Sean Harvey: This begins part two of an interview with Professor Thomas Hartmann on December 8, 1999, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, with Sean D. Harvey and ...
John Nieman: John Nieman.
SH: We concluded our last session with your duties at the end of the war. I would like to begin by asking about how you left the service. Where and when were you discharged?
Thomas Hartmann: ... I don't know if I got to this point about court-martials and so forth?
SH: No.
TH: No, I didn't? all right. My training squadron in North Carolina was decommissioned and it meant that I had no fixed assignment anymore. I was executive officer of that squadron when it was decommissioned and people were separated all over the place, sent by orders all over the place, enlisted and officers both. So, there were very few people left on the base, and my wife and I used to spend our days, it was in August of 1945, ... fishing, because we lived down in Moorhead City. We fished every day. That's about all we had to do, because there wasn't any duties. Suddenly, I got commanded to be on a court-martial board at the main station at Cherry Point, because it had been discovered that there was a Marine who was taking pistols of one sort or another, and taking them to Philadelphia, and selling them, on the black market, to organized crime, and this was a going business that this man had. So, he was being tried. He was charged with this crime and ... was being court-martialed as a result and I was on the court-martial board. It was a very real eye-opener for me, because the witnesses that had testified to the interrogation officers recanted their testimony in open trial. It was obvious that they were scared to death. I'm saying that just as a matter of opinion on my part and there was no way the court-martial board could convict the gentleman. He was a corporal and we used to say, afterwards, "Well, he was a drafted Marine and they aren't reliable," [laughter] as opposed to volunteers. ... So, he was allowed to go scot-free. Well, that was a short trial, very short, because, as soon as these people didn't testify, there was no case. So, then, I get word that, because I'm on the roster now, to serve on court-martial boards, [that] I would be appointed to the board for court-martials, full court-martial, of the operation of the post exchange at Cherry Point. The charge was that ... certain employees of the post exchange were taking rare commodities, ration type commodities, and selling them in the black market. They had a business going, but, I was warned that it would be a long trial, maybe six months, because we'd have to go over every invoice and every charge slip, and just an awful mess. ... Boy, I added that up and I said, "Hey, I'll never get back to college on November 1st." ... In those days, that was the beginning of the ... second of three semesters.
SH: Princeton was on trimesters back then.
TH: Then, yeah, just during the war and just shortly after. So, ... I wanted to be back on November 1st, to go to college and resume my education, and my wife was pregnant and not feeling very well, mornings and etc., so, I was anxious to get settled. ... So, I decided that I should go to Washington and see what's wrong with my discharge, why it had not come. Other people had gotten theirs, I had plenty of points, so, I wasn't being discharged. So, I found out, through a few inquiries, that the man signing the Marine aviators' discharge papers was my former skipper, overseas. I said, "Oh, my golly." So, I got an airplane, I flew up to Washington, went over to the Marine Corps headquarters in Arlington, and, sure enough, Elmer Glidden, my former CO, was signing discharge papers. ... He said to me, "Oh," he said, "I've had your papers for a long time, six weeks or more." He said, "Shortly after the war was over, you know, they came through, but, ... I didn't do anything with them, because I was certain [that] you wanted to stay in, be a regular." I said, "Well, I want to go back to college," and he said, "Well, we'll ... make an offer to you. The Marine Corps will pay for your education, pay all expenses, and you will continue on with the present salary," which was pretty good in those days, and it included flight pay. I only had to fly four hours a month to qualify for flight pay, so, that was a half above what the captain's salary was ... at that time. So, that was a pretty good deal, lovely, but, then, you have to make a commitment, upon completion of college, and graduate school, possibly; I mean, they would pay for that, too, through Ph.D., if you wanted to do it. That's to keep you and [have you] stay in, but, you'd have to stay in forever. I mean, you didn't sign a twenty or thirty-year guarantee, but, it was understood that, ... in return for their investment, you were to give your life career over to the Marine Corps, and my wife and I discussed it, because it was kind of nice sounding, on paper, and we decided [that] we didn't want a military life on a permanent basis. So, he signed the papers immediately and I was out in two weeks, after he agreed to sign it. I didn't have to serve on the court-martial board. I escaped that and ... I made it back for the 1st of November, for college.
