1976 interview with Toni Morrison

Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison recently received a “Lifetime Achievement” award from the Norman Mailer foundation. The ironic, if not iconic, image of Toni Morrison sharing the stage with those who seek to honor Mailer’s legacy as a writer sent me scurrying to see if I could uncover my typewritten notes from an interview I did with Morrison back in November 1976.

Morrison, at that time, was a fiction editor at Random House in New York City. She had come to Mt. Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass., to give a talk and a reading from her latest novel, as yet unpublished, The Song of Solomon.

I was a reporter – soon to be managing editor – of The Valley Advocate in Amherst, Mass., a weekly alternative newspaper in Western Massachusetts.

Having attended the reading the previous evening, I joined Morrison – and her young son, Slade – for a breakfast interview at Mt. Holyoke. Morrison was well-known in literary circles, on the cusp of fame, but not yet famous. To wit, I had a big argument to convince The Valley Advocate’s arts editor to run the interview, because he had never heard of her – or her books. And, Morrison, in turn, requested that a copy of the interview be sent to her mother in Lorain, Ohio, and provided the address.

It’s been a long journey since that encounter – for Morrison, and for myself. But it’s worth recapturing the interview here, three decades later.

When she spoke, according to my notes, it was “in exacting speech, clear, precise, powerful.”
Morrison explained that she taught creative writing at Yale University by letting her students edit manuscripts that had been sent to the publisher.

At her talk the night before, she had told to her audience: “When I wrote The Bluest Eye, I felt there was an idea abroad in the land that was extremely tragic and destructive of women. When we talked about beautiful women, we talked about virtue, as if they had done something extraordinary to achieve their beauty. Beauty was seldom warmth and goodness; it consisted of superficial qualities.”

“[In the book], the pursuit of beauty,” she continued, “was an all-engrossing obsession. The girl who accepted this standard of beauty that was given her, and never accepted anything else, so she wanted those blue eyes. It was a symbol that everything would be all right, if only… fill in the blank. And, even if she got them, it wouldn’t be enough, because it was never enough.”
In the interview, I asked her about her second book, Sula:

“My second book, Sula, was about a woman alone – not a woman without a man, but a woman alone, without women friends. Men deride the information that women have to give other women as old wives’ tales, or gossip, or girl talk, which suggests that this information doesn’t have any value. That kind of isolation [being a woman alone] may be devastating….”

Morrison continued: “The friendship in Sula was not homosexual, it was interesting in its own accord, and the women were not using each other in the pursuit of anything. [The book explores] what happens if the friendship should fall and break apart, with the other version of oneself, the other – the one person to whom you don’t have to explain anything, with whom no posturing is necessary, with whom you can be whomever you really are.”

She continued: “The women found themselves separating over the intimacy of one’s man. Sula would not honor the ancient laws [of community]…The book was also dealing with a structure, a cosmology. Death is not an accident; it happens because you fail to notice signs pointing to it. If you are attuned, you will pick up signs of disaster. If you ignore warnings, things will happen inevitably. The signs that should have meant something in the past had been ignored. Hannah askes the universal question for that person in authority: Tell me did you every really love me?”

The character of Sula, Morrison said, “depended on her own instincts, which for her was her impetus, experimentation. The most terrible thing that could happen was to become bored, ennui. It is boredom that created the atmosphere for her own death.”

Slade, her son, interjects here: “You’re books are so sad, Moma.” Morrison replies: “I’m going to write a funny one.”

I had run into Slade the night before, looking for the reading. I asked him: “Is she as good a mother as she is a writer?”

“Better,” he replied.

Morrison drew a distinction between women’s writing and men’s writing, and talking about the problems of writing from a man’s perspective. (Are you listening, Norman?)

“I don’t want to win anything. I don’t play games. I don’t care enough about it.”
She said: “If you are writing about somebody who is concerned about wining, then you’ve got to feel that drive, the feeling of lust, of gambling – what it must feel like to get something by chance, and you know you deserve it, it’s easy, something for nothing, without effort.”

Morrison continued: “I used to have a brother-in-law who hunted. He had marvelous dogs; he also had a family. I used to go hunting with him, and we would go out and get a raccoon. I would carry a lamp; there was me and the guns and the dogs. I knew that whatever noise the dog were making, he understood, and would respond. What as really going on was that they were talking to one another. The calls were very specific. It was a language. And I presume a time when men did really talk to the animals, a time before language, when could talk to a tiger.”

She continued: “It’s not important whether I’m wrong, or right, but it is important that this is the way I could go into a scene that’s a man’s scene. The kinship between the hunter and the hunted, the respect the man had for the animal. I had to feel authority in describing such a scene, to feel that drive, that pursuit.”

Morrison said that her first fan letter was “from Erica Jong, who had read the manuscript of The Bluest Eye in galleys, when she was still considered a poet.”

Morrison said that she had little use for fame. “I want to write perfectly, to have large numbers of people say that I write perfectly. I also crave anonymity with a passion – and not because I’ve had a taste of something. I am a private person, and don’t like what I see of fame. You begin to talk about yourself, as “we,” and to think of yourself in capital letters.” (Once again, are you listening, Norman?)

