. They could not hear reality very well. And that is true of any tight, cohesive group that has that high risk. The cohesion enables them to make these sacrificial actions and to look very brave to themselves and to other people, but it blinds them to reality. And I think most of them in the aftermath, years later, retrospectively believe they were crazy, but crazy not in the mental illness sense, but these factors that I am talking about combining meant you lose touch with reality. I am often dismayed if there are people trying to tell the SDS story as it somehow the Weathermen were on the right path. Really, their way of acting is very damaging to SBS. I do not think it was an absolutely important force in destroying the larger sort of movement. But beyond that is what you are raising with these other groups as well, is in the end of the (19)60s, there was this widespread belief, A, there was no way to change America's short of "revolution." And B, the model of revolution is the Vietnamese or the Cubans who overthrew their dictatorship through violent revolution. And that pacifism non-violent revolution of Martin Luther King, early [inaudible] did not work. Now none of those things were true, but they were powerful plots. And if you wanted to show your commitment to your people, whether you were African American, native American or Puerto Rican or whatever, adopting this revolutionary stance seemed to be important for a few years in that time period. I think the Panthers suffered greatly from getting publicity hype that was, they did not know who they were after a while I do not know too much about them internally, but their leadership became more oriented toward celebrity of a certain kind rather than serious work, even though they had made some strides in a community level. I do not think AIM took up a violent path so much as, I may be wrong on this, as being... Each of these struggles is a little different from each other. The Native American struggle is one defined by AIM and literal sovereignty in terms of the Indian reservation world and so forth. And it is not illogical to say, well, if we have some sovereignty, we need to have some way of defending it militarily as well as politically. Young Lords I do not know much about, but I do not think they were, I do not know. SM (01:50:11): Yeah, I think they kind of... RF (01:50:15): [inaudible] there were a lot of, the Panthers inspired these other organizations, and I think the best thing to be said about all of them is that after this phase, you are referring to, many of the people who have led those things went on too much more creative political and cultural roles in their communities to this day. That a lot of the California, some of the political leadership that now emerged from Mexican American world probably started with Brown Braid, I know that to be the case just as an example or you have former Black Panthers like Congressman Bobby Rush in Chicago. In fact, if you look at the broad, long history of revolutionary moments in American history, like in the early thirties, late twenties, early thirties, there was this group of young communists who thought they were revolutionary as well. Most of them abandoned that, but they then went on to be union leaders and other leaders of importance. There is a way in which the small seemingly marginal political sect groups that formed very often and they are like little positive side of it as they are like schools where people do see reality after a while and they have developed some skills and leadership and some capacity leadership that then turns out to be good. SM (01:52:11): Well, that is a sociologist, the generation gap. You probably studied generation gaps, not only the boomer generation, but other generations, but seemed to be very strong. And of course, I remember the Life magazine with a young man in the front cover with his glasses on with the father on one shade and the son on the other pointing fingers at each other. And it was about the generation gap. But in a book called The Wounded Generation that came out in 1980, there was a panel that included James Fallows, Carol Caputo, Bobby Mueller, Jim Webb, and they talked about not only about the generation gap itself, but they said that the real generation gap, this came up in discussion, was between those who went to war and served in Vietnam and those who did not. The real generation gap is really within the generation as opposed to between generations. Your thoughts on that? RF (01:53:09): Well, I do not think so. Yes. People who went to any war there is a strong feeling they have, that they have an experience that they cannot be understood by people who did not. And I never have bought the idea that the anti-war people were anti those who were in the war. That was a myth created mostly post-war myth because many people, anti-war movement fought or active in it, leadership in it thought a lot about how can there be connections. And in fact, there was a whole movement called the GI Coffee House movement, in the late (19)60s and early (19)70s where anti-war activists did go to military base areas and create coffee houses and newspapers and things that they connected with. And the Vietnam Vet organization I do not think they see themselves as cutoff from the anti-war people. There is a movie recently brought out called [inaudible] that describes these Vietnam anti-war that shows them now, it also reviews their history. A Much more complicated story than simply those who went to war and those who did not. There is a new collection, actually, I think 20 plus CDs of songs from the Vietnam era. It is something you ought to get for your library, Bear Family Records. This is very illuminating because it has songs sung by people in uniform in the war, a lot of the anti-war songs, a lot of the pro-war country songs. It is just when you listen to this and look at, it has got a book with it, you realize how much of a mosaic really of feeling there was around the war by people just expressed through these songs. And I feel that those who went to [inaudible] by, or those who were in some ways victimized for their anti- war activity are also veterans of the war and some of the songs that are sung actually by GIs or guys who had been there. This collection where the guy acknowledges the people who died in Kansas City as part of the war dead. That is how I prefer to think about it, there may be that is who would yell at me for this, but I think there are others who would agree. SM (01:56:42): I am down to my final three questions here. And I may have to read this one here, I am going to just read this all, then you can kind of take it in and respond. This is about the Free Speech Movement. What are your thoughts on the Free Speech Movement in (19)64-(19)65 at Berkeley? And I break it down into parts here. What were its influences on higher education both then and now? Secondly, do you feel that these students of that era would be disappointed in the university of today? That seems to forget that the university life is about ideas and not corporate control of the university. And finally, this is just an opinion. Are universities today afraid of student activism on their campuses? And maybe it is because they do not want to return to the (19)60s where universities, because today's universities are hurting financially and they do not want anything to threaten their ability to fundraise even at the expense of ideas because money is so important today in higher education. Basically, if Mario was a lie today, and I talked to Bettina and I talked to several students that were in the movement, but to me as a student, I would be very disappointed in higher ed today. But just your thoughts. RF (01:58:12): Well, I tend to make things a little more complex, but what was the first question though was about it? SM (01:58:19): What are your thoughts on the Free Speech Movement? Its influences on higher education both then and now. RF (01:58:29): I think, the Free Speech Movement, itself, but also the vast amount of commentary that happened around it and after it raised all kinds of fundamental questions about higher education and particularly undergraduate education and where the student experience and so on and so forth. And point one, probably a great many curricular reforms and models of obstruction, experiential, all kinds of things came out of that period that now are part of the normal operation of college campuses. And we do not think of it as very innovative anymore, but it would, that is one point. The second point is that the Free Speech Movement became a model of action by student activists on campus, which involved direct action, occupied making demands, trying to negotiate demands, but that failing, you take direct action, civil disobedient, and then there is a confrontation. And of course that became, there is just hundreds and hundreds of cases of episodes like that in the (19)60s. Just amazing numbers, tremendous wave. Again, this is a good example of what I referred to earlier about, here is why were the visions and hopes raised by that period and that wave of protest. What happened to that positive and why, as you say, there is so much movement in higher education towards corporatized models. It is hard for me to speak about this firsthand because I do not see quite that process in the campus that I am at, UC Santa Barbara which I think is more aggressive than it was 10 years ago. And I also think that when you say afraid of activism, my experience has been with an administration that wants to channel activism rather than repress it. And I do not mean in a simply manipulative way. They make efforts because many of the people who were in the administration were student activists back when kids. And especially since the activism that is happened has to do so much with the issues of race and issues of college access and so forth, administrators are sympathetic with demands. And there is much more tendency to negotiate and try to deal with activism and ritualize it. Okay, you can do your civil disobedience, but let us have it between five and seven tomorrow evening and it will all be done in an orderly way. People are afraid of activism, not so much because of money, I think because in general, they do not want it. I am saying I do not know about being afraid of activist because of the financial issue. I think it is more just a fear of disorder that is always there. And I think that here is a proposition people may have learned from the (19)60s how to respond to student protests in ways that are less disorderly. But that has not been tested by the kind of confrontation that students were doing then, in other words, we do not know yet. There is cases of surprising amount of police, even in the University of California, not here at Santa Barbara so much, but in other places on other campuses recently where protests have happened, and police really did come in with a (19)60s like roughing up students. And then there is a case just now in Irvine where a group of Arab students had disrupted a pro-Israel thing from months ago, and now they are being disciplined. I was surprised at that because the story I have heard is they were not that disruptive, they were trying to express themselves. It was a much more able to be interpreted free speech conflict rather than something that should be criminalized. You may be right. And I would guess that administrators are pretty varied in their patience or willingness to gauge rather than suppress. SM (02:04:22): My thesis has been that they were much more comfortable with the term volunteerism, and they say that is real activism. And. of course, that is but it is only for limited periods of time. Sometimes it is required in fraternities and sororities and other groups and others do it on their own. Today's college students really have that spirit of volunteerism. I would say 95 percent of college campus students have that from their experiences in high school. But activism is a 24/7 mentality. It is a way one lives their life. And that is where I see the difference and that oftentimes the people that do run the universities are members of the boomer generation, but they were oftentimes not the activists. And that they learned, they experienced it and they know what it was like, so they fear it. I have been in universities for 30 years and I have just kind of sensed that. RF (02:05:20): Yeah, no, and I think it varies institutionally and depends on who in the faculty may be influential when these conflict arise and so on and so forth. I think it is an open question. I would make this comment about what you are calling boomer generation faculty. Many of them, even when they have very left-wing political attitudes, do not seem to be taking the degree of responsibility you would have thought they would take if they had been student activists in campus policy and governance. In other words, one of the big trends of the boomer faculty is much more focused in personal career issues, their own work and not getting too involved in the governance domain. And that is part of why corporate influence might grow. If I were giving speeches on this, I would be directing a lot toward my colleagues of my era or slightly younger and saying, what are you doing with respect to the future of the university? SM (02:06:53): Two things here, and this is my next to last question, and that is two qualities that I have been asking every one of my interviewees. Number one, do you feel that one of the main qualities inherent in the boomer generation or the (19)60s generation is their lack of trust in leaders in any profession due to all the lies and illegal actions that they witnessed in their youth? Whether it be as a very young child watching Eisenhower lie about the U2 incident, which he did on national television in 1959. About Gary Powers, to the Gulf of Tonkin with LBJ, to Watergate with Richard Nixon, to all the other lies about the number of people dying in Vietnam, that McNamara would often give the numbers and so forth. And so there seemed to be and you probably know this more than anybody, that the college students of the (19)60s and (19)70s oftentimes just did not trust anybody in a position of responsibility, whether it be a minister, a rabbi, a corporate leader, a congressman, a senator, a university president, a vice president of student of affairs. It did not matter. I just do not trust them. And do you think this is a bad quality to link to the generation, or is it a good quality? RF (02:08:18): Well, I agree that that was the mood very strongly, and it was also, you think about what term participatory democracy means. It means instead of relying on leadership from above, we want to have voice, we want to participate directly. And SDS had a practice of rotating leaders. You could not be president for more than one year, which I think actually did not turn out to be a great method because for various reasons about stability of knowledge, leadership, knowledge and so forth. But anyway, the paradox is that a lot of that generation did become the people in the positions that you are talking about. And I think some of them are very thoughtful people about remaking those kinds of roles. Being a different kind of college president than the ones that were there when we came in. Being a different kind of rabbi. And I have a number of people I know who became corporate consultants on management for the purpose of helping people manage in a more humane or more less racist sexist fashion or things like that. And then I would say if you talked to a cross section of boomers and said, did you have mistrust and how do you feel about it now? I think many of them might say, I think we went overboard because now they are leadership position. Do not trust anyone over 30, as soon as you get to be 30, you start thinking, wait a minute, I do not trust anyone under 30 now. You know what I mean? SM (02:10:26): Right. RF (02:10:28): One way you become " mature" is to question some of the enthusiasms or beliefs that you had when you were young. And this is a good area where such questioning probably would be likely, because as you move up the ladder of responsibility, you begin to see things that way. Same thing if you are a parent, you start saying, oh, now I understand my father much better than I did as a kid. SM (02:10:57): One thing you learn as a political science major is that you learn it in political science 101, that the stronger a democracy, the greater the need for a lack of trust, because by lacking trust in your government, you are able to speak up and criticize it, which shows that democracy is alive and well. RF (02:11:20): Let us add to that the current example of WikiLeaks. My sense is, and Tom Hayden has wrote a piece about this, people of my generation not only do not see anything wrong with WikiLeaks, but think this is the breakthrough in government transparency and making government accountable. And the idea that you are going to criminalize the people who are doing this is something that people, certainly my generation types, who are politically active are going to be very distressed about. RF (02:12:02): ...the actors are going to be very distressed about. Yet just to be complex, there are people who say, well, exposure for the sake of exposure is not really the best way to proceed. And so there will be some questions about just blanketly throwing out everything out on the table, stuff like that. But I think the main point I am making is the one I wanted to make about WikiLeaks being seen as positive by the same people who lack that, who have that sort of inherent mistrust of what governments say. I mean, governments have to lie. So it is part of democracy. That is why we supposedly have a press. SM (02:12:53): The second part of my question was the issue of healing. I have let everyone know in my interviews that I took a group of students to Washington DC in 1995 to meet Senator Muskie. He had had not been well, it was part of our leadership on the road programs, and actually he had been on in the hospital and he just got out, and he talked a lot about the Ken Burns Civil War series. But the question that the students came up with, who were not even alive in the (19)60s, is due to the divisions, the intense divisions, that took place in the (19)60s and early (19)70s between black and white, male and female, gay and straight, those who supported the war and those who were against the war, and they even brought in the environmental debate in there, do you feel that the boomer generation, like the Civil War generation is going to go to its grave, truly not healing from the intense divisions that were part of their growing up years, because they never did in the Civil War? RF (02:13:58): Well, I do not think the divisions are quite like that, but they are being... I mean, to me, the big division is between people who welcome change and see the need for the new definition of America's role in the world, and a new definition of authority within America, versus people who are trying to hold on to what they think of as the past. Which involves, in most cases, not only past value, traditional values, but their own relatively advantaged positions. That to me is the division, that is not healed. And that if you elect an African American president, there are people who are so angry at that, that they do not want to believe that he is an actual American. And I do not see on the left the same, maybe I am blind to it, the same furious hatred. Even when in the Bush years, which were the worst years in terms of government practice that I have ever heard of in this country, and people really disliked George W. Bush and Cheney and all that. I do not think the same of pretty wild perspective on these guys was present. There might have been satire. And that is when you look back at some of the art and portrayals, let us say of LJ, they were far more vicious, you might say, than anything that was directed at [inaudible] W. So I do not mean to try to be self-serving and say, well, the left is nice and the right is not. But in fact, my own view is more to what I think Obama's view is, which is that the average American, left or right, does not have these passions to the degree that is being publicized in the media. In fact, when John Stewart made, he is the one who exemplifies the view I am just now saying. When Stewart, you know that march on Washington for that rally, his speech, he said this, he said, look, most people, left or right, do not have the sense of division that is being portrayed as the reality. Fox News is not America, or is not right-wing America, conservative America. And that is my experience and that is my understanding reading polling tea leaves. As a sociologist, I do not think the evidence is there for, on ground, that level of polarization. When it comes to race in particular, my experiences extremely other than that. There has been tremendous amount of coming together of healing, of mutual understanding on the ground and especially among young people. And the other way to answer your question is, if you look at the young generation under thirties, something has happened there in terms of race, sexuality, gender issues with large numbers of young people do not buy into the divisions and categories that you are referring to. And maybe that will change for them as they get older. But... SM (02:18:05): What the way Senator Muskie responded to that question on healing, he said, because I think they were thinking he was going to talk about the (19)68 convention and the young people there, he did not even mention. And he said, again, he talked about the Ken Burns series, how so many people had died and everything and how sad it was. He said, we have not healed since the Civil War in the area of race. And then he went on to talk about that in detail, and this is (19)95 and he died in (19)96. RF (02:18:35): Well, there is that the south remains different, having this regional difference is very, that is a very strong continuing difference. And many of the people who are speaking for the right wing are actually Southerners. And whether that matters or what that means, I am not sure. But John Stewart the other day who was satirizing some kind of organization that is promoting celebration of the Confederacy and how they were trying to deny that the Confederacy had anything to do with slavery and that it was because people felt overtaxed that they wanted to be [inaudible] and so forth. So there is still, there may well be those divisions. If you look at any of these countries, like in the Balkans that became tremendously bitterly divided and killing each other, I do not know that you could have seen that coming 10 years before. So, what are the conditions under which Americans would actually engage each other physically in combat? Maybe we have not been tested. SM (02:20:06): I know Gaylord Nelson, when I first, the late Gaylord Nelson, I remember he was, I was in his office at the Wilderness Society and I asked that question and he said, Steve, if you are asking on me that people are walking around Washington DC with lack of healing on their sleeves or whatever, it is not, it does not happen, it is not happening. But he did say it forever affected the body politic, and that is what he referred to, because we constantly talk about Vietnam over and over again, of course Vietnam syndrome and the links between Afghanistan, Vietnam. So it comes back many times. As my last question- RF (02:20:47): You are interested in that topic. Do you know Jerry Lemke? SM (02:20:51): Yes, I do. I interviewed him. RF (02:20:52): Oh, okay, good. Because he is really thought a lot of Vietnam. SM (02:20:55): Spitting image. Yeah, and the new book on Jane Fonda. As a lifelong professor, my last question is a two-parter too, but as a lifelong professor, how would you compare the students of 2010, (20)11 were the students who were your peers, the boomers. Today they are called the millennials. I know we do not like these terms. And then we had that group in between that never seemed to get along very well with boomers. And that is the Generation X-ers. RF (02:21:27): Lot of generalization. So I just do not follow. SM (02:21:31): How are they alike and how are they dissimilar? So I am talking about the students of the day and the students of the (19)60s and (19)70s. RF (02:21:41): I am retired and I have not really taught in the last year or two, so I am a little behind the curve. But point one, the thing I am most worried about is, I think back in the (19)60s, students in large numbers actually read newspapers. And I do not mean that the majority did. I do not know, we do not have, I do not know good data on that. But there certainly was a kind of shared awareness of current events, to put it very simply, which has seriously, seriously, seriously declined in the last period. Now, the majority of students say that they follow the news online, but I do not know that we know much about the content of that. Some students, online news junkies, are tremendously well-informed, equal to people I knew back in the SDS days. But large numbers, I think, are aware of themselves as clueless about a lot of things that are happening. And that is one thing that is worth really discussing, learning more about, trying to understand, what do young people today use as source of information? What is the knowledge base they are working from what and what consequences all that has? I do not see, I have never believed, that there was some fundamental change in the personality or character of people from generation to generation. Because I will show students films of let us say Berkeley in the (19)60s and 30 years later or more, and they will say, whoa, why are not we like that as if they were different. Well, you are not any different. The difference, they are facing a much more constrained framework of economic opportunity, than kids in the (19)60s thought they did, thought they had, in other words, in the (19)60s. And one way to measure it is what does rent cost a kid now, if he graduates from college, what are you going to have to pay for housing compared to then? It is not just inflation, it is much more than inflationary increase in housing prices, for example. It makes it harder to be experimental in your post-college life. People think they are required to find an income, they are in debt, they are paying for their college, they have to work during college. All of those things have effects on the capacity of students even to think they are part of a generation. I mean, they are not living such youthful lives, many, many kids, because they are required to play these economic roles that in the earlier generation of people their age in college, were not that required to do. And I think that has consequences, but it is hard to know exactly what they are. And I will say one other thing on this, which to me is interesting, but I do not have an explanation. The rich kids of today tend to be in a bubble and they are the ones who are not so burdened economically or not at all burdened. But in other words, if you are not working, I have done research on it, so I can talk with authority. If you are not working in college and you are not in debt, you are also not likely to be politically active, not likely to be community active, you are not likely to volunteer. Compared with first generation students who are working, who have debt, who may be the first to go to college in their families, are also likely to be more politically engaged, more service engaged than the rich kids. And the rich kids are partying a lot, binge drinking a lot and that kind of thing. So why is that? Because that class was part of the backbone of the (19)60s counterculture. They were the ones, the rich kids at the (19)60s were questioning authority, they were refusing to draft, they were experimenting with their lives. They thought they wanted to be different from their parents. So I do not have an explanation for this, but I do think it is a difference. The fact that there are plenty of young people now, plenty of college kids who are concerned, we have a global studies major at UCSB with something like 800 student and those are people who want to do something in a world. And that is just one. And that is maybe another difference is that a lot of the serving, socially serving impulses that students had in the (19)60s, they had to figure out on their own how to fulfill them. Now, there is a lot of curriculum, organized curriculum that gives them opportunities in that respect. And that is a good thing, but it may also mean they are less prone to the questioning of authority, the questioning of the status quo. They are trying to make use of their opportunities rather than question why do not they have those opportunities. SM (02:28:16): I want to recommend a book that just came out. You have heard of Dr. Alexander Aston? RF (02:28:23): Yeah. SM (02:28:23): He is a UCLA. Well, he has written an unbelievable book with his wife and one other scholar on the inner spirituality of today's college students. And it is kind of expensive, I am reading it right now. And it is basically that college students today, spirituality is very important to them. And it is always that question they are asking, who am I? Why am I here? What is my role in this world? That kind of thing. But he is finding that there is a direct link between spirituality and how well they do in school, how they get in involved in activities. The more spirituality they have, the inner spirituality, the more they are getting involved on college campuses, doing well in classes. And there is kind of four basic areas. I am just trying to get this off the top of my head here. I know there is a desire for inner understanding, a desire to care, a desire for greater compassion, and to understand their role, their social responsibility role. So those are very positive things when I am thinking about that. Because when you think of the (19)60s and early (19)70s, it seemed that religion was not a major factor. And of course, we all saw the example, the Beatles, and even Peter Coyote, he went into Zen Buddhism. And so they went from established religion into kind of an inner spirituality, even back then. And now it is important. So I recommend that book because I interviewed him for my book and he even said at the end, as did Arthur Chickering, another scholar, that the main issue in higher education today, the thing that disappoints him the most, is the corporate takeover. RF (02:30:20): Yes. Okay. SM (02:30:21): Yeah. And Chickering said that. I could not believe it when he said it at the very end. My last question is, the legacy. I know, let us forget about the boomer generation, the term, but when you think of this era of young people, and I include people that were, I would say born from (19)35 to about (19)56, because many of the leaders of the (19)60s were the graduate students. Tom Hayden was in the early (19)40s. Richie Havens over and over to me said, I am a boomer, Steve. I may not be a boomer in age, but I am a boomer in spirit. And so when you think of the legacy of this period, what do you think the history books and scholars will be saying? You are a sociologist, but what do you think that they will say about this generation, the legacy, that it is leaving future generations? RF (02:31:19): Well, I think the big thing is that it was the pioneer force, the era is the era of overcoming the racial divide. And not that we have fulfilled the dream, but we certainly made big change in race. And secondly, it might be understood, and that then, I should add, that then ramified into many areas of social inequality beyond race. And that the second thing has to do with what we were talking about earlier, the question of authority and hierarchy and a generation that started a process of challenging hierarchical social arrangements and authoritarian social arrangements. Not again that it achieved any dream fulfilled, but that the questions were raised more forcefully on them, for more people about that. SM (02:32:52): And one of the things I did not say in that many of the movements of the (19)60s and (19)70s particularly, we did not even talk about the women's movement, but many who went in the women's movement, left the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement, because of the fact that they were sexist. And that- RF (02:33:13): I do not know if they left it, they felt that the position of women needed to be raised to the forefront in those movements. SM (02:33:26): And your personal activism, yourself in the community of Santa Barbara, what have you done during the times that you have been a professor? Are there certain activist causes that you are really linked to yourself? RF (02:33:40): Well, when we settled here, it was just a few months after a big oil spill that devastated the coast. And Santa Barbara, at the time we arrived, was beginning to, the community was beginning to see itself as a center for environmentalism on many levels, not just the oil issue, but all kinds of related questions. Any politics around that began to take shape here, which we played an important part in helping and to this day. And so we are, Mickey and Dick Flacks, are seen as community leaders, veteran community leaders on the progressive side. That is one. As a teacher, I have been lucky to be able to teach sociology courses on social movements and politics and even on the university. So right out of my activist history, I can weave a pedagogical work. And so when I retired in 2006, we did a daylong conference about activism where many, many, many people who were students of mine came with different panels and so forth. And I could see this is what a teacher loves, that people you had helped enable a numbers of people that do things that you could feel great about in terms of the work that they have been doing. And that, so as a teacher, I have always felt it is very important to teach, not to get students to agree with me politically, but to think about who they were in, as you were saying, with quoting as them, what the purpose of their lives was in social term. SM (02:35:56): Well- RF (02:35:56): And how they could helping facilitate goals that they wanted achieve. In the campus scene, I am also, over 40 years, became quite a leader on campus. I did not want to take big administrative roles or even in the academic senate, take top leadership roles. But I am kind of proud of work that I have done. And in the last few years, I took a lot of leadership on admissions policy after the state abolished affirmative action. SM (02:36:36): I read that. I read that in the Whip. RF (02:36:39): Yeah. So we think we had a good deal of discuss in changing rules that allowed without dealing with the race directly, allowed for more diversity. And I can bore you with all the explanation of how you do that, but essentially just involves questioning the SAT as fundamental tool, but encouraging students' academic achievement in high school to be their measure of their merit or eligibility. SM (02:37:16): Well, I want to end this, but not with a question, but two anecdotes of, and I have been thinking about them as I was interviewing you, and they are both dealing with two of my sociology professors at Binghamton University. I graduated from the University of Binghamton, and one of them was in 1967, (19)68 when I was in my early first year or early year there, Dr. Leman, I do not know if you ever heard of him. He was a sociologist at Binghamton University, he was fired for leading a protest in downtown Binghamton in front of City Hall. RF (02:37:53): Is that Arthur Lehman? Arthur Lehman? SM (02:37:53): I am not sure if his first name, but he was my social 101 teacher. And I thought he was very good yet he was let go because he let a protest and I could not believe it. He was gone the end of the year. The second one was Professor Mahovsky who had just graduated with a PhD at Berkeley, and he was a brand-new social professor, and he was in this class, I think, it is the very second time the students met with him, in the very first semester. And we had a student who was one of our leading radicals on campus, who led a lot of the protests and he was in the back of the room with his dog. And Dr. Mahovsky said, first off, get the dog out of my classroom. So he took the dog outside and tied him up, but he came back in. And then before he had a chance to even say another word, he said, are you going to join us? And Dr. Makovsky said, join you? Yeah, we are going to shut down the administration building this afternoon, because they are bringing in the recruiters for ROTC, and we are going to shut the administration building down. Are you going to join us? You are a Berkeley grad. And I will never forget it, Dr. Mahovsky, who I remember seeing him drive into campus one day with an old Volkswagen, perfect (19)60s guy, he said, no, I have a job now. I am raising my, I have to pay, I have a baby on the way, and so I know I am not going to join you. And those are two memories of my college years from two Soc professors, and I never understood why Dr. Lehman was fired. I just could not understand it. RF (02:39:42): Well, maybe there is a way to find out more about that. I do not know if it is Art Lehman, I think he is still on the planet somewhere. SM (02:39:51): Yeah. Well, he was a very young professor back then. And maybe, do you remember a professor being fired? RF (02:40:00): I remember some kind of, but it is varied in controversies around Binghamton and sociology, but I cannot remember the- SM (02:40:07): Well, yeah, I thought that was wrong. He had guts to go downtown. And that is what we want in our faculty members, is to be associates with their students. So I want to thank you very much for a great interview. RF (02:40:21): Well, I always enjoy talking about this stuff that helps me formulate my thought. So that was very good. And if you have got stuff to share that you write, I would, certainly- SM (02:40:34): Oh yeah, you are going to see the transcript. I have been doing this now. I am going to be spending six to eight months on transcribing all these interviews myself. RF (02:40:43): Oh, wow. SM (02:40:43): And because I have come some people that told me that they had other people do them and the mistakes were outrageous and they decided to do them themselves. So you will eventually see it. But I am also going to need two pictures of you eventually. RF (02:40:58): Well, if you email me, I can send you back. SM (02:41:00): Okay. RF (02:41:01): Just that is electronically. SM (02:41:03): Great. Well, thank you very much for spending all this time with me and have happy holiday season and I will be in touch with you down the road. RF (02:41:11): Thank you, man. SM (02:41:12): And thanks for writing great books. RF (02:41:14): Thank you. SM (02:41:15): I love your books. RF (02:41:16): Okay, great. SM (02:41:17): Thanks. Bye. (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. Richard Flacks Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Flacks, Richard ; McKiernan, Stephen Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/wav Subject The topic of the resource Political activists--United States; College teachers; Sociologists; University of California, Santa Barbara; Flacks, Richard--Interviews Description An account of the resource Dr. Richard Flacks is an academic, social activist and Emeritus Professor of Sociology at University of California-Santa Barbara. He is the author of <em>Making History: The American Left and the American Mind</em> and <em>Beyond the Barricades</em>. Dr. Flacks has a Ph.D. from University of Michigan. 