SH: Was the black market a significant problem?
TH: I don't know, but, that's the first I had had any wind of it. I'm sure it was.
SH: You mentioned the black market twice.
TH: Yeah, oh, I'm sure it was, ... 'cause, you know, there are always people out there who are gonna ... make a buck out of something. I noticed, today, in the newspaper that Princeton University is shutting down its campus over the New Year's weekend, the whole campus, everybody off, everybody, except the Y2K people, and they're shutting off their computers, so [that] there's no chance for these vagrants, or hackers, or whatever to come in and put a lot of viruses in network computers. Well, those people are all over. Now, stealing guns from the Marine Corps, ... that's a less modern crime, [laughter] ... or stealing silk stockings, you know, nylons. That was the big black market stuff, from the PX. I really don't know about it. I never had any dealing with the black market, except indirectly, in that way.
SH: Did you ever paint pictures or phrases on your plane?
TH: No, we weren't allowed to. ... The armament people in the squadron would put bombs, a little bomb, on your plane for each mission that you went on where bombs were dropped. So, those were lined up, sort of like [how] fighter planes would have the Japanese Rising Sun for each plane shot down. In our case, they just put bombs on the side of the plane, to show how many missions that plane had flown, how many bombing missions, but, they didn't allow us to paint pictures of pin-up women and slogans and stuff on the plane. We weren't allowed to do that. In fact, we weren't even allowed to wear wings on our shirts. On a full uniform, yes, you could have your naval aviator's wings, but, on the shirt, which we mostly wore, we weren't allowed to wear that, because Major Henderson said that we didn't want to distinguish ourselves from other Marines.
SH: Were they afraid of snipers?
TH: No.
SH: Was it an issue of equality?
TH: Yeah, just that we were Marines first and pilots second. ... We didn't wear the wings and we didn't wear decorations on our shirts either, anything. That was just kind of tradition. There was no law or anything.
SH: You left the military for Princeton in November.
TH: Yeah, absolutely, and the interesting part of that, going back into that history, was that I was one of the first veterans to return, one of the very first, and they were expecting married veterans, but, they weren't used to them, because they'd always had a "no marriage" rule. No undergraduate could be married, at least legally, and so, ... they didn't have that at all, and they had arranged for certain dormitories to be turned over into apartments for married people to come back. We were the first two or three that came ... back.
SH: You were a sophomore then, correct?
TH: Just beginning my sophomore year, at least, chronologically, my sophomore year; intellectually, probably my ninth grade year, something like that, [laughter] and so, ... I walked on the campus to report to the dean's office in my uniform. I was still, officially, a Marine for thirty more days, donned my uniform, and the man who met me was dean of the college, and he had been a Marine officer in World War II, so, he immediately took personal interest in me. ... He had quite a heroic record, as a matter-of-fact, as a line company Marine, not a pilot, and he assigned me to one of his senior deans, assistant deans, to be my personal mentor, to make sure that we've got everything set and everything, even to the point where, when our first daughter was born, that assistant dean, who eventually ended up as dean of the college himself, loaned us baby scales, and other faculty wives loaned us other stuff, because our daughter was the ... second child born, that could be recognized by the university, to an undergraduate. There had been other children born over the years, but, they weren't recognized, because they were illegal, but, we were legal, we were living on university property, so, that was sort of fun, and then, they made a big to-do of that. They did. They were very nice. The faculty wives were very nice about that, you know. So, that worked out quite well, moving back in, ... because everybody was in the same boat. You didn't mind the fact that you had to share bathrooms, you know, women on one floor, men on the next, moldy dormitory apartments, hot plates, ... refrigerator was a little box on the window sill. Kind of primitive living, but, it's all right, pleasant.
SH: Were you close with the faculty then?
