66 10 1775 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/7fb4c0124c20c0a1d7dc35a5531c61c2.jpg 25486f633d486634ec88c6398ba5aadb https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/05ebf1741a4dbc56328086182b7ef8aa.mp3 41701facfd1362977109283f4f06768a 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 2010-08-09 Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Stephen McKiernan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Mark Hamilton Lytle 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 Biographical Text <span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Mark Hamilton Lytle is a scholar and educator. He received his Bachelor's degree from Cornell University and his Master's degree and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University. He is a professor of History and Environmental Studies, Chair of the American Studies Program at Bard College, and has written many volumes of history and biography."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":5039,"3":{"1":1},"4":[null,2,5099745],"5":{"1":[{"1":2,"2":0,"5":[null,2,0]},{"1":0,"2":0,"3":3},{"1":1,"2":0,"4":1}]},"6":{"1":[{"1":2,"2":0,"5":[null,2,0]},{"1":0,"2":0,"3":3},{"1":1,"2":0,"4":1}]},"8":{"1":[{"1":2,"2":0,"5":[null,2,0]},{"1":0,"2":0,"3":3},{"1":1,"2":0,"4":1}]},"10":2,"11":4,"12":0,"15":"Arial"}">Mark Hamilton Lytle is a scholar and educator. He received his Bachelor's degree from Cornell University and his Master's degree and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University. He is a professor of History and Environmental Studies, Chair of the American Studies Program at Bard College, and has written many volumes of history and biography.</span> Keywords <span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Baby boom generation; Activism; Drugs; Sexual revolution; Healing; Thurgood Marshall; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; Equality; Robert F. Kennedy; George McGovern; John F. Kennedy; Voting rights; War Powers Act; Generation gap; Youth culture; Women's Rights Movement; Sexual freedom;Lyndon B. Johnson; Civil Rights Movement; Kent State."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":3,"3":{"1":0},"4":{"1":2,"2":14275305}}">Baby boom generation; Activism; Drugs; Sexual revolution; Healing; Thurgood Marshall; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; Equality; Robert F. Kennedy; George McGovern; John F. Kennedy; Voting rights; War Powers Act; Generation gap; Youth culture; Women's Rights Movement; Sexual freedom;Lyndon B. Johnson; Civil Rights Movement; Kent State.</span> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 236:17 Subject LCSH Scholars; College teachers; Bard College; Lytle, Mark Hamilton--Interviews Accessibility Copy/Paste below: Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound, or alternative text from a visual medium McKiernan Interviews Interview with: Mark Lytle Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan Transcriber: REV Date of interview: 9 August 2010 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (Start of Interview) SM (00:00:04): Testing one, two. In your book, "America's Uncivil Wars: The (19)60s Era from Elvis to the Fall of Richard Nixon," I have several questions. Question number one. You include Elvis, who was in the (19)50s, and then the fall of Nixon was in 1974, so when you are talking about the (19)60s, you are actually talking about part of the (19)50s and part of the (19)70s. Could you explain that? ML (00:00:34): Well, it is partly said that the tyranny of the calendar does not really help us unlock historical events and historical trends. And so that scene, the (19)60s narrowly as phenomena of a particular timeframe. I do not think it is as illuminating as to think of the (19)60s as a state of mind and a cultural shift that worked itself out over a long period of time. It was also, for so long, there was the notion of the do not trust anyone over 30. And so, as an emphasis on the (19)60s phenomena as a generational conflict, which I think of as naive. It is not that there was the baby boom generation coming of age, with all of their energy and a certain amount of rebelliousness, but, as I argue in my book, if you look at the people who inspired the children of the (19)60s, they were all born prior to the baby boom, and most of them in the (19)30s, anywhere from David Dellinger, who has turned, who was in his (19)50s in the (19)60s, and Paul McCartney, who is born in the late (19)30s, (19)40s, something like that, and he just turned 70. SM (00:02:02): I think he did. ML (00:02:05): But in any case, Elvis is another example. Elvis would be in his, I believe he would be in his- SM (00:02:11): Late (19)70s. ML (00:02:13): Late (19)70s, or even (19)80. SM (00:02:15): Yeah. ML (00:02:15): Something like that. But I do think that, in the way the (19)60s had a kind of populist, the grassroots sensibility, even though an awful lot of the leaders did have somewhat of elite connections. Elvis is a good example of that grassroots phenomena. So that was actually my purpose of, I know it is sort of the long (19)60s, as opposed to the [inaudible]. SM (00:02:50): Do you like these terms? Tom Brokaw has just been written writing up the greatest generation. Then you had what they called "the silent generation," which is a short period of time, which is probably the people we're talking about here. They were not so silent. Then we had, of course, the boomer generation, which I am talking about, those born between (19)46 and (19)64. Then you had generation Xers that followed them. And now were into the millennials, who are college students today, who actually have surpassed boomers in numbers. ML (00:03:24): Uh huh. Actually, makes sense that they would, although I do not know if there is demographically as bunch of a bulge as the- SM (00:03:34): No. Right. Right. ML (00:03:35): I think that is one of the differences, the population's much bigger, so the pure numbers do not mean the same thing. I do think that there is generational experience, something that is, each generation has a few formative events who are shared experience, September 11th, or the coming of the Internet. And then, within generations, there are some people who are very much framed by the Internet, and some people it sort of goes by them and maybe it does not affect them until 10 years later. I can remember when I first went on e-mail in the early (19)90s, was because my son had it at college, and it was an easy way to communicate. SM (00:04:18): Yes. ML (00:04:20): But I had four colleagues at [inaudible] who also had e-mail. So now half the younger generation do not even use e-mail. It is considered to be old foggy stuff. SM (00:04:32): Yeah. ML (00:04:32): And so, there is a certain amount of that in the (19)60s also, that there were these cultural markers, rock and roll being one good example of it that began as a very much a defining phenomenon. And then, over time, there were a certain number of, part of the cultural elite who began to embrace rock and roll, break down some of the artificial distinctions or hierarchies of genres. So, and I think in that sense, they belatedly got on the bandwagon. SM (00:05:11): I think what happens, higher education has this tendency, they want to put everything in little boxes. And so, the boomers of the box from (19)46 to (19)64, because of the large number of people that were born during that timeframe, and certainly the generation Xers and those titles. Howard Straus had written a lot about this. They had the characteristics and so forth. You mentioned something very important before I got to the next question. Todd Gitlin was the first one that said that if you mentioned the word "boomer" one more time, I think we will end the interview. Because he says, "I do not look at it in those terms." He looks at it in terms like you do, about the events, and the fact that the people that experienced the first 10 years of the boomers are totally different than those who, and the second 10 years who were like 10 years old when things were happening. What kind of influence would they have? And one other final point, and then when I interviewed Richie Havens, Richie said, "I was born in," I think, "'41." He says, "I am as boomer as anybody. I am a boomer in mentality," and most of the leaders of the hippies, and the Yippies, and they were all born between (19)40 and (19)45. ML (00:06:20): Right. Like Abbie Hoffman. SM (00:06:21): Yeah. And Tom Hayden and- ML (00:06:23): Jerry Rubin. SM (00:06:23): Yeah. ML (00:06:23): Those guys. SM (00:06:24): That whole group. ML (00:06:25): Yeah. No, I think, and one of the things that I do emphasize in my book, but when I anecdotally test this proposition, my wife's two years younger than I am, and yet her experience was quite different from mine, because when I was in college at Cornell, it was still a (19)50s kind of atmosphere, very fraternity centric. We had huge beer bashes and [inaudible] out of "Animal House" on the weekends. And when I came back in the fall of 1967, or the spring of 1968, somewhere in that range of time, everybody was stoned. It was between the summer of (19)67, there was a kind of title change in cultural practice, at least I suspect it happened slightly later on other campuses, but it was like a page turned. And so, I do think that Todd's right about making the distinctions within a very narrow timeframe. I am actually technically not a boomer. I was born in January of 1945, so I consider myself a very front edge. And then also, the demographically this, the baby boom thing's a little bit misleading, because the population uptick began actually in (19)41, (19)42, as prosperity returned. And also, you have the going away babies and whatnot. SM (00:08:06): Right. ML (00:08:06): So, it was not quite as explosive then. But the demographic trend was upward. SM (00:08:16): It is interesting, because you went to Cornell, and I went to Binghamton. And Binghamton banned fraternities, and so the students at Binghamton had to go to Cornell to join a fraternity. And I remember one of my friends, Rich White, whose dad was, I think, the DA of Binghamton, he had to go to, he was a pre-law major, and he had to go over to Cornell, and he was carrying a tiger around campus. I never forget it. And boy, people kind of looked down on him because he was joining a fraternity. We abandoned him there at that particular time. ML (00:08:47): Did you ever know a guy named Norman Breyer when you were at Binghamton? SM (00:08:49): Norman Breyer, I graduated in (19)70. ML (00:08:56): He graduated in (19)70 also, or somewhere around, that is (19)68 or (19)70, maybe (19)68. SM (00:09:00): I know Camille Pollier was in- ML (00:09:02): Well Norman Breyer lives in Reinbeck. And he is such a character that if you were thinking there is a chance here- SM (00:09:12): Well, he might have. I was actually involved in a lot of intermural events, and I went everything. But I- ML (00:09:19): I think you were stoned pretty much though. SM (00:09:24): It is a great college though, I mean, geez. And this is your interview, but I will never forget, you are exactly right about that 1967, because in 1965-66, (19)66-(19)67, Herb Alpert and The Tijuana Brass, Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons, these were all popular groups. And then The Beatles were coming on too in (19)64, but it was (19)67 where everything changed. Herb Alpert and The Tijuana Brass, they kind of disappeared. ML (00:09:54): Still has a singing nun out there, and- SM (00:09:57): That is right. One of the things here too, and I just want your clarification on this, everybody I have talked to really believed you, taken off what you said earlier, that period of 1970, (19)71, (19)72, (19)73 is really the (19)60s. So, you cannot even differentiate, well, (19)67, (19)73. The war was coming down at that time, but that was still the (19)60s I would say, wouldn’t you? ML (00:10:23): Well, particularly, if you think of it in terms of the role of the war and Vietnam War as a frame for, as the Vietnam War intensifies, so do the (19)60s, or the political upheavals. SM (00:10:42): Right. ML (00:10:42): Even though I think that the civil rights movement was more of an initially generative, and certainly created the first wave of activists of the Mississippi Freedom summer types, and the veterans who went on to be part of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. But I do think that for many politically conscious college students, the Vietnam War and protesting the Vietnam War was more central, particularly until the draft, the repeal of the draft. So that really is (19)72, (19)73, and could still get people out demonstrating in the (19)70s, with [inaudible]. SM (00:11:32): Oh yeah. I got a question on that. ML (00:11:33): We have talked about defining moments in the (19)60s. SM (00:11:37): Yeah, I interviewed Phil Caputo when Phil was in Vietnam early on, around the (19)65 period. But dissent was really starting even then in Vietnam, from what he says in "Rumor of War." And, of course, he was back, and he covered Kent State. And now he has got the book "13 Seconds," but he was actually back to cover it, because he was a Chicago Tribune or whatever when he got back. So, he really talks about what is going on in Vietnam and everything. And what you are talking about is exactly what he talks about too, about everything was going in a different direction. Explain, I think it is very obvious what it is, but some people have not read your book, and when I interview people, some people said, "Well, just read it in the book." Congressman Anderson kept telling me, "Just read it in my book." Well, people do not have your book. It was printed in 1970. I just interviewed him last week in Washington. ML (00:12:31): May have lost it. SM (00:12:35): And I do not know if you ever saw his book. It is a great book he wrote in 1970. It is a classic book, and if you can get it, it would be great for- ML (00:12:41): Is this John Anderson, or? SM (00:12:42): Congressman John Anderson. A book he wrote in 1970. It is classic (19)60s stuff. He cannot remember a lot of it, because he is 89 years old now. But it is a very good book. But explain what you mean by the "uncivil wars," because we think of a civil war, and oftentimes, the (19)60s is looked upon as the second Civil War. ML (00:13:07): Yeah. SM (00:13:07): People say, "Oh no." Your thought, just your definition? ML (00:13:11): Well, I am just thinking, in terms of correcting racial injustice, the (19)60s are in, at least a metaphorical sense, a second Civil War. But I stole the concept, to some degree, from I think it is Bill Chase in his book on Greensboro and the sit-in movement and was talking about how oppressive the concept of civility was in an increasingly middle-class country. The idea of drawing negative attention to yourself, much less becoming obstreperous to the point of going to jail suffocated any kind of aggressive political action, civil disobedience of that. So, one of the things that happens in the civil rights movement is once all these middle-class kids started going to jail, and it became a badge of honor rather than a humiliation for their families, it really did shift their mentality, and to some degree, radicalize them, holding onto the term radical. Because if you look at the history of the four civil rights students, I just wrote an essay on for one of our books on the sit-ins in Greensboro and the, four of them went on to do stuff that had, one of them became a corporate executive, and one had a career in the military, and one of them runs some kind of public service agency in Boston. I mean, one has died. But none of them went on to be engaged in civil rights politics after that initial event. But I think that the people in authority also used the idea of civility as a way of suppressing opposition, because it was impolite to question your elders. It was impolite to call the dean a fool, to challenge your, challenge faculty authority and whatnot. So, one of the great, if you look at so many, like Ronald Reagan and others, when they're criticizing, during the (19)60s, smells like, I do not know, dresses like Tarzan, and [inaudible] like Jane, and smells like cheetah, or has hair like Jane, and smells like cheetah. It was sort of an attack on the incivility of, in a way, or the rejection of civility. Or when Mark Rudd gets up on the stage, and tells, says, "Fuck you" to the President of Columbia, nothing could be more uncivil. So, then it, to me, it became really one of the central themes of... Because I see so much of what the (19)60s was really about, was really a fracturing of the, I would never use the term "ruling class," because I do not really believe in that structurally, but of the sort of dominant elite, where it fractured, and the loss of the ability to communicate or to rebuild consensus. And I think that was one of the reasons why it was so strident. SM (00:17:06): Do you find it ironic that most universities today, particularly from the (19)90s on, have had civility day? ML (00:17:13): I do not know- SM (00:17:13): Yeah-yeah. We have it at West Chester University. And it is like when we had Tom Hayden on our campus, and we organized activist days, and we had 2 or 3 days of activist speakers. And Tom Hayden thought that was a joke, because activism is 365 days a year, not 3 days a year, but he appreciated what we were doing, because not many were doing that. But I do not know what Bard has it, but the university I have worked at, they have civility day every year, where they bring in a speaker, or say that we are civil with each other. It is important to be civil, but. ML (00:17:47): We actually have a requirement at Bard that has to do with a difference. You have to take a course, at least some course, that deals with cultural, ethnic, racial difference in the course of your career. So that is how we put it in. Bard has a pretty liberal left tolerant filter. In fact, I would say Bard is intolerantly tolerant. SM (00:18:19): Do they tolerate conservative people? ML (00:18:21): They have a little trouble with that, but if you are eccentric enough, they buy it. They like that. They like eccentricity. SM (00:18:27): Was not there a professor that was mad at Dr. [inaudible] this past year, or he got fired, or something? ML (00:18:32): Oh yeah, that was [inaudible]. SM (00:18:34): Yeah, I do not even, I remember reading that in "The Chronicle." ML (00:18:37): No, that was a classic kind of, where Joel still lives in the kind of Marxist frame of the (19)60s radicals, and he had become actively sympathetic to the Palestinians, and considered, he was in this sort of Noam Chomsky camp. Prior to that, he had been very outspoken about, he was a Green Party candidate in New York State, so he was against corporate exploitation of the environment. He always believed that the Vietnam War was fought over oil and the South China Sea. And before that, he wrote about civil rights and whatnot. So, he has sort of followed the trajectory of radical politics. And he had been at Bard as the [inaudible] professor of social studies. But over the course of time, he had become more and more remote from the community, and also more, he remained very doctrinaire, and so there was an increasingly fewer students who were interested in what he had to say. And he communicated less and less with his colleagues. So, when the financial crunch hit, turned out he was being paid a rather magnificent salary for being half-time. And I was on the committee, and one of the committees that has to do with hiring and new positions, and the planning and appointments committee. And Dean asked us to review all these faculty positions and say which ones could we live without, where the college had some discretion. His contract was up and decided not to renew it. And it was because he was, it was not because he was a leftist or pro-Palestinian. After all, Bard has created a liberal arts college on the East Bank for Palestinians. SM (00:20:37): Right. ML (00:20:38): So, there is no one who has put his neck further out on this issue than Leon Botstein. But I think also Joel's feelings were hurt. I mean, even though he, if he would not pretend to be a sentimental guy, I think underneath it all, he is a little bit. And I think if they had been, taken a different tactic with him in severing the relationship, that he might have been a little less upset. And it turned out that to be a tempest with little staying power, and the issue died pretty quickly, I think. SM (00:21:13): He had been there how many years? ML (00:21:15): Eh, probably 15 maybe, 10 or 15. He got appointed to Bard had been good to Joel. SM (00:21:21): He was only part-time too. ML (00:21:23): Well, he had been full-time, but we came in, he had been part-time, and had been on leave, and, I mean, hardly ever saw him. So anyway. SM (00:21:31): What were the most significant events during the period you described, the events that shaped the era, but also had lasting impact on the lives of boomers and the body Politic? I have, you break your book down into three phases, the phase up to present, from the (19)50s through the assassination of President Kennedy, then you have the period from when Johnson came into power through (19)68, that very tumultuous year, and then you have that period (19)69 to (19)73, so, in those three phases, what, of all the events that took place, what do you feel personally has stayed within the body politics? I say this because, when I interviewed the late Gaylord Nelson, who I know quite well from our leadership on the road trips, and [inaudible] to Westchester twice, he said that the Vietnam permanently affected the body politics forever. And he said 100 years from now, the effect will be in the body politics, it will not necessarily deal with the issue of healing, but. So, your thoughts on what you are talking about? ML (00:22:51): Well, I do think, I would say that there is no question that the Vietnam War ultimately destroyed the Cold War consensus. And so, in that sense, that redirected the political dynamics of the country. And to some degree, the Vietnam War absorbed the civil rights protests. I mean, it transferred into the military. But I would say also the assassination of President Kennedy, only because, not because Kennedy was so vital as a president, but because as an icon and a symbol of transformation. Again, he was the first, I think he was the first president born in the 20th century. So, and I also just the way it affected many of us who are these happy-go-lucky children of the suburban era and of the prosperity of the post-war era, and yet we are idealistic, I would say. And my brother, partly in response to the Kennedy magic, joined the Peace Corps. And it is, my brother’s, one of these people who in his heart is a boy scout but is also a cynic. And Kennedy had a little of that quality to himself also. He could appear to be a black scout, but he was kind of cynical. SM (00:24:39): Right. ML (00:24:40): It also, I think, in a causal way, certainly in having Johnson become president, this is hotly debated, people write about it all the time. I have a graduate student who I adopted when I was at University College Dublin, who is writing a book about Robert Kennedy in Vietnam. SM (00:25:03): And you doing it right now? ML (00:25:07): Mm-hmm. And he is, I think it is clear that Kennedy would, to me anyway, that Kennedy would not have pursued the same course in Vietnam that Johnson did. I do not think that he would ever have resorted to escalation, or certainly not on the scale that Johnson did. It seems to me Johnson that, there was a side of Johnson where he essentially threw the dice. I do not know that he believed he was gambling at this level, but that he just believed that if the Americans showed up in force, the other side would wilt, and that would be the end of it, and that he would then do his Mekong River Delta Project, and he would pay help [inaudible] off, the way they do in Texas, and that things would work out, because he is willing to give, as well as to receive. And I think Kennedy had been made all the more cynical, because of his experience in the Bay of Pigs, and was much more cynical about the CIA, about the military. And finally, he did not have that hang-up that Johnson had about his, had virility, different kind of hang, he had the Tiger Woods hang-up. SM (00:26:35): Oh yeah. ML (00:26:35): Predatory hang-up. But I think that Johnson had an experience in Texas politics where you had to be the big enchilada, and it bothered Johnson that he would be seen as a weak sister, or that his mom. And so, I do think that Kennedy would have been a different kind of president, how much they could have held off. Of course, a lot depends on, also on, it is like with a great awakening, or as opposed to the Salem Witch Trials. Some of the historians posit that you have this phenomenon of extraordinary behavior, and you can either choose to stigmatize it, and become frightened by it, and assume that it's the work of the devil, or you can say it is the hand of God, and the spirit is with us, and embrace it. And so that I think that was one of the things that also happened in the (19)60s, is that so many of the people in authority chose to stigmatize the behavior, felt threatened by it, having anesthetized themselves with habituates, and tranquilizers, and alcohol, and what were the drugs of choice of the older generation. They could not see that there was any comparability in the drugs of choice of the (19)60s generation, and chose to criminalize them, and in a sense, declared war. That is again why I call it, partly where the idea of uncivil wars come from. And there were some, lots of exceptions, like a lot of the ministers, who tried to keep the religious vital by tying into this youthful energy and quest for spiritual meaning and moral life and whatnot. But- SM (00:28:56): You raise a very good point there about alcoholism, because I saw it in the (19)50s myself, not from my parents here, but friends and so forth. I mean, everyone's drinking. And I will never forget when I interviewed Steve Gaskin, the communal leader who was in San Francisco, and [inaudible] the farm. He said that Janis Joplin committed a sin when she was around the hippies. She drank. Hippies did not drink. They only did drugs. ML (00:29:30): Yeah, well they- SM (00:29:33): And they were literally upset at her for drinking, because they did not believe in drinking. ML (00:29:38): Yeah. Yeah. Well that certainly was true. I mean, alcohol was the drug of the man, and the drug of the uptight, spiritually dead type. So, yeah. No. And that was why it was interesting to me. I grew up in a totally alcohol-driven social world. Parents were both alcoholics to one certain degree, and most of my parents' friends were alcoholics by anybody's standard of it. I mean, it is just that we also were given that mentality that all other drugs led to heroin, which was this almost like mannequin view of the world. And when we found out that it just was not that simple, that it was sort of like, oh. You know? SM (00:30:55): Yeah, I can remember, because at [inaudible] Bay, when everybody was- ML (00:30:59): Doing drugs. SM (00:30:59): But I did not. Now people, they do not believe me, the people that know me, because they thought I was always high on life. I need to get high on drugs. But I will admit, I inhaled. ML (00:31:12): Yeah. SM (00:31:12): But I did not actually swallow- ML (00:31:14): Well, I never took LSD. SM (00:31:17): I never got into anything of that stuff. ML (00:31:18): I tried a little cocaine once upon a time, and it was good. But it is like, okay, so, I mean, to some degree, I am a little bit like too, I mean, I am a sort of a high energy person, and so I do not need it. I mean, I like to get mellow rather than to get high or get ecstatic. SM (00:31:40): See, when I interviewed Paul Krassner, Paul is, when you talk to Paul, he is a very respectful person. Of course, he was the founder of the Yippies, and he knew Abbie real well, and he makes a lot of sense of drugs. ML (00:31:58): Mm-hmm. SM (00:31:59): And so, my project is not about being a judge of anyone. It is very important to certain people, and it has not affected their lives in any respects, so more power to them. One of the things that, I have talked to a lot of people about the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement and the women's movement, and I talked to a lot of the leaders of the gay and lesbian movement, some of the top people. Have not talked to very many Native American leaders, although I have been trying to, and certainly- ML (00:32:34): Unfortunately, an awful lot of those ones from that era died. SM (00:32:38): Dennis Banks, which you cannot get ahold of the guy, and I interviewed Paul Chop Smith down at the Native American Museum in Washington, but he is controversial. But the question I am coming up with is, you talked a little bit about the new identity movement, which is the environmental movement, the feminists, the gay and lesbian movement, and Latino and Native American. I would like a little more information about how important the Latino and the Native American movements were. I know about the American Indian movement from (19)69 to (19)73, but you do not hear a whole lot about the La Chicano Latino Movement and the Puerto Rican Movement of the young lords that kind of copied the Black Panther. Just your thoughts on the other movements of the (19)60s? ML (00:33:27): I do think that it is probably regional to some degree. That is, if we had lived in the southwest, the Brown Power, Chicano Mexican America, you would have been much more conscious of it. If you are in New York City, Puerto Rican politics would have had a higher profile. I do think, as I said in my book, that the Latino community in America is really diverse communities. You have Cuban community, Puerto Rican community, and- You have Cuban community, the Puerto Rican community, and the Mexican community, and they have very different historic cultural backgrounds, and very weak communication amongst themselves. So, it was hard to coalesce about practically anything. And also, their numbers were not so large then as they are now. And so, I think that it tended to marginalize them a little bit. So, it is a combination of diversity and regionalism. Plus, I think that one of the funny things, the difference is like Cesar Chavez, and he was very Catholic. And I have always believed that the Latin American community has a very conservative side to it, politically, and would be socially conservative, and would to some degree line itself up with some of the (19)70s, (19)80s, evangelical, fundamental, some of their political ...They should be anti-abortion, probably anti-gay to some degree, whatever. But the nativist streak that underlies a lot of conservatives ... Thank you. This is my wife. SM (00:35:39): Hi. How you doing? Nice to meet you. GL (00:35:39): Nice to meet you. SM (00:35:44): Yes. It is going to get in the (19)90s at the end of the day. ML (00:35:51): And the same thing with Native Americans. They tend to be in the northeast, even though their reservations and whatnot, they are really isolated. And to some degree that was true around the country except where you had significant Indian populations within the urban areas. But I think that symbolically, they were important in that it was a constant reminder of the sort of attack on WASP dominance. And that was part of the ideas of social justice and civil rights being inclusive as possible. And so that if you kept discovering these things having not been part of your consciousness as you discovered, "Well here is another group that we have abused and misused and-" SM (00:36:52): From the get-go too. ML (00:36:56): But I could give you a kind of flip side of this. One of the experiences I had when I was in college is that I grew up in an odd circumstance in that I grew up in a totally Jewish neighborhood. There were very few, a couple blocks from where I lived, they were Catholic enclaves and the public school I went to was 80 percent Jewish, 19 percent. SM (00:37:21): [inaudible] was 65 when I was there. ML (00:37:22): Okay. [inaudible] was 85 percent Jewish at one point, and now it is 15 percent. There were only one or two other Protestant kids in that school that I knew of other than my brothers and sisters and my son. And one of the interesting things was that when throughout the (19)50s, we never heard practically any reference to the Holocaust or the World War II experience, except once in a while you would hear somebody say, "Oh, so and so, that they were in Europe during the war. They died in Europe during the war." But no, I did not ever talk about it with my friends at all. It was just not part of their active conscience that I was aware of. Now also, some of my friend's parents would talk Yiddish to each other when they wanted to talk about things, they would not want us to know about. But when I got to Cornell in the 1960s, there really was what I think of, and I think in some literary circles that this is actually a concept of the Jewish Renaissance of ... One of the things that triggered it. So, talk about formative events in the (19)60s. And actually, in many ways, I think this was one, was the Six Days War. SM (00:38:44): Oh yeah, (19)67. ML (00:38:46): Yeah. Because I think one of the things that happened is the Israelis showed a kind of military competence and David flinging Goliath that spoke to the feelings of a certain number of people. But I think even more than that, it gave American Jewish kids a reason to think of themselves as Jewish much more actively than they had ever before. One of my experiences that a lot of my Jewish friends went to a private day school in Buffalo, which was WASP dominated. And so, you had to become sort of Waspy within this, not Jewish, but upper middle-class gentry. Gentrification. And at Cornell there was an awful lot of blurring. Although there were enclaves, there were Orthodox Jewish communities at Cornell. And Cornell had a very large student body as well. But that is really began to shift. And then part of it was the emergence of the whole mass generation of Jewish writers of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth subsequently. And it is just a very high cultural profile, plus a lot of our faculty were Jewish in ways that- GL (00:40:33): I am going to interrupt you for a second. It was just the electrician and the, Whitaker? ML (00:40:35): Yes. GL (00:40:35): First name is Wayne. ML (00:40:35): Whit. GL (00:40:35): Whit. ML (00:40:35): We call him. GL (00:40:35): [inaudible]. ML (00:40:38): Yeah, it is Dwayne Whitaker. GL (00:40:43): Dwayne Whitaker. ML (00:40:44): But he's known as Whit. SM (00:40:47): It is interesting that during my interview process, I had not been thinking about this, but when a lot of the people that I have been interviewing have been Jewish and then the people that were the leaders of the free speech movement that went to Freedom Summer, that were the hippies, the yippies. I just put two and two ... They are all Jewish. ML (00:41:08): It was a very high profile. SM (00:41:09): Yeah, a high proportion of activism. Susan Brown Miller who interviewed was Jewish. She brought it up of some of the ... In women's movement. I got thinking about that. And of course, I think it was Todd. ML (00:41:29): Todd [inaudible] is also Jewish. SM (00:41:30): Yeah, Todd is Jewish, but so is Mark Rudd. And Mark Rudd said ... There is no question in his book, The Underground, the links between what happened with the Holocaust having an effect upon him that never again. But you speak up and you speak up not necessarily about Jewish issues, but about justice. ML (00:41:46): Right. And then I think one of the things is that people started talking about the Holocaust in the late (19)60s. They began to go back and reconnect with their historical experience in a way that was very redefining. SM (00:42:04): And the history too, and I will get back to my questions here. We had James Farmer on our campus during the time of the Hymie incident with Jesse Jackson. And James Farmer had always been very close to the Jewish Americans and the Civil rights movement had been an African American. Jewish and African American were together so many times and it was making it look like they were enemies when historically they have been so together. It is amazing. And the conference that was at the Jimmy Carter Center. That was on Charles Corral one Sunday morning where this gentleman said, "Well, I am going to bring back the African American leaders and the Jewish leaders because they are all passing away to document these things at the Carter Center." And so, I saw that in Charles Corral. Then I drove down to Washington DC, went to the Jewish Center there, and I spent two solid days watching the tapes. I just felt I had to watch them. And they gave me a total access. And so, I have taking all these notes down. And so forever in a day, if anybody ever says that the alliance between Jewish and African Americans is a weak one, they do not know what they are talking about. They do not know their history. And that is why history is crucial here. They are more friends than they ever were. ML (00:43:18): No, there was question that certainly in the (19)60s, that civil rights consciousness was much more intense among the Jewish kids that I knew than it was anywhere else. It was not exclusive, but it was very disproportionate. And the Jewish students at Cornell tend to be the most liberal, the most activist. SM (00:43:45): I am from Ithaca. ML (00:43:46): You are? SM (00:43:48): Yeah, I am from the Ithaca, Cortland area. I grew up there. My aunt went to Cornell in 1927. My mom was five years old. I remember jumping on her bed the year that Babe Ruth did all those homerooms. And she was older than my mom. And then my cousin Nick, he graduated in Cornell School of Architecture. He married the homecoming queen. He is a successful architect in Boston. I got in there too, to Cornell. But my parents were now well off. And even though I could have lived at home, the tuition and such, I got into Binghamton. They thought it was important for me to go to SUNY Binghamton because it was a little bit farther away and it would not be as expensive. And I was always back because Stuart Park, we did functions with Cornell students a lot. And we were over going, and we brought our girlfriends over to Stuart Park. And that was always the place where the Cornell and Binghamton students’ kind of met. They were friends. A lot of people do not know the relationship between the two schools. And I have never [inaudible] the college students there. ML (00:44:51): Anyway, you asked about the defining events. I did write this essay for when I did the contrast with Andy Rotter at Colgate. SM (00:45:01): Yeah. How do you spell that name? ML (00:45:01): R-O-T-T-E-R. SM (00:45:08): Okay. ML (00:45:09): And where they were talking about 1968. And so, I was making an argument that you could consider 1964, 1973, to be every bit as transformative as 1968. And then I made another argument that there was actually an event that occurred, although I was torturing the chronology here a little bit, but that is probably the most transformative event of the (19)60s that nobody ever talks about. And that was that in 1968, the State Department announced that America's domestic oil production would peak within the next year and then begin a steady decline. And it began in 1970 that when demand kept rising, but oil production began to fall. And so, the US became more and more dependent on foreign oil resources. Well, we get most of our imported energy from Canada and Mexico coming from the Western hemisphere. But one of the reasons it was so vital is that for the entire 20th century, the United States had always been the country with the reserve capacity. So that when there were disruptions in the international markets, the United States could correct them at least over the short run. So, during World War II, we supplied Britain and the Western allies with a lot of their petroleum resources. I think a statistic was something like 40 percent of all goods shipped overseas during the war. It was petroleum or petroleum byproducts. So, one of the things that happens is that what this had meant is that after 1970, the United States could no longer play that role. We could not control prices and production. Saudi Arabia could. And so, we became dependent on our ties to Saudi Arabia to manage the world energy market. And so, one of the consequences you have in 1973, we are in the OPEC Boycott. SM (00:47:29): I was in the lines in Columbus. ML (00:47:32): And American middle-class prosperity has never recovered from the recessionary impacts. The middle class has been shrinking, that a lot of the major sectors, say, just think of auto workers as perfect example of this. Their wages have been declining in real terms ever since and their number of jobs has shrunk. So, what had created that sort of prosperous world that was part of the magic of the 1960s really begins to unravel. And then again, if you then project out into the future and think of all of the major war threatening crises or actual war events, you have the Iranian Revolution. You have the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan. You have the first Gulf War and the second Gulf War. You have the constant friction between the Arabs and Israelis. So that for the United States, really in the post-Cold War era, it is the Middle East is our Balkans. And so, one could argue that in the 1960s also, one of the failures of the era was that even while we are focused on Vietnam, was the failure to respond to the growing energy crisis and to think about what it meant to have a society that basically ... It is the preference of the post-war, World War II model was to solve social problems through growing the economy by creating more and more wealth so that even though you were not going to seriously attack income and wealth inequality, you going to improve the standard of living for everybody. And that was essentially what Johnson was doing with a great society. That was part of his trying to revitalize the post-war, World War II Economic Opportunity Acts and the GI Bill and the whole apparatus that came into play after World War II. Johnson was trying to extended out into the future and reached more broadly with it. One of Nixon's most enduring acts in the early seventies was to extend Social Security benefits much more broadly and to put in cost-of-living indexes in the Social Security. So, I think that when we get focused on the political (19)60s, the cultural (19)60s, we sometimes lose track of these sort of deeper forces or determining elements of the world that we have constructed, that we live in. SM (00:50:37): I do not think it is doing a very good job for costal living increases. ML (00:50:41): Yeah, well that is probably certainly true. SM (00:50:43): Yeah, because my dad, when he passed away, he did not have any. Yeah, I do not remember him getting ... He had the same check, the very same amount every year. ML (00:50:54): Really? SM (00:50:55): Yeah, he died in 2002. ML (00:50:57): Yeah, but it was supposed to be indexed to some degree though. SM (00:51:02): It was not. They said that from last year, this year there had been no change. ML (00:51:06): Well, that may be. They may have frozen the for the time being. SM (00:51:11): What are your thoughts on that? This is a very controversial subject because at the very beginning of the Students for Democratic Society, they were a good group. I will admit they were. A lot of people did not like him because they were anti-war, and they protested and all the other things. But then they eventually moved as ... Mark Rudd [inaudible] in his book The Underground. And he is the one member of that particular group that is wrong. The only one that I can remember, Bernadine Dohrn spoke at the Kent State Conference, and I particularly do not care for her. But I know he considers her a sister. But I want your thoughts on, if you feel this was really the end of the movement was when they turned to violence. And that is not only SDS to the weatherman, but there is a question whether the Black Panthers were violent, even though they had the food programs. The Young Lords, the Puerto Rican group, they followed the Black Panthers in many ways. So, what the Black Panthers did, the Young Lords did in the Puerto Rican community. Then you had the American Indian Movement which started out with Alcatraz, which was a very good idea of a consciousness raising with Jane Fonda and so forth. And then he ended up with Wounded Knee and Violence in (19)69. Then you even had a (19)69 Stonewall, which was, it was about time the gay and lesbians’ kind of said, "We have had enough." But there was a lot of violence there at Stonewall too. And there was a lot of violence after Harvey Milk's murder in San Francisco. I was out in the Bay Area back then and I could not believe the violence in downtown San Francisco. They just went after windows and everything else. Just your thoughts about when movements go violence. ML (00:53:00): Well, first, I always argue that there was no movement per se, that there never was a kind of umbrella thing, that there were lots of interactive. People often had beat in many camps, that as you beat anti-war and pro civil rights and pro women's rights and smoke dope and whatnot. And so, there were constellations of causes and commitments about the affected people across quite a range. But also, well that every one of the movements, whether it is the anti-war movement, whether it is civil rights, whether it is gay rights, and not, every one of these movements when you look at them have a kind of conservative wing. They have a kind of liberal progressive wing and then they have a radical wing. And one of the arguments I was making in my book is that lots of times what the public sees, but partly because of the way the press both demonizes but also zeroes in on the outrageous so that they are intrigued by some of the outrageous, outlandish things. It is like the burning bras at the Miss America pageant, as we know never happened. But I mean the pageant happened, but the bras did not get burned. And that one of the problems that every movement has is that notice that, how do you find across those divides of conservative, liberal radical, how do you find a common agenda? So, like the feminists for a while settled on equal pay for equal work on abortion rights on ... I do not remember. They are very important. They wanted take care for women. They want to get rid of the barriers making women equal. But then you have got these constant things where the feminists who believe that patriarchy is the handmaiden of capitalism and that it is inherently exploitative. And so as long as you have a capitalist culture, you are going to have female oppression and you are going to have black oppression and you are going to have minority oppression in general. And so, in fact, you cannot, cannot ultimately reference. So, these movements, because one of the things, again, I would argue in a sense, they start looking at the world through an essentialist lens, which is anti-liberal, that liberals always tend to look for the common thing that makes us commonly human. All men are created equal. All people are created equal. Jefferson would have said it. He wrote that a little later. And I think what the radicals tend to argue is that ... There is a wonderful little essay that I use with my students in environmental history, which is about this idea, it is called the Search for Root Causes. And it is about the battle between Joel Cabal. He is one of the participants in this and Murray Bookchin. And then people like Paul Ehrlich and Barry Commoner. They all want to save the environment, but they all want to say, "Is it technology that is to blame? Is it capitalism to blame? Is it patriarchy?" Why is it that human beings are just destroying the natural world around them? And so, the environmental movement, like all these other movements, fractures. And often that many of the participants, and this is often a case where egos are involved or self-promotion gets involved, that they wind up spending more time lacerating each other than they do in fighting their common enemy if they put a degree on who or what that was. I often remember going to rallies and SDS meetings and whatnot. And this partly my peculiar personality, and it's not unrelated to one of the inherent qualities of (19)60s politics that is revived in the Tea Party Movement. And that is the suspicion of authority and also the assumption that people who want to run things or rule things are dangerous, this kind of anarch equality. But I was constantly made aware of the kind of presumptuous of my contemporaries getting up and making these profound moral judgments about other people's behavior and calling for violent overthrow of this, that and the other thing. And I kept sitting there thinking, but the other side, they have got guns and they know how to use them. And violence has been there. It's how they rule. It's by controlling the instruments of violence. You are going up against that. All you are going to do is get a lot of innocent people killed. Because I always believe that the revolution had to be cultural rather than cultural and take place in people's hearts and their heads rather than ... I really do not buy the model of political revolution. SM (00:59:06): Everything I have read shows that violence leads you nowhere. And if the experiences of activists in the (19)60s and early seventies is anything for today's young people, they can learn from people like you and me in our age That violence will get you nowhere except for a bad label. People who will not like who you are and what you stand for because of your actions. Also, universities are somewhat afraid, I think, of activism today like it was in the (19)60s. They like volunteerism because that is safe. Activism is a little threatening. But again, if activists are right on top of things, then if activists from the (19)60s are great teachers and role models for young people today, you do not disrupt the classrooms because you do not disrupt someone's education for the sake of a cause. And I think that is something we hopefully learn from. ML (01:00:04): Yeah, sometimes you do come up against the problem of civil disobedience. And what Martin Luther King would say, "It is never a good time. There is always a reason not to do it." But at some point, you have too actually. Have to move. But I think in King's case, he paid his dues and he put his body on the line. And some of these, not those middle-class kids, I am speaking my generation get out there. And like I say, are passing, just standing there, passing moral judgment. And they had almost no experience doing anything. Even at the time, I thought this had been presumptuous. And it certainly is not the stuff of which real politics, effective politics has ever constructed. So that I always often found myself walking away from these meetings saying, "This ain't for me." So, I never joined SDS. I mean, I was sympathetic to SDS. And for me, one of the most grueling episodes I ever lived through in the (19)60s is that I got married in 1968, which was a very crazy year, a crazy year. And because I had spent a year after my undergraduate years teaching in Buffalo, and I wound up the year they eliminated the graduate school to ferment for first year graduate students, but not for second year graduate students. So, I was subject to the draft and my parents knew the local draft board and they said, " Your boy, he is high on our list. So, you got to get him into the reserves or something." And my grandmother, who is not this kind of person at all, but she was worried about me, knew somebody who turned out to be very highly ranked in the New York State National Guard and got me in the National Guard. So, I was what I would call a conscientious acceptor, a term that I had stolen. SM (01:02:29): CA instead of CO. ML (01:02:31): Right. And it turns out that when I was at Yale, there was a large cohort of us who had decided that we wanted to go. We had found our calling in life, that we did not want to go to Canada, but we were sure as hell we were going to go to Vietnam. We are just looking for a convenient way out, call it George Bush. And so, I got two or three of my friends into the Connecticut National Guard, got them transferred from New York to Connecticut. And lo and behold comes 1971. And then we have the Bobby Seal trial. SM (01:03:11): Oh, I remember that. ML (01:03:12): In New Haven. And every radical group, including Jerry Ruben and Abby Hoffman descended on New Haven with the intention to burn the place down and destroy Yale and stick it to the man and whatnot. And we all got called out for this. And so, our friends on campus are all planning demonstrations and political events and whatnot, and we are being told to go and police the streets. And we were traumatized by this because our political sympathies were somewhat divided in that we were sympathetic to the politics and the injustice being done to the Black Panthers. But on the other hand, we were also sympathetic to Yale in that Yale had changed its institutional dynamic dramatically in the (19)60s, changed its whole admissions profile and had become a real progressive academic institution in ways it had never been before. And so, it seemed to me that Yale was really one of the decent forces in the American world. I mean like contemporaries at Yale, Hillary and Bill were there. Clarence Thomas was a student there. There were a whole slew of- SM (01:04:40): The mayor of Baltimore was there, Kurt Schmoke. He was a good leader. ML (01:04:42): He is a little bit later. He is a little bit later than that. But anyway, we did not get called out for that event. And I tell this story about historical contingency because part of the narrative of what happened in New Haven at that time was that Yale had such incredible connections both in a government through George H. W. Bush, the CIA and this and that. Six of the nine Supreme Court Justices at the time, they had Yale connections. And there was one episode before the event where a shipment of 48 M-16 rifles that were going to a Connecticut Army Reserve post got hijacked. And there was this panic about who has got them. And so, Yale, through one of its connections, asked the mafia people if they had them. And they said, "No, but we know who has got them." And it turned out it was a right-wing paramilitary group of wow who took them. SM (01:05:54): Wow! ML (01:05:55): I think they assumed that they were going to defend Connecticut against all these communists who were coming in. SM (01:05:59): Oh, wow. ML (01:05:59): And so, the day of the event, or the day before the event, my wife dropped me off at seven in the morning at the Armory. You take your duffle bag. You are skipping out to the war. And I go in and the first sergeant says, "Oh." I was in OCS at the time. He said, "So you do not have a regular slot, so you do not have to be here." I said, "You have got to be joking. I do not have to be here." So, I rushed out. I called my wife, said, "Come get me. I do not have to be here." So, I go out on the street. I am waiting for her to take me away, and there is an NBC News crew there. And so, they start interviewing me. SM (01:06:46): Oh my God. ML (01:06:48): And I tell them ... They said, "What do you do when you are not in the [inaudible]?" I said, "I am a graduate student at Yale at like Jean John Chancellor." And all of a sudden out of the building, these guys come running out of the building and physically grab me and drag me back into the building. SM (01:07:03): Oh, no. ML (01:07:04): And am I worried about my first amendment, right? Not one bit. I am thinking I am going to have to spend four days in this stink hole and this is going to be awful. And also, my wife pulls up again and I said, "Look at those dogs over there. Is not that disgusting?" And grabbed my duffle back and ran out, got in the car. I was not there. And then afterwards, the first sergeant said, "Oh, I forgot what I meant to do. I was going to ask you to go out and collect intelligence for us." Send me out as a spy. Fat chance. But my friends did have to stay there, said that one of the scariest things, they were in the army with a detachment of Connecticut State Police. And the state police were so bloodthirsty. They wanted to get out in the street with crack heads and shoot people. And really... create crackheads and shoot people. Really, show them what it is for. They were morally and politically outraged, but the other thing about historical contingency is that Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, they are all trying to stir the crowd up and get them to tear the place down and whatnot. Partway through this, a bomb went off under the entrance to the skating rink at Yale. It was an Eero Saarinen designed building. Looks like one of the terminals at La Guardia or at JFK. But nothing quite jelled but one of the people who was subsequently when I was assigned to a Connecticut National Guard unit full regular assignment. My platoon, our battalion had been patrolling the streets that day. The platoon I was in, the mortar platoon had a lot of vehicles, so they were driving around doing peripheral, periphery patrols, and crowd observation, and management, and whatnot. The Guard at that time, a lot, a disproportionate number of people were police officers because police were not allowed to have second jobs- SM (01:09:22): Oh, wow. ML (01:09:23): ... because they had to be available at any time. But they were allowed to be in the Guard. So, it was a way to pick up some extra income, so there was this jeep with three guys in it. All the guys had been told that they were not to load their weapons. So of course, they did and one of the things I observed when I went into the company headquarters and whatnot was that almost all the guys in there were packing private handguns. Or just secreting them away in their back and on their- SM (01:09:54): Wow. ML (01:09:56): ... duffels and whatnot because they were afraid, they were going to be out in the street and people are going to start shooting at them. SM (01:09:59): Wow. ML (01:10:00): They would not be allowed to use their Army weapons so they said, "Damn, if I am going to get shot, I will ..." SM (01:10:04): Oh, my God. ML (01:10:07): So, these guys are driving along, and this guy is sitting in the back of the jeep. I think with his rifle and his rifle's loaded. As they are driving along, and these are nice Catholic boys from the Naugatuck Valley. All these young women are coming up to them pulling their shirts up and saying, "Would not you like to fuck this, you pig?" These guys are just ... They do not want to be there. They have no interest in being there you know what I mean? SM (01:10:36): Yeah. ML (01:10:37): All of a sudden, out of the crowd comes this guy wearing Army fatigues, obviously secondhand Army fatigues. He reaches in and he pulls out a gun and points it at the guys in the jeep. The guy in the jeep who is a police officer, has some weapons training turns around, and is about to blow this kid's head off, when the kid says, "Bang, bang. You're dead." It was clear that it was a cap gun and so this guy was a nanosecond from blowing this kid's head off. If he had pulled the trigger, the whole narrative of that weekend in New Haven could have been absolutely different, I mean. SM (01:11:15): Unbelievable story. So that was 1960- ML (01:11:19): (19)71. SM (01:11:21): (19)71? Wow. ML (01:11:22): Yeah. SM (01:11:23): Can I use the restroom real fast? ML (01:11:25): Oh, sure. SM (01:11:26): I am going to turn this over. We are halfway through here. ML (01:11:27): Okay. SM (01:11:27): This tape must be going ... There we go. One of the things that I had mentioned in several of my interviews, the last couple interviews, is that when I look at the 1950s, this is just me now. Three adjectives come out quite clearly for if you use the term boomer, which I do not ... I am really starting to not like the term myself and we will certainly raise this in the book, but if you still do use the term from (19)46 to (19)60, there are things that I remember as a little boy that now, upon reading history and understand history better, I define the (19)50s with these three terms, fear, being naïve, and being very quiet. ML (01:12:16): Hmm. SM (01:12:18): And let me explain. We all know about McCarthyism, but I see the McCarthyism as a little boy on the floor watching the television set and hearing this man, " Are you or are you not?" I just remember that and the HUAC Committees as well. Then of course, we have COINTELPRO and then we have the threat of nuclear attack. Then this feeling that you needed to shut up because I knew several teachers who were fired because they were communists. One was in my high school. Then of course, the Enemies List that we had from Richard Nixon, which is actually a (19)60s thing. Naïve is because I think (19)50s TV made us naïve with Howdy Doody, Walt Disney, (19)50s Westerns, the John Wayne mentality. Very few Blacks on TV. I think with Amos 'n' Andy, which was slapstick and a six or seven-week Nat King Cole Show and that was about it. When I interviewed Martin Duberman, you never heard anything about gays in the (19)50s. ML (01:13:24): No. You did not. SM (01:13:24): They were totally hidden and then of course, women were mostly in positions of housewife or teachers, which all my teachers were young, not married yet. ML (01:13:35): Right. Actually, wrote an essay about that. Also, it is in After the Fact. We have this chapter that is called, From Rosie to Lucy. SM (01:13:44): Oh, I get it. ML (01:13:44): Rosie the Riveter to Lucille Ball and the question of the chapter is, that if the theories about cultural conformity in the (19)50s were correct, and they're about the suffocating impact of the media, where did the women of the (19)60s come from? SM (01:14:04): Good point. Yeah. The quiet thing was just shut up or lose-your-job type of mentality. ML (01:14:14): Well, actually you could relate the quiet thing to the point I was making about civility. SM (01:14:18): Right. ML (01:14:19): I mean, they are not unrelated notions. SM (01:14:22): Yeah. C. Wright Mills' White Collar was a very important book that we read in sociology class. So, your career depended upon promotion. You had to fit in. You could not speak up. Tell me what I want to hear instead of what I need to hear, which is very bad role modeling for leaders today. But your thoughts on whether that is really right on, if those are three good adjectives to describe the (19)50s boomer- ML (01:14:47): Well, I think that they certainly define the sort of middle-class, conventional (19)50s as we look back and think about it. But I think when you pry the door open a little bit, you got a somewhat different look in that I would say that in terms of generative-cultural phenomena, the (19)50s were probably more lively than the (19)60s. There was sort of the introduction of modernism into American literature, and architecture, and painting, and certain kinds of music. So that it was a real kind of innovative spirit and there was all kinds of transformative technologies that really began to have a big impact on American life. So that this idea of conformism is more like just sort of reading America as a mourning middle-class society. I mean, that became the real center of gravity of American life. So, I think that and again, you sort of have to, as you said yourself, these things are so determining and so shaping. But where does all the turmoil come from? What caused people suddenly to reject, to stop being quiet, and stop going along to get along, and whatnot? So that was part of the puzzle I said for myself, but I think that this is sort of the accident of history writing history. I started the book on the (19)60s in 1990, 1991 and did not publish it until 2006. In the interim, I put it down a number of times. My publisher lost interest in it. The editor who had signed the book moved and it was clear that he had envisioned this series of books. It was going to be The Home Front During Major Wars and he originally suggested to me that I do the Korean War. I said, "How about I do the (19)60s?" He said, "Fine." But none of those other books ever happened and so mine was just this oddball thing sitting there. SM (01:17:19): Glad you got the oddball. ML (01:17:21): So eventually that editor went to Oxford, and I switched publishers, so that my publisher was Oxford. Instead, it was McGraw Hill, but in the process, one of the things that happened is that I really began to work intensely on the book again around when I was in Ireland in 2000, 2001. Part of that was also there was the parallel between the Troubles in Ireland, which began with the civil rights upheavals in the United States. Most people in Ireland were very much connected, the Irish part of the sense that the Catholics had in Northern Ireland for- SM (01:18:02): In Dublin, yeah. ML (01:18:02): ... being oppressed and whatnot. The idea of civil disobedience and protest, pardon me, in part came out of mirroring the American experience. But I lost my train of thought there for a second. But the parallel with Ireland got me off the track. Where was I? SM (01:18:37): You were talking about the (19)60s, how you are writing your book. ML (01:18:42): Oh, yes. That is, it, sorry. So, what happens is that in 2000, 2001, George Bush gets elected, and you have the 1994 conservative landslide in Congress. You have the emergence of the Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reillys of the world and FOX News. This idea that there is this revolutionary conservative movement and you think to yourself, "Well, a lot of these guys cut their teeth in the (19)60s." So, one of the things that I began to realize is that one of the real political revolutions of the (19)60s was really the conservative revolution. It was the Barry Goldwater to Ronald Reagan phenomena, and it was many ways more enduring politically, certainly, than the politics of the left of the 1960s were. Also, many of the divisions that existed then and created a lot of the friction and even some violence never went away. The people remained divided about their political values and there were always issues, drugs, which remained contentious. They got redefined in the (19)80s with the crack cocaine thing. But then, abortion rights stayed out there and also the cultural content of media. These are all issues that stayed on the front burner for a long period of time. So, it was one of the reasons that originally, I had thought about the book that the historical puzzle is, where did the (19)60s come from? We have the placid conformist (19)50s. How did all of a sudden it blow up? Well, there was civil rights and there was the war in Vietnam, but I think it is one of the things that are needed. I do not think I satisfactorily, to my satisfaction developed this in the book, was that it was a religious revival moment, and it was a spirit. A lot of it was spiritual, I mean, you can think of the shtick of Timothy Leary. You could think of him as kind of a barnyard huckster, a [inaudible]- SM (01:21:11): Ram Dass. ML (01:21:11): Yeah. But these guys were selling smoke and mirrors but in a sort of Aimee Semple McPherson realm, but I do think that there was a profound spiritual yearning because the Jesus freaks and the campus evangelical movement. The reidentification of Jewishness and there was a lot of interspersing with Catholic politics and the era of Vatican II, and of the Berrigan brothers. SM (01:21:56): Zen Buddhism was very big. That is Peter Coyote. 