A few years earlier, I had interview the poet, Nikki Giovanni, in Philadelphia, who had created her own recording company, for her poetry. I asked Morrison about that.

Morrison said: “If I were a poet, I wouldn’t go near a publisher. I would consider myself a lyricist. If I didn’t read my own works well, then I would find somebody who would read them well. Poets are losing a large market. I would buy a record of poetry faster than a book of poetry.”

Almost as an aside, she continued: “The first time I heard Faulkner he had a terrible voice, a Southern cracker voice. But reading is a special skill, like singing. A musician many not be able to sing.”

I asked Morrison about what I perceived as the violence in her books. My notes indicate that I cited a quote from The Bluest Eye.

She said: “I was trying to recollect what it was really like in one’s feelings as a child, a sense of being a child. It was not all innocent and delight. You discovered about yourself that you were capable of all sorts of emotion, including hate – pure and unprovoked malice, and it has no personal connection. It’s scary, because it could happen to anyone.”

She continued: “Those people who deny the naturalness of violence are impressed by it; they are very attracted by it. Violence is banal. Slavery is very attractive to some dramatists now. (The TV series, “Roots,” was soon to be aired.) It stimulates their interest in its character. And it holds tremendous possibilities for dramatic effect. Slavery, in reality, was tedious, boring, oppressing, and had little of what the dramatics would add.”

Morrison talked about the role of community in dealing with, and setting limits, with violent behavior. “There used to be a time when people could have fits, they were part of the normal range of human emotions. Short periods of outrage, and it was not considered unnatural. It was possible for village idiots to exist. And these people were not institutionalized. People dealt with them on a realistic, day-to-day basis. Madness was bumping up against one another.”
She continued: “The same thing is true with violent people, people who reach their limit rather quickly. But there were stop valves. Greater risks were involved. If you had the courage to commit murder, so you also had the courage to stop it.”

Further, Morrison said: “Black churches where you could run the gamut of emotions, scream and cry. When you take that away, you have an incredible amount of shame. You feel guilty [for such strong emotions]. Guilt is what you feel when you can’t feel the real thing – love, anger, hate – until it becomes a substitute for feeling.”

She added: “Before you knew the word, and what it meant, you could go ahead and feel it.”
Morrison talked about the importance of hearing as part of the writing process. “I hear everything before I write it. My goal is to make the reader understand the nature of the speaker. Dialect often functions as words only on a page, and the reader never hears a thing.”
She said that Alex Haley, who wrote Roots, didn’t realize this. “If I had been his editor, I would have kicked him in the butt.”

Morrison also addressed sexuality in her books. “Sula is bed with Ajax. All the sexuality is in the reader’s imagination, the framework of a woman saddling a man. It becomes a very visceral response to the act of sex without mentioning the word. It is sexually implicit.”

I asked Morrison which authors she liked to read:

“I read for enjoyment. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is absolutely incredible. I also read a lot of African writers. The Radiance of the King (by Camara Laye, written in 1954), the writing is so narcotic. A white man who comes to Africa, shipwrecked, who becomes stripped down all the way [of all his belongings and clothes], the continent takes them away.”

The interview has gone on far longer than anticipated, and Slade is anxious to go.

Some thoughts, 33 years later: In the world before Oprah, her book club, Amazon.com, even Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show,” how did someone discover writers and musicians not in the mainstream of culture, or who chose to swim outside or against the current?

Morrison was recently honored at Oberlin College, with a bench in the town square, the first American college to admit women and African Americans. The bench, as a symbol of community, where anyone is welcome to sit, and perhaps meet someone new, and share a story.

Uncovering these typed and handwritten notes from the interview is much like uncovering the never-released music of an early recording of a famous band.

I try to think of 140 characters for a tweet on Twitter that would make sense of this post: but my talent is not with writing précis.

For me, I feel as if I am opening a vault of memory, and wonder whether I should fast-forward to the present.

Would you prefer excerpts from a lecture by Allen Ginsberg on Kerouac and beat poetry, from 1980, where he reads numerous selections from Kerouac? I can try and post some of the audio.

Or, would you be interested in piece about what’s wrong with non-profits in Rhode Island, and the need to move beyond patching potholes, from the “patcher in the rye,” to become an accepted partner in reshaping the Ocean State’s economic well-being.

Who are the happiest people in Rhode Island?

In the opening line to Anna Karenina, Tolstoy writes,

“Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

YEARS AGO, in 1989, when assigned to write a piece for Rhode Island Monthly about “the richest people in Rhode Island,” I suggested, partly in jest, to then editor and publisher, Dan Kaplan, “Why don’t you write a piece about the happiest people in Rhode Island?”

“Who would want to read that?” he countered.

“Everyone would want to read it,” I answered, unsure of exactly how to prove that very intuitive thought.

“Nah,” said Kaplan, who believed he had the steadier finger on the pulse of what sells. “Keep working on the richest persons story.”