TH: Oh, yeah. Jeez, that was a great year. That was the best year to go to college that man ever had, because I was nearer of age of many of the faculty members that were teaching me, and then, the fact that they didn't treat me like an undergraduate, green undergraduate. They treated me like, you know, a mature adult and ... we became personal friends. We became social friends, the very people who were teaching me. Some of those ... friendships lasted a long time. They were fun, because it was a way to get educated that you couldn't get educated any other way. While I'm on that subject, often in life, and you guys are young enough to really take this to heart, you think, "Well, gee, I ought to write a letter to him or her, because he or she made a difference in my life," you know, and, "I heard she was sick. [I] ought to write a letter or make a phone call," but, you don't do it. You procrastinate and don't do it. The person dies, sometimes, so, always do it when you think of it, honestly. I had a mentor, a faculty mentor, ... I got assigned to his course, it was called "The History of American Political Thought," and, ... luckily, it was a lecture course, luckily, I got him for precept. One day, one of the three meeting days a week, well, there were two lectures and a precept, so, there were three meeting days, and, [for] precept, I got assigned to him as a preceptor, not to a graduate student or to an assistant professor. This was one of the senior professors, and so, ... we'd meet at his office, like here, and we'd have a precept, and he would start a discussion about the readings and the like, and everybody would have to speak, and that's the tradition there. Preceptorial is a tradition there, still is to this day, thank goodness, and he found out, after the second or third meeting, they were all very interested in me, because they wanted to see how we made the adjustments back to college life, he was very interested in me for that reason, and he found out, by asking me questions, that I didn't know a damn thing, and he said, "Are you reading? Are you doing the reading?" We were reading the Federalists Papers at this point, at about the third week in the course. He said, "Did you do the reading?" I said, "Yes, I did." He said, "Well, but, you don't know anything. If you've read it, you'd know something. You would know how to discuss my question and you don't, ... you don't know." So, he asked me to stay after class was over, precept was over, sat in his office, and he said, "Now, I'll tell you here, take the Federalist Papers, 'Number 10,'" I'll never forget it, he'd say, "Read this paragraph, and then, tell me what it says," and I couldn't. It was like reading Arabic. I couldn't tell him what it said. He said, "Okay, ... you need a lot of help." Well, what had happened was, being away for three-and-a-half years, I'd lost all the intellectual discipline I had to be able to think in terms like this, you know, theoretically, abstractly. So, he worked on me, his lunch hour, all through the half of the semester. He spent his lunch hour, every Wednesday, with me, having me read to him, telling him what it said, and I went from an "F" to a "2+," which was, in those days, just below an "A" in the course, and he was very impressed with that, and so, we became friends as a result of this thing, and I took several other courses with him. He became the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, and I had the last course taught by Edward S. Corwin on Constitutional Interpretation, and he, Corwin, had been originally brought by Woodrow Wilson, from the University of Michigan, to be a preceptor, and he was the world's expert on the US Constitution, Edward S. Corwin. The Constitution and What It Is Todaywas his magnus opus, and he was a delightful man and taught a great course, and I had a ball with that stuff, and, when he retired, they had a retirement dinner, and I got invited as one of 200 graduates to come and represent the undergraduates, ... the present undergraduates, ... so, that was an honor, because I was with Supreme Court Justices and other such notables, and it was a great, great occasion. ... Anyway, that professor, to get back to the original thing, Alpheus Thomas Mason, by name, I read in the newspaper, a couple of years ago, that he was going to have his ninetieth birthday. So, I had seen him off and on, you know, but, I had not really sat down and talked with him or anything. ... So, I wrote him a letter saying that I had noticed that he was going to be ninety, and I wanted to say how, you know, well-respected he was, in my opinion, and what he had done for me, etc., etc. My God, he died the day after his wife read my letter to him, and he was very pleased with the letter, and it was probably the last thing he read, or had read to him, before he died. So, I just snuck in there just before the man died and [I] am still appreciative of that. It was a lesson. I should have done it a long time before. I told him that. I told him orally, but, I'd never written it. So, if you have a chance, be sure you do it in a timely fashion. Anyway, that's the story of him and how much he meant, because he gave me an understanding of what intellectual discipline was. You don't know anything when you're a freshman anyway, right? You really don't know anything. You're just out of high school, what do you know? and so, having somebody like that helped you, really important, and there were a number of people who were not as important as he, but, close to it, befriended him, studied under him, you know. He's the one that told me, he said, "What do you want to do?" I said, "Well, ... I really would like to be a professor," 'cause, you know, here, I had a role model, great scholar, biographer of Stone and Brandeis, and, you know, very noted man, and a great teacher, all combined into one person. I said, "That's what I want to be," and he said, "You don't have a chance." [laughter] I said, "Why not?" He said, "Because you don't have the discipline. You see, you're too scattered. You can't focus on one thing and say, 'I'm gonna make it.' You've got to be able to sit at a desk and read and write all the time," and he said, "You don't have the patience or the personality to do that," and he said, "I don't think you should do it. I don't think so." So, I [said], "Okay," and I thought about it. He said, "I'll tell you what. I'll give you an option for an alternative. ... You can go to graduate school, if you want, but, I don't think so. I don't think you should." He said, "I'll get you into Yale Law School. You can go to law school, and you can get a law degree, and then, decide what you want to do with that. You want to fool around with politics or whatever you want to do with a law degree. ... That's the best graduate program I could recommend for you. It's the only graduate program I would recommend for you," he said.