35 years is in this. ML (01:21:58): But I think that was all part of that. An awful lot of what was going on was this kind of religious sensibility. Again, when you think about the hippies and how self-consciously apolitical, they were. They were not only against alcohol, they were also against political engagement. SM (01:22:15): Right. ML (01:22:15): And so does trucking. Well, how different was that from the tradition of the evangelicals in the United States? A remarkable number of the hippies did come from socially conservative, Republican middle-class families. So that was one of the things that had I published my book a few years after I started, it would have been a very different book than I wound up writing from the perspective of the Bush years, so. SM (01:22:45): Yeah. Those people like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. I think Pat or was it Dobson, Bob? ML (01:22:51): Yeah. SM (01:22:53): They are major figures in this time frame, Ralph Reed, who is a history professor and very smart, but certainly the epitome of the- ML (01:23:02): Well, one of the most intriguing guys is Richard Viguerie. SM (01:23:05): Yes-yes. ML (01:23:07): So, he is a (19)60s figure. SM (01:23:12): It is amazing because that gets into ... I got to make sure the tape goes. It will come to an abrupt end here and then it will ... It seemed like in the (19)50s people went to church. We went to church. Even my friends SUNY Binghamton, most of them are Jewish. At one point, when they got to Binghamton, they even got a synagogue now. As soon as they said, "Goodbye mom and dad." But there is also a lot of experimenting too, because students used to go to ... I went to a synagogue, and I went to a Catholic Church. I was a Methodist and I think that there is a lot of experimenting on the parts of many students just to experience going into a different church. I do not understand it and then there are a lot of people who did not do it at all. They just felt more of an inner peace, something inner and I think that was a lot of the change it seemed like. Religion was very big in the (19)50s and it kind of waned in the (19)60s. ML (01:24:02): Right. SM (01:24:04): Then we get into the (19)70s and we can look at the Beatles and what happened to them. It happened to a lot of people too. ML (01:24:12): Well, I think that it seems to be conventional wisdom now. The (19)50s is that the religion of the (19)50s was much more of a social than a spiritual phenomenon and that is you have an enormously transient population. You moved from one place to another. How are you going to make contact with people who are like you? You join a church, or you join a synagogue. So that you are going to church not because you have a need for faith, or bearing witness, or whatnot. It's because you want to meet people who share your values. SM (01:24:48): Right. ML (01:24:48): So that was big in the (19)50s and I think what happens in the (19)60s is that a lot of kids who grew up in that kind of what they saw as a kind of spiritually vacuous or emotionally- flat, religious life in the (19)60s were looking for some kind of spiritually transcendent. So, drugs is one. The transcendental notion of LSD that Timothy Leary is selling or the Zen, Eastern religion, or evangelical Christianity. So that the evangelicals do very well, grow a lot. I think the mainstream denominations were shrinking in the (19)60s and continued to shrink in the (19)70s, then you have evangelicals. So, during it, it is just that most of us were virtually unaware of the phenomena. I saw little bits and pieces of it when we visit friends of my parents who lived in Upstate New York, in these small little towns. But you knew about Billy Graham. But you never knew that there was this vast- SM (01:26:02): Yeah. Alan Watts wrote a book of Zen. Anyway, Peter Coyote, when I interviewed him said for 35 years, he has been a Zen Buddhist and he said, "I would if it was not for my Zen ..." Zen Buddhism to him is the most important thing in his life. If he cannot take that time to be quiet and reflect during the day. And I said, "Are you meditating?" I had done a little study in Zen Buddhism before I asked him these questions. And he said, "Obviously you do not understand Zen Buddhism. It is not like people tell you. You look at a dot and you try to look at the dot. Close your eyes and not think of anything for 30 minutes. That is not the way it works. You could have your eyes open. You have got to just not think about anything else except spiritual or ..." I do not quite understand it but one of the things here, you discuss the three phases. I would like your response to three events as symbols of what you are saying about the three phases you talk about in your book The Uncivil Wars. Phase one is of course, that period from the 1950s through Elvis, through the assassination of John Kennedy, and to me, values was very important during that time frame. Nothing better than Kennedy's inaugural speech where he said, "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." Then secondly, "We will bear any price, or we will- ML (01:27:35): Bear any burden, pay any price. SM (01:27:37): ... yeah, to guarantee liberty." Of course, a lot of people felt that is the beginning of the Vietnam War. The Cold War mentality continuing through Kennedy that was transferred from Eisenhower. Then of course, the concept of service. Are you really saying this? Is that a good example of what that first phase was all about? ML (01:28:00): Well, I guess it is a political marker. If I had to pick something that was a good example of what the first phase was all about, I would be more inclined to look at something like the emergence of popular folk music as being more sort of a cultural phenomenon that anticipates a kind of shifting set of values. There are certain events like the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is certainly defining too because we all sat around thinking, "This is it." SM (01:28:43): Oh, yeah. I know what you mean. ML (01:28:47): "Sayonara." And it pretty nearly was, so again, it is one of those things. If when you want to find something that is emblematic, I mean it is sort of emblematic of what? So again, I am more inclined to look into the cultural realm. SM (01:29:04): Okay. ML (01:29:05): So again, it would be things like the introduction of the birth control pill or these things that have unintended consequences or are liberating in some fashion. That was one of the reasons when I constructed the book also, I have a chapter about ... It is a bit of a potpourri, but of cultural literary events like the making of Dr. Strangelove or the publication of The Feminine Mystique. That is when I first wrote about Rachel Carson was because of the impact Silent Spring has in 1962. SM (01:29:49): Oh, yes. ML (01:29:52): So that is why I guess it would be hard for me to think of a single, encapsulating, to some degree, it is like people said. It would have been the 1964 New York World's Fair- SM (01:30:14): And which I went to. The Globe was still there. It used to be outside Shea Stadium. The second phase then is probably cultural too, but one that is really stood out between (19)64 and (19)68, which was when there was so much antagonism between groups. I put the epitome of it was when Senator Abraham Ribicoff was speaking at the Democratic Convention and he is saying to Mayor Daley, "Your gestapo police." or whatever. He is swearing at him. That was the epitome of the- ML (01:30:47): It was and one of the ironies of it is that in private, Daley was opposed to the Vietnam War. He thought it was a loser, but he is a loyal Democrat. SM (01:30:59): Yes. ML (01:31:01): I would guess it would be a toss-up between the riots in Detroit, and lots of riot. Detroit, Newark. That was one thing and then the march on the Pentagon. S M (01:31:22): Yeah. That was the levitating? ML (01:31:23): Yeah. They were going to levitate. It was where Norman Mailer ... I still think Norman Mailer is book Armies of- SM (01:31:29): Armies of the, yeah. ML (01:31:31): ... the Night is one of the best books written in about the 1960s. Norman Mailer drives me crazy. I am being such an egotist and whatnot, but sometimes he is so acutely tuned in. He gets some things, either he gets them right or at least illuminates them in a way that I find really effective. So anyway, I think that there are cluster in more of 1967 events really than (19)68. There is no question that the assassination of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were also importantly transformative. I mean, I think that is when people who believed there was a middle way lost all hope. Thought that the world was going to hell in a handbasket no matter what we tried to do. Some people like Mark Rudd went one way and others just sort of divorced themselves and drew back in other things, but- SM (01:32:34): Have you read Underground? ML (01:32:35): Underground, his book? SM (01:32:36): Yeah. ML (01:32:36): It is a good book, yeah. He always annoyed me, so. SM (01:32:39): Yeah. Well, I interviewed Daniel Bell. He is 91 years old. I am not sure if he was all there when I was ... He was eating his food and he had a maid ... in his home not far from Harvard Square. He kind of spent all his time blasting Mark Rudd. ML (01:32:59): Yeah. Well, you see, I think that Daniel Bell was part of the group that became the neocons and who found the incivility, the crudeness, and what they would have thought the insanity of these people like Mark Rudd were, and how destructive they thought that was. I think also, as Jews who struggled so hard to enter the establishment, to have somebody, have these young, sort of bad-mouth poorly, what he would say poorly educated kids come along and essentially attack the structures of the things that they had fought so hard to become part of, that were profoundly offended. SM (01:33:47): Oh, I tell you, when I interviewed Daniel Bell, I really appreciate the hour I had with him, but he got retired very fast because he is up there in years. But he responded about Mark Rudd and then I asked him about books that I thought might have been the most influential. I wanted his thoughts on Charles Reichs Greening of America and Theodore Roszak's The Making of a Counterculture. ML (01:34:15): He had nothing but contempt for either. SM (01:34:16): He hated them both. He said, "There is no ideas in there. They are nothing. Actually, they are nothing. There is no thinking at all in there." Then I said, "Well, how about Eric Erikson's books and also Kenneth Keniston?" He says, "Those two guys are fakers." ML (01:34:36): Right. See, but they were both sociologists and contemporaries of his. I actually knew all of them a little bit at Yale, not well, because they were all around the campus, at least Charlie Reich was and Eric Erikson. SM (01:34:53): Keniston? ML (01:34:58): Keniston, I think was not he in- SM (01:35:01): He was at MIT, I think. ML (01:35:03): Maybe he was there. Maybe he was not around, but so it was Eric Erikson. Anyway, it was Bill Coffin was married to ... Was not he married to ... SM (01:35:21): They had him on campus too. ML (01:35:24): He was married to oh, Erikson's. Was he married to Erikson's sister or something like that, Gretchen? GL (01:35:36): Who, what? ML (01:35:38): Bill Coffin. Oh, no. No, no. He was married to Arthur Rubinstein's daughter. SM (01:35:47): Oh, okay. GL (01:35:47): Daughter, yeah. SM (01:35:48): On the third phase here, I just said something from my interviews of Vietnam vets that really upset them. It was Nixon's peace with honor in Vietnam and as many Vietnam vets says, "What a joke. Peace with honor after killing all those people and destroying the land?" ML (01:36:05): Oh, there is something in a way deeply cynical about it from Nixon's point of view is he wanted to get the U.S. out of the war from 1969 on. But he wanted to do it in a way that would not interfere with his ambition to create that permanent Republican majority. I mean, I think one of the dynamics of the era in a sort of presidential political level was that Kennedy and Johnson both realized that the problems of Korea killed the Democrats in 1952. That part of Kennedy's appeal, as you said before, his Cold Warriorism was a way to take back the national security issue to the Democratic Party. It did lock both of them into a position where they could not give much ground. You could not lose Vietnam, or you could not lose the Dominican Republic, or just the way the Republicans lost Cuba. That is one of the reasons why Kennedy got trapped into the Cuban fiasco was because part of his new frontier was going to be to solve the problems of Eisenhower, to reinvigorate the Cold War. But I think one of the things that make Kennedy different, which ironically, he shared with Ronald Reagan is a profound anxiety about, and distaste for nuclear weapons. I think that is one of the things that guided him throughout the Cuban Missile Crisis. But if there was an event ... To some degree the object of a war is more I think, had more impact than the end of the Vietnam War because it also, it pointed to the kind of structural weakness of the American economy at the time because remember we have been through- SM (01:38:05): Yeah, you just told us that. ML (01:38:05): ... the stagflation crisis. SM (01:38:07): Right. ML (01:38:08): The economy was really tottering. Inflation was aggressive. I think it was five, 6 percent range by then, so it was one of the major lines of assault against the environmental regulation was the charge that environmentalists were driving. Making the U.S. less competitive and driving up the cost of goods, and creating employment, and whatnot. SM (01:38:34): In your own words, please define these time periods since World War II and I always put them down here because these are the years that defined term boomers have been alive. The oldest boomers are now 64 and the youngest are 48. So, there is no spring chickens anymore in the boomer generation. Their youngest are heading toward 50, but I am putting these terms down and it could just be a few words. It does not have to be anything in-depth, but just something that when you define the period. So here is the first one, 1946 to 1960. What does that period mean to you? ML (01:39:16): I would just say that it means the Cold War, domestic and foreign, and it means prosperity. Probably the period of the greatest economic growth in the history of the American economy in loan percentage terms, I mean. SM (01:39:34): The period 1961 to 1970. ML (01:39:39): I would say upheaval. SM (01:39:41): Yeah. ML (01:39:44): Uncertainty and factionalism. SM (01:39:51): 1971 to 1980. ML (01:39:54): I already labeled that in our textbook as the age of limits. SM (01:39:59): Age of limits. 1981 to 1990. ML (01:40:05): A conservative moment. The conservative revolution. SM (01:40:08): 1991 to 2000. ML (01:40:14): That one is a little tougher. I would say that is the internet era. SM (01:40:17): That is the Bill Clinton era too. 2001 to 2010. Is that 9/11? Is it- ML (01:40:29): I would say that this is the beginning of the end. This is the era which the Americans got so far off track and failed so deeply to address the structural weaknesses that it is what I will always hold against George Bush. Did not respond to global warming, did not respond to the energy crisis, misdirected the American response to 2001, and of the World Trade Center bombing, that he just misread. He had no sense of the historical situation of the United States, and he had too much of a Texas mentality because one of the things I suggest that is happened in the United States over the period since the (19)60s and was happening in the (19)60s it became more and more Southern. The popular culture becomes more Southern with NASCAR and country and western. The culture of Bubba and SUVs. Just the shift of population and wealth. SM (01:41:46): Even brought us a Southern president, for sure, too. ML (01:41:50): Brought us a whole string of them if you think about it. They are all Sunbelt- SM (01:41:51): Yeah. Both Clinton, Jimmy Carter- ML (01:41:54): Ronald Reagan, they are all Sunbelt presidents. They have been until Barack Obama. SM (01:42:01): You even saw that when President Kennedy was in power because he knew- ML (01:42:03): He even saw that when President Kennedy was in power, because he knew that the Democrats at the time he became president, the powerful Democrats were for segregation. And when he had to make decisions on whether to allow the march on Washington in (19)63, he was afraid of a riot, possibly, he brought them in. He was fearful that he would lose the Southern Democrats. So, the pragmatic politician that he was, he was a little hesitant at the time. That is why people did not think he really had to push John Kennedy on civil rights at times. SM (01:42:35): Oh, absolutely. No, I think that Kennedy and Johnson both knew that that civil rights was going to be the end of the Democratic party of [inaudible]. And persuaded one of the reasons that Johnson was so aggressive about jobs and public programs that were designed for lower income, lower middle class, it was to win back and win new Democrats to make up, to cover the loss that they were going to experience from civil rights. Although, one of the things that apparently, I do not know who has done the work, but that have made a pretty, was convincing to me, argument that the shift in southern politics had less to do with civil rights and more to do with suburbanization in the South. That as the South became more prosperous and whatnot, middle class southerners became Republicans. And they created middle class white institutions, Christian schools and churches and whatnot, that were pretty heavily segregated. So that is been a real trend, that the center of gravity of American life shifted southward. ML (01:44:03): Yeah, I would want to just put this for the record in the interview. These are things that really stood out in the (19)50s. And you have already talked about how important you think the (19)50s were, even some respects from the (19)60s, in terms of helping shape the (19)60s. So, I am not taking away from anything you have said, but again, it is getting back to some of the history that people see when they think of the (19)50s as being the groundwork for the future. Obviously, the Cold War, the fear of communists in all walks of life. We all know about the Hollywood [inaudible] movie out recently about one of them. I know that university professors and government employers were fired because of their links. And I know from college and high school, some teachers that were fired. Sputnik in (19)57, because of its importance in terms of the beginnings of a being strong in science and math and the whole business about education, which is real important, we have not talked about. Suburbia. Of course, lots of babies were being born. When we talk about juvenile delinquency, I think in terms of gangs back then, white gangs. Because I grew up in the Cornell, Ithaca area, and I saw gangs. They met at parks, but they were not going to kill people, they were just going to beat people up. Kind of the Jimmy Dean kind of thing. Women were most of the teachers, there were not too many men. Higher ed grew, the knowledge industry, as Clark Hurst said. That capitalism seemed to be revered. And then I say here, black and white, very innocent. But we did have Edward R Murrow, Dave Garaway, and Mike Wallace on TV, so we did have some really good news people. And then I always think of Arthur Godfrey, Steve Allen, the game show, the Breakfast Club. These are the kind of things that people in the (19)50s grew up with. This leads me into my question here. Oftentimes over the past 30 years, we have heard general statements from conservatives like Newt Gingrich, George Will in just about any book he has ever written. Some of his essays. Mike Huckabee today on TV, others, that the reason we had problems in today's world is due to the times in the (19)60s when anything goes i.e., very negative on the family structure, values, the destruction of an America we loved in the post-war era. That is Reagan kind coming into power. And so, what Newt Gingrich, when he came to power in 1994, he made comments about the breakup of the American family, the welfare state that Johnson created, the attack on the system of government, economy, the increasing divorce rate, the ongoing drug culture, the lack of respect for authority, the creation of special interest groups that only state what is in it for me rather than what is in it for us. Your comments on these statements, that even today are being made by people on television, that a lot of the way we are today is negative because of that era. SM (01:47:22): Well, one has to ask, how negative are we today, really? How profound is the negativism? I do think the economic downturn has darkened a lot of people's mood and whatnot. But I think to some degree, the media invents these narrative frames as ways of presenting presidential administrations, errors in history and whatnot. And they are fictions. They are organizing fictions that have some truth to them, but do not really accurately describe what's going on. And so, if you were to go back to the (19)60s and say, "Okay. Well, who was it that destroyed," for example, faith and government? Well, they would say, "Well, it was the radicals and the attack on the military during the Vietnam War and whatnot." Well, there was nobody who was more visceral in their attack on the government and governing institutions than the conservatives. And particularly the far-right conservatives, who thought the government was the government of communist conspirators. Accused Eisenhower of being a Commie. And then if you look at the agenda of the Buckley conservatives, part of it was that they wanted to tear down the New Deal and the idea of activist progressive government as a force in their lives. Was a wonderful quote, that some article that was just written in a Massachusetts newspaper by one of his colleagues at Mount Holyoke, where the guy said, he was talking about Tea Party libertarianism, which is a big part of the 1960s, I believe. That is do your own thing in your own time, easy rider mentality. A lot of that is Tea Party-ish. Just leave me alone, man. And this guy drew the analogy, he said, "This rhetoric of anarchic libertarianism and whatnot." He says, "It is great. He said, "It is like if somebody dropped you in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in a rowboat with a couple of oars. You would be free to go any direction you wanted." ML (01:49:36): It is interesting, when I interviewed Noam Chomsky, I got an hour with him up at MIT, and we talked about anarchism. Because everything about his life is linked to it. Everything. So how serious was the generation gap between parents and their kids, who were reared after World War II? We had parents obviously born and raised in the Depression. And they were very young as World War II began. So, we had this generation gap that, remember, I do not know if you remember the front cover of Life magazine with a guy with the glasses and the guy, I had the magazine framed, and the father screaming at the son and whatever. And the divisions were obviously many. In The Wounded Generation, the book that came out, I think in 1980, there was a symposium which Phil Caputo, James Fallows, James Webb, several people were in there, and they were talking about the generation gap between their parents and the kids. And what really came out of it was really revealing. That yeah, we all know about the generation gap between the parents. It is well documented. But we do not talk about the real generation gap. The generation gap within the generation, between those who's went to war in Vietnam and came home and served their country, and those who did not serve, who protested against the war, became conscious objectors, particularly those who evaded the draft, as James Fallows admitted he did. And even James Fallows will say that, to evade the draft, and at the same time, not protest against the draft, he said That was wrong, that was wrong. And James Webb, who is now our United States senator, who I am trying to get an interview with, said that really, what we have to think of here is, we talk about the (19)60s generation as a generation of service, that came to the ideas of Kennedy. "Ask not what your country can do for you." So many went into the Peace Corps, many went into Vista, many went to the Vietnam War. But in reality, they are not a generation of service. Because a generation of service will, when your nation calls, you go to war. SM (01:52:18): Yeah, but what if the war is on poverty instead of on Vietnam? They are being very simplistic about this. There are wars and there are wars. I think that many people felt they were doing their country a service by protesting the war in Vietnam, which was destructive for the United States, destructive for Vietnam, and was fought on false premises. One of the things, again, that makes, you talk about the veterans talking about [inaudible], when Henry Kissinger wins the Nobel Peace Prize. Or Nixon could have had the peace that they got in 1972, (19)73, they could have gotten it in 1969. He just did not feel like he could deliver it politically and persuade his base well, that he had done the right thing. But part of this is, I think it is the destructiveness of a certain part of the conservative American political mindset, which has been slaying false gods and creating monsters where they do not exist. They have consistently, from the beginnings of the domestic Red Scare, used the Cold War as a political device to attack New Dealism, to attack social democracy, to resist the Civil Rights Movement. And that they created, I believe, their mentality created a sense of division where that was not nearly as serious as they felt. Or many of them, I think, honestly believed this. But I think that the idea, they totally misread the Soviet threat, misread Khrushchev. The threat that the neocons really sold in the late seventies and that Reagan made the cornerstone of the thing, was false. We know the Soviet military buildup was based on a lot of profound corruption and ineptitude. Look what happened to the Soviet army when it got into Afghanistan. This was the army that was supposed to bring us to our knees. I feel like what the conservatives has consistently succeeded in doing is to move the political discourse, move the center in the United States to a place where it should not be. So, for example, the incapacity now to respond in any meaningful way to the energy crisis and global warming. The bankruptcy of the whole process over healthcare. This is one of the things that came out of living in Ireland and living in a social democratic culture for a couple of years. Quality of life in Ireland is every bit as high and higher than it is in the United States. And the materialism is not quite as grandiose, but it is getting there. But you have had this sense in Ireland, the way I always put this, my poor wife hears these things over and over again, but American conservative culture demands losers. There is a need to have somebody to stigmatize, some other by which you can demonstrate your own virtue. I did it. I say, "I am a hard worker, I did this. I am taking care of myself. I am taking care of my family; I am taking care of my community. I am not like these losers, who always want to be on the government doll, who always need a handout and whatnot." But they also are not willing to commit public resources to education, to job protection, to a whole series of things, that often forces people who are on the margin, turns them into losers. So, they do not want to extend jobless benefits, they do not want to put in program, they do not want to do deficit spending for jobs creation and whatnot. Because they do not like the government and they do not believe the government can do a good job. And they keep arguing the private sector, all you have to do is cut taxes. That is just horseshit of the first rank. One of the things that, what is interesting, the Irish are filled with prejudices, as I am sure you know. They are homophobic, they are racists often. They do not get stigmatized for, say, racism because it never was that much of a racial problem. But we saw evidences of it all the time. ML (01:57:06): And we know about England too. SM (01:57:08): Right. But one of the differences is the Irish are embarrassed by it. They are not proud of it the way Americans often are. And they punish it. Like when bus drivers would treat Africans badly, they would fire them. Or fine them or whatever. But it also, you saw in their healthcare system. Was not terrific, but everybody had it. And they had a parallel system of private insurance, of people who felt they wanted it to pay for it. But you could go to a public facility, and they would have things taken care of. And they were not overmedicated, and they were not over CAT scans and whatnot. And I just feel that one of the reasons, underlying reasons, is that particularly in the conservative Republican community, again, nativism is one of the core values of an awful lot of people, that they resent profoundly the darkening, the Africanizing, the Latinizing of American cultural life and the social life and what. They feel like they are being marginalized in their own country. To some extent, they are, compared to what it was in the (19)50s. That they are romanticizing. But it prevents them from doing, if you take the flip side and say, "Well, how do the Irish suddenly become wealthy?" Well, one of the things they did is they committed themselves to universal education. Anybody in Ireland who wants to go to college and qualifies, goes for free. So, when the companies of the world were looking for a literate, educated, English speaking, technically competent workforce, bingo, they came to Ireland. Now, Ireland is such a small economy, such a niche, it's hard to say that this would work on the grand scale. But I think that it is clear now that in a world where, I cannot remember the statistics, they said if you are one in a million in China, there are a million people just like you. But- ML (01:59:36): Yeah, you are probably right with the population. SM (01:59:36): Like in India and China, where they are cranking out 300,000 engineers a year and we are turning out 30 to 60,000. And where, now, they are outsourcing legal work. I guess. They are all of these hungry college university, English-speaking people out there who will do the same work for a lot less money. And Americans have to figure out how to maximize their mental resources if that is the future, as far as I see it. ML (02:00:18): One of the things that I think has come out of the (19)60s on, I would like your thoughts on this, then I will go to these last three pages here, is that there seems to be... Bill Clinton was often looked upon as a centrist. [inaudible]. SM (02:00:34): Yeah, mm-hmm. ML (02:00:35): He's a Liberal. Even President Obama, when he came in, says he was more, even though they say he is as liberal as you can get [inaudible] the extreme right. Yeah, I think he looks upon himself more in the center as well. But other people look at him differently. There seems to be a fear in America toward those who were on the extreme left or the extreme right, whether it be the new left or the Evangelical Christians. Everybody is okay if they kind of go toward the center. But is not it true, when you talk about people like her, she was not a centrist. Not in the area of the environment, because she was a subversive who did her homework, did her research, got her knowledge. And with knowledge is power and knowledge is a threat. And I think a lot of the people on the new left, some of the writers you talked about, and even the ones on the extreme right, who I do not care for, whether they be, Ralph Reed's a perfect example, because I think he is very well-educated and I think Newt Gingrich is very well-educated. So, they are a group that I think you have to listen to because they have knowledge of power. SM (02:01:48): Oh, I think that one of the things that happened is that there was a major shift where, from the New Deal into the (19)60s, most of the ideas about public policy came from the left. If you look at the major academics and whatnot. Now, a lot of those people shifted from the left to the right. And so, they took their intellectual baggage and their energies to the conservative movement. But the conservatives had been the consumer of and generators of ideas in the recent past, and sort of big ideas, more than the liberals are. Now, it does not mean I like those ideas or that I feel that they are constructive or appropriate, but there is a kind of intellectual vitality there. And although I love these things, it is like there are a lot of pretenders also, people who pretend to be [inaudible]. I cannot remember the evangelical from Houston, who is the guru to Marilyn and Dan Quail. And Garry Wills has an essay about it in his book on religion in America. This was from the eighties or nineties; this was a while ago. But he went down to interview the guy. And the guy always claimed, because he was educated in Greek and Latin, that he could read the ancient scriptures and interpret them in ways that were far more powerful and meaningful than the less educated clergy could do. Well, little did he know that Garry Wells is a classist and really can read. He can really read ancient Hebrew and Latin. And Wells, who [inaudible], this guy totally misreads. Does not really have a clue what half this stuff means anyway. But that is a pot shot. But I really feel like, it is obviously a clash ultimately, a clash of values or sensibilities or attitudes. But I just think the European model is a much healthier model for constructing an effective civil society. I think that one of the things that Bush tax cuts and a lot of the economic planning that happened in that era, besides just creating massive mountains of debt, public and private, was to increase the bankruptcy of the middle class or the marginalizing of the middle class, on the presumption that the old Republican notion that the creation of wealth would lead to the creation of wealth. But what you did not anticipate was that these Wall Street geniuses were going to figure out how to create obscene amounts of wealth that was going to be almost all fictional money. Is it going to be things that were purportedly had value, that had no value whatsoever. And I think that the failure to read that was almost criminally negligent. There was a lot of criminality involved. And it was just, when you look at what various regulatory agents [inaudible] you are talking about minerals management or you are talking about the SEC, or you are talking about the Federal Reserve. Here, Allen Greenspan, we now know, turns out to be a fool. That he sat upon it and nurtured and financed, with low interest rates, financed a lot of the subprime mortgage pool. And refused to accept any of the doubters, who could point out with some substance, how really fraudulent a lot of this was and how dangerous these instruments were. 2005, when Hank Paulson shows up as the head of Goldman Sachs, that persuades them to suspend the reserve limits that were on the big New York brokerage firms. And so, they went from 13:1 debt ratios to 35:1 debt ratios. ML (02:06:47): A lot of inbreeding in Wall Street and government. SM (02:06:47): It actually was not so much inbreeding. There were two crippling things. One was the suspension of Glass-Steagall in 1997, so that commercial banking and investment banking got reintegrated. And the other, it was the thing that happened in the 1980s. This is Michael Lewis, when he wrote Liar's Poker. Well, it happened at Bear Stearns, under, what is his name? Gutfreund. John Gutfreund was the head of Bear Stearns at the time. Or Solomon. It was Solomon. Anyway, Solomon [inaudible]. Took them public. Gretchen's uncle worked for one of the old time, classic New York Wall Street investment firms. They were partnerships. So, when you underwrote a bond or stock offering, it was your money, ultimately. The partners, it was their capital that they were using to make this. What Gutfreund succeeded in doing is the people who ran the brokerage firms, it is the stockholders' money that they are playing with. So, when they award themselves $200 million in bonuses, they are taking it from the stockholders. And they're paying themselves, all they added to this was chutzpah. Maybe a little vision here, a little shenanigans there and whatnot. But they had no downside risk, as became evident when these guys would get $50 million payoffs after having bankrupted their investment firms. And I think that this was partly a process that has got set in motion in the seventies, when the Americans really went to a paper debt economy far more aggressively than ever. That is the world that, remember when you got your first credit card? ML (02:08:49): Yeah. When was that? When I got out of grad school. I did not have one in grad school. I did not want one. SM (02:08:55): No. And that is what happened to us, like mid to late seventies. And I almost always thought that the thing was a little bit of a devil. I was dangerous. I did not trust it quiet. And Gretchen and I were talking to some friends about this the other day. How what for most of our married life, at the end of the year, when we wanted to do our taxes, we would have a stack this high of canceled checks. Now, we have stacked, we do not even get the cancel checks anymore, just get pictures of them. ML (02:09:26): That is right. Yeah. The checks are going to be a thing of the past. SM (02:09:30): Right. And actually, they are ending checking in Britain within five years or something like that. Yeah. ML (02:09:36): That is what the debit and credit cards are all about. SM (02:09:38): Yeah. Well, right. But it is a way of changing how one does business and how one manages one's money and whatnot. But it has made debt just an incidental part of everybody's everyday life. That was certainly not the case in the (19)60s or the (19)50s. ML (02:10:08): No. Yeah, it is amazing how... Yeah, nobody had credit cards. But I think they put it [inaudible] you owe so-and-so. There was trust in customers. Put it on layaway. Layaway was a big thing. SM (02:10:21): But there was store credit cards or store credit accounts. ML (02:10:24): Yeah. Store credit accounts, where you have until so many months to pay it off or whatever. [inaudible]. SM (02:10:28): But I do think it has been transformational. But in a way, it's sort of unfortunate. I sent one of my friends a check the other day and I said, "I am not sure if it's legal to use non-electronic money anymore." ML (02:10:43): Oh my God. Sometimes people say that the only boomer presidents have been Bill Clinton and George Bush II. I call him George Bush the second. SM (02:10:55): George, the... ML (02:10:57): Yeah. And they say, "Well, it is very obvious they are boomers." What do they mean by that? SM (02:11:03): Well, it means they are using that shorthand that they grew up in the sort of go-go prosperity of the (19)50s and that they are part of this generation that sees themselves as better educated, more socially mobile than their parents' generation were. That they went through a time of great opportunities and of material growth, wealth creation and whatnot. And also, they have been part of the generations who's basically its preoccupations have defined the public agenda almost all the way through. In the (19)50s it was about creating schools and housing for the baby boom generation. And the (19)60s was expanding colleges and creating enough space for the baby boom generation. Now it is social security and retirement benefits and pension funds for the baby boom generation. And I think it is partly because they represent a huge market, in so far as markets to determine- ML (02:12:28): See, right now, if you stay till (19)66, you can get your full social security. But the majority of people are not dead, they are retiring, and they are getting it ahead of time figuring, "Well, I can get it for so many years. And then if I die." So, the difference would still be, I would still make- SM (02:12:48): The actuarial, I think the consensus that I have gotten from people who do not need it but collect it, and others, is that it is best to wait till you are 66. ML (02:13:00): Yeah, you get more. SM (02:13:02): You get more, but you get even more if you wait till you are 70. I think the difference is between getting, say, I think you get about, I cannot remember what it is now. It is about $2,300 a month, if you are maxed out. But it goes up to $2,900 a month if you retire when you are 70. But the kicker is, that when you do the math in your head, you got to live to be 80 something to make up the difference of income you have let go by-by not collecting. And also, if you continue working, your benefits still go up some, not as much as- ML (02:13:43): You can get, I know, because- SM (02:13:45): You are paying into social security while you are collecting. ML (02:13:47): I am 62 now, so I am collecting it because that is how I... But I took a big cut in what I would get, but- SM (02:13:56): But you also collect, you are going to collect it for four years or five years. So, in those five years, I do not know. I am just going to guess there is probably, say you get 1,600 or a month or something like that. ML (02:14:10): Yeah. Then you got to take the taxes out. SM (02:14:11): Right. No, but I am just saying, so what you are giving, what you are going to give up is $700 a month, say $10,000 a year when you are 66. But you will already have collected 70 or $80,000, so it will take five or six years before it crosses over. ML (02:14:34): Yeah, and you got to- SM (02:14:35): And you will actually be at a disadvantage. ML (02:14:37): Yeah, and you got to live. And if you die, you are- SM (02:14:40): Right. It is all gone. ML (02:14:41): There is no heir to anything. So, it is like- SM (02:14:45): So, I think it is not a bad calculation. And if you need it, you need it. ML (02:14:50): Well, I need it [inaudible]. But you can get the $14,300 in earnings if you want to. It does not affect your social security. When you go beyond that, then they take one out of every $2 at that point, and then they, yep. SM (02:15:04): Because I think after 66 you can earn as much as you want. ML (02:15:06): You can. SM (02:15:06): It does not matter. ML (02:15:10): This is an important question I have asked everyone. We took a group of students to Washington DC in 1995, part of our leadership on the road programs. Where we met Senator Ed Muskie. Gaylord Nelson organized this meeting for us. He had just gotten out of the hospital, and he was not doing too well, but it was a great meeting. Students came up with some of the questions, and this was one of the questions they came up with. Keeping in mind that none of these students were born in the (19)60s, but they had seen videotapes [inaudible] up and everything. Their question was, due to the divisions that took place in the (19)60s for the boomer generation, the divisions between Black and white, male and female, gay and straight, with all the riots taking place during the (19)60s, they had seen these things, and they had also saw what happened in the 1968 convention where police were clubbing students- SM (02:16:03): ... convention. So, the police were clubbing students, and there were assassinations that year, and the president resigned, or withdrew from running for president. All the crazy stuff was happening. Do you think the boomer generation, the generation of the (19)60s, the Vietnam generation, is going to go to its grave, like the Civil War generation, not healing? That the divisions were so intense, particularly between Vietnam vets and those who were anti-war, and vice versa. The people that fought for Black rights, because my books about everyone. Someone said when they saw the term "boomer", they thought of white men. But boomers are everybody. They are African American, Latino, gay and straight, Native American. It is everybody. I encouraged students to come up with this question because if you go to Gettysburg, there is a statue there of a man who the last survivor of the Civil War was. He died in 1924. So, the last person who participated in the Civil War died in 1924. Over there, I have been to some symposiums where that generation never healed, obviously. Do you think there is a problem within the Boomer generation? It is like Gaylord Nelson said, "They do not walk around Washington DC with, 'I have not healed' on my sleeve," but do you think there is a permanent split between some of these people, particularly those that were involved as activists, that they are never really getting over the divisions? ML (02:17:51): Actually, no. I mean, yes, there is some people who never get a life or whose experience of that time or its impact on their lives is so profound or defining that it frames them forevermore. Then there are also like the Bloody Shirt Generation. They are all kinds of politicians who are going to flog that dead horse forever and ever. But one of the things people forget is that when they held Civil War reunions, they would go to Gettysburg and the Confederates, and the Union guys would all come, and they would camp out together and they would reminisce and whatnot. It was the politicians who kept alive, because the issue of race and segregation in the South and Jim Crow. It was the politicians, I think, who exploited the divisions as a way of seizing power and looting the South to some degree. There are certain issues from the Civil War that have never been reconciled about state's rights, the extent of federalism, the degree to which the federal government can enter into people's lives, create rules and regulations and whatnot. I think those were flaws that were inherent in the original Constitution. The Constitution never took on the problem of race. It created a fiction. It solved the problem. So, I do not think it has to do with the (19)60s so much. So, it is like when somebody interviewed me about the Tea Party phenomena, I think the Tea Party phenomena is a version of populism that comes back over and over again. There is a libertarian sensibility to it. There is an anti-elitist sensibility to it. There is a nativist wing in it. There is a kind of evangelical part of it. But these things are always out there. They are always there. They have been there since almost the founding, but certainly since the 19th century and with immigration, whatnot. And so, one of the things that makes the United States distinct from, although this is also [inaudible] one of the reasons we do not have a social democracy is because we have these much larger racial ethnic divisions. And so, like in Ireland, if somebody says, "Okay, well, I am being taxed for social security." They are thinking, "Well, it is going to go to somebody who is like my mom." Not maybe my mom or maybe my mom is dead, but "It is going to go to somebody who is like me." SM (02:20:40): Who needs it. ML (02:20:40): Whereas here, people say, "Well, it is going to go to those welfare queens and it's going to go to things. And I do not want that, I do not want that." SM (02:20:48): It is a different mentality. ML (02:20:50): It is a very different mentality. And I think what happens is that as has happened in Yugoslavia under the Serbian nationalism, that people step in and they exploit these anxieties, these fears of marginalization, these economic uncertainties. And they say, "Okay, if you are a Serb, the only one who is going to take care of you is a Serb. If you are a white middle class male, it is white middle-class males who are going to take care you. Those other guys are trying to pick your pocket and give your money to the undeserving." So back to your question somewhat, the sense that we are hopelessly forever divided. Yeah, Americans are a nation that... The idea of the nation itself is a fiction. It is like Ed Morgan wrote a wonderful little book called Inventing the People. And there is another wonderful book out there, Imagine Nation. It is Benedict Anderson's book about nationalism and national identity. SM (02:22:10): Are they recent books? ML (02:22:12): Ed Morgan's books about 15 years old, 10 years old. Benedict Anderson's book is from the 1980s. It is called Imagined Communities. But one of the things that Anderson, he was a professor at Cornell, an Irishman, my background. It is the most often cited book in social science literature. Imagined Communities. SM (02:22:36): What is his first name? ML (02:22:37): Benedict. SM (02:22:38): Benedict. ML (02:22:39): But one of the purposes of the book, it is a very brief old book. It is like 200 pages, and he is a specialist on Southeast Asia. But one of the ways he put it is, "Why is it that if some guy from California gets kidnapped in South America?" He would not have used this specific, but an example like this, "Why is it that you and I feel aggrieved? We will never meet the guy. We do not live in California. The guy lives 3000 miles away and we are pissed off. What is it that makes us see ourselves as part of the same community?" And he develops some theories in there about that. But one of the things that I argue to my students that creates division is a lot of people live in different cultural space and different cultural time. Some people embrace metro sexualism and multiethnic and multicultural. They live in a world that they do not think it is odd to see somebody who is Japanese with somebody who is Nigerian. It is the world they live in. They both got good jobs. They both love the party. Of course, they are together. Whereas in our generation, if you saw something like that, people would be absolutely agog- SM (02:23:57): Guess who is coming to dinner [inaudible]. ML (02:23:59): But one of my colleagues was saying, she is an African American woman, grew up in the Catskills, and she was down on the subway in New York City in the last 10 years or so and they have got down towards the battery and whatnot. And I think the train was headed to Brooklyn ultimately. And she looked around the car and, in the car, I do not think there was a single white person in the car, but Asians and Africans and Indians and this and that, just this mélange of people, classic New York City. All of sudden the door opens, these four people get on it, and they are wearing satin Ole Miss baseball jackets. And they take one look at this car, one guy turns the other and he says, "Are we in America?" SM (02:24:49): Well, that is America. ML (02:24:53): Yeah, exactly, it is. And the question is, for them in Mississippi, and this was not a racist... This was not some guy who has called the Klan to attack the car. It was just they had never experienced this. And it is like whenever we are in New York, you just look around yourself and you think, "I live up here in vanilla heaven." But New York, the diversity is so profound. And I think that there are people who embrace that and live in it, are cosmopolitan. And there are people who are frightened to death of it. And they are all Americans. And those divisions, the biggest divisions in the US have always been east versus west and urban versus rural and Protestant versus others. So, those things are still with us, and I think always will be. SM (02:25:56): Well, Senator Muskie, he said that... He did not even comment on 1968, was he thought the students... Because he was the nominee. He thought they would talk about the convention. And he said in very simple terms, he did not answer right away. We have this. I had the videotape of this too. He died six months later. And he said, "We have not healed since the Civil War on the issue of race." And he started going and talking about it. And then he said, "We lost 430,000 men." He had just seen the Ken Burns series in the hospital, and it really touched him. Almost an entire generation had been wiped out. The other thing I wanted to ask is the issue of... Well, a couple things. Many members of the boomer generation thought they were the most unique generation in history because they were going to be the change [inaudible] for the betterment of society. They were going to end racism, sexism, homophobia, war, bring peace. Nothing was ever going to be the same again. So, there was a real optimism, a sense of community, a sense of comradery, togetherness, the movements, there seems to be arm and arm. Whereas today, many people think that that arm and arm has now become very special interest. Rarely do they come together except in crises, which we see on university campuses. Do you think this generation was the most unique in its history? And secondly, is one of the major characteristics of this generational a lack of trust, that they just do not trust people because they saw so many government leaders lie? ML (02:27:30): Well, Americans have always been [inaudible]. Remember Mr. Finley, Peter Dunn, Mr. Dooley, "Trust everyone, but cut the cards." I think cynicism about public figures and about public life is fairly entrenched. Whether it is the most unique, I think only demographically, only by size. Not in terms of its culture or cultural values. Every generation is unique, just different. I think that one of the ways to get a handle on this, and I think that Thomas Frank, he had a book on advertising- SM (02:28:19): Oh, not that one. ML (02:28:20): What is the Matter with Kansas? SM (02:28:22): Yeah, that is the one. ML (02:28:25): He, I think, was really on to something. And I think that what has changed America that makes it seem like... Leads to the world of Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone. The Bowling Alone one. Part of it is just that the shift of women into the workforce, so that a lot of community building that went on in the (19)50s and (19)60s had to do with women who created community organizations, PTAs and this and that. Well, now that women are working full time and whatnot. There is much less time and energy left for civic engagement or even social civic engagement because there are all kinds of organizations and whatnot that are troubled, are struggling to survive, struggling to keep volunteer fire companies that... And the other thing I think that happened is that from the (19)20s into the (19)50s, you really had truly the development of mass media. And that is somewhat uniform, with some exceptions. There were local... Say local newspaper, local radio. But you really did get this creation of a broad mass national culture and mass national institutions like those Hollywood studios and the broadcast networks and big publishing houses. The music industry was dominated by five record companies, that sort of thing. And it is really the advent of cable television and the internet. And also, this is one of those arguments that also James Gilbert made his argument in his book on the (19)50s on juvenile delinquency, that advertisers began to shift away from seeing broad mass audiences to which they wanted to sell Marlboros or Chevrolets or Whirlpool dryers, to demographically fragmented markets. Teen market that you could sell teen products, you could sell Clearasil, or you could sell transistor radios and whatnot. And that increasingly, when growing up as a kid, you knew exactly what your friends watched on television because you had one or two... Now, Ithaca was different to some degree because they had cable television early because there was no transmission into that area. So, they had to bring it in by cable. So, you may have had two- SM (02:31:15): We had four. Well, we got Syracuse because my mom liked Kate Russell. Do you remember her? ML (02:31:21): Yeah. SM (02:31:22): She was on. And then there was Ed Murphy, with Hollywood Matinee on the... But in the (19)50s, they showed a lot of those films during the summertime. But we watched ABC, NBC, CBS. We got cable. We had a cable channel. ML (02:31:38): Well, that is what I am saying is that was... Because I remember that in Ithaca when I was a student there, you could sometimes get New York City stations, they would come on the cable. But I think that what has happened is that the market is now heavily fragmented. So, you have programming that is designed for old farts, the news, 60 Minutes. And advertising that is targeted for specific demographics. And so that what the mass media has become factional, meek media. You got 200 plus channels that you can watch so that, you have 500,000 people watching the Food Channel and 500,000 people watching Comedy Central and 500, 000 people watching AMC and maybe have a few million who are watching ABC. SM (02:32:36): Then you got the college students watching Family Guy. They do watch it. ML (02:32:44): And I think that what means also is that people now get their news from their evangelical station, from Fox News, from PBS, depending on what your prejudices are. So, you can educate your prejudices. You are not forced to negotiate contested space. And so, I think that feeds this sense of self- importance or you can be anything you want to be or have it your way. It is this celebration of self and that every life is a project self-creation in which we underplay the degree to which we are dependent on- SM (02:33:35): It is like the [inaudible] now that the advertisement that is geared toward the boomers, it is because they taught the constant retirement. The advertisement is about retirement. Dennis Hopper, before he passed away, was on that ad, "You are going to be different here." ML (02:33:47): But it used to be James Whitmore who advertised to the elderly. Now it is the boomers themselves. But yeah, and the advertising, it is sort of like, "Where's the money? Where is the market?" And it is always a question of identifying markets. But now, the biggest demographic is 24 to 45 because they are the highest spending demographic, and they buy big ticket items, cars, and whatnot. Whereas people, when they get over 60, they already have their house, their furniture, their this. They are not consumers in the same way. So, they will buy health insurance, or they will buy a retirement property or something like that. Again, it is the way election campaigns are now run. And it is why the national parties are increasingly irrelevant because there is a local demographic that determines how every congressman's going to run, how every senator is going to run, whatnot. Because they have their peculiar local demographic, which through gerrymandering, they can make exquisitely the way they want it. SM (02:35:12): Were there specific books that you felt were important to you, books that you read when you were in high school and college that were very influential and because you liked them, and you read them, and they influenced you? ML (02:35:33): There definitely were things like Catcher and Rye, Mark Twain. I tended to like cynical types. I read all the things that other... Lord of the Flies and that generation of literature. But I was interested in history early on and read about the Rise and Fall Reich and read a certain amount about politics. SM (02:36:01): And were you a Landmark Books person? ML (02:36:03): I was. I read them all. When there were 50, I read them all. And I read Battle of Britain, I read about 12 times. SM (02:36:09): By golly, I still have mine. Do you still have yours? ML (02:36:10): Yeah. SM (02:36:12): Yeah. And how about the Bruce Catton books on the Civil War, which were popular? ML (02:36:17): I did not read those. I was never a Civil War buff, though since then I have taught the Civil War [inaudible]. And I am interested in the Civil War as a historical phenomenon. And I also, I think the episode of Ken Burns thing, when they get to Gettysburg and the Gettysburg Address. I get tears in my eyes. Listening to the Gettysburg Address in the context of the battle and whatnot. SM (02:36:46): They have redone the building. I go about 10 times a year. I only live an hour and a half away. And I see something every time I go, different times a year. And they would redone where he wrote... Well, he arrived on the train, stayed at this hotel, and [inaudible] paid $3 to look into a room, which was the most ridiculous thing. I refused to do that. Now you go into the hotel. It is really the way it was. He redone it the way Lincoln... Exactly the way it was. Yeah, I just wrote down some books here that the people were influenced on. I had talked about The End of Ideology, because I think Daniel Bell's book was a major piece of literature. And Charles Reich's Greening of America and Roszak's Making of a Counterculture was required reading in our graduate school program. ML (02:37:32): But see, I think those were later. A lot depends on when... One of the things I argue in my book also is that there were certain kinds of mildly subversive, or like The Affluent Society or Organization Man. SM (02:37:50): White Collar. ML (02:37:51): White Collar, C Wright Mills. The people who said to you, "Things are not what they seem," or "There are other ways to think about this, that all is not perfect in the kingdom. And check out the emperor's clothes." And there was a whole string of his and Betty Friedan and Rachel Carson. SM (02:38:11): And certainly, the beat writers. ML (02:38:13): The beat writers, also. Michael Harrington. SM (02:38:16): Oh yeah, the other America. ML (02:38:18): And then there was... What is his name? Paul Goodman and so forth. So, there were a whole range of these things out there if one had an appetite for them. And actually, one of the most formative mind shifting moments for me came when I was taking diplomatic history at Cornell from Walter LaFeber. SM (02:38:39): He is a good get. ML (02:38:40): I think he was a new left historian, a student of Fred Harrington's and William Appleman Williams at Wisconsin. Where you got to the end of the World War II, and we are talking about the decision to drop the atom bomb. And this was the year that Gar Alperovitz published Atomic Diplomacy, which none of us were aware of but Walter LaFeber clearly read it. And he said to us, "People have always thought that the had a bomb was dropped on Japan to end the war quickly, which is what Truman explained." He said, "But in fact, there is serious evidence that indicates that the bomb was dropped on Japan, not to end the war quickly, but to send a message to the Soviet Union." And this was just one of those accepted truisms of Cold War America. It never occurred to you that it was anything but the way it had been always explained to you. And then the idea that there was another way to understand this phenomenon. It was like, "Huh?" It really shook the foundations. And it was not that... I was capable of certain amount of cynicism. It was just that there were just certain building blocks that no one had ever had the courage to publicly attack him and until Alperovitz. Now most of us do not agree with Alperovitz, we think that his case is distorted, et cetera. And there's truth to it. But he certainly changed the debate about the decision to drop the atom bomb. SM (02:40:20): What is amazing is one of my last interviews, a person I talked about the first time he became cynical, he said, "It is because I admired Eisenhower. I looked up to him. He was a World War II hero. But I also watched him on television when he said that Gary Powers was not a spy. And then within a week or two later, they had to admit that he was a spy. He lied to me on television and all of a sudden, a light bulb went on." ML (02:40:51): Yeah, right. I do think people do have those defining moments where the unthinkable, you see, it is right there in front of you. And that belief is not viable any longer. SM (02:41:05): I had these... These were mostly (19)60s books, but the Soul on Ice with Eldridge Cleaver, and certainly... Harold Brown wrote a book that I thought was very influential. ML (02:41:14): Love Without Fear. Or that was Norman- SM (02:41:16): How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World. Do you remember that book? ML (02:41:19): I do not know that I do remember that. This was not Harold Brown who went on to be Secretary of- SM (02:41:26): No-no, no-no. The Harold Browne that ran on the... I think it was a Green Party ticket for a while. He was an independent, he passed away. ML (02:41:34): I was thinking of Norman O'Brown who wrote a book on love and death or something. SM (02:41:39): Yeah, this guy was... He wrote a book, How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World. And then the other one was Dr. David Rubin, What You Need to Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask. ML (02:41:52): That was big. And I also included Playboy and Hugh Hefner and Mad Magazine. Mad Magazine was big. It was so irreverent that... SM (02:42:06): I still have some old Mad Magazines here. ML (02:42:08): Have you ever read, by the way, there is this wonderful book, The Wonderful World of Kavalier and Clay? SM (02:42:14): No. ML (02:42:15): Michael Chabone, I think his name is. SM (02:42:17): No. ML (02:42:18): It is such a wonderful read if you like the world of comic books and whatnot. SM (02:42:21): Oh, yeah. Well, I have a box of comic books that are from the (19)50s, but most of them are all Westerns. I kept all my Westerns. ML (02:42:30): All I can tell you is this is mostly about creating the superheroes and whatnot. But it is a wonderful read. I highly recommend it. SM (02:42:39): I am getting down to my last two questions here. This tape goes for about two hours, I think. So, we are getting near the end there. These are some questions about Rachel Carson. Because I just think... I have two other biographies on her, so I want to learn even more about her even from... This is so good. But I just have to say it. You indicate in your book on Rachel Carson that she was different from the outset in many ways. A female scientist where men dominated the profession. She had role models like [inaudible] where money was less important than ideas. Is not her story, like many of the boomer generation who recognized injustice and tried to write it or, like her, saw nature threatened and tried to do something about it, this kind of, what I consider, a selfless as opposed to a selfish reason for doing things? The second thing I say here about Rachel Carson, Rachel Carson was a woman who was aggressive in her style, very obviously she was. And she spoke up at a time when women were supposed to be seen and not heard. A great role model for feminism and the environmental causes that were to follow her life, especially with Earth Day in 1970 and the women's movement that was searching for role models. I think this book, as well as other books, need to be read more by more people because her life has meaning. I have read Silent Spring a long time ago as a book, but I really never read in depth about her as a person. So, I just think she is an unbelievable... She is a one of a kind. ML (02:44:28): She is a uniquely talented person. One of the things that you wanted to do, psychologize her, if you look at... She is like Franklin Roosevelt in that she is her mother's special prize. SM (02:44:45): You are right. Marian or is it, Maria? I forget. ML (02:44:49): Maria Carson. SM (02:44:50): Maria, yes. Yeah. ML (02:44:50): But this was a case where her mother essentially devoted her life to Rachel. So, in many ways it was confining, but in other ways it was very liberating. And I think that it gave her a sense of specialness all her life. And one of the things I always found remarkable is she never seemed to resent the demands her mother made on her. Although I think they became more extreme as her mother approached the end of her life, and that she was always very satisfied with the living arrangement that they had because it did free her to do her work in a lot of ways. And also, to have somebody who teaches you how to notice, who teaches you how to record and to discriminate and just spends a lot of intimate mental time with you. And I think that it made Rachel Carson different from other kids. I am sure any community she was in, that people always saw her as a little bit over there. Not dangerous, not offensive, not threatening really, but different, very different. But she was comfortable with the difference. So, I do not think she was one of these people who was particularly vulnerable to the potential taunts and jeers of... I do not think she really provoked them, does not seem that she provoked them very much. And I think that this is also somebody who was always basically quite serious. It was not that she did not have a sense of humor, but I think she took the world very seriously and her causes profoundly seriously. And in that sense, she was an extremely private person who in some ways lived a public life. Always that kind of contradiction. But she's somebody who hated public speaking, much preferred to write. And as I say, that is one of the things that intrigued me about her and also daunted me when I took up the book is how do you write a book about somebody who was such an elegant writer, but the person you're writing about is in a sense so much more...? SM (02:47:28): Well, you bring up also very important in here because I am a higher ed person about role models and people. You referenced several faculty members, and I had very important faculty members when I was in graduate school too that had an influence on me and pushed me to be better than I could ever be. They had faith in me, and she had people who had faith in her, a couple women, the one at Johns Hopkins, and one was even going to get married, but decided not to get married, her career was more important at that particular juncture. That was a very important role models, because we were talking... She died in (19)62, but we are talking the 1950s here. Is she truly symbolic of many women who were smart, well-informed, well-educated, but because of the attitudes that men had toward women in those days, do not speak up, be seen and not heard, she is the epitome of a role model that... "No-no. We have something to offer." ML (02:48:31): There was the occasional person like Paul Brooks, her editor or her boss at the Fish and Wildlife, who recognized her talent and nurtured it and created opportunities for her. But yeah, if you think about the job she had, she was basically an exquisite secretary for all the scientists who were too lazy or too incompetent to write literate reports for the Fish and Wildlife Service. They went to her, and she edited them and published them. And so, she was taking care of their business for them. She ran a small publishing company that served their interests, though she was paid decently for it and whatnot. And within her little realm, she had some authority. But by and large, hers was a service operation, not... And somewhat secondary to the primary purpose of the agency. She did however, being a resourceful person and socially adroit in some ways, she created lots of opportunities to go to visit facilities around the country and develop her network of friends in the science community and whatnot. And so, she was the author of a lot of her own success. I wish I had asked questions when I interviewed Senator Nelson about her because his- SM (02:50:01): ... about her because his hero or the person he really looked up was Leopold. ML (02:50:07): Oh yeah. He is from Wisconsin. SM (02:50:08): Yeah. ML (02:50:10): [inaudible] a homeboy. SM (02:50:12): And of course, during the anniversary this past year, because I interviewed Tia, his daughter. ML (02:50:20): Tia Nelson or Tia LaFeber? SM (02:50:21): Tia Nelson, a daughter of Gaylord. ML (02:50:23): Was that your classmate, Gretchen? GL (02:50:26): Who? ML (02:50:26): Was it William Proxmire or Gaylord Nelson's daughter who was a classmate of yours in high school? One of them, I am pretty sure you said was. GL (02:50:36): Do not remember. ML (02:50:38): He is the senator from Wisconsin. I thought it was Gaylord Nelson. GL (02:50:46): No, I do not think so. SM (02:50:48): Tia said that... This was the big anniversary year of Earth Day. ML (02:50:54): Yes, the 40th. SM (02:50:55): She was fearful that they were starting to forget Gaylord Nelson, that other people were. ML (02:51:01): Some of us remember. SM (02:51:04): But I bet you if Gaylord Nelson, if she had been alive, probably he would have picked her to be one of the main speakers at Earth Day. ML (02:51:11): Oh, absolutely. She would have been natural for it. And she most certainly would have written another important book in the interim. And actually, there were a whole series of majors. I just happened to read just before you came, I finished a manuscript for University of North Carolina Press, which is sort of a history of DDT in which she obviously figures quite prominently. SM (02:51:36): Oh, you are writing a book on it. ML (02:51:38): No. This is a book I read the manuscript for the press. Should they publish it or should not they? And one of the things he talks about is the later thing where there was this series of in Michigan, then Wisconsin, and then in Washington of legal battles over the toxicity of DDT and the ability of state or federal agencies to regulate or eliminate it. And so, she certainly would have been very centrally involved in that discussion. It would have interesting to see where she would have gone next. SM (02:52:20): How old is she? She was... ML (02:52:21): She was 57 when she died. SM (02:52:23): Too young. Too young. Too young. I just mentioned here that there is the light bulb thing. Obviously with Rachel Carson your book goes into when her light bulb went off in terms of pesticides and so forth. But Jane Fonda is a very controversial figure within the anti-war movement. And I have had people for and against her, but one of them has said point-blank that she really wanted to get out of the Barbarella mentality. She talked about Vietnam and came back from France because she had a mind, she just was not a body. It was kind of a light bulb there too, and certainly Betty Friedan being the housewife. How did you become who you are? What were your college years like and how did you become professor? ML (02:53:21): Well, my interest in history, partly probably the person who most shaped it was my grandmother, who was a professional librarian but always interested in foreign affairs and read history. I was quite close to her. And also, it was just partly I was intrigued by her history, because her father had been in the New York State legislature with Theodore Roosevelt and her husband was, I think he was editor of the Princeton newspaper, yearbook, something, when Woodrow Wilson was president of Princeton. And that is how my mother's family became Democrats. They came from a very Republican world, and they converted to being Democrats because of Wilson's influence. My parents were both heavy readers. But the big thing after that was when I went to... And I always did well in history; I have a memory for it. I read, like you read, the landmark books and was interested in biography and intrigued by the people's life stories and whatnot. And when I was an undergraduate at Cornell, the history department there was fairly young and filled with people who became real luminaries, but who were real teachers and in some ways mensches. David Davis was there, Don Kagan, the [inaudible], was the conservative. He's father of Bobby and Freddy Kagan. SM (02:55:07): Wow. ML (02:55:07): And good, close personal friend of George Will. But Don was there. And Michael Kammen won the Pulitzer Prize when I was an undergraduate. So did Davis won it. And Walter LaFeber was my advisor. SM (02:55:26): He wrote a book on Vietnam, I think. Did not he? I thought he wrote something on... ML (02:55:29): LaFeber? SM (02:55:30): Yeah. ML (02:55:30): He did eventually, but his big book at that time was called The New Empire, and it was sort of the basis for his career, where he revisited the causes of the Spanish American War and argued against the idea of accidental empire. It is really a book about empire by design. But it was about the new colonialism, the non-administrative economic colonialism. Anyway, he is somebody who you develop a kind of hero worship when you are a kid. Well, I admire him as much today as I did when I was an undergraduate. He had enormous influence on me, partly because he was a really wonderful family person. And then at the time, most of the faculty children are crazy. And I thought the price of going into higher education is to have a nutso family. Well, I think a lot of the people who entered into academia in the (19)50s and (19)60s were not tradition, because there was so much expansion that a lot of non-traditional types, Jews and ethnics and whatnot, went into academia. And they were very ambitious. They wanted to be accepted and be as good and better and whatnot. And I think he took a big toll on their family lives. But from Walter LaFeber, I thought you can be politically relevant and engaged but still be an academic and you can be a family