Which I wrote, and which appeared in Rhode Island Monthly, and, reportedly, was read aloud in parts by former Mayor Buddy Cianci, in his first go-round of being a convicted wrong-doer turned radio host.

According to the research, Doris Duke was the richest person. Yet, from all accounts, she led an absolutely miserable, unhappy life.

Over the next two decades, with each successive regime change at Rhode Island Monthly, I once again suggested that a “happiest people in Rhode Island” would be a great story. There were never any nibbles or bites.

The current editor, Sarah Francis, at least, recently put the challenge back on me, asking for a more developed query. “How do you define ‘happiest’? You need to flesh out this idea.”

A good response. So, here’s my answer.

First, it’s not necessarily about money. In my “richest” people story, it opened with quotes from an alleged literary exchange between Hemingway and Fitzgerald, in which Fitzgerald suggests that rich folks are different from the rest of us, and Hemingway replied, “Yeah. They have more money.”

But money can’t buy you love, as the Beatles sang. And, all too often, we’re reminded of the poem “Richard Corey” (by Edwin Arlington Robinson), the well-adjusted man about town who put a bullet in his head, when we read about the apparent suicide of the very rich Finn M. W. Caspersen in Westerly, on an exclusive golf course.

I once interviewed the writer, Tom Wolfe, who talked about what he called a “status” synapse that existed in the human brain, which switched on and off, promoting the social hierarchy. It certainly explains what makes the soap operas attractive; the continual episodes of girl meets boy, girl gets boy, girl loses boy, girl regains boy. Of course, Wolfe has made a career of writing about the pursuit of status and sex.

So, my first yardstick for defining happiness is that its pursuit is self-revealing. We seek what we think will make us happy, often defined by the influencers around us – society, parents and family, religious guides, even financial advisors. And, by definition, if we pursue it, if often means we don’t get it.

Needless to say, this pursuit is often misguided, like stalking your own shadow. All too often, the maxim, “be careful what you wish for,” applies. Unless you are as self-delusional and narcissistic as Donald Trump (and earned money the old-fashioned way, by inheriting it), attainment of success does not always equate with happiness. As Saul Bellow’s character once bellowed: “I want. I want. I want.”

Of course, my next yardstick to define happiness is the reverse, or mirror of the first: it is the search, not the attainment of happiness, which is important. At some point, we should recognize that we are all travelers, crossing the same river (or, in Rhode Island, the same highway bridge under construction) over and over again. The quest. The pursuit of the golden ring. The mythic challenge. The myth of eternal return.

Alas, the search for the Northwestern Passage often leads to a freezing, miserable death in Hudson Bay. The pursuit of happiness in the quest is an adrenalin rush, much like being a war correspondent, surviving while writing about others’ deaths. The absolute high of risk is probably more addictive than methamphetamines. But is it happiness? I think not; it’s more about the desire to disappear into thin air. Undaunted foolishness.


“So, if it’s not the attainment, nor the search, how are you defining happiness,” I can hear Ms. Francis interrupting, wanting me to get to the point. Editors are often like that (I say this as a recovering editor).

OK. The next yardsticks are the big things in our life – love, devotion, (as well as hate and self-loathing). Love is tough one; it is always changing, much as the weather does. Love when you’re 18 is very different than when you are 28, or 38, or 58. Endless love is a pop song, not a reality.

There are ecstatic moments of happiness – great sex, giving birth, being named a MacArthur “genius,” winning the Nobel Prize, or celebrating that the Red Sox finally winning the World Series. These are ephemeral moments in a lifetime, beautiful sunrises and sunsets. Our ecstasies, however huge the high, often don’t last. Happiness, perhaps, is more about the ability to stay in the moment, as we breathe in and breathe out.

For example, the pursuit of romantic love gets mixed up in the attainment, the desire. Or, as Stephen A. Mitchell describes it in his book, Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance Over Time: “In love, we are searching for points of attachment, anchoring, something we know we can count on. In desire, we are searching both for missing, disowned pieces of ourselves and for something beyond ourselves, outside the borders of self-recognition that, under ordinary circumstances, we protect so fiercely.” Translated: Those who define true love as happiness are always going to be disappointed in the long run.

For some, love can become confused with devotion – to religion, to work, to a family, all righteous things, but I’m not sure that the denial or postponement of life’s pleasures is really about happiness, but rather points toward obsession and compulsion.

Or misery. To complain, to share the grief, as if it were wealth.

And, history is filled with the stories of hatred of self-loathing of villains, who find happiness in the destruction of others. I don’t want to go there with this story.

So, where are we, then? The best benchmarks for happiness are the ones we define for ourselves. We can talk about what makes us happy. And, we can observe happiness in others, though they need to define it for themselves. Nor can we force anyone to be happy.

Let me try to define happiness, first, then, for myself, and for purposes of the story.

When I was in my late 20s, playing in a pick-up basketball game at a middle school, I found myself breaking down in tears while trying to run up and down the court. I walked off the court, sobbing. A friend ran after me, thinking that I had hurt myself.

No, I admitted, between sobs, “I’m just very sad.”