SH: If he really believed that you were scatter-brained, why did he recommend law?
TH: Well, because he thought that the law ... didn't have the same requirements of scholarship that a university professorship did. He's right, too. Anybody can be a lawyer, [laughter] if you work at it, get through the first year, and you work at it [and you are] reasonably intelligently. You've just got to memorize a lot of stuff.
SH: Did you go to law school?
TH: No, I didn't. [laughter] No, because it was money. I mean, you know, I had no money. I had the GI Bill, ... and some savings from ... being overseas, some money in the savings account, but, not nearly what I needed, and my wife had two babies while I was still an undergraduate, so, I ended up graduating. I did work, part-time, on a book with the History Department of Princeton called The Marine Corps and Amphibious Warfare, and the authors of that were both professors of mine, and they suggested I be a research assistant with them, and they did a study for the Marine Corps. The Marine Corps gave them 45,000 dollars to write a book on the history of amphibious warfare. You come from the boats to the shore. The Marines ... had perfected that technique pretty well. So, I did that. In fact, I postponed graduation for almost a year by working on that book with them, but, ... I got paid a dollar an hour. I mean, you know, come on, [that] wouldn't get you very far, and, when I graduated, I did decide to apply to graduate school. I applied to Princeton, and, again, Mason said, "Hey, you shouldn't go here. You've got the same guys that you've been studying with. You don't want to do this. You want to go somewhere else," but, I got accepted there, to graduate school, but, no money, and Northwestern offered me 1300 dollars a year, and that would have barely gotten, even in 1948, ... me to Evanston, Illinois, 1800 dollars plus, and the University of Washington. These are the two places that had the things I was particularly interested in, the University of Washington in Seattle, and that offered $1500, and I knew [that] it included, you know, being a section head in large lecture courses, you know, being a graduate student, taking large sections. So, it meant that you're not only doing your graduate work, you're also teaching in these large lecture courses and places of that size, anyway, particularly Washington. So, I decided that I couldn't swing it, just couldn't swing it. My wife, ... in those days, women did not go to work. She was a college graduate and she wanted to raise a family. Her decision was to be a housemother, to raise a family. So, she wasn't gonna take a job and it was either go into private industry of some sort or to do something else. That was the kind of options I had.
SH: Did you use the GI Bill?
TH: Well, I had used a lot of that up, you see. I used three years of the GI Bill, ... getting 135 dollars a month for living and all tuition and other costs, books and everything else, but, I had pretty well used that up. I maybe would have had a year left of it for graduate school, but, I wasn't interested in just going to get a Master's degree, didn't seem to make any sense. I wanted to get a Ph.D. if I did it and Mason was right, because I knew he was right when he talked to me, because my interests were too diverse. I really can't sit still long enough to do that.
SH: You even had difficulty focusing on whether or not to pursue your Ph.D.
TH: No, no. I would be entangled somewhere else, doing some other things, some other cause, some other stuff. I was very interested in politics and I'd be involved, politically, somewhere and be diverted from what you need to do to be a Ph.D. student. ... First of all, you've got to be willing to be brutalized by professors [laughter] and I wasn't willing to be brutalized, to tell you the truth. I would not take it, not for ten seconds, so that, again, you see, the war experience and everything else, I had established my persona and ... I knew, intuitively, that I would have a hard time that way.