person. One of the things that was a characteristic of the (19)60s, it was in my graduating classic at Cornell, of the 25 top ranked liberal arts students, 23 of them, and I was not one of those 25, but all went into non-for-profit career tracks. And I would guess from the 1980s and on, the pattern was reversed. That 23 out of 25 probably went into finance, law, business of some kind. And so, relates to your question you asked earlier about service and whatnot, I do think that there was a sense of wanting to make a difference, of contributing. It did not mean military service. And I am now a powerful, I feel this powerfully, I am not doing much about it, but a real believer in public service. That at some point, whether there probably should be two moments in somebody's life, either when you graduate from high school or when you graduate from college, where you have to do a year of public service. It does not have to be in the military; it could be in the military. It could be in the forest service. It could be health service. It could be Peace Corps. It could be create some [inaudible] job corps where you work, mentor to inner city kids, or you work in retirement communities, or whatever. But for a year you have to be trained to do something useful to help other people. SM (02:58:45): Buckley talked about that in his book, Gratitude, William Buckley, which I supported. Of course, students do not want to be told what to do, but I support two years of public service, similar to what happens in Israel. You do not have to go in the military, but I believe you need to give back in some way. And I think we have a president now that if he saw more of that, then it would help them toward their graduate degrees if they want to go on to graduate school and things like this. ML (02:59:17): Well, and also, I think it would change people's trajectories. I think a lot of people who just, for the lack of imagination or the lack of exposure, just fall into, "Oh, my father is a lawyer; I will be a lawyer." Or "Bankers make a lot of money; I will be a banker." Or whatever. I think that if you got training in something, you might decide, "I could make a life out of this. I could do this." Not everybody would, but not everyone should. But it would make a huge difference. And I think people would value themselves more than they do. SM (02:59:54): Can you list some of the tangible results or deeds of members of the boomer generation? They are 48 to 64. We all know about Bill Gates, we know what he has done, and Steve Jobs. We know they are boomers. But are there boomers that stand out? I only got about 10 minutes here left. And this might end, and I got a little dinky tape in here to end it. Are there boomers that really stand out, that you think really they had lived the idealism of the (19)60s throughout their entire lives? ML (03:00:26): Oh, maybe somebody like Paul Farmer. SM (03:00:29): Now, who is Paul Farmer? ML (03:00:35): Way out in the mountains, the guy who is in Haiti, the doctor in Haiti. There certainly have been a fair number of creative people who left an imprint. Funny the way you have framed the question, are there heroes of sports, heroes of science? SM (03:01:03): I did not say anything about sports. ML (03:01:06): Well, there have been some sports figures. Well, he was not a baby boomer, so... Oh, he may have been actually, like Curt Flood. SM (03:01:14): This is my last question here, so I am going to get to it. ML (03:01:24): I have had friends that have gone on to high achievement and people that I know who have lived good life, my older brother. Although he was not a boomer, because he was born in 1940, but he was involved in public education his whole life and always committed to it. There have been academics, like one of my classmates at Yale also. Again, I do not know if he is quite a baby boomer, but Donald Worcester and Bill Cronon as historians have been pioneers in the environmental studies movement, environmental history. So, there are not any, probably when you are gone, I will think six right in a row, particularly impressed with or done great things. A lot of courageous women who have broken a lot of barriers along the way. SM (03:02:38): [inaudible] the tape. ML (03:02:40): Hillary deserves a lot of credit. SM (03:02:42): Oh, definitely. ML (03:02:43): What she is accomplished, not without controversy. SM (03:02:53): This is getting down to the last question here really before I have a question on a legacy that ends it. Here it is. It is a little takeoff of what I just asked. What personalities between 46 today do you feel had the greatest impact on the generation that came of age after World War II? I broke it down into names, events, and trends. I like your comments. These are the people that I felt were the most important to the boomer generation and they had the greatest impact on. JFK, Martin Luther King, Richard Nixon, Jackie Robinson, Lyndon Johnson, Walt Disney, Hugh Hefner, the Beatles, Elvis and Reagan. Now those are the people that I thought had the greatest impact on the boomer generation. ML (03:03:47): And do you mean outside of the context of the (19)60s? You mean in the entire post-war era? SM (03:03:56): Yeah, both good and bad. ML (03:03:57): Okay. Nobody mentioned Jim Morris. I am joking. SM (03:03:58): Yeah, I know. ML (03:04:03): I am joking about that. I would have to say that there have been some writers, certainly. I think of people like Barry Commoner. SM (03:04:13): Okay. ML (03:04:15): Ralph Nader. SM (03:04:17): Let me- ML (03:04:25): ... coming up behind us. But then we have got to be careful that we are looking through a clear windshield and we see the road ahead as well. That is best I could put it. SM (03:04:37): The free speech movement in 1964, which was at Berkeley in (19)64, (19)65 was the precursor to many things that filed on university campuses in the late (19)60s. But keeping in mind that the free speech movement also was linked to Freedom Summer when many of those students who were down, a lot of them, Jewish, white Jewish students, and Catholic students, and Catholic priests, and African Americans who went south and came back to college campuses, and Berkeley was one of them. And of course, their whole free speech movement was about ideas and challenged the corporate mentality. And that, from one thing to the next, and freedom of speech is important, and liberty is important, because I know you are a man who loves liberty. And liberty is what it is all about, and freedom of speech is a very important part of it. And I think when you talk about what you talked about-about Chicago in (19)68, I think what you are saying is that it was sad that there was confrontation there, but that freedom of speech should always be guaranteed no matter what. And that liberty is why we are all here. I hope what you are saying is that liberty, some things, like you talked about the Republican Party, they are doing things that from the past they should be reinventing themselves or whatever, but liberty is forever. And so, whenever freedom of speech is denied, we need to be out there guaranteeing that it continues. Are there any thoughts you have on this generation that grew up after World War II? They are now 64 years old; they are going into senior citizen status right now. They probably will change it. But any thoughts of how the history books will write about this period in terms of- ML (03:06:39): Well, Tom Brokaw has already written about the Greatest Generation. You are wanting me to look ahead beyond that, I guess. And somehow, I have the feeling that they are going to do all right. I am not a purveyor of doom and gloom. SM (03:07:01): Good. ML (03:07:02): I do not think the world is going to end tomorrow if somebody's political program is not adopted in haec verba, in all particulars. I think we will find a way. I have great reverence and respect for the capacity of the free American spirit. Sometimes it lags a bit, takes some time to catch up, but I think our freedoms will endure. SM (03:07:40): You were in Congress in probably one of the most exciting times in American history, the (19)60s and seventies. To me, they were exciting times. Because you even talk about the constant of change, which is what the boomer generation wanted, but a lot of the people in politics were doing the very same thing. Just from the going to work every day and working with other congressmen, senators and having people come in that cared about civil rights and all the other issues that we were facing in America at the time. You talked about the moment you are most proud of, which was the 1968 law that was passed. You obviously talked to a lot of people. Give me a feel, because when we are talking about boomer times, we're also talking about congressional times. (19)60 to (19)80 was the key time when young people were growing and evolving from that generation. And you were in Congress at the time. What was it like? Who were your best cohorts? Who did you love working with? ML (03:08:54): Mo Udall. SM (03:08:55): Oh, what a great man. ML (03:08:56): Mo Udall from Arizona was my bosom friend, and I wish he had won the nomination and been elected president in 1976, because then I would not have had to run in 1980. He would have been running for his second term, and I would have been supporting him. So, I think that good men and good women are going to arise as the need occurs that will keep us on the path that we should be on. I just have a great feeling of confidence in the capacity of the American system for renewal and for a new generation to provide the kind of leadership that is needed. I am not one who believes our best days are behind us. I think that they still lie ahead. SM (03:10:07): And Mo Udall was your best friend then? ML (03:10:09): Yes, he was. Head and shoulders above anyone else. SM (03:10:14): He was a good man. No question about it. I think his brother just passed. ML (03:10:20): Well, it has been great talking to you. SM (03:10:21): Yep. Thank you very much. Let me take four more pictures and then I will go. ML (03:10:23): Yeah, that is right. You have got to take some at the end. SM (03:10:24): Yep. ML (03:10:28): I did not even look to see whether my hair was combed very well. SM (03:10:32): You are fine. ML (03:10:32): I hope it is. SM (03:10:34): You are fine. ML (03:10:34): And I am sitting here in my stocking feet and my leisure clothing. SM (03:10:43): You still talk to any former congressmen now, that you worked with? ML (03:10:48): Well, occasionally. SM (03:10:59): Was not there one, a powerful one? Phil Burton from California. ML (03:11:03): Oh, Phil, yes. SM (03:11:05): He's still alive, I think. He was a powerful congressman. And then of course there was Ron Dellums. ML (03:11:12): I am not sure that Phil is still alive. I think he has gone. SM (03:11:15): Oh, is he? There is Ron Dellums, who is now the mayor of Oakland. ML (03:11:20): Yes, I remember him. SM (03:11:20): All right. ML (03:11:24): All right, well, can I just sit here and look at you? SM (03:11:27): Yep. I am going to have one last picture in front of your books, because I always like to take pictures. Bear with me as this focuses here. Ready? Sit. ML (03:11:38): All right? SM (03:11:40): And one more from here, then two by your books, and then we are done. ML (03:11:43): All right. SM (03:11:47): And then I guess two over here with your books. ML (03:11:49): Do you want me standing over there? SM (03:11:51): Yep. Is that your congressional, did you have that in Congress? ML (03:11:58): What? SM (03:11:59): This at your desk. ML (03:12:02): That was given to me while I was in Congress, yeah. I cannot remember who gave it to me. SM (03:12:07): All right. ML (03:12:09): I have got another one over here. Mary. Yeah, I guess it is the same thing. You want me here? SM (03:12:16): Yep. ML (03:12:18): All right. SM (03:12:18): You are not allowed to take anything away from Congress? ML (03:12:21): No. SM (03:12:21): You cannot take your chair and all desks have to go back? ML (03:12:25): The desk? No, I bought that. SM (03:12:28): That is your congressional desk? ML (03:12:29): You are allowed to buy your desk. That is a congressional desk. SM (03:12:31): That will be my last shot, you at your congressional desk. ML (03:12:34): All right. SM (03:12:34): So, this is the desk to used when you were in Congress? ML (03:12:37): Oh yeah. That is from my office from my 20 years. SM (03:12:40): My gosh. It is nice. ML (03:12:43): It is a little untidy right at the moment. SM (03:12:46): Well, that is pretty tidy to me. ML (03:12:48): All right. SM (03:12:49): In fact, I think this is one of your books right here. That is the one. I have that book. ML (03:12:54): All right. SM (03:12:56): Okay. ML (03:13:01): I definitely agree that people, even though I am not totally sympathetic to them, but people like Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan had a heavy political footprint, but there have been people like Steven Spielberg or more of John Lucas have been creative. Steve Jobs. I know they are people in there. Stewart Brand. SM (03:13:39): The Whole Earth Catalog. ML (03:13:40): But he created Wired magazine also and has been continually active and generating ideas and connecting people from interesting walks of life. There are obviously some of the people like Sabin and Salk. And I have forgotten the guy who did the birth control pill. SM (03:14:04): Sanger? ML (03:14:05): No. There was some guy who was at, I think, the clinic in Worcester or whatnot who developed the birth control pill. I cannot remember who it was, but there is some person who is centrally identified with it, although it has been a variety. Obviously, someone like John Wood, the realm of sports, at least as a role model. Or Vince Lombardi, a different era. SM (03:14:44): I have not been doing any sports business related to this, although [inaudible] Jackie Robinson and Curt Flood and Muhammad Ali. ML (03:14:52): Muhammad Ali was a big deal. He was in many ways, embodied a lot of the (19)60s characteristics. I would say Barack Obama recently. I was amazed how politically re-energized many of my friends became, my contemporaries, who got interested in politics in a way that they either never had been or had not been for 30 or 40 years. And I think that they found in him a sensibility that, partly it is because he just embodies the idea of merit. Now, it is a very privileged kind of merit. He is well-educated from beginning to end, and he is the essence of professionalism in a way, but with charisma. A professional with charisma. I used to like to think that Barack Obama and Tiger Woods were similar and that they were the best at whoever did what they do, except now we know Tiger Woods is- SM (03:16:08): Falling apart. ML (03:16:09): Deeply corrupt. And so, the analogy is not all that flattering any longer. SM (03:16:16): His wife got a certain lot of money. How many millions? But the events that shaped the boomers more than any other events, I just listed these. And again, you can add or subtract, just terms. Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the three assassinations: JFK, MLK, and Bobby Kennedy, the Chicago Convention of (19)68, Kent State, the McCarthy hearings, the Free Speech Movement, the Vietnam Memorial opening in 1982, the Civil Rights Acts of (19)54, (19)64, (19)65, and (19)68, Watergate, the Berlin Wall coming down, the hostage crisis in Iran, the communism falling all over the world, and 9/11. Those are the events that I consider to be the... And I did not say Yom Kippur War, which I should have. ML (03:17:19): They are also, they are events of several different orders. They are like apples and oranges in a way when you think about them. Some of them are public political events and some of them are cultural events or whatnot. A lot, again, depends. That is why if I made the argument that it is about something to do with demographics or some tipping point in an argument I made about the decline of US oil production, something like that. You already did Sputnik. I think that was a biggie. I think that there have been some cultural moments that are like The Graduate. I would say The Graduate probably had more impact than, say, The Greening of America or any of those books, because it had a much broader, wider public audience. SM (03:18:34): Plastics. Have you thought about plastics? ML (03:18:42): A cute moment. I think that that was either Buck Henry or Terry Southern wrote that line. I am not sure. SM (03:18:51): I do not know. It is a great line. That was 1967, and he was 29 years old. Dustin Hoffman was no youngster when he did that. ML (03:19:01): No, actually he was in his thirties. I think he was 32. But you know what the age difference between Mrs. Robinson and Ben Braddock really was? SM (03:19:11): Oh, probably only about two years. ML (03:19:13): It was six years or seven years. She was 38 or 39. SM (03:19:17): And he was 32? ML (03:19:18): He was 32 or something like that. SM (03:19:20): I never could figure out why she married Mel Brooks. ML (03:19:23): Well, she is a nice Italian girl. Mel Brooks has got to be one of the funniest guys there is. SM (03:19:30): Yeah. That was quite a marriage. ML (03:19:32): But they stayed married, I think. SM (03:19:34): Yeah, they did. And then course she passed away. The movies obviously that come out are certainly Easy Rider and Zabriskie Point was another one that I remember. Or Bob, Carol, Ted and Alice. ML (03:19:48): Although I think that the movies that really had it, Bonnie and Clyde, have had more impact. Because I think that one of the things that happens culturally in the late (19)60s and seventies and affects movies, but more broadly American culture, is the conflation of pornographic sexual and pornographic violence. And that is really what Bonnie and Clyde was about. It was sort of the pornography of violence in which the eroticism of the most erotic moment, in a way, is that balletic death at the end of the movie. There is another version of it in The Wild Bunch, which comes out shortly afterwards, which is Sam Peckinpah. It is where, I like to point out to my students, if you watch a Busby Berkeley movie in the 1930s, there will be these moments, the [inaudible] will be marching towards the camera. The camera will be down low, and the shot will be from low to the high. And they are coming at you, and the camera is focused almost on their crotches. And you start to get a little embarrassed. Should I be looking at this? Is not this getting a little too intimate? And then the person turns away; it cuts away. So, you had this certain confidence that the camera would never let you see more than you should see. In the 1940s and (19)50s, you watch a lot of the westerns, and somebody gets shot, you do not see blood on the wall. They collapse. They get shot; they die. But what happens in these movies is the camera lingers over the scene, and then you think to yourself, "I am watching this, and I am fascinated." I am also repulsed, and I am shocked, but I am watching. There is a certain voyeurism involved in it, just as there is with pornography. And I think that this is one of the things that you see as a consistent trend. So, if you think of a movie like Pulp Fiction in the nineties, where it has now become comedic, where the same things happen. And it is like John Travolta accidentally blows the kid's head off in the backseat of the car, and kid is spattered all over the car and whatnot. And it is sort of like, "Holy shit, why do we do that? How do we fix this?" And I think that that was one of those shifts in the cultural sensibility, which is one of the things that conservatives, and particularly evangelical conservatives, what they are most offended about, is the pornographic elements in contemporary culture. The rules are gone, the censorship is gone, and it has gotten into television. It was already in publishing, in books. So how do you protect your world? SM (03:22:53): I know that people were upset with the play Hair, and because I am in Columbus, the nuns were protesting in front of the theater downtown as we walked in, saying we were all going to hell for going to see Hair because of nudity that was shown in there. So, Jesus Christ, Superstar, Hair, and a lot of the other movies or plays were interesting. And certainly, the movie Taxi Driver too, which was, "Are you talking to me?" That kind of the psyche of the Vietnam veteran coming back and the Vietnam movies. ML (03:23:27): And again, also this dystopian, pathological world. There is a certain kind of psychological disarrangement in the (19)50s, and a lot of it has to do with Freudianism and madness. But this has to do with a kind of profound pathology. SM (03:23:46): And Coming Home and Klute with Jane Fonda. That was her big role. She won the Academy Award. The last thing is trends. I had already talked about events and names. Trends to me, the Beat Generation and the (19)50s... trends to me, the Beat Generation now, the (19)50s, and it seems like Ginsberg went through it all. You could see him everywhere. The counterculture, the communal movement, the alternative religions that we talked about, and certainly LSD and Leary. Those are the kind of trends that I saw that developed. I do not know if there is any more that you... ML (03:24:28): Well, part of it is just different order of trend. There is this way in which capitalism and technology are very restless, and where broadcast technologies are redefined, where the internet emerges in the late (19)60s. ARPANET was created in the late (19)60s, where there is this endless flood of consumer technologies. There is a wonderful book, by the way, which I have out there. It is called The Way We Were. SM (03:25:08): I saw this movie. I saw the movie. ML (03:25:10): But this is a book, I have forgotten her... The woman who wrote sounded like Roberta Kleinfeld or something. But it is just an almanac of events from the mid-(19)50s through the mid-seventies. Each year, it tells you the big events of the years, new technologies, new terms, sports firsts, movie firsts television firsts, the top hit songs of the year. It is this catalog of stuff. And you go back, and you look at it, "Well, this is the year that Pop Tarts were created. This is the year that the term walk became popular." Or whatever. It is sort of like- SM (03:25:49): The Walkman. ML (03:25:50): And one of the things you are amazed at is the varieties of new cultural references and whatnot. The term WASP becomes popular in 1968. SM (03:25:59): Do you know what the number one hit was in America the week that John Kennedy was killed? ML (03:26:05): I shudder to think. SM (03:26:06): (singing) ML (03:26:10): It was the Singing Nun? SM (03:26:10): Yes, it was. ML (03:26:11): Yeah. SM (03:26:13): Because there was a song, you have to go into YouTube, there was a song that was from the... I forget the name of the group. It was the first two days of that week, but then Dominique came in on Wednesday, he was killed Friday, so the number one hit changed, and it was the Singing Nun. ML (03:26:38): There are trends. I guess the biggest trends I would say in the (19)60s really was the shift of the American cultural center of gravity, South and West. And also, demographics, the population moves as well. It becomes so that you have booming populations in the Carolinas and Florida and Texas, Arizona, California. SM (03:27:03): You see the shift of what it was like in the late (19)40s and (19)50s, then you go into the (19)60s, then you see with Reagan, the desire to go back to the (19)50s again, because Reagan came to... I interviewed Ed Meese. I booked an interviewed him for an hour in Washington, and I only talked to him, not about his years with Reagan in the White House, I wanted to talk about his years in California under the governor. ML (03:27:27): Well, because he was Attorney General, was not he? SM (03:27:27): Yeah, and he was- ML (03:27:27): In California? SM (03:27:30): Yeah, he is the guy that oversaw People's Park. ML (03:27:32): Oh, right, yeah. SM (03:27:32): He is the guy, and he was also the assistant DA in Oakland at the time... Excuse me, Alameda County, when the free speech movement was happening, so he was dealing with that too, but he was not dealing... He was not reporting to Reagan. He was reporting to someone else, but Reagan heard about him during the free speech movement (19)64, (19)65. ML (03:27:56): Oh, this is the kind of guy he likes- SM (03:27:56): And that is the kind of guy he would like. And I will tell you a story at the very end here, about him and another person. I know I said this was the last thing, but this is just quick one or two word, just quick responses to these words. These are all people from the (19)60s or events in the (19)60s. You do not have to go into any elaborate... ML (03:28:18): This is a free association. SM (03:28:19): Free association. Alcatraz? ML (03:28:25): Indian takeover. SM (03:28:27): Anita Bryant? ML (03:28:29): Orange juice and homophobia. SM (03:28:33): Hard hats versus long hairs on Wall Street. ML (03:28:37): Yes. John Lindsay and the beating up... Or the war protests. SM (03:28:44): University response to student protests nationwide? ML (03:28:49): How can we shut them up? SM (03:28:50): Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg. ML (03:28:53): A shock. SM (03:28:57): Watts. ML (03:28:59): Disturbing. SM (03:29:00): Earth Day? ML (03:29:02): Earth Day? Hopeful. SM (03:29:04): Ford pardons Nixon? ML (03:29:07): Politically necessary, politically unfortunate. SM (03:29:13): Nixon's Cambodia speech? ML (03:29:17): Final, desperate effort. SM (03:29:19): Chicago Eight or Seven Trial? ML (03:29:23): Farce. SM (03:29:27): Hippies? ML (03:29:29): Hippies were kind of naive saints. SM (03:29:31): Yippies? ML (03:29:31): Yippies? Cynics. SM (03:29:31): FDS? ML (03:29:40): Flawed. SM (03:29:42): The Weathermen? ML (03:29:44): Dangerous. SM (03:29:46): Cesar Chavez. ML (03:29:47): A secular saint. SM (03:29:53): Muhammad Ali? ML (03:29:55): Admirable. SM (03:29:56): Jackie Robinson? ML (03:29:59): Equally admirable. SM (03:30:00): Curt Flood? ML (03:30:02): Somebody I have great respect for. SM (03:30:05): I met him. He was the Oakland A's. He was at a game. ML (03:30:08): Yeah. SM (03:30:09): Got him to sign a thing I had. It is a- ML (03:30:11): One of my students at Bard wrote his senior project about Curt Flood and free agency. SM (03:30:16): But did he get Kurt Flood's book? Did he read his book? ML (03:30:20): I think he read his book. I do not think he ever met... I do not know if he ever got to meet Kurt Flood. SM (03:30:22): He died so young. He was 50. He was the same age Jackie Robinson... 51, 52? ML (03:30:28): Yeah, yeah. SM (03:30:30): Benjamin Spock. ML (03:30:31): Benjamin Spock? Patrician. SM (03:30:37): Henry Kissinger? ML (03:30:38): A criminal. SM (03:30:41): Robert McNamara. ML (03:30:45): Unfortunate. SM (03:30:47): Dwight Eisenhower? ML (03:30:49): Avuncular. SM (03:30:51): Harry Truman? ML (03:30:53): Over his head. SM (03:30:55): John Kennedy? ML (03:30:58): Admirable, but corrupt. SM (03:31:01): Lyndon Johnson? ML (03:31:03): Egotist. SM (03:31:04): Hubert Humphrey? ML (03:31:06): A weak-kneed liberal. SM (03:31:10): Richard Nixon? ML (03:31:11): A Black Irishman. SM (03:31:17): Spiro Agnew? ML (03:31:19): A crook. SM (03:31:21): Eleanor Roosevelt? ML (03:31:23): An admirable woman. SM (03:31:27): The United Nations? ML (03:31:29): In over its head. SM (03:31:31): Robert Kennedy? ML (03:31:33): Robert Kennedy? Combative. SM (03:31:35): Eugene McCarthy? ML (03:31:37): Lazy. SM (03:31:39): George McGovern? ML (03:31:41): Well-intentioned. SM (03:31:43): Geraldine Ferraro? ML (03:31:45): A person before her time. SM (03:31:50): Angela Davis? ML (03:31:52): A striking figure. SM (03:31:56): George Jackson? ML (03:31:58): George Jackson? An unlikely hero, I guess. SM (03:32:05): Tom Hayden. ML (03:32:06): Tom Hayden? Embodied the inability of moral consistency in politics. SM (03:32:17): Jane Fonda? ML (03:32:19): Jane Fonda? An idealist. SM (03:32:22): Bobby Seale. ML (03:32:23): Bobby Seale? He was complicated. I met him. SM (03:32:29): That is all I need. How about Stokely Carmichael? ML (03:32:32): He was very charismatic. SM (03:32:35): Huey Newton? ML (03:32:36): Huey Newton was a fraud. SM (03:32:38): Eldridge Cleaver? ML (03:32:40): A little less of a fraud. SM (03:32:42): Kathleen Cleaver? ML (03:32:44): I do not know Kathleen Cleaver well enough to... SM (03:32:46): H. Rap Brown? ML (03:32:48): H. Rap Brown was also a bad dude. SM (03:32:53): Yeah. His brother came to a conference we did. George Wallace? ML (03:32:56): George Wallace was slicker than Willie. SM (03:33:00): Barry Goldwater? ML (03:33:05): Righteous figure, I guess. SM (03:33:09): William Buckley? ML (03:33:11): A glib intellectual. SM (03:33:14): Thurgood Marshall? ML (03:33:17): A man who earned his stripes. SM (03:33:19): Ronald Reagan? ML (03:33:20): A man who was not as bad as I thought. SM (03:33:24): George Bush, the first. ML (03:33:28): A solid public servant. SM (03:33:32): Bill Clinton? ML (03:33:33): Bill Clinton is a morally flawed human being. SM (03:33:38): Bush II? ML (03:33:39): A man who is profoundly over his head. SM (03:33:42): And Obama? ML (03:33:45): Person with the best qualities to be president who has ever been president. SM (03:33:49): Gloria Steinem? ML (03:33:51): A very interesting conversion, I guess. SM (03:33:57): Bella Abzug? ML (03:33:59): She was florid, shall we say? SM (03:34:02): Betty Friedan? ML (03:34:06): She was another person who is quietly subversive. SM (03:34:11): Jimmy Carter? ML (03:34:13): A righteous populist. SM (03:34:14): AIDS? ML (03:34:17): AIDS is tragic. SM (03:34:21): Let us see here. The hostage crisis? ML (03:34:25): Hostage crisis was... I do not know, it was humiliation, I guess. SM (03:34:35): Stonewall? ML (03:34:36): Stonewall? Liberation. SM (03:34:39): And then the POW? ML (03:34:45): POW? I would have to say that was a phony issue. SM (03:34:48): Okay. The Ho Chi Minh? ML (03:34:53): A Vietnamese nationalist. SM (03:34:56): General Ky? ML (03:34:58): A kleptocrat. SM (03:35:01): President Thieu? ML (03:35:03): Another kleptocrat. SM (03:35:05): And Wayne Westmoreland? ML (03:35:07): He looked like a general but was not. SM (03:35:10): And Dennis Banks? ML (03:35:11): Dennis Banks? Let us say- SM (03:35:14): The Native American Movement. ML (03:35:15): I know, I was trying to capture him as a tragic hero, I guess. SM (03:35:23): And Harvey Milk? ML (03:35:24): Another tragic hero. SM (03:35:27): And the last three here is, I have put these on... This ends at, what does the wall mean to you? The Vietnam Memorial? You have probably been to the wall. When you- ML (03:35:38): I have. I wrote a little piece about that also, actually, about- SM (03:35:43): Did you go to the wall? ML (03:35:44): I have been. Yeah, I think it is one of the most powerful and effective pieces of memorialization. I just think that we had an interesting experience out in Seattle, of going to see an installed exhibit of Maya Lin's work. And she is one of these people that has the ability to redefine space. She is a genius. We actually have a portrait of her [inaudible]- SM (03:36:19): Yeah, there is a sculpture at Yale too, was not there? ML (03:36:22): Yeah. She is a Yale graduate, but- SM (03:36:26): What was your experience when feeling, because you were... This is part of your life too, and your wife as well. When you went to the wall, what was the feeling? What was going through your mind when you saw it for that first time? ML (03:36:42): I felt that what it did was, instead of focusing our remembrance on the war, it focuses our remembrance on the people who died in the war. It made the war about them, which it should be. The memory of it, since the war is so hard to remember, that making the soldiers the subject, rather than some heroic or nationalist image, the way the second sculpture, to me is, it represents all that is wrong about the wars. SM (03:37:21): The three-man statue? ML (03:37:22): Yeah, it is too artificial. It is too contrived. Whereas I think what she did was that she found a way to our hearts. SM (03:37:34): They say that the three-man statue is always overlooking the wall now, and the Women's Memorial is very important for the women as well. ML (03:37:42): Yeah, but those were political gestures, I think, more than they were... They do not have the kind of innovative way of... SM (03:37:55): What did Kent State and Jackson State mean to you? May 4th, 1970, to me, is one of the... November 22, 1963, obviously, but for anybody in that first wave of boomers, May 4th, 1970, is another one. And then 10 days later, Jackson State. ML (03:38:13): Oh yeah, no, those things were truly stunning. I went to a series of public gatherings on the Yale campus, where people were trying to make sense out of it. In some ways, it seemed to be just one more step towards, we are at war with ourselves. It is one of the refrains that we picked up from Vietnam. Who is the friend and who is the enemy? And it seems like it was emblematic of a gulf that had... Or wrenching a rift in America that had grown too wide to bridge. Turns out it was not altogether the case, but that was how we felt at the time. Kent State, yeah, if it had been Wisconsin or if it had been Berkeley or Yale even, it would have still been tragic, but it would make more sense. One of the things that always struck me is the people who were in the guard were not that different from the students who were on the campus. SM (03:39:28): Yes, you are right. Same age. ML (03:39:29): Yeah. SM (03:39:30): Watergate. What did Watergate mean to you? ML (03:39:33): Watergate was some of the most absolutely intriguing political theater I have ever witnessed. I think the ultimate moment of Watergate was when you could not believe... It is like one revelation after the other and you say, "Cannot get any nuttier than this. You cannot believe it." Suddenly it turned out that Spiro Agnew was resigning, because he was taking bribes in the White House. I thought, this is melodrama becomes farce. SM (03:40:05): Do you think John Dean was kind of a hero on this? Because a lot of people thought he was a culprit in the beginning, but he was the beginning of what they call the... And Ellsberg, the same thing. They were the tattletale people that- ML (03:40:21): Yeah, right, and being a snitch is always frowned on in America. They did make On the Waterfront to help us explore that terrain, but I do not think that Dean has quite the moral fiber to be heroic, but I do think that he shows the capacity for self-reflection and for reinvention in a constructive way, and so I admire him for having pulled himself together. I think partly it is hard to distinguish how much of what he did was to save his own skin and how much of it was that he was morally offended by what was going on around him. I think it was a little of both and I think over time, the latter, the moral offense, took over from the self-serving side of it. I think Daniel Ellsberg was truly troubled. Ellsberg had been in the war when it was like that. SM (03:41:17): Yeah, he had been a Marine too. ML (03:41:20): He had done the dirty. He had been there. And I think that Ellsberg, again, was somebody who ultimately just became morally burdened. And actually, one of the things that I was curious about that event is that the Pentagon Papers were not a problem for Nixon, they were a problem for Johnson, who was not quite dead then, but was about to be dead around the time. Oh, actually he might have been dead by the time they came out. SM (03:41:50): I remember the day he died- ML (03:41:51): He died in (19)72. SM (03:41:53): ... in (19)72 was the same day something else happened. ML (03:41:55): I think it was the day they signed the Paris Peace Accords. SM (03:41:58): I think you are right. Yes, that is right. Nixon made a reference to the death of the President in a speech, yes-yes. ML (03:42:06): I do not know. SM (03:42:10): In your opinion, when did the (19)60s begin and when did it end, and what was the watershed moment? ML (03:42:14): I still would argue partly that they begin sometime in the mid to late-(19)50s. I think, for a variety of reasons, again, some of the cultural reasons, that the groundwork for the (19)60s... Because I think that what you needed first was a process of delegitimization. Somebody, I think Robert Darton, did a similar study where they discovered that pornographic representation of establishment figures increases on the eve of political revolutions. It is sort of like the delegitimizing of... Mockery of... First, you have to destroy authority before you can overturn it. I think that was one of the things that happened. That black comedy, for example, black humor of the Dr. Strangelove types was, we took the strategic air command, which had this image of technical and vulnerability and of space age candoism, and turned it into this rip-snorting nuthouse, so that you never could look at this Curtis LeMay and the Strategic Air Command the same way again. SM (03:43:31): That was Andy Devine, was not it, that was on the missile, going- ML (03:43:34): No, that was Slim Pickens. SM (03:43:35): Oh, Slim Pickens, okay. [inaudible]- ML (03:43:36): You have got the wrong... Andy Devine was a regular, both the Roy Rogers Show and in John Ford movies. SM (03:43:47): When did the (19)60s end? ML (03:43:50): I would still argue, I have not shifted, even though I do not think there is a specific moment, but the coincidence of Watergate and the end of the Vietnam War, the end of the draft, the end of around (19)73, (19)74, the turning off the fuel supply, so that there's nothing to keep the fires burning as hot or bright as they had. SM (03:44:20): Was Vietnam a watershed moment? Just the ongoing from (19)59 to (19)75? ML (03:44:25): Well, we did not even know from Vietnam until about 1962- 3, somewhere in that. We still did not think about it even until the Gulf of Tonkin. That was the first time we really thought about it. SM (03:44:38): (19)64, yeah. ML (03:44:38): And I think people stopped thinking actively about it as the Vietnamization of the war, and one of the interesting things... The point that Phillip Epstein pointed out a long time ago, when he was talking about the distortions of news, but right around the time that the Peace Talks started in (19)68, (19)69, the news media stopped actively photographing the war and shifted their attention to the peace talks. Even though the war was far more violent from 1968 on, you saw much less of it, so it was not a constant reminder. Every so often, there would be an eruption of protest or an eruption, like Kent State would happen, or a Cambodian incursion would happen. Then things would gear up again, but then they would fade again. I do not think it was the same time. SM (03:45:40): Is there one watershed moment that you can define, or just... ML (03:45:44): Yeah, I met my wife at the [inaudible]- SM (03:45:45): Okay, I got that on record. ML (03:45:53): No, I would say, probably in terms of just emblematic experiences, probably the first time I smoked dope, that was sort of crossing a line. SM (03:46:07): You are the second person that is said that. The first one was the professor of history and political science at the University of Delaware, Dr. Smith. Do you know him? He wrote a book on Vietnam. ML (03:46:16): I do not know him personally. SM (03:46:18): Yeah, he is really good. He is a top political scientist. He was heading to become a priest. He was at the... I do not know what church it was, and a friend of his came by accident with his brother, and they said, "Hey, you want to try a..." He said, "No, I am going to be a priest." "Oh, come on." They went into the church and went up into the steeple someplace and he is smoking... Anyways, that was a very important moment for him. ML (03:46:47): I think the only reason I would say it-it was not that anything so unusual happened or anything. I enjoyed the experience. I was at a party at Johns Hopkins visiting at friend, and Johns Hopkins is a pretty straitlaced place. This was the fall, I think, the fall of 1967, something like that. But I think what it was is that once you crossed over to the world of dope, that you were willing to do things that were illegal. And also, you deepened your identification with the anti-authority, anti-establishment mentality. It was a kind of, I guess, what I would say, it was like an initiation ritual. SM (03:47:41): The Vietnam War, it ended. In your reason, why did it end? Some people say it ended because when body bags start coming home, when Middle America saw their sons coming home, they said, "It is time to end this war." And most of them were White. Now, we are not talking about the African Americans now, we are talking about the White... Others think that Kent State was the magic moment, that it is all over from there. ML (03:48:06): In 1967, when McNamara resigned, he knew the war was lost. Johnson could not persuade himself to wrap himself around that realization. He was too politically invested. It was too much his war. And Nixon was very cynical about it. Nixon knew the war was a loser. He wanted to get out as soon as he became president. He just wanted to get out on his own terms. I think that the war... And the war did not end. In many ways, the war did not end, certainly did not end in (19)72, it did not end in (19)73. It sort of ended in (19)75, but there was still violence galore going on. And so, it is when did the America's Vietnam end, is what [inaudible]- SM (03:49:02): Yeah, the American War, as opposed to the Vietnam War. Two more associations real fast. Timothy Leary. I did not get your ML (03:49:11): Huckster. SM (03:49:11): And the last one is the Free Speech Movement, (19)64, (19)65, of Berkeley with Mario Savio and Bettina Aptheker in that group. ML (03:49:19): I would say, transformative. SM (03:49:22): Very last question, and I swear to this, and your wife can verify this now, I have been here a long time; the best history books are written usually 50 years after an event. A lot of the best World War II books are 50 years after. I remember Stephen Ambrose being interviewed, and he talked all about this. The best history books are history, sociology, whatever books are written after the last boomer has passed away, the last Civil War, and I am sure we will be able to document that someday down the road, in the census. What do you think historians who were not alive, or sociologists who were not alive when all these things happened, will say about this generation and this period? The 74 million that... What do they say about it? ML (03:50:15): I think they're going to say that around the Vietnam War era and around the failure of this generation to come to grips with some of the fundamental contradictions in American history, some of the big ones being environmental, actually, that this was the beginning of the decline of the American Empire, a little bit in this period. Whether they will specifically say it was the Vietnam War era or the Bush era, one of the two, but they are going to mark this as the decline of American hegemony and new age globalization, a different kind of globalization. That is what I think. SM (03:51:03): What is really interesting about President Obama here, he has stated outright that he does not want to be identified with the (19)60s generation or the boomer generation. Of course, he is a boomer. He is only two years old, but- ML (03:51:17): He is the tag end of the- SM (03:51:18): Yeah, but his biggest critics say he is the reincarnation of the baby boomer generation. They say he is the most liberal president we have had since Roosevelt. ML (03:51:27): Yeah, but the- SM (03:51:28): Here, we got a president who does not want to be identified with it. He has so many people in his administration that are some of the leaders of the (19)60s in that particular respect. Most of them are brought up in the (19)60s, and yet he is being criticized for being the... ML (03:51:48): Yeah, but who is doing the criticizing? SM (03:51:50): Well, the conservatives. ML (03:51:54): Because I do not see him as the most liberal. I see him as a Rooseveltian pragmatist. He is somebody, he will take what the times will give him. He has an agenda that is liberal, it is social-democratic, but he also inherited an agenda that demanded social democracy, because the privatization of America bankrupted it. That is what Bush accomplished. We are going to have public services, we are not going to pay for them, and where we need regulation and controls, we are not going to have them, and he created financial economic anarchy. I think that Obama, part of the success that I measure, it is one of the reasons that I think Theodore Roosevelt stands out somewhat, is that he created political movement more theatrically. It was not like the outcomes were there to be grabbed, it took real presidential manipulation, management and whatnot to achieve some of the things that he did. I think that Franklin Roosevelt was less successful in that regard, that he had a potentially more opportunity to seize than he had the temperament to seize. That is, he could have been far more progressive and liberal than he was, but he was really... He had some very conservative side as well. I think that that Barack Obama is more disciplined and intelligent than any president who's ever been... Modern president; I cannot compare them to Jefferson or Lincoln or whatnot, but in the end, it almost does not matter, because it's how you play the hand you're dealt. George Bush was headed to oblivion in a one turn presidency until September 11th came along, and then when the country needed a cheerleader, man, he was golden. Then he got a cheerleading opportunity, and lacking an agenda, but wanting to be in charge and being around all of these ideologues and dark visionaries, he went right down the toilet. SM (03:54:09): Yeah. I tell you, President Obama, in the (19)60s, families were split and torn apart. Well, even my family, my brother's a diehard, cannot stand Obama, I cannot understand it. He knows it upsets me, yet he still sends it. Everything is about getting him out in the next four years, or the next two years or whatever, and it bugs me. He prefaces it by saying that... And this will not be on the tape, but that it is... I am not doing this because he's Black, I just do not like... I was taught in graduate school, I will not say this to my brother, because my advisor was Dr. Johnson. He was at Johns Hopkins University, and he said that whenever you hear somebody saying, "Well, I am not doing something, because my best friends are..." Or "It's not because he's female or male." You do not say that, just say it. You do not need to- ML (03:55:10): Preface it, yeah. SM (03:55:11): Yeah, if you do not like the guy, just say you do not like the guy. ML (03:55:14): Right, right. No, and I think that part of the reasons people do not like him is not because he is Black, it is because they feel diminished by him. They feel he is too good. SM (03:55:26): I think he is very good. ML (03:55:27): He is too smart. SM (03:55:28): Oh, I agree. ML (03:55:28): They do not trust him, because they think he is going to outsmart them and whatnot. SM (03:55:33): Just like her. ML (03:55:34): Yeah. SM (03:55:35): What we teach students and what you probably do in the classroom, and that is what another lesson that the (19)60s activist can teach young people. You do not just do things based on pure emotion. You study, you research, you understand your point of view, and also you study the other side. ML (03:55:52): That is what the conservatives under George Bush refused to do because, as they said, "While the liberals are studying and coming up with good policy proposal, we are changing the agenda. Reality is what we say it is. It is not what it is, it is what we say it is." SM (03:56:08): Is there any question I did not ask that you thought I was going to ask? I think I have asked a million. ML (03:56:13): If there was, I have forgotten. (End of Interview) Description 2 Microcassettes Rights Statement Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Dr. Mark Lytle Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Lytle, Mark Hamilton ; McKiernan, Stephen Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/wav Subject The topic of the resource Scholars; College teachers; Bard College; Lytle, Mark Hamilton--Interviews Description An account of the resource Mark Hamilton Lytle is a scholar and educator. He received his Bachelor's degree from Cornell University and his Master's degree and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University. He is a professor of History and Environmental Studies, Chair of the American Studies Program at Bard College, and has written many volumes of history and biography. 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 2010-08-09 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.10.2016.84a ; McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.84b 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. 236:17 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/5b81b4ca47d15dd45a771fdd0a65f680.jpg 9f14e7674f9263d409d46136bbf4ce67 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/332bec315a07f791fce10cbc3143cda0.mp3 4fa17c6941eaf614bfe44deb28c21ecf 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 2010-08-19/20 Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Stephen McKiernan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Mark D. Naison, 1946- ; Steven Hager Language English Biographical Text <span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Steve Hager is writer, journalist, filmmaker, and counterculture activist. Hager was the first reporter to document the hip hop movement of the South Bronx . Later, he became an editor of High Times and founded the Cannabis Cup. Hager is the leading figure in the hemp legalization movement of the '90s. He earned a Bachelor's degree in Theater (Playwriting), and a Master's degree in Journalism, both from the University of Illinois."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":13059,"3":{"1":0},"4":[null,2,16777215],"11":4,"12":0,"15":"Arial","16":10}">Dr. Mark Naison, a native of Brooklyn, is a Professor of African and African-American Studies and Director of the Urban Studies Program at Fordham University. Dr. Naison, a former political activist, was a member of Congress of Racial Equality and Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s. He is a founder of the Bronx Youth Employment Project, "Save a Generation." He earned his Bachelor's degree, Master's degree, and Ph.D. in American History at Columbia University.<br /><br />Steve Hager is a writer, journalist, filmmaker, and counterculture activist. Hager was the first reporter to document the hip hop movement of the South Bronx. Later, he became an editor of <em>High Times</em> and founded the Cannabis Cup. Hager is a leading figure in the hemp legalization movement of the '90s. He earned a Bachelor's degree in Theater (Playwriting) and a Master's degree in Journalism, both from the University of Illinois.</span> Digital Publisher Binghamton University Libraries Digital Format audio/mp4 Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data 2 Microcassettes Material Type Sound Interview Format Video or Audio Audio Keywords <span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Blue collar workers; Union; Socialists; Anti-communists; Black Panther Party; Optimism; Racism; Depression; Civil Rights Movement; Black women; Midnight black radio; Upward bound Columbia; Hostility; Black Power; Violence; Drugs culture; Prison-industrial complex; Vietnam; Baby boom generation; Unequal nation; Wealth gap."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":515,"3":{"1":0},"4":{"1":2,"2":16370588},"12":0}">Blue collar workers; Union; Socialists; Anti-communists; Black Panther Party; Optimism; Racism; Depression; Civil Rights Movement; Black women; Midnight black radio; Upward bound Columbia; Hostility; Black Power; Violence; Drugs culture; Prison-industrial complex; Vietnam; Baby boom generation; Unequal nation; Wealth gap.</span> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 220:18 Subject LCSH College teachers; African Americans—Study and teaching; Fordham University; Naison, Mark D., 1946--Interviews; Authors; Journalists; Motion picture producers and directors; Marijuana—Law and legislation; Hager, Steven--Interviews Accessibility Copy/Paste below: Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Rights Statement Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Dr. Mark Naison and Steven Hager Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Naison, Mark D., 1946- ; Hager, Steven ; McKiernan, Stephen Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/wav Subject The topic of the resource College teachers; African Americans—Study and teaching; Fordham University; Naison, Mark D., 1946--Interviews; Authors; Journalists; Motion picture producers and directors; Marijuana—Law and legislation; Hager, Steven--Interviews Description An account of the resource Dr. Mark Naison, a native of Brooklyn, is a Professor of African and African-American Studies and Director of the Urban Studies Program at Fordham University. Dr. Naison, a former political activist, was a member of Congress of Racial Equality and Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s. He is a founder of the Bronx Youth Employment Project, "Save a Generation." He earned his Bachelor of Arts, Master of Arts and PhD in American History at Columbia University.<br /><br /><span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Dr. Mark Naison, a native of Brooklyn, is a Professor of African and African-American Studies and Director of the Urban Studies Program at Fordham University. Dr. Naison, a former political activist, was a member of Congress of Racial Equality and Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s. He is a founder of the Bronx Youth Employment Project, \"Save a Generation.\" He earned his Bachelor of Arts, Master of Arts and PhD in American History at Columbia University. Steve Hager is a writer, journalist, filmmaker, and counterculture activist. Hager was the first reporter to document the hip hop movement of the South Bronx. Later, he became an editor of High Times and founded the Cannabis Cup. Hager is the leading figure in the hemp legalization movement of the '90s. He earned a Bachelor's degree in Theater (Playwriting), and a Master's degree in Journalism, both from the University of Illinois."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":515,"3":{"1":0},"4":{"1":2,"2":16370588},"12":0}">Steve Hager is a writer, journalist, filmmaker, and counterculture activist. Hager was the first reporter to document the hip hop movement of the South Bronx. Later, he became an editor of <em>High Times</em> and founded the Cannabis Cup. Hager is a leading figure in the hemp legalization movement of the '90s. He earned a Bachelor's degree in Theater (Playwriting) and a Master's degree in Journalism, both from the University of Illinois.</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 2010-08-19/20 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.10.2016.91a ; McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.91b Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2018-03-29 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. 220:18 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/65a958ce18c1b7be6f8c4b456fd6817c.jpg 4d70d54f3f273a0abb41cebe442ed3d6 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/b389af43142f7802f2a35d8796c9a7c3.mp3 4c7ebeb9b8ea53921c07ee4f960ecc6d 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 2010-11-23 Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Stephen McKiernan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Marvin N. Olasky Biographical Text <span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Dr. Marvin Olasky is an editor, an author of more than 20 books and a distinguished chair in Journalism and Public Policy at Patrick Henry College. He received his Bachelor's degree in American Studies from Yale University and his Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan. Olasky let his position of provost of the King's College to focus on his position of editor-in-chief of WORLD Magazine. "}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":5039,"3":{"1":1},"4":[null,2,5099745],"5":{"1":[{"1":2,"2":0,"5":[null,2,0]},{"1":0,"2":0,"3":3},{"1":1,"2":0,"4":1}]},"6":{"1":[{"1":2,"2":0,"5":[null,2,0]},{"1":0,"2":0,"3":3},{"1":1,"2":0,"4":1}]},"8":{"1":[{"1":2,"2":0,"5":[null,2,0]},{"1":0,"2":0,"3":3},{"1":1,"2":0,"4":1}]},"10":2,"11":4,"12":0,"15":"Arial"}">Dr. Marvin Olasky is an editor, an author of more than 20 books and a distinguished chair in Journalism and Public Policy at Patrick Henry College. He received his Bachelor's degree in American Studies from Yale University and his Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan. Olasky left his position of provost of the King's College to focus on his position of editor-in-chief of <em>WORLD Magazine</em>. </span> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 146:19 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="{"1":2,"2":"Baby boom generation; VIetnam War; John F Kennedy; Ronald Reagan; NAACP; Students \\nfor Democratic Society; Black Panthers; Vietnam Veterans; Free speech movement; Activism; Kent State"}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":513,"3":{"1":0},"12":0}">Baby boom generation; VIetnam War; John F Kennedy; Ronald Reagan; NAACP; Students \nfor Democratic Society; Black Panthers; Vietnam Veterans; Free speech movement; Activism; Kent State</span> Subject LCSH Editors; Authors, American; College teachers; Patrick Henry College (Purcellville, Va.); Olasky, Marvin N.--Interviews Accessibility Copy/Paste below: Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound, or alternative text from a visual medium McKiernan Interviews Interview with: Marvin Olasky Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan Transcriber: REV Date of interview: 23 November 2010 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (Start of Interview) SM (00:00:04): Testing one, two. MO (00:00:08): Yeah. A company is putting out his first in comic book perform, and then they will all be accumulated next spring. So. SM (00:00:17): Okay. MO (00:00:17): Some kind of fun writing fiction. SM (00:00:20): My first question is how did you become who you are? You are a fry edge boomer, which is those boomers born in those first 10 years, between (19)46 and (19)56. So how did you become who you are? And secondly, when you look at who you are, you went to Yale and graduated in (19)71, and then you went to Michigan and got a PhD there in American Studies. So what were your experiences like at those two universities, the college environment? MO (00:00:52): Well, first I became who I am because my parents at a certain time in 1946 decided to get married, and they had a son in 1947, and they had a second son in 1950. Mainly me, I owe it all to them. Those are a lot of questions you have asked. Kind of a multiple warhead question. Which one do you want me to start with? SM (00:01:18): I would start with that first one, how you became who you are first and the influences you had in your very early life with your parents and so forth. MO (00:01:36): Influences in very early life. Well, there is a lot there too. Growing up in the (19)50s, I think there was a certain amount of fear in the air concerning the possibility of nuclear warfare. Growing up as a kid in suburban Boston, there were lots of cultural influences. I think my grandparents were real pioneers. They managed to make their way out of the Russian Empire and get all the way to Massachusetts, usually by the way of Germany, in one case by London and Ellis Island and then Boston. So they had a pioneering spirit, and I think they wanted to assure as best they could, that their children would not have the same difficulties that they did. And so there was a certain protectiveness on the part of the grandparents towards their kids. That is my parent. On my father's side, my grandfather Lewis, who in my family would call Lewis the pioneer with my kids, I call them, that was a devout Jew. He would be praying a lot and my father had the forms, but not the belief. He was a very smart kid who graduated at the top of his Marden high school class in 1936, and he was accepted to Harvard at a time when I think there was a quota on Jewish student. He learned in the 1930s, he majored in anthropology. He learned that various tribes all made up their own creation myths and their concepts of God. He learned that there was no reason beyond tribal identity to choose one over another. He came to believe in religious evolution with cultures over time, moving from primitive belief to rationalistic understandings. So he began to think that the most important part of Judaism was not theology. There was no reason to think that writings from so long ago were grinding on us. Writing emphasized culture, which reflected the history of the people. And this actually is very common in the 1930s, whether in a very painful form like the Nazis or the fascist Italy. They emphasized, here is the genius of our particular tribe. And that was a murderous form. My father had a benevolent form of the same thing. Namely, there are tribes. The Judaism is a tribe, here are particular customs to follow, but there were no particular beliefs there. And then on my mother's side, her parents, as far as I know, were not particularly religious. They were entrepreneurs. Her father went to the streets of Boston with a horse and wagon, collect and used mattresses and then stuffing them. And that over time became a furniture store that made him fairly prosperous, but there was no particular belief there. And so, I think my older brother and myself in the 1950s were raised with a certain set of rituals, but no real belief behind them. And both of us in time noticed that. And that led me, I think probably with my brother's urging in some ways, or I think he was three years older or so, he came to these ideas. I think I started reading some books like Sigmund Freud, the Future of Illusion. This is about when I am 14 years old, or HG Wells book, the history of the world. And I became a pretty straightforward materialist. And then in my teenage play, an atheist. So that came out of, I think, living in an atmosphere in the 1950s and the early 1960s when there was a certain set of rituals, but there really was not belief, at least in my parents. There was a fearful time in certain ways. Again, nuclear warfare as a prospect. And the question was, well, what is there really? And if the answer was there is not really anything there, then that led into a search for alternative. SM (00:08:27): Was McCarthyism part of this too? This fear? MO (00:08:30): What? SM (00:08:31): Was McCarthy is not part of this fear? MO (00:08:34): No, not that I ever recognized, no. My parents were not particularly active, politically active. That was just a world that was really foreign to me. And then I am just thinking that there was a thing of just the other influences. There was a series of books, about hundred, over a hundred non-fiction books published by Random House in the 1950s and the 1960s called Landmark Books. SM (00:09:29): Oh, yeah. I had a lot of them. MO (00:09:32): And so I just read and read and read. This probably started when I was in probably the fifth grade, sixth grade. I read a lot of these about Christopher Columbus and Captain John Smith and Paul Revere and the Minuteman and Lee and Grant Appomattox. And I think the story of my grandparents pioneering, and I never knew very much about it, mean they spoke Yiddish, I did not. There was not a whole lot of communication, but I had a sense that they were particularly Lewis the Pioneer, a heroic person leaving his home. And somehow, he was actually drafted into the Russian Army in just about, I think 1912 or so, perhaps 1910. He deserted and somehow made his way across Russia, across Europe, and eventually came to the United States. And so, I did not know much about that, but I had the sense of being a pioneer. And so I basically was learning American history from the Landmark books, and I really bonded with it. So I think there was a certain love of America, or Love of the West, or love of pioneering. And then there were, I think this [inaudible], some of the television shows of the time. I was looking back recently and trying to remember what I was watching, and there were two that had an influence on me. I think The Rifleman was a popular show in the late (19)50s. And the Lucas McCain, who was the character in the show, was really, I mean, he got into gun sites, but I suppose was some sort of compassionate and conservative also. He gave ex-con an job on his ranch. I was looking back recently at some of the episode, I mean just this plot descriptions, there was one of his old enemies who had changed to become a doctor. He could not believe it at first, but then this Palmer adversary helped him in a gunfight. So it was a Western that many of the Westerns at the time. The writers were trying to make certain political and cultural points in them. And so it was an interesting western. It was to shoot them up, but also with the idea of helping people defending the rights of immigrants. Lucas McCain helps the man from China open a laundry, helps the family from Argentina buy a ranch. And they were very well directed. The creator and initial screenwriter and director of the series with Sam Peckinpah, who went on to direct some very good Western movies in the 1960s. So anyway, I think there were television shows that had a cultural impact. And then there was another one called Have Gun Will Travel. SM (00:13:24): Paladin, yeah. MO (00:13:27): Which there was an actor, Richard Boone, who played Paladin and Paladin, again, a gun fighter who had come to the rescue of those in need. So, he was also a chess player. I grew up playing chess, and he was smart. He was a high IQ gunslinger. So, there was this idea of being a hero in some ways and fighting for those who needed help fighting for the oppressed. So I suspect that had some influence on me too, in a way. Baseball had a lot of influence to me. I was a mediocre player, mediocre is probably over exaggerating my perilous, a pretty bad player. But I became a fan of Boston Red Sox and started to follow them. And baseball is just an interesting combination of the one and the many in it has had individual community. Everyone gets a ton of that. You are also part of a team. And so stuck in some ways also that an influence on me. Maybe that is deeper down, but if you ask about some of the influences. SM (00:14:55): Yeah, those are excellent examples. Well said. You went to Yale from (19)67 to (19)71, and of course you went to Michigan too for your PhD. The first question I had here is what were your college years like at Yale? Because everybody knows there were a lot of protests there. I know that John Hersey wrote a book, I think in (19)69, A letter to the alumni, explaining what happened there. And I know that I think the Black Panthers were involved in something at that time over there. MO (00:15:27): Oh, yeah. SM (00:15:27): With Bobby Seal. Your thoughts about your college years at Yale? MO (00:15:34): Oh... SM (00:15:34): Any influence on you there. MO (00:15:37): For sure, and very strange times now. I came into Yale in my own mind, an atheist and critical of lots of things. Some of the things at Yale, I would like to say this was all intellectual in a way. But I suspect I had a full of covetousness and I went to Yale. And I entered in the fall of (19)68- so hold on just one moment, please. SM (00:16:24): Yep. MO (00:16:50): And so, I am there with my two polyester sweaters, and I met one roommate, one of my roommates had his, had brought his own dresser, just to hold all of his luxurious woolen sweaters. So there may have been some covetousness there in my part. Had another roommate who was the son of a Virginia banker, and he brought with him a great [inaudible]. Excuse me, I am just going to be heading down an elevator if I lose you for a moment. I do not think I will. But if I do, just call me right back. SM (00:17:30): Okay. MO (00:17:31): No. Cause now I am trying to walk a little. SM (00:17:35): Okay. MO (00:17:37): And he sat for hours in the corner of a living room next to a high intensity lamp. But he focused away from himself, so he was invisible, and everyone else had to squint. I just remember the interesting characters, and that probably had an influence on me. But then also the- Hold on a moment. I am on the, let me just see. I do not think this is going to work. It will be harder to hear, because I will just walk around inside. SM (00:18:26): Okay. MO (00:18:32): No, and I am not blaming the professors because again, I came already predisposed to some of these things. But what I learned in history classes is that America, also known as Amerikkka, the way it was often spelt a deeply embedded class system within which, let us say expensive sweaters or stereos, could be seen as stolen. So in a sense, my covetousness could be made broader or bigger. And instead of having to look at myself and in my own sin, I will use that word, I could say, well, I am right. And we have a class system in America, and therefore, if I am going to be on the side of the pool in the oppressed, I should be out to attack the capitalist. And those folks, Amerikkka industrial machine, theoretically manufactured deaths in Napalm's, Vietnam, the excess of the machine, threatened to turn all of us into machines. So there was all that aspect to it. Essentially, I had a hole in my soul. I needed a good preacher. But Yale provided Williams Sloan Coffin. SM (00:20:24): Oh, yes. MO (00:20:25): Who was preaching, and [inaudible] about the Vietnam War. I mean, actually went several times and listened to him. And it would have been great if I had heard some message about my own, the hole in my soul and my need to change. But instead, I could see myself as good and the system as oppressive. I took a course offered by Charlie Wright. Charlie Wright had a number one bestseller, the Greening of America. SM (00:20:58): Oh, yes. MO (00:20:59): And in that book its told, it was my generation that would solve all the nation's problems. So, it always allowed me to look at someone else as the problem, or some system as the problem. Again, I do not at all blame Yale for some of my political weirdness, but I did not get their answers that would have been useful to me. I will give you just some other, well, Charlie Rock's class, it was kind of bizarre. You could do whatever you wanted as long as it showed some dislike for America. I think I received an honors in that class for cutting out pictures from old Red Sox's yearbooks and interspersing them with comments about baseball racism. There was a required art class in the art museum, and my artistic ability was even worse than my ability in baseball. So one of my roommates that year had a black cat. So I carried the black cat and let the cat out of the back onto the museum floor explaining that I had just created a work of art, showing how the Black Panthers were freeing themselves from the bag, the container in which America society placed members of their race. And I received an honors for that effort, even though the cat ran away. SM (00:23:13): Oh my God. MO (00:23:13): And hid among some expensive canvases that prompted a frenzy search. But nevertheless, got my honors. That was just a weird time where, as long as you, this was before political correctness was a term, but as long as you wrote things like that you could do well, and this was also period, the understanding was yes, humanity in some way had a change. And so how would that happen? There was a Yale professor named Jose Delgado, who was doing experiments in electrical stimulation of the brain. So he was putting tiny sensors into monkey brains to control their behavior. And the idea as well, maybe you could do this for people. And there were lots of cults and so forth. So there was salvation through science, salvation through engineering, salvation through various eastern religions, salvation through drugs. And I, instead of embracing drugs, recent religions, I