It had been a very rough year. My mother had been killed and my father badly injured in a car crash. I had just broken up with the woman who I had been living with for a year. My professional life was in shambles; I had given up writing, my plans for a TV production company had failed.

Concerned, the friend invited me over for dinner, to make sure I was OK. He gave me some good advice. “I remember when I first met you,” he said. “You were doing children’s theater, you were writing, you were playing softball, you were working on a cookbook. That’s the time I remember you as being the happiest.”

That summer, I recalled, was the first time I had been “free” to do what I wanted to do, without constraints and restraints – of parents, of school, of family, of having no money. I found I could sing in my own voice, however off key, with a little help from my friends and lovers.

I was living in an old house in a small, side-of-the-road town in Western Massachusetts. Rent was $75 a month; I had the house to myself for the summer. I was collecting unemployment from my last job, in which I had worked as a head cook at a local restaurant, Zelda’s. It was summertime, the blackberries were plentiful down by the nearby stream. On a whim, I did children’s theater every morning. I played softball in a men’s fast-pitch league. I had a tentative contract to write a Mexican cookbook for a local publisher.

OK, yes, Sarah, enough of my own story. Yes, I need to focus here.

The first thing about happiness is that other people will recognize and describe it about you, but you yourself often may not be able to see it.

So, for purposes of this story, in addition to the my piece, let’s also ask the readers of Rhode Island Monthly to make their own nominations in a readers’ poll, with the important caveat: You can’t nominate yourself, your partner, or anyone who’s a member of your own immediate family.

The second important benchmark: Being happy doesn’t mean that you cannot also be sad, too. It’s a sense of happiness over time, rather than tied to the rush of the moment, the ingestion of a drug. It’s not about “bright moments,” it’s about the people who seem to create bright moments around you.

The third important benchmark: It’s not about the work that someone does, nor the talent they have. To quote a lyric from Charlie King: “My life is more than my work; my work is more than my job.” It’s not about fame, winning the lottery, nor being a sports hero, or winning a TV reality show.

A fourth and final benchmark: While the pursuit of happiness, as well as unalienable rights, are proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, it’s not about politics. No elected officials are eligible.

It’s still my intuition that this would make a great story. I hope that I have established the criteria for defining happiness in terms of the story. So, Sarah, what do you say? And, why not let the readers of Rhode Island Monthly participate, in one of those readers’ polls.

Who are the happiest people in Rhode Island? What makes them happy? Wouldn’t you like to read a story about the happiest people in Rhode Island?

P.S. The response from Rhode Island Monthly

Hey Richard - thanks for the follow-up. I read your column with interest but it doesn't work for us, I'm afraid. The features we run are based on journalistic reporting and the conceit you're proposing, of turning the content into a reader's poll, just doesn't fit.
I’m sure you can find a home for your idea in a more literary publication, however.
Thanks and best wishes,
Sarah F

P.P.S.
The current issue of Rhode Island Monthly that graces the supermarket checkout line, has a cover story entitled: “Finding Love in RI: A survival guide for dating,” which included an online readers survey, described in the following language:

“It's a date. We asked, you answered. Our ‘Love in RI’ survey respondents told us about getting it on, Ocean-State style.”

The “journalistic reporting” included “more than 330 people [who] took our online survey in June and July.”

Hmmm. To read the tea leaves, I guess it’s OK to have a story with an online survey about finding love, but not happiness.

A willingness to stand up and say no

IN OCTOBER 2005, my aging oil furnace broke apart, causing water to pool beneath it on the basement floor, sending smoke billowing up the basement stairs, filling the house, a sure sign that it was now beyond any hope of repair or redemption.

For the New Year, it seemed, I was to be inscribed for a blessing in the book of life and in the book of debt.

Cleaning up my basement, I literally stumbled over a cardboard box, and unsure of what it contained, dug out a bunch of papers. It was a collection of artifacts from when our nation had been at war in Vietnam, and when I, turning 18 in April 1970, had registered for the draft as a conscientious objector. The papers were support materials documenting my claim.

I was young, Jewish, athletic, intellectual – and unwilling to fight in Vietnam. For me, it was an illegal war, built upon lie after lie, deception after deception – by Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon – for which I was unwilling to risk my life. My beliefs were confirmed by the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, a year after I registered, and by many subsequent books – from Fire in the Lake to Dispatches.

“It was a very strange time,” I started to tell my teenage son, as I pored over the newly unearthed documents as if I had uncovered buried Stone Age pottery, the edges of the papers flaking off in my hands. But he easily deflected the start of what no doubt for him was another one of my involved, meandering stories.

So, I began to compose this, in fits and starts. I’d not written very much about what James Thurber once called “draft board nights.” It always seemed too personal; it made me feel vulnerable, much like reliving a catastrophic car wreck from which I had somehow survived. (The caveat, of course, is that I did survive, and yes, in the end, I did not go to Vietnam. As my neighbor, who drove a tank in Vietnam and earned three Purple Hearts, said to me recently: “Good for you. You were smarter than I was.”)