JN: Instead of going on to graduate school, you went into teaching. What prompted that move?
TH: Well, I went ... and taught secondary school, because somebody in the teacher placement office said, "Very well, why don't you go teach in a secondary school?" So, that's what I did. [They] gave me a job, and (I got back with?) a boarding school, so, we got housing and food, you know, for nine months a year, ten months a year, roughly, and we got housing for all year, ... and teaching high school juniors and seniors was pretty much like I would have been teaching freshmen, you know, bright, mostly bright, people, you know, interested, and you could do a lot of the readings that I had done myself, and ... I found, always, that, as a matter-of-fact, ... the readings were better, certainly when you got into advanced placement work, and senior year in high school, and even junior year, but, senior year especially, in high school, the readings and advanced placement exceeded what the freshman and sophomore readings were in major universities. So, we were discussing things on that kind of intellectual level, which I thought was very exciting. I mean, that was great teaching. I really enjoyed that and, of course, you're much more personally involved if they're younger people, too, than you are at college, because ... you see them more often in high school years, and you get to know them better. ... In college, you're in and out of the courses. ... You only know those who come and make an effort to know you. ... You've learned that, I hope, when you guys have been here. You learned that? You show a little of the initiative. I had a professor, I did do a little graduate work, I tried to get a Master's degree, but, again, I got too many interests, this is at the University of Delaware, and the head of the Political Science Department just flipped over me. He wanted me to, you know, be a superstar, but, I didn't have the patience or the discipline, as I said. He said, "You've got to take a course in Marx from a Dr. Carl Dorn." It was one of the great experiences of my life, Carl Dorn, "He's teaching here." He was finance minister of the Weimar Republic, pre-Depression, pre-Hitler Germany, right, and he said, "He is the most knowledgeable man and it's hard for me to find students who get turned on by his teaching, not because he isn't a good teacher, but, because of the subject matter. They think, 'Oh, Marx, you know, what's that?'" So, I said, "Okay, I'll do it." I went in, and there's this little German, and he was fascinating. He was absolutely fascinating. ... The senior professor recommended him, told me he'd do handsprings if he found anybody very interested, and I was very interested, and, oh, he adopted me, you know. ... I had all these talks with him. He said, "I'm the only person you'll ever meet who had to negotiate trade treaties with both Stalin and Mussolini," and he did. He negotiated trade treaties between Germany and Italy and Germany and the Soviet Union in the '20s. Well, that kind of experience, you know. ... He was exiled from Germany by the Nazis, and, because he had a great interest, sometime, he was "Dr. Carl Dorn," he had his Ph.D. in economics, but, he had studied, maybe his dissertation was on something Latin American, so that, when he was exiled, ... he was such a prominent world figure, that they arranged for him to go to Cuba, where he taught finance and things like that in the university there, and, eventually, came up to this country and was teaching on the side, sort of. He was in his seventies when I had him, and he was really fantastic, but, anyway, if you just make an approach to people like that, and they find out you're interested in what they're interested in, the faculty member, (most?) do, mostly, not all, but, most faculty members, I think, will respond in kind. At least that's my experience, my experience with undergraduates, too, here. If you don't make any noise, nobody's gonna notice you, right?
SH: Where did you begin teaching?
TH: Well, I took a job right in town, because they said that's where there was one, and that sounded good to me, right at the Hun School in Princeton, and it was a struggling boarding school at that time, and the man who was running it, ... we turned out to be dear friends. To this day, we're dear friends, and he convinced me to come, and join him there, and try to save the school from failure and all kinds of things. It was an established prep school, but, I had a good time, and he and I ran the school, and we had a very interesting time, and ... that's what I did.
SH: Did you end up saving the school?
TH: Yeah, we did. ... We got enough students to save the school. It was simply a matter of filling beds, that's all, or getting tuition payments, you know.
SH: Like any school. [laughter]
TH: Right, like any school. ...
JN: Your next position took you to North Carolina. How did that come about?