began to look for salvation through Marxism. Actually, see if I have this, oh, Che Guevara was, he died in 1967. So, I am coming to Yale in (19)68, and this was the beginning of the Che Guevara cult. And Guevara talked about how we have to make sacrifices. We may find ourselves at the edge of destruction, but we will at the end, have created a communist society or ideal. So I could see what I called sin, but not my own. And it was caused by alienation derived from the division of labor, the existence of capitalists and so forth. So yeah, I kept moving further and further and further to the left. And I started running some columns in the Yale Daily News going around New Haven and exploring things. And my answer for everything was, go left young man. So... SM (00:26:05): Did you... MO (00:26:07): ... Had a rather blinker view of the world. And again, not blaming Yale, but that is what I picked up there. And it pushed me further and faster in a direction I was probably heading otherwise. Now, why did I go all the way to communism? And others did not. Number one, their heads may have been screwed on straighter than mine was. In my own mind, the justification was, well, I am willing to be bold, and they are timid, which was very nicely self-congratulatory. There may be a little bit of truth to that, and that probably because my social antenna were not as well tuned as they should have been, I would sometimes actually read things and believe them and try to act on them rather than just dismissing that and something, well, "That is fine for those folks to do, but I am not going to do it." So this came in a sense, in my own thinking, probably there was a merger of, well, my grandparents were heroic. I mean, they set off across the ocean and they did all this, and I am going to be heroic also and do something striking and unusual. And the two, in a sense, the two political parties at Yale were liberals and radical. Conservatives were fairly non-existent. And the only ones I ever encountered were there was a party of the right, which essentially believed in wearing suits some smoking cigars. That is all I saw of them. So that did not appeal to me at all. But as far as the folks who were appealing liberalism, radicalism, and I did not think liberalism worked very well in my understanding of what I thought was my wisdom. And so I just kept becoming more and more radical and thought, "Yeah, I am being bold and courageous." So that was my justification. SM (00:28:38): When you went off to Michigan and you picked majored in American Studies, why did you pick American Studies? And was Michigan any different in your doctoral program than Yale? MO (00:28:50): I picked American Studies originally because I had some advanced placement credits from high school. I had the option of graduating from Yale in three years rather than four. And even though I look back and wonder why I was in such a hurry to leave a place with lots of libraries and time to do what you wanted to do and so forth, I was in a hurry. And American Studies was the major I could take that the requirements were such that I could take care of all that in three years. I think originally, I was thinking of majoring in history, but that would have taken four years. And I found I enjoyed it because it is a mix of history and literature and film and so forth. And I was interested in writing, and I have been a reporter for a while in Boston and out in Oregon, this is also part of my pioneer stuff. I mean, the day after I graduated from college, I started bicycle across the country and bicycle from Boston to Oregon. SM (00:30:00): Wow. MO (00:30:00): So, yeah, that was it and... MO (00:30:03): Okay. SM (00:30:03): Wow. MO (00:30:03): So yeah, that was it and then continued around the world. After working in Oregon for a while, I took a Soviet freighter across Pacific, and then Trans-Siberian Railroad and stuff like that. I was interested in traveling and seeing things and probably doing something in journalism down the road. Michigan had a program in American culture that was appealing. They offered a very good fellowship, and so I took it. Now, why Michigan? Curiously enough, I had never been there. I had just been told, cool place. A professor in the American studies program named Robert Skalar, S-K-A-L-A-R, who was a Marxist or a radical or something and would be very sympathetic. Why do not you just apply there and see if they will give you some money, so you can afford to go there? And when they did, I went. As it turned out, Skalar was on leave my first year. After my first year, my beliefs were changing. So, I was no longer interested in taking classes with Skalar, but that was the one professor I had heard of. I mean, actually I applied there while in Europe and had just heard, why not? Why not do that? I applied to a couple other places too. Michigan offered the best fellowship. And, yeah, it seemed interesting. Before I traveled across the country, I had never been west of the Hudson River except for one short plane trip to Chicago. So, I did not know anything about the Midwest. I mean, I had bicycled through it. It seemed like an interesting place. And Ann Arbor would have the reputation of a hip community, so that is why there. And again, America Studies was just accidental originally. SM (00:32:18): Was that- MO (00:32:18): To Michigan in many ways, but I am glad it worked out that way. SM (00:32:21): Was that the place where you started reading the Bible and became a Christian, or- MO (00:32:27): Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that was the place where, yeah, I went through a big transformation. It was also the place where I met my wife with whom I have been married now for 34 and a half years. So yeah, I am very glad to have gone to Michigan SM (00:32:46): As a student of the (19)60s and the mid-(19)70s, how do boomer students differ from... You not only were, you went to school with the boomers and you have been a professor teaching the generation Xers and the millennials, and as I say here, how do the boomer students differ from generation Xers or millennial students of today? And what would be some of the strengths and weaknesses of the boomer generation of 74 million? If have any thoughts on that. MO (00:33:19): Yeah, hold yeah, hold on for just one moment, please. SM (00:33:21): Okay. MO (00:33:21): Good question. I do not know of any other generation in American history that has been so prematurely honored. In other words, when Sean Charlie Reich was wearing the greeting of America, he apparently wrote a lot of it sitting in a couple of dining halls of Yale, listening to students. And he wrote that this was the most wonderful generation as opposed to... He wrote about consciousness one, the old consciousness of small business and consciousness two was the consciousness of big organizations. And then consciousness three was going to be a new benevolent, wonderful processes that would bring peace and good times to America and the whole world. And the exemplars of consciousness three were these college students. So typically, you have had students going to college with the idea, at least in theory of learning from professors, doing lots of other things as well, but the draw was supposedly learning from professors, and it was all reversed. The world turned upside down and professors were supposed to be learning from students. So that is what this generation grew up with basically in college. And because it is so big bigger than before and after, in a sense that leadership, for better or worse for the whole culture, has remained with this generation as it has gone through the route within the body of the snake moving down. So, whatever this generation has found most interesting is what has led the culture in many ways and so it is no surprise. But right now we're seeing you saw in this past year such an attention paid to healthcare, because this is something that this generation cares most deeply about. So, there is that solid system, that self-infatuation. Being told early on, "You are the best and the brightest," and then just by the power of numbers being always the center of attention for advertisers and propaganda and others. SM (00:36:21): When did the (19)60s begin and when did it end in your opinion? And was there a watershed moment? MO (00:36:32): Yeah, probably began with the assassination of President Kennedy. Probably ended in some ways... I am shortening the decade a little bit. In some ways it may have ended with the shootings at Kent State or may have continued all the way to the end of the Vietnam War- SM (00:37:10): (19)75. MO (00:37:11): ... The impeachment of Nixon, the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. I can see either way, going from 1960 to 1970, from 1963 to 1975. And I think of the Kent State shooting because that is when it became obvious to lots of people that this was not play. Three days before there had been big demonstrations in New Haven over the trial of Black Panther leader, Bobby Seale. The Chicago Seven, Abby Hoffman, and all had come to New Haven and were poor ratings. There were probably about thousand [inaudible 00:38:11] around the country who came there. There were rumors of gun shipments being stolen. There were several thousand National Guard troops dispensed to New Haven with live ammunition. And people were walking up to the National Guard soldiers and taunting them and at night there was some rock throwing and so forth and providentially, the National Guard soldiers did not fire in response, but it could have happened. I do not think there was a sense of reality that in fact people could be dead. Three days later that changed. I mean, it is interesting that the war demonstrations fell off sharply when two things happened. I mean, number one, there was instead of men generally being draft able, there was the draft lottery. And so, two-thirds of men were safe at that point, and the draft was sprawling off at that point anyway. And then second, you had people trot dead in a demonstration. So instead of just being able to play, it was serious, and instead of your own life being on the line through the draft, suddenly lots of people were protected and it became less of an urgent matter. So, I can see that aspect of the (19)60s dying then. And then of course, the other big thing in the (19)60s is you have the civil rights movement, in many ways culminating in Martin Luther King Jr's speech at the Washington monument, I mean the Lincoln Memorial. But then morphing into something very different and instead of peace often bringing violence. So, you have the race riots in (19)65, and then big time in (19)68. So, the civil rights era that had the moral superiority of the civil rights movement with sit-ins and peaceful not violent. Yeah, that died and there was talk of, from Stokely Carmichael and others, a violent activity. This was not connected with the civil rights movement, but the riots did break out that basically ended the good spirit of things. And then you moved from a situation where African Americans were discriminated against quickly to a situation where at least in terms of university placement and so forth, and some jobs with affirmative action, they actually had benefits. And so, the good feeling that grew out among a lot of white folks of wanted to help the underdog, got dissipated. So that is why I think you could look upon 1970 or so at the end of the decade. But on the other hand, since the Vietnam War continued and there were actually a lot more Americans, and I suspect a lot more Vietnamese, dying during the first Nixon term than during Johnson's years in office, that you could say which led to a lot of education kept going. And culturally, you start to see lots of changes in music and drug use and so forth and so that might continue all the way up to 1975. SM (00:42:27): Yeah. Do you remember where you were when John Kennedy was assassinated? The exact moment that you heard? MO (00:42:34): Yeah, I was 13 and playing a board hockey game with my brother. My father came home and gave the news. I mean, this was several hours after it happened. There had not been an announcement of my school, I had walked home, had not been listening to the radio or watching television or anything. So I was a late learner. But I certainly remember that whole weekend with the television broadcast and the funeral and so forth. SM (00:43:09): In 1990, I think it was 1994, Newt Gingrich made some pretty strong comments against the (19)60s' generation when he came into power. And of course, he's a boomer himself, but I know George Will has oftentimes in his writings made some strong attacks against the generation. Of course, during the recent campaign, I know even John McCain had made some comments about Hillary Clinton, even though they're close friends because of her (19)60s and so forth. And my question is this, many people on the right have attacked the (19)60s' generation for the breakup of the American family, the drug culture, the divorce rate, the lack of respect for authority, the welfare state, which the idea of a handout society, a lot of the isms that we see today, your thoughts on the right, these are people from the right making strong attacks against the voter generation basically for most of the problems we have in our society today. MO (00:44:19): Well, yeah, I think some of those attacks are justified, but the (19)60s came after the (19)50s. It is not as if the (19)60s just grew out of nothing. There were real problems in the (19)50s. While you had a lot of people, as I mentioned at the outset, and my parents were among them, but I think this is more general, a lot of people observing certain rituals going to church, going to synagogue. I am not sure how deep the belief was or how much it affected what people did not on Saturday or Sunday, but throughout the week. So, there were real theological weaknesses. In the 19th and the early 20th century, there were great opportunities for smart and entrepreneurial women in leading a great number of volunteer associations, civil society groups, social service organizations. So there was real outlet for, say, middle class women who wanted to be executives. They were not in the business world, but they were in the social service world, which was very big because the volunteer nonprofit sector, because you did not have government doing so many of these things. And then as governments started growing in the 1930s and this kept going in the 1950s, a lot of those opportunities disappeared. So, there were a lot of bright entrepreneurial women who no longer had those opportunities, but they were not yet welcomed into the world of business or the ranks of the governmental bureaucracy and so forth and so there was a lot of frustration there. Betty Peran wrote out of frustration. So there were problems there. And you go down the line, it's not as if the 1950s were a great decade in the 1960s, a horrible decade. While you certainly see some major cultural shifts, there's a lot of continuity. Now at the same time, yeah, I certainly see my own generation as pacific, tending to be self-gratifying, self-infatuating. So yeah, if I hear negative things said about this generation, I tend to agree with them. But this was part of a long process, not just something that came out of nowhere. SM (00:47:43): The generation gap was... Did you have that in your family in any way, particularly in your Yale years, because... So then you changed, of course, when you went to grad school, but was the generation gap, which was so prevalent amongst the boomer generation between parents and kids at that time, number one, was that part of what your experience was like? And number two, a book was written in 1980 called The Wounded Generation, and in there was a panel that met, which included Jim Webb, Bobby Mueller, James Fallows, Phil Caputo. They talked about the Vietnam War and in that discussion, it came up that the stronger generation gap was between those who went to Vietnam and those who did not. So just your thoughts on the concept of the generation gap itself in the boomer generation. MO (00:48:44): No, I think as far as the second part, I think that is very true. I mean, a huge gap and probably bigger than the generation gap as such. Yeah, I do not know. Look, historically, there is always a gap of some kind, it is hard for me to measure how good this was compared to others, but certainly the gap between those who went and those who did not was very large. SM (00:49:17): How about between you and your parents when you were at Yale? MO (00:49:23): Oh, sure. But again, hard for me to measure. And if you read a book like the Education of Henry Adams, there was a gap. Just about every autobiography I have read, there is a gap of some kind. So yeah, it is just hard to measure how large this was or how significant compared to others. SM (00:49:59): One of the qualities, and I think you have already made reference to this in your commentary about being self-indulgent, but many of the young people in college camps in the (19)60s felt they were the most unique generation in ,American history when they were young because there was a kind of spirit and a belief, and it may have been naive, but a belief that they were going to be change agents for the betterment of society. That they were going to help end racism, sexism, homophobia, bring peace, save the environment. Some of the older boomers still believe that this was a very important part of the spirit of the times. Your thoughts on this concept of unique generation? MO (00:50:40): Oh, yeah. I mean, as I mentioned in terms of the Charles A. Reich book, The Greening of America, that was very much there, and not just among the students at Yale, it was among the professors. And so there was a tendency of professors to, in a sense, kiss up to the students. SM (00:51:03): There was another book at that time that was equivalent to Greening of America, and it was the Making of a Counterculture by Theodore Roszak. You ever had a chance to read that? MO (00:51:12): Yeah, I remember that vaguely. SM (00:51:18): That was- MO (00:51:19): And I think that was strong. I mean, there were a lot of different aspects of the counterculture. So, I gravitated in the early (19)70s to the Marxist aspect, which in some ways was more traditional. There was not a lot of drug use, his people would sit around listening to Paul Robeson music and playing chess. So yeah, some of the more colorful aspects in terms I may have missed as I pursued some other parts of it. SM (00:52:04): One of the things that you will learn in studying the Free Speech Movement is that Ronald Reagan really came to national prominence, everybody knew his acting, but in terms of politically, he came to prominence in California because he took on two issues. He wanted to bring law and order to the college campuses. He was tired of students protesting, and he was making reference to the Free Speech Movement is (19)64, (19)65, and also People's Park in (19)69, which was more violent. There's no violence in the Free Speech Movement and then the end of the welfare state. Those are two issues that were important in California. And obviously those are two issues, certainly, they kind of brought them to national attention. Your thoughts on the rise of Ronald Reagan, because part of his rise was his attack on the students. MO (00:52:56): Well, I remember once in 1972, I hitchhiked from Salem, Oregon down to San Francisco and went to sleep on the interstate highway at one of the bus stops and was awakened at 6:00 AM or something by the sprinklers going off. I remember getting up and condemning Ronald Reagan. So I was blaming him for waking me up wet from the sprinkler. So yeah, there was a tendency to look upon him as the bad guy for anything. Well, the Free Speech Movement, as I understand, it quickly became the Dirty Speech Movement. I do not know how glorious an episode it was, because I do not think there was any lack of opportunity for free speech among students, but anyway. So it was an attempt basically with the aid and comfort of professors to overturn the university system. And in many ways, it may have deserved overturning, but I do not think the results were any improvement. SM (00:54:47): Well, I know one of the central thesis was that the university's about ideas, not about corporate takeover of college campuses. And even some of the critics of higher education today say that the corporation has again taken over the university because of the issues of money and fundraising is become so prominent. Some things- MO (00:55:08): Hold on a moment please. SM (00:55:09): Tape player back out. Forget what I was saying. Oh, it is about the free speech. The university is about ideas, not about corporate takeover. So that was the basic premise of... And free speech and certainly justice and the beginning of rights, student rights and so forth. And of course, I have interviewed a lot of people about the impact and well, the universities have forgotten the entire history of the student movement is because the corporations are again in predominant power again on university campuses. Just your thoughts on that. MO (00:55:50): Well, but look there are, certainly in areas of science and engineering and so forth, I mean, I saw this at the University of Texas. There is corporate power there, but there is actually much more governmental power and corporations certainly do not run these universities now. I mean, these universities are run by the left. At the University of Texas, I do not know of any cases where someone on the left has been denied tenure or promotion or law and honor of various kinds, but it happens to conservatives a lot, it happens to Christians a lot. So yeah, there is the tenured left. A lot of folks from this generation, the 1960s, are now running the universities and creating, again, a state where the two political parties are liberal or radical, and usually the dominant political party's radical. SM (00:57:16): I know when I interviewed Phyllis Schlafly, and I know David Horowitz, I interviewed him too, and we had them on our campus twice. But Phyllis Schlafly's main quote is this. She said that the troublemakers of the (19)60s are now running the schools, and particularly in certain academic areas and studies departments. And she was referring to women's studies, gay and lesbian studies, Chicano studies, black studies, environmental studies. Basically about those areas, she said they're run by the left. MO (00:57:52): Yeah, I think that is largely accurate, at least in my experience from what I saw at the University of Texas, what I have read occasionally from the American Culture Program with the University of Michigan, what I saw during the year at Princeton when I was on leave and so forth. I think that is largely accurate. SM (00:58:22): I am going to turn the aside of my case. Hold on one second. You are still going to be at the school though through the end of January. I might come down to New York. I have to take three professors pictures. I may come down and take your pictures sometime early January, if that is okay. MO (00:58:42): Okay, sure. SM (00:58:44): Looking at the presidents of the boomer regeneration, from Harry Truman, right through to President Obama. You wrote a great book, a really good book on leadership, I like that. And then your three books on compassionate conservatism. I like that book. And the one you wrote in 1992, the Newt Gingrich, we talked about, those are my three favorite books. But when you look at the presidents of the time that the boomers have been alive, I would just like to brief comments on your thoughts on John Kennedy and his new frontier President Johnson and his great society, and Richard Nixon, who, when he came to power, I guess he was going to vietnamize the armies in Vietnam or whatever. And brief comments on all the other presidents from Truman to Obama in terms of leadership quality. MO (00:59:41): Truman and Eisenhower, I do not have any personal memory of. Kennedy was in many ways an old-style Democrat, machine politics from Boston, but a strenuous foreign policy. But a strenuous foreign policy, very, very opposed to the Soviet Union, and willing, as he sat in his inaugural desk, wanting to bear any price in order to win the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Economically, he cut taxes. So, these days, I mean, he would be called a conservative Democrat. Lyndon Johnson was, I think, a terrible failure as a president. Domestically, the enormous expansion of the federal government, part of which designed to help the poor, the War on Poverty, Great Society, but actually has been enormously destructive. And you can see this in a whole variety of ways, including... Again, there are a lot of cultural changes involved in this, but certainly some contribution to the disintegration of many families and poor communities. So, a terrible president domestically, and then internationally, trying to fight the Vietnam War as he did, turned out to be a disaster. SM (01:01:43): Mm-hmm. MO (01:01:43): I do not know. At this point, was back in the (19)60s. In the late (19)60s, I was certainly a dove. I think the hawks at the time made an argument, but at least what I understand is if every escalation is so carefully planned that the adversary has time to get ready for it, you are unlikely to be able to win a war that way. So it just seemed to be trying to fight a war as a politician does not, at least from my very small understanding of military history, seem to be the most effective thing. SM (01:02:26): And those two presidents seem to have what they call, as David Halberstam said, the best and the brightest within their administration. MO (01:02:35): Yeah. And this certainly showed that someone who ran the Ford Motor Company is not necessarily the best person to run a war. So that is what I think. I mean, I just think of Johnson as a total disaster as a president. SM (01:03:03): Nixon? MO (01:03:03): Oh, Richard Nixon? SM (01:03:04): Yeah. MO (01:03:07): I am not a particular fan of his either, and it would take a while to go into that. Gerald Ford, a Michigander, seemed like a nice guy, and probably did the best he could with the very bad hand he was dealt coming in right after Watergate. Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter is the first modern Democratic president, and not exactly having a realistic understanding of the world. And that contributed to the mess in Iran that we're still having difficulties with. Yeah. And then you have Ronald Reagan, who understood the world situation better than any president since John F. Kennedy, let us say. And I used to have a poster on my door at the University of Texas. On one side of it were statements made by leading college professors, leading Sovietologists, experts on the Soviet Union as late as 1988, talking about how strong the Soviet Union was, how it would survive for decades, how it was winning the Cold War against the U.S., and so forth. And then there was Ronald Reagan who was saying against all the advice of the experts and the advice of the experts within his own administration, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." So that is impressive. And his stance took the Soviet Union was not as strong as it looked and could quickly crumble was just seen as totally out to lunch just a few years before the Soviet Union in fact did crumble. And that is the clearest example in my lifetime of a political leader who had a vision that proved to be accurate and feasible much faster than even some of the people on his own team, probably most of the people on his own team would have expected or imagined possible. So that is impressive. And there are a lot of other ups and downs of the administration, but the tax cut seemed to help the economy a lot. So he's the flip side of Lyndon Johnson. Lyndon Johnson a failure both internationally and domestically, and Reagan a success both internationally and domestically. SM (01:06:21): Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. MO (01:06:24): George H. W. Bush, the first president that I met, and so have some sense of beyond that mediated by television, but seemed like a very nice guy, a very honorable person, did not have the vision of Reagan. And that got him, that made him a one-term president essentially. Bill Clinton, just, I mean, such a supremely competent politician. Probably no better politician in America. I mean, he is probably the best politician in America since Henry Clay and probably better than Clay, and then Clay ran for the President three times and lost, but very similar in a sense of the person who was good at doing small things to gain popularity and insinuate himself and into the confidence of people. Tell you a Bill Clinton story. Well, so a few Clinton stories, if I may. SM (01:07:55): That is okay. MO (01:07:55): Because this right... At the end of 1995, and then again at the end of 1997, my family and I were invited guests for the annual New Year's thing down at Hilton Head, Renaissance Weekend. And in (19)95, this was right after the battle with the Republicans about supposedly shutting down the government. In (19)95 he and Hillary came at the last moment. They came on December 31st. Typically, I was told that they would come maybe on December 28th or 7th, go to a variety of panels. They came on December 31st. And December 31st, New Year's Eve, the schedule was that Hillary at 11:00 PM was supposed to introduce Bill, and then he would speak until about 11:50, at which point people could break and go to the champagne and dessert table. Now at dinner, Bill and Hillary were a couple of tables away, but she had her back turned to him a lot. And from one person who was at the table, I mean, she was incredibly frosty towards him. And then at 11 o'clock she stood up just to introduce Bill. But instead of doing that, she started giving a speech about her travels around the world. She took us all the way around the world and then took us all the way around again and kept speaking until about 11:55, maybe 11:50, but giving Bill only time for a few short remarks ending at about 10 seconds to midnight, at which point there was a mad dash for the dessert and champagne table. Now, I find that interesting because later on, reading Ken Starr's chronology, it appears that earlier that day, Bill and Monica had a tryst. SM (01:10:02): Oh, wow. MO (01:10:02): And I suspect that Hillary, despite her later denials, knew about all this. And thus not only leading her frostiness at dinner, but her extraordinary, taking what was supposed to be a five-minute introduction, turning into a 50-minute speech. SM (01:10:17): Wow. MO (01:10:17): For instance, squeezing out Bill. So Bill Clinton had to live. I mean, he messed around a lot. He also had to live with Hillary, which does not justify his messing around at all. But this was the type of... Well, let me just go on. I mean, that was just my early first experience. And my second experience with him, I think, is more telling. I mean, the first one kind of sets it up that here was some of the tensions in his life and the way he lived. But the second one, he did come. He and Hillary came down a few days early. And so he would go into these various sessions. And the way it works, there are lot of these different panels on different subjects. So everyone's involved in a variety of panels, and he just bobs in and bobs out, and wherever he bobs in, whoever's speaking might finish speaking and then the chairman... I saw this several times. The chairman would stop and say, "Now, Mr. President, what do you have to say about this topic?" So, I was on one panel talking about interracial adoption, and Bill comes in and I, of course, finish up what I am saying at that point, and then he says, "And this question, interracial adoption, is the most important question, so important in our national life that I am thinking about it all the time." Okay? SM (01:11:59): Mm-hmm. MO (01:11:59): Then I heard him say the same thing in relation to several other questions, thinking about it all the time, and this is what he would do. There was-was one session where Bill Nye the Science Guy from CBS was talking about the importance of the U.S. going onto a metric system, and having heard Bill Clinton say all these different things, "I am thinking about this all the time," I expect him to say that then. But he did not that time, so he was not thinking all the time about the U.S. going on a metric system. He is thinking all the time about transracial adoption. So, I went up to him at one point, and this is when I was writing this book on the American leadership tradition that he referred to. And so I mentioned to him that I had been studying the 1830s, 1840s, and finding very interesting. And reading about Henry Clay, and Clinton was a lot like Henry Clay. And I expected him to ask me how, at which point would have talked a little bit about how Clay was. Henry Clay had a reputation as an extreme womanizer with adultery and so forth. But he did not give me that opportunity. He said, "That period, those decades, 1830s, 1840s are so important. I think about them all the time." Anyway. SM (01:13:21): Yeah. Wow. Those are quite the stories. How about the last Bush and, of course, President Obama? MO (01:13:30): Oh, well, the last Bush, I liked him. I still do. I did some occasional talking with him in Texas about what became known as compassionate conservatism. Yeah. I think he had a personal visceral understanding of it from the way he himself changed from being pretty much at least a borderline alcoholic. And then his life changing. I mean, he understood how other people can change. He understood the way that a long-term alcoholic or an addict or someone else through God's grace can change. And so, he just understood this in a way that other politicians cannot. And then he had this kind of individual history, thinking about going about baseball. The Governor's Mansion in Texas is a nice old building a couple of blocks away from the Capitol, but the dome of the Texas Capitol is even a slightly bigger, I am told, than the U.S. Capitol. But very similar. And so, he showed me up once on his balcony that overlooks the Capitol and talk about how he would sit up there at night and listen to Texas Rangers games on the radio and just sort of look over at the Capitol and listen to baseball and things like that. So there was a certain romantic streak there about... I am not all the time just being a policy wonk. I care about baseball. I found that all very appealing, and his administration was disappointing to me in that compassionate conservatism that was supposed to be a decentralizing policy became looked upon as part of big government. And so it really ruined the brand. But that was the smallest part of his activities. I mean, once 9/11 happened, he became a foreign policy or war president, or any hope of real change in domestic policy really went out the window at that point. It was Iraq and Afghanistan all the time. So that I found disappointing since I was involved in these matters. I mean, you read about it in The Tragedy of American Compassion. SM (01:16:14): Yes. Yes. MO (01:16:14): Welfare reform and fighting poverty, and really not much got done. And compassionate conservatism got a bad reputation. And the faith-based initiative pretty much fizzled. But that was outside of his control. SM (01:16:29): And, of course, President Obama, he has been there two years, but... MO (01:16:36): Oh, well, I disagree with a lot of his policies, most of his policies I suspect. But personally, as compared to Bill Clinton, he seems to have a strong marriage and strong family, and I credit him on that. And I really do not like it when conservatives attack him personally or start psychoanalyzing him. I mean, we disagreed politically. But he seems to be within his political mode, which is essentially an attempt to syncretize Marxism and Christianity. I mean, he's consistent and honorable in that, which again, I very much disagreed with back when I was in the Communist Party. I got some training in how to talk to church people trying to syncretize Christianity and Marxism. And I recognize in the types of approaches Obama the has basically that attempt, which I think is trying to meld two beliefs that are diametrically opposed. So, I mean, I see some policy incoherence, and I do not like his approach, his policy aspects, but personally, it is important to have a guy right down in the White House who is honorable, and particularly important, I hope, and useful in the Black community, where over 70 percent of kids are born out of wedlock, to actually be an operating family, and to see a guy who says, being smart is good, it is not being white. It is you. And you can get somewhere. So personally, I applaud his presidency, but politically, public policy, I think he is totally wrong. SM (01:18:49): Yeah. One of the things about President Obama is he tries to separate himself from the (19)60s generation, but his critics say he is the epitome of it. And some of his critics, like Newt Gingrich will say he is even to the Left or the Left and... MO (01:19:03): Yeah. SM (01:19:04): So, he cannot win know-how, and he is a boomer because he was only two years old, but... MO (01:19:11): Right. SM (01:19:11): Yeah. So- MO (01:19:14): So, I mean, he is the epitome of it in terms of policy. But in terms of personal discipline, he is the antithesis. SM (01:19:22): On Richard Nixon, I know we cannot talk about him, but would you say that Watergate was a watershed moment in the lives of many boomers because there were a lot of other experiences, the Vietnam War and McNamara and the Gulf of Tonkin. But that watershed experience really showed about not trusting leaders. And how can a guy so smart be so stupid in what he did? MO (01:19:53): Yeah. That is a good question. I think that there was already so much distrust of leaders. I do not know if he made it all that much worse. I mean, that was right at the tail of an era where the operative mantra was never trust anyone over 30. It is not as if he created that distrust. In fact, the distrust probably created Watergate in some ways because the country had gone to the Left. Nixon did not think he could get any favorable treatment from the wizards of media or academia, and that seemed to speed the sense that you have to fight back by whatever means necessary. So he in a sense became the mirror image operatively of his opponent. And that is what brought down his presidency. SM (01:21:12): In terms of the Eisenhower, I think a lot of boomers do remember him because they were in elementary school, and I remember him as a kind of a grandfather figure, and I felt kind of comfortable because he had been a hero of World War II and he had that smile and he made you feel comfortable. I do not know. Maybe he was not doing what other presidents have done, but there was something about Eisenhower in the (19)50s that fit right. MO (01:21:40): I do not know if you are- SM (01:21:40): Yeah. MO (01:21:43): Yeah. I just do not remember very well. The grandfather figure I remember is when I was 20 years old in 1970. In May of 1970, we had a whole series of long weekends, one being the anti-war demonstrations, and then Bobby Seale demonstrations in New Haven. And then I think the next weekend there was a big anti-war march, a few 100,000 people in Washington. And on Monday after that weekend, the idea was that college kids were supposed to camp the halls of Congress and talk with their representatives. Did not have any success in there really. But towards the end of the day, we were just walking past the office of the Speaker of the House, John McCormick at the time. And McCormack was from Cambridge, which was right next door where I grew up. And so my roommates and I decided just to go in and see. This is about 05:30 or so, see if McCormack would talk with us for a few minutes. And surprisingly enough, he said, "Sure." And so we went in, and I thought I was being very bright, making analogies, since McCormack was of Irish ancestry, making analogies of the Irish revolt against the British to the position of the Vietnamese in regards to the U.S., and so forth. And he kind of laughed it off, but engaged just in a very grandfatherly way. And then he said, and I found out later this is true, he said, "Well, I need to go home to have dinner with my wife. That is what I do every day." And apparently this is true. Whenever he was in Washington, I mean, they would always have dinner together. But for here, let me show you something. And so, he took us into the Chamber of the House of Representatives and pointed us to this chair, this big tall chair that swivels around. He said, "Here. Go sit in my chair. And I am often out at dinner, but please have fun, sit in my chair. And there's the sergeant of arms or whatever who will watch you." And we all did. I mean, we all thought of ourselves as 20 year old mature radicals, but we enjoyed being like McCormack's grandchildren or great-grandchildren, probably at that point, and swiveling in his chair. SM (01:23:53): How incredible. Yeah. I remember. MO (01:23:57): So... SM (01:23:57): Yeah. MO (01:23:58): Yeah. So he actually knew how to treat us. I mean, he took us seriously, but not too seriously. He did not kiss up to us. He did not agree with us. He basically knew, I mean, here are kids who think they're very wise in their own eyes, and I will humor them and enjoy them, and then let them fool around in my chair. SM (01:24:19): What's interesting is the first lie that I remember as a young person growing up was very clear. It was 1959 when Eisenhower went on television and said that the U2 incident, we were not spying. And Eisenhower lied. And it was well known that he was lying. So the question I had here now is about your books. The two in particular, The Tragedy of American Compassion and Compassionate Conservatism are two very important and influential books that you wrote. What is the basic meaning of those two books, and why are they so influential, not only back when Newt Gingrich was handing them out in Congress, but still today? I have read a lot of literature that they're still talking about it. And so what's the basic premise? MO (01:25:09): Well, The Tragedy of American Compassion told the story, essentially tragic story, that with good intentions of helping the poor, government grew and created new programs, and those programs, for reasons that I explained, produced exactly the opposite results. So it's a tragedy because there's an attempt to soar high towards the suns and there's hubris and the wings melt and you plummet to Earth. So, it is a tragedy when attempting to do something that is exciting, to be a pioneer, to do the right thing, you end up actually hurting those you are inclined to help. So, I tend to look upon a lot of poverty fighting by the Left as not... There certainly was a power grabbing aspect of it, but a lot of it was very well-intentioned. It just failed for reasons I saw. And so that is why I think that it had some play, and if it is useful, that is why, because it is not so much attacking or psychoanalyzing or yelling, but trying to tell a story and explain what happened in a way that indicates there were honorable people on both sides. SM (01:26:44): What are your thoughts on the new Left? Obviously, a lot of times when people criticize the (19)60s generation, we know that only five to 10 percent may have been the activists of a particular era, and 90 percent we are probably subconsciously affected, but were not out on the streets or on the front lines. What are your thoughts on the new Left in the (19)60s and the liberal activists linked to the following groups? So just your quick comments on these following groups. Do not have to be in any great detail. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee? MO (01:27:21): Playing with violence. SM (01:27:23): Because that was SNCC. MO (01:27:25): Right? SM (01:27:27): Southern Christian Leadership? MO (01:27:29): So, you are saying, what, you are saying, the Student Nonviolent... This is SNCC you are talking about? SM (01:27:32): Yes. MO (01:27:33): Right? Yeah. Yeah. SM (01:27:35): Southern- MO (01:27:36): Playing with Fire. Playing with fire. SM (01:27:38): Southern Christian Leadership Conference? MO (01:27:43): Largely Christian. SM (01:27:45): Congress of Racial Equality? MO (01:27:53): The same two involved with the government. SM (01:27:57): NAACP? MO (01:28:00): Same. More so than core, I suspect, but similar. SM (01:28:05): The National Urban League? MO (01:28:08): Similar. SM (01:28:09): Students for Democratic- MO (01:28:11): In other words, the problem was instead of helping people to be independent of government, it made people more dependent. It made people dependent on government. And that is not a good situation in which to be. SM (01:28:25): Students for Democratic Society? MO (01:28:31): Students in essence for non-democratic society. SM (01:28:36): Of course, the Weathermen? MO (01:28:41): Turned out they really... It was Ronald Reagan who knew which way the wind was blowing. And they did not know. SM (01:28:49): The American Indian Movement? MO (01:28:53): Never had much involvement with them. SM (01:28:56): National Organization for Women? MO (01:29:03): Sympathizing with the plight of Betty Friedan. I mean, I sympathize with the plight of Betty Friedan, but they did not help. The organization has not helped women. SM (01:29:20): Earth Day? MO (01:29:28): Replacing in some ways Arbor Day, and Arbor Day emphasized, let us say, going out and planting a tree, and Earth Day by pushing for more. That is probably accomplished less. SM (01:29:44): The Young Lords? MO (01:29:49): I had no involvement. Do not really know. SM (01:29:52): Black Panthers? MO (01:29:59): Yeah. The. MO (01:30:00): There was a Black Panther led rally in the Yale hockey rink in 1970, where one of the Black Panther leaders beat a white kid in front of everyone, and the populist cheered. SM (01:30:36): Vietnam Veterans Against the War. MO (01:30:37): Well, a lot of them had reason to be against the war, but at least from what I understand of John Kerry's testimony, there is a tendency to emphasize the worst and not keep in mind the reasons America went into Vietnam. Again, there is a tragedy. There were initially good intentions of initially good intentions, and then it became a mess. SM (01:31:21): Young Americans for Freedom. MO (01:31:31): I never had any involvement with them in their peak. So while ideologically I would tend to be in agreement with a lot of what they were saying. I just really did not, I did not know them personally. SM (01:31:49): I think you have talked already about this, but the Free Speech Movement, I think you have already... MO (01:31:56): Yeah. SM (01:31:57): Yeah. Kent State and Colo... I think you have talked about Kent State already. Columbia, (19)68. MO (01:32:06): Oh. Then for too many professors lacking any confidence and catering to students unwisely. SM (01:32:28): Chicago, (19)68. MO (01:32:32): Well, that I just saw on television was not there, so I have just heard different things about it, and so I do not necessarily blame either side there. This was a confrontation waiting to happen. SM (01:32:50): And then the Moratorium, (19)69. MO (01:32:54): Yeah, this was a... Led to a big demonstration in Washington. I did not go that one, I went to the next one. So again, I am just generally aware of this I do not have any personal involvement. SM (01:33:06): When you look at the year that the boomers have been alive, which is 1946 to 2011, the oldest is now 64, and the youngest is 49. So, there are no young squirts anymore in this generation, even in the latter group. In a few words, I know you have already talked a little bit about the (19)50s, but in a few words, could you describe the following periods in America, just from your perspective, the period 1946 to 1960. MO (01:33:39): The two were not... SM (01:33:43): Well, you know. MO (01:33:44): No, they, Cold War, economic growth. Nothing. I have no brilliant observations tonight. SM (01:33:56): The year 1961 to 1970. MO (01:34:06): Yeah, I think I will skip this because I have already sort talked about that and do not have any pithy observations here. SM (01:34:12): Yeah, it is all those different eras through... I think you talked about the president, so... In the (19)60s and (19)70s, students protested against the Vietnam War, but they were also against the IBM mentality that universities were like factories producing mines that where they tried to get people to think alike based on the needs of society, like a production line. The Free Speech Movement was a front-runner of many protests later on in the (19)60s and early (19)70s where they wanted the universities to be about ideas, not corporate takeover. Yet today, some top educators say we have returned to this mentality when corporate takeover takes precedence over ideas. If you could, and I am particularly... I know I asked this before, but the area of fundraising has become so prominent in universities today that the... I have read a lot of articles, there's a fear that fundraising has gone to not only that the president of universities are, that is their number one job, but there is a fear that ideas will stop in universities if, for example: speakers, whether it be conservative or liberal, come to a university and thus there may be a potential loss of revenue because these speakers have come to the school. Just your thoughts on that, my comment there. MO (01:35:42): Oh, I mean that may be, I tend to see the, as we have talked about, I tend to see the left political emphasis to be greater having. So I mean that indeed is a problem, but not the most serious problem. SM (01:36:05): Well, I remember when Michelle Malkin went to Berkeley and the students were not allowing her to... did not want her to speak. And to me that is ridiculous. I do not care if it is conservative or liberal, everybody has a right to give their ideas, especially if they are invited. MO (01:36:25): I agree. I once was charged with introducing Wade Connolly, the... SM (01:36:29): Oh, we had him on our campus. MO (01:36:36): And yeah, the left students came with... They had a big bass drum that they kept beating and he eventually gave up. I mean, they would not allow them to speak at all. So yes, this is why at least this epitome of the free speech movement is not for free speech at all. SM (01:36:56): Wow. Yeah, many members of the boomer generation wanted to change the world for the better. We talked about this, but how would you grade them overall on the scale of 1 to 10, in terms of their ability to change the world we live in? MO (01:37:14): Well, I mean, every generation changes the world in some ways. I spoke the idea was to change the world and make it a more wonderful place, and I would probably give about a 1 on a scale of 1 to 10. SM (01:37:27): How would you rate their leadership on a scale of one to ten? We have had two boomer presidents now, President Clinton, and actually President Obama, pshaw, he is two years old, so. How would you rate their leadership on a scale of one to ten as a boomer generation? MO (01:37:46): Oh, that is hard. There is so many different leaders. There are the two presidents, I would rate them differently. That is too causes of question for me. SM (01:37:58): Okay. And how would you rate them in the area of compassion, as a generation of compassion? MO (01:38:08): Oh about... Well, again I would not generalize. I would say that some of them, I would rate some of them a 10, I would rate some of them a 1. Overall to make a generalization, I would tell you about an 8 in talking. About a 3 in doing. SM (01:38:30): Oh, wow. Do you believe today's universities are afraid of the return of activism? You are working in a college environment right now that has a basic philosophy, but you were also at the University of Texas Austin. MO (01:38:43): Correct. SM (01:38:45): Do you feel that universities are afraid of that word, that volunteerism is the okay word on campuses today? And the reason why they're afraid of the term activism as a return to the (19)60s kind of? MO (01:39:00): Yeah, but I do not see any huge worries about that because the (19)60s have not happened again. I mean, the reaction to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars has been so small compared to that to Vietnam. And part may be because we do not have to draft anymore, and part there may be other reasons, but I do not see any huge fear in part of university administrators. SM (01:39:28): And could you discuss in your own words how you defined the culture wars or what happened in the (19)60s and (19)70s is still alive today in our body politic and in everyday interactions between people who disagree on tactics, solutions, belief systems between each other? MO (01:39:48): Well, I mean, the basic cultural divide is between people who essentially, as fallen sinners as all of us are, try to live or aspire to live in accord with biblical principles and those who have become self-proclaim gods. [inaudible] So, I mean, that is the basic cultural divide and there are lots of ripples from that all over the place. But that is the, basically, "Who do we worship God or a man?" SM (01:40:33): I have just a list of names here of people. You can just give quick comments on them. These are personalities from the (19)60s and (19)70s. The first one is Eugene McCarthy. MO (01:40:49): Again, did not know him personally, but he showed courage and seemed to be a personally virtuous individual as far as I know. SM (01:41:05): Bobby Kennedy. MO (01:41:14): Certainly a person who thought things through carefully, who thought things through with political care and caution. And I tend to think of him to some extent like John Kennedy, a representative of the older Democratic Party, that while I might disagree about some things. I mean, they had a lot of personal reasons to be associated with it. I mean, said personal, I mean a lot of decency associated with it. There were all sorts of different things about personal lives and so forth, but from what I know he did care about his family, he did care about this country, and was willing to be... Well gave his life campaigning. So basically, I think positively about him. SM (01:42:27): Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X. MO (01:42:32): Well, I tend to think positive about Martin Luther King Jr. I mean, again, there are all sorts of questions about his dissertation, his sexual life, his this, his that. But I think he was a positive force in American life, particularly in his emphasis on non-violent. Malcolm X, hard to know because he seemed to be in a period of change at the time he was gunned down. Hard to know what would have happened. Certainly his early writing and the autobiography of Malcolm X was filled with hatred. Again, the earlier part of it, and who knows what would have happened to him. But his legacy, I do not think was positive in the way that I still tend to think positively of towards Martin Luther King Jr. SM (01:43:20): How about Bayard Rustin? MO (01:43:25): He was more of an ideological leader, a theorist. It's been so long since I read it in college, so I will defer on that. SM (01:43:40): Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden. MO (01:43:45): Oh, Jane Fonda certainly very cute and crute in other movies. Pretty good actress. At the time I applauded her, so I am no better than she. But certainly going to North Vietnam, and as I understand it, posing with anti-aircraft gun that shot down American flyers and so forth, not a good thing to do. Tom Hayden, very consistent through his career of trying to push forward radical ideas and sometimes in one way, sometimes through California politics. So, I think he has been largely a destructive force, and he does not have the virtue of being cute and a good actress like his wife. SM (01:44:51): David Harris. MO (01:44:54): Oh, that is the name I remember so vaguely mean. SM (01:44:58): Joann Baez's husband. MO (01:45:03): Yeah, I do not remember much about him. SM (01:45:04): William Buckley and Barry Goldwater. MO (01:45:12): Well, Buckley did a lot to revive the Conservative movement and in largely a positive way. I mean, he turned to be a fusionist, he wanted to bring together libertarians and traditionalists. Wanted to bring together Christians and non-Christians. I think he was a positive force in American life and fun to listen to, and a good writer. And there are not all that many good writers, so I tend to esteem them. Barry Goldwater. Well, the world is the theater of God and the way God brings in particular actors fits the time. I mean he briefly had a starring role, and I think overall acquitted himself recently in that role. So I just tend to think of him... He was an astounding American character from the 1960s who was quintessentially American and regardless of any... I could tell you a lot, but kind of delightful as an American character, SM (01:46:36): Benjamin Spock and Timothy Leary. MO (01:46:42): I remember Timothy Leary turned, what is it? Turn on, tune in, drop out? A destructive presence in American life. And I never took LSD, that is one of the things I missed, I am glad I did not. Cause apparently it had some very bad effects on some people whose lives were ruined in the process. So, a very destructive. Benjamin Spock, I mean who knows whether his baby book was useful or not. I guess a lot of parents found it useful. There's a lot of controversy about whether the way kids were raised, Spock kids. Later on, his anti-war stuff I do not think was particularly helpful. SM (01:47:25): How about Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman? MO (01:47:29): Well, Abbie Hoffman, I remember from the Bobby Seale demonstrations and that he got up and he was chanting, the president of Yale was named Kingman Brewster, and he got up and was chanting always, "Fuck Kingman Brewer. Fuck Kingman Brewer." And I do not know whether he was deliberately mispronouncing the name as an insult. Seems kind of a strange insult or whether he was so ill-informed what was going on that he actually did not even get the name. That to me as a reporter, if you do not even get the name, that tends to, leaves me to look less favorably on anything else. So he was kind of... again there's a very opposite person from Barry Goldwater, but one of these, a uniquely character who was amusing and had a passing role in the theater. And at this point I look back and I see him as being very destructive, but this is part of the panorama of American life. And so I just think back at him with amusement, but also certain disdain. SM (01:48:45): How about George McGovern and Hubert Humphrey? MO (01:48:49): George McGovern I rode around with when I was a reporter in Bend, Oregon, early in his campaign before he got any chance at all. I mean, I was reporting and wrote a profile on him. Seemed like a very nice guy personally. Later on, after he was in the Senate, I read that he owned for a while a hotel or an inn of some kind in Connecticut and learn something about a business and about the difficulty of managing a business, and said he wished he had known some of that when he was in the Senate. So yeah, I think of McGovern as the person who turned the Democratic Party from something that had good points to it, to something that is culturally and internationally very unhelpful. Yeah, nice guy. Personally, I wish he should have been the manager or owner of an inn before he went to the Senate. SM (01:49:48): How about Humphrey? MO (01:49:57): Again here, here is a guy who had a lot of benevolent impulses, certainly his... In 1948 I think he was mayor of Minneapolis and standing up against the state's rioters and the Democratic Party, Strom Thurmond at the time, and others. I think he was useful in promoting racial integration at that point. Certainly, a happy warrior, was not real nasty on the campaign trail. Kind of a bridge between the old Democratic Party and the McGovern Democratic Party in a way. So, I do not know, this is interesting. I mean, I have not thought about these people for a long time, but it is hard for me to think ill of some of them, unless they were really diametrically tearing down some good institutions, unless they were very deliberately attacking God. It is hard for me to think negatively of them because I think back to them though as well, this is part of the... These are interesting characters SM (01:51:09): That gets into Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger. MO (01:51:14): Yeah, well, Kissinger I have a hard time distinguishing from Dr. Strangelove. So kind of a mad genius in his way. The advice he gave concerning Vietnam, I do not think was all that good, and in other areas as well. McNamara, seems to me in fighting war it's good to take into account the experience of those who had their boots on the ground. SM (01:51:52): How about Ed Musky and Spiro Agnew? MO (01:52:00): Yeah, none of them made a huge impact on me. Spiro Agnew I once I remember talking with a speech writer who had the enjoyable task of throwing out some alliteration. I cannot remember one. I mean talking about the press and so forth. So Spiro Agnew it seems to me like a little kid who was spitting at his opponents all the time, but then not to think all that benevolently of him, and then he seemed somewhat corrupt, as I recall. That must be a Democratic politician. No, I do not know anything about him personally really. I do not remember anything about him personally, but not a person I remember as either particularly heroic or particularly nasty. He represented the Democratic Party at the time, which some good things, some bad things. SM (01:53:02): Daniel Ellsberg and Gloria Steinhem. MO (01:53:10): Well, Ellsberg I think was one of the heroes for my roommates and myself at the time. Beyond that, he has faded from my memory. Gloria Steinem, I mean, the feminist movement took a wrong turn when it became pro-abortion. And I tend to think of feminists like Susan B. Anthony in the 19th century who I think were doing the right thing and fighting for women's rights in a way that did not kill babies in the process. I mean, Susan B. Anthony was very pro-life. So yeah, I am all in favor of women being able to be in good jobs and to have equal treatment and so forth, but when Gloria Steinhem tries to advance women on the corpses of unborn children, I cannot think very benevolently of her. SM (01:54:27): Along this line, where would you put people like Bella Abzug and Betty Friedan and Geraldine Ferraro? MO (01:54:36): Again, Betty Friedan, I just remember her original book and I thought her complaint had a lot of merit to it. But all of them, again, this is a great sadness in American life, when they embraced abortion at that point, I just think this is something that is so evil and so much against the good parts of liberalism. I mean, liberalism was always... Hubert Humphrey would say some more nice things [inaudible] he was always talking about how we treat people at the dawn of life, at the end of life. He was a compassionate liberal. I do not think the big government strategies were effective, but I can certainly honor his goals. And in the Democratic Party, led by some of the feminists you just mentioned, turned pro-abortion. I mean, that to me was a killer for the Democratic Party. And if Democrats have managed to resist that, they would have been much more virtuous and also more successful politically over the years. SM (01:55:45): The most recent boomers that are very influential certainly are Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice. Any thoughts on those two? MO (01:55:57): Not particularly. I mean, Condoleezza Rice, I mean very smart and a good musician, and also knowledgeable about football. These are not bad things. And from what I understand, she was a good advisor to President Bush, a good Secretary of State. So I tend to think positively of her. Hillary Clinton, I cannot, again, the abortion part of her agenda and so forth. Therefore, I have a hard time getting mad at her personally. Bill put her through a lot and no, she hasn't been as bad a Secretary of State as a lot of people would have expected. SM (01:56:53): Go right ahead. MO (01:56:55): No, I mean, she seems to have been a good mother to Chelsea, and I do not know the details of her personal life. I imagine it must have been very, very hard over the years. And whether she should have stayed with Bill or not, that is not a judgment for me to make. So yeah, I just cannot get as mad at Hillary as some people do. SM (01:57:21): How about Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh? MO (01:57:27): Again, I see all these, I mean, they are just astounding characters. I mean, Newt, actually, I got to know a little bit. I remember in 1995, and again, I am very grateful to him, and that he made The Tragedy of American Compassion well known. So, I am very grateful to him for doing that. And I think he had a genuine concern for poor people and a genuine concern about welfare. I think it was hugely reckless what he did in having his affair, I mean, number one, wrong. Number two, when political leaders have affairs like that, it's not fair to the thousands of people who work for them, and many kids dedicated their lives, because they just have thrown it all the away. I remember sitting in a restaurant late one night, it was almost midnight in Washington near the White House, and I asked Newt, well, how could I pray for him? And he said, he thought for a little, and he says, "Well, the physical things." And I thought he meant by that, well, he was on the go 20 hours a day and with reporters ready to take any slip of the tongue and amplify it. I thought that was what he was talking about mean, but he may have been talking about his adultery at the time. And I had lunch once with his wife, she seemed like a very nice person, but she did not deserve to be treated the way he treated her. So, I tend to, as I think about various people, if they are pro-abortion that gets me angry and if they have not been faithful to their wives, that irritates me. So, in WORLD, back in 2007, actually, we had a good interview with Newt and we had a profile of him that I wrote and we put on the cover basically, "Newt do not run." And I feel the same way now. He just has not proven himself as a trustworthy leader, and in part because of the way he treated his first two wives. I am glad now that he seems to have settle down and if it came to voting for him or Obama, I would vote for him on policy issues. MO (02:00:02): I would vote for him on policy issues, but Obama seems to be personally leading a more virtuous life. SM (02:00:10): And Rush? MO (02:00:12): Rush, I think he performs a useful function in American life. Given the ardent liberalism and sometimes radicalism of the big television networks, with the exception of Fox, and the big newspapers, I am glad that talk radio is there, and Rush has been a pioneer in it. Some of the things he says I do not like, but overall, I think he's performed a positive function in American life. SM (02:00:51): Just a few more names, and then, my final two questions. William Fulbright and Gaylord Nelson? MO (02:00:59): I do not remember any of them, either. Fulbright, I remember as a smart guy from Arkansas, the Fulbright program and so forth. I just remember him as a very well-spoken person who turned against the Vietnam War, and maybe he was right in doing so at the time. Gaylord Nelson, I just do not remember very well at all. Just a name from Wisconsin, that is about it. SM (02:01:26): Yeah, he is the founder of Earth Day. Rachel Carson. MO (02:01:29): Right. SM (02:01:30): Rachel Carson, who wrote "Silent Spring." MO (02:01:34): Rachel Carson, I wrote an article a few years ago about the growth of malaria and other diseases in Africa because of the bans on spraying and so forth, and bed nets just do not keep out the mosquitoes all that well. As a result of Rachel Carson and her good intentions, there are a lot of people who have come down with malaria who otherwise would not have. That, to me, is a great tragedy. I just think of her and the association with that. Again, I am sure there are many other things she did, the book and so forth, but thinking about malaria, you have got to kill mosquitoes before they ruin the lives of people. Protecting, preserving human life, to me, is a priority. I am sure there were some good things she accomplished, but perhaps going too far. It is just been destructive of millions of lives. SM (02:02:50): Tommy Smith and Stokely Carmichael? MO (02:02:54): I just remember Tommy Smith from the 1968 Olympics, that is about it. At the time, I applauded it. Looking back, that is not something I think he should have done. Stokely Carmichael, I think, is very destructive. "Burn, baby burn," that was not helpful to anyone, and particularly the people who did the burning. SM (02:03:20): How about John Lewis? MO (02:03:24): Very limited memory of him. SM (02:03:27): He is the congressman from Georgia. MO (02:03:30): Yeah, that is about all I know about him. SM (02:03:32): And then, the Black Panthers, which is basically seven different people: Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, H. Rap Brown, Eldridge Cleaver, Dave Hilliard, Elaine Brown, and Kathleen Cleaver. MO (02:03:51): I remember at Yale, Bobby Seale came to speak, and I wrote an article about his speech, and just the reaction of Yale students. This was playing, basically, and again, this is why in some ways, when people saw it getting serious, with Penn State and so forth, the playing stopped. This is playing. Here, you basically had bullies, and loud mouths, and criminals essentially, and honoring them. This was playing, and I played, other people played, but it just was not a mature way to respond to them. SM (02:04:37): The two well-known Weathermen, Mark Rudd and Bernadine Dohrn. MO (02:04:45): Again, largely destructive, and sometimes ending up some of their associates, when bombs blew up in New York and so forth. I just see them as destructive in American life, and in so far as they're still around, and they have not changed their thinking, probably still destructive, although not in as direct way as they aspired to be in the late (19)60s and early (19)70s. SM (02:05:12): Of course, Vietnam, Colin Powell and William Westmoreland. MO (02:05:16): Again, I never had any personal involvement with them. They both seem to be honorable people. Colin Powell, I wish he had been pro-life. Had he been, I certainly would have wanted to support him for the president. Westmoreland, I do not know, had he had a free hand, it would have turned out better. It seems to me to be a miserable position to be a general, asked to just do a strategy, be micromanaged by Lyndon Johnson. SM (02:06:06): Okay, that was my last... the Vietnam Memorial, just your thoughts. My next to last question is the issue of healing. We did take a group of students from Westchester University to Washington DC in 1995. The students, none of them were born at the time of the (19)60s, they had looked at the entire year of 1968, and they wanted to ask Senator Muskie this question. Do you feel that- MO (02:06:39): Can you hold on just one moment please? SM (02:06:40): Yes, it's okay. The question they asked Senator Muskie in (19)95 was this: due to the divisions that were so strong in the 1960s, particularly in (19)68, with the divisions between Black and White, male and female, gay and straight, those who supported the war or against the war, or supported the troops and were against the troops, do you feel that the boomer generation will go to its graves like the Civil War generation, not healing, still bitter, still divided? That was the question they asked Senator Muskie, and they were hoping he was going to talk about the (19)68 convention, and all the other stuff. I will tell you what he said after I hear your response. Do you think healing is an issue in this country, that people are still bitter about what happened back then? Or, do you think it is not an issue? MO (02:07:43): I do not know, I cannot generalize. I think some people are and some people are not. I do not know what the percentages are. I know a lot of my former colleagues at the University of Texas, some of them are still bitter, but whether it is old grievances or new grievances, I do not know. SM (02:08:17): Do you