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 2010-12-13 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.10.2016.52a ; McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.52b 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. 161:24 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/720d17f8efd07001e02b0361ff89d86f.jpg e2fcc22995a7a2ecdca529aa40f85843 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/58af0198e0506e0f488f9f3d6b8da9c3.mp3 c4eaae83e953462122c1f5c1f92db3a2 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 2010-02-06 Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Stephen McKiernan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed V. P. (Vincent P.) Franklin, 1947- Language English Biographical Text <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Dr. V.P. Franklin is a Distinguished Professor of History and Education at the University of California, Riverside. Dr. Franklin is the editor of the Journal of African American History. He is the author of The Education of Black Philadelphia: The Social and Educational History of a Minority Community, 1900-1950, Black Self-Determination: A Cultural History of African American Resistance, Living Our Stories, Telling Our Truths: Autobiography and the Making of the African American Intellectual Tradition, and Martin Luther King Jr.: A Biography. Dr. Franklin received his Bachelor's degree from Penn State University, his Master's degree in Teaching from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in the History of Education from the University of Chicago.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:13057,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;11&quot;:4,&quot;12&quot;:0,&quot;15&quot;:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;16&quot;:10}">Dr. V.P. Franklin is a Distinguished Professor of History and Education at the University of California, Riverside. Dr. Franklin is the editor of the <em>Journal of African American History</em>. He is the author of <em>The Education of Black Philadelphia: The Social and Educational History of a Minority Community, 1900-1950</em>, <em>Black Self-Determination: A Cultural History of African American Resistance</em>, <em>Living Our Stories</em>, <em>Telling Our Truths: Autobiography and the Making of the African American Intellectual Tradition</em>, and <em>Martin Luther King Jr.: A Biography</em>. Dr. Franklin received his Bachelor's degree from Penn State University, his Master's degree in Teaching from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in the History of Education from the University of Chicago.</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;Penn State University; Harvard; The Young Americans for Freedom; African American student; Black Power; Jackson State; Anti-War Movement; Black Panthers; John Carlos; Students for a Democratic Society; Weathermen; Nation of Islam; Richard Nixon; Black capitalism; Ronald Reagan; George H.W. Bush; Vietnam drafts.&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;:13228792}}">Penn State University; Harvard; The Young Americans for Freedom; African American student; Black Power; Jackson State; Anti-War Movement; Black Panthers; John Carlos; Students for a Democratic Society; Weathermen; Nation of Islam; Richard Nixon; Black capitalism; Ronald Reagan; George H.W. Bush; Vietnam drafts.</span> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 151:14 Subject LCSH College teachers; University of California, Riverside; Editors; Authors; Franklin, V. P. (Vincent P.), 1947--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 V.P. Franklin Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Franklin, V. P. (Vincent P.), 1947- ; McKiernan, Stephen Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/wav Subject The topic of the resource College teachers; University of California, Riverside; Editors; Authors; Franklin, V. P. (Vincent P.), 1947--Interviews Description An account of the resource V.P. Franklin is a distinguished Professor of History and Education at the University of California, Riverside. Dr. Franklin is the editor of the <em>Journal of African American History</em>. He is the author of <em>The Education of Black Philadelphia: The Social and Educational History of a Minority Community, 1900-1950</em>. <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Dr. V.P. Franklin is a Distinguished Professor of History and Education at the University of California, Riverside. Dr. Franklin is the editor of the Journal of African American History. He is the author of The Education of Black Philadelphia: The Social and Educational History of a Minority Community, 1900-1950, Black Self-Determination: A Cultural History of African American Resistance, Living Our Stories, Telling Our Truths: Autobiography and the Making of the African American Intellectual Tradition, and Martin Luther King Jr.: A Biography. Dr. Franklin received his Bachelor's degree from Penn State University, his Master's degree in Teaching from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in the History of Education from the University of Chicago.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:13057,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;11&quot;:4,&quot;12&quot;:0,&quot;15&quot;:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;16&quot;:10}">Dr. V.P. Franklin is a Distinguished Professor of History and Education at the University of California, Riverside. Dr. Franklin is the editor of the <em>Journal of African American History</em>. He is the author of <em>The Education of Black Philadelphia: The Social and Educational History of a Minority Community, 1900-1950</em>, <em>Black Self-Determination: A Cultural History of African American Resistance</em>, <em>Living Our Stories</em>, <em>Telling Our Truths: Autobiography and the Making of the African American Intellectual Tradition</em>, and <em>Martin Luther King Jr.: A Biography</em>. Dr. Franklin received his Bachelor's degree from Penn State University, his Master's degree in Teaching from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in the History of Education from the University of Chicago.</span> 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 2010-02-06 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.10.2016.53a; McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.53b 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. 151:14 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/4232cc90b9fab3cba52af6e2ee2be636.jpg 8e0fb9331cdda59de3c2405cbbfff2d0 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/d5863e11537dc265494c4ad622163851.mp3 5dfdea803901823af58c26f1645a69c8 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 2012-01-24 Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Stephen McKiernan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Lise Funderburg Language English Biographical Text <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Lise Funderburg is an author, educator and editor. She went to school at Reed College and Columbia University School of Journalism. She has had publications at The Washington Post, the New York Times, The Nation, Salon and many more.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:13057,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;11&quot;:4,&quot;12&quot;:0,&quot;15&quot;:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;16&quot;:10}">Lise Funderburg is an author, educator, and editor. She went to school at Reed College and Columbia University School of Journalism. She has had publications at the <em>Washington Post</em>, the <em>New York Times</em>, <em>The Nation</em>, <em>Salon</em> and many more.</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;Drug culture; Racism; Culture wars; Race and Identity; Baby boom generation; WWII; Korean War; Welfare mentality; Drug culture; Watergate; Christian right; Great recession; Dr.Martin Luther King Jr.; Nineteen sixties; Equality movements; Vietnam Memorial; 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;:13228792}}">Drug culture; Racism; Culture wars; Race and Identity; Baby boom generation; WWII; Korean War; Welfare mentality; Drug culture; Watergate; Christian right; Great recession; Dr.Martin Luther King Jr.; Nineteen sixties; Equality movements; Vietnam Memorial; Vietnam Veterans.</span> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 148:37 Subject LCSH Authors; Educators; Editors; Funderburg, Lise--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: Lise Funderburg Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan Transcriber: REV Date of interview: 24 January 2012 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (Start of Interview) SM (00:00:08): You are what we call a late-stage boomer, and I say this because the boomer generation is defined as people born in the years 1946 to 1964, and there is often, in my interviews, been a discrepancy in terms of impact over the events that transpired when boomers were young between those that were born between (19)46 and (19)56 and (19)56 and (19)64. LF (00:00:35): Sure. SM (00:00:36): However, my question here is, knowing this, do you personally identify yourself with the boomer generation, and if so, in what way? LF (00:00:47): I do not generally think of that label as being pertinent to me, although I have to admit that when I see characteristics of boomers in the media, there are times when I have to admit that they describe me. For example, the idea that everything that happens to me is being invented for the first time, that no one has ever gone through whatever my current stage of life is. It is like an amazing discovery. That applies to me and my peers, but I do not really identify with that label. SM (00:01:46): Yeah, it is interesting. One of the questions I have asked is do you like the term, period, in defining a group of people. Obviously it was linked toward the large numbers of babies being born after World War II for almost 18 years, as men and women came home from the war. Others say that it could be the Vietnam generation or the (19)60s generation or the movement generation, a lot of different terms, but they still identify because it is based on a large group of babies being born over a period of time. Is there another term that you feel would be more applicable to this group? LF (00:02:27): Well, your first question was do I like the label. I would say not particularly, because although its origins have a simple factual basis in referencing a spike in the population, like many labels of generations, it has come to be a shorthand that is generally, I think, pejorative. I think that is true of other ones, like how Generation X became better known for the limitations of the people in that group or the negative ways in which they interacted with society as opposed to something positive about them. Maybe one of the only exceptions to this that I can think of is... what was the group Tom Brokaw wrote about? SM (00:03:29): The Greatest Generation? LF (00:03:32): Yeah. That was a pretty positive label. I think that has pretty positive connotations, but generally boomers, that label connotes a kind of self-interestedness, a desire for luxury and comfort. While those may be true attributes for many of us born during that period, it is not a particularly positive one. I do think it is interesting to think about this generation. I mean, what is more pertinent to me now is a sub-category. I should also ask you, are you taping this? SM (00:04:18): Oh, yeah. I tape everything, and then eventually you will see it. I have got 250 transcripts. LF (00:04:23): Oh, sure. SM (00:04:24): Yeah. It is a long ordeal. I love it, though. LF (00:04:27): Right. I currently identify more with a subcategory, which is the sandwich generation, and that is an experience that other people have had in history where they are taking care of or have some level of dependence from the generation below as well as the generation above them, at the same time. Because of the numbers of boomers, it is a phenomenon that is changing our culture. That is an interesting thing about my boomer generation. Wherever you were born in it, you are part of a cohort that is so large that the life stages you are going through are more evident in the culture, and have more of an impact in the overall culture than other generations have. SM (00:05:20): Given the long-view perspective over time, what are your overall feelings on this generation? We do not even have to call it boomer, but this generation. Things you admire or things you do not admire, characteristics you like or dislike? LF (00:05:40): Well, I guess my feeling about that is in contrast with generations that have come before and after. For example, I think that what I like about a lot of people my age is a combination of idealism and pragmatism. Again, that might just be that we are in our (19)50s and (19)60s now, and that is when you become more pragmatic in life. I think that maybe, particularly having lived through the protest and social justice movements of the (19)60s and (19)70s, many of us retain a kind of hopefulness that has perhaps been tempered by the years, but persists, and I am comfortable with that. Again, that may be because that is what I know, so I like that about my generation. I also think that we are permitted to have that kind of an outlook and that kind of hopefulness in part because of the sacrifices the generation before us made to, whatever, get us into the middle class, to get us through some big wars, World War II and the Korean War. I think it is partly we are afforded that ability to be optimistic and hopeful because of the sacrifices made by our parents and grandparents, but also, we did not grow up under the dark, dark clouds that the generations after us have grown up under. There might have been the atom bomb, the Cold War, but not AIDS and not, for Americans, the Twin Towers, and no other globally frightening questions of who can make nuclear bombs. Weapons of mass destruction, real or imagined, were not as pervasive when I was a child. There were freedoms just in lifestyle. The over attended child now, that looks horrible to me, parents who are trying to give their children the best, but over program them and are constantly involved with them. I look back and I relish that I had a childhood where my parents were not always paying attention, so that I could have the life of a child with other children. Even though we lived in an urban environment that had crime, it just felt so much safer. I see kids today living with more fear. SM (00:08:55): Those are very good points. Over I would say the past maybe decade or two decades, a lot of the critics of the boomer generation have said that many of the problems we face today in this country, including those right here in 2012, we can go right back to that generation and blame that generation somewhat for the problems we face. Of course, the critics say the drug culture, the welfare mentality, where it is a handout over individual responsibility, a decline in church and synagogue attendance, where people left religion and went into more inner spirituality, a breakup of the family, the increase in the divorce rate, the lack of respect for law and order, lack of respect for authority because so many leaders lied to them when they were young or witnessed it nationally. A whole lot of things. Even some people that criticize the generation say remember on college campuses when college students would make a demand, and if all the demands were met, they would make more demands. They would be absolutely sure that the demands would never be met. It is an, "I want it now," mentality, and so that is some of the financial problems we face in the generation, directly related to that attitude of spending now and worrying about how to pay for it later. When you look at all these criticisms of the generation, some of them could be directly related to what we call the culture wars today too, so just your thoughts on these people that criticize this generation for a lot of the problems we face today in America. LF (00:10:44): I am sure there is some validity to those critiques, but I am not sure that it is appropriate to hang the blame solely on the door of baby boomers, but in fact maybe it is more of an American epidemic, part of the broader culture, up and down across generations and classes. It is hard for me to find a kind of across-the-board validity to critiques like that because we are such a diverse people, even inside of this generation. To pick out one of those critiques you listed, these people critiquing baby boomers for the fall of social order through something like an abandonment of organized religion, organized religion seems to me not an absolutely good thing, as evidenced by pedophilic scandals in the Catholic Church. Or in the South and in terms of race, which is a topic I am more familiar with, the usage of the Church to justify the sanction and further the cause of racial bigotry and to perpetuate an unjust order of Jim Crow, that was in the house of organized religion. Perhaps some of the turning away from such places was to an attempt to keep close to God, but not the deeply flawed behaviors of the people practicing in His name. SM (00:13:14): When I was on a college campus, I know this was an attitude many young people had in the late (19)60s through the mid (19)70s, and that was that we can be the change agents for the betterment of society. There was a feeling that the world was going to change for the better, that eventually because of this generation, war would end, peace would come, racism, sexism, homophobia, all the structure of the environment, all these ills would be corrected by these 74 million young people. As time goes on, critics will say... again, critics; you cannot generalize everyone because many people have done good things... that war has continued, all the -isms have continued. There have been improvements in many ways, but as some people say, we take one step forward and two steps backward many times. What we are seeing here is this attitude that many within the generation, that they were going to be the change agent for the benefit of society, that they have miserably failed. Your thoughts? That is another general criticism, but progress has been made in so many areas for people if you look at the 1950s and 2012, but then you see these terrible individual instances. You have raised a couple of them already in your remarks. LF (00:14:43): Once again, I think to place on any group of people the responsibility to cure all of society's ills is an awfully heavy burden to carry. Whoever expected that maybe needed a sort of realistic adjustment, some adjustment in their outlook, to expect that. Again, because one of my areas of professional focus is race and race relations, I have often said that many people place a parallel expectation on mixed-race people, that they are the hope for a future without racial animosity, and that is such an unrealistic expectation. On the one hand, I think that is a highly unrealistic expectation, and it is a superficial expectation too. It does not allow for the complexity of who we all are as people, and also how our identities are overdetermined by the circumstances around us. In other words, we are made up of so many different components of influence, whether it is our generation, as you are interested in, and what that means, our place on the timeline of history, what came before and what comes after, our gender, our religion, our geography. In this country, it makes such a huge difference whether you are born and raised in a city, suburb or rural environment, in the Northwest, in the Southeast, in the Northeast. The composition of the area around you, the personalities and convictions of the people who raise you and the people on the street in which you grew up, the kind of education you have, the amount of education you have, and on and on and on. You can put 10 people in a room who seemingly have so much in common and you will find as much, if not more, that they do not have in common. Therefore, expecting that group of people to all behave in a certain way or fulfill a certain goal I think is unrealistic. On the other hand, I would say that not only is it unrealistic to expect a particular generation to take on such a large burden, but I think it is also unrealistic to expect anyone to be able to solve such enormous, profound, entrenched problems essentially overnight, in one generation. I mean, look at slavery. We are nowhere near where we should be in this country in terms of racial and social justice and equality, I think. We still have a tremendously far way to go. If I were to only look at that, I would not be able to get out of bed every day. It is too bleak to only look that way. If I also look at where we have come from in just a handful of generations, then that gives me some hope that there has been progress, which is now the time when I would trot out Obama. SM (00:18:35): Yeah. I have a question on him later, but you can talk about him, because you are talking about, first off, the first African American, but he is biracial. LF (00:18:43): Yes, he is. SM (00:18:48): Just your thoughts on how he has been treated in America, in terms of not only race but biracially. LF (00:19:00): Well, that is a big question. I think that he has been put on a pedestal by some people and expected to be the messiah for Black people particularly, but also other people who feel that they have not historically been allowed to play on a level playing field in this country. I think that he has raised the knap of racism that had been smoothed over in certain areas, acts of racism, especially in a polite society. Not people with swastikas tattooed on their foreheads, lynching someone, but instead in say the halls of Congress or the Senate chambers. Maybe we are a less civil society in general, but the idea that a representative, a government representative, would shout out, "You lie," to a president was inconceivable to me. Does that have something to do with race and a feeling of not needing to respect someone? I do not know the man who shouted that well enough, but that is one example of a way in which I think Obama has not been accorded the respect that a white person in his position would have. Meanwhile, though, of course, people said horrible things. Progressive Democrats, liberals, said horrible things about George Bush, the second Bush. It is hard to know when it is just horrible behavior and when it is horrible racist behavior. It is very hard to identify it, to separate them. As far as a biracial president, it gives me a great pleasure to see him in office for many reasons, some of them having to do with his actual capacity to serve, but in an iconic way to see a Black president and to see a biracial president. To me, he is both of those things, which is not how some Black and biracial people feel, who would have him choose. SM (00:21:57): What is interesting about President Obama is that one little note, that he has really wanted to separate himself from the (19)60s generation. Oftentimes he says, "I am not a part of the (19)60s generation," but he is in terms of years. He falls within that boomer generation. He was two years old, so I think he was born in (19)62 or (19)61, in that particular area. He does fall into that area, but he is tried to disassociate himself from the (19)60s, yet his critics say he is the reincarnation of the (19)60s. It seems like an oxymoron at times. LF (00:22:37): What is it about the (19)60s that he is trying to divorce himself from, do those critics say? SM (00:22:42): Well, I do not know. I just know early on I saw him on television. He has said several times, "I am not part of the (19)60s generation," and probably because he was two years old, but then he does not go on any further. You read articles in magazines, how he tries to separate himself from that period, which was the period of activism, the period of the movements and everything. Then his critics say he is the reincarnation of the (19)60s, the more progressive, way to the left. It is part of the culture wars, almost, that we are seeing today. LF (00:23:28): Well, I am not familiar enough with that criticism, I guess, to really have a way to comment on that. SM (00:23:35): This gets right into that. How did you become who you are in terms of your growing-up years? What were your early influences, some of the mentors, the role models that influenced you as a young person? I know you have written a new book, and I know your father is a very important part of this, but what were your high school years like and your college years, before you started your professional career as a writer? What was it like... and I know that I am saying a lot here... growing up as a biracial female in the (19)60s and (19)70s? LF (00:24:09): Well, I was just a little kid in the (19)60s. I was not 10 until 1969. I do not know how much I looked outside of myself for models, but of course, my mother and my father were big models for me. The neighborhood they chose to raise me and my sisters in was really significant in my developing outlook of the world. They chose a very rare situation, which was a stable integrated neighborhood. I make note of it being stable because there are a lot of neighborhoods that go through, say, a gentrification process, and halfway through, or the old neighborhoods that went through white flight, there was a point at which it looked like it was the 50/50 neighborhood of two races, but it was really just in the midst of a transition. This neighborhood my parents chose to raise me and my two sisters in in Philadelphia was... well, I considered it a tremendous gift they gave us to live in a microcosm of possibility, which is to say that we were able to live in a neighborhood that was by no means perfect... again, there are always humans involved when you are talking about people, which means that no one is perfect and everyone is complicated... but to grow up in a neighborhood where it was normal to be around people who were different was both a sense of possibility of what the world could be like, and it was an affirmation and a reinforcement of the normalcy of my own immediate family. I had a Black side of the family and a white side of the family, and they were all equally my cousins and uncles and aunts and grandparents, but that was a very rare image in the world around me. That has changed significantly, probably because of a lot of the boomers. It would be interesting to look at the particular rates of intermarriage and how much it spiked with the boomers, but there were not that many images around when I was growing up. It was an epiphany for me to watch the ship... SM (00:26:51): Still there? Hello? Oops. LF (00:26:58): Where did you lose me? SM (00:26:58): Well, you were talking about your parents and growing up, being a biracial person in your early years. LF (00:27:09): Had I gotten to the neighborhood? SM (00:27:10): Yes. You were starting to talk about your neighborhood. LF (00:27:13): Okay. It was a tremendous gift and sense of possibility to grow up in a neighborhood where it was normal to interact with people who were different, who looked different, came from different backgrounds. That was not only a sense of possibility of what the world could be like, which was very unusual then, and in terms of residential integration is still highly unusual in this country, but it was also a reaffirmation of my own family and the normalcy of that. Having a Black set of cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents and a white set was my reality and my normal, but it was very unusual in much of the world around me. In this neighborhood, that did not seem so strange. I remember as a kid watching the show, The Jeffersons. Had I gotten to that part? SM (00:28:20): No. LF (00:28:21): Okay. I did not love the main character, George Jefferson, and so did not enjoy the basic humor of the show, but it was an epiphany for me that there was a character on the show who was biracial, the son of the upstairs neighbors, who looked like I did, which is unusual even for a mixed-race person in that I look very, very... well, I look white. Typically it is often hard for people to see or believe, in fact, that my father was Black. That was a powerful sense of who I was. The writer Paule Marshall said once you see yourself depicted in the world, you have a sense of your right to be in the world. Once you see yourself truthfully depicted, you have a sense of your right to be in the world. There were exceptions like that that I looked for, that would speak to my reality. Maybe in a way, perhaps there is a way in which people like me were outliers to our own generation, because we had some significant experience or piece of our identity that gave us a different vantage point, forced it upon us by birth. Also I think of that as a great advantage, that I know what it is like to be on the outside looking in as much as I know what it is like to be on the inside looking out. I actually think that that is one of our presidene strengths. LF (00:30:03): I actually think that that is one of our president's strengths, which may well have come from that shared experience. SM (00:30:11): One thing that when your parents, when you were very young, did your parents ever sit down with you? Your neighborhood may have been different obviously than what was happening in the South. And I am not sure where your parents grew up themselves, but did your parents ever talk to you about the fact that in the 1950s, if you were, I think mixed marriages were even a crime in the South. And of course, we all know what happened to Emmett Till for just simply whistling at a white girl. He ended up being murdered, thrown in the river, the hatred in the south between a black male and a white female and all these other things, that southern mentality. And then here few years later, what it was like for your parents to even grow up and to be living during that time, even before you were born. LF (00:31:03): Well, my father was from rural Georgia. SM (00:31:06): Oh wow. LF (00:31:07): From a part of a neighborhood called Colored Folks Hill. So he knew all too well about what was happening in the south and where racial violence could go. My mother was from Chicago and was less familiar with that. When my parents decided to get married, my father went to the library, they met in Philadelphia, and my father went to the library to look up the laws because he knew it was illegal in many states to be married. I think there were still 17 states that had laws on the books the year my parents married, which was 1955, and they were not completely eliminated until 1967, in the case of this famous couple, Loving, whose last name happened to be Loving, L-O-V-I-N-G. And I think their case went to the Supreme Court and was Loving versus Virginia. So my father was much more aware of racial issues and concerns than my mother, which is not uncommon for who was white. I mean, it is not surprising given that she was white and did not need to know a lot of those things, and he was black and had to know them in order to survive. That said, neither one of them had, I think there was not much of a vocabulary for talking about issues of race and identity then in the way that there is now. There were not identity politics, there was not such a self-consciousness either celebratory or self-denigrating about identity in the public sphere. There were not these public conversations the way there are now. And my mother tells a story that in her own effort to somehow bring more black culture into our home, because my dad, I do not know, I guess she felt that my dad was not perhaps doing enough of it. She suggested that we subscribe to Ebony and Jet. And my dad just laughed and that was the end of that conversation. But we did know my parents were pretty active. I think they were more involved in the (19)60s and (19)70s politically than I could ever claim to be. SM (00:33:50): Hold on one second. I [inaudible] change this one tape player here. Hold on a second. Almost there. Okay. All right. Go ahead. LF (00:33:57): And were very upfront and honest about what was happening in the news. So we were not unaware of racial issues when we were growing up. So they did not really talk about it. And I think one of my sisters may have asked my dad once what she should fill out on a form that gave her the options of black, white, other. And I think that he said she should fill out other. But we were pretty much left to our own devices in terms of figuring out what we wanted [inaudible] or how to think about our racial mix. But again, they more than words, they gave experience of living in this neighborhood, which in the end I think had much more power than any talks might have and really, really shaped my view of the world. SM (00:35:00): Now, this neighborhood is where? LF (00:35:02): It is in Philadelphia, it is called Powelton. SM (00:35:04): Oh, I know that, yes. And this is kind of a follow up to this question, but it is no longer, I will just read this and make sure I get it correct. The Civil Rights Movement in the (19)50s and (19)60s and (19)70s centered on equality for African Americans. Could you describe the confusion and or lack of insight that most people of that time had for biracial Americans? And I want to follow this up with the following statement, that the African American community and the white community both agreed at one time that this concept of the one drop of blood meant that you were black, not white. Am I correct on this? And what findings in your book, Black, White, and Other, did your family and many others of the people that you interviewed for the book feel about this? LF (00:35:58): I would say that this notion of the one drop rule, which is also, I believe it is called hypo dissent, that a particular race will trump another race no matter how much or little of it you have in you persists to this day. So many people, black, white, and mixed, feel that that is true. That if you are part black, you are black. And some of that comes from the history of where mixed race people found a home. They were relegated to the black community. And the black community, either by choice or without choice, puts them in. Now, I think the way that people identify is so complicated, but a lot of people choose their identity based on how they look to the world and how they are treated. Most biracial, black, white people are brown-skinned. So they are treated in the way that much of our society acts upon race, which is based on your surface. So for a lot of people, it is just easier. There is nothing bad or good about it necessarily. So that is where they identify. Other people have different layers of identity that are sort of a public identity versus a private identity. A recognition that people respond to us out in the world in one way, but we may feel a different way in our experience and our chosen association. But mostly I think what is most important to think about is that race is a made-up concept, does not actually exist. It is a social construct by and large, which is why the US Bureau of the Census has changed its definitions of race over the years, many, many times over, who is white and who is not. So what I found most liberating in the research for Black, White, Other was that what had long been pathologized by social scientists was actually really healthy. So that is to say the truth for a lot of biracial mixed race people is that they feel different ways and different sort of pieces of their identity in different contexts in the world. When you say it that way, that is not surprising to anyone. If you are, let us say Greek and Jewish, you might feel more Jewish during the High Holy Days and more Greek when you go visit that Greek neighborhood in Chicago that serves food just like your grandmother made. So how is that any different from these cultural associations with black and white? I think it is not. But it used to be seen by psychologists and social scientists as a kind of unhealthy inability to choose a kind of sitting on the fence, an inability to resolve your innermost identity. And what I would say I found in working on Black, White, Other, and what is increasingly accepted in the social sciences and psychological communities is that identity is more plastic. It is flexible. The truth of our identities is that they wax and wane of the pieces of our identity. And I think for biracial people, that is just more exaggerated than it is for everyone else. But everyone has some experience with that. You are more political in one context. You are more an identified with being a man in one context, you are more identified with being someone's son versus being someone's father. SM (00:40:04): It is like when in the late (19)60s and early (19)70s, if you were a college student, you filled in, you were African American or Latino American, Native American or Asian American, or white, depending on the background. But working in the university in the 1990s, when you came to visit our school, particularly in the early part of this century, the first 10 years, students were confused. I remember students coming in filling out forms on, well, wait a minute, I am Latino, but my parents are white and Latino. Should I put Latino or other? And they were actually going to the vice President of student affairs and asking for a clarification because a lot of them identified as Latino, but they really want to put other because they are proud of their white heritage too. LF (00:40:53): Right. SM (00:40:54): So I see a difference. There seems to be clear cut back in the boomers, but today with the children and the grandchildren, it seems to, it goes to a lot of different ways. LF (00:41:06): Well, I do not think there was a choice. There was no choice before. There was no sort of critical mass of a mixed experience. And it has grown to the point where people are finding their voices. And it is also less threatening than it used to be. I mean, you were literally taking your life into your hands. If you tried to stand up as a black, white, biracial person in a lot of situations and say, "Oh, no, no, I am half white. I am as white as I am black." That just was not going to fly. SM (00:41:42): We might be seeing some of these experiences you went through is now expanding into the areas between Jewish and Arab Americans. Because I am seeing a lot of the universities a-a microcosm of society, you probably see it at Penn, and I see it at Westchester when I was there, is that if a guy falls in love with a girl and vice versa, or even in a same sex relationship, I tell you, I am seeing more others than I am straight white, straight black. I am amazed at the relationships that are really forming today in society, which to me is a positive. And I think it is good. And I think if there is anything that can really heal our nation in so many different ways, it is the category of other where we appreciate the backgrounds of all Americans because that is the dream of what America is truly about. And Dee, do you know what percentage of African Americans or white Americans were biracial at say, in (19)68 as opposed to 2012? LF (00:42:43): I do not. SM (00:42:46): Okay. And when one thinks about that, 74 million, you have [inaudible] and wonder about the numbers within the group who were biracial at that time, who identified as black or white, and was mostly probably they identified as black during that timeframe. LF (00:43:01): I