That summer, in 1970, I received my 1-A classification and, a week later, my notice for pre-induction physical. I responded by frantically writing out my appeals on legal pads, even going to the draft board in person to tell them, in all earnestness, that they’d made a mistake. By not ruling on my other possible deferments, declaring me to be 1-A, they were violating their own rules. Of course, a draft board official just laughed at me, and suggested in stern language that I’d better show up at my physical, or else.

I never went.



IN SEPTEMBER 1970, I began my college career with a 1-A draft card gnawing a hole in my dreams. Many of my fellow students were much too busy having a good time to think or talk about the war, which, to most of them, was an abstraction, a distant thunder.

Some afternoons, while walking to class, the huge B-52s from Westover Air Force Base in Chicopee, Mass., would fly over the campus, a few hundred feet off the ground, having just taken off, the bomber pilots on training flights. First, there would be a sudden shadow spreading darkness, then the thunder of jet engines swallowed up the sky.

As a senior in high school, as a kind of unfunny joke, I had pinned on my bedroom wall the letter from the superintendent of West Point, General S. W. Koster, inviting me to apply to the U.S. Military Academy as a result of my scores in the National Merit Scholarship Program. Over it I had taped a description of B-52 raids in Vietnam from a front-page story in The New York Times:

“An allied official, who has been flying his helicopter over the target areas within five minutes after the B-52 strikes, said: ‘They have been the most lucrative raids made at any time during the war.’

‘Every single bomb crater is surrounded with bodies, wrecked equipment and dazed and bleeding people,’ he related. ‘At one such hole there were 40 or 50 men, all in green North Vietnamese uniforms, but without their weapons, lying around in an obvious state of shock. We sent in helicopter gun ships, which quickly put them out of their misery.’”

The yellowing letter, with the clipping still attached, were part of the recently unearthed documents.

Years later, I would come across the poem, “The Teeth Mother Naked at Last,” by Robert Bly, and think, yes, this is truly an American lyric:

“Massive engines lift beautifully from the deck
Wings appear over the trees, wings with eight hundred rivets

Engines burning a thousand gallons of gasoline a minute sweet over the
huts with dirt floors…

“Helicopters flutter overhead. The death-
bee is coming. Super Sabres
like knots of neurotic energy sweep
around and return.
This is Hamilton’s triumph.
This is the advantage of a centralized bank.
B-52s come from Guam. All the teachers
die in flames. The hopes of Tolstoy fall asleep in the ant heap.
Do not ask for mercy.”

They taught Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter in my high-school English classes. Not surprisingly, they were still teaching Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter to my son in high school, in his “American Studies” classroom. But, no Robert Bly.

Why, I wondered. Bly’s words were written about President Lyndon Johnson, but their truth still reverberated:

“Now the Chief Executive enters; the press conference begins:
First the President lies about the date the Appalachian Mountains rose.
Then he lies about the population of Chicago, then he lies about the
weight of the adult eagle, then about the acreage of the Everglades

He lies about the number of fish taken every year in the Arctic,
he has private information about which city is the capital of
Wyoming, he lies about the birthplace of Attila the Hun.

And the Attorney General lies about the time the sun sets.”



SOME OF THE earliest unearthed papers dated back to September 1969, when I was a high-school senior in Millburn, N.J. There was a dog-eared copy of the Superintendent’s Bulletin, praising a front-page story that had appeared in the local community weekly newspaper, The Item, with the headline, “Students Join War Protest, Ban Boycott.” It detailed plans for a voluntary assembly at the high school on Oct. 15, an event I had organized. (Truth was, I had also written the article that had appeared in the weekly.) Right next to that story in the weekly was a story about how a former high-school student had recently died in Vietnam, not from combat wounds, but from an infection.

The superintendent had written: “I am gratified that the students proposed that this assembly be held, but I am not surprised. It is another indication that they can approach problems with maturity.”

In 1969, Sam Brown, David Hawk, David Mixner and Marge Sklencar, veteran community organizers, had hatched a scheme to schedule national moratorium days on the Vietnam War. Their idea had been refined from Jerome Grossman’s call in April 1969 for a general strike if the war had not concluded by October. “We ask you to put aside ‘business as usual’ on Oct. 15 and devote the day to organizing your co-workers and neighbors to work actively for an early withdrawal of all our troops from Vietnam,” the organizers stated in their ads. One day in October, two days in November, and so on.

I believed it would be a great idea for our high school to engage in a spirited discussion on the war.

I recruited a history teacher, Dana Stivers, to serve as a faculty advisor, and I enlisted a fellow editor at the high school newspaper, Doug Wilhelm, to be a co-chair. Amazingly, the principal, Donald Koehler, bought into the idea. There would be a voluntary, hour-long assembly program, with speakers, both faculty and students, representing both sides of the Vietnam issue. Following the assembly, there were optional small group discussions, 15 in all, run by teachers paired with about 30 students.

“This program planned for tomorrow will attempt to arouse an interest, to clarify events through discussion, to provide some points for discussion, for thought and for action if one is so moved,” wrote Mr. Stivers, the day before the event, in a mimeographed presentation to faculty moderators, which I retrieved from my box of artifacts, the blue ink faded to a faint turquoise.