TH: No, no, no. There's a number of things. First of all, I did that for four years and decided that the school was struggling, I mean, I had been through the struggle, and, maybe, I'd like to teach at a well-established one, where I could really teach, and then, not worry about all the other stuff, like filling beds, [laughter] you know, that type of thing, and to get out of the boarding school, because we had three daughters by then, and it wasn't the right place to raise daughters, you know, a boys' boarding school. So, I took a job in Wilmington, Delaware, at the Tower Hill School, which is a well-established, wealthy day school. ... So, I went down there to teach history and, eventually, be dean. I coached baseball and, you know, did odds and ends and had a good time. It was a great school and the students were magnificent, I mean, really good students. That was very pleasant, did that for six years. Then, I took a job. From there, I got asked to be a candidate for headmastership of a school in Dallas, Texas. So, I went down to interview, and they liked me, and they offered me the job. It's still in existence. It's theschool in Dallas, called St. Mark's School, Texas, and so, I went there. We moved to Texas and I was head of the school there. ... That was okay, because ... I was able to build it, although Texans were very anxious to have, particularly the people who founded Texas Instruments, they wanted a school which had very strong math and science, where they could attract people to come to work for TI in Dallas by offering a school for their sons [laughter] that was equivalent to anything that they would find in San Francisco or Boston. I mean, that was the idea, attracting people. So, they made it possible. They gave me tons of money to build the school, and to improve the faculty, and to put in large scholarship programs and all kinds of good things. I mean, it was really spectacular. In five short years, I mean, it just took five years, and it's even continued to improve since then, and the money has just rolled in, because Dallas is a city always on the make, so, it needed a kind of a trail-blazing educational institution that they felt was equivalent of any place, and that the students from there could go anywhere in the country to college, you know, that type of thing. It worked out very well. It was a good deal, except, ... [in] my case, the promotional part of it, I liked, I enjoyed that. I got to know the community pretty well and got a lot of great supporters and had great students. I mean, golly, you know some of them by name. I mean, Tommy Lee Jones, the actor, was a terrific student.
SH: You taught Tommy Lee Jones?
TH: Yeah. Well, I never taught him directly, because I was headmaster of the school. I don't know how you are in music, rock music, but, two of the superstars from there were Steve Miller and Boz Scaggs. They were classmates, as a matter-of-fact, yeah. ... Those are the celebrities we had. I mean, there were other guys who've done extremely well in life, in many ways. The ... owner and publisher of the Dallas Morning News, ... the (Betow?) Corporation, it's called, ... Robert Decker. Oh, golly, I mean, these are very nationally known people in their own professional fields. There were some doctors, some lawyers, and, you know, a very high rate of success in alumni of that school. It's been the leadership school in Dallas, now, well, I went in ... 1958, so, since '58, so, that's what? forty years it's been just on a path, like this. About the only thing they haven't done is become co-educational, which is unfortunate for the girls in this town, because the girls' school is pretty good, but, it can't touch St. Mark's, it can't, and large scholarship programs. I still, to this day, get letters from, well, the fellow who's Dean of the Social Sciences at Georgia Tech. He wrote me a note, sent me his latest book. ... He was a poor kid who ... heard about it, word of mouth, that there was scholarships, and he came out with his mother, his father had abandoned them, ... and he was a great guy, named Greg Nobles. ... Now, he's being interviewed, I just heard through the grapevine, ... to be dean of Trinity University in San Antonio, which is a pretty good school. Now, as a Texan, he might go back home from Georgia Tech. He's done well at Georgia Tech, but, there are guys like that who are out there. It's a great school. That was a marvelous experience, except [for] dealing with all the conservative people I had around me in Dallas, [laughter] I mean, politically conservative people, and, oh, gosh, it was the summer before I left, it would have been the Summer of '62. We had a large summer school operation. Part of our promotion was to open a large summer school operation to the whole town, modest tuition, and [we] hired the teachers from the school and from elsewhere, high school, public high schools and the like, come in and teach in summer school, and house it there. The buildings were air-conditioned, because ... the trustees were smart enough to know that you couldn't run a school in warm weather months without air-conditioning in that part of the world. So, they air-conditioned many of the facilities, and so, it was rather pleasant, and the man who ran the summer school was very good at