am sure that is true, yeah. SM (00:43:07): [inaudible]. Are there any events or developments that you feel shaped the post-World War II generation more than any other? I am referring to events that may be called watershed moments or moments where members of this generation reflect on when they look at their past that really shape them then and still shape them now. Could be individual events and since post-World War II America, any time that the Boomers have been alive. What do you feel were the watershed moments and what were the watershed moments in your life? LF (00:43:46): Certainly the Cold War and Vietnam War. The Vietnam War, particularly because it was the first televised war, which made it such a personal experience that this was in our living room. Then the microwave, think revolutionized our relationship with food and not necessarily in a good way. I think technology, which continues to just shift us on every level of relationships. It changes how our minds work, it changes our expectations of each other. It changes the boundaries between public and private. And I am definitely more comfortable looking backward than looking forward on that. I do not enjoy... I use social networking media, but I do not feel very comfortable with it. I do not even feel that comfortable with my apps. SM (00:45:12): When I asked this, I interviewed two people, actually within the last week. I have added six people, and I thank you for being one of the six that I added to my long list of interviews. And when I mentioned that business about the watershed events, you have already mentioned Vietnam here, but some of the things that have come up throughout these 250 plus interviews, the events that shape them in individual ways. And I have got 10 here and I just want to throw them out to you and see if there is anything that clicks. LF (00:45:45): Okay. SM (00:45:45): I will just read them. And certainly the election of John Kennedy in 1960 and his assassination in 1963. LF (00:45:52): Well, that is actually my first memory is his assassination. SM (00:46:02): Oh, yeah? Well, that is an interesting, you were very young. LF (00:46:02): I was. SM (00:46:02): What do you remember? LF (00:46:02): I remember that I was with my mother in a thrift store where she bought a lot of our clothes and that the women all began to cry and gather around a radio at the checkout desk. That is what I remember. And then coming home, and then a neighbor of mine, also a grown person crying about that too. But I was more connected to the assassinations of his brother. And I was much more cognizant then of Martin Luther King. SM (00:46:40): Yeah, that is interesting because when John Kennedy was killed, you must have been four or five and when Dr. King was killed, you would have been about 10? LF (00:46:53): Nine or 10. SM (00:46:54): Yeah, nine or 10. LF (00:46:54): (19)68, right? Yeah. SM (00:46:56): As a young person, what were you thinking about this nation that you were growing up in? Sometimes I wonder what young kids think, but what does it do to the psyche to see three major leaders of your nation murdered? LF (00:47:14): Well, I do think that that was a period of hopelessness where the carriers of the torch were being assassinated one after another. And what were the other 10? SM (00:47:31): Well, the other items I had here, the other was the march on Washington (19)63. LF (00:47:35): I was there. SM (00:47:36): You were? Wow. You were so lucky. Oh my God. Your dad and mom took you there? LF (00:47:44): Wait a minute, I might have been at the Poor People's March. When was the Poor People's March? SM (00:47:48): Well, that is it. LF (00:47:49): Oh yeah, I was there. My mom took me. SM (00:47:51): 250,000 Americans were fortunate enough to be there in the presence of all those great speakers, but just to be around and... Oh wow, you, that is history. LF (00:48:02): And I remember being afraid of the National Guard with their rifles because I did not know anything about guns. SM (00:48:06): Wow. Yeah. The other ones were of course, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, Kent State in 1970. LF (00:48:15): Of course. SM (00:48:16): The Ronald Reagan election, because things seems to really change in a different direction. Watergate in (19)73, certainly the entire year, 1968. And the rise of the religious, which seemed to really evolve in the late (19)70s and has been around ever since. And then certainly the election of President Obama. I put all these down as watershed kind of developments. I do not know if anything clicks there, but they were just, for a lot of people watershed moments. LF (00:48:47): Well, they are all major. I mean, I think more currently the current economic downturn, this major recession is a really affecting experience for everyone I know. So it feels like one of the most widespread, powerful forces going on in my life today. SM (00:49:11): When you think of, were you aware as a young person of Dr. King's speech too, in 1967 against the Vietnam War? And if you did, were your parents talking about the extreme criticism that he was receiving not only from the civil rights community, but from the administration of LBJ and others, that he should just stay in the area of civil rights and not be going into world issues? Did that ever come- LF (00:49:39): I wish I could remember. I cannot remember that specifically. I mean, my household looked up to Martin Luther King. And I would say my parents would have supported that position wholeheartedly? SM (00:50:03): Still there? Yep. Hello? LF (00:50:07): Actually, I am going to have to go in about three minutes. SM (00:50:11): Oh really? LF (00:50:12): Yeah. SM (00:50:12): Oh my God, I am only halfway through here. LF (00:50:14): [inaudible]. SM (00:50:16): You do not have 90 minutes? LF (00:50:19): Oh, I thought we would said (19)60. SM (00:50:21): Oh no, it was 90 it minutes. W- LF (00:50:24): Well, I can probably squeeze in another 10, so you should, I guess, cut to your favorite. SM (00:50:29): All right. All right. I guess we will go down here. In your view, when did the (19)60s begin and when did it end? LF (00:50:35): Around 1970, it began. I mean, I have always heard and believed the joke that the (19)60s really happened in the (19)70s. But again, I was so young. Maybe an older boomer would have more of a personal connection to that. But I was just a little kid. SM (00:50:59): Did the (19)60s ever end? LF (00:51:01): Not in the neighborhood I was growing up in. It is still in the (19)60s. People still walk barefoot on the city streets there. SM (00:51:12): Wow. So it is still ongoing. Describe your feelings about watching the equality movements in the (19)60s, the civil rights, the black power, the certainly women's, rights Latino movement. There was the yellow movement, the environmental movement, disability movement, you name it. And obviously there was no biracial movement, but what were your overall thoughts on all these movements that were happening when you were very young? And that is why when they talk the culture wars, there is a feeling that the culture wars is the battle to really put a stop to a lot of the progress that is been made here almost to go back to 1950s America. Your thoughts? LF (00:52:02): That was a multi-part question. SM (00:52:08): Well, it is about the movement. LF (00:52:10): Oh, okay. SM (00:52:11): Yeah. Just your thoughts on- LF (00:52:12): All of those movements could come under the umbrella of social justice, seeking social justice for people who have been disenfranchised from the rest of society. And I was a child at that point, being led by my parents' values, which I continue to hold. I never broke away from them as some children do. And it was in support of every social justice movement. I think we were not aware of some of those because geographically they were not happening. Probably the, did you call it the yellow movement? SM (00:52:48): Yeah, the Asian-Americans. LF (00:52:50): That was probably more West Coast space. SM (00:52:52): Yes. LF (00:52:53): And we were in Philadelphia, so that was not very, I think on the screen. That was not so visible to us. But my household was a household that was interested in social justice. So all of that being good. SM (00:53:13): One of the questions I have asked everyone is the issue of healing. Do you think the boomer generation will go to its grave, like the Civil War generation not truly healed from all the divisions that took place when they were young? The divisions- LF (00:53:25): Did you say naturally healed? SM (00:53:28): No-no-no. LF (00:53:28): Truly healed. I just could not hear you. SM (00:53:30): No, the question is the issue of healing. Do you feel that the boomer generation, like the Civil War generation, will go to its grave, not really healed? Oh, okay. LF (00:53:42): Oh, okay, not really. Okay. SM (00:53:43): Not really healed from the intense divisions that took place when they were young, the divisions between black and white, male and female, gay and straight, those who were for the war and against the war, those who supported the troops, did not support the troops. The divisions were intense. And do you think, does this generation like the Civil War will not be healed? And is that an important issue within a generation? LF (00:54:10): I do not think that it is as divided as the Civil War generation was. But I do think people will go to their grave from my generation without having resolved the gulf between their position and other people's positions, whether it is about race or disability or class. Sure, I think that is always going to be true. SM (00:54:39): Have you been to the Vietnam Memorial? LF (00:54:43): Maybe. I actually do not remember. I might have gone on a class trip. When was it? SM (00:54:49): It opened in 1982. LF (00:54:54): I do not remember. SM (00:54:55): I know the Vietnam Memorial was built as a non-political entity with a hope that it would not only heal the veterans and their families, but start the steps toward healing the nation. Do you feel that that wall has done anything beyond the veterans themselves? LF (00:55:16): Not personally for me. SM (00:55:21): How about the generation? Do you think it is done anything in terms of healing the divisions and the generation over that war? LF (00:55:29): I do not know if that memorial itself provided healing, but I do feel like the generation has done some significant healing where people who were against the war have developed their points of view to be able to separate the warriors from the war, to be able to honor soldiers while disagreeing with the war, which was not a feeling during a lot of the protests. They sort of threw the baby out with the backwater in terms of vilifying soldiers as well as the policies of the government. So there was a lot of antipathy between protestors or from protestors toward the vets who are coming home. And I think that has certainly shifted. And those people who protected the war have become more humane and I think wiser in their outlook. SM (00:56:41): Phyllis Schlafly, who I interviewed, said that the radicals of the (19)60s now run today's universities. And they are the most influential teachers now running departments like women's studies, gay and lesbian studies, black studies, Latino studies, Asian studies, native American studies. David Horowitz has also said that. When you hear that, what do you think? LF (00:57:02): I think that sounds stupid. That is what I think. SM (00:57:13): Okay. She- LF (00:57:13): That just sounds like a gross generalization. And I think generalizations are a risky way of trying to make sense of the world. And it is tricky, even in your project, which I think it is a great enterprise to ask questions about this humongous cohort of people who have affected the world as a group in lots of ways and have had a very particular and interesting experience. So it is not that I am against investigating these large groups, but when people make a comment like that, I have to wonder what Horowitz and Schlafly are basing that on. How carefully have they looked at who is running what programs in university? It just seems like a knee-jerk partisan viewpoint, which from any [inaudible] spectrum, knee-jerk, partisan viewpoints are generally stupid. SM (00:58:21): I got three more questions and then we will be done. Are you still there? LF (00:58:25): I am. SM (00:58:25): Okay. LF (00:58:25): [inaudible]. SM (00:58:29): This question I have asked just about everyone too, would you say the following quotes truly define the boomer generation? Quotes, what people say oftentimes are re-quoted for a particular era of defining a time and a group. And I have got six of them here. And you can add one if you think there is another one that is important. Bobby Kennedy is really signifying about activism that, "Some men see things as they are and ask why. I see things that never were and ask why not?" Of course, Dr. King, " I have a dream that one day my little children will grow up in America that is more equal," from the March on Washington that you experienced as a little girl. Timothy Leary, who talked more about the drugs, "Tune in, turn on, drop out." "We shall overcome," which is the slogan of the Civil Rights Movement. John Lennon, about the anti-war, "All we are saying is give peace a chance." And certainly Peter Max symbolizing the kind of the hippie mentality, "You do your thing and I will do mine. If by chance we should come together, then that will be beautiful." And then I know there was a historic one from the women's movement. That really defines a lot of different groups. Do you have a quote that- LF (00:59:43): Well, the one from the women's movement might have been, "War is not healthy for children and other living things." SM (00:59:49): Yeah, that is it. LF (00:59:49): Yep. SM (00:59:52): That would be another one there that could define the boomer generation based on the quotes that people listen. Do you have any others? LF (00:59:59): Well, I think that goes towards defining the experience- LF (01:00:03): ...That goes towards defining the experience then. But the Boomer Generation now is a while different ...I mean, I guess you are focusing mostly on the (19)60s and (19)70s. SM (01:00:12): (19)60s and (19)70s and actually their influence even today, because they have now reached 65 years old this past year. LF (01:00:21): Right. I think one of the things that is happening is that our large cohort is helping to revolutionize the way this country treats old people because we are becoming old people, and we are a force to be reckoned with. So I think that is actually a really positive thing and a positive legacy we will leave. But let us see, those were really fun quotes to hear. War's not healthy for children or other living things. I remembered the poem, Desiderata. "So placidly amid the noise and the haste," and then it goes on from there. In Sunday school, I made a giant banner and spelled out at least the first stanza of that in yarn with glue on burlap. SM (01:01:24): Oh my gosh. LF (01:01:28): War is not healthy for children and other living things. Make love not war. That was back then. Also, I do not know if I remember this more, this has such an impact on me now, in the aftermath of King's assassination, but his speech in the church where he says, "I have been to the mountaintop" speech was very big, and the chillingly resonant line was, "I may not get there with you." SM (01:02:00): Oh, yes. What- LF (01:02:04): Go ahead. SM (01:02:06): When the Boomer Generation is long gone, what do you feel historians, sociologists and writers will be saying about the Boomer Generation and the time they lived in terms of your feelings? And then secondly, what do you think some of the lessons learned or the lessons lost? LF (01:02:25): Those are very good questions and big questions. Well, what I would hope for is that historians and sociologists, the good that my generation did. One of the things might be, as I just mentioned [inaudible] because we had strength in numbers, that was a distinctive quality of our generation. We had strength in numbers. We had probably more mixed-race people. That strength in numbers perhaps dovetailed with things like technologically base increase in being able to be heard. You know what I mean? SM (01:03:34): Mm-hmm. LF (01:03:35): So we not only had strengthened numbers, so we had more voices, but now what we grew up in a world that made it easier for voices to be heard. So when we did good, we did very, very good. SM (01:03:55): Excellent. And then my last question is broken down to parts here. This is the period that Boomers have been alive, just it can be a few words or a couple sentences, in your own words, briefly describe the America of the following periods when Boomers have been alive. 1946 to 1960. LF (01:04:20): You mean like the keywords? SM (01:04:22): Yeah. Just what comes to your mind, what was America like in that period? LF (01:04:28): Well, I think that was a period of recovery and retrenchment. Post-war. It signified the rise of the middle class. It gave birth to social policies which have both benefited and plagued us, for example, public housing. It was a period of survivors turning away from their losses and beginning to envision a future. SM (01:05:20): How about 1961 to 1970? LF (01:05:25): All right, first help me, what were the years of the Vietnam War? SM (01:05:30): Vietnam war was 1959 to 1975. LF (01:05:34): Oh (19)75. (19)59 to (19)75, okay. So we are saying the 1960s right now? SM (01:05:45): Yep, just 1960s. LF (01:05:46): Okay. So that was a fracturing of that unified society that had just come before that I was just describing before over social policy, civil rights and the war. SM (01:06:14): 1971 to 1980? LF (01:06:25): Oh, that is a weird period because when was Reagan elected? SM (01:06:32): (19)81. LF (01:06:32): Oh, okay. So we are not there yet. Extraction from Vietnam. I do not know, that is the hard one to characterize. SM (01:06:55): A lot of people think that period between (19)70 and (19)75 is still the (19)60s because we did not get out of Vietnam until (19)75. LF (01:07:04): Right. SM (01:07:04): And on college campuses, student activism was still strong through (19)73. So then of course the disco period came. LF (01:07:12): Oh, right, maybe that is why it is so forgettable. SM (01:07:16): Then we had (19)80- LF (01:07:17): The styles. I had a Farrah Fawcett then. SM (01:07:24): Oh, did you? LF (01:07:26): Mm-hmm. I am not saying it was a good thing. SM (01:07:28): Then (19)81 to (19)92? LF (01:07:28): (19)81 to (19)92, so I was just out of college. Well, those were the go-go years. Well, that is sort of "The Bonfire of the Vanities" years. That is what I can say about that. And an increasing tug of war between the right and the left. SM (01:08:03): 1992 to 2000? LF (01:08:11): More of the same tug of war. To 2000, yeah, I do not have much to say about that. SM (01:08:20): Okay. And then of course, 2001 to 2012? LF (01:08:28): Well, we are now global. I think 2000, we were headed towards this before the World Trade Towers and the war against terror, but in positive and negative ways, we are a global village now. Americans used to feel like the big fish, and now we are just the same sized fish in the world pond. I mean, we are a little bit cut down to size now, that is been happening in the last decade, that our place in the world is shifting. We have to take a slightly more humble stance. SM (01:09:14): What is interesting about terrorism that a lot of the young people today, the Millennials, think that terrorism began on 2001. Obviously, it was extreme in 2001, but anybody who lived in the (19)80s and (19)90s know that terrorism was ongoing, and actually really since the 1972 Olympics when the Jewish Olympic team was murdered. So it is like ever since (19)72, there has been some terrorism, a takeover of airplanes and all the other things we saw during the Reagan administration, it was just progressively getting worse. My final question and then we are done. LF (01:09:50): Oh yeah, we really do have to be done. Okay. SM (01:09:54): This is the last question, and this is about the free speech movement in (19)64 (19)65, obviously you were very young, but how important do you feel that movement was on the Berkeley campus with respect to laying the groundwork for all the movements that took place in the late (19)60s and early (19)70s that we have discussed? Secondly, because you teach in a university and experience going to college in I guess the (19)80s, the changing university in the college campus with respect to how it deals with student activism on the campus? Because my perception, I may be wrong, I would like you are feeling, is that I think universities today, for many years are forgetting the meaning of that movement. That the students at that time fought against the corporate takeover of the university and they wanted it stopped. They felt that university life should center on the exchange of ideas, not corporate domination that basically wants students to take and act in a certain way in order to get ahead in the world. Have universities forgotten lessons of the (19)60s and have they forgotten what it was like to be a student in that period and are universities today afraid of activism returning to college campuses because corporate control seems to dominate today? So it is a lot involved here in that question, but- LF (01:11:11): Well, and I remember when I was an undergrad that the big issue for activism on my college campus was apartheid. SM (01:11:26): Oh yes. LF (01:11:26): Anti-apartheid movement and a rising sense of, which may be borrowed from the Berkeley movements or grew out of that, a rising awareness of the connection between corporate profit and abuse of other people in the world. But the problem is I am an adjunct professor, so I am not involved in the wider university life, and I really do not know enough about what goes on at Penn to tell you that. So I am afraid it is a quick answer which is to say I do not. SM (01:12:08): There has not been a whole lot of activism on college campuses except that brief period of anti-apartheid period in the early (19)80s, (19)83 I believe. Now we are seeing the Occupy Wall Street group with many college students involved in that. There could be a reawakening here of activism on college campuses and the universities could be afraid of that returning knowing what happened in the (19)60s. LF (01:12:34): Yeah, well, my anti-apartheid experience was in (19)77. SM (01:12:41): Okay. LF (01:12:41): Or it was (19)78, so it was happening back then, but maybe. SM (01:12:48): Yeah, I guess if you have any final comments on the Boomers, any final thoughts you want to say? LF (01:13:00): I cannot think of any. If I think of any, I will email you. SM (01:13:05): Yeah, I have about 20 more questions here, but we are doing fine. I really thank you. LF (01:13:09): Oh, sure. SM (01:13:10): And eventually you will see the transcript. LF (01:13:14): Great. SM (01:13:15): I will work on it. Somehow, in some way, I have to take your picture. LF (01:13:20): Can I send you a picture? SM (01:13:21): You can send a couple pictures. LF (01:13:23): Okay. SM (01:13:24): I do not know if you have a picture of you when you are in college. LF (01:13:27): I may. SM (01:13:29): It is that kind of stuff because I am trying to do this at the top of each interview, there will be two pictures. One will be when some of these people were younger and one current. I have done that with a lot of them. Of course, the politicians that were older, just I have their pictures, I took them in person. You have my email address. LF (01:13:48): I do. SM (01:13:49): You can send them. LF (01:13:50): Can you do me a favor and just email me the request for the photos and be specific about what you are looking for and jpeg size and all that? SM (01:13:58): Yep. LF (01:13:58): Okay. That would be great. All right. SM (01:14:00): Lisa, thank you very much and you have a great day, and thanks for spending this time with me. LF (01:14:04): Sure. Thank you. SM (01:14:05): Bye now. (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 Lise Funderburg Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Funderburg, Lise ; McKiernan, Stephen Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/wav Subject The topic of the resource Authors; Educators; Editors; Funderburg, Lise--Interviews Description An account of the resource Lise Funderburg is an author, educator and editor. She went to school at Reed College and Columbia University School of Journalism. She has had publications at the <em>Washington Post</em>, the <em>New York Times</em>, <em>The Nation</em>, <em>Salon</em> and many more. 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 2012-01-24 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.10.2016.54a ; McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.54b 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. 148:37 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/5634ec59b1b14f9281820f622859e952.jpg 5cec64179a174808acb010f89bf3e972 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/2b498f5c680ccbfaa0f6eaa80dc44de2.mp3 1752dd40c7aa5de5decc6a8a10a3a0c3 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 2010-11-01 Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Stephen McKiernan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Carolyn Garcia, 1946- Language English Biographical Text <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Carolyn Garcia, a native of Poughkeepsie, NY, is known as \&quot;Mountain Girl\&quot;, and is a former Merry Prankster. She is the former wife of Jerry Garcia. She wrote a book on marijuana cultivation, called Primo Plant: Growing Sinsemilla Marijuana, first published in 1976. &quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:13117,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&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;6&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;7&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;8&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;11&quot;:4,&quot;12&quot;:0,&quot;15&quot;:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;16&quot;:10}">Carolyn Garcia, a native of Poughkeepsie, NY, is known as "Mountain Girl" and is a former Merry Prankster. She is the former wife of Jerry Garcia. She wrote a book on marijuana cultivation, called <em>Primo Plant: Growing Sinsemilla Marijuana</em>, first published in 1976. </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;Baby boom generation; Polio epidemic; Nuclear pollution; Psychedelics; Communal living; Acid tests; Counterculture; Vietnam War; Nineteen sixties; Nineteen seventies; Summer of Love; Vietnam Veterans; Assassination of John F. Kennedy; Marijuana; Golden Gate Park; The Grateful Dead at Harpur College; Sexism; The Beatles; Woodstock; Academia; Psychotherapy.&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;:13228792}}">Baby boom generation; Polio epidemic; Nuclear pollution; Psychedelics; Communal living; Acid tests; Counterculture; Vietnam War; Nineteen sixties; Nineteen seventies; Summer of Love; Vietnam Veterans; Assassination of John F. Kennedy; Marijuana; Golden Gate Park; The Grateful Dead at Harpur College; Sexism; The Beatles; Woodstock; Academia; Psychotherapy.</span> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 98:21 Subject LCSH Merry Band of Pranksters; Marijuana; Mountain Girl, 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. 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 Carolyn Garcia Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/wav Description An account of the resource Carolyn Garcia, a native of Poughkeepsie, NY, is known as "Mountain Girl" and is a former Merry Prankster. She is the former wife of Jerry Garcia. She wrote a book on marijuana cultivation, called <em>Primo Plant: Growing Sinsemilla Marijuana</em>, first published in 1976. 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 2010-11-01 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.10.2016.55 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. 98:21 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Garcia, Carolyn, 1946- ; McKiernan, Stephen https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/fef00cbff6579b4d66b7d49cbb60f1ec.jpg 370736aae2bfee75b91e7c7b173a3d5a https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/ad702399ce88deb7805e51d36c31f867.mp3 896f22a18c05296ccab313f2719ccf90 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 2010-04-23 Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Stephen McKiernan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Peter Goldman Language English 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;Columbia, Journalism, Baby boom generation, Racism, Bourgeoisie, Self Expression, War, Silent generation, Yippies, Brown v. Board of Education, Thurgood Marshall; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Black Panthers, Segregation, Liberals.&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;:13228792}}">Columbia; Journalism; Baby boom generation; Racism; Bourgeoisie; Self Expression; War; Silent generation; Yippies; Brown v. Board of Education; Thurgood Marshall; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; Malcolm X; Black Panthers; Segregation; Liberals.</span> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 187:25 Subject LCSH Journalists; Goldman, Peter--Interviews Biographical Text Peter Goldman is an author, editor, and journalist. He was the national-affairs writer, senior editor, and team leader of a special-projects unit for <em>Newsweek</em> magazine. Goldman wrote over 120 cover stories on race, politics, Watergate, criminal justice and other aspects of American life. Goldman additionally generated a half-dozen books, including the best-selling <em>Charlie Company: What Vietnam Did to Us</em>, and won numerous awards for the magazine. Goldman has a Bachelor's degree in English Literature from Williams College and a Master's degree in Journalism from Columbia University. 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: Peter Goldman Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan Transcriber: REV Date of interview: 23 April 2010 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (Start of Interview) SM (00:00:07): Testing, one, two, three. Testing. Testing, one, two. Okay, good. I will keep double checking this to make sure this is working. Thanks again. Mr. Cohen, could you give me... Peter, I apologize. Could you give me a little bit about your background, where you came from originally, your parents, your college, your schooling, and how you chose journalism as a career? PG (00:00:40): Well, I will start with the last one first. I chose journalism as a career when I was probably eight years old and at the time wanted to be a sports writer at eight or nine, and just never changed. The sports part of it changed totally obviously, but I knew that is what I wanted to do. Ask me why, I do not know. But as a child, I was a reader and attempted to be a writer. I have the old-fashioned composition books with mottled-color covers and I would be writing all the time. My dad, when he was single, he came from St. Louis, had a graduate degree in economics, but he wanted to be a writer and so there may be a genetic connection there, and he actually had a fair start as a freelance. He sold some stuff to Mankins Old American- SM (00:02:15): Old American, yep. PG (00:02:19): Was talking to the New Yorker about writing a Wall Street letter for the New Yorker. But when he got serious about getting married and having kids, he decided that is not a stable life. At the time he was living in Greenwich Village, so he joined a stockbrokerage and was off to a hot shot start in that when the depression happened. He had a bumpy time for a while and wound up willy-nilly in the shoe business. He and my mother met in the '20s with both of them living at Greenwich Village. My mother had some talent as an artist that she never really attempted to pursue professionally. For a while during the depression, she was supporting the family working in the books department at Macy's. Department stores in those days actually had book departments, and rather good ones actually. They were pretty good bookstores. That was until my father found his way into the shoe business first as a retail manager then and other aspects sort of corporate side and then finally in his later years as a traveling salesman. Where am I from? That is a much more complicated question you want to know. I was born in Philadelphia. In between birth and my second year in high school, I lived in many places is the simple way to put it. If you want them all... SM (00:04:44): No, that is fine . PG (00:04:48): We finally came to roost in the suburbs of St. Louis, which had been my father's hometown, and I went to high school there, went to Williams College. SM (00:05:01): Great school. PG (00:05:04): At the time, I was not especially happy there, but that is a whole another story. SM (00:05:08): Was James McGregor Burns there when you were there? PG (00:05:10): Yeah-yeah. They had a great faculty, a great teaching faculty actually. They put more stress on teaching than on publication. It was not a publish or perish school. SM (00:05:26): Right. PG (00:05:26): I was very happy with that part of it, but it was a school with a lot of problems. A lot of it was essentially ruled by fraternities. It had next to zero Black students that had a very clear quota of Jews, and if the fraternities had clauses and I saw one of them, it was standard for the fraternities. It is limited to white Americans of Christian persuasion, which meant the rest of us were outcasts. If you were one of the outcasts, you had a hard time with extracurricular stuff. SM (00:06:31): Now, what years were you there? PG (00:06:33): I was in the class of (19)54. I was there from (19)50 to (19)54. Then I went to Columbia Journalism School, which was a one-year graduate school program, and then I went back out to St. Louis, worked for seven years at the St. Louis Globe Democrat, which is now defunct. One of those years I spent at Harvard on a fellowship. Then (19)62 I got married to a New York newspaper woman. We met accidentally at a murder trial in Boston and courted for a year and got married in (19)61, moved to New York in (19)62, and I went to work for Newsweek at that point. Stayed at Newsweek on active duty for 25 years and have continued to do work for them ever since. Took early retirement in (19)88, but since then I have done work for them usually on presidential campaigns. SM (00:08:04): Obviously from all of your scholarship and your work and your writing from the book on Malcolm X to your book on the 12 young African American men- PG (00:08:14): [inaudible]. SM (00:08:15): That project, certainly Vietnam veterans as they came back, of course many of them were treated poorly upon their return to America and some of your other early books that looked at the African American experience in the (19)40s, (19)50s and the (19)60s, can you say that maybe that experience of being at Williams College and seeing discrimination and exclusion really sparked something in you and then you wanted ... Well, how did your interest in African American issues develop? PG (00:08:51): It was another childhood phenomenon. When I was in grade school in New York, my last four years of grade school, I went to a private school that was progressive in both senses of the world. It was progressive educational philosophy, but also politically progressive. For a great school library, they had an amazing library, and I found my way to just willy-nilly to some books about the Black experience. The one that had the most powerful impact on me was Howard Fast's Freedom Road, a novel about the Reconstruction Era and the betrayal of the Reconstruction Era. It just had a huge impact on me. This is not right, this is not fair. The school was good background music for that because it was a recurring subject. As eighth graders, we got to write our own class play and it was about Jim Crow in the south and the part that everyone wanted and I did not get was the Black character, the Black protagonist. I got to play Senator Bilbo, who was the outrageous segregationist senator from Mississippi. Had to play him in short pants. SM (00:11:04): Oh my God. PG (00:11:17): Got laugh from some of the parents. So I really think that was the origin. My sister and I went around collecting signatures to allow Blacks into Major League Baseball. This was obviously before Jackie Robinson, that would have been (19)45, I guess. We got neighbors to sign petitions. So, it has been an issue with me essentially for all my whole entire life. SM (00:11:58): When you were doing that, was that just before Jackie went in, it was (19)47? PG (00:12:04): Jackie went to the Montreal Royals who were the Dodger farm team in (19)46. This was before that, it was (19)45. Our petitions had pictures of six Black ball players who would certainly have been qualified. Jackie Robinson was one of the pictures. SM (00:12:30): Probably Monte Irvin was in there and Larry Doby. PG (00:12:33): I do not remember the others. Satchel Paige was one. (00:12:44): So, it has been with me all my life, continued in high school. I continued to be fascinated by that, did a lot of reading. To me, the Williams experience was just an example of the unjust practice. You are in college for four years, you spend seven classes from the people who were seniors when you arrived to the people who were freshmen when you left, and I think during that whole time we had three Black Americans and one Black African, and two of the three Black Americans were essentially basketball mercenaries who flunked out in freshman year. SM (00:13:49): I have a lot of questions on Malcolm and some of your other books and your experiences, but the Boomer generation are those born between (19)46 and (19)64, and I have tried to make sure that I am inclusive here because someone early on in the interview process said they thought that Boomers were white men. That is the first perception they get. Then they said, well, maybe white women too. And I said, no. Other people say, when we talk about the 74 to 78 million Boomers, we're talking about all Boomers. Black. PG (00:14:27): It was one of the things I was going to raise with you. SM (00:14:27): Oh, yes. PG (00:14:27): If you had not raised it. SM (00:14:27): Oh no, because I want to make sure it is for everyone. That is why in all these different interviews when we talk about the break ... well, people used to go to church in the (19)50s and then church attendance went down and the African-American family was also fairly stable in the (19)50s and then in the (19)60s, the African-American family as well as many white families and the [inaudible] went up and all the other things. I am trying to connect everything here. It's for all groups, it is for Latinos, Native Americans, which I am trying to include here by getting different perspectives. The Asian American experience is very difficult because they were not in any anti-war activity and they were almost non-existent. So that is one group I am not sure if I am going to really be able to do well on. But what I am getting at here is when you think of that period between 1946 ... I break the periods for Boomer lives all 63 years now, Boomers are now 63 in the front-runner and the youngest is 46. PG (00:15:32): The Tea Party is the last Boomer movement. SM (00:15:35): Yeah. Well you may be right. I do not know what the average age is, but- PG (00:15:44): The average age ... The Times just did a full issue, which if you have not seen you ought to look at, which has a pretty good typology of the Boomers. I do not know if it was the average age or whether it was the location they used was 45 and up, but they are Boomers. The great majority of them are 45 and up, which would make everybody 45 and up as a Bloomer. SM (00:16:23): Did it say whether they were more conservative or more liberal? PG (00:16:27): Tea party people? SM (00:16:28): Yes. PG (00:16:28): Oh, much more conservative inherently. It is a conservative movement, got strands of racism, but I do not think that is the driving force. It is kind of a classic revolt of the petit bourgeoisie I think. It is the angry. They are economically better situated than the average. SM (00:17:10): They are the haves more than the have-nots. PG (00:17:11): They are more the haves than the have-not. They are the have-some, I would think. SM (00:17:18): I have not kind of pinpointed it. Do you feel also that they are more against those Boomers who were protesting in the (19)60s? That group, I do not know, do they shun them? PG (00:17:32): I have not seen data on that, but I doubt that they would have anything in common. It is interesting that the Tea Party movement does not seem to have violent feelings on the so-called social issues, which were the culture war, which has been typical of our slightly earlier past. The [inaudible] and standing in front of Republican conventions anywhere in the middle of a culture war. These people seem to be more Ross Perot rebels. Anti-government, anti-tax, anti- deficit. As I say, I think there is a strain of anger that we have got a Black president, but I do not think that is the central of that. SM (00:18:35): I have noticed that if you watch Mike Huckabee, oftentimes he takes shots of the (19)60s a lot. Of course, Glenn Beck does too, but I do not put them in the same category. I know that when Hillary Clinton was running for President, John McCain liked to make some comments about her, even though they are friends, that she is from the (19)60s and those kinds of comments. We all know what Newt Gingrich said when he came into power in (19)94, he made some commentaries about that era even though he is a Boomer, and certainly George Will oftentimes in his books will have a little segment about that period. Even Barney Frank, who I am a big fan of, we brought students to him, he even wrote in "Speaking Frankly," a book that came out in the (19)90s that the Democratic Party had to get away from the anti-war, those movement types and the George McGovern types, if the party was going to survive. And he is a Democrat. PG (00:19:36): Yeah. Well, I mean, my own feelings about the Boomer politics of the (19)60s are somewhat mixed. I think the most consequential Boomer movement was Black rather than white. The civil rights movement, when it really exploded in the (19)60s, starting with the sit-ins and the Freedom Rides, that was young, Black baby boomers, college students and people slightly older than college age. To me, it was a more mature movement than some of the later whiter movements. More politically mature, accomplished more, and generally stirred the country I think. It made it impossible to be overtly racist. That did not happen overnight, but we have evolved to a point now where in polling, it is impossible to measure racism because everyone who's polled knows there are certain things you do not say. SM (00:21:39): It is subtle of everything. PG (00:21:40): Yeah, yeah. It did not make racism impossible, but it drove it underground. They had political successes, like the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, 1960, the Voting Rights Act of (19)65, the engagement of the federal government, the war on poverty. So, I think that of all the movements, that is the one I most admire. The anti-war movement, I completely sympathized with it, but I do not think it was a mature political movement. I think in fact that the Boomers who were of fighting age really split in two directions. Boomers fought the war, young Boomers. Boomers opposed the war. The Boomers who opposed the war, I think were what we classically think of in an oversimplified way as who the Boomers were, privileged kids from suburban backgrounds, college-educated and deeply into self-expression and deeply against fighting the war. I am a member of the Silent Generation. I was in college when the Korean War was happening. There was no movement against the Korean War. There were a lot of reasons for that. The Korean War was in the penumbra of war, it happened five years after World War II. World War II united the country almost wholly, about as close to wholly as you can get. In the penumbra of that, people did not question wars. If the country called, you served. But we were not Boomers. We were the Silent Generation and we just shut up. SM (00:24:53): We’re not The Beats part of that though? We’re not the beats part of the silent? PG (00:24:57): Yeah, certainly in age terms. When I was in college, I was enamored of The Beats. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That I was must reading for me. Kerouac, Chandler Broussard, Ginsburg. Yeah. SM (00:25:19): Pearl Kennedy. PG (00:25:19): Yeah, Pearl Kennedy. I was an English major and was very much taken with them. Part of the reason I was taken was because the degree to which they were white writers, but they intersected with the Black culture and adopted some of its language, some of its style. But I think the Black movement, the Black boomers very strongly influenced the style of all the subsequent movements, including the anti-war movement, the women's liberation movement, which consciously adopted the Black style of protest, the music, the march, the demonstration as an expression. I think the American Indian movement, about which I am not very well educated, but I think they borrowed heavily from the Blacks. So, to me that was the most con-, and it is not just because of my particular affection for Black America, I think it was the most consequential Boomer movement. SM (00:27:12): I think the gay and lesbian movement also took a lot from the civil rights movement. PG (00:27:17): Yeah, definitely. Yeah. SM (00:27:18): And even the Chicano movement, although the Young Lords tried to copy in Philadelphia the Black Panthers. PG (00:27:27): Yeah-yeah. SM (00:27:27): Now, when we are about the Boomers now, we are talking- PG (00:27:32): Just parenthetically, it is movements like the Young Lords, the Black Panthers, the Black P. Stone Rangers, that to me is not mature politics. The SDS to me is not mature politics. What do you accomplish if you blow up a ROTC building? What do you accomplish if you blow yourselves up in a townhouse in Greenwich Village? What did the Symbionese Liberation Army accomplish? Politics to me ought to have a reasonable prospect of gain or chance of gain or a realistic assessment of the possibility of gain for the common good. It should not be just self-expression. Abby Hoffman smoking dope and wearing an afro is to me, not- SM (00:28:50): I mean that is the hippies. PG (00:28:53): Yeah-yeah, yeah. SM (00:28:54): I have been interviewing some of them, so... PG (00:28:56): Yeah. Good. No, they belong in this project. SM (00:29:01): The Hippies and Yippies. I always have to check this to make sure. It is a crazy tape player. What is fascinating me, because actually, this particular area is the greatest interest in my life because I had an African-American professor at Ohio State University, Dr. Johnson. I was there in 1971, (19)72, and all these things were happening, and African American issues have always been very important to me. I did internships in prisons for prison inmates. I have spent my whole life really caring about this issue. Man, monumental. We had Dr. King celebrations every year for 33 years, wherever I worked to honor him. We have had a tribute to Bayard Rustin, and we have had a tribute to Jackie Robinson, but what I am getting at here is, what's interesting is if you look at the Brown versus Board of Education, I would like your comments on this, Thurgood Marshall, Jack Greenberg, they were the types that, it was more of a gradualist approach, and Dr. King was challenging. He loved them, but he was more, "I want it now. I do not want to wait." PG (00:30:16): The fierce urgency of now, which Obama used this quote. SM (00:30:20): So, he wanted it now, and I know some of the big four, not even as much as Dr. King, but then you have Stokely Carmichael challenging Dr. King, basically saying, "Your time has passed." Even Malcolm debating Bayard Rustin, I believe in (19)64, telling him, "Your time has passed." So more Black power type of a- PG (00:30:45): They debated each other several times. I saw Malcolm debate several people, and I think the only one who held his own required Bayard Rustin. Rustin was really good. It's very tough to debate Malcolm X, who first of all is very gifted at argument and second of all, the case for the prosecution is a whole lot easier given the history of race in America is a whole lot easier. The prosecution case is a whole lot easier to make than the ... Rustin was not arguing the defense, but he was arguing the defense of a strategy of one step at a time. Malcolm was arguing for essentially millennial strategy, give us [inaudible]. At the time he debated Rustin was before his conversion to traditional Islam. SM (00:31:53): Obviously, Malcolm died in (19)65. He was 39, just like Dr. King. I find that ironic. The irony that they both died at 39, both at the hands of a gun. PG (00:32:02): Yeah. SM (00:32:02): That they both died at 39, both at the hands of a gun. But do you feel that Malcolm was the inspiration for the Black Panthers and people like that? Because when you listen to Stokely Carmichael, or H. Rap Brown, or Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Cleaver, Dave Hilliard, that whole ... Huey Newton. I mean they were, Kent State's having their 40th remembrance ceremony, Bobby Seale's going to be there. There was a link between Black Panthers and SDS, and before, the Weathermen. Just your thoughts on those personalities, and Bobby Seale too. They were personalities. [inaudible] they were serious. PG (00:32:49): Yeah. There is an arc that was happening here, starting in Montgomery in the middle (19)50s, through the demonstrations led by King, not only by King, but king is the sort of cover boy of the movement. There were a lot of people that I regarded [inaudible]. He was the most prominent one. Which, and the first incarnation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which began as kids sitting in lunch counters. Its early members were, a lot of them were students studying for the ministry, believed in the doctrine of nonviolence. Believed, not in integration, but in desegregation. And I think sometimes movements get hung up on semantic difficulties, but I think that is, that it really is a difference. Integration meaning it is better for Black people to be in the company of white people. Desegregation means you cannot legally, that separate but equal is not viable. And the SNCC kids were younger, more radical than the people of King's generation. King, some of the field workers in King's organization, the Southern Christian Leader Leadership Conference, were also young and radical and being radicalized by the movement. Same with CORE, Congress on Racial Equality, which I had been a member of in the (19)50s. Did a couple of sit-ins before they were called sit-ins. SM (00:35:31): Were you with. James Farmer at all or? PG (00:35:33): I never, I was in St. Louis and it was during summers in my college years. I knew the local leadership. SM (00:35:44): Right. PG (00:35:45): Farmer was a distant and lofty figure. I did not meet him at ... I met him years later. SM (00:35:53): I knew when Roy Innis replaced him, or Bruce Wade McKissick, I believe. PG (00:35:57): McKissick. SM (00:35:59): And then after McKissick, Roy Innis. PG (00:36:00): Yeah. SM (00:36:00): Oh my God, it is not even in the same league. PG (00:36:07): But I think there was, even as the, even while the so-called mainstream civil rights movement seemed to be making progress, engaging the Kennedys, sort of. The Kennedys were quite timid, but Jack was obliged to say finally, for the first time by any president, this is a moral question. Lyndon embraced it wholeheartedly. So, they did what King urged them to do, which was to catch the conscience of the nation, and by doing that, make it politically impossible, make themselves a politically irresistible force to the people in real power. That worked. But a couple of things were going on. One was the increasing discovery, particularly among the younger movement people, that this all had to do with segregation in the south, that the real problems were much more difficult. The problems in the north, which was widely supposed by liberals, by white liberals to be the promised land, was not really the promised land. It had different forms of segregation, and they were not written into law. But housing segregation, which in turn led to school segregation and prejudices not much different from what you found in Alabama or Mississippi. They were just quieter. So, there were, with that discovery, that the relevance of what the mainstream movement had been doing was beginning to seem less important. And second was there was a, the doctrine of nonviolence began being called into question by people in the movement. Because there were too many funerals, was the way the young field workers in the movement expressed it, "I have been to too many funerals." And the doctrine of the non-violent movement was that you cannot defend yourself, or so it seemed to be. Malcolm arrives as a public figure in the early (19)60s. He becomes visible first, I think, on a program, TV program called The Hate That Hate Produced. I am not sure of the date. I think it may have been 1959, in fact, that looked at the Muslim movement, the Nation of Islam, with considerable horror. And Malcolm was one of the people, I think Mike Wallace [inaudible], I think he did. And Malcolm was an extremely, as you know, an extremely articulate spokesman for that point of view. And Malcolm's level of political sophistication even at that point was rising. He was straining against the bounds of the teachings of the Nation of Islam in this matter. Elijah Muhammad, his preaching was getting to be more speechifying and more politicized. So, by late 1963, he is still a member of the Nation of Islam, but he did, one of his most famous speeches was called Message to the Grassroots, and it is wholly politicized, and it is wholly a critique of white America and of the non-violent movement. And he often forgets to attribute the teachings to the ... He had ritually, practically every sentence, in his past, he had, practically every sentence would begin, "The honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches us," such and such. In Message to the Grassroots, we do not hear much about the honorable Elijah Muhammad. So he was on, no matter what the cause, we know why he was first sort of suspended, then sort of shut down entirely and why he broke. But I think he was destined to break anyway because he was on this arc. As he gets on this arc, he begins to influence local ... This is way too much detail for you. SM (00:42:35): This is important because he was a major influence. PG (00:42:39): He begins to influence first the more militant local leaders in, people who were leaders in Cambridge, Maryland, for instance, Gloria Richardson, a number of others around the country. And in fact, the Message to the Grassroots was at a conference they had put together, and he spoke there. They called it the Conference on Grassroots something or other. So that is his first audience outside the orbit he had been in. And then he begins influencing the younger SNCC people, and SNCC is beginning to come apart at the seams, the people who were committed to something like the King doctrine, non-violent direct action- SM (00:43:52): The John Lewis types, yeah. PG (00:43:53): The John Lewis- SM (00:43:53): Julian Bond. PG (00:43:55): Julian Bond, yeah. Another good example. And they're moving toward Stokely, and Rap, and Willie Ricks, who was, a field worker, who was probably the first person to utter the slogan "Black Power." SM (00:44:16): Oh wow. PG (00:44:17): On the Meredith March, which would have been, was that (19)65? SM (00:44:23): Wow. PG (00:44:24): I am a little rusty on my dates. And that became the battle cry of the younger, cutting-edge movement. That, there was a direct influence of Malcolm X on those guys, the Stokely and the Raps and the SNCC workers particularly. And from SNCC it spreads into CORE. So, CORE, which had been called to Congress on Racial Equality, began kicking out its white members. SNCC kicked out its few white members. And King is moving more toward different issues, to the annoyance of the, what you might call the right wing of the civil rights movement, the Urban League, the NAACP. He begins talking about the war and about and about economic as against purely color problems. So, what we are seeing in that period is a radicalization, we are seeing ripples in a pond flowing out. SM (00:46:09): Right. PG (00:46:13): And it was affecting everybody, including King, who in the general public impression was the teacher of peace and nonviolence. SM (00:46:33): Even on college campuses in the late (19)60s and early (19)70s, there was the split. And... PG (00:46:38): That is my experience. SM (00:46:48): Yeah, a couple times the [inaudible] came off today, even before, on the other side, I do not know why. But around that timeframe, many African American students were instructed to not protest the war anymore, you need to concentrate strips solely on issues of African Americans. And that is when they had big afros on college campuses and the real tensions when there were separatism, particularly in (19)71 and (19)72. I taught at Ohio State, and you cannot find, except for one picture of one African-American student at Kent State. PG (00:47:23): Yeah. SM (00:47:24): They were told to stay away, and "Your cause is not Vietnam. It's African American issues." So, this might be a continuation of it. PG (00:47:34): Yeah, I thought that the, actually, I think the style piece of that happened as part of the Black Power movement. The afros, Black is Beautiful, which to me was a crucial development. The idea that Black is Beautiful. Malcolm taught that the worst crime the white man ever committed against us was teaching us that we were inferior. And we believed, and that was the demoralization of the race, which limited its possibilities, that it had... SM (00:48:40): Right. PG (00:48:41): Great and potentially glorious possibilities. But that if you wake up in the morning and look at yourself in the mirror, and you have accepted white standards of beauty among all the other white standards, that you're, it's not healthy mentally. So, I think the Block is Beautiful business was-was more than just a slogan, and I think the afros were more than just a style. It was an assertion Block is beautiful. SM (00:49:28): I know at Ohio State it was intimidation too, because you could sense it. And I was not really involved in this at Ohio State as a grad student. I will tell you a little bit more about it after the interview, because there is this thing I want to tell you about what happened at the Ohio Union, which is kind of historically, Glen Llewellyn was then the director. When you look at that, what does it mean, By Any Means Necessary?? Is that the call to violence? Is that the call to say that non-violence will not work anymore, so pick up a gun. If the cops are going to do something else, we're going to do something to them? PG (00:50:11): Malcolm, I think when Malcolm used it, it was meant to be mysterious. It was meant to be suggestive. Watch out for us. And it was not, he never, to my knowledge, preached aggressive violence. But he believed very strongly in arming yourself for self-defense. But he kept an ambiguity that was partly ... He was very politically, he was very gifted of political rhetoric, but he was also under legal advice to sort of watch it. The Smith Act was still in force, he could be tossed in the slammer for advocating the overthrow of the government by force of violence. SM (00:51:23): I have been looking, in preparation for this interview, looking at some of the tapes on YouTube of Malcolm. And I find that, and also, I found this with Abby Hoffman, the people that may not have liked his politics, but they liked him personally. I get a sense from Malcolm X and from Abby Hoffman, I do not like Jerry Rubin, but people liked him. If you got to know them, when Abby Hoffman was in jail, they did not like the other members of the Chicago Eight, but they liked him, because he was funny, he had a sense of humor, and they liked talking to him. With Malcolm, the tape that I really liked was when he spoke over in England, I guess at Cambridge or Oxford. PG (00:52:09): Oh, the Oxford Union, the [inaudible]. SM (00:52:10): Yeah, that was, with Bill Buckley or whatever. I wish I could see that whole debate. But I think the students, boy, they were really listening, paying respect. But he had a sense of humor that was amazing, and how could you dislike him? And I am just seeing this from afar. And the other one I like, he responds to, he was being interviewed on a television show, it is actually in color, and they're asking him, "I would like to know your last name." It was Malcolm X. There is one on YouTube, and he tried to explain to him, "I do not have a last name." PG (00:52:50): Yeah, actually he did. It was Shabazz by that time. But he- SM (00:52:54): Yeah. PG (00:52:57): The doctrine of the Nation of Islam was, his name was Malcolm Little, and the doctrine of the Nation of Islam was what you think is your last name is actually your slave name, it was the name of your slaveowner. Which is historically accurate, in most cases. SM (00:53:16): You we're going to get into some Vietnam veteran issues here, but I think I already had your feelings on the Black Panthers and Black Power. I would like your thoughts on the 1968 Olympics with Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fist. We have had Tommy on our campus and he said, "I was never into the Black Panthers." PG (00:53:37): Yeah. SM (00:53:37): It was about black power. The second one was the 1969 takeover of the Cornell Union, remember, with the guns, and I think Harry Edwards was the advisor on that at the time. Those are major events. Some other ones, Freedom Summer in. (19)64, Fannie Lou Hamer, [inaudible]- PG (00:54:00): Which was not really called Freedom Summer by the sponsors, it was- SM (00:54:05): What was it called? PG (00:54:06): The Mississippi Summit. SM (00:54:07): Oh wow. PG (00:54:09): Freedom Summer was the name of a book by a white woman student, Sally Belford, who wrote her story of her experience. SM (00:54:18): Yeah, I think I- PG (00:54:18): It is quite a good book. SM (00:54:24): ...I have that book. Then of course, the sexism that was often in the civil rights movement, where women were second class citizens. PG (00:54:31): Yeah. SM (00:54:31): These are just some of the things that were happening to boomer African-American women in that timeframe. And I know Dr. King, if he were alive today, would be very sensitive about this, really. But just your thoughts on that, those things. The Olympics first in (19)68, I do not know if that had any impact on you at all, or was... PG (00:55:01): Not a large impact. I thought it was a gesture, it was fine with me. Again, I tend to separate politics that ... meaningful politics from the politics of gesture. I think that was the politics of gesture. They were entitled to do it, it was an act of free speech and a gesture. I just, I do not think it helped anything, but, except a segment of Black America responded positively to it. But I do not think it advanced the ball anywhere. The Harry Edwards thing, I did not really think about at the time. You mentioned the women in the movement being the second-class citizens. So that was a very real problem. And what I want to just dial back to, we have talked about the transition to Black Power and purging the young militant movement of white people. There was a guy named Bob Moses who was in the early SNCC. I mean, wonderful, bright, educated, just almost saintly guy. Was not Stokely or Rap, he was not in that bag. In fact, it was almost the opposite. But he talked to me once about, white volunteers would come down to the south and would walk into a SNCC office, and there might be, in Mississippi, let us say, and there might be a young Black woman trying to type a document and really struggling with it, struggling with the process of typing it. And the tendency of, as Moses described it, the tendency of white kids, with the best of intentions, best of intentions, would be to say, "Let me help you with that. I can do it. I can do it faster. I studied typing," and moving the Black kids out of the way. And that had an impact. It did not send Bob Moses out into the street yelling, "Black power," but it was part of a cumulative impact of, over a fairly condensed period of time, a couple of years. It was part of the flow that led to the Black Power Movement. SM (00:59:09): When you think of that period, there has been a couple books, a lot of Jewish male and female students went south. I know David Hawk, who I interviewed, who was on the Mo Committee, the Moratorium. I know that, well, [inaudible], who was at Berkeley in the free speech movement, certainly Abby Hoffman. He went down there, and then of course they brought these, a lot of these ideas back to Berkeley and the free speech movement. Mario Savio actually was down there as well, in the summer. So, you saw this young people coming together. What I also liked about it was there were Catholic priests, there were Jewish rabbis, there were young people. And I know the relationship between Rabbi Heschel and Dr. King is something that needs to be pursued a lot more than it has. I think the relationship that those two men had with each other, and the criticism that they both received within their religious communities for their stands against the war in Vietnam are historic. And of course, he died young too. He looked like he was older, but he was not that old when he passed away, Rabbi Heschel. So that is the period, and that, boomers that were really influencing, and then a lot of them became part of the anti-war movement, and they went into the women's movement, and where all the other movements, there is a lot of links here, how important civil rights is to the boomer generation. PG (01:00:50): Oh yeah, no question about it. One of my ambivalences is that for some of the white kids who carried those influences back into various aspects of the struggle, there was a strain of wanting to be white Negro, so far as some of the [inaudible]. My view of the anti-war movement is perhaps heretical. I mean, I am glad they did it, I was rooting for them. I do not think it ... And that the war made it very difficult for Lyndon Johnson, literally difficult for him to leave the White House to go anywhere other than a military base in his last couple of years. Is that productive politics? I have mixed feelings about that. But I think the popular sentiment that ended the war was the sentiment of the families who were sending their kids to be cannon fodder. People in the anti-war movement were finding ways out. They were getting college exemptions, they were moving to Canada. They were hiding, they went underground. And so, I have always had a lingering question, it is not an issue, it is not a suspicion, but I have had a lingering question about the degree to which the motivation for a lot of what happened in the anti-war movement was self-preservation, not wanting to go to Vietnam and get trashed. The parents of the kids ... I wrote in the introduction to Charlie Company that the anthem that marked the turning point politically, that told us that the war was no longer sustainable, was not Give Peace a Chance, which was... PG (01:04:02): Give Peace a Chance, which was Anne and some of the student anti-war movement, the young anti-war movement. It was a Country song, Ruby, Do not Take Your Love to Town. A song by Mel Tillis. And it is the ballad of a quadriplegic veteran who's come home and his wife is straying, he's no longer sexually capable, and his wife is straying and he's stuck in bed and pleading with her not to go out and winding up saying, if I could move, I would get a gun and put her in the ground. That song, when it was first recorded, went nowhere. Two years later, it was number one on the Country Charts and high up on the National All Purpose Charts. That told me something very profound that Johnson and then Nixon had lost the faith of the people, of the people who had classically supported the war. That dear honor of- SM (01:05:44): I have seen ahead. A great movie. PG (01:05:50): Some of my friends objected to the closing scene in which they're gathered around the table and they start saying, God bless America. But that is unrealistic because look what it did to their family. I think it was exactly accurate. There are people who believe, a lot of people who believe that when your country calls you answer the call and you may die, your sons may die. But that that is part of being an American. And then when you lose those people, those tend to be working class people. People who really were not looking at much of the future beyond high school or maybe high school and community college or junior college. In the North, kids who were going to go to work for the auto plant or the steel mill, where their dads worked. In the South, where there's a strong military tradition. I think they are the people who entered the war and they did not have a movement. They were not out in the streets, but it was clear in polling that they were gone or that they were going. That that support was happening, made it impossible. I think it finally turned Nixon into Nixon, and probably Kissinger into, we got to find a way out of this thing with saving face. That we have got a weakness, is not supported. We cannot keep this going. SM (01:08:10): Some of the music of the (19)60s that really were the inspiration, obviously after Kent State, four dead in Ohio, which we will be hearing that in a week from now, a week from tomorrow, I will be there. And they will be playing that a lot because that was a very popular hit by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. And then you had Country Joe doing those songs that he wrote that are classic. And of course, she had John Lennon and his music. All we can say is Give Peace a Chance. And Bob Dylan and his music were anthems of the anti-war movement. PG (01:08:50): If God is on our side, He will stop the next war. And of course, there were anthems of the anti-war movement that I just do not think the, and I do not denigrate the contributions of the anti-war movement, but I do not think the anti-war movement ended the war. I think they helped, but I do not think they ended the war. SM (01:09:20): Do you feel it was when the people in middle America, Ohio, realized that their sons are coming home in caskets, they realize it's over? And while I cannot say it had a lot to do, the other two were white students killed on a college campus. PG (01:09:47): It is over because the kids are coming home in coffins or body bags or however they were coming home. And because there was very clearly no sign of progress, we went through a period between, I think the Tet Offensive, which militarily, a defeat for the other guys, the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese. Was a huge victory for them? A huge psychological victory. Huge. Had a devastating impact on the American national psyche and on the American war effort. In some months, or maybe a year later, maybe a year and a half, again I am rusty on the dates, we had My Lai. American troops massacre a village. You take those two and print those on the American public's psyche and you are in a... The old saying in politics is, when you have got a failing campaign, the dog food is purple and the dogs do not like it. And at that point I thought the dog food is purple and the dogs did not like it. SM (01:11:35): Charlie Company, they were 65 different young men who came home. PG (01:11:44): All of them did. We started with a roster of one company, which consisted of, I think it is somewhere around 160 soldiers. We found as many of them as we could. It was very difficult. Very, very difficult. We spent half a year just finding a workable, startup list of names, and with any contact information. Addresses, sometimes just a hometown. SM (01:12:17): Wow. PG (01:12:23): And they had fought in the (19)67, (19)68, (19)69 period, (19)68, (19)69 really, which was the period of America's maximum involvement. We had 560,000 troops there at the time. And we picked that particular company. We wanted a combat infantry company. I did not want any special, we wanted ordinary grunts. We did not want special forces. We did not want chopper pilots. We wanted just ordinary on the ground infantry grunts. We found our way to The Big Red One, has an alumni association. We have looked through their records, found one battle that sounded interesting to us. We wanted to get a collective account of one battle. We got a list of names of people who had served in that company, but with no contact information. The Army was only allowed to give us contact information for people who were still in the military, and I think only four of them were. So, we had to scratch and claw for half a year, as I say, and then another half year to do the, we had a team working on it, and to do the necessary interviewing. And for the magazine version we found 50 some, maybe 54, that included a couple or three who had been killed over there, and a couple who had died back home. And after we published the magazine version, we began to hear from other guys in the company and we checked them against our roster and they were legit. And so, for the book, I think we had 65 members, that is less than half the company. And one of the ironies was the battle that attracted us originally, none of them remembered. It was not that it was not that significant, but they told us about another battle that was significant, to the extent that any of those battle were significant. I mean, we were fighting over patches of real estate that nobody wanted. We would hold them for a few days and then leave. SM (01:15:47): And even Caputo, I interviewed him and he said, you read the Rumor of War, and even in (19)65 he started asking questions, what are we doing here? Because they are taking a hill. Then they have to go back and they would not lose as many people, but they would lose one. And then he lost his life and we just gave the hill up again. I mean, it was starting in (19)65 with the attitude, but (19)67 to (19)71 was the heyday. PG (01:16:18): Was the heyday. SM (01:16:21): These young men, did most of them feel they were discriminated against when they came home in terms of- PG (01:16:26): A lot of them. SM (01:16:27): A lot of them. Was it because of that image of My Lai, that Vietnam veterans were all baby killers? That kind of an attitude? PG (01:16:37): And it was not just My Lai, it was an unintended consequence of the anti-war movement, which was throwing around terms like baby killers. (01:16:52): Several of them told us when they were being flown home on commercial jets under contract to the government, they would get to the airport, duck into the first men's room they saw and change into civilian clothes. They did not want to walk through the airport in military clothes. SM (01:17:24): Is it true that at least some of them had a hard time getting a job, but also that some of your military organizations like Veterans of Foreign Wars did not even welcome them? In the beginning. PG (01:17:41): In the beginning, and I think that is one of the reasons for the formation of the Vietnam Veterans of America, or whatever the group is called, their own thing. I think the traditional, the VFW and the American Legion, caught onto and began welcoming them. But I think if you're a young guy and you have got people my age sitting with their caps on, that is not an environment that is going to make you feel real good. SM (01:18:34): I can remember affirmative action included Vietnam veterans at that time. Because I worked at Ohio University and they put Vietnam veterans in with African-Americans and Latinos. And because there was a feeling that they were certainly being discriminated against too. And of course, when the wall was built, everything changed. It went from being not popular to being popular to be a Vietnam vet. And everybody wanted to be one and people lied about being vets. And what's the thing that you learned the most about Vietnam from these 65 men. They were mostly probably middle or lower class in terms of economics. PG (01:19:19): I will tell you the main line would be working class. It was not everybody, but working class. For some of the Black guys it was a job opportunity where there were none. For some of the white guys, a lot of the white guys it was, well, I am waiting for my factory job, but I just got my draft notice. And ooh, that is what you do. (01:20:00): What I learned was that all the stereotypes of the Vietnam veterans were precisely that. They were stereotypes. They were empty stereotypes that what we found, 65 is a fairly good sample. It's not a statistic out of a commitment of a couple of million troops over the whole period of the war. And of all Vietnam era veterans it's not a very good sample. But I am a believer in journalism. And what we found was, what the stereotype was, was they come home, they're crazy, they shoot up their families, they drank too much. They do drugs. They cannot hold jobs. That was the stereotype. In some cases, that is what we found. In some cases, we found people who just resumed- SM (01:21:34): Life as normal. PG (01:21:35): Life as normal. We found a tendency among them not to want to talk about the war experience, even to their own families. A lot of them had wives. Did not talk to their wives about the war experience. One of our guys was interviewing a vet down in Texas at the vet's home. And they sat and talked just as we were sitting and talking. And my guy looked up and saw 90 percent hidden behind the door frame, the veteran's wife. And she had been eavesdropping. And when he left she said, he has never told me any of those things. I think that is been true in past wars as well, that it was very hard for veterans to talk to anyone except people who had shared the experience. But what we were astonished by was the degree to which they... We were the big-time national press and suddenly we were asking them. And we had a feeling that a lot of them, a lot of them, maybe a majority, were just waiting for someone to ask them. Not family, they did not want to talk to the wife or the kids or their parents, but they wanted the country to notice them, I think. SM (01:23:48): That is why the words, welcome home, is such an important. If you see a Vietnam veteran, I always say welcome home. Because even though it's been 35 years or whatever, that means something to him. PG (01:24:00): I agree. SM (01:24:09): You're a journalist and