Not everyone liked the idea of the assembly and small-group discussions. The high school football coach, believing that football players were football players, ordered a mandatory practice for the entire team, preventing any of them from attending the optional small group discussions. A friend on the football team, Jim Stokes, told me about it, and in the next issue of the high school newspaper, I wrote about it in a front-page article, saying that attendance at the small group discussions had been hindered by the discussion to hold a mandatory practice.

The morning after the school newspaper came out, the football coach waited for me to arrive at school in the high school foyer. As I entered, he grabbed me by my jacket and started banging me against the wall, screaming at me, until another student, Carol Watson, went to get the principal to rescue me.

“Would you like to continue this discussion in my office?” the principal asked.

“No, we’re all done,” the coach said.

“Are you OK?” Carol asked.

I said yes, but the truthful answer would have been no. I was shaken, unnerved. I wanted to throw my arms around her and hug her for saving me, but I felt too awkward, too scared.

Later, an assistant football coach literally chased me through the hallways, threatening to kill me. As I sprinted down the hallway, he was gaining on me, so I fled into a classroom where I didn’t belong, sat down, and pretended to be part of the class. The assistant football coach, face contorted, stared in through the small window of the door, clearly conflicted about charging into a classroom to get me. After a minute or two, he left. I stayed in that class until the bell, thanking the teacher profusely. I never told my parents about either incident.

Reading through the faded mimeographed materials prepared for the day, I am amazed at the quality of the preparation (most of the credit must go to Mr. Stivers, as I recall). There were excerpts from a speech from Nobel Prize winner and Harvard University Professor George Wald. There were articulate, thoughtful questions for the small group discussions: “What happens to American after Vietnam? If we leave Southeast Asia, what happens to the area? Is the Vietnam conflict a moral cause gone wrong – or was it an immoral action from the beginning? Even if Vietnam ended tomorrow, how an we control the so-called military-industrial complex. What happens to our position in the entire world? Can we win the war in a traditional sense? Has there been a failure in American education – a failure to teach patriotic ideals, for example. To what extent can the law be disobeyed without subverting society?”

Substitute Iraq for Vietnam, and these are good questions for high school students to wrestle with today.

The next morning, over breakfast, I asked my teenager son if he thought there could be an assembly at his high school to discuss and argue about the war in Iraq. “Maybe,” he said, “but most of the kids would be bored.”

Do you think the students and teachers would talk to each other about the war?

“Probably not,” he answered, honestly. “It would be too uncomfortable.”


ALL DAY LONG, as I waited for the plumber to arrive, banging away at the computer, my mind kept drifting back to Oct. 15, 1969. For sure, our discussions and dialogue that day did very little to change the outcome of the Vietnam War, or, for that matter, the opinions of many in the audience.

The moratorium, and its criticism of the war, did provoke a strong response from then Vice President Spiro Agnew, the stand-in hammer for Richard Nixon, who called the demonstrators “an effete corps of impudent snobs.” More chillingly, Agnew later spoke about the need to separate “the bad apples.” Nixon, in a wonderful non-denial denial, said he would not be influenced by the demonstrations. And, of course, the bombs from the B-52s were still falling in Vietnam – and illegally in Cambodia.

In Millburn, hawks were still hawks, doves were still doves, and the superintendent, in his next weekly bulletin, preserved in my conscientious objector archives, was still very self-congratulatory. The panel of three students and thee faculty members, he said, “did a good job with a difficult subject, approaching it from a number of different positions. One position they seemed to have in common was that we should not continued in the war, but how we got in and how we should get out was not a topic on which most of the panelists could agree.” Some four decades later, his words had an eerie resonance with the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The superintendent went on to say: “The television channels gave wide coverage to mass meetings in New York and elsewhere on October 15th, but nothing that I saw on TV was better or more effective than what I saw in our high school assembly.”





A FRIEND OF MINE, Barr Ashcraft, a former combat photographer for Time-Life in Vietnam, was having a show of his photographs at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst that fall. Barr sent a photograph of the show as a postcard, inviting me to come. My son, who saw the postcard, agreed to go see the exhibit with me the next week.

We went on Rosh Hashanah. It is a chance to be reflective of the past and of the upcoming year, I told my sister, who is upset that we are not going to services.

My son’s favorite photograph in the show was of a Vietnamese woman, clutching a bamboo stake, who had been rummaging through the rumble for what remained of her home and family after being bombed. The camera had caught her expression, angry, sorrowful, her fist clenched around the bamboo. It seemed to capture so much of the waste of the war, a place destroyed so it could be saved.

In April 1977, two years after the fall of Saigon, as managing editor of The Valley Advocate, an alternative weekly newspaper in Amherst, Mass., I published a number of Barr’s photographs. It almost cost me my job. His images, mostly of Vietnamese and Cambodian troops, cut through the verbiage of so much that had been written about Vietnam and got to the essential truth about war: it’s about killing people. Even for a self-proclaimed alternative newspaper, the truth about the war crossed a boundary.