think the wall has done a good job? Jan Scruggs wrote the book "To Heal A Nation," and of course, it was geared toward healing the families of those who lost loved ones in the war, and also, all the Vietnam vets who served in that war, to heal them. I think he wanted to go beyond that, to try to heal the nation, as his book said. Do you think the wall has healed the nation in any way? MO (02:08:41): I am sorry, the Vietnam Memorial? SM (02:08:44): The Vietnam Memorial, yes. MO (02:08:48): No, I do not think something like that can heal a nation. That would be an overreach. Does it help individuals? Yeah, I have been there and seen the way people react to it. I think it is actually pretty effective. I would hope there has been healing there, because that is not going on. In other words, the abortion war is still very much with us, so I do not think there is going to be any healing until finally, we come to some reconciliation. SM (02:09:35): That is Roe v Wade, the Roe v Wade decision. MO (02:09:39): Yeah, exactly. In a sense, that is a gift from the Supreme Court that keeps on giving in a very negative way. As far as the Vietnam War, that is long ago at this point. It depends. I have seen reconciliation between, for example, Japanese Christians and Christians who dropped bombs on them, similar in Vietnam. I think the reconciliation tends to come when people realize that we're all sinners. We have all, in various ways, hated, and done destructive things. We cannot compliment ourselves, and lord it over anyone else. That generally comes with, at least in this country, most often a Christian understanding. I have seen that reconciliation between former enemies through Christ. I have not seen it very often through politics, or anything else. SM (02:11:08): Yes, Senator Muskie's response was that he did not even mention 1968, or any of the problems in America in the (19)60s. He said, "We have not healed since the Civil War over the area of race." He talked about racism in our society that was ongoing. That is the way he responded. The issue of trust is also a quality that is often given, a lack of trust is often given to many people in the boomer generation, for good reason, because they saw so many leaders lie to them. Do you think it is good to be a generation that is labeled as not a trusting generation? Is that good or bad? MO (02:11:58): I do not think it much matters. SM (02:12:03): Do you believe, like a lot of people who are majors in political science in college, that the first thing they learn in political science is, the stronger democracy is the democracy where the citizens are constantly not trusting their government and their leaders, because that is what a democracy is about? It keeps people on their toes. MO (02:12:30): Certainly, there is an old hymn, "Do not put your trust in princes," and so forth. A certain amount of distrust is very healthy. Does it come to the point where one assumes that everyone is always lying all the time? You cannot live in a society that way. Distrust of people in power is very useful, but the assumption that they are all out to get you, that they're all thieves, where does useful distrust end and paranoia begin? That is a difficult charting sometimes. It seems to be useful that people are distrustful of politicians, because then, you're going to be in favor of decentralized government, less centralized power, that is very helpful. Taken to an extreme, you have a society that just tears itself apart. SM (02:13:42): What do you think the lasting legacy will be? Usually, the best history books, or books in sociology, political books are written 50 years after something ends, whether it be a war or talking about a generation. What do you think historians and writers will say about this boomer generation once the last boomer has passed? What do you think their evaluation will be of it? Of course, it is hard to say it now, because the boomers are just entering old age, and they have still got 20 years of life, most of them. MO (02:14:20): Yeah, that is a good question. I am just trying to think, if I were around in 50 years, and trying to write a history of this period, this has been an extraordinarily blessed generation. Only a small percentage have had to face war, or natural disaster, or hunger, or any of the things that were the common lot of mankind since the beginning, or close to the beginning. It's been a very blessed generation, and what have we done with those blessings? I think some people have acquitted themselves well, and others not. I do not know if there will be a lot of generalization. It strikes me that I would hope that future historians will look back at abortion the way historians today tend to look back at slavery, as something abhorrent. In so far as this generation has really pushed abortion in lots of ways, I think that would be certainly an indictment of this generation. We saw lots of positive as well. I suspect people looking back will see that we were very occupied with some bread, and lots of circuses. Hard to say. SM (02:17:05): I am going to end everything here, but if you would listen to what I have to say here, and did not just respond to it, it deals with the issue of poverty that you have talked about in several of your books. I am just going to read something I have written here, and your thoughts. "An activist is often defined as a person who believes in what is in it for us, not what is in it for me. As Dr. King used to often say, "It is about we, not me," so, activists should fit your definition of compassion." But, in "Compassionate Conservatism," you put political labels on a quality that both liberals and conservatives should have. I know you say compassionate conservatism, but maybe compassionate liberalism, too. We all want to end poverty, but when we have a society that oftentimes emphasizes what is in it for me, do you fear that our society cares more about personal survival over group survival? I conclude by saying, "In short, understanding our past is important, as you state in your books. But, we oftentimes accept that we will always have poor people. Is not this part of the problem? Why must we always indoctrinate our youth that there has always been poor people, and there always will. How about believing that one day, there will be no poor people?" Am I being realistic or utopian? When you talk about compassionate conservatism, I think it's very important to have it, but I also believe in compassionate liberalism, and something that crosses over to all of our society. I have always thought, as a young man who was in sociology classes in my early years, professors saying, "We always have poor people. History has always shown us we are going to pay poor people." Why cannot we believe one day there will not be any? That is part of compassion and conservatism, that everybody... I do not believe in handouts, either, but everybody will be able to live a productive life, and everybody will have a legacy. I believe we are brought onto this planet, because I am a deeply religious person, too, that if we are born on this planet, we all have a right to have a legacy on this planet. Just your final thoughts. MO (02:19:43): No, I agree. I think the critical few words you just said were, "I do not believe in handouts." Where programs go wrong is when they become handout programs, and that is been the problem with a lot of governmental programs. Not all, but a lot of them. You can actually make things worse in the process of wanting to make things better. I think we should aspire to a time when there's no poverty. There will be some people who are poor by choice. I do not think we have to force-feed people. There are going to be some people who believe, like Buddhist monks, it is good to be poor, and you will have that. As far as people who are working, who are striving, who are aspiring, I do not think any of them should be poor, and I do not think any of them have to be poor. This is a rich enough society where that should not be necessary at all. But if you start having handouts, then you're actually likely to have most of those people remain poor, and probably their children will grow up poor also, because their children will not see where it is to work. That is a problem. You can do great harm if you try to do good in an unwise way. I agree with you, we should certainly aspire to a society where there will not be any poor. SM (02:21:27): I remember during the Clinton Administration, when somebody was working at a McDonald's in one of the inner cities, I remember Bill Clinton had just given a great speech, and he is a pretty compassionate guy. Increasing jobs was part of it, but a lot of criticism that these are just not very good jobs, they did not pay a lot. I can remember one person saying, "Well, geez, I have been working at McDonald's, and now I can make a little bit more by going on welfare rather than going to work at McDonald's," that it would be about the same amount of money. MO (02:22:06): Yeah. SM (02:22:06): That is a terrible attitude to have, because that takes the work ethic out, and that means that is a handout. "I will not work because I do not have an incentive." MO (02:22:19): The government program that I am very comfortable with is EITC, earned income tax credit, and so forth, because that actually is designed to make working at McDonald's better than anything you're going to get from the government. You need something like that. The problem is, when you set up a program to try to help people who desperately need help, because we really do not want government officials to be sometimes arbitrarily deciding who gets help and who does not, we have to extend it across the board. The people then who do not really need the help, it actually leads them not to work. Governmental programs are a very blunt instrument. They're hard to do right, and we have seen them do wrong. That is my basic critique of them. Programs that are much more flexible tend to be much better, and we do not associate government bureaucracy with flexibility. SM (02:23:34): Do you think that most of these programs that are really hurting the poor have really come through the time that boomers have evolved as adults? MO (02:23:47): Yeah, they started in the (19)60s, and you cannot blame the boomer generation for that at that point, they were not in. Certainly the way it's continued, it is hard for someone whose needs have always been satisfied, and not more than needs, whose wants, whose desires have been satisfied, to say no to other people, even when it might be important to say no at times. I have had people who had poverty programs, church programs, who grew up poor themselves. They have a much easier time saying no than upper middle class folks, because they themselves have seen the destructiveness of what happens when you just start passing out stuff. You know this, this has been going on for a long time, but you have certainly helped me go down memory lane. SM (02:24:45): Thank you very much, I am done. I do not know if you have any final comments, but I think you have said it all. I truly appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule to do this interview. MO (02:24:58): You are welcome. You say you type up these transcripts, or you have them typed up? SM (02:25:02): No, I am going to do them myself. Peter Golm and others, some other people who have written books, have had horror stories about people who have been transcribing for them. I am going to be transcribing all of them myself over a six-month period. Everybody will see their transcript, too, and when they see their transcript, it is the final "Okay" to be able to publish it within this book. MO (02:25:27): Oh, good. SM (02:25:27): I will be keeping in touch with you. I am going to come into New York sometime in early January to take your picture. I will just let you know that. I want to wish you happy holidays. MO (02:25:40): You too. This is a great project you are involved in, and I hope you are enjoying it. You sound like you are having fun with it. SM (02:25:46): I am. I am learning a lot, but I want to make sure that students learn from this as well. My whole life is devoted to students in higher ed, so I want to make sure I have a product that students can read, so that they can understand. You cannot live in the shoes of someone, but do not judge people by what other people say about them. Just listen to them, and learn. MO (02:26:10): Yeah. SM (02:26:11): Okay. MO (02:26:12): Okay, thanks. SM (02:26:13): Thanks. Have a great day. MO (02:26:15): Thank you. SM (02:26:15): Bye. (End of Interview) Description 2 Microcassettes Rights Statement Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Dr. Marvin Olasky Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Olasky, Marvin N. ; McKiernan, Stephen Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/wav Subject The topic of the resource Editors; Authors, American; College teachers; Patrick Henry College (Purcellville, Va.); Olasky, Marvin N.--Interviews Description An account of the resource Dr. Marvin Olasky is an editor, an author of more than 20 books and a distinguished chair in Journalism and Public Policy at Patrick Henry College. He received his Bachelor of Arts in American Studies from Yale University and his Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan. Olasky left his position of provost of the King's College to focus on his position of editor-in-chief of <em>WORLD Magazine</em>. 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 2010-11-23 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.10.2016.146a ; McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.146b Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2018-03-29 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. 146:19 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/753dc953383c2071f455c2a16802a0e8.jpg 6d2b4459676c295482e0a2f5e6c6bed9 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/d3f6cb215188b88dbd5f2556c0b70aee.mp3 83a5d98ed0b7c8487deb28f018d9a939 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 2010-09-10 Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Stephen McKiernan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Marvin Surkin Language English Biographical Text <span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Dr. Marvin Surkin is a scholar, author, and specialist in comparative urban politics and social change. He worked at the center of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit. Dr. Surkin is the author of Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from New York University."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":7043,"3":{"1":0},"4":[null,2,5099745],"10":2,"11":4,"12":0,"14":[null,2,0],"15":"Arial"}">Dr. Marvin Surkin is a scholar, author, and specialist in comparative urban politics and social change. He worked at the center of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit. Dr. Surkin is the author of <em>Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution</em>. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science 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 1 Microcassette Material Type Sound Interview Format Video or Audio Audio Keywords <span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Baby boom generation; Assassination of John F. Kennedy; TV in the Nineteen fifties; Segregation; \nCivil Rights Movement; Vietnam Memorial; Kent State; Jackson State; Watergate; Summer of Love."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":515,"3":{"1":0},"4":[null,2,11791078],"12":0}">Baby boom generation; Assassination of John F. Kennedy; TV in the Nineteen fifties; Segregation; Civil Rights Movement; Vietnam Memorial; Kent State; Jackson State; Watergate; Summer of Love; Dwight D. Eisenhower; Republicans; Vietnam War; Detroit Riots; Dr. Martin Luther King; Black Power movement; Detroit in 1960s; Black Manifesto<br /></span> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 106:59 Subject LCSH Scholars; Authors; Social change; Metropolitan government; Surkin, Marvin--Interviews Accessibility Copy/Paste below: Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Rights Statement Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Dr. Marvin Surkin Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Surkin, Marvin ; McKiernan, Stephen Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/wav Subject The topic of the resource Scholars; Authors; Social change; Metropolitan government; Surkin, Marvin--Interviews Description An account of the resource Dr. Marvin Surkin is a scholar, author, and specialist in comparative urban politics and social change. He worked at the center of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit. Dr. Surkin is the author of <em>Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution</em>. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science 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 2010-09-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In copyright Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.115 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2018-03-29 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. 106:59 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/82df6d5503cc009d7696869cc9d7e3a0.jpg 69f9eb241e79cea4e35206e98850934a https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/2f8e82e93b379a361067a85cf0948ee5.mp3 6516a06e77e4277a50ad924973491dbd 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 2010-05-26 Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Stephen McKiernan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Maurice Isserman Biographical Text <span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Dr. Maurice Isserman, born in Hartford, Connecticut, is a professor at Hamilton College and an accomplished author. He got his Bachelor of Arts in History from Reed College and his Master of Arts in American History and his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester. Dr. Isserman specializes in modern U.S. History, American radical movements, and global exploration and mountaineering."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":13311,"3":{"1":1},"4":[null,2,16777215],"5":{"1":[{"1":2,"2":0,"5":[null,2,0]},{"1":0,"2":0,"3":3},{"1":1,"2":0,"4":1}]},"6":{"1":[{"1":2,"2":0,"5":[null,2,0]},{"1":0,"2":0,"3":3},{"1":1,"2":0,"4":1}]},"7":{"1":[{"1":2,"2":0,"5":[null,2,0]},{"1":0,"2":0,"3":3},{"1":1,"2":0,"4":1}]},"8":{"1":[{"1":2,"2":0,"5":[null,2,0]},{"1":0,"2":0,"3":3},{"1":1,"2":0,"4":1}]},"9":0,"10":2,"11":4,"12":0,"15":"Arial","16":10}">Dr. Maurice Isserman, born in Hartford, Connecticut, is a professor at Hamilton College and an accomplished author. He received his Bachelor's in History from Reed College and his Master's degree in American History and his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester. Dr. Isserman specializes in modern U.S. History, American radical movements, and global exploration and mountaineering.<br /></span> 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 2 Microcassettes Material Type Sound Interview Format Video or Audio Audio Keywords <span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Vietnam War; Baby boom generation; Beat writers; Activism; Volunteerism; Kent State; Jackson State; Woodstock; Counterculture; Hippies; Yippies; Weathermen; Beat generation; Sexuality; Women's Rights Movement; Students for a Democratic Society."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":5041,"3":{"1":0},"7":{"1":[{"1":2,"2":0,"5":[null,2,0]},{"1":0,"2":0,"3":3},{"1":1,"2":0,"4":1}]},"8":{"1":[{"1":2,"2":0,"5":[null,2,0]},{"1":0,"2":0,"3":3},{"1":1,"2":0,"4":1}]},"10":2,"11":4,"12":0,"15":"Arial"}">Vietnam War; Baby boom generation; Beat writers; Activism; Volunteerism; Kent State; Jackson State; Woodstock; Counterculture; Sputnik; Beatnik; Hippies; Yippies; Weathermen; Weather Underground; Beat generation; Sexuality; Women's Rights Movement; Students for a Democratic Society; Participatory democracy; Nat King Cole; Bob Dylan; Aretha Franklin.</span> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 145:25 Subject LCSH College teachers; Hamilton College (Clinton, N.Y.); Radicalism--United States; Isserman, Maurice--Interviews 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: Maurice Isserman Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan Transcriber: REV Date of interview: 26 May 2010 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (Start of Interview) SM (00:00:06): Testing one, two, testing. I will be checking this. (00:00:13): Could you tell us a little bit about your background? I have read about it in the web and everything, and what fascinates me is several things that I would like you to comment on. You had an Uncle Abraham who took you to the 1967 protest at the Pentagon, that was when they levitated. MI (00:00:34): Right. SM (00:00:34): I would like you to mention that experience and how important he was. And secondly, your college experiences when you were out in Portland. You were joining the Students for Democratic Society and becoming involved with the Portland experience. MI (00:00:50): Right. Well, I was born in 1951, so I am smack dab in the middle of the Baby Boom. And grew up in a small town in Connecticut, which was really not on the cultural or political cutting edge of the era. But I came from a family that was marked by, not one, but two dissenting traditions. One was on my father's side, well, he was Jewish. But in the case of my uncle and to an extent my father as well, influenced by participating in the Communist Party in the 1930s and thereafter. My father was not a communist, but he certainly was sympathetic. And on my mother's side, a Quaker background, she was the daughter of, and the sister of Quaker ministers. People are sometimes surprised to hear the Quakers have ministers, and in the East they tended not to, but in the Midwest, they do. So both of those traditions, I think were influences even before the 1960s, sort of picked me up and threw me in front of the on-rushing train of history. So in the summer of 1967, I was on an American Friends Service Committee work project in Indianapolis, which is where my uncle was a Quaker minister at the time. Bonnie Raitt was on that work project. She was not yet Bonnie Raitt, she was just a high school kid who played guitar. We sang a lot of folks songs that summer. That was high school kids doing good works kind of project, but it was also in that context, it was a lot more because it was the summer of Sergeant Pepper and we were these long- haired kids coming into conservative Indianapolis and getting involved in anti-war protests there, such as it was. I remember we had Vigil Hiroshima Day and reading and talking and thinking about stuff. On the project, that is why I read Michael Harrington's "The Other America" for the first time, and the "Autobiography of Malcolm X." So that was one influence. Then going into that fall, I had been in my first anti-war protest the previous spring in New York City, the spring mobilization, which knocked my socks off to be coming from a little town in Connecticut, to be suddenly marching with 300,000 people down to the United Nations from the Central Park and hearing Martin Luther King speak. SM (00:03:51): Wow. MI (00:03:51): I am getting my chronology all jumbled here. SM (00:03:54): But still those are- MI (00:03:55): So there was the spring mobilization, then there was the Summer of Love, which I happened to spend in Indianapolis with the AFSC. Then in the fall I went down to the Pentagon with Uncle Abe. My parents were not entirely on board with this going off to anti-war protests. But somehow because my uncle was taking me, it was... When I say my parents, in that case, my mother and stepfather. So with Abe escorting me, we marched from Washington to the side of the Pentagon. And of course what happened at the Pentagon was not part of the program, which was that there was somehow a line where the MPs were not strong or were not there at all. Somebody tore down a cyclone fence and suddenly 5,000 of us tore up the hillside, were right next to the Pentagon building. Abe, I did not come all the way up to the Pentagon with him, I kind of waved goodbye to him. I was there for several hours. And finally the MPs were picking off small groups of protestors. Actually I think it was federal marshals in this case. The MPs were just standing in a line. I was gassed and thrown down the embankment, then I walked back across the Arlington Bridge to Washington and to the hotel where my uncle was staying. I wrote an article about it, which you may have seen for the Chronicle, and said that all in all, it had been the best day of my life. SM (00:05:33): Was that your awakening, you were awakened by other things, but the true awakening, was that it? MI (00:05:40): Well, I am not sure. That seems a little melodramatic, but I was certainly awakening for several years there in the mid-(19)60s. Already by 1965, (19)66, I was flipping The Times religiously of articles about Vietnam. I remember Harrison Salisbury reports from Hanoi, which established for American readers for the first time, the fact that it was very heavy bombing of civilian neighborhoods going on in Hanoi and other North Vietnamese cities. I would cut out these articles and put them up on my bedroom wall. So even before I was in the streets, I was increasingly aware of what was going on in Vietnam. Before that, the Civil Rights movement, which I had no direct participation in, but was sympathetic to. I mean, I remember watching in 1963, the March on Washington was broadcast live, and I watched King give his speech. We would get Life Magazine every week and there were these pictures of Sheriff Price and the other officers in Philadelphia, Mississippi who had kidnapped Schwerner, Cheney, Goodman. They were sitting at their trial, big fat stereotypical southern sheriffs, laughing and chewing tobacco. I knew which side I was on that one. Then it being the (19)60s, listening to the Beatles and all that was going into the mix. So by 1967, awakening, yes, I was certainly awakened, although I do not think any single event is key. I was also working at my teenage identity and establishing independence issues, going into New York or going down to Washington on my own was a way of showing my parents that I could take care of myself. In 1968, I graduated from high school in June, I am not sure the exact dates, but June 14th, let us say. That night got on a train to go down to Washington for Solidarity Day. King had been assassinated in the spring. The SCLC was calling for people to come down in solidarity with the Poor People's Movement, Resurrection City, the shanties built around the reflecting pool on the mall. So I told my parents I wanted to go down, support this, and they thought, okay, big public March in favor of poor people. What was so bad about that? So I took the train down overnight and took part in the demonstration and then wound up hanging out with the Resurrection City people for the next week, which had not been part of my parents' plan at all. I had some friends in Washington, so I stayed with them. So every day there were marches, I remember Jesse Jackson leading a march to the Department of Agriculture so I was going along. Of course, I was sort of an imposter. I was not a poor person, but in solidarity. Then the announcement was made the next day, a week after I had arrived that the feds were going to close down Resurrection City, that they had had enough of this festering mess in the middle of the Capitol. SM (00:09:28): Because it was raining too, was not it? MI (00:09:29): It was raining, it was muddy and so forth. So I called up my parents and I said, "I am going to go get arrested tomorrow." And they said, "No, you are not, you are coming home." I said, "No, this is what I got to do." First time I ever hung up on my parents. So I went down to spend the last night at Resurrection City. I went to the main gate and they said, "Well, have you been staying here are you a registered poor person protestor?" And I said, " No, just a supporter." They said, "Well, you cannot come in." So I had my knapsack and I walked down the fence and I propped myself under a tree preparing to spend the night there. It was Washington in June at this point. Somebody looked over the fence and said, "Hey kid, what are you doing?" I said, "Well, I wanted to get in, but they would not let me in." They said, "Oh, here." So they took me through a gap in the fence or something, and they took me to their little shanty. It turned out this was a Blackstone Ranger, which was a notorious Chicago Street gang, which I probably read about it in one of the books for the AFSC, except they were enlisted in the cause of the Poor People's March. So I spent the last night of Resurrection City in a shanty with a bunch of Blackstone Rangers, which is not the kind of company that most suburban kids from Connecticut actually might spend any time with. SM (00:10:57): Oh, no. MI (00:10:58): They were very pleasant. The next morning we all had breakfast and marched off to the Capitol and demonstrated on the Capitol grounds and were arrested, because it was illegal to demonstrate on the Capitol grounds, and was sentenced to seven days in jail, sent off to a minimum-security prison in Virginia. It was great. It was like an all-day-long political seminar, sitting out on the grass talking with Civil Rights veterans, singing freedom songs with this whole stock of freedom songs. Was talking about nonviolence versus violence and all kinds of issues [inaudible] the movement at the time, eating better than we did when I went off to college the next September, food in prison was much better. So I thought it was this great experience. When I came back and my parents lionized me because I made this heroic sacrifice on behalf of the poor, which they had forbidden me to do, but they knew I survived it. SM (00:11:59): How long were you in jail? MI (00:12:00): Seven days. But it was like this great adventure. What was I? Summer of 1968, I was 17 years old, turned 17 in March. Then I went off to college in the fall of (19)68. So of all times to go off to college. I had gone to England that summer for a month, which was my reward for graduating school, with a friend and his family, and hooked up with the British Left. So I met Tariq Ali, who- SM (00:12:35): Oh yeah, he has written several. I got a couple of his books. MI (00:12:39): Led the demonstrations against the American Embassy of Grosvenor Square, which took place in the previous spring when I was not there. Traveled around London, went to several demonstrations I guess about the war. But then while I was there, the Soviet Union invaded, or the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia. The British New Left, as well as a lot of Czech students who were studying in London, were of course outraged. And so there were three nights of demonstrations in the London streets marching on the Soviet Embassy and the Czech students waving the Czech flags. So when I hear charges that the New Left was pro-Soviet, [inaudible] demonstrations, which was clearly anti-imperialist, whether imperialism was our own or the Soviet version. I also was impressed by the London bobbies, and this was a pretty anarchistic crew that was turning out. This was the summer of (19)68. It was after the May (19)68 riots. So people were pretty in the streets and they were not throwing things, but they were truly not obeying the traffic laws. The London bobbies would remove people, but do it quite gently without guns and billy clubs, so it was a model of good crowd control. SM (00:14:18): Did you happen to see at the Pentagon in (19)67, the guy that burned himself to death? Were you aware that there was a man there that did it and he did it with McNamara looking out the window? MI (00:14:29): Yeah, but that was earlier. That was Norman. What was his name? SM (00:14:34): Was that another protest? MI (00:14:35): Yeah, he did that as an individual protest and that was a 1965. SM (00:14:40): Okay. Yeah. MI (00:14:41): Norman Morrison. I was certainly aware that that had happened, but it was on a different occasion. SM (00:14:49): Right. You have written some unbelievable books, of course, the one in the (19)60s, but what did you learn from all of your research on the war between the New Left of the (19)60s and the (19)70s? MI (00:15:10): Okay. Well, in "America Divided," and when I lecture to students about the era, I make a number of points. One is that although it seemed like all the thunder was on the left in the 1960s, we remember the decade in terms of a series of iconic images connected to Civil Rights protests, anti-war protests, counterculture. The decade also has to be seen as the seed time of a conservative revival that would dominate American politics for the remainder of the 20th and be certainly the beginning of the 21st century, starting with the Goldwater campaign in 1964 and the George Wallace insurgency within the Democratic Party, the rise of a right-wing populist reaction to particularly the Civil Rights, but also to counterculture and the anti-war protests. It was not something that was apparent to me at the time, but looking back, it was obvious that as significant, if not more significant than the left-wing story of the (19)60s is the right-wing story of the 1960s. Ever since, the (19)60s have been a touchpoint, as you suggest, for conservatives who are nostalgic for what they imagine to be the stability and order and morality of the patriotism of pre-1960 America, which I think is a construct. It is a Golden Age, and it is a myth, but it is a powerful argument. I mean, in fact, the 1950s were certainly not a Golden Age if you were Black in America. If you had not had the insurgencies in the 1960s, you would still be having Jim Crow society. So you cannot simply look back and say, "Oh, it was all terrible." But the problem with that right-wing argument is that the forces for the dissolution of the family, or for new family structures to emerge were already coming into place in the 1950s. Moreover, they were not restricted to the United States. If you look at single parent families and so on and so forth, any kind of social parameter you want to use, this is something that is across the industrial democratic West, and even to Eastern Europe as well, which did not have a (19)60s. But these are changes that are somehow connected to, and we do not yet have, not far enough away from it to have a satisfactory historical explanation, but something with modernity, something with what has been happening in industrial and post-industrial society, certainly the decline in the birth rate. The Baby Boom itself is an aberration. That temporary expansion of marriage rates, lowering of the age of marriage, increase in the number of children per family, and so on and so forth, which we now take as the norm is an aberration from well over a century of just the opposite, that women were getting married at older ages, having fewer children and so forth, stretching back into the 19th century. Then for particular historical reasons in certain places, United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, you see this Baby Boom phenomenon. Again, it is illusory to see that as somehow being the norm. So powerful cultural forces were coming along and were going to change the family. One of the most important reasons why the family has changed is because of the decline in real wages for industrial workers. When you had a secure, stable, industrial base in this country where a male breadwinner could support a family, then you could have women stay at home and be primary childcare providers and cook a hot meal every night that the whole family sat down to eat. Once that is removed starting in the late 1960s and for the last four decades, you see a decline in real wages means women go out to work. If women go out to work, it means that first of all, they have more financial independence so they can contemplate getting a divorce if they are in an unsatisfactory marriage. It also means you are not going to have the Betty Crocker kind of housewives that you had in the 1950s. Families are going to not eat together. They are going to eat more fast food. I mean, the obesity epidemic is probably a byproduct of this. So it is a really complex mix that has something to do with the cultural insurgencies and the counterculture, the 1960s. But only something. I was just reading a piece in the New York Times the other day that pointed out that teenage birth rates, a single parent, unmarried teenage women having babies are much higher in the red states than they are in the blue states. That has something to do with the availability of abortion. There might be more pregnancies in the blue states, but they are not being carried to term. But it has also something to do with the availability of contraception. All you have to do is look at Sarah Palin's daughter, who's now going around as an advocate of teen abstinence. SM (00:21:34): She did not do it. MI (00:21:35): Well, not really a role model for that. So it is not simply decadent places like Berkeley and Cambridge and New York City where cultural patterns have changed. It is precisely in places where you still have, at least this kind of strong norm for church, family, patriarchal authority, where in fact, the family structure breakdown is most evident, at least as measured by teen pregnancies. So it is a bogus argument. SM (00:22:13): It is interesting too; the Boomers for years have said that we are the largest generation in American history. We are not anymore. There are more Millennials now than there ever were Boomers. There is a brand-new book on, I was perusing through it, and it states that it is very difficult to state the exact number of Boomers, anywhere from 74 to 78, but they do know that there are close to 80 to 81 million Millennials now. So to say that Boomers are the large generation of American history isn't true. MI (00:22:51): Well, that might have something to do with immigration. SM (00:22:53): Yes, you are probably right there too. Obviously, I have interviewed a lot of people and a lot of them give their reasons, but I put down six here, but I would like your thoughts on these. What event in your eyes was the number one reason with respect to why the Vietnam War ended? And here is the six that I am listing. Tet. Number two, Kent State and Jackson State in 1970. Tet was in (19)68. Number three, when middle America, like Ohio, their sons were coming home in body banks. Number four, funding was cut off by Congress. Number five, student protests on college campuses, major effect. And number six, the wrong military strategy. MI (00:23:40): Number one, in a broader sense, which is to say that the war was never winnable. I mean, you could annihilate all Vietnamese, you could drop atomic bombs, but you could never build a stable South Vietnamese government there. The material simply was not there to do it. If you did not win politically, did not matter what you did militarily. The Vietnamese were not going anywhere, it was their country. They knew, just like the Americans knew in 1776, that eventually the British would get tired and go home, which was also the Confederate strategy in 1861, except in that case, the North was closer to the South. They were neighbors. But we were not neighbors to Vietnam, so we were never going to win. You could stretch it out, you could increase the number of amount of bloodshed, but at some point, there was going to become a breaking point. Tet was the symbolic breaking point, because thereafter, American people as a whole decided that it simply was not worth fighting in Vietnam. The only way you could fight in Vietnam, as Richard Nixon discovered, was by saying, we were fighting to get out as to say of this Vietnamization program, in fighting for peace with honor, we want to get back our POWs, which was a sort of self-reinforcing rationale for the war, because the longer you fought, the more POWs there were to get back. But in the end, that too was going to run out as a rationale for the war. American people after 1968 simply did not believe the game was worth the candle. Nixon and Kissinger understood that too. This is not a secret. They have this new revisionist history about how we were really winning after 1969. Well, that would have been news to Nixon and Kissinger, who on a number of occasions in the secret White House tapes said, "We cannot win this. We know we cannot win this. We are stretching it out. We want to pass it on. We want the collapse to come after we are out of office. We want a decent interval between the final withdrawal of American troops and the collapse of the Saigon regime." In 1972, they almost lost it. American troops had been wound down. It was only by a massive air expansion of the Air War, bringing the B52s from Guam, that a South Vietnamese route was halted in the summer of 1972 offensive. Two years later signed the Paris Peace Accords, or actually January (19)73, signing the Paris Peace Accords. At that point, even that air offensive was no longer politically possible. So in 1975, when the North Vietnamese again on the offensive, the entire house of cards collapses. When Nixon and Kissinger agreed that both sides would keep their forces in place, they signed South Vietnam's death warrant. Again, you could prolong it if Congress said, "Yeah, here, take another $500 billion, rush aid to South Vietnam." Maybe the final collapse would have come in 1977 instead of 1975, but there was no way it was going to be [inaudible]. So again, that is a long way of saying that, yes, Tet was the most important turning point because at that point, realization dawned on the American people that this was not World War II all over again. There was not a satisfactory narrative that it was going to end in American victory. And it was only a question of how and when we get out, and how many more American lives would be squandered. In the case of Nixon, it could have spared 20,000 American lives and a million Vietnamese lives. The peculiar thing is that if Nixon had simply come into office in 1969 and said, "I would like to win in Vietnam, we all would. But my predecessors have so screwed up everything that we are just going to go to the peace table when we are going to get out," he would have been a hero. He would have been politically invulnerable in the same way that he was when he went to China. No Democrat could open the door to China, but Richard Nixon could have- SM (00:28:10): You are right. MI (00:28:10): ...could have used to get that Communist credentials. And had he done that, there would have been no Watergate, because Watergate was a direct outgrowth of his desire to keep fighting the war, expanding the war in terms of the Air War secretly, while pretending to the American people that the war was winding down. The plumbers were created to fix the leaks in the State Department. That was where the first illegal wiretaps were on the state department's personnel to see who was leaking information about the secret bombing of Cambodia. So Nixon would have gone down in history as the great unifier, the great peacemaker, no Watergate scandal, but instead, he decided he was going to prolong the war for whatever reason. SM (00:28:58): What was amazing about him as a person who was... I am only three years older than you are, and what is amazing is that I was in college at the time, what I considered the arrogance of Richard Nixon, that even though he may have been trying to Vietnamization process and have the peace talks and all the other things, he boldly said that no protestor is ever going to influence me. MI (00:29:26): Right. SM (00:29:27): No one protesting. And he was referring to college students, but I think he, he is referring to more than that, I think anybody. And that was just pure arrogance, was not it? MI (00:29:35): Right. But it also was not true because they were very aware of protests. And when he overlooked that with the invasion of Cambodia in May of 1970, that was the last time he used American ground forces to expand the war. He had suddenly understood the limits of his mandate because that strike in May 1970, I mean, again, the Vietnamese won the war in Vietnam, and it had nothing to do with protests at home. If there had been no protest... That had nothing to do with protests at home. If there had been no protests at home, the war still would have been lost for the U.S. However, it did set some constraints on policy. That strike in 1970 is significant because it was not simply places like Harvard and Wisconsin and Michigan and Berkeley that went on strike. It was places like Kent State, which is a commuter school, a working-class school, in the middle of Ohio in the heartland. It was places like Notre Dame, Catholic colleges, Southern colleges, community colleges, even some of the service academies. The Merchant Marine Academy had a protest. It was the entire younger generation in college that was rejecting war, and a lot of other people in addition, and Nixon never risked that again. Even though basically after the spring of 1970, the anti-war movement continued, it was never as powerful again. The protests between 1967 and May of 1970 created a specter of what could happen if you escalated before. SM (00:31:22): I am hearing something. You had been very critical of the current Students for a Democratic Society. I know several students at my former school that are in the current SDS, that they glorify the extreme radicals of that particular period, the Bernardine Dohrns, the Mark Rudds, the Bobby Seales. I find that interesting because there is truth to that, because I just got back from Kent State after being there four days. The main speakers were Bobby Seale, Bernardine Dohrn. Mark Rudd, though, I will say about Mark Rudd... MI (00:31:59): Mark is very self-critical. I brought to Mark speak here. SM (00:32:00): Yeah. I like Mark. He admits he was wrong and he admits that they destroyed a good thing, which was SDS. Sometimes Bobby is confusing, because Bobby says real good things. I do not see the anger in him anymore, but I do see the... what is the word here? He defends that they were not violent in any way. Bernardine Dohrn, to me, has never said anything to apologize for what has been done. MI (00:32:30): No. She has forgotten nothing and learned nothing. SM (00:32:32): Yeah. Well, your thoughts on why. Kent State was very important, because you had Alan Canfora there and Chic Canfora, and they were students that experienced it, and some of the more radical students at Kent State. They were there when all this happened. Just your observations on why that group is being idealized more than any others by some of the younger anti-war activists today. MI (00:33:02): Well, that is a big question. I think people are drawn to iconic figures. Angela Davis, say, or Bobby Seale, would have a great appeal. They are appealing public personalities in a way that say David Harris is not, or he has not chosen to play that role. One of the things I talked about in my (19)60s seminar is the leaders who chose not to be leaders in the 1960s. One of them is a Hamilton alum. Bob Moses is a critical person in the history of the (19)60s, the Freedom Summer. SM (00:33:55): He is the math guy too, isn't he? MI (00:33:59): Yes, and spoke at the first SDS anti-war march, and the people of 1965 knew. Really a central figure, who pulled out of the movement and went into self-imposed exile for a while. It was a draft business, but I do not think he felt comfortable in the way that the movement was developing. He was not a Stokely Carmichael. John Lewis, another person. Nobody was as important in the history of the civil rights movement as John Lewis, from the Freedom Rights to the march on Washington in (19)63 to the marches in Selma and in Montgomery, leading the march across the bridge. Lewis pulled out. I mean, he was displaced as SNCC chairman by Stokely Carmichael, but he did not try to out-militant Stokely Carmichael. That would have been difficult. The Berkeley Free Speech Movement... SM (00:35:00): Mario Savio. MI (00:35:00): ...Mario Savio, he continued to be politically engaged, but he pulled out of leadership. He had some problems. I just read a biography. SM (00:35:10): Oh, I have read it too. It is a great biography. MI (00:35:12): It is a very good bio. SM (00:35:13): Robert Cohen, I believe. MI (00:35:14): Robert Cohen. There were all kinds of interesting, thoughtful people who simply did not fit in with and could not bring themselves to do the celebrity militant politics of the late (19)60s. What we are left with in terms of public memory are the people who did not have a problem with that, people who were not self-doubting in any sense and have these big extroverted personalities and egos to match, and who are happy to offer themselves up to the later generations as the model (19)60s radical. One of my problems with the idea of creating a new SDS was who in SDS were they looking to as leaders. Not the ones, in my mind, who exemplified the best of the movement, but actually those who killed the movement, who killed SDS, as Mark Rudd says. The second problem with the idea of a new SDS is that the essence of SDS, the reason SDS took off, was because it looked back at previous left-wing movements, and some of these kids were coming out of red-diaper-baby backgrounds. Some of them were coming out of pink-diaper-baby backgrounds, Socialist Party backgrounds. They said, "What came before does not suit us anymore. We have to do something new." SDS grew out of the Student League for Industrial Democracy. Well, what did the League for Industrial Democracy mean to young people at the start of the 1960s? It meant nothing. Industrial democracy meant nothing. They brilliantly renamed themselves as Students for a Democratic Society, which did mean something, and they [inaudible] their own statement, which owed nothing, owed little, to previous left-wing manifestos or ideas. They brilliantly recreated a Left that was relevant to their era and their generation, unlike SDS, which is a brand name. Yes, who would not want to belong to SDS? I would like to belong to the Industrial Workers of the World, but they had their moment in the past. I thought there was an irony involved in paying homage to SDS by doing something very un-SDS-like. SM (00:37:42): With Mark, did you talk about that in the class? MI (00:37:49): We did talk about that, yeah. SM (00:37:50): I interviewed Mark on the phone, then I had dinner with him at the conference. We spent some time together and then the rest of the time, as soon as Bernardine and that group came in, I kind of distanced myself. He has an intellectual, and he likes intellectual conversations. When I interviewed him, he said, "I do not want these fluffy questions. I want something where I can deeply think about it." He is the real deal. He is the real deal, and with respect, he has done some deep thinking about the mistakes that were made. He really admits he is wrong and it destroyed something that he loved deeply, which was SDS. MI (00:38:27): Kathy Wilkerson's book is good. SM (00:38:29): I have it. I have not read it. MI (00:38:31): It is good. I mean, there is problems with it. There is a disconnect at a certain point between her actions. It is hard to see from the book how she changed so dramatically. She came out of Quaker background as well, as did actually quite a number of people in the Weathermen. Jeff Jones, coming out Southern California, I think he had a Quaker-ish background or a pacifist background. SM (00:39:05): Well, I know that Thomas Powers wrote the book on Diana Oughton. I have the book, because she is one of the three that died. She was actually the girlfriend of Harris, who ended up marrying Bernardine Dohrn. Not Harris. He wrote a book too. MI (00:39:24): Bill Ayers. SM (00:39:27): Bill Ayers, yeah, President Obama's friend. I did not realize how close they were. MI (00:39:32): Oh, yeah. SM (00:39:32): Boyfriend and girlfriend. Okay, we are pretty close to the first half here. How did the New Left of the (19)60s differ from the old left of the (19)30s and the (19)40s? I know personally from what I have read, but what were the defining characteristics in a generation of 74 million? What was the New Left? How did they differ? I say this because I mentioned Mark and how he talked about how he read Che Guevara and these were important ideas. It was all about ideas. When he talked about Mario Savio at the Free Speech Movement, he said, "We are about ideas. We are not about just being here for the corporations. The bottom line, the university's about ideas." The Old Left was more about just pure politics, was not it? MI (00:40:33): Well, it was about ideas too, when they were reading their Marx and Lenin. There are a number of crucial differences. One is that the Old Left looked to the industrial proletariat as the agent of social change, so workers organizing around their economic interests would inevitably, through a scientific process that could not be stopped, come to realize their interests were in opposition to that of the employers and eventually they would make a revolution, whether peaceful or violent. People dispute it, but inevitably they would turn to Socialism and seize control of the means of production. That was their idea of who the agent of change was. In the 1960s, the agent of change was young people themselves. Instead of youth organizations like Students for a Democratic Society, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, being the affiliates of adult organizations, which had always been the pattern ...the Socialist Party had the Young People's Socialist League, the Communist Party had the Young Communist League, the League for Industrial Democracy had the Student League for Industrial Democracy. Instead of seeing themselves as the affiliate supporting this adult project, rather, they said ...C. Wright Mills famously wrote in a letter to the New Left, "Look around the world. Who is in motion? Who is demanding change? It is young people," young intellectuals, young workers and so forth, so there was a generational cast to their politics. "We are people of this generation, uncomfortably inhabiting a world we did not make," something like that. It is the opening lines of the Port Huron Statement. That was one thing. The other thing was organizational. The Old Left was hierarchical. In the case of the Communist Party, it was hierarchical and authoritarian. In the case of the Socialist Party it was more democratic, but still there were national chairs and presidential candidates and so on and so forth. The New Left developed a much more ultra-democratic, unto anarchistic ... not in the violent sense but in the sense of being distrustful of all authority, even authority within their own organizations ...which created a very different movement, a very localized movement. A movement, again, without a formal hierarchy, which had a lot of strengths at times, and also made for an impermanent movement and also opened up the movement for infiltration by people like the Progressive Labor Party, who had their own agenda. Ironically, being ultra-democratic meant that the authoritarians could sneak in the back door. That too, in the sense of who was the agent of social change and what was the correct proper organizational strategy, the New Left was fundamentally different than what had come before. SM (00:43:57): I know I see it in the current SDS at my university before I retired, is it takes forever to make a decision. MI (00:44:04): All process. Process. SM (00:44:05): Oh, it is all process, process. Everybody's got to be included. Well, they never make any decisions. That is frustrating. MI (00:44:12): Well, that is where it can lead. It is not an adult form of organization. There is a famous story about SDS had projects called the ERAP, Economic-something-something Action Project. One of the projects... I think it was in Cleveland... spent 24 hours debating whether it should take a day off from work to go to the beach. For young people, who have endless amounts of time and patience for that kind of thing, it is a good form of organization. For grownups, that drives you crazy. SM (00:44:50): Yeah. Actually, I was driving a few students crazy to join. They did not know. I think they were remembering the history or studying the history. MI (00:44:59): Well, there is a third element, and that is I think the pacifist movement was actually very influential in a number of ways. Not that by the end of the 1960s the New left was pacifist. Increasingly it was turning not to violence but at least to the rhetoric of violence, violent imagery and Black Panthers. The notion of a prefigurative politics, that is to say that your movement should embody the values that you hope to create in a new society, came out the pacifist movement. It came out of groups like the Catholic Worker, but others as well. I think was very influential and shaped, particularly in the mid (19)60s, SDS. You see that. SM (00:45:46): Hold that line. Hold that line. Very good. MI (00:45:56): We were talking about the impacts of the pacifist movement. You see that kind of prefigurative politics, that your movement itself should embody a more harmonious, a more humane, a more communal atmosphere. That is why these kind of campus takeovers, building takeovers, were so important, because at a place like Columbia, for the five days before the police stormed in, the occupied buildings themselves became a kind of model of what a university could be or what a decent society could be. Of course there was a lot of silliness and utopianism and so on and so forth, but it was an interesting moment. If only the world could be like that. SM (00:46:49): You talked about there is two different qualities and I am going to address them now, the issue of healing and the issue of trust or lack thereof. You mentioned that in the New Left, that they did not trust anybody. When you look at the generation as a whole, there is a perception out there that the generation, whether they were involved or not, just did not trust anybody in positions of leadership or responsibility, whether it be a university president as a college student, anybody in leadership roles, whether it be a church or synagogue. Because I know my fellow students at SUNY Binghamton did not trust anybody in the religious community, the corporate community, the university community or the political community. They did not trust anybody in leadership roles. MI (00:47:32): Right. SM (00:47:32): Do you see that as a major characteristic of the boomer generation overall, and by having that characteristic, it is transferred into their lives over the last 60 years and maybe into their children and into their grandchildren, and is that good? MI (00:47:52): I do not know if it is good, but it is certainly a fact. It is a fact. I mean, they were taught that by Lyndon Johnson, and they were taught that by Richard Nixon. The publication of the Pentagon Papers and publication of the Watergate transcripts demonstrated the absolute chasm between the public rationale and justification for issues as important as war and peace and what the private position of the policymakers were. John McNaughton, Assistant Secretary of Defense, writes a memo to Robert McNamara and lists statistically... very significant because statistics were the end-all and be-all of the McNamara defense fund... he gives a statistical breakdown of the reasons we were fighting in Vietnam. "Why are we fighting in Vietnam? It is 80 percent to protect our reputation as a guarantor, that is for credibility, 10 percent because we do not want the Red Chinese to take over South Vietnam, and 10 percent because we want the people of South Vietnam to have a free, democratic form of government," which inverted the public rationale, which is like fighting the Nazis, that we are fighting for democracy and free French, and so on and so forth. The lesson was taught, not just to the baby boomers but to their parents as well, that people in Washington would lie to you. At the start of the 1960s, public opinion polls, the Gallup poll or whatever, would ask every year, "Can you trust people in Washington to do the right thing?" 75, 85 percent of Americans, said, "Yeah, you can trust that." "How about corporations?" "Oh, yeah." At the end of the decade, you could not get 30 percent of people to believe that, because they had been through Vietnam, they had been through Watergate. There was a massive collapse in the legitimacy of institutions and leaders, which in one way was a healthy skepticism. You know, you should not trust what public authorities tell you if you do not verify. Trust but verify, as Ronald Reagan once said. On the other hand, I think it also bred a deep cynicism about politics. "Well, if they are all so corrupted they are all liars anyway, the hell of it. I just will not participate." The other thing you see is not only the number of people who trust people in Washington goes down, but voter participation drops down to 50 percent or below. I think by the mid 1970s, it is every election. Richard Nixon wins a landslide election in 1972, but about 10 percent fewer voters are participating than took part in the election 10 years earlier. That was one of the real legacies of the 1960s. That is bounced back a little. One of the interesting things about the Obama campaign is the involvement of young people and really the political participation of young people, which is always lower than that for older people [inaudible] sustained. SM (00:51:09): No one believes anybody in Washington today. What is interesting is that the boomer generation, whether they were protestors or not protestors, had I think an attitude that we are going to bring peace to the world. We are going to be different than any other generation, that we are going to end racism, sexism, homophobia. We are going to ... I forget the name of the book. Panacea, this book that we had to read in grad school. Basically, this generation was going to change things. It does not seem to have changed anything. In fact, it seems to have gotten worse. The question is, has the boomer generation as a generation been a failure in terms of their idealism, their hopes and dreams? MI (00:52:00): Well, I think it has changed tremendous amounts culturally, if not always politically. I tell my students, "Whatever your politics are, Republican or Democrat or liberal or conservative, you would not like the 1950s. You would feel really out of place in the 1950s at the level of the assumption that this was a white society. Blacks are simply invisible. Go back and read Life Magazine. Try and find blacks in the advertisements or in the news stories. The expectations about women's roles." If you go back and read the Smith or Wellesley yearbooks for the late 1950s, they would list all the people who had their, "Mrs. degree," or the number of people who were pinned or who already married, as they were going out into the world at the age of 22. The notion that women would have a career was simply not thought of, so the kind of double standard in sex and sexuality. In many ways, we are a freer, better, more egalitarian, more humane society as a result of the changes that began in the 1960s, that Rand Paul gets shellacked because he says, "I am not sure I would have voted for the Civil Rights Act." Americans might be anti-government and they might be free marketeers and all that, but the idea that a restaurant owner could discriminate on the basis of race is simply no longer possible to sustain. If you cross that line, you get slapped down, as he did. I would have to say that the (19)60s changed an enormous amount in that, in that disillusionment that followed Vietnam and Watergate, there was a disillusionment with government, and that worked against liberals and that worked against the Left. That worked against the Democrats because the Democrats are the party of government, so people did not simply conclude that government was bad because it lied us into Vietnam and could not win in Vietnam. It generalized, that the government is bad no matter what it tries to do. Regulation is bad. Workplace safety regulation is bad. Glenn Beck says fascism grew out of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, so progressivism is the beginning of fascism. I mean, you could not possibly have sold that idea at the start of the 1960s. When people thought about big government, they thought about the New Deal and Social Security and workers' rights to organize and so on and so forth. Once that idea of government as benevolent and competent was tarnished in the 1960s, it allowed the Reagan Revolution to establish a new common wisdom, which was the government's not the solution to problems, government is the problem. SM (00:55:26): Yeah. Then one thing when you talk about the Free Speech Movement in (19)64, (19)65 in Berkeley, when you talk about the students demanding to be part of the governance of the university and getting a better understanding of the money coming in and the money going out, the donations and everything, this link to the corporate world was talked about at Berkeley in (19)64, (19)65. You even see Clark Kerr, in a major speech he gives about the corporate, the multiversity and everything. Students at that time were coming in saying, "I do not want to be that IBM person." MI (00:56:03): The knowledge factory. SM (00:56:04): Yeah, the knowledge factory. You had that happening in the 1960s, and yet today... and that is the beginning of the Research Institute too. I interviewed Arthur Chickering, who wrote Education and Identity, the great scholar who was the Seven Vectors of Development. Integrity was the seventh one. I interviewed him. My degrees are in higher ed, and I basically said, "Is there anything about the universities today that you criticize?" He said, "Yes, that the universities are again under the control of the corporations." That scares him. Correct me if I am wrong, because someone I interviewed said that when you have universities and corporations in control, you have fascism. MI (00:56:54): That seems like an exaggeration. SM (00:56:58): That the ideas are being controlled from outside rather than inside. MI (00:57:03): Well, universities have sort of returned to a credentialing industry for career advancement. I mean, even in the (19)60s, many more people were business majors than [inaudible] history majors. One of the things on which the 1960s protests depended was this sense, that was not universal at the time, that economic prosperity was a permanent fact in American life, that things were going to get better and better. If you talked about poverty, you talked about poverty thinking it is terrible that these people are not sharing the general affluence. "We are a really affluent society. Why cannot everybody have access to it?" If you are a kid in college, you can think, "Well, I do not have to rush towards the degree." First of all, college is very cheap. I got out of college without any debt whatsoever. We were not from a wealthy family by any means, but what was my tuition, $2,000 a year or something? You could take time off, you could drop out, you could experiment, you could go into public service, you could be a schoolteacher or whatever. You did not have to go think of yourself as being a hedge fund manager so you can pay back your college debts. The underpinnings of that economic prosperity collapsed in the late (19)60s and the start of the 1970s with the energy crisis, stagflation, declining real wages and deindustrialization, none of which were thought of as possibilities at the start of the 1960s, but which became the economic reality through the 1970s and thereafter. Much greater instability, a much greater sense of, "You really need to buckle down, because it is a rat race out there." The number of history majors goes down and down and down, and the number of people going to take classes that they think will get them jobs with a hedge fund just goes up and up and up. I forget what the starting point for this question was. Oh, so the state of the university today. Well, I teach at what is a little outpost of the declining ideal of the liberal arts. Very few students. There are millions of college students, but probably 5 percent of them go to colleges like Hamilton, which is not vocational. I mean, you cannot take a business administration... I mean, you cannot take a business administration. You can take economics, which is what a lot of them do. You know where the ideal is, you are going to be schooled to be a better person, a better citizen, a better thinker. Where most of your teachers are tenured or tenured track. You are not being taught by adjuncts. It is a four-year residential program. I mean, that just does not describe the 95 percent of the college and university student population today. Hamilton used to be the norm. It is no longer that. It is a relic and we know that. And even at Hamilton, I am probably part of the last generation to enjoy the benefits of being a tenured faculty member at a place like Hamilton, where life isn't so bad. At least, I remind myself it is better than working in a coal mine. SM (01:00:59): I went to Harper College, Arts and Sciences there. I identified more with Harper College, within the school of Binghamton University, than anything. This is the other very important question I wanted to ask. Let me preface this by saying that, in 1995, I took a group of students to Washington DC to meet the late Senator Edmund Muskie, who was part of our Leadership On the Road programs. He had not been well, and we were still able to secure him through Gaylord Nelson, at the Wilderness Society. Took 14 students down there and they came up with the questions. And one of the questions was, they had looked at 1968, they knew he was the vice-presidential Democrat, running mate with Hubert Humphrey. The nation at that time looked like it was coming apart. The nation was torn apart with assassinations that year with the terrible confrontations in the streets of Chicago. The president withdrawing from the race. And then of course, looking at the (19)60s and all the other things going on. But the question is, "Is this generation going to its grave, the boomer generation, comparable to the Civil War generation, that went to its grave not healing, due to all the unbelievable divisions between black and white, male and female, gay and straight, those who supported the war, those who are against the war, supported the troops or against the troops?" It comes down to a lot of things. I even add on here, through the interviews that I have had with people, the divisions also included, certainly between Native Americans and white people and Latinos and the hard hats against the college protestors. The list goes on and on. I will tell you what Senator Muskie said in response to that question, "What is your question? Do you worry that this generation of 74 to 78 million, maybe they do not have a problem, but that they are going to go to their graves without healing from all these divisions because the division still exist?" MI (01:03:13): Well, interesting. I guess healing is not a word I would use, as if growing up is a therapeutic process. I would say that the significant portion of that generation was indelibly marked by the 1960s. My politics, whatever year we are in, 2010 are not my politics in 1968 or 1970. But you can certainly see the influence on the way I understand the world, on the way I understand personal responsibility and the morality. All those things are affected by the 1960s. In the aftermath of the Civil War, people voted as a shot. So for the next 40 years, American politics were dominated by that Civil War generation, north and south, and the political allegiances and conclusions that they drew on the basis of the experience of living through that kind of war. We lived through a war too. Now, oftentimes I will ask my students, "What did your parents do in the 1960s?" Actually depressingly, increasingly, their parents were not alive or were just very young during the 1960s. But when I could ask that question with reasonable assurance that their parents were my contemporaries, sometimes they would call home and say, "What did you do in the (19)60s?" And their parents would say, "Well, I missed the (19)60s. [inaudible] nursing school or I had a young child at home. Or