your career as a journalist is amazing in its own right. You talk a lot about Malcolm and African Americans and the civil rights experience and how important it was for the other movements as a model for the movements that followed in the late (19)60s and early (19)70s. We talked a little bit about the Vietnam veterans here. But I would like to talk a little bit about journalism and about newspapers and about magazines during that timeframe. Question I asked Richard Reeves, who I interviewed yesterday, we were about three hours on the phone, was the fact is between 1946, which is the time that rumors were born, and 2010, when was journalism at its finest and when was it at its worst? And I preface this by saying that two things. Number one, during the Vietnam War, even though it was a terrible war, it seemed like journalism was unbelievable because of the fact that journalists had total access to the war with Halberstam, Sheehan, Peter Arnette, Malcolm Brown, the names go on and on. Television, the reporters, they had access. The access that you did not see in other wars. And then of course you had the Pentagon Papers, which was very important. And the whole issue of Watergate and the coverage and then the whole situation with Woodward and Bernstein, investigative journalism to me, just as a person who's not a journalist, this seemed like a heyday. But I do not know when you look at journalism in the 1946 after the war to John Kennedy, was that a good period? Was it a good period from (19)60 to (19)70? When were the best periods during this timeframe? PG (01:26:15): Well, I always thought I walked into national journalism at the almost perfect moment. I started at Newsweek in (19)62, national affairs writer. They discovered that I was interested in civil rights. Civil rights was a burgeoning story. I had been there two months when they sent me to Ole Miss to cover and get shot at. SM (01:27:00): Wow. PG (01:27:05): And the civil rights movement was a monumental story for years. The Vietnam War and the anti-war movement was a monumental story for years. The other movements we have discussed, and Watergate, which became also my beat. I was not working as an investigative reporter. We did not really have a serious investigative capability and it certainly was not me. I am not good at sleuthing. But I wrote something like 35 cover stories on Watergate. SM (01:28:04): Wow. PG (01:28:08): And so that period in my life, from (19)62 to (19)74, that was the flowering of American journalism. Certainly, it was at Newsweek. It was when Newsweek engaged with those issues in a way that news magazines traditionally had never engaged with issues. We were doing journalism on Gaje, essentially on civil rights. The war, Watergate. Since I was working out in the provinces in the latter (19)50s, but I think beginning with probably the Montgomery bus boycott, well, probably beginning with Brown versus Board and the Montgomery bus boycott, we saw a flowering of journalism. I think journalism responded to those stories very, very well. So, it was not like the day I started at Newsweek was when the golden era of journalism. A lot of things were at play there. We had an editor at Newsweek who wanted to engage with those stories. A man of serious conscience with a very clear sense of right and wrong. Was not a liberal. He was like an old-fashioned- SM (01:30:10): What was his name again? PG (01:30:12): Oz Elliott. Osborn Elliott. O-S-B-O-R-N. Elliott with a double L and double T. He was a man of breeding, high church, but a man. He reminded me of the old Progressive Movement in the early part of the 19th century that if the good people would get together, we could fix everything. And I think that was a core belief for him. And it was a motivating thing for our engagement with the political and moral questions of the day. But I think there were other editors around similarly disposed. I think the issues made journalism better. The money situation made journalism better. In those days you could afford to cover stories and cover them really all out. For a big story we used to say, we're going to scramble the jets on this one. And we would scramble the jets. I wrote the Jack Kennedy assassination story, and I think I had files from maybe 15 to 18 correspondents. Similarly, with Nixon's resignation. And when you have money to throw at a story, you can really cover the socks off it. That does not much exist in the industry anymore. Everybody is shrinking. SM (01:32:32): And also, I will say this, people read. Magazines and papers. Because on my college campus, New York Times. Everybody was reading the paper. So, you knew that when you were writing a piece people were, and even the Binghamton Press, when I was at Binghamton, they were reading. And I remember Joseph Craft, you started to get his name. He wrote a lot of good articles and boy, I learned a lot from him. He was a good writer. PG (01:33:03): He was. Smart guy. SM (01:33:07): What are your thoughts on Daniel Ellsberg, The New York Times was involved in that. PG (01:33:11): And the Washington Post. SM (01:33:11): Right. PG (01:33:15): The Times, first. SM (01:33:19): There is a feeling today in journalism that... Here we go. Is this going? Yes. Very good. The audio. The computer will check it just to be on the safe place. I was just mentioning about the journalists, Woodward and Bernstein, and certainly Daniel Ellsberg. Your thoughts. Was he right in doing what he did? PG (01:33:43): I think so. SM (01:33:46): And then the relation. I did not know Neil Sheehan was somewhat linked to this. Because I am reading a book now by Harrison Salisbury where he talks about The New York Times and how he had approached The Times and so forth through that link. So, I am learning that as well. There is a movie out now. Any thoughts on Daniel Ellsberg? Because the Pentagon Papers were like... PG (01:34:09): It is not a story I covered, so I have no close information about it. I just was glad they did it. I think it was an act of great courage and it was a contributing factor to the end of the war, to the sense that this war never made any sense and we're losing it. So, I think my tendency is to honor him, but again, I was not closely involved in the Pentagon Papers. SM (01:35:12): The gentleman I mentioned who I interviewed a couple of weeks back, mentioned he thought you were a god because of what you did at Newsweek regarding gay and lesbian writers. And I am doing an interview with him about his book, 1968, and we're talking about Harvey Milk, and we're talking about a lot of the issues. Because I have interviewed a lot of gay and lesbian Americans for this book project. So, they are going to be well covered. But, obviously that was a very courageous stand to take. Could you explain now a little bit about, obviously it's very important to people who are gay and lesbian, but how important. SM (01:36:03): It is very important to people who are gay and lesbian, but how important, maybe the criticism you even had for doing it that the courage it took. PG (01:36:09): No. I felt it took zero courage. I think part of the gestalt, which Oz Elliot's reign lasted through the (19)60s, but the gestalt continued for a long while after that, and we were a magazine with conscience. I think one of our sins was that we did not notice that while we were writing, well, while we were taking sides essentially, in print with the Civil Rights Movement, with the Anti-War Movement, to a degree with the counterculture, which I was a little less happy with, we were working with a caste system, a gender caste system. The model for Newsweek was Time Magazine. Time was, I think, again, my dates are rusty, but it was seven or eight years older than Newsweek. Some of our senior leaders have, including Oz Elliot, came from Time. That caste system had been created a time where researchers actually were required to wear white gloves and they were really a serving class. The men were the writers and editors and the women were researchers, fact Checkers, clippers. Newsweek imitated many, many things about Time when Newsweek was born in (19)33, a date that is familiar to me because I wrote the 50th Anniversary Edition. I turned 50 about the same time as Newsweek did. The original model was Time and we did things the Times way and that endured. The Newsweek I walked into in (19)62 still had this caste system. The women were essentially an underclass and we were blind to it, all of us. In 1970, the women, all of whom had been schooled and they were children of the (19)60s, they were Boomer young women. They filed an equal opportunity complaint, hired a lawyer, Eleanor Holmes Norton. Now, a sort of member of Congress and essentially sued Newsweek. The reaction was interesting because Newsweek was not angry. It was sort of public humiliation because it obviously made all the papers and everything, but the management response was not angry. I think the management response was chagrin. How could we have been blind to this situation? It did not work wonders overnight, but one of their demands was that, "Since they have been kept in this box for so long, they wanted a course in Newsweek writing and reporting. They wanted classes." They asked for me and one other guy to teach those classes. I taught three, eight-week semesters. And a few of them actually turned out to be very good Newsweek journalists or got enough confidence in themselves to work outside the nest, for other magazines or freelancing and stuff. That was our big blind spot. I think gays and lesbians were not. Charlie may think I played some important role. I never thought of it. SM (01:42:29): He is very gifted in terms of his ability to write and his ability to think and to be very critical where criticism is due. So, he is not going to give a whole lot of praise, but he praised you. PG (01:42:44): Well, we are friends and have been for a long time. I honestly think he gives me too much credit. There was nothing brave about it. SM (01:42:57): Would you say that here we are again, Boomer Generation, we have been talking today a lot about African Americans, Boomers, and certainly women taken as a role modeling here. Can you also say that even what was happening at Newsweek or even Time, may have been happening at other newspapers and magazines around the country, that newspapers grew up due to these pressures of the Boomers, when in all these different movements? PG (01:43:36): I have only circumstantial evidence, but I think the circumstantial evidence is pretty good that they did. You began to see women with serious roles. My wife was an extremely gifted journalist, extremely gifted journalist. She worked for the New York Post when it was a good newspaper. It is very hard for someone seeing it now in the Murdoch Era to believe that. Back in its day, back in the (19)50s, (19)60s, even into the (19)70s, it was, in the (19)50s and (19)60s, if you were talking about what are the best written papers in America, the conversation would not have included the New York Times, would not have included the Washington Post, would not have included the LA Times, would not have included the St. Louis Post Dispatch, would not have included the Chicago Tribune. The conversation would have included the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Post. They had extremely gifted writing staffs. And one day, my wife Helen got a call. Helen Dudar, D-U-D-A-R, D as in- SM (01:45:18): It is in the book. PG (01:45:19): Yeah. SM (01:45:19): You had devoted, I think, one of your books to her. I think it was Malcolm. PG (01:45:26): Yeah. I also, when she was terminally ill, I compiled and self-published an anthology of her work. Did I just lose my train of thought? SM (01:45:49): Talking about newspapers and the New York Tribune and that. PG (01:45:53): The Herald Tribune and The Post, yeah. The editor of The Times called her one day, when she was still working at The Post, and he said, "I do not suppose we could tempt you into writing for our society page?" I will not quote her exact language because it would be like... But the short version was, "No." SM (01:46:41): It is really amazing. I worked at a medical school, I will not mention it, in Philadelphia for four years, the manager of activities, they did not have any women in medical school, and the first one started in 1965. Now they make up over half of the medical school. I am shocked. I heard about these stories in law school. I have heard all these. Now, there were obviously exceptions. Obviously, Phyllis Schlafly may have been an exception because she was a lawyer and she went through that timeframe. PG (01:47:16): There are always exceptions. But I think now the majority of students in all med schools are now women. When my wife was in the hospital with what turned out to be the terminal breast cancer- SM (01:47:43): That is what my mom had. PG (01:47:44): Yeah, it is pretty common. It is very sad, but common. We dealt a lot with the young woman resident who was running the service where my wife was hospitalized, and I liked her a lot. She was very straightforward. She leveled with me. There was no feel-good stuff, but there was sympathy without sugarcoating, which was very important to me. I told her, "How great it was, I was seeing more and more through my wife's illness, I was seeing more and more women in the profession on their way up." And she said, "Yeah, but it is still very tough in the prestige professions." Surgery, not so much, very tough for women to crack that. That is a fraternity. It's not universally, but it's pretty much a boy’s club. And I said, "Well, what about pediatrics? Everybody loves pediatricians." She said, "Yeah, we can, but it is not a prestige." SM (01:49:24): Everything is evolving and hopefully it continues to evolve. PG (01:49:29): I think that is an evolutionary stage, [inaudible]. SM (01:49:33): Two of the questions I have asked every single person somewhat, is we have gone into just unique things that you have been involved in, is the issue of healing and the issue of trust. I have been prefacing the question on healing based on a group of students that I took to see Senator Edmond Musky in the middle (19)90s. We had a program where we took students to meet the leaders, small numbers of students. He had just gotten out of the hospital and Gaylord Nelson helped me to organize this. So, students, we put the questions together, and one of the questions they came up with is... They had seen all the divisions in 1968 and assassinations and the convention. And the question is, "Whether the Boomer Generation is going to go to their graves with lack of healing within their psyche?" And the reference was also made that it was a common knowledge that the Civil War generation went to their graves without healing. And you can see it at the Gettysburg Battlefield right now. I go five times a year over there to try to get a feel of war and everything. And the question was this, "Due to the tremendous divisions between those who supported the war, those who were against the war, those who supported the troops, those who were against the troops, those who between black and white, between male and female, between gay and straight, between, and then of course, they had threw in the burnings of the cities throughout the (19)60s, and the tremendous divisions, is that generation that experienced it when they were young, going to go to their graves with really very sad feelings of not healing, whether that is the activists who participated or the people who experienced these things? Do we have an issue with healing as Boomers age and pass?" PG (01:51:47): I think the important question is the generations that follow, will the Boomer experience affect future generations in a positive way? I think there is some fragmentary evidence that, that is happening. The Boomers... I am 77, I feel as if my life is defined. I have done some good stuff. I have done some not so good stuff. Healing is not an issue with me. I cannot read the minds of Boomers. I guess that some of them will be sad or disappointed that they did not change America. The problem with the revolutions is you never get to the Emerald City because it does not exist. I hope they go to their graves in some degree of peace about their lives and times. My guess is they are far enough past it now that they have got their old war stories, but at peace. The Boomers I know I do not think are particularly broody about it. But I just do not know. To me, again, the real question is did the Boomer Generation advance the ball politically and socially? Are we a better society or are we more just society? To me, I know that Tea Partiers say, "That a just society is a Communist slogan." But to me, it is not. To me it is a [inaudible] principal [inaudible]. I think if they even incrementally advanced the ball toward a just society or what became called the Beloved Committee, they have a right to go to their graves feeling okay about it themselves. But I do not know, I do not think it is an answerable question. SM (01:55:00): The wall has done a tremendous part in healing a lot of the Vietnam veterans and their families. Although, I have gone to the memorial every year on Memorial Day and Veterans Day since 1994, after I had met Lewis Puller who wrote Fortunate Son. There's still a lot of healing amongst the Vietnam veterans coming together in brotherhood is very important to them. PG (01:55:26): I still know some of them from Charlie Company. I am still in touch with very few of them. And that book is what, was published in the early (19)80s, so it is- SM (01:55:40): To Heal a Nation, by Jan Scruggs. PG (01:55:43): No, my book was, I think, published in 1980. SM (01:55:48): (19)85, I think, was not it? PG (01:55:50): No, it was not that. SM (01:55:51): Well, I got the date here. PG (01:55:54): It does not matter, but it is 25 or 30 years later, and I am still in touch with a few of the guys. SM (01:56:05): Scruggs wrote his book because he felt it was not only to heal of vets, but to heal a nation, that is why he wrote the book. The question I have asked myself at times and others, is whether it has healed the nation, whether the wall has done some part in healing the nation? But most importantly, as people have said, "Please define this question in a more clear way. It's really what you're saying, Steve, is Vietnam veterans and those who opposed the war, the anti-war people, and can they ever come together and hug and be friends and be accepted at the wall?" Whereas Bill Clinton, when he came there, some people were yelling at him, "As a coward," and everything. And certainly, people like McNamara and Jane Fonda and those types, there would be a war if they were ever there. PG (01:56:59): I tend to doubt that, that is going to happen, the hugs between the Jane Fonda's and the veterans who knew people on that wall, that ain't going to happen. Again, among other things, there remains a class difference between the anti-war people and the people who actually fought the war. It was interesting when I wrote Charlie Company, the wall was still just a plan, it was an architect's drawing. The veterans we interviewed, almost to a man, hated it, hated it, hated the design. When it happened, they fell in love with it. One guy I am in touch with in Oregon helped bring up a scaled down model of it, a traveling affordable model of it that he's been up and down the West Coast with. SM (01:58:27): We brought it to our campus. We had over 5, 500 people that came. I would say, maybe only about one third were students. I mean, it is just like they came out of the woodwork and they came at night. But no one was around. I stayed there for four days. I had three hours of sleep, I think, in those four days. Veterans had come in after midnight when no one was around. I was amazed. Musky responded by saying... He did not talk anything about (19)68 when we asked him the question. He said, "We have not healed since the Civil War," talking about race. That is what [inaudible]. The other one is, and again, as a political science major and history major, dissent and protest is very important. So not trusting your government is really we are taught that, that is good for a democracy. But the question is, was the Boomer Generation more than any other generation that just did not trust because their leaders had lied to them, whether it be the Gulf of Tonkin with President Johnson, whether it be Watergate with Richard Nixon, McNamara's lies about the numbers and the bodies? You can even go back to Eisenhower, and he lied on national television about the U2 incident with Gary Powers, he lied. PG (01:59:51): One of my quarrels with the Boomer Generation is that they did not do what needs to be done in a democratic order, which is get serious about creating an electoral movement. The marches and levitate the Pentagon and blowing each other up, that was all to me, theater. If you want to change the trustworthiness of people in government, you have got to organize in a very serious way, and it is hard work, and you have got to elect people you trust. You have got to find people you trust out of your own ranks. And you have got to organize, you have got to get people to the polls. You have got to do all the hard work. You have got to raise the money, so that you can call attention to your movement. In that sense, when I talk about mature politics, that to me is mature politics. I think the Tea Party Movement, which I earlier called the Last Movement, is not there yet. They love to complain. They love rallies. They love signs. But they're not a party. They're not a serious political organization. I am nowhere near on their side politically, but if they want to be taken seriously, I will tell what [inaudible] to be taken seriously. SM (02:02:15): One of the things I observed in the (19)60s and early (19)70s is that when there was a protest... And I only got a couple more minutes, then I am done. The protests were, you could see posters from just about all the groups. When Earth Day took place, Earth Day and when Gaylord Nelson met with the anti-war people to make sure he was not stepping on the anti-war people, so there was a working relationship between that group and the beginnings of Earth Day. Phyllis Schlafly said, "All the people that were involved in the Environmental Movement were all former commies." That was her perception. PG (02:02:53): That is her perception of everything that is left of Genghis Khan. SM (02:02:59): But it is interesting, you could see the posters, you could see the... Actually, all of the movements, the posters were there, probably at the moratorium in (19)69 and in Earth Day, the first one. But now, it does not seem to be that way. It seems that they have become separated again. They're into the Women's Movement is really into women's issues. The gay and lesbian organizations are into their issues. The Latinos, they are into their issues. And of course, the Anti-War Movement is all scattered all over the place. So, it seems like there's a separatism happening within the movements even. I might be wrong in this. PG (02:03:49): I think at least in the period we're talking about, I think that is always just... We were talking about the cleavage over the pressure on King, not to talk about Vietnam or the economy. What you described, the students who did not show up, the black students who stayed away from- SM (02:04:15): Kent State. PG (02:04:17): ... from the Kent State mobilization. I do not think that is new. And within those movements, there were many tendencies within the Civil Rights Movement, certainly. Even within the Anti-War Movement, you ran the range from the Fellowship of Reconciliation to the Weather Underground. I think that is inherent, that is inherent. And people with grievances are going to have a hierarchy of grievances. And the top at the of the hierarchy is the one that most affects me, my life, my friends, my circle, my peers. If I am a college kid and during the Vietnam War, all my friends are going to be agitated about the draft and the possibility of getting called up. SM (02:05:54): I am down to the last part, which is basically, you already spoke to this, some names, terms, people that were well-known during the period. They could be just quick responses. But my final question before that is, you had mentioned that you were there in Mississippi, James Meredith and you have obviously experienced so much, number one, were you at Malcolm's funeral? PG (02:06:21): No. SM (02:06:21): Okay. PG (02:06:22): No. I made a conscious decision to stay away. SM (02:06:33): Your meetings with him, they must be unbelievable memories, just interviewing him for a couple hours. What was it like to be in the same room with him? PG (02:06:53): What is your reaction seeing him on YouTube? It was very hard not to like him. I would love to be able to say, I got to be friends. I cannot say that because I cannot speak for him. The first couple of times I interviewed him, he was a prisoner of a theology that held that white people were devils, blue-eyed devils. But the first time I met him was in St. Louis. I had seen him during my fellowship year at Harvard. I had seen him speak at the Harvard Law School Forum. He happened to be there when I was in the middle of reading Sierra Lincoln's book called The Black Muslims in American. I was quite absorbed by it, so I thought I better go watch this guy. And I did and- PG (02:08:01): And when I got back to St. Louis, one of my first orders of business was to go to my city editor and say, "This is an important phenomenon in America, and let me go find out what they're doing here." They had mosques all over the country. And he said, " Okay." The St. Louis newspapers did not really cover the Black community in St. Louis very well. And so, I decided I was going to make that migration to start covering the Black community in St. Louis. And I started with a four-part series on the local mosque of the Nation of Islam. And a couple of months later, I got a call from Malcolm saying, "I am going to be in St. Louis to visit the local mosque. Would you like to meet with me?" And I said, "Yeah." Helen, my wife, was then freelancing, because we were looking for a year in St. Louis. And she was leading her not very successful freelance session. She said she wanted to see him. That conversation was, I think probably the best word I could find for it is civil. Was civil for the most part. But I thought it kind of got a little easier, a little more conversational, a little less interview-y. Went on for a couple hours and Malcolm was defending a theological position. But a lot of the reporters he was confronting those days were portraying him as a preacher of hate, dangerous dude. And we were not asking that kind of question. We were not coming on like district attorneys. We were just asking him civil questions about what's this all about? And by the end of it, the tone was pretty good. And as we were getting up to leave, my wife said one of the objectives of the Nation of Islam was to create a lot of small businesses, black owned businesses in the ghetto, was sort of the beginnings of building economic independence in their minds. And my wife said to Malcolm, "What if all those businesses succeed? And all the people running them got successful and they run off and joined the NAACP?" And at first, he did not understand she was kidding. And then there was a double take and then a wide smile. And I think that became a key to my subsequent interviews with him. And Helen interviewed him a couple of times there. She wrote about him separately in the New York Post. She wrote pieces about him. But I think in our subsequent interviews, they really were more like conversations. And I think I won his trust, but I also did not feel he was obliged to like me or embrace me as a friend. I did want his trust and I was happy when I felt that I won it. In fact, after the last piece I wrote about him, he had one of his staffers call me and say, "Minister Malcolm thought that piece was very fair." SM (02:13:10): So, you may have shown him that, because I was around students at Ohio State that really did not like white people, and if you show that you care about them, about what they are saying, we can never live in the skin of a black person. But if there is a sense that a person truly does care, and you may have been, he sense you cared about this. PG (02:13:41): I think I probably conveyed that. But I also think what was important to him was, he had two public persona when he was dealing with the White Press. One was playing the caricature Malcolm. People would say, "Are you teaching hate?" And he would do riffs like "by any means necessary", or if you ask them questions about the state of Black America and how his beliefs might help and responded with someone understanding. One of his, a line he used once when he was under a lot of pressure about his advocacy of Blacks owning guns for self-self-defense, he said, "I am the man you think you are." He said to a white reporter, "I am the man who you think you are." What he meant in the context of that conversation was, "If you hit me, I am going to hit you back." But I think he applied the same principle to just personal interaction. And if you respect him, he will respect you. And I think that worked between us. SM (02:15:26): That is very important because I think that TV segment on YouTube, if you have not seen it, maybe tonight or whatever, go on YouTube and check out the- PG (02:15:35): There is hundreds of them. SM (02:15:36): There is hundreds of them, but there is only a few that are in color. And it is actually one of the first ones. And it was a person challenging him about his name, and I did not think he was saying it in the right way. And I think he did not show any respect to Malcolm at that time. And you could sense it. Are there any other personal stories you would like to share about people you met during the (19)60s and the (19)70s, or (19)50s, (19)60s and (19)70s that would be little good anecdotes? Did you meet James Meredith? PG (02:16:13): I met him, but I had very little interaction with him. When I was down there, he was surrounded by US Marshals and Federalized National Guard troops. So, he was pretty insulated. I met him later on. I cannot remember the circumstance, but I never had a real conversation with him. SM (02:16:40): Specific instances, the ones that really stand out amongst the events that you covered? Obviously, you have mentioned, you wrote the article on the JFK assassination and you wrote about Malcolm and you covered James Meredith. Were there others that stand out? Watergate, but what other others that stand out? PG (02:17:06): Well, I think the whole Civil Rights movement, I was writing about that practically every week during the civil rights season, which tended to be spring, summer, fall. It tended to be a warm weather movement. The active street, the street movement. I remember scenes, but they do not particularly make great anecdotes. I covered George Wallace a couple of times, a couple of his campaigns. One when he was running his wife, maybe he couldn't succeed himself, so he ran his wife who had terminal cancer for governor in his place, and I just felt sorry for him. You asked earlier about, parenthetically, you mentioned Woodward Bernstein. We never got back to that. And you asked about- SM (02:18:28): Investigative journalism, which seemed to have brought in a whole new generation of writers that wanted to be like them. PG (02:18:42): And I think that was a very mixed blessing. I know them both well, I worked with them both. I excerpted their second book for Newsweek and I had to work with them for that. And I excerpted Bob's book on the Supreme Court. Got along well with both of them. I kind of got along better with Carl than with Bob. But Carl was more the writer. Bob's a very serious man. SM (02:19:24): He has been on TV. He was a commentator. PG (02:19:27): Yeah. Yeah. So, when we were working on the Final Days, which was their second book, I spent a lot more time with Carl than Bob, and also, we were friends with Carl's... One of his wives or Alfred. SM (02:19:52): Oh yeah. No, she was married to him. PG (02:19:56): Oh, yeah. SM (02:19:57): She's wrote a book out about something about Double Chins or- PG (02:20:02): I do not like my neck. SM (02:20:03): Yeah. PG (02:20:05): Well, she wrote a novel about him, and which became a movie about her marriage to Carl, which ended unhappily. Carl was a bit of a Tom Cat. I will look. I may have better inside information on the website. Just going back to that, I think that they were a mixed blessing in a number of ways. Obviously, what they did with Watergate was fantastic. That was a great, I think that was a great contribution. I think the subsequent book was, the Final Days was a great contribution too, as a first rough draft of history of the period. But as you said, I drew a lot of people into the business, and that is been a mixed blessing. I think it partly had to do with glory and money. Carl and Bob were played by Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford in the movie. That is pretty glamorous. That makes sense. Carl looked pretty glamorous and they made a ton of money. And I think that was catnip for a lot of young journalists. And it changed. It was not their fault, but the character of investigative journalism began to change. When I was beginning my career, there was a kind of gentleman's agreement in the press, and it was all gentle. There was the kind of agreement that there were certain subjects you did not talk about, like people's sex lives, drinking habits, other vices. What the Watergate period led to was what came to be called character journalism. Look at Nixon. The guy was an epic neurotic, so much so that he was trying to tear up the Constitution. So, we have got to look closely at all these guys. Okay, that is good. That is a good outcome. But it's now what it became, which I think is connected with the glory and money piece of it. The definition of what is character has broadened and broadened and broadened. And now it is in the age of bedsheet journalism. And we look under bedsheets. SM (02:24:21): Edwards. PG (02:24:22): Yeah. And the National Enquirer got nominated for a Pulitzer for their expose of Edwards's a fair, which I think is a low moment. Now, do I find Edwards's behavior acceptable? No. The guy is what used to be called a cad. Clinton and Monica, or Clinton and Jennifer Flowers, I am not fond of that. My test is what matters to their conduct in public office, what matters to their capacity for leadership. John Kennedy was leading an extremely vivid sex life back in the (19)60s. Everybody in the business knew. Everybody in my business knew about it. It was just common gossip. And we knew a lot of detail. But the code was different then, and you did not write about those things. And the irony is that there were two of the women that we should have written about, probably. One was a woman named, who was, as it turned out, an East German- SM (02:26:04): Spy. PG (02:26:05): I do not know if she was really a spy, but she was connected with the East German Secret Service. And the other was Judith Campbell Wexner, who he was sharing with a mafia Don. And those would be legitimate subjects of journalistic investigation. I have said a moment ago that we knew his activities were common gossip, but we did not have those two names at the time. And I think if we had had those two names and their affiliations, we probably would not in that time, we probably would not have written about them. But it would have, there would have been conferences about them. SM (02:26:58): Even speculation about Marilyn Monroe. PG (02:27:00): Oh yeah. She is the most popular subject of the Kennedy stories. And I think it was real. SM (02:27:10): Peter Lawford was obviously a friend of hers. It is amazing, the story of Bobby Kennedy flying back to California, meeting with Peter going over to the house, and whether that is true or not. Then she died. Whether she would be on drugs or whether it was to shut her up. I mean, who knows. PG (02:27:33): I am a violent Eddie conspiratory theorist. SM (02:27:35): There are lot of books on Kennedy though, Kennedy and King on the conspiracy theories. The other question I have, and then you know what? You have been here a very long time and you do not have to respond to all these names, if that is okay. PG (02:27:52): No, go ahead. SM (02:27:55): But I want to ask you, Malcolm's death is very suspicious. And we had a speaker on our campus. PG (02:28:05): No, it is not. SM (02:28:07): Is there a link to Farrakhan and that fascination? PG (02:28:11): Farrakhan was involved, yeah. There are all kinds of CIA and FBI and New York Police Bureau of Special Services conspiracy theories. They are all junk. They all knew what was going on. We have bushels of tape recorded. The FBI, which was playing a really invasive role and to me, objectionable role in surveillance of Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam turned out to be a boon to historians, because there are bushels of transcripts of phone calls in which we have Elijah Muhammad saying, among other things, "The brother's eyes need to be closed," which was a death warrant. The FBI and the NYPD were privy to everything that was being said in the Nation of Islam. They had both, they had room bugs and telephone taps at Elijah Muhammad's home in Chicago, Elijah Muhammad's second home in Phoenix, Malcolm X's home, Malcolm X's office. They knew everything. A senior official of the New York Bureau of Special Services and Investigation told me, "We knew what they were thinking." They did not have to lift a finger because they knew Malcolm was going to be dead. There were six attempts by the Nation of Islam before the one that succeeded. I have interviewed in prison. Three people were convicted. Two of them should not have been, although they have been involved in one of the earlier attempts. I interviewed all three of those guys in prison. The guy we know was guilty and who was caught at the scene essentially told me the whole story, named the names of the assassins, told me how the assassination was generated. Another one of the, I think wrongly, in fact, I know wrongly convicted men, told me about a meeting at the New York Mosque where the national leadership from Chicago was extremely angry that the New York Mosque had not been able to whack Malcolm. So, they sent in Elijah Muhammad's son, Elijah Muhammad the second, a very-very tough guy who was in charge of the Fruit of Islam, which was their paramilitary corps. They assembled enforcers from all over the country in the Harlem Mosque. And Elijah Jr., as he's also sometimes known, said Malcolm then was living in a house that had been bought for him by Elijah Muhammad in Queens. They were trying the Nation of Islam after Malcolm defected and was trying to get him back. Elijah Jr. said, "What you all need to do is go out to that house and clap on the walls until the walls come tumbling down. Then you want to go inside and cut the nigger's tongue out and I will put it in an envelope and I will send it to my father." I have zero question that the assassination was the work of the Nation of the Islam and that while the FBI and the New York police, not so much the New York police, because it became a New York because it happened here. But the FBI no doubt celebrated. I mean, Hoover was nuts and they no doubt celebrated the outcome, but they did not have to. They knew they did not have to do anything. They knew this was internal, and that sooner or later his former brothers would get him, and they did. SM (02:34:19): When you talk about Malcolm here, because I do not like conspiracy books either, because I am tired of them, and I know Groden wrote one on the Kennedy assassination. We had him on our campus, but after he wrote that book, everybody's been reading it. But do you believe that the John Kennedy assassination is, as they say, it was Oswald. That Bobby was Sirhan Sirhan alone, that there was not a second person with a gun, and the third is Martin Luther King was the guy at the- PG (02:34:52): King, I think there were... The best evidence on King, I think, is not that there was a government conspiracy, but that a couple of rich and slightly illuminated brothers in Missouri put a bounty on his head. And this is not original reporting with me. This is stuff I have read and it's the most persuasive stuff I have seen on King, on the King murder. That James Earl Ray heard about this when he was in prison for whatever he had been in prison for before the assassination. He escaped and lived on the lam for, I think, a couple of three years and found his way to these brothers, and they financed him. That is the most persuasive version, I would say. SM (02:36:06): It is amazing that the King family was starting to believe him. PG (02:36:11): Believe Ray? Yeah. SM (02:36:12): Yeah, yeah. PG (02:36:13): Well, Ray was a story about Raul and yeah. SM (02:36:20): When the best books are written about the Boomer generation, which includes, is all-inclusive, all ethnic groups, and we have not even talked about Cesar Chavez, who was a very important person to me in the Latino community. Bobby Kennedy, he's a major figure too. Better than- PG (02:36:36): I covered a little of Bobby's (19)68 campaign and I interviewed, I did, I think three cover zones. SM (02:36:43): Did you ever get to meet John Burns, the mayor of Binghamton, New York, who ran his presidential campaign in... I mean, senatorial campaign in New York? He was our mayor in Binghamton. He was my very first interview. He has passed away quite a few years back. But when the best books are written on the Boomer generation after the last Boomer has passed on, what do you think they will be saying about the generation and the period? PG (02:37:17): I hope they will be saying something complicated. A generation is a vast population cohort, and they do not define very easily. They do not profile very easily. I doubt that a majority of Boomers lived what we think of as Boomer lives. We think most people got up in the morning, went to work, got married, had kids, lived plain lives. I think the politically active Boomers, which we sometimes... Boomers sometimes become shorthand for... The term "Boomers" sometimes become shorthand for the politically active minority of Boomers. So, my guess is they will get mixed reviews. I would give, if I were writing the book, I would give them mixed reviews. SM (02:38:34): Certainly, the media plays a role here, because you talk about if indeed they are only talking about Woodstock, summer of love, some of the more eccentric activities, along with the more serious too. But the media has to play a role here, and how history and history formed. You said that you would be willing to do this, but there is a lot of names here, so yeah. You want to use the restroom or? PG (02:39:11): Yeah. SM (02:39:11): But that is actually one of the questions I did not ask that is in here, and the books that influenced you in your life, but particularly some of the books that may have been written in the (19)50s, (19)60s, and (19)70s, that really said a lot. Whether you read that for King's Books or Strike Toward Freedom, what are the most important books that influenced you in your life? PG (02:39:35): In my life, All the King's Man, The Plague. There is what nobody's ever heard of, by a rudder called Bernard Wolfe, called The Late Risers. PG (02:40:02): Writer called Bernard Wolfe called The Late Risers, which is Book of the 50s. The non-fiction works of James Baldwin. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, although it's a quite flawed piece of work. King's writings, although if I had to pick out a single document, would be the Letter from Birmingham Jail. The speeches of Malcolm X, of which there are several collections. A lot of political books and a lot of old books I am currently reading. I am reading up on the Gilded Age because I am finding so many parallels to our own time. SM (02:41:30): Did you ever read The Greening of America by Charles Reich? PG (02:41:32): [inaudible]. SM (02:41:33): And then The Making of a Counter Culture by Theodore Roszak? PG (02:41:36): I have not read that. SM (02:41:37): Those are major ones from that [inaudible 02:41:41] period and anything that Eric Erikson wrote and Kenneth Keniston, they were great writers of the movements that was happening on college campuses in that period. All right. Here we go. PG (02:41:58): Hofstadter. Richard Hofstadter. SM (02:42:00): Oh, yes. PG (02:42:01): Major influence on my political maturation, such as it is. SM (02:42:09): Did you read The Making of a Quagmire by Halberstam? PG (02:42:13): Yeah. SM (02:42:13): I thought that is a classic book too. A Rumor of War by Phil Caputo. What a great book. PG (02:42:20): I read a syllabus of war books during the run up to Charlie Company. Michael Herr... SM (02:42:32): Dispatches. PG (02:42:32): Yeah. But I also read some war novels from past wars when I was doing that. SM (02:42:43): I want to recommend a book for you to read if you have not read it. And that is Fortunate Son, not the book on George Bush. It's the book that was written by Louis Puller that won the Pulitzer Prize back in (19)92. And he killed himself in the spring of (19)94. And I am very pleased that Toddy Puller, his wife agreed- PG (02:43:08): Yeah. Is this Chesty Puller's son? SM (02:43:09): Yes, it is a great book. It is a sad story. The book is a really good story, but it is a sad story about how he ended his life. And Toddy Puller has agreed to be interviewed. She is a state representative in Virginia. PG (02:43:25): I met her once there just briefly on a political campaign. SM (02:43:31): I thought she would never say yes because there was friction at the end when he killed [inaudible] they were heading for a divorce. But the story is... I will mention that too. These are just to respond to some names and not in any length. The first one is Tom Hayden. Just quick thoughts, responses to these people, whether you like them, dislike them, thought they were important, not important. PG (02:43:58): I thought among that whole Students for a Democratic Society orbit, I thought he was the smartest. SM (02:44:10): Jane Fonda. PG (02:44:13): I do not think much about her. I do not really have a good answer for that or even an answer for it. SM (02:44:28): How about Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin? The two hippies. PG (02:44:34): Hoffman, I thought once, this is off the record, I once smoked dope with him. SM (02:44:39): Okay. That will not be in the transcript. PG (02:44:43): Okay. He was fun to be around, but I thought he was mostly show business. I thought of him as a standup comic with political content. And he's not one my heroes. SM (02:45:04): What about Rubin? PG (02:45:08): Rubin was a standup comic without the comic sense and the revolutionary who winds up on Wall Street. It's not what revolutionaries... SM (02:45:27): Timothy Leary. PG (02:45:30): Leary... The whole drug piece of boomerism never appealed to me. I thought all that stuff was... Even though I smoked dope with them. I thought all that stuff was self-indulgent and I have no fondness for Leary or his works. SM (02:46:18): How about Daniel and Philip Berrigan? PG (02:46:23): I honor them. I think they were true Christians. And there were a lot of people who call themselves true Christians. They do not know a lot. I honor their memory. SM (02:46:43): I think you have already mentioned this, but the Black Panthers. I mentioned the seven names. PG (02:46:49): I thought the Panthers were interesting and attractive. But I have low respect for them in the struggle. I think Huey Newton, one of his classic documents was called Revolutionary Suicide. I am not a believer in revolutionary suicide. I once wrote a cover on the Black Panthers and it gave them mixed reviews and got involved in the picture picking. And the pictures were spread over... Some stories you wrote, there might be six pictures. We had a conference table covered with pictures. They were beautiful images. And the then editor of Newsweek looked at that tabletop and said there were too many pictures of these guys. They're not serious. And I went out there, I interviewed Bobby Seale in jail, interviewed him a couple of times since Huey was in prison and not accessible. I interviewed Donald Cox, David- SM (02:48:27): Hilliard. PG (02:48:28): ...David Hilliard, a couple of others. I think it was an exercise in futility. I am not pro futility. SM (02:48:44): A lot of people that I have talked to said that Fred Hampton was probably the most dynamic of all of them. He was the one that was murdered in Chicago. Yeah, the FBI wanted him outed. The National Organization for Women, and I put in here Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinam, and Bella Abzug. The Women's... There are others but... PG (02:49:07): Yeah, I am pro feminist I think those people you have named were major contributors. Steinem, who could have lived a very soft life as a glamor girl. SM (02:49:36): She was a Playboy bunny. PG (02:49:37): Yeah. Instead gave her life to that. Gave her working life to that movement or commitment to that movement. I honor her particularly. But [inaudible] Friedan, Abzug, they're parts of what when America and Newsweek finally woke up to the woman question, they were very important. SM (02:50:11): The Feminist Mystique, Mr. Kaiser, mentioned to me, or Charles, that she's not very well liked, Betty Friedan, in the gay and lesbian movement because she was homophobic. And so that is an issue there. Vietnam Veterans Against the War. PG (02:50:37): I was for them. I do think the vets needed something [inaudible]. SM (02:50:45): That was Bobby Muller and Ron Kovic and all that. PG (02:50:49): Yeah-yeah, yeah. SM (02:50:50): How about Mark Rudd and Rennie Davis? These are two other big names from that period. PG (02:50:58): No, I just do not think much of them. I do not mean that negatively. I just do not... They do not populate my interior landscape. I do not really have anything interesting to say about them. SM (02:51:14): How about SDS before The Weatherman or then The Weatherman themselves? PG (02:51:21): The Weatherman, I think, were practicing, essentially... I was about to say "juvenile," I will be a little kinder and say immature politics. SDS, I think was an attempt at being a white [inaudible]. And I think a lot of the women in SDS were not very happy with their roles as women in SDS. SM (02:52:03): How about Dennis Banks and the American Indian Movement? Do not forget the American Indian movement took over Alcatraz in (19)69 and the American Indian movement itself, we're not talking about the... I have learned this, that Native American movement was pretty strong even before AIM. But AIM looked at some of the more revolutionary tactics so that what happened at Alcatraz in (19)69 and what happened at Wounded Knee in (19)73 where there was violence. Because the FBI was all over this group. PG (02:52:36): Again, they are not part of my psychic population. SM (02:52:41): How about Stonewall and Harvey Milk? PG (02:52:47): Well, Milk obviously is a martyr, and Stonewall was a great liberating moment. But Stonewall was an amazing turnaround. And the Blacks went through the whole, "We're human too." And I think gays had to have similar moments. And I thought that was a major, major moment. Yeah. SM (02:53:32): How about the Free Speech Movement, when you think about that, what happened at Berkeley in (19)64, (19)65, Mario Savio, [inaudible]? PG (02:53:37): [inaudible]. SM (02:53:41): Yeah, that particular group. Just your response on that movement. PG (02:53:46): I was not there. I did not write about it. So again, I do not really have... SM (02:53:55): Okay. Just the term "counterculture." Your thoughts on the counterculture, the hippies and yippies. I think you have already mentioned them, but I just... PG (02:54:03): Yeah, politically, I thought they were immature. I thought they had a high show biz quotient. In terms of political gain, I do not think they achieved actually anything much. SM (02:54:26): How about the conservative group, Young Americans for Freedom, which has often been forgotten? They were very strong in the anti-war movement, and they were conservative, Young Americans for Freedom. Of course, I think Bill Buckley was involved in that. So, I have down here Young Americans for Freedom and William Buckley. PG (02:54:45): Well, Buckley's obviously a seminal figure in the development of what we now think of as movement conservatism. I disagreed with a lot of what he said, but I have a soft spot for him in my heart because he essentially subsidized an anthology of the columns of Murray Kempton, who is one of my heroes. SM (02:55:27): God and Man at Yale. I do not know if you had that book. PG (02:55:30): I had it a long time ago. SM (02:55:32): I read it and I thought he was kind of a radical, conservatively. He handles the system at Yale. So, Barry Goldwater, and- PG (02:55:42): He was also an apologist for Joe McCarthy and- SM (02:55:48): He wrote a book on that. PG (02:55:52): And then one of the things that politicized me as a very young man was McCarthy. McCarthy and McCarthyism. SM (02:56:06): Barry Goldwater and Dr. Benjamin Spock. What a combination. PG (02:56:12): What a combination. Goldwater is... I think my first political cover was on the Goldwater campaign in (19)64. Another seminal figure. And really, I was happy he was not elected, but was nowhere near the monster that he was made out to be. He was really a classic libertarian, a western libertarian and a likable guy. Dr. Spock, Dr. Spock, I do not think much about. It's another one. SM (02:57:15): I found it interesting too that the irony, and there's a lot of irony in the (19)60s, in the (19)70s. The irony is that Barry Goldwater, who was really defeated by Lyndon Johnson. And then Nixon becomes president in (19)68, beating Humphrey. And then it was Barry Goldwater and Hugh Scott that walked into the White House and told him that he needs to resign. PG (02:57:40): That is right. SM (02:57:43): McCarthy, Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy. PG (02:57:47): Bobby Kennedy is a major figure for me. Major positive figure for me. As I mentioned, I covered a couple of states in his primary campaign for President. I did an early Bobby cover when he was Attorney General. I did a cover on him when he was US Senator, thinking about running for President. I thought he was one of the most powerful political figures I have ever seen. And it was in an anti-matter way. Bobby wore tragedy on his sleeve. I think he never recovered from Jack's death ever. I think part of what success he had... I do not think he would have won the presidency. I think it was fairly well wired. You could still wire elections and in those days. We did not have primaries or caucuses in all 50 states. I think it was pretty much wired for Hubert. And I am not an anti Hubert. I think he got bashed around more than he deserved. SM (02:59:34): [inaudible]. PG (02:59:42): But Bobby looked like a man in pain practically all the time. His hands shook when he would make speeches. I saw his... He did a famous speech to the University of Nebraska Medical School students in Lincoln. They had a podium, a carved wood replica of a sawed in half Greek column with fluted... And all through the speech, it was sort of sad and harrowing to watch. His fingers were working into the flutes, the fluting on the column, up and down, up and down. It was just a nervous tick. He was very uncomfortable in his skin. The only time I saw him relaxed and peaceful was in Indianapolis. He had gone to a stop on his schedule and he cut the stop short. Because he had, on the way there, he had passed a schoolyard for a... Must have been a preschool. The children were very small. And he led his staff and the not very large press corps into that schoolyard and just started connecting with the kids. And one little black kid, maybe four... He radiated something to children. He was extremely good with children. And children saw it immediately. And this little boy came up to him and Kennedy was squatting like this, and the kid just sat on his knee. Kennedy did not put him there or beckon him there. He just sat on his knee. And Bobby asked him, "What's your name?" And he said, "Eldridge," which I thought was interesting, it was pre-Cleavers. SM (03:02:44): Oh my God. PG (03:02:48): So, he was not named for Cleaver. And he said to Kennedy, "How did you get out the television?" He thought Kennedy lived inside- SM (03:03:01): Oh my gosh. Wow. PG (03:03:07): ...the television. SM (03:03:07): Well, that is the one heck of a story. PG (03:03:09): Yeah. And it was so sweet. And he was so at peace. And it was the only time... SM (03:03:19): That is when he gave his speech too. He was in Indianapolis [inaudible], the impromptu speech- PG (03:03:23): I was not there for that one. [inaudible]. SM (03:03:28): He did not like McCarthy. PG (03:03:30): No. SM (03:03:31): [inaudible] Eugene was [inaudible]. PG (03:03:32): They hated each other. Eugene used to brag that... Well, he was furious at Bobby for getting into the race after he, McCarthy, had opened the door a crack. And he would say, "Well, I got the A students." SM (03:03:53): Wow. So how about Robert McNamara and John Kennedy? Just a couple comments on them. PG (03:04:13): John Kennedy, I think did a lot of good. And I am not one of his worshipers, but as an inspirational leader, I think that may have been his most important single contribution. The creation of the Peace Corps, which was actually Hubert Humphrey's idea. But it happened on Jack's watch. A lot of boomers did the Peace Corps experience. And I think it was a great happening for them and it led a lot of people, a lot, to public service. I think for the better. And Jack Kennedy was the first to say something that Eisenhower had refused to say that race was a moral issue in America. It was very important. To this day, you visit homes in a black neighborhood and the pictures you will see on the wall are Jesus, Jack Kennedy and Martin Luther King. McNamara, I really was not covering the policy under the war, so my feelings about him are really third hand from stuff I have read. Those guys all got themselves trapped into this notion that this was something doable, that this was something winnable. And by the time he... I give him credit for realizing late, way too late, but the fact that he realized it at all, that it was a losing proposition, that it essentially had been a mistake. I think [inaudible] he had a learning curve. SM (03:07:08): What about Nixon and Spiro Agnew? PG (03:07:16): Nixon, I think is one of the most wonderfully... From a writer's point of view, I think is one of the most- (End of Interview) 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 Goldman Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Goldman, Peter ; McKiernan, Stephen Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/wav Subject The topic of the resource Journalists; Goldman, Peter--Interviews Description An account of the resource Peter Goldman is an author and journalist. He was the national-affairs writer, senior editor, and team leader of a special-projects unit for <em>Newsweek</em> magazine. Goldman wrote over 120 cover stories on race, politics, Watergate, criminal justice and other aspects of American life. Goldman additionally wrote several books on Malcolm X. 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 2010-04-23 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.10.2016.56a ; McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.56b 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. 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Date of Interview 1996-07-29 Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Stephen McKiernan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Dr. Henry Franklin Graff Language english 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;War protesters; Robert F. Kennedy; Veterans; War injuries; Vietnam War; Media; Civil rights legislation; Empowerment; Healing; Vietnam Memorial; Baby boom generation; McCarthyism; Alcoholism; Generational gap; Lyndon B. Johnson; Trust.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:4865,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;11&quot;:4,&quot;12&quot;:0,&quot;15&quot;:&quot;Arial&quot;}">War protesters; Robert F. Kennedy; Veterans; War injuries; Vietnam War; Media; Civil rights legislation; Empowerment; Healing; Vietnam Memorial; Baby boom generation; McCarthyism; Alcoholism; Generational gap; Lyndon B. Johnson; Trust.</span> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 02:04:59 Subject LCSH Vietnam War, 1961-1975--Veterans Biographical Text Dr. Henry Franklin Graff is Professor Emeritus of History, specializes in the social and political history of the United States. He is the author of The Glorious Republic, and the editor of The Presidents: A Reference History, as well as several books and articles. Dr. Graff received his B.A. from the City College of New York, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in History from Columbia University. 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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Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound, or alternative text from a visual medium McKiernan Interviews Interview with: Henry Franklin Graff Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan Transcriber: REV Date of interview: 29 July 1996 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (Start of Interview) SM: All right. Well thank you for participating in this project. The first question I would like to ask is, the boomer generation and the (19)60s and early (19)70s is being attacked as one of the reasons for the breakdown of American society. Could you respond to this criticism and comment on the period and its impact on present day America? Is the criticism fair? And when this criticism is often directed to the youth of the era, what can you say about the boomers of the (19)60s and early (19)70s? HG: Well, I think there is a change. I guess some people would label a that a breakdown. I see our generation as, it is not the cause of that, as much as we were in the wrong place at the wrong time here. We were the vehicle for much of that change. And when I think about the change today, one of the things I think about first is that the last time I read something, it was-was over 70 percent of women now work outside the home. That was not true of my parents' generation. When I think about the street I grew up on, most of the mothers were home all day with the families. The fathers went to work. And I think about how traditional and conservative my upbringing was, and actually I think about the year I went to Vietnam and when I came. HG: Think about the year I went to Vietnam and when I came home, it seemed like everything had changed in my absence, everything. And then I remember the late (19)60s and the (19)70s, and I do not know that I see our generation as having any responsibility for causing that. We certainly had responsibility for trying to cope with economic forces, and I think some shifting of values. Certainly our generation for whatever their purposes began to question basic values such as when your government asks for your help, you provide it without question. SM: You made an important point there that when you went to Vietnam and then when you came back. Now, were you there one year, two years? HG: I was in country 222 days, and then it was a month and a half in hospital in Vietnam and Japan before I could come home. So it was almost a year. SM: What were your feelings at that time toward the protestors before you went to Vietnam and then when you came back from Vietnam, those who were opposed to the war? Did you have any thoughts toward them at that juncture? HG: Not really. I mean, I enlisted in the Marine Corps and then I volunteered to go to Vietnam. I did not originally get orders for that. I was waiting to go to Officers Candidate School and then the Tet Offensive of (19)68 took place and I was sitting at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. And at that point I was told that it might be another six months before everything was done and I could start Officer Candidate School. That would be six months. And then I would start a whole new enlistment as an officer for three years. And I just decided that, well, maybe I will go to Vietnam and see what that is like. And if I want to be an officer, I can always do that. So I resigned from the commissioning program and went over as an enlisted man. I thought it was a personal decision. I did not understand people who said no or even challenged the right of the government to ask for these sacrifices. I always felt that my father's generation and previous generations had sacrificed. That is why we had America. It required sacrifice and I did not question it, and my choice was to go and do what needed to be done without any questioning of that. I thought other people could make their choices. I did not feel they had to make same choices I did, and I never regretted my choice, and even as things have turned out. SM: Now, one of the two interesting politicians in that era are Senator Fulbright in his book Arrogance of Power, and I know that Dr. Benjamin Spock wrote a small book on Vietnam in 1968, basically talking about the Diem regime and basically condemning the government, not anybody who went over there, but the government and the leaders of America. And in both, not only in Arrogance of Power, but also in the commentary of Dr. Spock, it was the fact that those individuals who decided that they did not want to go to war and protested against the war were American patriots. That they were true patriots. Now they were not on the one hand condemning the Vietnam veterans who went over there, but they were saying that they looked upon those individuals as true American patriots even though they were being condemned on this side, especially in fighting Johnson and all the other eventually Nixon and so forth. What are your thoughts on Fulbright and Dr. Spock and those types of leaders who were making those kinds of commentaries? Was there some validity to that? Do you think that not only from your own perspective, but from the perspective of other Vietnam veterans, how did they look upon those leaders saying those types of things? And then of course, how did they look upon those people who protested, decided not to go when you said it was your duty to go just like your dad in World War II? HG: Well, many Vietnam veterans feel that anyone that did not take their place in the ranks would be anything but a patriot. As I said, I thought it was a personal decision, and I do believe there is times, I do not believe that you always accept the government version and that you do what the government asks. I think there is lots of opportunities for challenging and that sometimes to challenge the government does make one a patriot. It is a patriotic thing to do. I think about Desert Storm, certainly I was against the idea of sending a half million American troops over there when I believe that in the end it would turn into a ground war. I mean, the conventional wisdom was you could not win a campaign like that with an Air War, no matter how smart your bombs are, and that eventually American troops are going to have to close with the Iraqi troops and fight it out, and that is going to determine the outcome. And I was very upset at the idea, and I thought when that happened, there would be tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of casualties, and I did not feel that the stakes were worth it. And so I was against the idea of involvement in the Persian Gulf. So I guess I could be called a patriot of that era because I took a position that we should not be there. We certainly should not send our young men there. It is one thing to provide monetary support and arms to the other combatants. But why are we taking the lead? Why are we the first one there and why are we sending Americans? For cheap gas? I will pay $4 a gallon if it takes that. SM: If you knew then now about what was going on in Vietnam and how the leaders were, well, really not telling the whole truth about what was going on in Vietnam, how do you feel most of the Vietnam veterans would have felt? Of course, a lot of Vietnam veterans, Senator Kerry being one of them from Massachusetts, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, when they came back, Bobby Mueller was involved in that group. He had another group he was involved in, but- HG: Jack Smith was one of the founders of that. SM: ...He was, yeah. Well, do you think that you might have had a different point of view? HG: Well, when I came back, I had lots of opportunity. I spent years in and out of the Naval Hospital in Philadelphia, had lots of opportunities to think about the war per se. I mean, when you get there and I do not know how to say this, but when you get there it does not take long to realize it is a bad war. I mean, we are dying for what seems like nothing at that level, and you do not have the big picture. And in a real sense, it did not make any difference anyway. What mattered was surviving and making sure that your buddy survived. It did not matter what the war was all about. It did not matter if I was on the beaches of Normandy or Pusan perimeter or Vietnam or getting ready to go into Iraq. At that level it is really irrelevant. SM: Do you think the majority of the veterans, obviously you are saying now that at that juncture most want to survive, the bottom line is to survive, get through their year and get out of there. HG: Mortal combat. SM: But then when you come back, then that is when the thinking really starts in terms of what it was all about? HG: Well then you try to make sense of what has happened to you. You try to find some meaning in it. I was proud of what I did. I was proud of the men that I served with. Was I proud of what we were doing? Not particularly. I did not think it was a very good strategy. I certainly felt that the biggest losers of all were the Vietnamese people. I mean, they feared us and they feared the NVA and the VC. And all they wanted to do, and you could see it in their faces every day, all they wanted to do was scratch out a living, find something to eat that day to feed their family and try and avoid being killed by anybody, either by design or by accident. They were the biggest losers of all. SM: Getting back to that question regarding how Vietnam veterans felt when they came back and there was a division. Going to the wall, nowadays, I just tried to see the ambience of feelings of the people, and there is still tremendous dislike for those who oppose the war, at least this is my perception, and this is why I am trying to get some clarity on this from the people I am talking to, the 300 people, Vietnam veterans, people who protest the war, leaders, younger people today. Do you still feel, I know there is some that will never heal, but do you still feel that the majority of the Vietnam veterans are still against the people who oppose the war? Do you think there is still, because after all, when you look at the wall and the formation of the wall, this is getting to a question later on here, but that Jan Scruggs did such a tremendous job putting the wall together because it was supposed to be a non-political statement, it was supposed to state that we were going to pay tribute to those who gave their lives and also those who served, and also try to heal the veterans and give them recognition that they deserve and also try to heal the families. But when Jan wrote the book To Heal a Nation, it was my perception that it has helped the Vietnam veterans along, but I do not know what it is done totally, really for the nation. In terms of the boomer generation, which the Vietnam veterans are part of, and those who protested the war are, is there any healing there happening between those diverse groups? HG: Well, in my experiences I have seen what during the war was a division and I have seen those same people now 20, 30 years later and there is not a division. We have all moved on my mind now. I forgot what it was. There are some people who in trying to find meaning in what they have gone through, they have to use other people to create their own meaning. So on the one hand, there was the people who did not go, the people that went to Canada or Sweden or the people that marched against the war, even Vietnam veterans who came home and then protested against the war like Vietnam Veterans Against the War. And they need to use people like that in order to define themselves. I am not one of them. And I have always felt that, as I said, everyone had to make their own decision. I could not make any other decision than the one I made having been brought up the way I was brought up and having had the feelings I had about being an American and being able to grow up in this country and feeling from the start that I owed a responsibility to the country. And when it came time for that responsibility to be called upon, I was there. It was not dependent on whether or not I believed in the war, or whether or not I thought we had a good chance of winning or anything like that. And the nature of the war is what the resistance to it was all about, rather than the fact that our country has the right to become involved in war. I mean, it was the same thing with Desert Storm. For the first time, I was questioning whether or not the country had the right to get involved in that. Not that we should not have helped out Kuwait, but the degree of our involvement was simply due to the oil that was there. That was it. If it was some poor country somewhere that had nothing that we felt was important strategically, we would not have done that. I mean, little countries get overrun or annexed or cut off or whatever for a long time. SM: Question here, what has been the impact of the boomers on America? This is a general question beyond just the Vietnam veterans, but you are a boomer, and what do you feel has been the impact of boomers on America? Positive or negative? And I want to preface this question by saying, and I think I mentioned over the phone that we see today from the Christian coalition, an attack on the boomer generation constantly it is all the ills of society seem to stem back to that period. Breakup of the family, the divorce rate is on the rise, the drug culture, the counterculture, and of course we have a lot of drugs in generation X, lack of trust in leaders, lack of trust in politics, lack of trust in any kind of leaders, people not really voting. Boomers do not vote, and their kids do not vote. And it gets into a lot of different areas here. It is not just the Christian coalition. You hear it amongst a lot of the politicians today. There is the Republicans and even some Democrats who are trying to go middle of the road. And I know in all generations there are mistakes made, but is that a fair analysis? And what is your thought as a person who was a Vietnam veteran who was young at that time? You have gone on to become a professional psychologist. What are your perceptions? What are your perceptions of your generation, not only when you were young, but how has that evolved over the last 25 years? And how do you feel today about that generation, your generation? HG: Well, in the (19)60s and (19)70s, I felt a part of a generation that was defining itself. Again, it was talking about individuals who defined themselves as the opposite of other people that they can pick out. That is not a rebellion or a revolution. I mean, in the (19)60s and (19)70s, we were talking about revolution and we were going to change things. But if your revolution is that you are going to be the exact opposite of someone else, well, that is no revolution at all because your identity or what you are going to do or what you are going to believe in or what you are going to act on is really defined by the individual or the group that you have decided to be in opposition to. And I thought a lot of our early revolution was simply challenging the status quo and the morals and the values even around basic things like sexuality and the use of drugs for recreational purposes. Most of these people I know from my generation have mellowed out some more into the mainstream once they became people with careers and homes and mortgages and families and they paid taxes. And that our generation went through that shift, and then has become I think more alike. Now we are the middle-aged generation for the country and we have some responsibility. We have responsibility for the younger generation. And as time goes on, we take more and more responsibility for the older generation. We are now the power brokers. We are now the people that decide what happens. Clinton is president. I think the choice this fall between the class of (19)46 and Senator Doll and President Clinton who is a baby boomer, I mean, that is the choice that country's facing. I might happen to think that our generation has done right by the country, and I think we can lead the country and make the choices that we need to make to keep it true to its ideal. SM: So you are not one of those boomers who are advising this attack that all the ills of today's society are directly related to the boomers? And their counterculture and the way their rebellious dialogue, which do you see any linkage at all between the divisiveness of that era and what we see in the divisive today in terms of how we talk to each other, how we communicate with each other? In other words, a lot of times we do not talk. We shout at each other. We do not listen to each other. Do you think it is fair or is it depending on who you are, some will say it is ridiculous and some will say there is validity, but that all began back in the (19)60s and early (19)70s. Do you feel that way or could that be a part of- HG: I feel like when I was growing up, we did not talk to adults. As children the idea was you were there to be seen and not heard, and you did not sit at dinner table and talk to adults, even in school with your teachers. And I think there is one example of how there is more interaction. One of the things that I think our generation brought was more dialogue between different generations. I think you can look around and find examples of everything from McCarthyism and the Red Scare. I mean, was a better than in the 1950s? The use of recreational drugs was very uncommon, but the rate of alcoholism was much higher than it is today. And the per capita consumption of hard liquor in this country was probably eight times what it is today. Today, hardly anybody except the older generations drink hard liquor and even the distillers are having to branch out and get into other businesses because that is not the culture. But there was certainly alcoholism around and it destroyed families. I mean, we did not invent it. There was divorce around too. What was more common I think, in