Ever since then, Barr and I had engaged in an extended dialogue about the war. It was the quintessential event of his lifetime, he would argue, and he would berate me because I had chosen to miss it. I always answered by saying: I fought the war at home, and I had no reason or desire to go to Vietnam.

He had spent 1965-1975 in Asia, and when he returned, the world he had left behind no longer existed.

Two events reshaped our dialogue. In 1985, his friend and former colleague, Neil Davis, was shot and killed while covering a coup in Thailand. As he was hit by a tank’s machine gun, Davis fell forward, dropping his camera. “Neil had performed the final irony,” Barr would later write, “the terrible horror of photographing his own death.”

The macabre scene was then broadcast worldwide, and when Barr saw it on TV, he went into a post-traumatic shock episode, falling to the floor of his bedroom, desperately trying to shield Neil from the gun, the way that Neil had saved Barr’s life on numerous occasions.

At that time, I was an assistant news editor at a local daily in Greenfield, responsible for the editorial page, and I asked Barr to write the story about his relationship with Davis. For the first time, after years of posturing with a bravado about the rush of performing on the razor’s edge during combat, and surviving, Barr admitted to himself that the thrill of war was a hollow emotion.

“I received a kind of perverse pleasure in going to death’s door and knocking in quiet defiance. …Going to the precipice of death at the time seemed to make each day much more meaningful… The wanton destruction we witnessed and photographed in Vietnam and Cambodia was then, to us, commonplace. But today the death of Neil Davis is a cold, uncommon numbing experience. It has heightened no awareness nor brought any fullness of life to me. This time there is no perverse pleasure in surviving; there is only profound, haunting and agonizing loss.”

Some years later, Barr told me another story that, much as a piece of twisted shrapnel, had taken 20 years to work its way out of his flesh. He described visiting the family of a young Vietnamese boy in a village north of Saigon. Barr had taken off his flak jacket, left it in the hooch, and went off to photograph the village from a nearby ridge. While he was there, looking through his telephoto lens, he watched as a Viet Cong patrol entered the village, found his jacket, accused the boy and his family of collaborating with the Americans, and executed them. All Barr could was watch through his camera.

Barr had planned to meet us at the show, but it turned out that he was too ill. So, we journeyed to his home in Shutesbury, where we found him in a makeshift cot, cared for by his brother, Peter, and a hospice worker. For the last few years, he struggled with prostate cancer, a battle he seemed to be winning, but then it returned, with a vengeance.

We talked for a while, until he could not longer stand the pain; the hospice worker connected his IV with a sedative. We said our good-byes. Barr died a week later.


SO, WHAT HAPPENED? It’s a question my son often asks of me, when I’m in the middle of a story and I pause, drifting into silence, lost in a tangent of memory. A gentle reminder that I have become, like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five, unstuck in time again.

It was a few nights after we had returned from Shutesbury, and I had just gotten back from the high school’s open house and parents’ night. In his American Studies class, in which history and English courses are team-taught, I found myself struggling to ask the teachers a question.

I had been trying to figure out how to ask a question about Robert Bly, Vietnam, and the Iraq conflict, but I had been unable to think of a way to phrase the question. I keep quiet. It was my question, not my son’s, I realized.

One of the mimeographed pages I found had listed the students and teachers who helped lead the small group discussions. Becky Varner and Carol Watson. Prosie Stanziale and Linda Dowdell. Alan Bateman and Jan Hoffman. Gary Henoch and Liz Pasquale. Where are they today? What, if anything, do they remember about the Oct. 15th moratorium? Do they have sons and daughters who are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan today?

We are fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that bear an eerie resemblance to Vietnam. The conflicts are different, but our leaders have lied to us about the reasons we entered both battles. In each, the stated goal is to promote an illusory version of American democracy, taught to us in our high school history classes. Once again, we find ourselves in a conflict without an exit strategy, draining our nation’s wealth, to defend a flawed concept of national security. We have projected our insecurities onto these conflicts, much as we did in Vietnam.

The stench of blatant corruption in Iraq and Afghanistan is everywhere; it mirrors the same pus-filled infection that was Vietnam and Southeast Asia. Heroin trafficking. Targeted assassination squads. Torture. Contractors making millions. There is even symmetry with the investigative reporting – Sy Hersh broke both the My Lai massacre in 1969 and the Abu Ghraib prison torture stories in 2004.

Yet in our history classes, in our high schools, there was an absence of dialogue, of discussion, of thoughtful inquiry. Why?

I did not know what lasting influence or memories the Oct. 15 moratorium had on my high school classmates. I knew that it influenced me, for the better.

What it all comes down to, I believe, was a willingness to stand up and be heard, to speak up and say no, and to say it out loud, and in public. It took more courage to say no, rather than yes, to swim against the current, rather than with it.

The source of the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, who gave them to Neil Sheehan at The New York Times, when asked the reason why he did so, said he had been strongly influenced by his interaction with Randy Kehler, a conscientious objector.