I got married at 21. Or I was living in Dubuque and we did not have the (19)60s until the (19)70s." So one wants to avoid generalizing too much about that experience. Some people simply sailed through it. Most people are not involved in public affairs. It is not important to them. It might, every four years, sort of attract their attention, but most people are focused on home and family and relationships and work and so on and so forth. But for those of us who were involved one way or the other, on one side or another, went to Vietnam or protested against Vietnam, sometimes those are the same people. I think we will carry those influences for the rest of our life to our grave. I do not think that is a bad thing. I do not feel like I need to heal from the 1960s. I think we, as a country, need to understand the lessons of the (19)60s, the meaning of the (19)60s, and not simply reduce it to a set of iconic images and a few stereotypes, whether favorable or unfavorable. SM (01:06:08): I think originally when I had talked to the students, I think they were a little influenced by me. Because I think what they were really talking about is what you just mentioned, those who protested against the war and those who served in that war. And thinking that when those who protested the war bring their kids or their grandkids to the wall in Washington DC, are they having second thoughts about, "Maybe I should have served. Maybe I should have been involved. Maybe I should not have gotten a deferment." The questioning, because sometimes kids and grandkids ask questions that really make the parents think even deeper about something. MI (01:06:53): Well, I never think that when I go see the wall and I go pretty often. I think, what a terrible tragedy that 58,000 lives were thrown away, not to mention 3 million Vietnamese lives, for nothing. And one of the great stereotypes about the 1960s is that anti-war protestors hated soldiers, hated veterans. It simply was not true. When I got involved, when I went to college in (19)68, I started meeting large numbers of Vietnam Veterans who were protesting the war. Vietnam Veterans against the war had just come into existence. And those guys were our heroes. We assumed, maybe [inaudible], that most people going through that kind of war, being of the same generation, would come back opposing the war. And in fact, there were war protests in Vietnam. People wore black armbands, people wore peace signs. People increasingly refused combat duty. I mean, one of the reasons the war came to an end is because it was destroying the American Army, collapsing morale, drug abuse, [inaudible], AWOL's and so on and so forth. The longer you stayed in Vietnam, the less of an Army you were going to have, in any sense, combat ready. So I do not see... Obviously, there were veterans who came back who hated hippies. I do not doubt that there were a few of them who were spat upon. Although, I think that is also one of the great myths, lots of people were being spat on in airports. I certainly remember anybody who spat on a veteran or somebody in uniform. If you think about it is inherently unlikely, given that hippies tend to be sort of not fighters. And these guys are just coming back from Vietnam. You do not hear about the people being sent to the hospital with broken jaws. Which is what you would expect me hear if somebody spat on you, coming to the airport back from Vietnam. So I do not see that as one of the great divisions in that sense. SM (01:09:04): What has the wall done? Obviously, the wall was built to heal the Vietnam Veterans and their families and to pay respect for those who paid the ultimate price. And when Jan Scruggs wrote his book, To Heal a Nation, his goal was to heal those families who had lost the 58,000 plus and all Vietnam Vets, to recognize that when they came home, they were not welcomed. They had another war, but that their service was something to be honored. But in the book, itself also, he talks about the fact that, "He hopes it spreads beyond the veterans to really the nation itself." Do you think it is done a good job there? MI (01:09:47): Well, again, I am not crazy about the word, "Heal." After the Civil War, every southern town put a memorial to Confederate dead in the town square. And every northern community put a little model of a statue of a Civil War soldier in the town square. It was a memorial. It is a recognizing the sacrifice of the soldiers who fought on one side or the other. Memorial Day itself began as an annual occasion of putting flowers on the graves of Civil War Veterans specifically, and then it became like Iran sort of general occasions to honor veterans of all American wars. So I think that the Vietnam Memorial has to be understood as that, as a memorial, not as a therapeutic device. But in the design, interestingly, there is an ambiguity that is present in those simply heroic statues of generals or private soldiers, which is, that there is a kind of sadness to it and a contemplative. You can see your reflection in the shining stone, and plus seeing all of the names, of course, it is obviously a powerful device. Initially, it was opposed by some veterans groups who said, "It was a black gash of shame," and so forth. They wanted a more traditional statue, and eventually they put up- SM (01:11:25): The three-man statue. MI (01:11:26): ...three-man statue, which to my mind, it detracts from the effect of the original. But the wall has become the most popular tourist site in Washington. So clearly, people do see it as an appropriate memorial to the Vietnam War. SM (01:11:47): The Muskie response was that he did not even comment about 1968, which the students thought he would talk about. His comment said, "We have not healed since the Civil War." And dealing with the issue of race, he said, "When 430,000 Americans lose their lives and almost an entire generation is wiped up, particularly in the South, that is a tragedy." And you go to Gettysburg and you see oftentimes the flags on the Southern side. Is there some... Is that a train? MI (01:12:24): No, it is the fire siren. SM (01:12:27): Oh. MI (01:12:27): Tell you also when there is an accident. I hate it. SM (01:12:32): This is a question that is kind of different. Is there something about the (19)50s, the (19)60s, and (19)70s, the time when boomers were young, that is rarely discussed, but important in your eyes, with respect to the overall impact that had on 74 million? Something that is rarely discussed but important? MI (01:12:53): If it is rarely discussed, I probably have not thought about it or have not discussed it. Well, I do not know if it is rarely discussed, but you often see the baby boom generation counter pose to the Greatest Generation. And recently, we have been living in sort of this Greatest Generation boom let, Band of Brothers, Saving Private Ryan, and [inaudible], The Pacific. I think what has to be understood about the (19)60s generation is of course, they are the children of the World War II generation. And World War II was enormously influential for thinking and worldview. When I grew up, when I was 10, every adult authority figure I had, from my father, to my sixth-grade teacher, to the President of the United States was a World War II Veteran. SM (01:14:10): Same here. MI (01:14:14): And the war was endlessly celebrated, Longest Day, Great Escape, television shows like Combat and Gallant Men. SM (01:14:24): Victory at Sea. MI (01:14:25): Victory at Sea, even earlier, Sergeant Rock. So you are kind of living in this. And children's play, Tom Engelhardt has written a good book called, Victory Culture about the way children's play- SM (01:14:37): That is with the cowboy on the cover. MI (01:14:39): What is that? SM (01:14:39): Is a cowboy on the cover? I think there is a cowboy on- MI (01:14:43): Oh yeah, I guess. SM (01:14:44): ...of course. Yeah. MI (01:14:44): I guess so, because he takes it back to the narrative victory culture goes back to the Western. But that was the world we inhabited, and there was a tremendous amount of idealism about the United States role in the world as a liberator, liberating force, winning the war as we thought. Because we did not think much about the Soviets. A good war and so on and so forth. I think that idealism carried over into the (19)60s generation just was put into different directions, which was to instead of simply endlessly celebrating American virtues and triumphs, it was to get America action to exemplify the values at its best, it had represented in the past. So lots of people went from being excited about John Kennedy, war hero PT 109, to being excited about the moral qualities of the Civil Rights protestors, people like Bob Moses. And to being disappointed about when America and Vietnam its actions and value, seems so at odds with those World War II values and actions. So World War II did not go away. World War II went away in the 1970s. It would reappear in disguised ways, like the Star Wars Imperial Storm Trooper in helmets, like Nazi helmets and so forth. So it disappeared because of the general war movies went away. People did not want to see movies about war, they had just been through Vietnam. And then at the end of the century, as the veterans were dying off, you quickly realized this generation was not going to be around anymore, then suddenly it returned to the vengeance. But I do not know what I am going to say. SM (01:16:50): You made a point there. Why did the children of the World War II generation in the 1950s, all they saw were Westerns, cowboys and Indians. Indians, and guys wearing black hats were the bad guy. And the good guy was always Hopalong Cassidy, the Lone Ranger, Matt Dillon, that whole group. What was the psyche there? Because we grew up as kids with cowboys and Indians, the movies, everything was Cowboys and Indians. MI (01:17:24): Well, that had pretty much been the case since the 1890s. I mean, the story of America was the story of Western expansion. And the conflict in Western expansion was the conflict between the cowboys and the Indians or the whites and the Indians. There was little doubt that who was the good guy in that conflict. So it was a powerful story. Hollywood was drawn to it, created its own icons like John Wayne, cowboys and Indians went away in the 1970s. SM (01:17:56): Yes, they did. MI (01:17:58): Or they changed where the Indians became the good guy, suddenly. That was a product of Vietnam as well. SM (01:18:07): Who do you think were the personalities of the Boomer Generation that both good and bad, that had the greatest influence on them, whether they be politicians, activists, writers, you name it, entertainers? Were there things that stood out that really, yes, this was the impact. This person in that group had the greatest impact on everyone, regardless of their politics. MI (01:18:40): Well, rock and roll. SM (01:18:42): Right. MI (01:18:42): I mean, I do not have anything surprising to say about that. But certainly, a lot more people took their politics from music than they did from sitting down and reading a report here on statement. And Dylan, even when he left behind his protest, Woody Guthrie persona for his other personas, he was changing personas every a couple years, but the sort of angry alienation of the mid 1960s music, the, "Do not follow leaders watch the parking meters," was still very expressive of a political worldview. So you cannot underestimate the influence of those pop-cultural figures. SM (01:19:39): I know that when I read the March book, Underground, he talked about the importance of Che Guevara. He read about him and thought about him a lot. But why did many of the new left read not only Che, but Mao, David and John Paul [inaudible], Camus? Bertrand Russell, who I loved to read. In fact, the opening of his biography, that first couple lines there, the purpose of his life. I do not know if you remember that line. MI (01:20:10): I bet a lot more people wore the T-shirt, than actually sat down than read Che. I bet a lot more people bought and carried around a little red book as a cultural icon, which I did, than actually sat down and read Mao. He was pretty boring. So I do not think, certainly by the late (19)60s, that those figures were so much important as intellectual influences, as they were just as images of heroic gorillas and so forth. SM (01:20:52): It is like the thought that a revolutionary can create a revolutionary society. And that socialism, we keep hearing that word today of being labeled against President Obama, which is ridiculous. But that they believed that revolution should happen in the United States. What were they meaning, "Revolution should happen in the United States?" Was it ideas? They were reading this before violence was part of the anti-war effort, before the Weatherman became part of SDS, or they took over SDS, the Black Panthers, the Young Lords in the Latino community, the violence even at the Wounded Knee, which was different than the takeover of Alcatraz in (19)69. So what were they saying here? This was even before violence. MI (01:21:46): Well, one of the most powerful texts to come out of the 1960s, published right in the middle of the decade, was the autobiography of Malcolm X. And sales, no doubt, helped by the fact that Malcolm X was assassinated before the book came out. And Malcolm X's story, Malcolm X famously said, "By any means necessary." But he was not himself a violent revolutionary. He simply said, "If that is what it takes to win freedom, then that is what we will do." But the story is really a story of personal transformation, of creating a new identity. He had been a pimp and a drug dealer and a drug addict and a convict who remade himself into this powerful spokesman for Black power, Black pride. And in doing so, it was a very American story. I like to compare it to the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, which is also a story of his recreation. He runs away from Boston and goes to Philadelphia [inaudible] two pennies in his pocket and becomes one of the most important businessmen and inventors and philanthropists, and then later, a revolutionary, a different revolution. I think that that was a very (19)60s message. That idea that you could remake yourself, become a new person, take on a new name. Malcolm Little becomes Malcolm X. So that text strikes me as much more authentically representative of what was driving the politics in the (19)60s, which were a lot about self-transformation, for better or worse. Then Che Guevara's Bolivian notebooks or [inaudible] Revolution, or certainly the Little Red Book, which again, I do not think anybody actually read. SM (01:23:52): So you saw that with Cassius Clay and Muhammad Ali. And then you saw that with Lew Alcindor and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. They were all somewhat linked to right Elijah Mohammad. They were never [inaudible]. MI (01:24:03): Right. SM (01:24:09): But anyway, I do not know if you ever had a chance to read Theodore Roszak's book, The Making of a Counterculture and Charles Reich's, the Greening of America. To me, (19)67 to (19)71, they were classic books that we were required to read in our graduate program at Ohio State. And they had a tremendous impact on me. When think of the counterculture and what was happening, would you consider those two of the greatest books to really describe the young people of the era? MI (01:24:45): No. I mean, I think they were attempts by well-meaning academics to account for this change. I think if you went back and read them now, they probably would not stand up. I mean, millions of people read them because they wondered, "What the [inaudible] is going on with these kids?" Again, I guess I would turn to novels for one. I turned to a book like, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey. Kesey is an interesting, significant figure. Or Doris Lessing's, Golden Notebooks, especially lots of women, but lots of men were reading Lessing. Again, books about social transformation, identifying with outsiders, people on the margins, On the Road. SM (01:25:45): Oh, yeah. MI (01:25:45): On the Road was published in 1957 and sells okay. It remains in print, but it is real moments in the 1960s. And what is On the Road? On the Road is an account of this journey of self-discovery, which is in part going to the West, a great American story, but it is also going to the margins. I think a lot of (19)60s politics, youthful (19)60s politics needs to be understood in terms of the identification with people who were on the outs. SM (01:26:21): The Beats. MI (01:26:22): Well, the Beats, but migrant farm workers. Sal Paradise goes off and picks beans and in Imperial Valley or picks cotton, jazz musicians and so forth. Especially when Kerouac was writing that book, were mostly invisible to most Americans. And the idea that true wisdom, true spirituality... Because Kerouac is nothing if not concerned with things of the spirit, Beat. Beat is the root of beatific and also beaten down. That those notions that you could find truth among people who did not share in that sort of cornucopia of American consumer culture, were not white and middle class and living in suburbs, that was at the center of a lot of (19)60s politics. And so when sharecroppers coming along in the early 1960s trying to register to vote, it was an incredibly evocative image for young people, white and black. That is why Fannie Lou Hamer, who becomes a heroine, because it is this, "Illiterate woman," as LBJ referred to her, stood up to the sheriffs. They beat her and she would not back down. And she says, "If these things can happen, I question America." Well, that had a lot of power. Now, that could translate into things, which looking back, I think we are pretty bad, which is the identification of the Black Panthers, the brothers on the block. Well, they must know something we do not know because they have this gritty, urban, authentic experience. And in fact, [inaudible] about what was going to change America. And in fact, their vision was rejected by most black people. Most black people followed Martin Luther King, they followed Bobby Seale. Black Panthers had 5,000 members at their height. SM (01:28:30): Well, can we go over maybe 15 or 20 minutes? MI (01:28:33): Sure. SM (01:28:33): Because I got about five here. One of the things at the very end, I am going to mention just some names and personalities for just quick thoughts. But when you look at this, this was also a protest generation, or at least protest was very important part. Obviously, you had all the rights movements, from the Civil Rights and Women's Rights, Native American, Latina, environmental groups, certainly the anti-war groups. And they even had, which has led into some of the things today, dealing with ageism and mental rights issues and disability rights and so forth, so it is carried on. And that is a very important part of the... I am getting a lot, [inaudible] here. Of all these movements, and there were a lot of them... The Civil Rights Movement is historic, so I am not even really talking about that. And the anti-war movement, we have talked about. And the Women's Movement somehow was a shoot off because of the fact that there was so much sexism going on in the Civil Rights and in the Anti-War Movement. But of all the movements that took place during that period, and as we have gone into the (19)70s and the (19)80s and the (19)90s, and now in the tens, which of the ones are the most successful in terms of consistency and being on-going? Most successful in terms of consistency and being ongoing in their fight and struggle. Are they all that way or have some kind of taken the back burner? They are not as important anymore, or they do not have the leaders like we had before? MI (01:30:16): Well, the civil rights movement was prime formative as, say if you take away the civil rights movement in the (19)60s, it would not have been an anti-war movement. There would not have been witness movement, would not have been in the left counter for anything, would have been small groups like in the (19)50s. But there would not have been movements. It established, it was an inspiration, it was an organizational model. It showed that small groups of people, totally committed, could actually change history. So if you are asking me to rank the movements in terms of importance, I would have to say both in terms of the issues and in terms of the influence that the civil rights movement was the first among equals. Movements can only sustain themselves at that fever pitch of kind of Christ's politics for so many years. The labor movement begins, well just beginning 1930s, but it takes off in the 1930s with the sense that labor is the great news force that is going to transform. Okay. All right. Oh, the labor movement. So the labor movement begins in this kind of fever pitch of commitment idealism and sit down strikes and whatnot. It is going to transform on the world and it becomes institutionalized. It survives, it provides a service function, and in some ways, it becomes bureaucratic in some cases becomes corrupt because you cannot simply be at that crisis edge for forever, wear yourself out. But the moment passes. It is an interesting question. What would have happened to Martin Luther King if he had not been assassinated before 1929? He could well have lived while he had a kind of unhealthy diet, but theoretically he could still be with us today. Would he still be Martin Luther King? Would he be a national icon? Would he be a national holiday after he died? Probably not. Because he would have had to settle down. He would have had to have a life post movement. The people who are around and productive, who came out of that era found a post. John Lewis became a congressman. Loads of good stuff. SM (01:32:52): I have interviewed him. He was great. MI (01:32:52): [inaudible] (19)60s. Yeah. So you cannot sustain, it is an illusion to think that, oh well, civil rights movement, it is not what it used to be. Well, it could not possibly be. It had its moment. Anti-war protest is waxed and waned in the decades since. There were certainly protests against the Iraq war, although interestingly, the biggest ones were before the Iraq War. Somehow it was hard to sustain once the Iraq War actually came and lasted and lasted and lasted. So I am not surprised, and I do not think it is a commentary on the movements of the 1960s that they are not still around in full force and full throat 40 years later. That is the life of social movements, they come and go. SM (01:33:44): One of the criticisms of the social movements today though, is that when protests took place in the (19)60s and early (19)70s, you would see, say for example on Earth Day. Earth Day, Gaylor Nelson consulted with the leaders of SDS before they had the Earth Day on April 22. There was a cooperation and agreement. We do not want us to outshine you, but we would like you to be a participant. There seemed to be signs of all the groups at some of the rallies. Now, this is just my observation. Now, it seems so insular that the gay and lesbian movement is just the gay and lesbian movement signs. The women's issue, just women's movement signs. And civil rights, you do not see any other group. It is all so insular now. MI (01:34:32): Okay. Civil rights movement, for a brief moment, to sort of, I am getting coin the phrase, but the we shall overcome moment of basically 1963, 1965 succeeded to the extent that it seemed to embody not simply the needs interests of black Americans alone, but of all Americans. It is to say white Americans who wanted to live in a true democracy, felt that their interests were being represented by the Civil Rights group. They identified with it. What happens post (19)60s, and this is again part of the rise and fall social movements, is that rather than any movement embodying a kind of larger vision, they fragment and they become interest groups, identity politics, is the phrase that is often used. And it is left to the right to pick up that banner. So Ronald Reagan, speaking about his morning in America and government is not the solution. He is the one who has the compelling narrative that this is about all of us, not just about the interest. And part of the problem with Democratic Party, is that it is political platforms and political message seems to become simply a laundry list of the demands of this or that group, without convincingly portraying itself as speaking in the interest of all Americans. And that is why Barack Obama talks about the need for the post (19)60s political paradigm and also kind of reinvent politics. And they will get past those divisive tags left over from the decade, and I wish them luck. Because it does not seem to be happening at the moment. SM (01:36:27): He is sometimes labeled by his opponents as the epitome of the reincarnation of the (19)60s. MI (01:36:33): Which of course he has no real interest in. I mean Barack Obama is essentially a moderate Republican of the early 1960s. Thinks there is some role for government, it is not central to his vision, thinks some regulation, but he is also a pro-business. I mean, it is ludicrous that people get away with calling it a socialist or a communist, let alone a Nazi dictator. Oh, my God. Do not give me started. SM (01:37:02): Yeah, I know. I hear from some of my relatives. I have to walk out of the room. MI (01:37:09): Yeah, it is insanity. So anyway, so I am not surprised that the civil rights movement is not what it was or the anti-war movement. If people studied in the 1960s, students studied in the 1960s. I hope what they conclude is that, not that they missed everything, but that you can learn from the example, if not the model. It is certainly not the organizational trappings like becoming from SDS. You can learn how social change happens. Just small groups of people study their situation, understand the need for new kind of politics, new kind of movement, devote themselves to a great cause. SM (01:37:54): So many notes here. This is a broad question here, maybe too broad, but what accomplishments lay at the hands of the boomer generation and what disasters lay at the hands of the boomer generation? I think you have already commented on quite a few of them. Anything you want to add to that? MI (01:38:19): No. SM (01:38:20): Technology, would you say technology is a big plus for this generation? MI (01:38:24): Well, not me. I am a technophobe, but I do not even have a cell phone. Right. My children call me a hippie technophobe. SM (01:38:34): I have had it for a couple of years. One of the questions back on here, and this is I have asked quite a few people, this particular, not everybody, but in your own words, describe how the following timeframes influenced and developed the boomer generation, between those born between (19)46 and (19)64. I have known already that people told me you cannot generalize. And when we talk about the first 10-year boomers and the second 10-years, it is almost the difference of night and day. But in terms of these periods, just if you were to briefly describe, if you were in a classroom and the students were asking you, professor, would you describe how 1946 to 1960 shape the boomers, just in a couple sentences, what would that be? 1946 to 1960? MI (01:39:21): Well, I think it has a lot to do with that post World War II period, the great influence of the war, the prosperity sense of a rising expectations. Sense that anything was possible in your own life. Sense of dissatisfaction with disparity between the idealism absorbed from your parents' experience of World War II and some of the senior sides of American life. And then of course the war itself. The war in Vietnam. SM (01:39:58): How about 1961 to 1970? MI (01:40:01): Oh, I cannot break it down like that. SM (01:40:03): Or (19)71 to (19)80. MI (01:40:07): Well, again, my wife was born in 1961. She is a boomer. She got to college in 1979 or 1978. Her life, her experience as a student, her expectations of the world were different to mine. Made a difference, whether it became along the start, middle or the end, used to drive me crazy speaking to when I was doing this kind of interviewing myself with some of the founders of SDS. And they said, "Oh, it is too bad you came along when you did. Too late. You missed everything." Said, "I went to college in 1968. What do you mean I missed everything?" I had to be there in 1962. Really? It was very aggravating. But the experiences were different. SM (01:40:51): Well, there is no question though, that when you talk about that period 1980 and beyond, it is as if the whole world of the boomers and it was all when they were young, nothing mattered really when they were older. Because the era of Reagan is 1980 and beyond. Seems like everything has been influenced by him since. MI (01:41:14): Right. SM (01:41:15): Boomers, instead of criticizing that generation or criticizing the Democratic Party like Barney Frank did and his book, Speaking Frankly, you have got to disassociate yourself from the anti-war and the left wing of the party. Is there anything you can say about the (19)80 to 2010, the last 30 years, in terms of the influence on that generation? MI (01:41:41): I mean, again, the pendulum does not swing. We have this tendency to think in terms of decades. So 1980s is the decade of Reagan, just like the 1960s is the decade of John Kennedy and Malcolm X. But I mean, we forget for example, that 1982, the largest war protest in American history, dwarfed the anti-war protests in 1960s took place, people were terrified Reagan’s getting ready to fight nuclear war, nuclear freeze movement was expanding dramatically. And in June of 1982, 3/4 of a million people marched in Washington, not Washington, in New York City. It was the start of the UN session on nuclear disarmament or something to protest Reagan policies. So our history, our selective memory of the past eliminates it. It is like it did not happen. Or in 1981 crushes the [inaudible] strike. Half million people, summoned by the AFL-CIO, go to Washington on Solidarity day, which was in September, maybe late August of (19)81, to protest the crushing of the strike and that gets airbrushed out too. AFL-CIO, it never had a happening in the streets of Washington. Pete Seager was there, singing Solidarity Forever. He was not usually a feature of AFL-CIO, public events. So it is much too simple to say, okay, well boomer generation or the left wing of the boomer generation, has its moment and then sort of packed its bags and went back in its tent and sulked. And things were going on and also, lots of younger people were involved obviously as well. It was not people who gotten their start in the 1960s. I mean, America has never gone, the pendulum has never swung back to where it was in the 1950s. Things remain contested. And certainly Ronald Reagan changed the equation and spoke to a great public disillusionment of the government, which was itself partially a product. Largely a product in the 1960s, Vietnam and Watergate. But it is not simply that the boomers went away. SM (01:44:17): A lot of the critics of the boomers say they did. But overall, not everyone, because he cannot generalize. MI (01:44:24): So Jerry Rubin started running the meat and meat business so that, you get one sort of iconic figure and you say, oh wow, that is representative of all. SM (01:44:35): And Bobby went off, Bobby Seale went off and did a cookbook. MI (01:44:39): Well, that is wrong with that? Cooking was a big part of [inaudible]. SM (01:44:42): He would talk about that at the conference. MI (01:44:44): I would talk, actually that reminds me of something, which is food. Food in the (19)50s stank. Food in the (19)70s actually got interesting. And today the concern about food, the local food movement and the slow food movement and the Alice Waters and Michael Pollen and all, that is a product of the 1960s. We were in 1971 when I was in a collective, our Bible and our cookbook was Diet for a Small Planet by Francis Moore Lappe. He is still around and still writing, which was about how you could not sustain a meat-based diet. It was going to be bad for the Earth. It is going to lead global warming because the clearing of land in the Amazon for grazing cattle and so on and so forth. I mean, all of that was a product of the 1960s. And there was a movement that was enormously influential, even on people helping of themselves as part of the counterculture part of the left. But white would like to eat healthfully. That would not have happened if it was not in the (19)60s. SM (01:45:53): When you mentioned about food in the (19)50s, I think of two things that immediately come to mind. Number one, milk was brought to your door. Remember they leave milk and then the second thing, they did not have fast food places, but you could not go out and get chicken in the basket. Do you remember that? And that was very popular. What do these things mean to you? These are just quick responses. You already talked about the wall. What does Jackson State and Kent State mean to you? MI (01:46:20): Well, personally was sort of the height of the 1960s. All what happened in 1970 was the moment when it seemed like all things were possible. You could stop the war, you could change America. And you know that it was a deadly serious moment, four dead in Ohio. SM (01:46:46): What is Woodstock mean to you? MI (01:46:48): Well, it means I was 18, I met my girlfriend at Woodstock. SM (01:46:51): You were there? MI (01:46:51): Yeah. I was there. SM (01:46:51): Full four days? MI (01:46:56): No, I was only there for a day and night because I was stupid. Because when you went to it, you did not know it was like this historical event. I mean, I bought tickets for a day. I could not afford to buy tickets for the whole time. Nobody bothered to collect your tickets. And then once I got there, it was really cool and really neat. But you did not realize it, 40 years later, be a museum there. And the Jimmy Hendrix would know, sort of have this defining moment on the very last day if I had known that it would have stayed. SM (01:47:28): Now what entertainers did you actually see and hear? MI (01:47:32): I wrote a piece for the Chronicle Higher Education about them. I had to go check the playlist on Wikipedia. See, I had seen the movie so many times. I was a little confused. But I saw Santana. SM (01:47:44): Oh, what a great piece they did, that one. MI (01:47:45): I saw Jefferson Airplane and I saw Janis Joplin and I saw Sly and the Family Stone. And those are the ones that spring your mind. Oh, and Country Joe. Although there was a dispute about, on different websites about when Country Joe actually performed. But the website I read that persuaded me was he was after he performed. SM (01:48:17): Yeah. And that is where he said, give me an F, give me an O. MI (01:48:20): Well he performed twice was the thing. SM (01:48:22): How far away were you parked? Did you have to walk miles to get to it? MI (01:48:26): Few miles, yeah. I was in the parking lot. Muddy field. SM (01:48:30): What do the hippies and the yippies mean to you? The hippies and the yippies, two different groups. MI (01:48:36): Well, the yippies were sort of the Abby Hoffman, Jerry [inaudible] for the Chicago Democratic Convention. And it was never really an organization. It was just the people who identified with Hoffman who did in politics, which I did not, especially. The hippies were kind of much broader, diffuse. I mean, when I teach this, I draw circles on the board, overlapping circles. And I would say, okay, hippies, do you mean leftist, anti-war protestors? Here is one circle though, hippies. There is another circle that is a new left. A part of new left, the hippies, here is another circle, it is the anti-war movement. Part of the antiwar movement, were hippies and new leftists, but a lot of them were, so they were not all the same category. SM (01:49:27): I interviewed Steven Gaskin, who was a great interview about the farm. Very proud to be a hippie. And they have done unbelievable things too. Inventions. What does Watergate mean to you? MI (01:49:41): Well, Watergate proved we were right all along. SM (01:49:45): Vietnam, veterans against the war? MI (01:49:47): Were central to my understanding of the war. And were heroes to the anti-war movement. And repudiate the motion that there was a split between anti-war protestors, in the one hand, Vietnam veterans on the other. SM (01:50:03): What do the communes mean to you? MI (01:50:05): Well, lots of us were in communes and thinking that this was an alternative to family and work life and home life, that would sustain itself forever. Of course, it did not but it was certainly an interesting moment. I still find it difficult to cook for less than 13 people because I learned to cook mostly rice and vegetables. But I was cooking for the 13 people I lived with. SM (01:50:34): So, you were probably responsible for cooking a meal a week. And then, yeah, because I visited a commune up in Boston, when my brother was a diabetic and everyone responsible for one big dinner a week. MI (01:50:51): And you had to clean up too. And that was good training because it meant be cleaned as you cooked. So a big cleanup still. SM (01:51:01): How about, what does the counterculture mean to you? And that is counterculture, often defined as the music, the long hair, the clothes, the drugs, the sex, the whole thing. MI (01:51:12): Yeah. Well, you just said it. SM (01:51:13): Okay. What does the Black Panthers and black power mean to you? MI (01:51:20): Well, black power was much broader than Black Panthers. Black Panthers, one organizational expression of it, who unfortunately I think had a very negative effect on terms of their sort of gun idolatry and street thug language, which we took to be represented revolutionary authenticity, but was actually just a sort of cult. SM (01:51:46): How about My Lai? What did me My Lai mean to you? MI (01:51:51): My Lai was not exceptional, it was representative. I mean, it is not like people were not being killed every single day in terrible ways in Vietnam. It is just the one that we learned about. SM (01:52:04): And Tet? MI (01:52:06): Tet was the turning point. SM (01:52:11): The last part here is, where is my list at? These are just responding very few words. So these personalities or terms? Oh, I do have one question before the final thing here. In about the last 30 to 40 interviews, I have said that there are three slogans that I personally think kind of identify the boomer generation. And the other people had said, we shall overcome. And I wish I did not have on there some. But they are, the more violent aspects of this period are symbolized by Malcolm X, by any means necessary. MI (01:52:48): Okay. SM (01:52:48): Second is the quote that Bobby Kennedy used. It was a quote from another author, obviously. And that is, "Some men see things as they are and ask why. I see things that never were and ask why not." Which is symbolic of an activism, a positive mentality, non-violent protest. Seeing injustice and wanting to create justice wherever you see it. And the third one is kind of a hippie mentality, that was on a lot of the posters. The Peter Max posters were great for that counterculture in the early (19)70s. And I had one hanging in my room at Ohio State, and that was, "You do your thing, I will do mine. If by chance we should come together, that will be beautiful." Which was a hippie mentality. And then of course the civil rights mentality was, we shall overcome. And the only other one that people have mentioned was Kennedy's, "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." And then the other one was Timothy O' Leary, "To an intern on dropout." Are there any other slogans you think really symbolize? Does that cover it? MI (01:53:53): Bob Dylan lyrics are endlessly mineable for insights in these (19)60s. I think I already mentioned, "Do not follow leaders, watch the parking meters." SM (01:54:01): Right. MI (01:54:02): "You do not need a weather man to know which way the wind blows." And so forth. SM (01:54:05): Oh yeah. MI (01:54:06): Subterranean homesick blues. We used to sit down and play it endlessly and analyze it over and over again. SM (01:54:13): Who were your favorite, besides Bob Dylan, who were your favorite rock musicians? Did you have to have a message in your music or did you just, you would like the combination of message and just great sound? MI (01:54:31): Well, I mean the Doors, not political group a message except sex is a message. The approach of the apocalypse is a message. So nothing would surprise you. The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, Credence Clearwater, Country Joe. SM (01:55:01): Were there any Motown performers that you really dug? MI (01:55:05): Not so much. I mean, although I think that is a weakness in my musical education, but I mean, I am certainly hear about all the time. So it was part of the musical backdrop. SM (01:55:16): Did you ever listen to what is going on by Marvin Gay, which is just one of the greatest? We will end with these, history responded with a very few words to these people or [inaudible]. MI (01:55:28): Actually one local group, local to the West Coast, Joy of Cooking. You do not hear much about them, they were a Berkeley group. Came, when I was in Portland. They would come up and play, were sort of cult followers of Joy of Cooking, partially because they had women lead guitarists, which was quite unusual in those days. SM (01:55:45): You were at the Summer of Love too, were not you? Did you say you were there or no? MI (01:55:48): I was in Indianapolis. SM (01:55:51): Oh, okay. That is right. That is right. MI (01:55:52): We were conscious, that was going on. Everybody laughed at the Scott Mackenzie song, which is now sort of seen as this anthem of the Summer of Love. Sergeant Pepper was really the soundtrack for that summer. SM (01:56:06): How about, my first one is Tom Hayden. Thoughts on Tom Hayden? MI (01:56:08): Tom is a smart guy. I interviewed him myself, many years ago. And I think he had a sort of complicated politics, years that followed. Sometimes it is true, there are no second acts in American lives. And I think he is an example of it. SM (01:56:32): He has written a lot of good books though. MI (01:56:33): Yeah, well he was absolutely essential in 1960s. Very brave guy. I was a young reporter from an underground newspaper and I was trying to formulate a question. I could not come up with a way of doing it. He very sort of gently steered me to the formula I still use. He said, "Well, some people would argue this. What would you say to that?" Shaping the question for him. Oh, yes. See, I was floundering. He had been a reporter, student reporter, for the Ann Arbor Daily. So whenever I use that formulation, I think of Tom. SM (01:57:07): I will remember that. MI (01:57:07): Some people would argue. What do you think? SM (01:57:12): Jane Fonda? MI (01:57:14): Well, Jane got a bad rap. I actually met Jane Fonda. Jane and Tom, in fact, came from Portland and part of the China Peace campaign in 1973. I washed her dirty laundry. That is fine. She is the most stunningly beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life at that point. She was 30 and I was just a kid. So I had never met a Hollywood star. And it is true, they are kind of incandescently walk into a room. Also, your jaw drops. SM (01:57:44): And she had lived with what is his name for a long time before she met Tom. MI (01:57:49): Roger Vadim. SM (01:57:50): Yeah. Roger Vadim. And she did Barbella. MI (01:57:53): Barbarella. So I mean, all the stuff about her being Hanoi Jane. Had one bad photograph taken, but lots of people were traveling to Hanoi. John Baez traveled to Hanoi, actually got caught in an American bombing raid. So it was not a treasonous act. SM (01:58:14): How about the Kennedy brothers? Just quick thoughts on John Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy. MI (01:58:18): Yeah. Well, John Kennedy was a figure in the (19)50s, not the (19)60s, and did not care about domestic reform and was remembered as a reformer, but because of the civil rights movement, picked him up and pushed him in a direction he would not have gone himself. I think Robert Kennedy, under a much more fundamental transformation. He was younger, more attuned to the moment. And it is an interesting question. If Sirhan Sirhan's elbow, had been jostled at the last moment, I think Robert Kennedy would have received democratic nomination in (19)68, and we would not be talking about the onset of the conservative era with Richard Nixon. One of those moments of contingency as we historians, like you say, where a historical accident changes what followed. SM (01:59:15): How about LBJ and Hubert Humphrey? MI (01:59:20): Well, they are both kind tragic figures. They wanted to be domestic reformers and they wound up creating and apologizing for terrible work. SM (01:59:36): Dwight Eisenhower? MI (01:59:39): Eisenhower looks better, as the years pass. Partially because the Republican presidents who followed him were so terrible. This is not my insight, but political scientists, what is his name? He said that the New deal was ratified by Dwight Eisenhower because... The New Deal was ratified by Dwight Eisenhower because when he came into office, he did nothing to dismantle it. He was not an anti-government crusader, he in some ways expanded it. The largest public works projects in the history of the United States were the Federal Highway Act of 1956, which he pushed for. SM (02:00:19): Right. And the Eisenhower Locks up in the North. MI (02:00:21): Yeah. And again, in terms of foreign policy, although John Foster Dulles talked a mean game about rolling back communism, Eisenhower was pretty cautious. SM (02:00:32): What about Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew? MI (02:00:38): I tell my students that you only really hate one president in your life, so choose carefully. Because I really utterly, totally loathed Richard Nixon. And there have been Presidents since whose policies I have found repellent, but I cannot summon the level of vitriol that I did for Richard Nixon. And Agnew was joined at the hip with him. SM (02:01:04): Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern? MI (02:01:08): Well, I have met McGovern, brought him here to speak. And he was the first Presidential candidate I voted for in 1972. I think he would have been a good President. McCarthy had the courage that Bobby Kennedy lacked to challenge a sitting incumbent Democrat, so it is an admirable act. SM (02:01:30): You have already talked about Malcolm, but just comparing thoughts on Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. MI (02:01:36): Well, King was a great... They are often thought of as the moderate and the radical. But King was, to my mind, the better radical. And he really talked of... First of all, he was more realistic politically. He could build coalitions which Malcolm X could not do. And lead great consent, and actually risked his life, while Malcolm was killed by his own followers or ex-followers of the nation of Islam, whereas King was on the front lines of endless confrontations and responded non-violently. King was a real radical, and we forget that the slogan of the (19)63 March on Washington was not just Freedom Now, it was Jobs and Freedom. In the beginning, he wanted to link economic change with social and political change, and that was what he wound up doing at the end. We also forget how unpopular he was. Now, we are so in love with King, we think he is so wonderful. But many Americans hated him for opposing the war. His coming out against the war in spring of 1967 was enormously influential and legitimizing for people like us who were just beginning to cover anti-war politics. SM (02:02:49): But of course, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, and George Bush the first. I make a comment on Ronald Reagan when he came in, he emphatically said, "We are back," which means that the military is going to get stronger again. We are going to change the military. And then of course, Vietnam syndrome is over. And I remember George Bush saying, number one, saying that. So those three, Bush, Ford, and Reagan. MI (02:03:16): Well, Ford was an accidental President and was not in office long enough to move or do anything too bad. Reagan's politics, again, I find the antithesis of my own, both domestically and in terms of foreign policy. But Reagan is actually remembered as having won the Cold War. Well, I think he contributed to the end of the Cold War in the sense that he actually made an opening to Gorbachev, allowed Gorbachev to be Gorbachev. It was not by saber-rattling or building expensive, useless systems like Star Wars that he brought about the end of the Soviet Empire. Rather it was by seeking agreements. Reagan and Gorbachev signed the only arms limitation agreement which actually is an arms reduction agreement. The IMF, I believe in 1987, all the others, assault ones, simply said, "Okay, you can build more bombs, but you have to stop at this point." And Reagan, again, this is sometimes forgotten, at one point, meaning I think it was at Reykjavik or Reykjavik, however you say that said to Gorbachev, "Why do not we just do away with nuclear weapons all altogether?" Which horrified his own hawkish advisors, Reagan's advisors. Because he actually had this utopian streak. He actually really loathed nuclear weapons, and the idea of nuclear warfare he found genuinely horrifying. And we forget that. So Gorbachev thinking, "Okay, I have got this soulmate in Washington," was then able to step back from Afghanistan, from Eastern Europe. In 1989, the Soviets had 400,000 soldiers in East Germany. And Gorbachev said, "Stay on your bases. Do not interfere." If they wanted to crack down on what was going on in East Germany, they could have put an end to that real quick. But Gorbachev said, "It is a new world. We have to get used to it. If we lose Eastern Europe, we lose Eastern Europe." SM (02:05:24): Do you talk to your students at all in the (19)60s course about Ronald Reagan's coming to power as governor of California? MI (02:05:31): Yeah. SM (02:05:32): And what is really- MI (02:05:33): It is another of those ways in which the (19)60s were seed time for the conservative revival. SM (02:05:40): I interviewed Ed Meese, and it was great because he was the Assistant District Attorney of Alameda County. And at the time of the free, excuse me, yeah, Free Speech Movement. And he was not working for Reagan at the time, but he heard about him and they did not know each other. And then, of course, he had appointed him to be in his administration. And of course, he was involved with the People's Park crackdown and heavily involved in that. And of course, Reagan came to power dealing with the students. MI (02:06:15): Yeah, I will tell you a (19)60s story that has something to do with People's Park. Hamilton had compulsory chapel, been a part of the college since the beginning and had been whittled down over the years so that by 1964, there was only one... You only had to go on Sunday. We used to have to go twice a day every day of the week. But in 1964, Hamilton, which again is a sort of small, isolated men's college in upstate New York, but not the cutting edge of politics. But in spring of 1964, a freshman by the name of Daniel Steinman wrote a letter to the Spectators, this college newspaper, saying, "This is ridiculous. Why do we have to do this? It is an infringement on our conscience, and religious freedom and so on and so forth. I call on my fellow students to refuse to go into chapel on next Sunday, instead sit non-violently, not blocking way, to sit on the chapel steps instead." And 150 Hamilton students did so. SM (02:07:14): Oh, my God. MI (02:07:14): It is not like this was a hot bed of radicals. SM (02:07:15): Oh, yes. MI (02:07:19): Most of the people that did so just did not want to go to compulsory chapel. And a month later the trustees said, "Okay, no more compulsory chapel." So this 150-year-old tradition came to an end because this one college freshman said enough is enough. SM (02:07:33): That is student empowerment, really. That is the... MI (02:07:37): There is a correlation to this. SM (02:07:38): Okay. MI (02:07:40): So three years later he graduates and he goes off to the University of California to start law school at Bull Palm. And he was elected as the president of ASUP, Associated Students University of California. And at a rally in May of 1969, he is the guy who says, at the end of his speech, "Let us go take the park." So Daniel Steinman, who had gotten his start in radical politics leading a sit-in on the front steps of the chapel was the one who sent the mob marching on People's Park, which resulted in a month of civil disturbance, helicopters, James Rector getting killed, helicopters dropping CS gas on Sproul Plaza. SM (02:08:19): That is right. Yeah. MI (02:08:21): So I do not know whether he was happy with that distinction, but... SM (02:08:25): That is irony, though. He is a historic figure then really, when you think about it. MI (02:08:30): Yeah. SM (02:08:30): Are they proud of him here at Hamilton? MI (02:08:32): I do not think they- SM (02:08:34): They hide it. MI (02:08:35): Well, neither. I am writing the bicentennial history of the college. I just finished writing it, and I put him into the book just because I thought it was an interesting sideline. SM (02:08:43): That is an interesting sideline. MI (02:08:45): But I do not know how I stumbled on that fact. SM (02:08:47): But that, because I had mentioned People's Park with Ed Meese. MI (02:08:49): Right. But I do not know how I found out about Steinman's role, but I thought it was quite interesting. He still practices law. I look him up on the website. SM (02:08:57): When I am done with my interview, I want tell you a story that Ed Meese told me. I do not want to ruin it here now, though. The Berrigan brothers, Phillip and Daniel Berrigan and Dr. Benjamin Spock. MI (02:09:09): Well, the Berrigan brothers kind of emblematic of the Catholic Left, which also often gets left out of the story. And some relationship to, though independent of the Catholic worker movement, were very significant figures. And of course, Philip Berrigan was... There were crimes that they committed. Crimes? They threw blood on draft records. But Philip Berrigan was at the center of one of these alleged conspiracies, which jurors were rejecting. The Harrisburg Seven were acquitted, like the Gainesville Eight. Nixon Justice firm was setting up these elaborate conspiracy indictments against different groups, Catholic Left and Vietnam Veterans Against the War. And by the early 1970s, ordinary jurors, middle-aged, middle class jurors simply were not buying government propaganda, throwing those things out of the court. SM (02:10:11): How about Spock? MI (02:10:15): I was raised as a Spock baby. Simple version of that is permissiveness. Dr. Spock created this whole generation of so on and so forth. But actually just continued to trend towards child-centered families that had been developing since the early 19th century. SM (02:10:34): In my job at the university, we brought Daniel and Phillip to the campus. We brought Daniel, and then we brought Phillip, and Elizabeth McAllister, his wife, and he gave his last presentation in Phillip's library three weeks before he died, his last public presentations at Westchester University. MI (02:10:52): Interesting. SM (02:10:53): I went, because we had honored Frederick Douglass, who gave his last speech in 1895 at Westchester University. And I went to the administration and I said, "I think we need to put a plaque inside the room that this was the location where Phillip Berrigan gave his last speech." You can guess what they told me to do. Take a hike and jump off a bridge. MI (02:11:24): Do you have a watch on? SM (02:11:24): Oh, yeah. MI (02:11:24): Just to make sure of the time. At some point I [inaudible]. SM (02:11:24): Yeah. It is 4:00. I only got maybe five, six more minutes here. MI (02:11:28): Okay. SM (02:11:28): The other ones are certainly the Black Panthers, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Cleaver, Stokely Carmichael, H Rap Brown, Huey Newton, that group, they were all unique and different personalities, but they were all part of that group. MI (02:11:42): Right. Well, I think overall the impact of the Black Panthers was very negative on the Black left and on the white left as well, with the sort of gun idolatry and the adventurous politics that they represented. SM (02:12:05): The others, Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. MI (02:12:09): Ellsberg was central, the original whistleblower, and also a boon to historians. Most histories of the Vietnam War down to the present are simply glosses on the Pentagon Papers. And that was the basic documentary record. SM (02:12:25): Angela Davis, she was not a Black Panther. MI (02:12:28): No. Well, I think Angela Davis went to Paris on the Hamilton Junior Year Abroad program. She was a Brandeis student, so she had a Hamilton connection. A very charismatic figure. I think she was guilty as health. She was another acquittal, but I have no doubt that she was involved with buying the guns that were used in the Marin County Courthouse Shootout. SM (02:12:55): That is the one where George Jackson's brother was involved. MI (02:12:58): Dr. Jackson. SM (02:12:58): He got killed, did not he? I think. MI (02:12:59): He was killed. SM (02:13:00): Yeah. Let us see, just a few more here. Robert McNamara and Woodward and Bernstein. MI (02:13:09): Well, McNamara, he saw what he had done. He was horrified by it. He was weeping in his office in the Pentagon, but he kept his mouth shut for 30 odd years. And then when he spoke out finally in 1995 about what he really thought, he found himself loathed both by the left and the right, both by people who had supported the war and people who opposed the war. And was not an admirable figure. He was the architect of the war. Kept silent when speaking out might actually have made a difference. On the other hand, you cannot imagine Donald Rumsfeld ever 30 years later saying, "Gee, the Iraq War was not such a good idea after all." SM (02:13:55): And Woodward and Bernstein? MI (02:13:58): Well, they did not bring down Nixon by themselves. Judge John Sirica was probably much more instrumental in that. But they got on the story early and they pursued it. And they owned it in a way that... SM (02:14:10): Timothy Leary. MI (02:14:12): Showman, opportunist, obviously influenced a lot of people. SM (02:14:20): Muhammad Ali. MI (02:14:23): Very important figure, again, in that sort of sense of personal transformation. So central to (19)60s politics and (19)60s culture. Great fighter. SM (02:14:34): The female leaders, which Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm, some of that group of politicians. MI (02:14:42): Yeah. If you go back and you read the Feminine Mystique, in much the same way as we were talking about the Civil Rights movement, it is not really just about women. It is about what kind of families do we want to have? What kind of society do we want to have? And I think part of its success, its influence was that lots of people can identify with it. Obviously, women were her main constituency and readership, but it was one of those moments when the feminism was speaking with a universal appeal. SM (02:15:25): SDS and the Weathermen, I think you have already talked about them. How about the American Indian Movement? Your thoughts on... That was a four-year phenomenon, really. MI (02:15:34): Yeah. It was an example of the influence of the civil rights movement that all kinds of other subgroups suddenly began to see themselves as having rights that needed to be defended in a confrontational style. They skirted. Well, they did not skirt, they embraced the violent politics, which I think worked against them. And their leader is still in jail many decades later. SM (02:16:01): Barry Goldwater and William Buckley. MI (02:16:05): Reinvented American conservatism. SM (02:16:09): Jackie Robinson. MI (02:16:13): Obviously, major figure in terms of the idea that American athletics was all white up through the end of the 1940s is kind of astounding in a sense. SM (02:16:26): He was a supporter of Richard Nixon. I could not believe that. MI (02:16:31): Right. Well, Nixon, for a while, Martin Luther King thought that Nixon had really good racial politics in the 1950s. SM (02:16:41): Chicago Eight. MI (02:16:48): You would have to separate them out. Some of them I think were incredibly important. And responsible figures like Dave Bellinger, Hayden obviously left. Jerry and Abby were entertaining clowns. SM (02:17:03): Bobby Seale was. MI (02:17:05): Bobby Seale. SM (02:17:05): Lee Weiner was in that group. He is still an activist. I think he is an environmental activist. And he has actually been involved in Jewish rights all over the world. I am trying to find the two that you do not hear about are Lee Weiner and the professor out in California, the eighth person. MI (02:17:26): Yeah, I know. SM (02:17:27): Anyways. But they are both still involved. MI (02:17:29): Right. SM (02:17:30): But you do not hear about it as much. And I guess we will finish with how important you feel the Free Speech Movement was overall and the Peace Corps. MI (02:17:43): Well, the Free Speech Movement sort of established a paradigm for campus protestors. Just to say that up to that point, protests had been launched from campuses, but not directed at university policy. And thereafter, university policy would become a central concern of new left activists. The difference was that the Free Speech Movement thought of itself as defending the best principles of the university with general intellectual and liberal arts principles as opposed to sort of the corporate shill aspects of the university. Later on- SM (02:18:22): Okay. MI (02:18:23): I was saying the Free Speech Movement identified with the universities, even while challenging university policy. But later on, I think unfortunately the universities came to be identified as, he was caught in the bushes, as the enemy, as part of the war machine and just shut it down. SM (02:18:47): And the Peace Corps, is this times of service? MI (02:18:51): Still here, part of the inspirational, idealistic side of the Kennedy administration. SM (02:19:00): The only last ones I have here is, of course, 1963 was the assassination of President Kennedy. Where were you? Do you remember the exact location where you were when you heard he had been killed? MI (02:19:12): Yeah, I was in eighth grade. I was in art class. Our teacher, Mrs. Williams, walked in the door and she was weeping, which impressed the heck out of me. I knew something important happened, because I had never seen an adult authority figure, let alone a teacher, crying. So we were all sent home, watched television the next four days, including Oswald's assassination. SM (02:19:37): Yes. You saw it live, too. MI (02:19:38): Well, I do not think I saw it live. SM (02:19:39): I did. MI (02:19:40): I saw in endless loop thereafter. SM (02:19:42): Yeah. MI (02:19:43): And then the funeral, the state funeral on... SM (02:19:49): He wants to go in. He wants to go in. I am down to my last three here. Okay. Let us see where my... Yeah. And the second one, do you remember where you were when you heard that Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were killed? Exact moment. MI (02:20:21): I do not remember Martin Luther King. I remember it happened. And I remember hearing about Kennedy's assassination the next morning on television. And by that point, assassinations had become so commonplace that I just sort of thought, "There is another one." SM (02:20:46): Were you in front of- MI (02:20:47): It was so much less powerful an experience than hearing that John Kennedy had shot, which itself is testimony to how common assassination had become. SM (02:20:59): Were you very fearful on the Cuban Missile Crisis that we- MI (02:21:02): I was not aware of it. SM (02:21:05): Okay. And the last one I have here is just the black and white TV of the fifties, which is Walt Disney, Howdy Doody, Hopalong Cassidy, those kinds of television shows. What were your favorite shows as a kid? Did you watch all those, too? MI (02:21:21): Sure. I was totally swept up in the Davy Crockett craze, which was the first great- SM (02:21:26): And Fess Parker just passed away recently. MI (02:21:27): I saw that. I played something for my students from YouTube with Fess Parker David Crockett. SM (02:21:33): Oh, wow. MI (02:21:34): I could sing all the words when I was five. SM (02:21:35): King of the wild frontier. MI (02:21:40): King of the wild frontier. Born on the mountaintop in Tennessee. SM (02:21:42): Greatest state in the land of the free. MI (02:21:44): Yeah. Killed in a bar when he was only three. Lived in the woods, so he knew every tree. Killed in a bar when he was only three. SM (02:21:49): Davy, Davy Crockett. Buddy Ebsen was his sidekick. MI (02:21:52): Yep. So yes, obviously. And all those westerns, I could bore you by singing theme songs to at least a half a dozen of them. SM (02:22:03): Have Gun Will Travel reads the card of a man. MI (02:22:03): A knight without honor in a savage land. SM (02:22:03): Yep. MI (02:22:03): So yes, I was a child with the television. SM (02:22:13): And those TV shows, those family, Donna Reed Show, Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver. Well, that was the ideal family of the fifties, but, boy, it was really hiding what was reality in the- MI (02:22:29): Yeah, I had a working mother, so it did not seem to describe my family. She was not standing around the kitchen in pearls and high heels washing the kitchen floor. Also, our kitchen would not look like theirs. SM (02:22:42): The last two Presidents are the Bill Clinton and George Bush. What are your thoughts on them? Because they are the only Boomer presidents. MI (02:22:49): That is right. SM (02:22:49): And someone said, "When you see their weaknesses, you are saying you can tell they are Boomers." I have had a couple people tell me that. Can you say that they are Boomers by looking at their life and their- MI (02:23:03): No. George Bush missed the (19)60s. He was a (19)50s character. He was consumed with his fraternity of skull and bones, or whatever it was. SM (02:23:14): Right. MI (02:23:17): So he was not really a (19)60s character at all. Clinton, sure, he was a (19)60s character. He was also... It is not like everybody who came out of the (19)60s was a womanizer with a taste for women with big hair. He was who he was. He is like a lot of politicians, which is an interesting point. Compare him to John Kennedy. John Kennedy makes Clinton look like a piker. Bill Clinton only had one affair while he was in the White House. John Kennedy had hundreds of women cycling through. So Clinton famously met Kennedy. He thought the rules had not changed. He thought he could be John Kennedy, the open zipper presidency. SM (02:23:59): Wow. MI (02:24:00): So was John Kennedy a typical boomer? Hardly. SM (02:24:08): Yeah. This is the absolute last question. And that is, when the best history books are written, or sociology books you know as a historian, they are often written 50 years after an event. And my question is when the best history books or sociology books are written on the Boomer generation after the last Boomer has died? MI (02:24:31): Probably so. SM (02:24:32): Yeah. What do you think history will say about that generation? MI (02:24:40): Well, that is one of those impossible questions, isn't it? I think we have much better histories of the Civil War being written now than were written when a Civil War veteran was alive, so I think that is true. We will understand the (19)60s finally when we are all gone. But it is precisely because I am part of the moment. And when I teach this course, I say to my students, "You have to be able to separate out when I am speaking with my historian's hat on and when I am speaking as an artifact." And you can learn from both, but there are some different messages involved. SM (02:25:16): Very-very good. Is there a question I did not ask that you thought I was going to ask? MI (02:25:20): No. SM (02:25:20): Well, thank you very much. (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. Maurice Isserman Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Isserman, Maurice ; McKiernan, Stephen Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/wav Subject The topic of the resource College teachers; Hamilton College (Clinton, N.Y.); Radicalism--United States; Isserman, Maurice--Interviews Description An account of the resource Dr. Maurice Isserman, born in Hartford, Connecticut, is a professor at Hamilton College and an accomplished author. He got his Bachelor of Arts in History from Reed College and his Master of Arts in American History and his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester. Dr. Isserman specializes in modern U.S. History, American radical movements, and global exploration and mountaineering. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource ND Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In copyright Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.130a; McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.130b Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2018-03-29 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. 145:25 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/224bf36e72b71c637343a9268dd4e0a8.jpg e6c7d56c52b2a3e78f2eca2b97389a42 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/edbc614873d4137fc049bb6701ef4f08.mp3 6df18ab684ff70583796da5d5aa9ce1f Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Audio interviews Title A name given to the resource McKiernan Interviews Description An account of the resource Stephen McKiernan's collection of interviews includes more than two hundred interviews with prominent figures of the 1960s, which were collected between the mid-1990s to 2023 The collection provides narratives of people who were actively involved in or witnessed events in the 1960s, an era which spurred profound cultural and political transformation in the twentieth century. Interviewees include politicians, artists, scholars, musicians, authors, and veterans who delve into the decade’s most prominent issues and events, including the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the anti-war movement, women’s rights, gay rights, segregation, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Hippies, Yippies, and individualism.<br /><br /> <h3>The McKiernan 22</h3> <div>Stephen McKiernan interviewed legends of the 1960s. When asked in 2021 where one should start when sifting through his vast collection, he provided the following list:</div> <ul> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/854">Julian Bond</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1866">Bobby Muller</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1175">Craig McNamara</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/910">Dr. Arthur Levine</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/837">Diane Carlson Evans</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/942">Dr. Ellen Schrecker</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/876">Dr. Lee Edwards</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/841">Peter Coyote</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1233">Dr. Roosevelt Johnson</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/899">Rennie Davis</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1222">Kim Phuc</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/917">George McGovern</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/833">Frank Schaeffer</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/840">Rev. Dr. Frank Forrester Church </a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1240">Dr. Marilyn Young</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/842">James Fallows</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/835">Joseph Lee Galloway</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/911">John Lewis</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/839">Paul Critchlow</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/888">Steve Gunderson</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1159">Charles Kaiser</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/2407">Joseph Lewis</a></li> </ul> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Stephen McKiernan Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In copyright. Template: Simple Audio Player (Amplitude.js) This template displays an audio player with the first attached image file as the 'cover image'. For its audio source, the template looks for the first attached audio file. If additional audio files exist, they should be combined using audio editing software, or a separate Omeka item should be made for each part. Date of Interview 2009-12-11 Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Stephen McKiernan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Meta Mendel-Reyes Language English Biographical Text <span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Dr. Meta Mendel Reyes is a professor at Berea College and she teaches Peace as well as Social Justice. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley. She loves to be a community service worker for people in California and she helps people in Philadelphia with race-related issues."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":13059,"3":{"1":0},"4":[null,2,5099745],"11":4,"12":0,"15":"Arial","16":10}">Dr. Meta Mendel Reyes is a professor at Berea College, where she teaches Peace as well as Social Justice. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley. She loves to be a community service worker for people in California and she helps people in Philadelphia with race-related issues.</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="{"1":2,"2":"Kent State; Assassination of John F Kennedy; Baby boom generation; Women's movement; Civil Rights Movement; Anti-war movement; Chicano Movement; Native American/ American Indian Movement; Vietnam War; Activism; College campus; Vietnam Memorial."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":515,"3":{"1":0},"4":{"1":2,"2":16370588},"12":0}">Kent State; Assassination of John F Kennedy; Baby boom generation; Women's movement; Civil Rights Movement; Anti-war movement; Chicano Movement; Native American/ American Indian Movement; Vietnam War; Activism; College campus; Vietnam Memorial.</span> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 71:15 Subject LCSH College teachers; Berea College; Social justice; Mendel-Reyes, Meta--Interviews Accessibility Copy/Paste below: Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Rights Statement Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Dr. Meta Mendel-Reyes Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Mendel-Reyes, Meta ; McKiernan, Stephen Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/wav Subject The topic of the resource College teachers; Berea College; Social justice; Mendel-Reyes, Meta--Interviews Description An account of the resource Dr. Meta Mendel-Reyes is a professor at Berea College, where she teaches Peace as well as Social Justice. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley. She loves to be a community service worker for people in California and she helps people in Philadelphia with race-related issues. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009-12-11 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.10.2016.98 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2018-03-29 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. 71:15 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/706d0e3d4fdf8b4f30e51654f1f56b8f.mp3 c3be02a857706a5e8b439e3aa21c46ad 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 Armenian Oral History Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource <p>Aynur de Rouen, Ph.D.</p> Description An account of the resource <span>This collection includes interviews in English with informants of all ages and a variety of backgrounds from various parts of Armenia.  The interviews provide deeper insight into the history of the Armenian culture through personal accounts, narratives, testimonies, and memories of their early lives in their adoptive country and back in Armenia.  </span> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In copyright.  Relation A related resource <a href="https://www.binghamton.edu/libraries/about/collections/oral-histories/index.html#sustainablecommunities">Sustainable Communities Oral History Collection</a> Language A language of the resource English 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 3/8/2016 Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Gregory Smaldone Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Dr. Michael Allen Bogdasarian Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 27:08 Language English Digital Publisher Binghamton University Interview Format Video or Audio Audio Rights Statement This audio file and digital image may only be used for educational purposes. Please cite as Armenian Oral History Project, Binghamton University Libraries, Binghamton University, State University of New York. For usage beyond fair use please contact the Binghamton University Libraries for more information. Biographical Text Dr. Michael Allen Bogdasarian is a retired vascular and general surgeon who practiced in Binghamton for over thirty years and has a wife and two children. His grandparents immigrated to the United States from Eastern Turkey around 1913. Keywords <span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Traditional roles; Eastern Turkey massacres; Armenian church; Sunday school; food; Turkey; Armenia; diaspora;"}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":15105,"3":{"1":0},"11":4,"12":0,"14":[null,2,0],"15":"Calibri","16":11}">Genocide; Eastern Turkey; Armenian church; Sunday school; Food; Armenia; Diaspora; family; Customs.</span> Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound, or alternative text from a visual medium Armenian Oral History Project Interview with: Michael Allen Bogdasarian Interviewed by: Gregory Smaldone Transcriber: Cordelia Jannetty Date of interview: 8 March 2016 Interview Settings: Binghamton, NY -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (Start of Interview) 0:02 GS: My name is Gregory Smaldone. I am interviewing Michael Bogdasarian for Binghamton University Armenian oral History project/ today is Tuesday, March 7th, 2016. Michael, can you please start with some basic biographical information, name, birthplace etc. 0:19 MB: I am Michael Allen Bogdasarian. My parents Robert Bogdasarian and Carol Spahr Bogdasarian. My father was born here in Binghamton to his parents who were immigrants from Eastern Turkey. The time frame for their coming is a little bit unclear. 0:43 GS: We will get to that, but can you just give us your age, birthplace. 0:44 MB: I am now sixty-eight. I am a retired vascular and general surgeon, practiced here in the community for over thirty years and I have a wife and two children. 0:57 GS: Can you give us their names and ages 0:58 MB: Yes ̶ Peter Bogdasarian, currently an attorney in Washington D.C, he is turning thirty eight this year and my daughter, Laura who works for the company called ADP and she is going to be thirty six this year. 1:18 GS: And your wife's name? 1:23 MB: Bonnie. 1:24 GS: Okay ̶ What were your ̶ What are your roles and your responsibilities in the home when you were growing up or when you were raising your children what were those of your spouse? 1:34 MB: Well let me start first with what our roles and responsibilities were when I was a child, because that morphs into how we ended up raising our own children. As a child growing up, each of us, and I have two brothers, John and Ron and a sister Barb, the sister is the youngest of us, she is four years younger than I, and we were all assigned chores. We had an obligation through all the different seasons to do different things. I was part and parcel of familial responsibility. When I was raising my own children, the degree of requirement was somewhat less, we were a little bit more indulgent but they still had things they were obligated to do and I give a great deal of credit to Bonnie because she began to teach the children at a fairly early age to do certain things for themselves, even including things like laundry when they got to an appropriate age. Little bit of cooking so they could self-sustain themselves when they got to be a bit older and ̶ you know ̶ things like doing their homework and being sure that they were current with different activities they were involved in. 2:52 GS: Excellent. Can you tell us about your parents, their occupations, their roles in the house and their generational and immigration status? 3:00 MB: Sure. I will start with my mom. My mom's family was what we would have considered back then certainly upper middleclass; she was born just outside of New York City and grew up in a small town called Bellerose. Her father was an economist. He had actually grown up in Indiana on a farm, but later became interested in education and pursued education and became an economist and worked in New York City. Her mother was also from the middle part of the country, also grew up on a farm, but they very quickly adapted to a more urban lifestyle, Buelah was her name and she was basically homemaker. My mom was the eldest of three children, she had a very strong intellectual capacity, and as a result would sometimes butt heads with her parents as would be typical anyway for first borns, often, but she went to Oberlin College for a couple of years, it really did not suit her style, she ended up going to NYU and after she graduated, and I think she graduated she was 20, had a job I think working in a laboratory and ended up meeting my father who was at that time in New York City through a distant cousin arrangement, and I can talk about that later if its relevant. My father grew up here in Binghamton New York. His parents had been orphaned we believe massacres had occurred in Eastern Turkey in 1895. 4:54 GS: Okay. So they were not fleeing the genocide of 1915, they were fleeing the massacres that preceded that? 4:59 MB: Right. In fact they came to this country, I believe, in 1913 or thereabouts. The.... My grandfather was in an orphanage for boys, my grandmother was in an orphanage for girls, I believe they were run by Danes at the time, and the only recollection that they had, and I am not sure about its complete accuracy, is that I think my grandfather escaped being killed because he was hiding in a tree. I do not know about my grandmother, they really did not talk much about that, but then they were very young at the time and they grew up in these orphanages and because the boys orphanage did certain things, the girls orphanage did certain things, they would communicate back and forth, trade goods back and forth and that was how apparently they met. My grandfather, my father's father came to this country to find work and once he could find work, planned to bring my grandmother over, they were not married at the time but they had known each other and grown very close, of course. So when my grandfather came over he was able to link up with some family. I believe first started in Massachusetts, where there was a fairly strong Armenian community but for reasons which I am not clear on they ended up coming down to Binghamton partly to work at EJ, Endicott -Johnson famous shoe factory that employed many immigrants and provided jobs. But he worked there only for a relatively short period of time; it really was not his kind of thing. Also shortly afterward he moved into a different line of work. He was able to save enough money and communicate with my grandmother that she came to Ellis Island. But interestingly because of the kind of work that was being done in the orphanage and I think it had to do with wool or cotton I really am not sure, but it was one of those materials and they would pick things out in order to get it ready to be carted and then woven into fabric and things of that sort, apparently it irritated her eyes so when to Ellis Island she was actually thought maybe to have trachoma which was a real problem of a particular kind of eye infection that affected people from the Middle East. So actually they were not going to let her in and instead she ended up in Philadelphia. Now even there she was not supposed to get in unless she was either married or had a clear sponsor. So part of the amusing history was my grandfather went down to meet her but he got terribly motion sick so when he actually arrived to meet her he a little bit looked like death in one form or another and she was kind of put off by this fellow, she was thinking what happened to him, I do not know this sick character as a husband but I think he reassured her that it was really transient and they ended up getting married and returning here to Binghamton. He ended up finally running a food produce business and what he would do is go down to the general market, he would pick out fruits and then he literally had them with a horse and a cart and he would travel neighborhoods and he would sell the products to various neighbors and I have actually heard from people who were growing up at the time remembering my grandfather coming to sell things like that. He was fairly successful in that. He ended up ̶ the two of them ended up with three children, my father the eldest, Robert then a daughter Lilian, we called hooker, I am not even sure what the derivation of that word was. 9:07 GS: Kind of sounds like [unintelligible]. 9:08 MB: Yeah and my uncle John the youngest of the three, and they, the parents, ended up with buying some real estates at different times running different ancillary businesses and so on. So by the time we came along they had essentially retired but were very self-sufficient. 9:30 GS: What were your parent's role in the house and their occupations when you were growing up? 9:34 MB: My father went to college and then medical school at the University of Michigan and he became ENT physician and practiced here in the community with a Doctor McNett, who had kind of known my dad when he was in high school and told him that if he was successful in graduating from college and medical school and residency that he would take him on as a business partner and indeed that happened. My mom came up to Binghamton with my father and she was basically a homemaker, kept everything in order and kept us in order as much as is possible with a bunch rambunctious kids and the way things ran at the time. 10:25 GS: How many siblings did you have growing up? 10:27 MB: I had two older brothers John who is four years older than myself, Ron about a year and a half older and my sister Barbara who is about four years younger. 10:38 GS: Did you attend Armenian language school or Bible school growing up? 10:45 MB: We did. Initially we started going to a congregational church and my dad would go over to the Armenian Church which had been established on Corbet Avenue. After a while my mom felt that this was just not working and took us all over to the Armenian Church and we became very well integrated into that community. 11:10 GS: Did you attend a language school specifically or just Sunday school? 11:12 MB: No actually the interesting part was that they did not have particular language school set up. We did have a Bible school; we did attend that on a regular basis. And you know you pick up bits and drabs of the Armenian language but there was nothing formal not like you see with say a Hebrew school or something like that. 11:33 GS: Did your parents speak Armenian in the house or no? 11:35 MB: No. my mom spoke no Armenian, to speak my dad was very fluent as were Uncle John and Aunt Alice, I mean ̶ hooker and of course my grandparents spoke Armenian back and forth most of the time, but everybody would speak English around us or communicate with us. 11:54 GS: So Armenian was an important medium of communication for your parents and their siblings but it was not something that they felt was important for you to learn? 12:02 MB: Correct. They would certainly morph into the Armenian language if they did not want us to know what they were talking about. 12:08 GS: Naturally. When ̶ your friendship group growing up you and your siblings, would you say that it was mostly Armenian, other Armenian children, mostly non-Armenian children or was there some mix? 12:21 MB: Mostly non-Armenian. We certainly had other children at church who were our age with whom we were friends; we did not see them outside of Sundays primarily. 12:28 GS: They were church friends. 12:34 MB: Right, right. 12:35 GS: Okay. How would you describe the Armenian community in Binghamton while you were growing up? 12:43 MB: It was marvelous. [laughs] It really was. There was a great sense of belonging. The whole community seemed to really enjoy children even though they were adults and dealt with things at their own level as they would, but there was a certain kind of indulgence which was really pretty marvelous; a welcoming and warmth that was very embracing to children. I do not think we were terribly really aware of it growing up, but it was a sense that when you went to events like the Armenian picnics or things of that nature after church there might be a sort of coffee hour or there might even be a program or things of that sort, you really felt as though people were glad to see you there. It was not a chore. It was something they really appreciated and liked. And I think there was also a very strong sense of community support not so much that they did things for us, but that any success or achievement we had made the entire community very proud of us. 14:00 GS: Where would you say was the social space of the Armenian community, the central meeting place? 14:07 MB: That was the church. 14:08 GS: That was the church? 14:09 MB: Yes. There were small enclaves when we were very young and growing up where there would be a neighborhood that had a fair number of Armenian families within it, but it was never a tight social network. It was kind of a sense of familiarity whereas the social activities were primarily at church. 14:31 GS: Okay. How important was it for you to teach your children Armenian if at all? 14:36 MB: Actually we tried. We did have a priest who came and he began to conduct Armenian language classes and I took the children to that and I attended it myself to try to learn some Armenian, but for a whole variety of reasons it kind of fell apart after a while; that had to do as much with the priest himself as it had to do with just what it meant to be growing up; again in the [19]80s. 15:07 GS: What would you say was some of the consistent cultural themes within the Armenian community when you were growing up; the types of food, types of practices? 15:18 MB: I think it was primarily the food and food was the center piece. It is not so much a sense that there are particular foods which we would call Armenian foods. I mean as you are aware, many of those foods types are shared among the entire Middle Eastern communities so you can go to a Lebanese restaurant or a Turkish restaurant, a Syrian restaurant or else and find very, very similar foods. But what was particularly valuable was the way in which food was the center piece for engagement. So many times around the dinner table, many times when you are gathering people together, even if they are non-Armenians and you present something that represents an Armenian food, there is a certain kind of ̶ I will call it love ̶ that is demonstrated through that. So food in a way became the epitome of what it meant to be within an Armenian community ̶ that kind of affection ̶ that sense of solidarity...that sense of completeness that really was a part of it. 16:34 GS: Okay. Have you ever travelled to Turkey or Armenia? 16:39 MB: Yes. I actually went to Armenia after the [19]88 earthquake. So I was there as a medical mission in order to evaluate injured people whom we wished to bring to the united states to have advanced medical care and rehabilitation. 16:58 GS: Okay. Do you attend church regularly? 17:01 MB: Not now. 17:03 GS: Not now. What would you say you identify as your homeland? 17:08 MB: America. The interesting part and I have to say this, it will sound critical, but it is not quite as critical as it would sound, that when I first travelled to Armenia within the capacity that I expressed, people would be travelling to Armenia, they get off the plane and then they kind of kiss the ground kind of thing. Now I have to admit that that just never struck me that way, partly because I think my mindset was very different. So I identify it more as a place from which a good part of my heritage stands and I have respect for that but I feel very much an American in that my home is really here in this country. 17:59 GS: Okay. This is going to be a little curveball now, what are your thoughts about gender roles in society today? 18:05 MB: In general? 18:06 GS: Yes. 18:09 MB: As a medical person and as someone whose got a lot of science background I think that there are certain biological imperatives and the biological imperatives are men and women are different, they have different requirements, they have different roles and there’s a tendency in the current culture to think those things do not matter and I think we do it at our peril because we're ignoring literally millions of years of biological evolution. 18:48 GS: Okay. How do you view the diaspora? Do you think it is an accident of history and evil or a good? 18:58 MB: My wife once made the comment, which I thought was very profound which was if the massacres had not occurred I would not be here. Now, is that a good thing or a bad thing? And yeah, it goes to the heart of what you are asking. So is it a tragedy that what happened in Armenian both 1895, 1905 and 1915 particularly the [19]15 massacres, those are horrible things that happened ̶ terrible, terrible things but to my or oneself in the tragedy alone means that one has never either looked for some benefits, some goodness that even comes out of the worst tragedy and more particularly, has become mired oneself personally made it hard to move further on and accept certain realities and learn to live with them but not have them be an anchor that holds you back. 20:12 GS: Do you think the diaspora is a temporary entity or permanent one? 20:19 MB: I think it is permanent. You hear people talk about how they want to go reclaim this and that and the other, and that is again a backward looking process that doesn’t take into account human history as a whole, and if one looks at the spectrum of human history, and you want to go back to the very beginning of homo-sapiens and migration out of Africa and that is certainly reasonable, but if one goes to more modern history even going back to the period of, say, 2[000] or 3000 BC, or as people prefer to call it, before the present era, migration of peoples, destruction of various tribes, the disruption that occurs throughout most tribal organizations that they are more primitive nature all the way up to the more civilized natures even to today, this is part of the human current, and it has its tragic moments, its tragic parts. There’s no question about that. But to assume that you could make it static is to deny the lessons of history. 21:33 GS: Do you think that the diaspora has its own identity? 21:36 MB: Yes. I think that one of the things that is true and it goes back to what you asked earlier about the identity of an Armenian culture and how does one do that. Well, America’s my home. I do identify as Armenian, even though I am only half Armenian, even my children who are a quarter Armenian still feel a strong relationship to that as an identity. It is partly name, but it is also partly culture, partly upbringing. The kinds of food you ate when you were growing up. My mom for example, who has no Armenian background, she is a real mongrel wasp, okay in terms of how one would define ̶ linked herself to the Armenian church such that she became a very prominent part of it. She played the organ, she helped run the thing when we did not have a priest, she engaged fully, in fact when I have talked to her even at her age of ninety-three, one of the reasons she finds it hard to go to an Armenian church service is because it reminds her so strongly of those connections, it actually makes her very sad. So we had that identity, we had that cultural connection, and feel it very, very strongly. I think that most people in the diaspora feel it very strongly. I think that is great. I think it’s wonderful. But the way in which most of us would identify ourselves, is, you know, it is kind of the reverse of what you hear other people say. Armenian-American, that’s the normal thing. We are American with an Armenian heritage. Do not want to ever deny that, that’s part of who we are. 23:25 GS: How would you identify yourself? 23:27 MB: I would say Armenian-American. I think I am very much American in the sense of my love of this country, my understanding of its history, my sense of being a part of it. But there is no doubt that the Armenian part of me is very strong. 23:45 GS: Do you think that there is a separation in the diaspora between American born Armenians and recent Armenian immigrants? Do you think that American-Armenian organizations do a good job attracting American-born people of Armenian descent? 24:02 MB: I think they do a fairly good job. There are a number of those organizations but I think ultimately it comes down to the church. And one of the things that has happened is that’s it has been very difficult to maintain that cultural center in focus. Even though I do not understand the language, there was a certain degree of link that occurred because when I would attend a service we would sing in Armenian, and there's something valuable in that even if you do not get it, it’s just part of that culture that ties you in. The difference between the recent immigrants and the people who grew up here in this country from the point of their birth is that there is certain heritages that the recent immigrants have that American-Armenians do not have and that can create some difficulties in and of itself. Certain attitudes, certain sense of freedom certain ways families work and so on and so forth that are very different. 25:13 GS: Interesting. Okay so just two more questions; and the first one is how do you think your children will define being Armenian? How do you think they do? 25:20 MB: I think they do. It is something I eluded to a little bit earlier. I think there is enough of a sense within our family that they feel that is a strong part of who they are. They do not go to Armenian churches, they do not speak Armenian but it crops up every now and then as an identity issue and I think they are very proud of it. 25:48 GS: And then one last question I was supposed to ask a little earlier when we were talking about your parents. Are they still living and if not how were they cared for at the end of their lives? 25:59 MB: My father’s passed away. He died about eleven years ago and my mom’s still living, 93, she is in an assisted care facility but she is remarkably independent including still driving occasionally. Admittedly, only in good weather and short distances but up until a few years ago she would drive literally several thousand miles from her home in Florida now she moved up to be closer to family. And within the family there is a strong sense for both of my parents that being independent, making your own decisions was very important and their ability to do that laid not only within their financial resources but their intellectual resources, both of them quite bright, able to make decisions for themselves and do what they felt they needed to do. 27:03 GS: Okay, alright. I think that is everything I needed. Thank you. (End of Interview) Accessibility Copy/Paste below: Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. 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. Michael Allen Bogdasarian https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/0c1104ed0fb3a0a1e44aa826908d9bcf.jpg 6ece1a61dab48f9a1fbf3271a03ac523 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/32917909293bb94458f8389ee5f641d2.mp3 66d45c3b65f66d3125cca06306c3f673 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 2011-02-12 Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Stephen McKiernan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Michael Kazin, 1948- Language English Biographical Text <span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Michael Kazin is a historian and professor at Georgetown University. Kazin's research focuses on the American social movements from the 19th and 20th centuries. He received a Bachelor's degree in Social Studies from Harvard, a Master's degree in History from Portland State University, and a Ph.D. in History from Stanford University. "}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":7043,"3":{"1":0},"4":[null,2,5099745],"10":2,"11":4,"12":0,"14":[null,2,0],"15":"Arial"}">Dr. Michael Kazin is a historian and professor at Georgetown University. Kazin's research focuses on the American social movements from the 19th and 20th centuries. He received a Bachelor's degree in Social Studies from Harvard, a Master's degree in History from Portland State University, and a Ph.D. in History from Stanford 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 MicroCassette Material Type Sound Interview Format Video or Audio Audio Keywords <span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"George McGovern; Foreign policy; Conservatism; Generation gap; The Wounded Generation: America After Vietnam; Vietnam War; McCarthyism; Montgomery Bus Boycott; The moon landing; John F. Kennedy inaugural address; Neo-liberal; Radicals; Higher education; African Americans; Pop culture of Nineteen sixties; Richard J. Hughes; New Leftist; Harvard University; Students for a Democratic Society."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":3,"3":{"1":0},"4":{"1":2,"2":14275305}}">George McGovern; Foreign policy; Conservatism; Generation gap; The Wounded Generation: America After Vietnam; Vietnam War; McCarthyism; Montgomery Bus Boycott; The moon landing; John F. Kennedy inaugural address; Neo-liberal; Radicals; Higher education; African Americans; Pop culture of Nineteen sixties; Richard J. Hughes; New Leftist; Harvard University; Students for a Democratic Society.</span> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 1:54:16 Subject LCSH Historians; College teachers; Georgetown University; Social movements--United States--19th century; Social movements--United States--20th century; Kazin, Michael, 1948--Interviews Accessibility Copy/Paste below: Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound, or alternative text from a visual medium McKiernan Interviews Interview with: Michael Kazin Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan Transcriber: REV Date of interview: 12 February 2011 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (Start of Interview) SM (00:00:02): Testing, 1, 2, 3, testing. MK (00:00:11): [inaudible] if you rather, but this is more comfortable. SM (00:00:12): That is fine. It carries pretty good. MK (00:00:16): You got two of them, huh? SM (00:00:17): Yep. MK (00:00:17): Stereo. SM (00:00:18): For the last maybe hundred interviews I have had two, because Peter Goldman gave me some advice there too. He said, you need to have two interview tapes because if you are redoing the tape and something that happens to one, you got a second one. Could you tell me a little bit about your growing up years? I know you had a famous dad who was a literary critic and a very well-known critic, but what were your early influences? Who were your role models, teachers, historians, and how important was your dad in shaping who you became? MK (00:00:53): Well, I will deal with him first, I guess. I was born in 1948. My parents were actually divorced when I was one and a half. I have no memories of them living together. So direct influence in terms of being by the house, there was not any, I saw him once a month or so. We had a difficult relationship. He was not very good with little kids. He was only comfortable with people if he could talk about books and ideas. And when you are five years old, you do not really do that. So, we had a difficult time, but by the time I started at junior high or high school, at least, I do not remember exactly when people said, "Oh, are you the son of Alfred Kazin?" He was part of this world of what Irving Howe called the New York Intellectuals. And I grew up in a suburb of New York, Pinewood, New Jersey, near just a one exit off the South East Parkway from George Washington Bridge. SM (00:01:53): It is Englewood, is not it? MK (00:01:54): Yeah, Englewood. So I kept hearing about him. I read his work when I was in high school and we argued about politics. When I was in high school. He was a Cold War liberal, and I was beginning to be an anti-war liberal. And then of course, later on, a radical. So I think the conflict between us, which was partly personal and partly political, was constructive, I think, to teach me how to argue about politics with someone who is very smart. And also I learned to take ideas very seriously. And also, without thinking about it at the time, I certainly learned that you could have a pretty good life being a teacher and a writer, which of course is what he was. He was more writer than teacher. He taught all the time, but his real passion was for writing. He taught only because he could not make enough money writing. If he could have made enough money writing, he would not have taught. Which is not true for me. I love teaching. So other influences. My mother, of course, who I grew up with, who was on the left politically. She had gone to Russia in 1936 when American liberals as still thought Russia was a pretty good place, at least a lot of them did. And just as a tourist, she went. And she had been involved in various popular front groups in the thirties, a fellow traveler, old term for that. And she had friends who I met, some of whom were emigres from Nazi Germany, who got out just in time in the thirties, and I met them growing up. And our next-door neighbors were left-wingers. They subscribed to a magazine [inaudible] called the National Guardian, which was a left-wing magazine. You might know of it. Again, late (19)40s. In fact, one 4th of July they had a barbecue, and they had The Weavers over to sing- SM (00:03:59): Oh my God. MK (00:03:59): In the backyard next door. SM (00:04:01): Pete Seeger. MK (00:04:03): That was pretty cool. This is, I forget exactly the year, sometime in the (19)50s. So I grew up in, what I understood later was a particular kind of left liberal background, people who had been close to the Communist Party at one point, but no longer were, it was mostly Jewish, not all Jewish, certainly. And my schools, I will not go into great detail, but my schools were influenced too. I went to a public school until seventh grade in my hometown, in Englewood, New Jersey. And it was an integrated school. And in fact, my first two teachers were Black, first grade and second grade teachers. And so, I think, again, in retrospect, I never had an experience of seeing Black people always under me. And I was a great baseball fan, still am. And I used to go to games in the [inaudible] grounds in Englewood and crowd was almost half Black at that time. Baseball was a very popular sport among Black people then, much more than this now. And that was important too. I was a Dodgers fan. The Dodgers had signed Jackie Robinson. So this was all part of the gestalt of politics and culture at the time. So, I would not say I had any role models per se, but clearly my parents were the biggest influence on me and being part of this whole milieu. I met my father's friends. I met Norman Mailer, met Robert Loeb, Richard Hofstadter, who was his best friend. These, in retrospect, very important intellectuals. But at the time, I just thought were my father's friends. And I identified very early with left-wing causes, civil rights movement. There was a sit-in Englewood for integrated schools. And my mother would not let me go, but I talked about it at my school. SM (00:06:19): How old were you at that time? MK (00:06:20): 14, I think. SM (00:06:20): Okay. Wow. MK (00:06:22): She was afraid of violence. I wanted to go to the March on Washington (19)63. I forget why I did not go, but I did not for some reason. But I started to go to anti-war demonstrations very early in early (19)65. And also my stepfather, Mario Salvadori, who was a professor of engineering Columbia, helped to sponsor the anti-war teach-in at Columbia. It was one of the first anti-war teach-ins in, I think it was January (19)65, February (19)65. I do not know exactly when. And I ran for a school president at one point too. And I was [inaudible] because I had talked about my views about the war and so forth. And I remember one poster of the candidates who ran against me showed Khrushchev on one side, Castro on the other side and me in the middle all of us shaking hands. So, I lost, that is why I lost. And also, I worked on political campaigns. I worked on John Kennedy's campaign as a 12-year-old in Englewood. And at the time, when Englewood was basically Republican and Nixon was very popular. I worked on Johnson's campaign in (19)64. I was head of a group called Young Citizens for Hughes. Richard Hughes was running for reelection as governor of New Jersey. So I was not a new leftist yet. I was still a liberal Democrat. But I like a lot of people I knew, there was a continuum in some ways between being a liberal Democrat, at least there and being leery about the Cold War. My mother took me to a SANE nuclear policy, the group SANE rally in Madison Square Garden in I think (19)58, which was part of their campaign for a nuclear test ban treaty. And I heard Dr. Spock speak, he was a lead speaker at the time. SM (00:08:25): William Sloan Craws was connected to that. MK (00:08:25): So as I said, there was a lot of stuff going on. SM (00:08:28): Did you talk to your dad? When I looked at what your dad, the people that he liked the most, Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, they were the really big thinkers of the 19th century that he, and, of course, they were role models to a lot of people on the left, especially Thoreau and Emerson. Did he ever talk to you about them? MK (00:08:45): Not so much. Part of our conflict was that I tried to stay away as much as possible from people he liked. He loved Henry Adams, I did not meet Henry Adams until I was much older. He loved Dreiser loved. I did not meet Dreiser until I was much older. So if my father wrote about somebody, I made a point of not reading until I was older. SM (00:09:00): I can understand. MK (00:09:01): We read Thoreau and Emerson High School a little bit. SM (00:09:07): How did you end up at Harvard? How did you pick Harvard? MK (00:09:12): Well, it was Harvard. Obviously, back then, if you get into Harvard, you would try. And also, my father had always wanted to teach there. He was a great admirer of people. He was friends with [inaudible] Junior. He looked up for Perry Miller, a great scholar of the Puritans who was a Harvard teacher. And he would have wanted to teach at Harvard if he could have. So certainly, to get into Harvard back then for a upwardly mobile intellectual Jewish kid was the pinnacle of academic success. So that is why I applied. I did not think I would get in, but I did. I applied other schools. I did not get in everywhere. I did not get into Stanford where my daughter goes Now, I did not get into Haverford, but I think I was very political. Harvard probably liked that in my application. I think my statement I wrote about why I wanted to be US Senator. I said, "I do not want to be president because it is not time for a Jewish kid to be president yet. But I would like to be Senator." SM (00:10:27): Was Chuck Schumer in your class? MK (00:10:30): He is one year younger, I think. SM (00:10:31): And was David Eisenhower also there at that time? MK (00:10:39): Yeah, actually, no, he went to Amherst, I think. He did not go to Harvard. But in my freshman dorm, he was friends with one of the kids in my freshman dorm. And we used to have parties and he and Julie Nixon would come to these parties and bring their own bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label. Like the secret of service, they do not drink from anybody else's. SM (00:10:58): I remember years ago reading about him that Fred Grandy, the actor, his father had picked him to be kind of the role model for David when he went there as a first-year student. MK (00:11:10): I think it was Fred's room where the parties were. SM (00:11:13): Yeah. Fred was a year older than him. Anyway, now, you were very active at Harvard and you became president of the Students for a Democratic Society, which had one of the largest- MK (00:11:23): Co-chairman was the actual name. SM (00:11:26): That was one of the largest chapters. Even I remember this back then, it was the one of the largest chapters of SDS, I think, in the country at that time. MK (00:11:34): I am not sure. SM (00:11:37): What was your student life like? I really want you to talk about the experience of the Harvard Yard experience because that is a historic event. When you think of Columbia of (19)68, when you think of Harvard in (19)69, when you think of Ken State in (19)70, these are really historic events to me, as a person who studied the (19)60s. What was the main issue? Describe what was going on there in (19)69, how this all evolved. MK (00:12:08): Well, of course, this happened after the student of the left had been growing for a couple years, beginning with in many ways, with the free speech movement from Berkeley in (19)64 and going onward. And of course, things got really amped up with the escalation of the war. And then with the Columbia strike in the spring of (19)68. In Some ways there was a kind of emulation competition going on. I think without emphasizing it too much, we felt, "Well, Columbia SDS can shut down their school. How come we cannot shut down our school?" Because I had a lot of friends in Columbia SDS, some of whom died in the townhouse explosion. Ted Gold and I was friends with Mark Wood. We worked together at SDS regional office in New York in (19)67. So, I knew a bunch of people. But anyway, the key issue, of course, was the war as it was everywhere. That is why you had a large new left as you know. It would not have happened without that. And we were very responsible, I think, contrary to the image that a lot of people have about the students running amok and going crazy and smashing things. We believed in organizing. We had a careful campaign, which is probably detailed in that WHRP book. We began in the fall of (19)68, some ways coming off the Democratic Convention in Chicago where I was and got arrested. And we decided, "Well, what is the main tentacle of the octopus of the war machine on campus? Well, it is RTC." Now, there was not much. RTC maybe had 30 people in it. It was not a big deal. But other people in the country were attacking RTC. It was one way we could localize issues of the military and the war. So, we started petition to, in a very responsible way, to try to get the administration to abolish RTC on campus. And they refused. And so we kept going to meetings and making some noise, faculty meetings, and some people got arrested for disrupting a meeting. But in the end, we got, I do not remember how many, but we had many thousand signatures because the war was very unpopular at Harvard, as it was a lot of campuses like that around the country, so it was not a problem. And then had house meetings at the Harvard houses. We had house meetings in Harvard Yard where the freshmen lived. We did what organizers have always done. I spent probably, that was my junior year, I spent most of the year organizing, not much time on classes. And we basically had The Crimson on our side, the daily newspaper, which was useful, of course. They would report on our meetings. I do not want to go into great detail about this, but we had two pretty antagonistic factions within SDS as you probably read about. One was my faction, which is we sort of called the new left faction. It was sort of loose. We liked rock and roll, and we thought there was nothing wrong with smoking dope. And we wanted a sort of vaguely radical democratic society. Was not too sure what that might mean. We were very pro Vietcong, we were pro the Cubans, but we were very supportive of Black Panthers and other Black power groups. But we were very critical of what we saw as sort of dogmatic Marxism. And of course, the other side was the Progressive Labor Party, which was a group, as you probably know, that was [inaudible] for the Communist Party in the early (19)60s over supporting the Chinese and the Sino-Soviet Split. And they were very hard-nosed about how you have to organize workers and do strike support and men should cut their hair, women should wear dresses and very counter-culture of all kinds. So we had a lot of divisions and they tended to be actually on campus actions more militant than we were. So when it came down to deciding, when the faculty did not agree to abolish RDC, we had to decide what to do. And at first, people in our faction were not in favor of taking a building, taking University Hall, which was the administration building on campus, the main one. But the PL group called the Workers Student Alliance always was in favor of it. They believed in being more militant. And also they wanted to build their faction nationally. And they knew, if they were the leaders of a chapter which shut down Harvard, this would be a feather in their cap. And there were three co-chairs of SDS. I forget exactly why we had three, but that is the way it evolved. Two of them were from their faction. I was the only one from our faction. But PL because they were so hard line on dogmatic had a certain, was not as popular in the wider student body as our faction was. So, a lot of people who were not in SDS looked to me, I think more as a leader than they did to those people. So again, and this, of course, is always true at the time, if you want to have a militant action, you do it when the weather is nice. And, of course, up in the Boston area, it did not really start until April. So April 9th I think is when we took over University. Again, this is all detailed in these books. But we had a very tempestuous meeting the night before going back and forth. And I thought we had to seize the moment or seize the time as the Black Panthers used to put it. And so if we were going to force the issue, we had to do it then. So, I was always in favor of taking the building, even though the first votes in this meeting were not in favor. So somewhat manipulatively, I must admit, I kept the issue alive. And PL was prepared with that too. So in the end, I think the vote was inconclusive. I forget exactly what the vote was, but I have not gone back and looked at these books to check. But we decided we were going to have a march after the meeting was over that night, I guess April 8th it was and march through campus. And I had a list of our demands. And I, the historian already, nascent historian, I knew about Martin Luther tacking these 95 theses up on the door of the cathedral in Germany. So, I decided to go to the President's office and tacked the demands up on his door and made some little speech of some kind. And then as we walked around Cambridge after that, our faction and the PL faction decided we were going to take the building. So we spent much of the night putting together leaflets, passed them out on campus. And at noon we went to University Hall and kicked the deans out. PL people picked the deans up and took them out. They wanted to show them a little of who they were, which in the end they got arrested. Some of the people who did, they got arrested for that. And you want me to go into University Hall, what happened there? SM (00:19:41): Yeah, you took over the hall. How long did it take? MK (00:19:45): We were there for basically from noon until about 6:00 AM the next morning when the police came in. And there was a big debate. Actually, I was not inside University Hall when the police came in. I thought someone should go out of the hall and first of all see if they were in and if they were, tell people that the police were coming. And then I thought I would go back in the hall. But I went outside and the police started to come in almost as soon as I got outside. So, I said, "Well maybe I will stay outside and not get arrested and get the stuff going." And also, to be honest, in retrospect, I was a little scared too. I did not like the idea of just sitting there and getting my head beaten. And again, I think it was probably a good decision because the other leaders of the chapter were arrested. So I was able to start a rally on the steps of Widener Library right in Harvard Yard, denouncing the police and calling for a student strike as other people were doing too. And the student strike basically started spontaneously, in large part, not necessarily because everybody at Harvard thought we had done the right thing by taking the building. There was a lot of people... Got the dog on your tape there? SM (00:21:05): Yeah [inaudible]. MK (00:21:06): A dog passed by [inaudible], but it is her turf. SM (00:21:08): Brody does the same thing. MK (00:21:10): Zoe shut up. SM (00:21:13): Brody just barks because he does not want anybody to leave. MK (00:21:15): Really? She gets upset when we go on a trip. As soon as we bring her back downstairs, she knows what is going there. SM (00:21:22): Oh, boy. Does she bark? MK (00:21:23): No. Sits in front of the front door and says, "You are not getting past me." Where were we? Oh yeah, the strike. So as often happened, it happened at Columbia too, other places, the student movement grew large partly because students were in support of our basic anti-war position, even if they were not in support of our specific politics, dogmatic imperialism, supporting the people fighting American troops and so forth. But they really got active when they saw their friends getting clubbed by police. And we would not have had a huge, good strike without that if we just sat there. In fact, ironically, if the administration just let us sit in that building and they just waited us out, we probably would have had to leave in defeat. But in the end, the calling the police in, which of course they had a legal right to do, galvanized the student strike. And we had big meetings at the Harvard stadium across the river, 10,000 people, 12,000 people, obviously the cover of Black Magazine because it was Harvard. Now, what we were doing was not all that different really from what was happening on hundreds of campuses around the country. SM (00:22:45): In happened in Hamilton too. MK (00:22:45): It was Harvard. That is the reason it was a big deal. And we knew that. We knew we would make a splash by doing this. I must say though, one of the things that I realized, and I have written about since then was, you can see how happy or glad I should say, the police were to bust our heads when they came in. And this a [inaudible], the idea of driving their cruisers into Harvard Yard, leaving deep ruts in the grass of Harvard Yard. These were mostly middle class white guys from Cambridge, from other parts of the Boston area who all thought Harvard was these stuck up, privileged, rich people. And to them, I think, even though all of us certainly were not rich, lots of [inaudible] kids and so forth, but to them it was pretty clear, they took a certain glee I think in smashing into Harvard and smashing up these unpatriotic freaks who had [inaudible]. SM (00:23:48): James Fallows was there too, I believe around that time. MK (00:23:50): Yeah. [inaudible] here now. SM (00:23:52): And then, of course, just recently, the death of John Wheeler, the murder. And I had interviewed him for my book. And he had been at Harvard too later on after he had served in Vietnam. MK (00:24:02): Jim was president of Crimson. I am not sure if it was that year, but maybe the year before. SM (00:24:09): And he had written a lot about how guilty he felt about avoiding the draft. MK (00:24:12): [inaudible]. SM (00:24:12): Yeah, yeah. And of course he became close friends of Jack Wheeler over time, The Long Green Line, the book that was written. You went on to Portland State and then you went on to Stanford. Were you as active politically on those campuses? MK (00:24:25): Oh, yeah. SM (00:24:26): Now when- MK (00:24:27): Did not have much at Stanford. By then it was the mid (19)70s. And if you are getting a PhD, you do not have much time. But I got active in the early (19)80s again in the nuclear freeze movement. But Portland State, well first of all, I went to Portland not to go to school, not to go to university, but because I was kicked out of Harvard in the fall of (19)69 for leading a demonstration against the people of the Center for National Affairs, which Henry Kissinger had set up, sort of a think tank/elite department. And I went to New York, started work on Liberation Mews Service, this underground press service, sort of like the AP of the Radical Press and long story. But basically they had taken a feminist turn. There were too many men on the collective. They said I could work there, but I could not join the collective. My girlfriend who I met there was not happy about it, but basically, I would not be able to stay there as a man. So, they liked my work a lot. So, I looked at all the papers that were coming to the office there from all around the country, all over the world, for that matter. And the one from Portland, Oregon was a really nice paper. And I always like the idea of living on the West Coast for a while. I had lived in Berkeley for a while, in the summer of (19)69. Actually. Oh, it was (19)68. And so I called up the Portland paper, I said, "Do you need a staff member?" They said, "Sure, $25 a week." And so I hitchhiked out to Portland. And while I was there, the paper, long story, it fell apart basically after about a year. And I had a few jobs, working restaurants and working at Portland State University and Tate Library. And I said, "Well, I always liked history. The revolution might not be happening. I would better think of something to earn a living. I do not want to be short order cook for the rest of my life." So, I applied to Portland State history program just to try it out. SM (00:26:41): And then you went on and got your PhD? MK (00:26:42): Yeah, but while I was there, I was involved in the anti-war movement, which, of course, still going on. SM (00:26:47): A very liberal area out there too, Portland. MK (00:26:51): Yeah. And of course, we had that newspaper that I helped edit, called the [inaudible] Bridge. And I got involved in a free clinic. I was involved with a group called Medical Committee for Human Rights, which was in favor of national health insurance. And actually, it had been originally started by this guy, Howard Levy, who was an army doctor who turned against the war. And I was also involved in, we had a little campaign to impeach Nixon during Watergate. So whatever was going on, I was involved in. And I worked for McGovern, which was sad. But I did for a short time. SM (00:27:26): That was quite at a defeat. I saw McGovern in 1972 when he flew into Columbus, Ohio. He got off the plane but never really left tarmac. And I could not see him very well, but I heard him, Ohio State had a big contingent there. Big. MK (00:27:39): Is that where you went to school, Ohio? SM (00:27:43): Yeah, grad school. I was there for five years I noticed that you had been a professor, and adjunct professor at a lot of different schools from San Francisco State, Stanford, Santa Cruz, even went to Europe for a while and taught there. And then of course- MK (00:27:59): I went to Europe; it was after I was already a tenured professor. SM (00:28:03): And that of course, you have taught at American and now at Georgetown. When you look at your peers, and you have probably been asked this before, and it was not any condemnation of the two generations that have followed the Boomer generation in terms of... But when you compare the students from your era, the students that you went to class at Harvard and Portland and so forth and the students that you have been teaching over the years, do you see a big difference within the generations? And what would those differences be? Because I like the millennials that are today. I know they are doing a lot of things, but... MK (00:28:43): I do not think as deeply about generations as some people do, I guess. I think about groups within generations and they have to all... We know from polls today that Boomer generation is probably more conservative on a lot of issues and has been for a while than younger generations are, certainly on issues like gay marriage, on abortion, on US foreign policy. So, the image that people often have that the Boomer generation was full of leftists, it was not true then, and it is not true now. There was a certain group within it who certainly were, and college students tend to be more than people that did not go to college. But I often tell my students that the most popular candidates in 1972 among people who were from my generation, a lot of them had been voting for the first time, were both for George McGovern and George Wallace. So rebellious figures were popular, it was just not necessarily rebellious figures on the left. And I have written a little about this in my book on populism. So, there is a real division within the generation, I think, more than there was some lock step. One of the things which is true though, and of course, I see these younger generations mostly through my kids who are now 19 and 22 and through my students over the years, and one thing I have noticed since I have been teaching for, wow, 35 years now in college and some in high school too. I taught some high school in the late (19)70s. One of the things I see is that there is less desire, I think, to mix it up ideologically, less desire to really fight over essentials, more inclination to be civil towards other people's opinions, sometimes to a fault, I think. I am always trying to get my students and talk my kids too, to really see that that is a lot at stake in these different points of view. And there is nothing wrong with having sharp arguments about these things. But I notice, especially kids my age, to a certain degree, I have noticed this for the last 10, 15 years of my students too, that they are loath to really take on someone from their own generation, really argue fiercely with them about issues. They feel somehow being impolite or perhaps that in the end, the differences do not matter as much as getting along matters. And that is very different from our generation's feeling as you know. We can be accused of a lot of things, but not taking politics seriously is not one thing we cannot be accused of. SM (00:31:48): Kind of the Rodney King mentality, cannot we all just get along? MK (00:31:50): Yeah. And it is fine. I am not in favor of revolution. I have not been for many, many years now. I am a liberal democrat basically today and I think conservative Republicans have terrible ideas. And I think if they do not explain why I think they do is fine. And I have considered this with my class and I am very empathetic with them. I draw them out, evaluations they give me show that they respect that, and they know I do not agree with them, but they do not argue for conservatism as much as I would like them to, to be honest with you. There is a lot of lazy liberalism on my campus anyway, and my views in general. And I think it is important for my liberal students to hear arguments well-articulated and well defended and vice versa. [inaudible]. SM (00:32:42): I was feeling, when I read the first biography of Hillary Rodham Clinton, I remember when she was in high school, her teacher- MK (00:32:49): In Illinois? SM (00:32:51): Yeah, in Illinois. She was a Goldwater girl, and her friend was a big supporter of LBJ. They had a project, you probably know, have heard about this, and she wanted to debate her friend representing Goldwater. Well, he said, "If you are going to learn about the other point of view and the positions of the people that you are opposing, then you need to learn backwards and forwards what they stand for. So you are going to represent LBJ and your friend's going to represent Goldwater in the debate." And as a result of that experience, Hillary became a liberal. That is a true story. MK (00:33:26): I did not know that. SM (00:33:27): And it was all based on this teacher who realized the true learning and we tell this to students all the time that you can be emotional about your feelings, but knowledge is just power. Know the issues. When you hear Newt Gingrich make statements about President Obama, well you study President Obama and where he stands on things, but you need to study Newt Gingrich too. Just do not take a line here and then- MK (00:33:51): I started to write about conservatism about 20 years ago and it was partly because I wanted to understand why they were doing so well, for someone who did not agree with them. But also it is useful because you learn to not demonize the other side and actually- MK (00:34:03): It is useful because you learn to not demonize the other side. And actually it leads to more civil dialogue, I think. It does not mean you agree with them more, but you at least understand why they have come to that position. SM (00:34:13): Do you like the term, the Boomer generation? I get a sense you like groups within the generation as a- MK (00:34:20): I mean obviously generations matter. I mean they listen to some similar kinds of music. They are affected at the same time of their lives by certain kinds of events. So, I am not saying generations do not matter. I just think this is a big, big country and it is also a big, big world. And to assume that somehow generational experiences are all the same, that is just not the history. I mean also more and more historians; it is just sort of transnational ways of looking at things. And I do that some too and obviously the generation I was part of, especially the cohort of it, there were people in Italy and France, and Germany and Britain, and Japan and Argentina, and Mexico were going to a lot of the same experiences. And to generalize about how the experiences affected them would be presumptuous. What I really know about without studying it, about what a kid growing up in Tokyo who happened to join Jim [inaudible], the Japanese left-wing kids’ organization. What specifically was driving that person? Was it same thing as driving me as a Jewish liberal New Yorker? Probably not. Some things, yes, some things, no. SM (00:35:34): The generation gap is a term we all know. It was defined as the disagreement between the older generation, the younger generation or between parent and child. And if you remember 1968, Life Magazine had that front cover with a guy with glasses on. It was kind of a black silhouette with the fathers pointing at the son and the son pointing at the father. So the Generation Gap was well known. But in the book, the Wounded Degeneration, which was a book that came out in 1980, there was a symposium that included James Fallows, Phil Caputo, Jack Wheeler, a young man then. Who else? Bobby Mueller and Jim White was an unbelievable symposium. And basically they were talking about a lot of different things, generation gap. And they brought up this very important thing. MK (00:36:22): All men are all white. SM (00:36:24): Yeah. And there was another writer that I cannot remember, he was a columnist though, not a vet. And the issue came up and said that the boomer generation has always been labeled as a service generation. That is not what your country can do for you. That Kennedy inspired so many people in the Peace Corps Vista. Well one of the gentlemen in the conversation said that this is a myth, that this generation is a service generation. The reason it is a myth is because they did not serve in the war in Vietnam. A service generation is one when your country calls, you go. And this was Jim Webb I believe, who was the at the time was... And so, he said when we start talking about the generational gap between parents and children, I think it is equally important to talk about the intra generational gap between those who went to Vietnam and those who did not. MK (00:37:19): And those were in the military, and those who did not. As you know, most people went in the military, did not actually go to Vietnam. And that chart, that was chance of circumstances, other charts since then, I always show my students because they have the sense of you in the army and you in combat. Not true. But obviously the idea of being in the military and making that decision when if you are from a certain background like my background, you could get out of it, which I did. That was a huge division as well. I always tell my students about when I had my physical in 1970, it was May 18th I think 1970 if I remember exactly, it was in the middle of the student strike after Ken State, after Jackson State, the biggest of student strike in American history. And I would come from Cambridge, I dropped out of Harvard, but I was a student anymore. But it was clear they did not want anybody from Cambridge like me. And I got out, I will not go into the details of how I got out, but it was not hard and walked out. There was this guy sitting there, short hair, looked pretty gloomy. And I believe that counselor, I said, "Hey, I just got out. You want me to help you get out?" I said, "Where are you from?" He said, "I am from South Boston." Irish, catholic kid probably, I am not sure. And I said, "Get out. Hell, I do not want to get out. If I do not pass this physical, my parents' going to kill me." Because everybody's family had had been in the military and he actually was afraid he would not pass, because he would bring disrespect on his family. So that was an important experience to me to have that interaction. SM (00:38:57): Did you have any conflicts with any of your fellow students in Harvard or Portland regarding over the war or any of the other issues? That would be the intergenerational battles. And then did you have battles within your family with your mom? MK (00:39:10): No, my mom was very- SM (00:39:11): And your dad. MK (00:39:12): My father was opposed to the war. By the time I was eligible for draft, it was (19)66. Because I had a two S for a while, then I burned my two S card. Actually, I am sure you will love this for the book, I actually rolled a joint in my two S card and smoked it. SM (00:39:30): Oh my gosh. That is a magic moment. You cannot go to jail. MK (00:39:41): Yeah, right. Well it was a party. It was party. I got pretty stoned in my dorm. But I mean I thought, again, it is a class thing that Fallis talked about in an essay. I thought the draft system was the cemetery against other class people, which it was. And so, I wrote to my draft board and said, I understand I am doing my draft, but I said, "I am giving up my two deferment and this is a terrible system." And of course the draft boards were all local. So they wrote to my mother or my father, I forget who in the state. "He is putting himself up eligible for draft." And I said, fine. So I went to physical but then failed. I purposely failed the physical. It is not that I wanted to go, it is just that I did not think it was fair for me to have a legal way out when a lot of other people did not. So where were we? So basically, yeah, so that was my experience with that par generation gap. And I went to a private high school in New Jersey, Englewood School for Boys, it was then called. Now it is called Dwight-Englewood School. And there was only one kid I knew who went to my high school, who went to the military and he enlisted, he became an officer. But clearly, I mean that itself shows, I mean this is a whole generation of people. When the draft was on, none of whom, as far as I know, were actually even drafted. He enlisted. SM (00:41:01): Wow. I got so many different angles here. I am coming with this interview. And in your opinion as a historian, a person who studied social movements, I was going to have you do comparisons here, but I am really going to concentrate on the movements of the late (19)60s and (19)70s. But the first question I want to ask, is there any link between McCarthyism of the (19)50s and the red baiting in the late (19)40s and (19)50s that we all know about? Because there is a lot of fear of speaking up. People sometimes felt they were being watched and many were reported and people that were all fear of being linked to somebody or something connected to being a communist. Is there something between what was happening in the (19)50s and what we call in the six (19)60s where we have seen more and more people speaking up and thus, we see these great movements because there is no McCarthyism happening now. MK (00:41:56): Well, there is an attempt. They did not fail. SM (00:42:00): Yeah, it is an attempt. We have seen precedence in, we know that there is prices that people pay for standing up for the beliefs. We know that. So many of the anti-war people that I have talked to believe that they are veterans as well as the people that served in Vietnam. Not in terms of military veterans, but in terms of the damages, broken noses. I have had a few people that- MK (00:42:19): Even though I am supportive of most of what I did then- SM (00:42:22): You are not going to go that far. MK (00:42:25): Got the stretch. I mean we purposefully put ourselves in danger. So whereas if you were drafted into the army and sent to Vietnam, you might not like it, but you had orders. Nothing. SM (00:42:36): Those movements really could not have happened in the (19)50s though. Could they? Even civil rights was happening and people were taking the risks and Dr. King and- MK (00:42:46): That is a different matter. That is a different matter. I am talking about people like me, white middle class kids who were in the [inaudible ]. That was a different matter? No, of course if you were a black person in Mississippi or Alabama and you took your left hand if you wanted to, wished to vote. I mean that was very different. That was very different. Well, I think that the impact of McCarthyism did not last really much since the (19)60s. As you know there was this famous demonstration, Francisco City Hall to protest The House Un-American Activities Committee hearing 1960. And the people who were supportive of the committee, made a film, Operation Abolition, which they thought would expose the communist threat trying to abolish this stolen, patriotic anti-communist committee. And the film was left at it, it felt completely flat. And more people saw the film, said, "Hey, that is a kind of cool kid protesting." And the police attacked them and so forth. So it was a backlash. Todd Gitlin has written his book on the 60s talk about this. Todd's a friend of mine. And so I think that certainly in the south, the civil rights movement with the COINTELPRO program, really with Hoover trying to tar... King with being a communist. So his aid, Stanley Levison having a communist of course has to basically get out of the inner circle and so forth. Under all that was going on, Hoover was still a powerful figure. But among people I worked with, sort of middle class whites, especially in places like New York City and the Bay Area in Chicago, college towns and Swarthmore and Wellesley, and even some places like Chapel Hill, Madison, Wisconsin, McCarthyism was not a cause. These were liberal places would never like McCarthy anyway, and never liked Hoover anyway. And so, the real division was between people who were supporting the Democratic administration and people like us who were denouncing it. So that conservative anti-communism did not really have a place there. I remember there was this guy, Joe Mulotmuraz, his name was, he was from Hungary and he had immigrated after the revolt of (19)56 have been put down by the Soviets and their allies. And he used to show up at every FDS meeting, every FDS rally at Harvard, anywhere in Boston home of the Hungarian Freedom Fighter. He is also an anti-Semite, which has a long history in Hungary. And he had a sign saying communism is Jewish and denounced this. And it was a joke. I mean no one took this guy seriously and he was not the antisemitic, he was