my parents' generation was to stay together no matter what, no matter how horrible it was, whether you said it was for the kids or just because I am not the kind of person that divorces. I deal with all kinds of pain and suffering in members of my generation who grew up in those kinds of toxic families where no one was going to leave. And these kids who are now adults do not know how to be in a relationship. They do not know how to relate. They do not even know who they are. And I see that as a consequence of growing up in the family where there was not any acknowledgement what was really going on there. Women did not have the ability to leave and be independent and take care of themselves. They were too dependent on their husbands, so they stayed no matter what. You can take any issue like that, and if you really look at it, see that in fact there was something just as awful or just as upsetting going on, but it only looks different on the surface. SM: One of the old slogans when I was in college was the IBM mentality. You ever see that old advertising where five people come out the front door with their hat on and their suit on, and they all drove the same car, had the same suit, and the wife kissed as they went away and everything, almost the house was identical. And there was a feeling of in the university, because it was called the multiversity in the late (19)60s, that we did not want to be carbon copies of what preceded us. And so there was kind of rebelliousness, and you raised some very good points about the fact that at the table rarely the parents talked to their kids. Certainly they stayed in marriages and they were not honest with their kids about the things that the kids saw them, but they just stayed on board. Linking back to the boomers, they probably wanted to be more honest and meet more open and to be critical at times, whereas their parents may not have been critical. And the question I want to get into this next question here is can today's generation of youth learn from the boomers? What can the boomers teach today's college students? This question is based on the fact that many of today's students often look at the (19)60s and early (19)70s as a period of activism, drugs, and single-minded issues. Dave Bolt mentioned that he thought they were simple-minded issues. Though many of the same issues remain there are new ones, and the lessons of the past are either not taught in schools today or never discussed between parent, the boomer parent, I mean the boomer itself, and today's kids, which is Generation X or slackers, another term that is used. Please give your thoughts on the issues in boomers lives and how they can have impact on students’ eyes today. This question came forth based on a couple conversations I had with a couple faculty members at West Chester University, one African American who is a dynamic professor and another is a majority professor. And both of them felt that they did not want to relate to their kids about what it was like when they were young because they have too many problems today. So why burden them with their parents' problems and what it was like? And I asked myself, wow, is this an example of how boomers are raising their kids? Are boomers talking about what it was like to be young, what it was like to be a Vietnam veteran, to share the experience with their sons or daughters? I have three students at West Chester. Two of them went to see Lewis Puller. Neither dad had ever talked to their son about Vietnam, and they learned about Vietnam through Lewis Puller. Now that is amazing. Neither parent would talk about it. They loved their dad, but they just would not open up. And then the other person was an African American who was about the civil rights movement, but she did not want to burden her kids with talking about that era when there are other problems today. The question is, can boomers share this experiences and are Generation X and slackers, do they want to learn? Do they want to listen to this? That is what I am trying to get at. HG: Well, I actually have not that much experience with today's generation. I mean, that says something. I mean, I will just stay with the example of the students that you had who had never talked to their fathers about being in Vietnam. That is not unusual at all, whether it is Vietnam or World War II or Korea. If you read Lewis Puller's book that his father did not talk to him about being in war. My father did not talk to me. I did not find out until after my father died and I was responsible for all the records. I did not really find out what exactly he did until I found his records and I was able to read those and then piece them together. And then I had some idea. He never talked to me about war before I went to war or after I went to war. And even at the end, I met a professor of mine, he was not a professor of mine but he was teaching and at my school, and he wrote his memoirs of being a fighter pilot in the South Pacific in World War II. And I bought it and read it and wondered, because my father was in the South Pacific in the Army Air Force, and I wondered if this was his experience. And I gave him the book to read and he read it. And the only comment he ever made was that the author had made a mistake with the model type of plane he was talking about, it was not a T-9, it was a T... And that was it. That was his whole reaction. And the reason I gave him the book was to see if maybe it would not spark some conversation about, well, gee Dad, what did you do in the war? And I never told him what I did in the war. So it is not unusual at all in my experience that- SM: Hey. HG: ...That sons do not talk to their fathers, the warriors, whatever their wars. I think we could learn. I think today I would like to think that today's generation can learn from us and that they do not make the same mistakes. My goal has always been to make different mistakes than the ones that my father's generation or the other members of my generation made. SM: If you were to describe the youth of the (19)60s and early (19)70s, please describe the qualities you most admire and then describe the qualities you least admire. You can use adjectives or what were the things about the boomer generation, that is people who were born, sometimes I hate using these parameters. People born between (19)46 and (19)64 are boomers when we all know that those born between (19)46 and say (19)58 are so different than those in the... HG: I was born in (19)47, and I do not have a lot that I would identify with someone who was born, well, actually, my wife was born in (19)60. She is 13 years younger than I am. And when we hear a music, I mean, I play oldies in the car on the radio, and I will say, "Did you ever hear that song? Do you remember that song?" A lot of times she will say, "No, I do not remember that song," or, "I do not remember that." Or we will watch something on TV and it is about something that happened in the (19)60s... SM: Okay. HG: Just say, "I do not remember that." And that was an important part of my life. I mean, when I was in Vietnam, she was eight years old. So not all boomers are the same. She does not even think of herself as a boomer. SM: She is post boomer probably. Post boomer, pre slacker. Tell her that. Well, if you were to give some adjectives to describe the boomers, the positive things, what would be the positives of the boomers? HG: I think our generation was committed to various visions of what America should be, and we took the initiative to try and bring about change. And I think we can take responsibility for a lot of things that have changed. And again, I think of getting women out of the house where their sole role in life is to have children and raise them. A friend of mine called women like that breeders. If you have the kids and you stay at home and you take care of them, and that is your whole life. Boy, I would not want to just have the family as my whole life. I would want to have the opportunity to be fulfilled in other ways. And I think women today, by and large, have opportunities and have options that they did not have in my mother's generation. SM: How about any negative qualities about the boomers? HG: I am not really used to thinking about us as separate and apart and different than the rest of the population. So I cannot think of any specific negative about us. SM: One of the comments, so again, I have not interviewed many people, but a few comments have come forth that the boomers are a very irresponsible group. Do you find that as a negative or- SM: Do you find that as a negative, or... HG: Well, it would be a negative, I would not say that, and I would not agree with it, but I do not know why someone else would say that. SM: I think they were prefacing it with the statement when they were out there protesting and/or some of those Boomers are the so-called elites. That is what they call 15 percent who are protesting the war, and found some sort of activism. They would just- HG: Every generation has its elites. America is more elitist than ever. The distribution of wealth is more disparate than ever. Now we are moving into a really very difficult time, when there really is a separation between important parts of the group. I know people who thought John Kerry was very elite because he had money, came from a money family, and he would go to rallies, but he would fly to them. SM: Oh, geez. HG: It is all on your perspective. The other guys in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War- SM: Hitchhike. HG: ...who did not have money looked at him, or some of the big names now who were officers. It all depends on your perspective. I certainly would not think of our generation of irresponsible. If we are, then the country's in big trouble because right now we are carrying the economy and everything on our shoulders. Our parents' generation, we are going to be responsible for taking care of them, probably at our own expense, and to also take care of our children's generation, and our grandchildren's gen... Well, selling them down the pike like they have been sold down the pike already. I do not believe that that was our generation that is done that. Why you got a friend? SM: Hey, how are you? HG: That is Shadow. SM: You are going to be interview... Shadow, you will be interviewed next. You got to wait your turn, so be prepared. Okay, Shadow? Could you comment on the importance of the Boomers with respect to the Vietnam War itself? HG: We fought it. SM: You fought it. HG: Could not have had it without it. SM: There is a lot of historians and sociologists have stated that if it was not for the protestors, the war would never have ended. Do you find that there is validity in that statement? HG: Well, in the things that I have read, it was clear that it might have ended sooner without them because toward the end, there was a lot of concern about doing this in a way that politically did not look like they cannot win. I mean, I read that someone said to Johnson, and I think it was his Secretary of Defense, "Look, why do not we just bring all the troops home and say we won?" He was concerned how that would look, and certainly what I read suggested that Nixon was concerned about appearing to give in to these kids that were causing problems, and we cannot appear to let them run things. I think without them it might have been easier to fold our tents, and come home and call it a day. Certainly the war would have been, I mean it was going nowhere, and we did not really pursue, I mean we were not really fighting a war after (19)72. We had very few troops there, and they were advisors, and serving behind the scenes. They were no longer taking the Fed to the enemy. We did get out, is that what we do? And it was too expensive, and there was all kinds of reasons it would have ended. SM: Back in (19)64 Dr. Spark's book, and of course a lot of people know about this, that he made a commentary that we will never send during the (19)64 campaign, we will never send our boys to into China because that that is... the Asian boys will fight that war. Our boys will not fight it. Of course, that was a criticism of Goldwater too. They felt he was going to take our troops right over there. And then from 15,000 advisors when Kennedy was there, to the beginning of troops going over after Johnson went into the presidency. I guess, what I give back is a lot of Boomers at that period, from seeing what happened, and of course they feel that they are one of the main reasons for Lyndon Johnson leaving the- ... Not deciding to run in (19)68, because the people that were going to support McCarthy, and then Bobby Kennedy, and the protests, and he did ... Really would not have a shot at winning. It was tearing the nation apart, decided not to move on. During that era, from seeing the Robert McNamara's and Lyndon Johnson, and then Richard Nixon and then leading up to Watergate, there was this whole lack of trust on the part of many Boomers, certainly the 15 percent who were protesting. That is a term that a lot of people use. 85 percent were not involved in any kind of an activity but my thought has always been that maybe affecting the subconscious of the whole generation, so that there was no trust happening. No faith in leadership as Mayor Burns up in Binghamton, a close friend of Bobby Kennedy. Bobby Kennedy was our last hope. Even then, since that time there has really been no one that the nation could get behind in terms of trust and support, as an entire nation. What are your thoughts on this business regarding the concept of trust, and the lack of faith in our institutions? Because, if indeed there is a lack of trust, psychologist was saying, and you are one, I can remember reading in my psychology 101 book. Something about the fact that if you cannot trust then you may not succeed in life. There is a concept before you have got to trust someone, whether it be your parent, or somebody. You have got to have a concept of trust. And yet, if young people are being raised by not having faith in their leadership of the country, and they were not telling the truth about the war, the body counts, all these types of things that were coming back, and we saw it on television, because another person said we are like the TV generation, not the Boomer generation, the TV generation. That there is something within the Boomers about not trusting people. Do you think as a psychologist, not only as a person who works with Boomers as patients, but as a boomer yourself, that there is some validity to the fact that this generation more than any other in history, is a generation that does not trust, and thus, they are passing that on to their kids who are today's young people in college, and they themselves may not be able to trust? Is there some validity to that thought? HG: Well, I think part of maturing is moving from naive trust to informed trust, kind of learning to do your homework before you trust someone, whether it is an individual, or whether it is an institution. Part of maturing is learning the rules, and I say moving away from civics 101 to the way the world really works, that I can think about Desert Storm again, that we did not go in there because we were guests. That this big militaristic country had overrun this poor small democracy, and we wanted to go in there, and protect democracy from the tyranny of a dictator. Again, we went in there because it was in our best interest, if we are going to have oil that is easily available and cheap to run our economy. As you grow up, you learn who to trust. Sometimes, you learn it the easy way, and sometimes you learn it the hard way. I do not know that our generation has any more difficulty with trust. There was a concept when I was an undergraduate that came out of Neil Durkheim, who was a sociologist in the 1800s, and he wrote a book on suicide. He talked about a state of enemy when in culture there did not seem to be enough structure, things seemed to be in chaos. I can remember when I was younger reading that, and identifying with that. I bet today's generation is doing the same thing. They are reading about Durkheim's concept of enemy, and saying, "Yeah, that is us," but it cannot be that every generation feels, and some of the things I have read about my parents' generation coming out of the Depression, and you know, read The Grapes of Wrath, or you watch the movie, the messages that society is that society is not working right, there is no structure, it is every man for himself, blah-blah-blah. And then, World War II, the same major shift that an impact that had on the culture, and then the recovery, and then the Cold War. I think again, we are talking about if you look hard enough, none of these things originated with our generation, and I do not think our generation is overly influenced, or practicing them. These are other generations. I think the issues can be different. I think it is sure hard to be a kid today. It is dangerous out there, and I think the rise of violence, the easy availability of guns, the saturation of drugs to the corner level in your little town, wherever it is. When I was growing up, drug abuse was so unusual and so foreign. I can remember a couple of movies, the Man with a Golden Arm, and if you ended up having a drug problem, they sent you to I think it was Louisville or Lexington, Kentucky, or there was a special federal prison for drug addicts from all over the country. Now, you go to any jail, and it is full of drug addicts, or people that have a problem with drugs. It was there, but the magnitude has shifted somewhat, although there are not as many alcoholics as there were. SM: But you see that, I do not want to make this in a political interview, but then you have those who comment that well the welfare state, and the policies begun under the Johnson administration began a trend. Special interest groups, we care more about special interest groups than we care about the general public. That is conservative, that is a conservative attack on democratic policy. Well the thing is, and then now that Boomers are in or going into, because they are 50 now beginning of the Boomers, so they are really just have not been in positions of power and authority for very long, and they have still got many years ahead. HG: We have all the problems with the previous generation and depositing on our doorsteps. I was talking to somebody about healthcare, and I am old enough to remember that when I got sick, we called up with Dr. Loftus, and we went over there, and whatever I needed then my father paid him for it. There was not any health insurance back then, if there was, we did not have it. A lot of times we were sick, we did not go anywhere, because we did not have the money. I remember in 1965, that was the I graduated from high school when Johnson brought Medicare in, and there were actually quite a few old people who had very little, very little during their working life, and then had very little to retire on. Nowadays, the rate of elderly who are destitute is very small, at least from the statistics I have read, so a remedy was developed to take care of those in need. That is where I remember the great society, and I thought all of that was well-intentioned, and a good idea, and did not have a problem with it then. I think there is some things we can do to... Actually, I think the difference, what I am remembering now is I did not have a lot of good to say about Reagan, the president, but one of the things that I was very pleased with was when he passed, and signed off on a catastrophic healthcare bill for Medicare beneficiaries, I think it was (19)83 or (19)84, so that everyone would have guaranteed catastrophic healthcare, that no one would lose everything as a result of getting sick, and it was to be paid for by the Medicare beneficiaries themselves. They would pay the premium. Well, the AARP people and the well-to-do elderly got so upset, and caused such a ruckus that two years later it was done away with. They did not want to pay the premiums for their poor fellow generation, World War II generation class of (19)46. I thought that is really ludicrous. I think of us, to go back to the other question, I think our generation has grown up with the idea that we are responsible for the rest of society, and I personally do not have a problem with having programs. Can programs get out of hand? Can they take on a life of their own? Can people become too dependent? In politics, it is clear that once you have given somebody something, it is much harder to take it back than if you never gave it to them in the first place, because people come to feel entitled to it. Depending on where you are at, where you are at in the food chain because I do not expect to get anything out of social security, or very little. As I work on my investments, and things like that. I feel that I have to be able to take care of myself because I do not think there is going to be anything there. But my mother's generation, my mother's getting social superior now, and I am real happy for her and her generation, and they are getting much more than they ever put into it. That turns out to be the fatal flaw, and this kind of approach and it remains seen what they are going to do about it. SM: You bring up that, it is just an example, I will look at the (19)60s and the Boomer generation as a group that cared about other people, who cared about what was happening in the south. Young people went down to Freedom Summer, even though the (19)64, they were not the Boomers, but the Boomers were coming on, and seeing these experiences because in (19)64, most Boomers old enough to go down south, but that was that group that just preceded the Boomers. You got the issue of civil rights caring about African Americans, you got the issue of certainly poverty in the inner cities. You have got the issue of the environmental movement, which came to fruition with that 1970 Earth Day ceremony in Washington. You have got the women's movement, who ... Even the Native American movement. That happened in Elk- The were a Hispanic movement. The Latino movement started around that time, gay and lesbian movement. It was like a caring about some of the disenfranchise in our society, and I look upon that as a very positive quality within the Boomer generation. But then, there are the naysayers out there who say that in reality we were our very selfish generation, only caring about ourselves, and our own special interests. Then they see what is happening today that African Americans care about only their issues. Gays and lesbians care about their issues, and women care about their issues, and break all the breakdowns. What are your thoughts on that? Would you categorize this generation as a very caring generation, different than any previous generation, or they cared more? Is that a quality that is positive in this? HG: I think my parents' generation, and their parents' generation, that it was rugged individualism all the way. My parents did not feel any particular responsibility for other people. They felt that it is what you do for yourself. You got to get up and go to work, and you do not expect nothing from anyone else, and you do not... You are not responsible for anyone else. As opposed to my generation where, as I was growing up, I saw the government turn into turn again... I mean you can just look at the New Deal, and everything that was done to overcome the Depression, and see that in fact the government has created programs, some of which are still around now, and do not need to be that. In fact, I think of the government, if the government is not there to attempt to remedy problems in the society, and problems that only affect special groups or interests, then what is the government there for? Versus the government that is there to keep the status quo, which means some people who are doing swell are going to continue to do swell, and then other people who are not, just too bad for them. SM: The haves will continue to be the haves, and the have nots- HG: Right. I think of the kind of government that I believe in is a proactive, and a reactive government that does things, and tries new approaches, and does not close its eyes to problems, and it does not have to be a problem that affects everyone in the country in order for the government to be reactive to it. SM: When you talk about that, that is directly linked to when these Boomers were growing up. Because they saw the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson, and they saw these things, and it was really affected them, and those that have gone into public service, and want to be involved in working for others beyond themselves. I got a question here. Have you changed your opinion on the youth of the (19)60s over the last 25 years? HG: Just on the youth of the (19)60s? SM: Yes, the youth. Have you changed at all? HG: No, not really. SM: Do you feel you are consistent in your thoughts? HG: Yeah, I did not look down on us. I thought I served with a lot of guys that felt that they were doing the right thing, just like I thought I was. I could also understand people that did not want to die, and did not want to get hurt, and did not want to be exposed to horrible things. Much of my generation, 90 percent of my generation was not in uniform in the whole Vietnam War. What is that make them? I did not have a problem with Bill Clinton. I do not have a problem with the letter he wrote from Oxford. I do not have a problem with him wanting to get out of serving the Vietnam War. I did not have a problem with Dan Quail, who managed to wangle a National Guard position so he did not have to go. In any war, the majority of the citizenry do not serve, and in anywhere. What is that make them? SM: If you recall Don Bailey, when he spoke on our, at that program in (19)75, I mean (19)75, (19)85, he refused to even acknowledge the Vietnam veterans over at that program. Remember we had the reception upstairs, and he said, "No, I will sit downstairs with a program start." So he was very bitter, and I think he had a couple purple hearts, or was right front lines and- HG: Personality disorder too. Being a surgeon in Vietnam does not make you a wonderful person. SM: That is true. They are always going to be those people of the extreme who are not going to ever change, and are still going to have the bitterness probably to the time they go to their grave, but it is my hope that the majority will want to create a dialogue between, as they get older, and not have this bitterness, when they go to their graves about that era. It is a feeling that hopefully this whole project will get involved with. This is a comment, the Boomers always used to say they were the most unique generation in American history. I can remember in the early (19)70s when I was in Ohio State University, we go to rallies, and they say we are going to show the world that we are the most unique generation in American history. Not only were they fighting the war, but all the other issues that were involved, and to this day, as a Boomer, now in my late 40s still, I feel that we are something unique. That is just me. Certainly different than my dad's generation, and I work with student’s day in and day out, and they are totally different than what we were, but they are not activists. I have perception, do you think that for that we are the most unique generation in American history, or in this century? HG: No, I do not think we are the most unique. Again, I can think about the first generation who came over as English subjects, and what it took them to decide that they wanted to set to get freedom from England, and pursue a war that there was no consensus at the time that we could even pursue successfully, and everything went on. I look at the generation that fought to keep the Union together. I look at the generation that came out of a Depression and joined a World War, and wanted... I do not think that we are any more unique. I think we have had some challenges that other generations might not have had, but they have had their challenges. I think we have met our challenges by and large, well. I think of this as unique. SM: If you are described a good quality or an adjective that would describe this generations' activist, they may have been more activist than any other generation, irrespective of the American Revolutionary period, which they were obviously activists risking their lives, but they were in the minority too, at that time because I think one third, only one third were against Britain. One third supported Britain, and one third care less. HG: Well, I also think that one of my pet peeves is the media. I also think that our generation saw the sentencing of the media, as not only people who reported the news, but people who make the news. You can look around for many examples today, that young girl that made her walk on the women's gymnastics team pretty strong. When in reality, we had already won. She did not know that. She was... The next day I heard on TV that she was being told that she could probably make four or five million dollars now if she wanted to put her efforts into marketing herself, and whatever. My major problem with the news today is that I think they spend too much time making the news from the start. They have been committed to the idea that the TWA flight 800 blew up with a bomb, regardless of evidence, or lack of evidence. These stories take on a life of their own, and I think that began with our generation. The electronic media was really coming into its own. I mean, I remember growing up watching the news of Walter Cronkite, and he just, he was just a talking head there most of the time, and would have a couple of clips. He reported it in his monotone, and then he would end up with, "and that is the way it is." The news is presented differently. It has spin on it, just like, I mean, everything anybody is feeding the media has spin on it, and then they put their own spin on it. I think that we came of age during the electronic media era, when the electronic media was coming of age is starting to realize it is potential. SM: I think a lot of the perceptions of Vietnam came from those reports too, especially morally safer. In that one report that everybody remembers, and I remember it was because I was there seeing the news that night of burning down that village, setting in a fire. That might have been 60 minutes. I am not even sure what it was, but I just know... I think it was Morley Safer. HG: 60 minutes. SM: Yeah. HG: -went over. SM: Yeah, I think it was Marley Safer. Yeah, he was there, and so was Mike Wallace. HG: I can remember every night hearing the casualty count, and how many people, how killed in action there were that week. SM: From now we know that the true numbers that were coming in. This might be repetitive here, but Boomers used to say they were going to change the world. They were offering quotas being the youth that would change the world in a positive way. Was this true? Were they different? And in what way? I think you have already kind of made a comment in there. It has often been quoted that only 15 percent of the Boomers were truly activists, were involved in some sort of activity linked civil rights, Vietnam War protest, the women's movement, the gay and lesbian movement, the environmental movement, or any kind of activism overall in politics. Any issues today? Is this true, or is this another way to lessen the impact this group has had on America since the (19)60s? In other words on, there has been reports on the television, public broadcasting, documentaries on the Vietnam War, and they will always say that actually there were not that many people really involved in that. They lessened the impact these people had on what was happening in America based on the numbers. Since this is a generation of 60 million, 65 million, only 15 percent on were involved, so thus it was not that great a movement. But, that is the media again. HG: Well, I think- HG: I called Tom Williams up and I said, "Where did you get this statistic?" And he mumbled around and I spent years trying to track it down. It supposedly, and you can ask Jack Smith about this if you talk to him, because it apparently came out of some church study that he had some involvement in. A church group had given him some money, and some people he was involved with, but it was patently untrue. And Tom Williams, we finally identified that he heard it from Jim Webb, who wrote Fields of Fire and was Assistant Secretary of the Navy or something like that. Well, he was an Annapolis classmate of Tom's, and Jim was going around the country doing the radio shows, pushing his book, and that is where he was throwing this out. But it is patently untrue. The VA, who has the best data... Suicide data, for one, is difficult data to work with. There was lots of problems with it, but they have done the best study to date, and there is nowhere near that. And other states have done their own studies of this. I mean, it is such a statistic that really gets a reaction out of people. So a lot of people have looked at it, but it is not true. It is not even close to being true. And I am really disturbed to hear that they are still pushing it down there. SM: They did not do it this year, it was last year. There is the guys at the wall, the guy that go around showing they have a... HG: Right. I have little patience with veterans who are professional victims at this point. As we all approach 50, it is like time you get on with it, although there are many veterans who just will not ever get on with it. And so they identify themselves with the fact that they have been victimized, and they have never moved on to a survivor identity. So they are stuck in Vietnam and they will never make it home. SM: Are many of those peoples not diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, they just do not move on? HG: They just do not move on. And that is true of any war. Not everybody gets over it. And so we owe them. Lincoln said, when the VA was created, care for the, what is it? "Care for the Warrior and for his wife and for his orphan, for his widow, and for his orphan." But that does not make it sell to Vietnam veterans as a group and not come home and off themselves as a way of dealing with what they found when they came home. That is not true at all. SM: Remember when we did the program back in (19)85? That was a big issue even back then, because we had the Harry Gaffney, who would always dress in a suit, and Dan Fraley would dress in a suit, remember? And then you would go down to the Vietnam Memorial in Philadelphia, you would see those that are still wearing their army fatigues, but that it was okay for that opening ceremony. But I remember Harry saying that there is just some people, they ought to learn to dress now. I mean, they have got to move on from it. So what are your thoughts on the former left leaders who state that their past activities and those of their peers had more negative impact on society than good? Many of the... We are talking about the David Horwitz, the Collier who wrote that book on the Destructive Generation, basically condemning the entire generation as real negative, especially those people who were on the left. That is, the war protestors. Those people took over the Democratic Party in 1968. Those people that were affiliated with Eugene McCarthy, and possibly Bobby Kennedy and certainly, oh, during that timeframe. And of course they disrupted the Democratic Convention in Chicago in (19)68, some of the Republican convention too, in a smaller way. So what are your thoughts of those people who look back on when they were younger and did things, and from a psychological perspective, what does that entail? HG: Well, I think we all look back at our coming of age, and we all have things to regret, and we all have things to be proud of. We can all say, "Boy, if I knew then what I know now," and I think no matter where you stand on the issue, that is a common experience. Whatever your positions are on different issues, that maturity and wisdom and the things that we pick up as we grow, we might be in a different place. SM: When you look at people that, either the boomers or whether... You said you have been consistent on your thoughts from then and now toward your perception of people in your age group. But what about those individuals that have kept their ideals? Another word term that has been used from our generation is that they were idealistic somewhat. Dr. King coined the phrase Dreamers, hoping for a better future for all of us, but certainly idealistic. And you almost also made a comment earlier on that many have moved on, and mellowed out, and raised families, and the idealism was just something in their youth. And that is even psychologists and psychology will say that most young people are idealistic when they are young. And as they get older, they have to raise families and get into the reality of what life is. But there are many that still live those ideas. HG: Mellowing out or becoming responsible to a family and all that does not mean you have to give up your ideals or change who you are, what you believe in or what you feel a lot about. SM: Do you feel that the people that you have worked with, the boomers, what was the percentage that they have given up their ideals and just live day to day or they still fight for things? HG: Fight for issues? Well, certainly the populace is less, if you take the voting rate, is less involved. And I could not wait to vote. I came home from Vietnam and I was not old enough to vote, or old enough to have a drink in the state of Pennsylvania as I was laying in the Naval Hospital in South Philadelphia. But once I became old enough to vote, I vote, I vote regularly, and I stay aware of what the issues are and I try to understand the world that is going on around me. The people I spend a lot of time with and who are in my generation seem to do the same thing. We can talk about it. In my experience, we have not lost our passion. We are not 19 with a lot of free time on our hands, but we can write letters, we can make donations to political organizations, we can join political organizations. We can do things like that to try and continue to support our vision of what we think America ought to be. SM: I have a list of names here that I would just like you just comment your thoughts on them. If you were to try to place the following names in the minds of boomers, what overall reaction we do for the following names? I would like your thoughts, just a couple sentences on each of these individuals personally, and maybe if you can speak for the boomers, try to think what they think of them today now that they are almost 50. First name is Tom Hayden. HG: Well, from what I understand, he was an effective legislator in California, and that is really all I know about him. Besides the fact that he was married to Jane Fonda. SM: How about the fact that he protested, went to Hanoi and all the other things? HG: So did Jane. SM: Now as a Vietnam veteran, have you forgiven them for that? HG: I never had a problem with him doing it. I personally felt, again, to confuse the warrior with the war was the big mistake. What I had hard feelings about with the American society was they confused the warrior with the war. I did not have any problem at all with what people felt about the war, but I really felt that they should not be hostile or against the warriors, meaning the Americans who went over and pursued what the government policy was. SM: So again, getting back, and I am going to put Jane Fonda in here too, because she is down further. One of the things when I go to