NO, WHAT HAPPENED with the draft? It was late April 1970, a week after I registered for the draft as a conscientious objector. I went to Seton Hall University in South Orange to meet with my draft counselor from the Fellowship of Reconciliation. He had been helping me prep for my appearance before the draft board. At the end of the session, he asked, as an afterthought, looking at my thick-lensed glasses: “What’s your spherical equivalent?”

Huh? What?

“What’s the prescription for your eye glasses?” he asked.

“Oh, that’s easy. It just changed. Minus 8.75 and minus 9.00.”

“You’re out of the army!”

“What?”

“Regulation 2-13 C. Anyone with a spherical equivalent exceeding plus or minus 8.00 is exempt from military service.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“No. What you need to do is file for a medical interview. Get a letter from your ophthalmologist stating what your prescription is.”

And so, a few weeks later, I sent a request for medical interview, in addition to my request to be a conscientious objector. By then, the world had changed dramatically, with the invasion of Cambodia, the killings of students at Kent State and Jackson State.

In the aftermath of Kent State, I asked the principal to set aside time for an assembly, where students could express their feelings with an open microphone. It went well, until a yahoo suggested that what we needed to do was kill Nixon. I pulled him away from the mike, but things quickly unraveled. It was decided to hold a silent protest the next day in front of the high school.

That afternoon, getting dressed for baseball, I got beat up, thrown around, in the locker room, by a number of the players. Then, the baseball coach ordered us to sit on the third-base bench, when, shouting and waving his hands all about, he threatened any player with suspension who attended the protest, as well as formal letter in his college file. The coach then fell down on his knees, in front of me, and said, “I’m so sorry, Richard. I didn’t know you were here,” as if it were some kind of joke. He broke up with laughter, and the team joined in. Something else I never told my parents.

For the rest of the season, the coaches called me “Red” as in communist, and I wasn’t allowed to play, or even coach third base, until the last two games of the season, when he had to play me because the other catcher was hurt.

A month after graduation, in July, my local draft board, in its infinite wisdom, decided to interpret my request for a medical interview as a desire to join the U.S. Army. Inexplicably, I was sent my 1-A notice as well as a date for my pre-induction physical.

I was glad that I had made the decision to register as a conscientious objector before ever knowing about spherical equivalents; I was not surprised that the draft board seemed to be out to get me.

WHY HAD I CHOSEN to be a conscientious objector? There were many influencers. In 1967, when I was 15, I spent my summer studying computer mathematics at Columbia University, working on an old IBM 7094, learning the computer language known as Fortran Four, punching key cards with each line of mathematical formulas. I was in class, when a message reached the professor, for me, saying that Newark was under martial law, I would be unable to get home by my normal commute.

That evening, after getting picked up at a diner in North Arlington, N.J.,, I drove with my father through streets lined with the National Guard, the smoke drifting from the blackened buildings on South Orange Avenue, through the war zone in America. It forever changed my worldview.

I began to read about Vietnam War, researching the history. The more I read, the more I became convinced that our leaders were not telling us the truth. It was reinforced by the shattering events of 1968 – the Tet Offensive (and the front-page photo in The New York Times of the South Vietnamese official executing a suspected Viet Cong terrorist, shooting him in the head), President Johnson’s withdrawal, Martin Luther King’s assassination, Robert Kennedy’s murder, the riotous Democratic National Convention, and “Nixon’s the One.”

I attended three lectures by David Schoenbrun, the former CBS News correspondent, at the New School for Social Research.

At his first lecture, Schoenbrun explained how after the Geneva Peace Accord in 1954, when Vietnam was artificially divided into North and South, pending an election, it was the United States that refused to hold an election, because President Eisenhower was afraid that the Communists would win. It was startling to hear what was clearly the truth.

NO, WHAT HAPPENED to you, and the draft? In late November 1970, my local draft board sent me a 4-F card, granting my status as requested in the medical interview. I burned my 1-A card in the fireplace, with my parents looking on.

Today, there is no military draft, and as we prepare to withdraw troops from the Iraq war and increase our forces fighting in Afghanistan, it’s difficult to imagine teachers and students in our high schools engaging in any dialogue about the issue. Too many of our elected representatives – and the most vocal citizen protesters, it seems, are bought and paid for by corporate interests. All that’s missing is the NASCAR-style jacket proudly listing the logos of the corporate sponsors.

There are some who might challenge my wisdom of declaring to be a conscientious objector. If they push hard, I would gladly say I would have served in World War II, but not in Vietnam. Mostly, it comes from men and women who didn’t serve in Vietnam, or those who are much younger and arrogant – who somehow believe that we could have won the war in Vietnam, that the Tet Offensive was an American victory, that we can still win the war in Iraq.

However, no one who ever actually served in Vietnam – from tank driver to Green Beret, from Airborne paratrooper to CIA interrogation officer, from fighter pilot to Navy lieutenant – ever questioned my courage, or the fact that I had been correct. Whenever the question has come up in conversation, with men my age: “Did you serve?” when I answered that I was a conscientious objector, I am always treated with great respect and dignity – and honor.