like the crazy right wing anti-communist who always showed up. And after a while it became a sort of pat. It was like, "Hey Joe, we missed you last time." I mean he was so serious and he was not convincing anybody. SM (00:46:06): How important were the following events and shaping the times that boomers were alive? And what I am referring to here is, it is amazing how people book state the number of boomers there are, I think 79 million is the actual figure. I heard 74- MK (00:46:22): I think about the (19)60s as well as was active in it. That number, I do not know. SM (00:46:26): 79 is, let us give or take a few amount. But what I am trying to get at here is we know that the new lesson, we know that the anti-war movement was a small number of people comparison to the entire generation. And basically, what I am trying to get at with this question is not so much that these particular events influence and created protests, but that it is subconsciously affected the entire generation in terms of their lives as young people and their lives since as the oldest Boomer turns 65 this year. So, I am listing these events and just simply say which ones are few that you feel really get all of a generation. Congresses Board of Education in (19)54, the Montgomery Bus Boy Act in the (19)50s, the lunch counter protest in (19)60, freedom Summer in (19)64, the Free Speech Movement in (19)64, (19)65. Kennedy's election and his inaugural speech in 1961, Sputnik in 1957, the Kennedy assassination in (19)63. MK (00:47:36): You want me to go each one? SM (00:47:38): Oh no, no, not each one. I am just saying which ones you feel really affected all. And some of them may not affect all, they might affect the new left more than the Civil Rights Act of (19)64, (19)65, the year 1968 when Nixon was elected and certainly Ken State and Jackson State in 1970. And the election or loss of George McGovern in (19)72. And certainly, the escalation of the Vietnam and Reagan's election in (19)80. MK (00:48:04): Well make course without doing research specifically about that, I am just going to speculate because again, it would be great research project to take and maybe someone is doing it to take a scientific cross section of the boomer generation, different cohorts chronologically, different regionally, racially, men and women, et cetera. Yeah, as far as I know, no one has done that. It would be interesting to do that. Someone should do it. Or maybe someone is doing it. Maybe someone has. I should know. But again, just speculating pretty wildly because I believe in research. Clearly the most important events that influenced everybody were ones that influenced all Americans, which is presidential elections. I mean, you forgot about things like the moon landing for (19)69, Woodstock, which probably more if people think about what they still think was important about the (19)60s, those things are more important than any of the things you mentioned except perhaps Kennedy's election. And so Kennedy's inaugural. But again, at the time, how many people actually watched it? Probably not that many. Well a lot did, but there was in American Divided at the end, I think we found a poll done late (19)90s. I think when the first edition of our book came out, people actually, Americans were asked which these things about the (19)60s are most influential to you. And it was the Beatles, Woodstock, and the moon landing, none of them specifically political events. And that is important to realize, partly because people like to remember things that made them feel good. And all the things made people feel good. I mean, human beings are like that. Our lives are fairly short. We rather think about the Beatles than think about Vietnam. And that is probably true of people in Vietnam too. So I mean clearly the war, everyone knew the war was going on. All young men, unless they had some easy out had to think about, do I want to go in or not? And the civil rights stuff you mentioned clearly was any black person, any African American, could not be influenced by those things in one way or another. They were all over the black class, all over. People knew people who were involved in them. Whites, again, I do not know for sure again the research project to figure that out. But if you were in Greensboro, North Carolina, then obviously, or around near any place, citizens were taking place in 1960 that mattered If you were involved in a school that was beginning to be desegregated sometime after Brown, as it took a while, yes. For that to happen, all the liver speed was meant really slow most places and so close cases to actually make it happen after that. I think I am always amazed. I have my students in my 1960s lecture course, which I am teaching right now. I have taught it many times, have them do oral histories. Someone like you are doing with someone from the (19)60s and they have to put in a more demo context. Really do it about race, and they do it with a white person and race is central to it. I am almost amazed how unaware most whites were about what was going on in these terms. I mean, again, most people are making their own lives. They do not feel themselves being involved in making history. Dick Flacks you might know is- SM (00:51:54): Oh yeah, I interviewed Dick. MK (00:51:55): Yeah. He wrote an essay called, Making History. And then he wrote about and read his book on the left, he read his book. And he talked about that. And it is obvious in ways, but somehow a lot of historians forget that, that people do not see themselves as part of this world, historical things. They think about their family, they think about maybe their ethnic group, they think about their church and their religion, but basically they neither have time nor interest in thinking about the larger world and politic people somehow forget that. After the Democrats lost the house in (19)94, I had lunch with Dick Gephardt who had been the majority leader and would have been the speaker of the house if they won. And with some other people, was not just me, in his spacious office, he was about to lose because Republican was taking over. And he said sort of tongue in cheek, he said, "We have polls which showed that 75 percent of the American people neither consume nor wish to consume politics." And that sort of stuck with me. And he was a pretty skillful politician and he understood that most people really, really, we just assume politicians go away and politics go away. SM (00:53:12): In your own words, can you describe... The boomers are reaching 65 this year, the front edge boomers, I think I read that 3,500 people a day are going to be turning 65 until the last Boomer turns 65 from the group from 64. And so, the question I am trying to ask you- MK (00:53:39): I just say, just one quick thing about that, again, the generation really 18 years, I always question that. Barack Obama is a boomer, but is his experience of the (19)60s is really, really much like that of yours and mine? I do not think so. SM (00:53:54): That is what Todd said. And many others besides Todd. Todd said he does not like generations period. He does not like the greatest generation, but Tom Brokaw kind of emphasized, did not like Generation X and you did not like anything. He was like, what you were saying, things within generation. I have learned from this project that the people that were born between 1937, (19)38 and 1945 are closer to the first 10-year boomers, the first front edge boomers than the last 10 years in the boomers. MK (00:54:23): No- SM (00:54:26): Because if you can remember as students, one of the first things you learned and I learned in grad school when I went to Ohio State is the Harry Edwards book where he breaks down the differences between the radicals, the activists, the anomic activists, the militants and so forth. And the revolutionary. And he talked about it and he said a lot of the young people in college, they were being led or inspired by graduate students, students who were in their mid to late twenties. Now those are people born between (19)40 and (19)45. And one thing I have learned from Missy Havens, Richie says, "I am a boomer. I was born in 1941, but I am a boomer and it is because of the spirit of the times that has nothing to do when I was born. It is the spirit." George Hower was born in 1916. He is part of the spirit of the time. So that is one thing I think you really hit the mark. And this is one thing I really learned by doing this book is- MK (00:55:30): Well, I think Mr. should be better sociologist often than, and one of the things sociologists teach is that who influence you the most in politics, as you say, people who are just a little bit older than you. It is peers and people who you see as leaders. And Todd, he is five years older than me, Tom Hayden is maybe six or seven years older than me. I am not sure. I mean, I was in FDS. The people who founded FDS were obviously going to be my mentors in a way. And they were all, as you say, were born before (19)46. SM (00:55:59): Yeah. Rennie Davis was the same. And that whole group is there. I would like your feelings though, in terms of, just as a historian, you teach the (19)60s. When you teach the (19)60s, you have to talk about the (19)50s and certainly the late (19)40s. MK (00:56:15): The first lecture I did was on the (19)50s. SM (00:56:15): And between (19)46 and (19)50 too. Cause when we started being born at that timeframe. Just in your own words, describe America in terms of whether it be culturally, politically activists wise between 46 and 60? MK (00:56:33): That is a good question. Well, it is a combination of clearly economic growth and shared economic prosperity. More shared than any other time and American history. Any other time in world history actually, we know now, given what is happening in Europe and Japan, even in the Soviet plot. Eric Hobsbawm, his book Age of Extremes, wonderful book, which is a world history of 1940, 1989. And he calls these years the golden age, late (19)40s, early (19)70s. It began after World War II, of course. But at the same time there was a lot of anxiety, a lot of fear that nuclear war had happened, that communists were gaining. There was a lot of racial tension in the cities in the north as much as south. My friend Tom Sugrue has written a book that sort of a very important book called, the Origins of the Urban Crisis. I do not know if you know that book. SM (00:57:39): I know Tom Sugrue, but... S-U-G-R-U-E, right? MK (00:57:43): S-U-G-R-U-E. Yeah. And he points out that about Detroit. Other people have written about this in other cities at the time. If black people tried to move into white neighborhood in late (19)40s, early (19)50s, they often would meet with mobs saying, forget about it. And even though civil rights laws were on the books and some of these states from late 1940s on, it was very hard to, if you are a black person, to get an apartment or a house in a white neighborhood, realtors and final council. And then if they decided, of course, famous block busting- SM (00:58:19): Got 30 minutes, I think we still got 30 minutes. MK (00:58:23): Yes. SM (00:58:23): Because I know that was the one order there. MK (00:58:35): That does not matter, but I am just looking at just ordinary black people wanted to move with the white neighborhoods who did not have any politics to speak of. SM (00:58:43): Yeah, we are okay. MK (00:58:44): Because of course that shows not just racism, but also insecurity on the part of white people in this neighborhood that they felt understandably, that if black people began to move in their house, which is what they had more money stock into than anything else, was going to go down at value, they were afraid their schools would be problems. Of course, they were afraid that their daughters and sons might get involved manically with black people. And so just on and on and on. So, the glory of (19)50s was glorious economically in the aggregate compared to other times in American history. And compared to recent times too. But it was clearly still a time of great insecurity and in great anxiety, many people who were doing better were not so sure that the better times was going to continue. It was a time when institutions were very strong. Labor unions. People forget, were stronger than ever before in American's history. And that had something to do with the prosperity. And obviously corporations are strong. People thought they could go to work for big corporations, GE or Westinghouse, or thrift meat packing or Ford, and you could work for the rest of your life until you retired. And then when you retired, you would have a pension. You would not have to put your money in the stock market like you do now. But at the same time, people would come out of the depression, come out of the war, and they did not know whether this could continue. They did not have great optimism that their kind of country would always be as prosperous as it was. And of course, with the Cold War there, in 1960 debates, when Kennedy talked about the missile gap, which was of course a complete lie, it was all on the other side. But nevertheless, people believed him enough because they said, well, Soviet Union seems to be gaining and all these countries are communists and communists are causing trouble around the world. And so there is this fear that, yeah, the United States are in pretty good shape now, but who knows what the future will bring. And of course, there was youth revolt in the (19)50s too. Rock and roll riots and Elvis, and juvenile delinquents and all this stuff. SM (01:00:53): Gangs. MK (01:00:53): Yeah, exactly. So comic books, there were congressional investigations into comic books. SM (01:00:59): James Dean. MK (01:01:00): It seems hilarious now that people be thinking comic books were a threat to the republic. But nevertheless, as in history, nothing is spontaneous, nothing comes from nowhere. And everything happened in the (19)60s, the seeds were sewn for that earlier. I mean, a lot of them before the (19)40s and (19)50s too. But certainly, in the (19)40s and (19)50s already, you have debates between my uncle Daniel Bell and C. Wright Mills about whether the United States is a plural society or is one run by a power elite? All that is taking place in the (19)50s already, a rather kind of debates between liberal and radicals that we think about in the (19)60s already happening, beginning to happen in the (19)50s. SM (01:01:44): How about the period 1961 and 1980? MK (01:01:49): What about it? How would you contrast it? SM (01:01:50): It is the same thing. Yeah. How would you contrast it with that whole period from John Kennedy's inaugural to Ronald Reagan's inaugural? MK (01:01:57): I think I am not a Marist anymore, but I am enough of a... I believe in important of economics lives enough to believe that when a boom ends, then a lot of other things are affected by it. And that happens in beginning in the late (19)60s, but really as in the early (19)70s with stagflation with the oral crisis. And so, I would, like most of historians and days, I would say the period is more (19)61 to (19)73 than it is (19)61 to (19)80. I mean, the rise of conservatives would be, of course, who knows kind of factually. But it can only be understood in the context of inflation, unemployment of fear that Keynesian remedies are not working anymore. That one of the reasons Americans were willing to elect liberal presidents from Roosevelt to Truman, to Kennedy to Johnson, and have not been willing to ever since, perhaps Obama's exception, but he did not run as a liberal, is because they saw liberals as whether they remember or not, as people who basically said the government will take care of you. The government will keep the economy afloat. And it did not. Even though Nixon was in power when the worst of it happened, the programs were basically the Keynesian programs. And Nixon was the first president, said he was a Keynesian. They are all Keynesian now. So I think that that was a key that you took a win. The (19)60s ended, it ended in the early (19)70s with the economic crisis, of course, with the end of the war. SM (01:03:40): Yeah. And I am the only person that said this. And that is that I knew in the fall of (19)73 that the (19)60s was beginning to end when streaking happened. And I am working on my first job at Ohio University, and I get a call from all my buddies that are still in graduate school there at Ohio State and Jones Graduate Tower. And they said, "You have got to get back here tonight." And I said, "What do you mean I got to get back there tonight?" "Oh, they are going to be doing the Rockettes behind the law library." And I said, "The Rockettes?" "Yeah, the girls are going to come out all naked and then the guys are going to file suit and then there is going to be a big streak across the oval tonight, and then they are going to streak the Olympics all weekend." And I did not believe it, but then I went, I said, "Oh my God, this is in the (19)50s where they just stuck themselves into-" MK (01:04:35): Telephone booths. SM (01:04:35): Telephone booths or in the laundromat. Oh I said, "Oh, boy." MK (01:04:39): Or a panty wave. Right. That is a good point. SM (01:04:42): So that particular period, so when you say the next period really is the onset of, I think the late (19)70s and the (19)80s is the era of Reagan and conservatism, would not you say? MK (01:04:56): Politically, yeah. We talked about this in America Divided, and I think culturally, people on my side continue to gain even, we did not have a movement per se, but feminism continues to percolate in various ways and continues to affect women. I mean, college students today, women, just think if you told them, well, what else we need, that you cannot really think about the engineer because that is a man's job. They would say, "What are you talking about?" The idea that is a man's job, a woman's job. But of course, we were growing up in the (19)50s, that was taken for granted. Ads in the papers said, help wanted, man. Help wanted, women. It was just expected. And I think race is lots a lot more complicated now because of immigration, partly, but also because I think people no longer, again, I mean the civil rights movement did not succeed in all the things he wanted to do. As king was an economic radical, not just a civil rights person. He really wanted a guaranteed annual wage health insurance. He was basically a democratic socialist. In fact, he said so in private. But clearly culturally you cannot be a public racist anymore in this country, and you cannot justify things on the base of race. Now you can still justify the basis of not like the immigrants, and that is partly racial, but that is more recent. And the whole thing about sexuality, which of course gays and lesbians have been able to more open sexuality and people thinking, if you love each other, why not have all the right to anybody else? That is a creature of the (19)60s, I think, too. SM (01:06:39): And the age crisis, which infuriated many of the gay lesbian leaders, because Reagan refused to even mention the word. And many believed that he cost thousands on thousands of people that dying because he could not even say the word. MK (01:06:53): Which is ironic, because as he was not anti-gay personally. I mean, Nancy had lots of friends who were gay and this whole Hollywood scene it was, and designers and stuff, he was hardly a fundamentalist on these issues. So in that sense, yeah, conservatives, I mean, we talked about this in American Divided, conservatives won for the most part politically. Though again, there is limits too. I mean, as you know, when they attack the healthcare bill last year, this year, they attacked it for jeopardizing Medicare, which of course Ronald Reagan said was socialism at the time. So there is a lot of these conflicts. I mean, America's never been as liberal as some people thought in the (19)60s. It was not as liberal then as its people thought, and it is not as conservative. And it was not as conservative in the (19)80s as people thought either. We have these conflicts in American history, which in many ways go way back and neither side wins a complete victory. SM (01:07:47): Would you say the culture was as ongoing with respect to even how they look at Bill Clinton and George Bush the second? Because here you have two boomers, one conservative, one liberal, and they are comparing them, and this guy is this way and this guy's that way. Is that just part of the culture- This guy is this way, and this guy is that way. Is that just part of the culture wars, the ongoing culture wars? MK (01:08:05): Well, the partnership was obviously very strong. SM (01:08:07): The Vietnam War. MK (01:08:09): If you look at it-it in the larger perspective, neither Clinton nor Bush... But both Clinton and Bush were, in many ways, Clinton was sort of center left. Bush was sort of center right. Neither was trying to roll back "New Deal", "Great Society" programs to any great degree. Bush was not a Tea Party person at all. We were not. And Clinton was certainly not a far-off liberal, either. And yet of course, both sides jumped on the other one, partly for Bush was because of the war, of course, in Iraq. But even before that, people saw him as illegitimate winning the presidency and everything else. And I think one of the results in the (19)60s is that people were politically active, which is not most Americans. People who are politically active really believe that the other side is evil. And I was saying before, earlier in the interview, that I think it is important to take a strong stance. But it does not mean that that Democrats and Republicans, as parties, are really ideologically bound parties. They are more than there used to be, certainly. But still most Americans who vote for Democrats, Republicans agree with some of the things the other party is for, too. Most Americans are not deeply ideological. SM (01:09:33): A major question I have been asking every person from the very first interview with Senator McCarthy is the issue of healing. Whether you feel that there is an issue within this generation of lack of healing for those who were... Support for the war, against the war, for the troops, against the troops, the divisions between Black and white, male and female, gay and straight. This question comes because a group of students came up with a question, they wanted to ask Senator Edmond Muskie when we took a group in 1995 to meet him in his office. And because they had seen the film on 1968 and they thought we were close to a second civil war. And they were not born yet, but they had seen the riots, some of the films in (19)60s, they had seen the riots. They saw two assassinations, King and Kennedy. They saw the Chicago Eight trial, they saw the terrible confrontation in Chicago that year. And they came up with a question and they thought Senator Muskie would talk about (19)68 and all the divisions. And I will give you his response after I hear from you. Do you think that part of the divisiveness that we have right now, that there is a link between what is happening today and what happened back then? The bitterness, the somewhat hatred between people with opposing points of view, that this is continuing, ongoing and that the generation itself, either consciously or subconsciously, because you cannot talk about 79 million, but it is something that I have brought up to everyone, and they have all had different answers to this. Do you think we have an issue with healing as a generation? And that many will go to their grave still bitter toward people who had opposing points of view, no matter the issue? MK (01:11:26): Again, it depends on who you are talking about. I think you have to separate people who were activists then and continue to think as activists now. People who were not much activists then, or they might have gone to a demonstration or they might have gone to a rock festival or something, but they were just sort of riding on the wave, whatever the wave happened to be. But those who actually started the waves and continued to want the waves to continue and not to break on the shore, that is the right metaphor. I think yes. I think on both sides, if you talk about two sides, continue to say that if you are on the left, that conservatives now are the same people who are wrong back in the Cold War in (19)64 and supported the war in Vietnam and liked the police cracking people's heads in Chicago and so forth. And of course, on the right, mirror image, "These crypto communists think America's not exceptional." I just wrote a piece. I have a column for the New Republic, and I just wrote a piece on American exceptionalism, how Obama can maybe take advantage of that concept. But as I said before, I think that if you look at issues though, there has actually been some healing. Or I would rather think of transcendence than healing. I am not sure it is healing. As often happens in history, after a while people no longer care to argue about certain issues. It is just not relevant anymore, either to their lives or to the society. It is not politically opportunistic to argue about it. I think we are approaching that with gay rights. Certainly already approached it with gay military. That is over. And I think we will approach with gay marriage in the next five to 10 years, as well. Already at the Conservative Convention downtown, the CPAC convention- SM (01:13:27): CPAC. MK (01:13:27): Happening now. No one. Did anybody talk about gay marriage? Not because they might not believe that it is wrong, but because they realize that most people do not care enough about that to vote on that basis. Abortion is still a very loud issue, and in fact, young people are probably more anti-abortion now than they were a few years ago. But again, it is not something that is central to the dialogue. And someone who is in favor, pro-choice and yet hopes that people do not have to have abortions, I think that in many ways that is where the center of Americans are. They do not want to make abortion illegal, but they would like it to as few abortions possible. So, there is ways in which people are transcendent to those debates. Foreign policy... Again, I will not go into all the issues, but yeah, I think that is basically where we are. That activists, core activists on both sides will not surrender. But the large majority of people from the boomer generation, I think, have transcended the idea that there are two sides. They have a more complicated position depending on the issue and depending on their experience. SM (01:14:37): Do you think the Vietnam Memorial, the wall... I want to ask you, when you went there for the first time, what did you first think in terms of... Were you having flashbacks of your youth? MK (01:14:48): No. SM (01:14:48): When you went to the wall for the first time? I am going to get back to this question of healing, but as part of it, Jan Scruggs wrote a book called "To Heal a Nation". And of course the goal of the wall was to heal the families of those who lost loved ones in Vietnam and also those who served the nation in Vietnam. And many are still going through unbelievable problems upon their return. Just your thoughts on whether Jan Scruggs's idealism of hoping that that wall would heal the generation, because we were so divided over the war, I do not know if there has been healing between Vietnam vets and anti-war people, but your thoughts on going to that wall and whether it will heal the nation anymore. MK (01:15:34): My first thought as someone who was spent important years of my life in the anti-war movement were that this was an anti-war memorial, because it is black, it is a gash in the earth. SM (01:15:44): Yeah. MK (01:15:44): It is right next to the Lincoln Memorial, which is a memorial to a war that was won. At least by the north, it was won. Great Greek temple, it is like a Parthenon. That one is also a war memorial. And I think it is a brilliant piece of public art. She is a brilliant architect, Maya Lin. But also, I was aware that people going there were able to have a mourning experience publicly and privately that they had not been able to have before. So I think it was wonderful in that sense. By the time it started, I forget when I first saw it, maybe two years after, three years after it was finished... (19)85, I think I came here first. I was living in California before then, so I had not been back there to see it. I was blown away by it. I really thought it was one of the most beautiful pieces of public art or architecture I have ever seen, because it allowed you... It made you think right away about the war. It did not tell you what to think the way I think the World War II Memorial does, which I hate. I hate that memorial because it just... SM (01:16:57): Ooh. MK (01:16:59): Oh, "All hail the concrete heroes." Wars are not that simple. People die in large numbers. And anyway, and the Vietnam, our memorial, I saw people there. I saw people crying. I went there at night, I think, the first time, and saw the candles there and people's faces reflected in the black marble, which is a brilliant effect. Now, clearly, this came out of a desire to heal those divisions, which even though those divisions were very raw, clearly enough people got on top of them, the Vietnam vets groups, scrubs, and others to realize that this was not a good thing. And it was not helping either side. Was not helping Vietnam vets, either. And of course, Vietnam vets themselves, we provided, as you know. SM (01:17:48): Oh, yes. MK (01:17:49): A lot of donors were Vietnam vets. We thought they had been betrayed by the country. So some folks, they were betrayed by the country for having sent them there in the first place. Some folks were betrayed by the country for not supporting them more once they were there. So, it is a mix. So, I thought, I still think it is a wonderful place, and partly because it allows all kinds of things to happen. Of course, a lot of people who go there and have petitions against Jane Fonda and people who were there and sold the flags of "Do not forget the MIAs, the POWs", even though there is hardly any evidence, there is still people there. It enabled a debate to take place on a more rational basis, which is very important. SM (01:18:30): But the bitterness towards Robert McNamara is still pretty evident, even though he wrote those two books. Because what he wrote, "In Retrospect"... I will never forget going to the wall. I went to the Vietnam Memorial, which I have been to the Vietnam Memorial, Memorial Day and Veterans Day, ever since I knew Lewis. And after he died, since (19)94. And the very first year I was there... "In Retrospect" was (19)95, I believe. And I have some unbelievable shots that I took there that because, so there were two "In Retrospect" books left at the center, and they had bullet holes in them. They had been taken to a firing range with bullets and left there. And I took about 25 pictures at different angles. Sure. Unbelievable. So the bitterness... But I interviewed Craig McNamara there in California. Craig's unbelievable. I do not know if you could ever get him into your class, if he is ever back in the east. He is a gem. MK (01:19:24): Has he written anything? SM (01:19:25): No, he does not write. No. But he runs a farm out in the North, up in the Napa Valley. It is a walnut farm. He has done very good. And I really respect him. He was an unbelievable person. He was anti-war. MK (01:19:39): I was friends with Bundy's son while in California. He married a friend of mine who was a radical sociologist. And Bundy came to... When I was in the freeze early (19)80s, he came to is this is McGeorge Bundy, [inaudible]. SM (01:19:59): Oh yeah. MK (01:20:00): He came to a meeting and he was very impressive, partly because he was so guilty. SM (01:20:05): Of course, what is really amazing about McGeorge Bundy is McGeorge Bundy, just like Robert McNamara, knew very early we should have gotten out it. MK (01:20:11): Yep. SM (01:20:11): And I bet... And I know both of them went to their grave thinking that. It might have even helped. MK (01:20:17): Well, the fair fact, McNamara commissioned the Pentagon Papers. SM (01:20:21): Yes. MK (01:20:22): It showed historicalness, but also when he quit, it would have been a huge impact if he had said "This was a mistake." But of course, he did not do that. SM (01:20:30): In (19)70, he went to Ashton. I got him in trouble. Do you say one of the qualities that defined the entire generation, though, is their lack of trust? It is not a trusting generation. Again, I am talking about... MK (01:20:42): I think America in general, since Johnson escalated the war in (19)65 and sent American troops in large numbers that year. I think Americans, since then, have not been trusting of any generation. I am not sure... Again, like Todd, I am dubious about thinking about the generation as a whole. And polls showed that. Polls showed it. As you probably know, from World War II up to (19)64, Americans... As you know, Gallop Poll has this every year. "Do you trust this institution, the authorities to do the right thing? Government, church, military, universities, et cetera?" And since that point, government has never had majority. Sometimes it is low, it is like in the teens, like during Watergate. Sometimes it's a little higher, like right after 9/11. Universities are, I do not know, twenties and thirties. Churches are a little higher. Military's usually higher. But in general, Americans as a whole do not have huge amount of trust for any major institutions or authorities. SM (01:21:51): I know specifically, for me, as a young person going into I think sixth grade or something like that around the time, it is that Eisenhower lied at the U2. That is the first time I ever saw a President lie. MK (01:22:03): Yeah. SM (01:22:03): Because I think everybody was shocked that this grandfather figure had lied to us. MK (01:22:12): Of course. Absolutely. Famously, FDR, who I think was a great guy, he lied. He knew the US was going to get into World War II, but he was not going to say it. SM (01:22:22): I wanted to mention that the result of the response to Senator Muskie to that question. Senator Muskie did not even mention (19)68 and then did not mention anything that was happening in America. The students were totally shocked because they were all waiting for this great answer from the Vice-Presidential candidate in (19)68. And he said, "We have not healed since the Civil War in the area of race." And he went on to give a lecture and he said, "I have just seen the Ken Burns series in the hospital. We lost 430,000 people in that war. Almost an entire generation of Southern..." MK (01:22:53): Civil War? SM (01:22:53): Yeah, Civil War. MK (01:22:53): It was more than that. It was 600,000. SM (01:22:53): Yeah. Well, the thing is, he went on to talk about that and he showed his emotion too, by the tears. And actually witnessed what the news media had talked about. The guy had emotion, and there is nothing wrong with that. (01:23:08): One of the things here, too, is the violence. You were a member of SDS. I do not know if you know Larry Davidson. MK (01:23:15): I was living there for a short time, too. SM (01:23:15): Yeah, I am going to bring that in. Larry Davidson founded at Georgetown. He was the founder, he is a history professor at Westchester University., And he founded SDS at Georgetown. MK (01:23:26): I never- SM (01:23:26): Lawrence Davidson. And he was on the front newspapers, he got arrested. His parents were not too happy with him because his father was in the military. But the question is this: he quit SDS because it went to the weatherman in violence. And so many quit. Do not you think? And Mark's done a great job in "Underground". I have interviewed Mark and I was with him for a whole evening at the Kent State last year. MK (01:23:53): I saw him. It is funny, I do not know if you know this. We had lunch, he had not finished the book yet, maybe three years ago. And he had come to Washington and I said, "Why come to Washington?" He said, "Well, the FBI invited me to Quantico to talk about terrorism." SM (01:24:06): You are kidding me. He did not say that he was there. MK (01:24:10): That is hilarious. So, he stopped to Washington on his way out of Quantico. SM (01:24:11): Oh my God. Well, I really like Mark. I love Mark. MK (01:24:16): I liked him back then, too. SM (01:24:18): But he admitted the mistake that was made that he would not have supported violence. And he says about it in the "Underground" book, really, that he was against it. And I think that is where he has had different disagreements. MK (01:24:29): He was not against it soon enough. [inaudible] Right? SM (01:24:31): Bernardine. I am interviewing Bernardine in about two weeks. But your thoughts on, SDS going to the Weather Underground the biggest mistake ever made by SDS was that? MK (01:24:41): Well, no, I think it began before then. And the biggest mistake we ever made was to basically think that revolution was possible in the United States, and talk that way. And to support people like the Black Panthers. This is for Weather Man, who basically talked about revolution. We really thought that. We are so angry at this country... People who run this country, what they are doing, and also at a lot of Americans for supporting what the country's doing, that we basically are not going to identify with the country and not going to make an analysis that any political person should be making of what is possible, and whether what we are saying is jeopardizing what is possible. So, on the one hand, yes, we have built some important movements and the anti-war movement, most important of them, at least for people like me. Of course, the Black movement was also on before then. But I think we... I just finished a book on History of the American Left. I have been thinking about this a lot. It is coming out in August. But ever since the New Left collapsed, there has not been a mass radical movement in this country. There has been campaigns here and there. There has been things like Chomsky and Howard Zinn who speak for radical causes and radical ideas. SM (01:25:58): Right. MK (01:25:59): But basically I think we did not... And it is not just our fault. Context has changed, too. But basically, we did not think about the future. We just thought... Look, we were kids. That is part of it. My wife is always reminding me that when you are 20, 21 years old, you can do a lot of things, but reflecting soberly is not usually one of them. And that is part of all that falling apart. We did not have mentors. And so I think our mistake was an analytical mistake, which came out of our putting emotions ahead of thinking. And some of that was useful. Being angry was important, but we should have coupled our anger with a long-term strategy. And we did not. We thought somehow that everything was coming down around us and we would somehow be able to take advantage of that. And you probably know the history of Nazis a little bit. Famously, the German communists had these battles with German socialists in the streets of Berlin where the Nazis were gaining in votes. And when the German communists were asked why it was more important to eliminate their rivals on the left than it was to fight the Nazis, the slogan was, I forget the German, basically "After Hitler, us. Hitler will not make it. Germans will not follow this crazy guy. And then they will want communists to go in power." And in fact, we believe that. I remember in (19)68, there was a chance Reagan would run for president, even though he had just been elected governor of California. And George Wallace, of course, is running for president. And I thought, "What would it be like if the presidential election came down to Reagan against Wallace?" Two people who, from my point of view, were both crazy right-wingers. And I asked some friends of mine from SDS, and they said, "Great. Country deserves that. Country deserves to go to hell that way." And when I was a Weatherman, long story, but basically people who were in my collective had to give these very short speeches on the subway at one point. Like 30 minutes. And one of the guys in my collective was a working class kid from Northeastern University, from Southie, actually, Irish Catholic kid. Jimmy, I forget his last name. Jimmy O'Toole, I think. And he was reticent about speaking. He just was not used to public speaking. He had to come up with something. So, the subways stops and is quiet all of a sudden. And Jimmy said, " This country sucks." A lot of people thought we thought this country sucks. That is not a way to convince the majority of Americans. SM (01:28:39): Knowledge is power. Knowledge is power. Know your stuff. MK (01:28:41): Anyway, so the message that many Americans received from SDS was "This country sucks." And that that is not a message that a majority of Americans... You are not going to convince the majority of Americans to hate their country. You are just not going to. SM (01:29:00): Yeah. MK (01:29:01): And you should not, either. So that is why- SM (01:29:03): One thing- MK (01:29:04): The Weathermen came out of that. See, the Weathermen did not come out of nowhere, it came out of that. We basically said, "Yes, this country sucks. Let us bring it down." SM (01:29:11): You were not in the group that was hiding, were you? MK (01:29:14): No, I left before it went underground. I did not go underground. SM (01:29:17): How we doing time wise? We got five minutes? MK (01:29:19): Five, 10 minutes. SM (01:29:20): Okay. These are just very important terms that, again, the people that are going to be reading this, this is going to be geared to our college students, high school students, and the general public at large. But mostly I want this to be in the (19)60s courses. I have got some great interviews. Jack Wheeler interview, Mike [inaudible], you cannot believe that interview. MK (01:29:36): You are going to have to cut it. You are going to have to make it shorter, though, because college students- SM (01:29:38): No, I know that. MK (01:29:42): [inaudible] pages. SM (01:29:43): Yeah. Just your quick definition of these terms, if you can do it. "Counterculture". What does that mean? MK (01:29:52): It means a set of behaviors and ways of thinking. Stop a sec. SM (01:30:00): Yep. MK (01:30:05): Basically behaviors and attitudes opposed to what people perceive to be the dominant behaviors and attitudes about sex, about drugs, about a lot of things. Friendship, music. It was, I think, more of a youth culture than a counterculture, per se, because so many people were able to be part of what we think of the counterculture, who were just basically consuming differently. Not necessarily changing their minds. Some of them changed their minds. But for the most part, again, they were activists. Everyone with counterculture was not Abbie Hoffman. SM (01:30:43): Right. Participatory democracy, which we know about was part of what SDS's foundation was. And also I believe participatory democracy was very important in the Freedom Summer and the Civil Rights Movement itself. (01:30:56): Bye. Nice meeting you. Take care. (01:30:58): Definition of participatory democracy. MK (01:31:10): Well, again, that is more easily defined because it was the New Left, White New Left, especially, but soon to be Black New Left's attempt to project a vision of the way they thought politics should work. As small scale as possible, as much based on ordinary peoples having a voice as possible, as opposed to representative democracy. It was utopian and impossible to run a society that way. But I think it gave rise to a lot of people joining groups. And in some ways it goes back to Tocqueville and goes back to the flowering of volunteer institutions, voluntary associations in various parts of American life. And I think it was important part of the New Left's appeal that people believe that everyone should be able to have... What was the SDS's slogan statement... Something like "Everyone should have a,..." I forget exactly. "Should be able to help decide, make the decisions that affect their lives." And that makes sense to me. SM (01:32:35): It is people as opposed to one specific leader. That was very important. Black Power. MK (01:32:42): Well again, Black Power had a specific definition at the time in the late (19)60s when it began to be talked about by Stokely Carmichael and others. Clearly was, in many ways, the latest phase of Black nationalist ideology. Black nationalism goes all the way back to Martin Delany and people like that, even before the Civil War. That Black people have to [inaudible] themselves to free themselves, and should also be proud of who they are culturally, how they look, how they dress, their history. So it was both connected to Jewish ethnic assertion, Italian assertion, Irish assertion and identity, and different from it because the history of African Americans in the United States is different from that of any other group for obvious reasons. SM (01:33:35): Why was Che Guevara so important to many people in the New Left? Mark mentioned, when we started having our conversation, he immediately started talking about Che Guevara and how important he was. And he was reading at Columbia. And even since then, why is Che Guevara, Herbert Marcuse, why are they so important? MK (01:33:56): But they are very different. SM (01:33:57): Yeah, I know. MK (01:34:11): Che was much more important than Marcuse. You want about Che? SM (01:34:11): Yeah. MK (01:34:11): Well, it was not that important to me. Ho Chi Minh was more important to me. But he was... First of all, he was cool. He was beautiful-looking. He was international. He saw himself as a citizen of the world. He had been in different countries, Congo, and he was Argentinian, but he was in Cuba helping to make the revolution. He was a writer, an intellectual, as well as being an activist. And that was of course what people like me in the left wanted to be, as well. And he was a martyr, and martyrs are always important. We would not have Martin Luther King Jr. holiday if Martin Luther King was still alive. SM (01:34:51): He was a doctor too, if I am correct. MK (01:34:55): Yes, he was. That was less important to me. And he wrote Guerrilla Warfare, and of course people were beginning to have this romance with guerrilla warfare. And Cuba had a special place. You probably read some of that Van Gosse book, "Where the Boys Are" and so forth. Cuba had a special place in the minds of New Leftists. C. Wright Mills wrote a book before he died called "Listen, Yankee", supporting the Cuban Revolution. And it was in our hemisphere, a lot of Cubans had been in the United States. Of course, then, we tried to overthrow the government. So it was in the minds of people becoming leftists, people already were leftists. It was going to have a very important place. A lot of people have been there. My in-laws, Beth's parents who were in the Communist Party took their honeymoon in Cuba in 1953 or something. SM (01:35:49): You were part of that group called the Vencer... MK (01:35:53): [inaudible] Yeah. I went to Cuba. SM (01:35:54): Yeah, did that- MK (01:35:55): That was after Che died. That was (19)69, (19)70. SM (01:35:57): Did that get you in trouble in terms of the FBI looking at you? MK (01:36:01): Well, I was already in trouble after I was a Weatherman. I was already in trouble because I had been a Weatherman. But yeah, I think my name was mentioned at Senate hearings. I think Senator Eastland from Mississippi said we were "little capsules of revolution", some metaphor he used. "Little missiles of revolution." SM (01:36:17): Has that affected the rest of your career in any way? MK (01:36:20): No, not really. Academia is a pretty safe place for people. SM (01:36:26): This is very important because Tom Hayden, when he came to our campus, really had to almost give a lecture to students on this, the difference between power and empower. Your thoughts on the difference between them. Students sometimes feel they have power, and then you use the term "empower" and they look like this. And if you use this term to boomers who are my age, who are conservative, "Oh God, the (19)60s." So just your thoughts and difference between power and empower. MK (01:36:59): I do not use the term " empower" too much because it seems like jargon, but... Well, power is obvious. Power is you have the ability to get people to do things you want them to do, either because you control institutions or because you have people believe that you are their leader. And "empower" has a connotation more of ordinary people feel that they have the ability to get power and to influence people in power. That is what I think. SM (01:37:35): And then just the difference between the Old Left and the New Left. MK (01:37:38): Well, again, the Old Left was people who became radicalized, mostly 1930s, some earlier. Again, generationally, it is complicated. But people whose primary ideological paradigm was Marxist and was focused on the working class and on the labor movement. Not to say they [inaudible] other things. And people who thought the battle over whether the Soviet Union was a good place or not was absolutely crucial to everything else. The magazine I am co-editor of now, Dissent, was very much part of the Old Left when it got started. And Patton, Irving Howe and other editors battled with people in the New Left, in the late (19)50s, because they thought New Leftists were naive about communism because they were socialists. And for them, the Bolsheviks and then Lenin and Stalin and all those people in the American Communist Party and other communist parties had destroyed any real hope for socialism, because it had made socialism equated with tyranny. In retrospect, I think they were probably right. But at the time, I thought... At the time most of them... I was an anti-anti-communist. I thought anti-communism was just a way of saying "People in power in this country continue, are okay. They might be doing some things wrong, but at least they are not communist, so we cannot really oppose them any major way." And of course, War in Vietnam, a lot of the people, the anti-communists Old Left, were either supportive of the war in Vietnam at first, or very ambivalent about it. Because after all, this was a war against Stalinists, as they put it. And the New Left of course, were people like me, mostly Baby Boomers, not all, as we talked about before, who got radicalized in the late (19)50s and (19)60s, when the key issues were first Black freedom, inequality, then Cuba, and then the war in Vietnam. And the issue of... Marxism was influential, labor. They were pro-labor, but these are not their priorities anymore. SM (01:39:48): And also the difference between neocons and neoliberals. MK (01:39:54): Well, neoliberals means something very different in Europe than it does here. Neoliberalism, here, was a term that was coined I think in the late (19)70s, early (19)80s, by people who were Democrats, capital D, who understood liberalism was in decline and disrepute. And they wanted to move somewhere to the right, less regulation, dubious about affirmative action, try to win back majority. And people like Paul [inaudible] were neoliberals. I am trying to remember some of the names now. It did not last very long. In many ways, Bill Clinton could be argued was a neoliberal. The Democratic Leadership Council, which just went out of business this week, was- SM (01:40:36): Did it? MK (01:40:37): Yeah. Was very much a neoliberal bastion. The think tank called Progressive Politics Institute still exists, but that DLC does not exist anymore. And it also is a way to show businesses, which of course all is very powerful in the politics of this country, that we are not just anti-business; we are just anti-business going off on their own and opposing regulation. So with neoconservatives, the term was coined by, I think, Michael Harrington, who was of course a socialist, or maybe Peter Steinfels, who was a left-wing Catholic. There were people who had been liberal-driven radicals in their youth in the (19)60s, mostly Jewish, who began to move to the right because they opposed the New Left, they opposed Black Power, and they identified with Israel and opposed the Soviet Union. Part of the Soviet Union was, they thought, tyrannical, and part of the Soviet Union was anti-Israel. And they thought that supporting Israel, supporting what they saw as mainstream centrist government was being attacked more by the left and by the right. And of course, most of these people ended up just being conservative, like Billy Crystal. And then his son, Billy. But at the time, they continued to support the welfare state as they understood it. They just were opposed to---Continued to support the welfare state as they understood it. They just were opposed to what they saw as some people on the left, who were trying to move things beyond where they should go. Anyway... SM (01:42:11): Two final questions. What lessons had the institutes of higher education learned from the student protests of the (19)60s and (19)70s? Are they lessons learned, and lessons lost? I say this, because when you look at the Free Speech Movement in (19)64, (19)65, it really did not have to happen, although I think eventually it would have happened because the war was coming, and so forth. What really gets me is that when Mario Savio, the things that always stand out, and why I think he is a very important person in the history of activism in America, but also in terms of what happened in free speech and higher education, is the fact that ideas matter. I know your father, ideas matter. Universities are about ideas. All ideas should be presented, all points of view. Yet the universities were still were at that time being controlled by corporations. MK (01:43:11): Well ... SM (01:43:12): The reason why I bring this question up is when you look at universities today, and I have been in higher education for 30 years until I left two years ago, fundraising, scholarships, doing a program, everything seems to be linked to we got to raise money. We got to raise money, we got to have a corporate link to this, this, prove that this program has value because is it bringing money in? MK (01:43:39): I think I told you now that was then, actually. SM (01:43:40): Yeah. When I interviewed two great educators, Arthur Chickering who wrote Education and Identity. One of the things in higher education in masters and PhD programs you learn about is seven vectors of development. The ultimate for all students is that they have a sense of integrity. That is what we all shoot for, knowing who they are. Like you, you know who you are and what you stand for. Activists have lived a lifetime. They have integrity because they are genuine. When I interviewed Alexander Aston and Arthur Chickering, I asked them, "Is there one disappointment that both of you have in higher education today now that you are," well, one is retired, one is still there. Yeah, corporations have taken control again. They are running the universities. MK (01:44:24): I think it depends on the university. I think it is less true at wealthy universities because they can get money from wealthy people who went to school there. Harvard, I do not think is owned by corporations. I think it is certainly true. We have a new business school, and we only have it because corporations have financed that. It does make sense in some ways, you want people to learn how to work in corporations, corporations might as well pay them, help them do that. SM (01:44:52): Yeah. MK (01:44:55): Part of the whole context of the (19)60s as I was talking about, was this unprecedented prosperity. I mean, state university campuses were being founded Every year. I mean, Ohio had 78. Pennsylvania, California, New York, I mean places that did not exist before for World War II. I think in some ways, people who grew up in that period, and then went to higher education, I did get a sense that sense of entitlement, I guess is the best way to put it, that we should be supported for whatever we think, and whatever we want to do. Now, I believe in tenure, I believe in free speech, of course. At same time, there are some people, and I say this as person on the left, some people on the left in academia who feel like somehow whatever they want to do, whatever they want to say should be, is sort of immune from criticism from outside. I mean, the war Churchill is the worst example of that, of course. Because, he even lied about what he did, but who he was. I think that one of the good things, not corporate takeover isn't good, but I do think that there is a lot of programs in universities now, at least in mine, others which where people do go back and forth between the outside world and world university, they all have internships and so forth. I think that is really good because it is important for the university to be in the world. Of course, you cannot avoid being in the world to certain extent. The whole ivory tower thing I think was and is a little over over-hyped. I think the best professors, to me, the best professors I had in college, the best professors now that I know of, are people who are continually in dialogue with people outside. I see myself as doing that because I do a lot of journalism, and I am still active in various things. I think certainly everyone has got to do that. I think it is important to have an important cohort, people in universities who do that, who do not see themselves as just completely apart from everything else. Now, at the same time, if you are an Aristotle scholar, I would not expect you, or want you necessarily to be involved with having ... Politically in your town. You cannot be if you want. Cannot be, you are not. But, for political scientists, for example, who studies, let us say Congress, not to care at all about what people think of Congress outside is a mistake, I think. SM (01:47:25): Of course, David Horowitz and Phyllis Schlafly, when I interviewed both of them, they were pretty clear that they feel that the universities are now run by the troublemakers of the (19)60s. MK (01:47:38): Yeah. See that is also, take it the other way. SM (01:47:41): That is the culture wars. Again, the whole concept of PC, being politically correct and everything, that is all part of the... MK (01:47:46): Yeah-yeah. I mean, I always say about conservatives when I have been on lots of church committees in history departments, both in American University, and here at Georgetown, here in Georgetown. We never get conservatives applying. It is not that we will not hire conservatives, it is ridiculous. I mean, conservatives do not go into history, or philosophy, or for the most part, or English departments, or American studies, or anthropology, or sociology. They go into government some, and economics, of course, and business schools. In general, students have decided that universities are hostile to them, or they just want to make more money. SM (01:48:29): That is what they go, many of them to think tanks like the heritage organizations. MK (01:48:31): Well, local schools too. Yeah. SM (01:48:34): The last question is kind of a three-partner here and oh, you put it all into one. I do not like to use the term the boomer generation either, starting to feel the same way as you and Todd, but when the Best history book, you are a scholar, you have written books. Your book on the 1960s was written in (19)95, I believe? MK (01:48:53): The first edition came out in (19)99. SM (01:48:54): (19)99. I think. MK (01:48:56): The 4th edition comes out in a couple months, actually. SM (01:49:02): Yeah. Well, I like the first edition. MK (01:49:02): Okay. SM (01:49:03): Because, I actually given a couple first editions to my family. MK (01:49:09): Oh, great. Thank you. SM (01:49:09): I have the original. MK (01:49:09): We keep updating it. SM (01:49:10): Yeah, something about the first ... I like first editions. I like the hardbacks. I am a hardback guy. When the best history books are written, I remember Steven Ambrose saying before he passed away, that the best books on World War II are usually 50 to 75 years after the period has happened. I guess this question came about when I go to the Civil War battlefield every year, and I spend a lot of time over at Gettysburg. I go there five, six times a year. There is a statue there. The last person who was alive, who was around during the Civil War, and they had a name person who participated in the war. What will be the legacy? What will historians and sociologists be saying? Do you think, I know it is hard to say when the last boomer has passed away? For the last ... Yeah. That might be the, and also, what would be the, what is the legacy of the generation? What is the legacy of Vietnam, and the legacy of the movements? Because, some people think the movements have gone backwards. MK (01:50:11): Well, I mean, I guess we should look at the new conclusion, the latest conclusion of the fourth edition of our book. Because, I am responsible, we provide the chapters, Morrison, I am responsible for that, for the conclusion. I wrote that mostly. It is a huge question. Again, never know for sure. I think that, as I said before, two things are going to be essential. One is the framework of prosperity, and the assumption on the part of a lot of people that prosperity would continue. There is insecurity, but nothing like now. Two, obviously the cohort, and the way in which it shaped, it divided people, and it taught people that there is only two choices in the world, either freedom or capitalism, and freedom or communism, as in this country, or in Soviet Union, socialism, or exploitation. I think that sort of dualism in the world, even though, of course, it was more complicated than that, but that expectation that has be on one side or the other, is something which is no longer true. It was not true for the most part before then either. It is very rare when we have a two-power world. We do not have one now, and we did not have them before then either. That shaped possibilities in many ways. Part of what, even though we were not necessarily aware of at the time, I think part of what the new left was trying to do was to find space in between those two. Basically, we liked the individual freedoms America afforded, and we liked the idea of a more collectivist, more egalitarian society that socialism. We wanted to put those two together. We were not successful. I think that impulse of ... Ray Mills talked about this basically his, before he died, he was trying to put together a conference of ... I think he even called it the Third Way, E.P. Thompson, the great, British historian I interviewed back in the early (19)80s. He said Mills was trying to put together, he was trying to invite the Cubans, and the Yugoslavs, and Martin Luther King Jr, and all these folks. He died before he put it together. Maybe he would not have been able to put together even afterwards. But that I think was the impulse that was there among new leftists. It was a good impulse, I think, in retrospect, but we were not able to carry it into fruition for all kinds of reasons. SM (01:52:46): Any final thoughts on the boomer generation? MK (01:52:49): No-no. SM (01:52:51): The legacy of Vietnam? MK (01:52:52): I think we had better music. SM (01:52:54): Yeah. MK (01:52:57): I always tell my kids, I stopped doing this, but I say, "Tell me which group that you like now, people will still listen to in 50 years the way they are still listening to the Beatles, stones, Motown and so forth." They have a hard time because they say, "Well, a whole musical genre, we might listen to hip hop, yes, but anyone hip hop artist, I mean...", so that is what was fun. SM (01:53:17): That is a great legacy too. MK (01:53:19): Yeah. SM (01:53:20): I think one of the legacies of the boomer generation is all the progress that has been made in so many different areas in terms of women's rights, and stuff. MK (01:53:29): Yeah. SM (01:53:30): It is interesting. I constantly put on my Facebook (19)60s and (19)70s. I got, in fact, with the Valentine's Day coming up, I just put on the Beatles song, which I think they did one of the greatest love songs of all time. And they- MK (01:53:44): Words of Love, that one? SM (01:53:46): One. Yeah. All you need is love. What is interesting, if you go to the YouTube, if you can find it is just, it is a classic. It is ... they are all dressed up. They got flowers in their ears. I remember that. MK (01:53:56): Yeah. SM (01:53:57): Then in the audience is Jagger. I mean, things are just sitting there listening. MK (01:54:01): Yeah-yeah. SM (01:54:03): It is like, "Oh man, what a time." What it is like forever. I often wonder, somebody who complained against the boomer generation often said they never grew up. I have had a couple people tell me that. MK (01:54:15): But again, it is a danger of generalizing by this generation. SM (01:54:16): Yeah. MK (01:54:16): I mean, usually when people talk about their generation, they are thinking about two or three people they knew. SM (01:54:16): Yes. Well, we at Westchester University, we are done. But, close off, thank you very much. (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 Dr. Michael Kazin Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kazin, Michael, 1948- ; McKiernan, Stephen Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/wav Subject The topic of the resource Historians; College teachers; Georgetown University; Social movements--United States--19th century; Social movements--United States--20th century; Kazin, Michael, 1948--Interviews Description An account of the resource Dr. Michael Kazin is a historian and professor at Georgetown University. Kazin's research focuses on the American social movements from the 19th and 20th centuries. He received a Bachelor's degree in Social Studies from Harvard, a Master's degree in History from Portland State University, and a Ph.D. in History from Stanford 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 2011-02-12 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.10.2016.72a ; McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.72a 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. 237:12 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/36863aef1daa1f3e22da69d6c4bab09b.jpg a1db53d2fde9ad3455d94f2cef04e609 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/c0cf0b87bbfc3f8ed6fc9136fdf0e54f.mp3 b4fdc42fad586b1a671dc00a41a3d7d3 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 2010-04-16 Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Stephen McKiernan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Michael Walzer Language English Biographical Text Dr. Michael Walzer is a political theorist and professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey. He has written books and essays on a wide range of topics in political theory and moral philosophy. Dr. Walzer has a Bachelor's degree in History from Brandeis University and a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University. 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="{"1":2,"2":"Activism; Generation X; feminist movement; Ronald Reagan; Baby boom generation; Red diaper baby; Brandeis University; Montgomery bus boycott; Freedom Summer; Fred Shuttlesworth."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":513,"3":{"1":0},"12":0}">Activism; Generation X; feminist movement; Ronald Reagan; Baby boom generation; Red diaper baby; Brandeis University; Montgomery bus boycott; Freedom Summer; Fred Shuttlesworth.</span> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 89:50 Subject LCSH Political scientists; College teachers; Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, N.J.); Walzer, Michael--Interviews Accessibility Copy/Paste below: Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Rights Statement Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Dr. Michael Walzer Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Walzer, Michael ; McKiernan, Stephen Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/wav Subject The topic of the resource Political scientists; College teachers; Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, N.J.); Walzer, Michael--Interviews Description An account of the resource Dr. Michael Walzer is a political theorist and professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey. He has written books and essays on a wide range of topics in political theory and moral philosophy. Dr. Walzer has a Bachelor's degree in History from Brandeis University and a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard 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 2010-04-16 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.10.2016.119 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2018-03-29 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. McKiernan Interviews Extent The size or duration of the resource. 89:50 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/8178f30327f1bee3bb3893797385f2ac.jpg a009d01f6fc7e9733fd170d8769a31bb https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/5f50109da7138cc1a71e499f1373e063.mp3 7378990c05340a0e3cafdea541cd0e43 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. Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Michael Zuckerman Date of Interview ND Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Stephen McKiernan Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 150:21 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 3 Microcassettes Material Type Sound Interview Format Video or Audio Audio Biographical Text <span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Dr. Michael Zuckerman is a historian, scholar and author. He is a Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Zuckerman He taught courses in popular culture, national character, human nature, and religion. He recevied his Bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania and his Ph.D. at Harvard University in American Studies."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":13059,"3":{"1":0},"4":[null,2,16777215],"11":4,"12":0,"15":"Arial","16":10}">Dr. Michael Zuckerman is a historian, scholar, and author. He is a Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Zuckerman taught courses in popular culture, national character, human nature, and religion. He received his Bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania and his Ph.D. at Harvard University in American Studies.</span> Keywords <span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Vietnam Veterans; Vietnam Memorial; Nineteen sixties; Counterculture; Baby boom generation; Tom Hayden; Jane Fonda; anti-war movement; Black Panther Movement; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":513,"3":{"1":0},"12":0}">Vietnam Veterans; Vietnam Memorial; Nineteen sixties; Counterculture; Baby boom generation; Tom Hayden; Jane Fonda; anti-war movement; Black Panther Movement; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.</span> Subject LCSH Historians; College teachers; Authors, American--20th century; University of Pennsylvania; Popular culture; Zuckerman, Michael--Interviews Accessibility Copy/Paste below: Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Rights Statement Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Dr. Michael Zuckerman Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Zuckerman, Michael ; McKiernan, Stephen Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/wav Subject The topic of the resource Historians; College teachers; Authors, American--20th century; University of Pennsylvania; Popular culture; Zuckerman, Michael--Interviews Description An account of the resource Dr. Michael Zuckerman is a historian, scholar, and author. He is a Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Zuckerman taught courses in popular culture, national character, human nature, and religion. He received his Bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania and his Ph.D. at Harvard University in American Studies. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource ND Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In copyright Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.172a ; McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.172b; McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.172c Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2018-03-29 Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. McKiernan Interviews Extent The size or duration of the resource. 150:21