the wall is that is the name that is up on all the details. Jane Fonda bitch, upside down. I have a picture of a Vietnam veteran, I think I told you on the phone, with an artificial arm and an artificial leg, and he has got these big badges and I think they even sell them down there. It is like that is the name. Jane Fonda seems to be the name that you see on the badges. HG: I never heard Jane Fonda say anything against Vietnam veterans except we were being abused or used by the government. She even tried to... She made a movie, Coming Home, which was one of the better movies about Vietnam veterans' adjustments and issues, and that was 1980. SM: Okay, then what draws the ire of people? She was in Hanoi, that picture that that was taken, of course the North Vietnamese should win. Of course, they are fighting. That is the enemy of the American Soldier. HG: And again, that that is speaking to the nature of the war. And I do not begrudge anybody their feelings about the war and the validity of the war. But if you are going to say something about the warriors that carried out that war, then I have a problem with it. SM: Lyndon Johnson? HG: I feel that he was a good president, that the Great Society and many other programs that he created were important programs that were... I believe the government should have been getting involved in these issues. SM: In terms of him bringing the troops to Vietnam, he was the guy that brought the first large numbers of troops. You do not begrudge him or have a negativity toward him? HG: Yeah, we had a mindset that we had won the Second World War. It was the same mindset that got a lot of guys killed in Korea, and it was felt that it was just like in Desert Storm. And Desert Storm worked out really nice. Vietnam did not, but basically, they were very similar actions. We felt that if Vietnam fell, the domino theory, all the Southeast Asian countries were going to become communist strongholds, and this was against our strategic interest. So we got involved to try and prevent this. I mean, that is what it was all about. SM: How about Bobby Kennedy? HG: It is funny. I was in Vietnam most of 1968, so I did not even know when people were getting killed. They did not tell us. SM: Really? How long was it before you knew that Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy were killed within a two month- HG: I found out when I came back home. SM: Really? HG: Yeah. Anything that happened in 1968, I went over in early March, and I got back on December 5th, and they were not... For example, when Martin Luther King got killed, they were not playing us up as big news. We only had one radio station, Armed Forces Radio, and they were not playing that up, and I can imagine why they were not. And same thing with Bobby Kennedy. SM: What are your thoughts on him though, as you think back on the boomers? HG: I thought that had he not been assassinated, he might have made a good president. SM: How about Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin? HG: I think of them in the same terms. Actually, the thing that we were watching a week ago was a special on the serial murders, and Charles Manson was in there, and my wife was saying, "I seem to remember something about him." But she was only seven or eight at the time, and this guy was nuts, and did crazy things. And I think of these people as individuals who were in the right moment at the right time, and they got their 15 minutes of fame. And I do not have any enduring feelings about them one way or another. I think Abbie Hoffman died in New Hope of an overdose. That is what I think about him. It does not sound, from what I read at the time, it did not sound like he ever got over the (19)60s. SM: Right. What is interesting, Jerry Rubin was criticized often as selling out because he went on to become a successful businessman. He got killed in a crime. I thought it was interesting. He was doing something illegal when he got killed. He was crossing the highway in LA, jaywalking, and he got run over, but he was a successful businessman. Whereas Abbie Hoffman, the Yippies, that period, that was just a bunch of, you satisfy this one issue and we will find another issue, that kind of mentality. Yet he did live his entire life as an activist, because he tried to fight to save the Hudson River. HG: He was here to fight the pumping station on the Delaware. SM: And I guess what struck me, not so much the eccentricity of the man, but the fact that the way he died, and the fact that as he was older, because he was about 54 or 53 when he killed himself, he only had $2,000 in the bank, and he had given all his money away. And that suicide note or something like that is they said he had nothing more to live for because no one was listening to him anymore. And I thought, "Ooh, is there something to be said there? Is this the fate of the boomers?" Even though he is only one person, is this the fate of the boomers and all the issues that they cared about when they talk about today's young people who have their own issues. When you talk about the issue of civil rights, that we have still got racism there. "I do not want to hear about it. I do not have other problems. I want to get a good job. And we got our own problems here, and you are just living in the past." So that is what struck me about Abbie Hoffman more than... He was a legitimate activist, but his earlier years hurt him because he played all these games as a Yippie. As he matured, he was a mature activist. So I am wondering what that says about our generation, in terms of... HG: He is clearly in a minority and most of us are not, do not spend our lifetime being activists, at least in that sense. SM: How about Timothy Leary? HG: He just died of cancer. For someone who had made it into academia, Harvard, and he developed some psychological constructs that are still useful today, that people still talk about them. And I learned them, and was surprised to know that that was him. I originally at the time thought he was just wispy professor that was on the fringe, but he was very much a part of the establishment. You cannot get much more than faculty at Harvard. And he gave all that up. SM: To get into the drug scene. HG: Yeah. I could not imagine why he would, why he revoke all of that. SM: Name a couple more here. Huey Newton? HG: I think the Black Panthers, was not he? SM: Mm-hmm. HG: All right. My experience with the Black Panthers was kind of a fascination with them. That felt like, well, if everyone is talking about revolution, this is as close as you can get to revolution, armed revolution, and that is my association to him. SM: It is sad, too, that I think he was gunned down in Oakland when he eventually died in later years, in the late (19)80s. Ralph Nader? HG: A fellow alum, who is still fighting for the consumer. I think world is a safer place for Ralph, and it is good that we have him. SM: He is an example of a guy who has been an actor his whole life. He goes from one cause to another. HG: Most of them have to do with protecting the citizens from big business. SM: George McGovern? HG: He seem like a nice man. SM: Boomers latched on to him in 1972 in large numbers, even though he got clobbered in the election. Many people blame him for the demise of the Democratic Party, or part of the demise. It is basically a lot of the Democrats, McCarthy, and Mondale, and Jimmy Carter, and Dukakis, they bunch all these people in together, and other Democrats of that era, Hubert Humphrey. He is a liberal. A lot of boomers still, when I think of the names of that era, (19)72, it is McGovern, McGovern, McGovern, McGovern. Do you still think that strikes a chord with a lot of veterans? They still think of him in positive terms? HG: Yeah, I guess as they think of him. Most of these people I do not think about. SM): They have moved on, huh? HG: I cannot remember the last time I thought about any of them. Yeah, certainly he was identified with getting out of war. SM: How about Gene McCarthy? HG: Do not really have any association with him. More association to Joseph. SM: Because of the Red scare. Of course, Eugene McCarthy was the guy that the young people started latching onto to fight against the war. HG: Nixon was one of them. SM: Yep. In fact, he is next. Richard Nixon? HG: My association to him is that he managed in 20-some years to come back from what I thought was probably the biggest disgrace you could possibly have. And, at least in some quarters, he kind of rehabilitated, politically rehabilitated. And I still hear people say that he was the greatest political mind around, and whatever. And I remember when Watergate was going on, I just could not believe that these people were that stupid, and that this was all going to... This stupid little project was going to bring down the presidency. And it was scary at the time. SM: His impact with Watergate had last lasting imprints on boomers, how they lead their lives? HG: It has not on me. Everybody does dirty tricks. And everybody... Maybe not everybody, and maybe this is my own lack of trust in politicians, but I assume that everybody is going to try to get away with what they can get away with in the political game. SM: How about George Wallace? HG: A racist. Did not deserve a bullet in the back. SM: Daniel Ellsberg? HG: The first word that popped into my mind was a patriot. We were talking about that earlier. He did what he felt he had to do. He took on the federal government, which is no small thing. SM: Hubert Humphrey? HG: The memory I have of him is that he supported programs that took care of people. SM: And Robert McNamara? HG: Well, I did not buy his book, I am sorry to hear he is distressed with his performance in the war. Then again, Secretary of Defense, all you do is provide your opinion. You do not make the decision. SM: But he is criticized for holding his opinion back. HG: I do not believe that. I believe that that opinion was represented at the highest levels of government. And if he did not share it, someone else would. Certainly from what I have read, is there was a group that always felt that it was a losing proposition from the start. And there was always someone around who would take that position. It was not like everyone was telling the president, "Oh, yes, we are going to win this one." And it became in (19)67, (19)68, not the question of would we leave, but how are we going to leave, and how do we do it and look good, and how do we manage it politically? SM: Do you think inviting him to the wall would be, and having him come to the wall would be positive or negative, if he would come? HG: I think it could be positive. SM: I do not know what [inaudible] would think, but I have a sense, knowing he is very open-minded that he would like him to come, and just like Lewis Puller believes we need to heal. Bill Clinton, all of need to come at some juncture. And it is not an interesting too, that the only president who has visited the wall is President Clinton. Ronald Reagan did not come. Neither did George Bush. And it is amazing. I do not know if they have invited Jimmy Carter ever, but I know that Al Gore was there once to speak before he was a candidate, John Kennedy? HG: Well, I was not old enough to really know what was going on. My enduring memory of John Kennedy was I was in ninth grade when he and Nixon were running against each other, and the class was arbitrarily split in half, and I was made a Nixon devotee, and had to argue that Nixon should be elected. SM: You look at the assassinations of Johnson, not Johnson, assassinations of both Kennedys and Martin Luther King, and then in a smaller way, of Malcolm X and Medgar Evers, and the bombing of kids down in that church in the south. And then, of course, the attempted assassination of George Wallace. They were all over a period of time. How does that affect the boomers in terms of their psyche? HG: Well, I think it was a traumatic time, to have the president assassinated. Makes you feel pretty helpless. SM: As a professional psychologist, you cannot have 60 million people in front of you. But if you were to analyze the effect that this man had on, remembering that that boomers would only be, what, 14 when John Kennedy was killed? The earliest boomers. The oldest boomers. I met him, by the way, when I was a kid at Hyde Park, just by accident, and had a chance to shake his hand. But just for a brief moment, he had an impact on me back in 1960. That was when he was at Hyde Park. But the sense that things would have been different, but you cannot always project what may have been. You got to deal with what is. Do you think boomers, I know they do not think about it, but in the subconscious they may be thinking, "What if John Kennedy had lived? What if Martin Luther King had lived? What if Bobby Kennedy had lived?" All these what ifs. Because some of the what ifs, if John Kennedy had lived there may not have been a Vietnam War. We may have not sent the troops over, but there is no proof that there would have for that. HG: Well, he sent the first ones there. SM: Right. HG: What I remember about John Kennedy is the Cuban missile prices. And I was convinced we were all going to get nuked. And that is from going through it, and then watching things on TV or reading about it, you realize how extraordinary that was, to take that position. What would have happened if he would not have, and they would put more and more missiles on Cuba. That really was a time, in everything I have read and watched, that that really was a time when we could have had a nuclear war. That was the one time that it could have went either way. SM: Getting back to the question on the psychology, has this... What effect has that had on the generation in terms of- HG: Well, I do not know if it has had any effect on our generation as opposed to the rest of the populace. None of us voted to put him in office. None of us probably paid much attention to his campaigning. And I remember the big point in the election was, well, he was a Catholic. We have never had a Catholic elected president. So I would guess that it probably would have had more of an impact on the adults who were involved in the election and had voted for him. And I did not really know what he stood for when he was elected. And no, I do not know that it had big an impact at all on our generation. SM: A couple of more people here, Spiro Agnew? HG: Another crook. And the only person I ever knew that used the word effete. SM: Muhammad Ali? HG: As I have gotten older, I have come to admire him for his position. He took on military service. Because I remember when Elvis went in the service. And he went in, he put his time in. That was the expectation. And Muhammad Ali said, "No." I had always admired him as a fighter and as a boxer. SM: How about Barry Goldwater? HG: I did not really know much about Barry Goldwater. I did not have much of a reaction to him. All I remember is the bumper stickers, AUH2O. He was not a major player as I knew. SM: How about Dr. Benjamin Spock? HG: Well, I did not read his book. I knew that he was against the war and was an activist. And all I remember thinking is he could have stuck to being a doctor. Being a doctor does not necessarily make you knowledgeable about the bigger world, and the issues of war and peace. SM: And Gerald Ford? HG: He was the first president I voted for. Maybe the second. That is right, I voted for Nixon in (19)72. It was only recently that I finally voted for somebody who got elected. Yeah, Clinton from the first. Now I voted for Nixon, and he got elected. But that was my first vote, and... HG: Yeah, that was my first vote and I felt he had experience and the alternative... At that time, I thought we needed people with experience, but since then until Bill Clinton, everybody I voted for lost. SM: I have not voted for too many winners either. How about Sam Ervin, the person who headed the Watergate Committee? HG: I just remember watching him on TV and he seemed fair and impartial and I mean, I thought that was great drama. SM: And John Dean. HG: Well, I bought his book, Blind Ambition and read it, and then I watched a movie where Martin, what has he called, played him. SM: Martin Sheen? HG: Yeah. SM: Okay. HG: Played him. Yeah, he seemed like he was in over his head. SM: He spilled the beans though. He just... HG: Well, yeah, when he started to see that he was going to go for a ride. SM: And John Mitchell. HG: John Mitchell, he was a crook too when it came down to it. Our highest judicial officer. And he was a crook too. SM: How about the musicians of the era? I will just put like Bob Dylan and Jimmy Hendricks and Janis Joplin, those are the types. HG: Actually, my taste in music was like early to mid (19)60s and that kind of real hard stuff. I have gotten an appreciation for it as I have gotten older. I did not at the time. Yeah. SM: Because at that time, a lot of the era, the society of young people listen to that music and they think about the war and the big issues in society, and there was a lot of social commentary in the music and it kind of excited me. You wanted to get out there. HG: I was listening to Motown all the time and they did not sing about any of that. They were not commenting about anything except men and women and falling in love stuff. SM: And the last name here I have is Gloria Steinem. A lot of the women's movement people you know. HG: Right. I have come to appreciate the women's movement, although to the degree they want to become men. I think they were nuts because they had a better deal as a woman whether they realize it or not, in many ways. Much of what men are about in this culture and have been is very unhealthy. SM: Do you think the movement has changed from the early (19)70s to what it is today? HG: Well, yeah, I think everyone agrees there has been gains and they were fighting very basic issues. Well, first of all, they were fighting to be taken seriously, and I think they are taken seriously today. SM: What do you think of the Berrigan brothers? They burned the documents there and they went to jail for it. HG: Again, they were priests or brothers or something like that. SM: Yes, Philip and Daniel Berrigan. HG: I am just thinking that they must have been acting out of their conscience. SM: And the last one is Martin Luther King Jr. HG: I felt that he did have a dream and that he pursued that, that in his death he became more important than he may have become, had he not been assassinated. He became the symbol, and I think he helped polarize people around the issues and not just black against white. I think a lot of whites moved to support racial equality as a result of what happened to him. SM: In all these names that I have given, whether they be positive or negatives, do you still feel tremendous bitterness toward any of them at all in your thoughts? Say your thoughts 10 years ago, 15 years ago, back in, when you came back from the service, from early (19)70s to now, was there a period when you may have felt that negative toward them, but now it since time has passed- HG: No, I did not feel bitter towards any of them. I mean, I can certainly disagree with people. SM: How do you explain then a lot of the, again, I will not say a lot, but some of the commentary that is out there that as soon as they start talking in political terms, the politics of the day, they will refer back to those times. And you just mentioned the name, whether it be a, I do not want to say the Berrigans, I do not want to talk about them anymore, but any of the activists of that era, the Tom Hayden, I can imagine what they are going to say about him when he goes to the convention in Chicago because he was out protesting in (19)68. Now he is going to be inside the convention as a delegate from California. And the commentary that will be out there is, "Well, look, this party has not come anywhere. Look at that. The guy who protests is now inside. So the liberals are still in charge." And I am not saying I am a liberal or conservative, I am trying to be fair here, but there are many people that just cannot forget and cannot forgive. Congressman Dornan, for example. HG: He is not a good example of anything. SM: But he goes ballistic. HG: Nuts. SM: And Don Bailey, which we all witnessed in (19)85. And then I have a few people that I have witnessed down at The Wall who just talk amongst themselves and I just listen. It is just amazing, some of the things they say. Do you feel these are in the minority, that these people are in the minority now as opposed to- HG: Sure. SM: Okay. HG: Yeah, extremists are a minority by definition. Thank God there are not that many Bob Dornan around. SM: Yeah. What is amazing about him is he served this country well and he fought in the Korean War there is a lot of good things about him, but boy, when he starts talking about his opponents, it is really below the belt. HG: Well, I think personally, having been through it all myself, having served in combat or been wounded or this or that, that does not necessarily prepare you for anything. You can still be nuts. You can still be out on a limb. You can still have just really weird ideas. SM: Could you comment on the generation gap in the (19)60s and early (19)70s and the generation gap, if you sense one today between boomers and Generation X? HG: Well, my sense of it is that today's young people did not get the same kind of introduction to certain values and beliefs and practices that our generation did. At least my experience was, my parents passed on their values and beliefs and practices, and there was a lot of should, should, should, should. And so your choice was to accept that or reject it or negotiate what you are going to accept and what you are going to reject. And my sense today is that there is a lot less of that. I guess the boomers have tried to encourage younger people to make more decisions for themselves and to be more of their own person. But that I think can make the process harder as far as finding out who you are and what you do believe in and what is important to you and how important it is to you. SM: That generation gap, there is a couple of books written on the (19)60s about the generation gap between the World War II generation and boomers and trying to understand that, a lot of it was what you talked about earlier, the status quo and being different, wanting to be different. HG: There was books on the me decade or the me generation and the ones I read just took it to an extreme and maybe a Leary or someone, but the idea of gaining self-knowledge and understanding yourself I think is important. And sure anything, can be taken to an extreme. I believe that in the end, we do not have the answer for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for all of us. We are all in this together. And anything that diminishes others in the end will diminish us. And so we are either all going to make it or we are not. But the strides the human race has made, we have made not through competition and aggression, but we have made through working together. That is how the human race has come as far as it has. And 10,000 years working together for the common good is where it is at- SM: See, that is interesting because that is another commentary. And when they talk about boomers is they were very impatient. It was on the category, they were an impatient group because they saw things as they were the status quo, and they had seen the roadblocks all these years for the status quo remaining. So they said, the heck with this, we want it now. That is where that revolutionary rhetoric came. And so they were not going to wait, even when you look at Dr. King at his non-violent protest, it was actually not a condemnation of Thurgood Marshall and the gradualist approach through the courts. But it was saying well, there was another way, and certainly we admired, but we want it now. We were not going to put up with the road blocks anymore. We were going to end segregation. We were not going to wait for the courts to do it for us. So there was kind of a symbolic thing that passed off into the boomers, that they were an impatient group at times, wanting it now. And that many of these boomers are now in positions of authority and responsibility, and what characteristics, are they still using that quality in their own everyday lives of wanting it now, not going through the process? HG: I think being young and all young people are impatient. I think Martin Luther King used a non-violent approach because it was very powerful. He learned that from Gandhi and you do not have to the amount of power and with a lot less of a downside than if you try to have a revolution and overtake something. SM: What has been the lasting legacy of the boomer generation? HG: Well, I feel that we were a hopeful generation. SM: The legacy of the boomer generation. HG: Well, as I said, I think we were a hopeful generation. The motivations of the generation were to make American culture and society, I will say more user-friendly, and to take care of those who needed help. SM: And as a follow-up, you feel that is one of the real good things about the boomers. HG: [inaudible] SM: What role, if any, does activism in the boomer generation penetrate into the lives of their children, Generation X? HG: I do not know if I can answer that. I do not have children. SM: I put that question in there because it is a biased question on my part, even though it is supposed to be fair here. I do not see a whole lot of activism amongst today's college students, except I see a tremendous amount of volunteerism. 85 percent of our students today and nation are involved and volunteer, which means they care about others. But in some sense, they feel somewhat lack of empowerment, because they do not vote. All the time, low numbers in terms of college students and young people. I think 18 to 24-year-old who vote, it just like amazes me. And of course we know from the data how they feel about elected leaders and their distaste for politics and wanting to become involved in politics. It is like what, between 15 percent and 17 percent in some of the entering classes, last two years amongst entering freshmen in higher education. Their interest in politics is way-way down, yet their interest in volunteerism is way-way up. So I am just trying to see what the perceptions are of those individuals who may work with them or have kids and so forth. Just again, let me repeat this, even though it may seem repetitive, do you think it is possible to heal within a generation where differences and positions taken were so extreme? Is it important to try to assist in this healing process? Should we care? And is it feasible? And the premise of this question goes back again to the many trips that I have taken to The Wall in Washington over the last five years basically. And I have been to several ceremonies with veterans in the audience and commentary like, they hate Bill Clinton. They hate Jane Fonda. They hate those who protested the war and never gave veterans a royal welcome on the return of the mainland. The Wall has helped in a magnificent way, but the hate seems to remain for those on the other side, should have never be made to assist in this healing beyond The Wall. Your thoughts? Are you optimistic or pessimistic? And again, maybe I am just seeing a very small group of people that always come to The Wall every year during those ceremonies. HG: Well, I mean, I have been to The Wall, I have been to the ceremonies down in the Philadelphia Memorial and I have talked to 1000s of veterans. I would say at this point in time, there was a clear minority who have not been able to come home from Vietnam and continue to identify with some kind of Vietnam dynamic as opposed to, I am a Vietnam veteran, I was there, but it was not something I tell people about myself. It is not something I think about or remember. I got too many other things that are more here and now and I have a whole other identity. And this is one part. And I think that is where the majority of Vietnam veterans are today. I think we can heal a lot of veterans and a lot of people that did not go ahead and hard feelings 20, 25, 30 years ago. SM: Do you have any [inaudible] people you have gotten to know who regret that they did not go? There is a guilt complex? [inaudible] HG: Well, there was a couple of people that wrote famous articles in the early (19)80s. It was almost getting to the point where it was in to be a Vietnam veteran, but it did not, and it has not, I do not think it ever will be. I felt the same way for them that I felt for McNamara, you have got your burdens to bear from the Vietnam era and I have got mine. I feel like everybody's a Vietnam veteran who lived through that period in America. SM: Even those who did not go? HG: Yeah, Women, mothers that sent their sons off. We all went through that period. We all suffered through that and watched it unfold and were upset by it. SM: Historian sociologists will say there has been two real traumatic experiences in American history that have come close to tearing the nation apart. Of course, most people will agree that you cannot really put the Civil War on the same scale as the Vietnam War, but it is close. Because when you look at what was happening here at home and the breakdown of the college campuses, the shutting down of college campuses in the cities and the protests in Washington and all over the country, and the divisions were there. I mean, it was just like, you cut it with a cake, when you are in the room with someone who was against you or for you. And there was not a whole lot of listening either between those who were for or against. Not just that issue, but there were a lot of other issues too. So those were tough times. Bear with me, I have just got a few more questions and we are done. Again, this is getting back, it sounds like a little repetitive here. Do you think we will ever have the trust for elect leaders again after the debacle of Vietnam and Watergate? If boomers’ distrust, what effect is this having on the current generation of youth? I think we have covered that in an earlier question. How did the youth of the (19)60s and early (19)70s change your life and attitudes toward that and future generations? HG: My experiences in the (19)60s, (19)70s? SM: Just overall, how did the young people of that era, of the (19)60s and early (19)70s, because when you think of the (19)60s, people will really say that the (19)60s is really (19)65 to (19)73, (19)72, (19)73 ish, that juncture. Then it goes into the (19)70s, which is the me decade and all this other stuff. So how did that change your life, the attitudes and all those things you were witnessing and seeing? Certainly the young man who went, before you went over, was different than the young man that came back. HG: I do not know how much of an impact on me because at that point I was trying to physically and mentally and emotionally find out who I was, now that I was different, I was very different. And I was in and out of the hospital most of that period. Well, from the end of (19)68 through (19)73 or (19)74, at a military hospital, [inaudible], I was very protected and insulated against a lot of this. SM: Were you were injured on the front lines during the war? Were you in the Army or the Marine Team Corps? Did you step in a booby trap or you were- HG: The guy in front of me did. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I was no longer in the service. I was retired, but I was in the hospital having reconstructive surgery done for most of that time, and everybody around me was in uniforms. And so it did not have as much reality for me as, I guess if I would have been home living there seven days a week, 24 hours a day. SM: There is a brand-new book out right now called Quarantine Diary. Have you heard of it? There was a documentary on it. It was written by Jack Reid who was a Vietnam veteran from Texas. And it is a story about, well, there was an encampment that was overrun by the American soldiers and North Vietnamese army. And he took one of these little diaries and he thought it was from a dead Vietnam veteran. And he kept that in his backpack at his home for over 20 years after he came back from Vietnam. He served there, I think (19)68, (19)69, thought the guy was dead. And finally he had a hard time healing and was having a hard time, and so he decided, somebody encouraged him to try to find the family in Vietnam of this dead soldier. HG: Actually, the Vietnam Veterans of America has a whole program now to try and return kind of personal memorabilia like this, to get it back to survivors of these soldiers in Vietnam. It might have been in that program that he got some encouragement. SM: Well, actually the guy was still alive. It was a mistake. But the thing what came out in this book was that there was a concern that he brought forth, and that is that many of the Vietnam veterans went over there and saw their buddies get killed and they just wanted to kill Charlie, and they would go into a village and sometimes kill others. And so there was a sense of, it was not premeditated, but it was like a vengeance, I want to get back at the person who killed my friend. And thus he tried to bring over the fact that when he came back to America, he did not know what kind of an impact this had on him in terms of when he saw violence happen or someone was killed. He had no sensitivity. There was no sensitivity toward it because he had seen it all in Vietnam and seen people killed, kids killed, older people killed and so forth. And what he was before he went over there and what he was when he came back again, was a totally different person. And he was very concerned that when he saw tragedies on television and death and murder in America, that did not ring, it did not really strike him as anything out of the ordinary because he had witnessed it all in Vietnam as a different person. In fact, he would kill himself and things he never told his parents about. And I guess the question I am getting at here is, this is not a condemnation of Vietnam veterans. It is basically looking at the warrior and all warriors in all wars, that when they come back and they see violence, and of course the media portrays it on television all the time too, the violence, we were no longer sensitive toward it anymore. It is just an everyday happening. And I guess a question I want to ask also to you, as a result of the boomer generation in World War II, we did not see these things. There were not films taken of dead people, but during this era there was. And then of course it is documented much more in the stories too, of Vietnam veterans. That is this another quality of the boomer generations that is different than others, is this accepting violence as an everyday happening? Even not only those who went but those who saw it on television. "Oh, that is just part of being a part of a living human being." And so then this had transferred on to young people. HG: Well, I see much more of that today, where you turn on the local news and somebody has probably been murdered or run over and that is what they put on. And they show the body or the blood trail or the pool of blood or the spent casings in the drive-by shooting. That is happening today. I still remember things were not that gory on evening news and during the Vietnam era, at least they were not on CBS. SM: It did show that one scene where the South Vietnam soldiers shot that one, that was [inaudible] and you saw the young girl running down the road burned. HG: Yeah, those were the exceptions. That is why they became timeless. SM: One of the best history books ever written on the growing up years for the boomers, say in 25 to 50 years from now, and I was a history major, political science, and they say the best books of any period are 50 years afterwards. The best books in the World War II are now, really good books. Stephen Ambrose, really good books. What will be the overall evaluation of boomers? I talked to you about the lot of Left leaders are condemning their whole backgrounds, like Horowitz and the destructive generation. There is a lot of good books, like Lewis Puller talking about one of the best books ever written. He deserved the Pulitzer. What a writer. He should not have killed himself. He had such a skill in writing, that is why he was hired at George Mason University to teach writing to young people, because he knew how to write. What do you think historians, how will they write about this period, the (19)60s and early (19)70s in 25 years when it is that 50-year period? How would you project they will look at this whole era and the young people that came out of this era? HG: Well, I think they will identify it as a period of questioning the status quo, large numbers of the generation. SM: And that they say that it is an identity of a group that questioned the status quo. What was the impact? The concept that the boomers feel empowered and why do not Generation X, the children feel that way of boomers? That is amazing. When you had these people who felt empowered and yet their kids do not, not all, there is some that probably do, but not as empowered as their parents. HG: I do not know. SM: It is something you cannot quite answer, huh? HG: NO, it is too bad, if our legacy is that our children become passive and introverted and are focused on only themselves and their own needs. SM: Final question here, is the youth of that era believed they could have an impact on society, government policy. The (19)60s and early (19)70s is the Vietnam War policy, the draft, civil rights legislation, non-violent protests via Dr. King and the multiple movements that I have already described. In other words, that concept of empowerment, which is a term we use in higher education today. We want young people to know that they are at this university, they are empowered. They say, "What? I am only a young person of 18. What do you mean I am empowered?" Well, we are here at your leisure. And so you get involved in things and you give them a sense of empower. Why is society today resisting this today? And why, in your own words, do the sons and daughters of boomers feel less confident about their ability to have an impact on society and oftentimes less desire and seemingly less opportunity? This is just a concept that I have and I am trying to find out here. Am I wrong in assuming this in the question? HG: No, I do not think you are wrong in assuming it. SM: Do you have any answers, any more commentary on that or- HG: No, I think my brain is fried. I mean, we use empowerment in the healing professions. The idea is to empower. I mean, I believe it is much better to teach somebody to fish than to give them a fish if they are hungry. To not do for them as much as to teach them to do for themselves. That is where the real payoff is for them and society. SM: I think we are almost done here and we are down to the last thing here, but I want to follow up. Since you are a person who is a professional psychologist, what are the most important qualities for healing? When you talk about just a general concept of healing, especially if you were around a group of Vietnam veterans who was at The Wall and you kept overhearing this commentary, of course you would not butt in, but if you were in a room with them and had an opportunity to talk to them, what would you tell them in terms of- HG: Well, I would say that healing is a process, not an event. It requires a willingness to be aware of yourself and your surroundings. It is an active process, not a passive process. And you need to find- (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. Henry Franklin Graff