this. ... In fact, we got some of our very good students and it was co-educational, too, by the way. So, the girls would come to it, too. So, he came to me, this director of the summer school, and he said, "I think we're gonna have a problem," and I said, "What's that?" and he said, "Well, we have a black applicant." This is 1962, and he said, "We have a black applicant," and I said, "Well, that's fine," and then, he said, "No, I don't think so. I think you're gonna get a reaction," not that he had a problem with it. ... This young man was the son of the leading black surgeon in Dallas. There was hardly a class thing. It was simply a black question and he was also, ... the father, a leading Episcopalian, too, and he wanted his son to go to the Kent School in Connecticut, which is an Anglican boarding school in Connecticut of some prominence, and he wanted him to go to Kent, but, he needed to do some academic work, because he wasn't gonna get into Kent, not the brightest light in the chandelier, you know, or bulb in the chandelier. So, he was modest that way, a nice, young guy, so, no problem of taking him, socially, or ... academically, even. So, I said, "Oh, golly, go ahead. I think that's great." Everybody knows this doctor. All the whites that I knew knew who the doctor was. So, ... some of the trustees heard about it and you would have thought that I had [committed], probably, I don't know, whatever the worst crime you can think of, on the steps of the administration building, whatever I did, hung somebody here, did something. I mean, oh, golly, the noise and the frantic nature of the thing. I really got discouraged. I really did. If this young, black guy, in a summer school, caused that much of a turmoil, I was really very uncomfortable. I'd grown up in a mixed environment, and I think I mentioned that the last time I was here, and I had long overcome the whole black-white thing in my own mind. Did I tell you the story about Wilson, the mathematician, the black mathematician, in the Marine Corps? I'll go back to that. Well, this part of my lesson, ... we had a black defense battalion, came on the island in Majuro in the Marshalls. They're the guys that run the antiaircraft batteries, all black, officers, all white, enlisted, all black. Here, they arrive, First Defense Battalion, it was called. They were gonna defend the island against invasion or aircraft. They had all kinds of cannons and stuff. First day they're there, they begin to peer at the ready room, because there's nothing to do on the island, nothing, and so, on their time off, they had nothing to do, they served their watches, and then, they'd come, and they'd come over to the ready room, because ... at least planes were taking off and landing, and we had a routine that you flew a mission, the next day, you had off, and, the third day, you had an engineering flight, they called it, where you're taking up a plane that had been repaired to test it, test flight, and, the fourth day, ... you might get a scouting mission, where you'd go out and scout enemy territory, ... but, not drop any bombs, then, the next day, you'd drop a bomb. You go through that routine, so, it meant that, on the engineering hop days, every day, there were certain pilots who were on engineering hop duty, and they were in the ready room, hanging around. The line captain would come in with a request of some pilot to fly a plane, test it out. So, they wanted to go up in the back seat. You'd just fly around the atoll, you know, and test it out. They wanted to fly. That's what they wanted to do and there was no recreation involved. They hadn't been in an airplane ever and this was fun for them. So, there was one ... corporal, yeah, he was a corporal, two stripes, his name was Wilson, and he said, could he come up with me? and I said, "Yes, if I get a plane, ... I'd be happy to have you." Nice man, and so, I got a plane, and he said to me, after we flew around for an hour or so and landed, he came back to the ready room, and he said, "How do you ... navigate the plane?" and I said, "Well, ... we don't need to navigate on the flight we had today, because we stayed within sight of the landing strip the whole time." "Okay." "But," I said, "there is a plotting board that fits on a tray underneath the dashboard of the airplane, instrument panel it's called, and you pull it out, and it's got grids on it, and it's got, on one side of it, is a little, kind of a circular slide rule, and you set ... your compass headings according to where you want to go, and then, you plot, on the plotting board, the airspeed and the wind speed, ... so [that] you can figure out what compass heading you need to ...
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TH: ... Pulled out the plotting board and Wilson said to me, "Oh, ... let me look at that." So, I gave it to him and he says, "Let me explain how this works and, if I'm right, will you tell me?" and I said, "Sure." He went through the whole exercise, the first time he'd ever seen it, and he told me exactly how it worked, and I said, "Gosh, ... how do you know that?" He said, "Well, ... I have a Master's degree in mathematics." What the Marine Corps had done was, they had no black Marines until, this was '44, and, ... by that time, they had ran out of volunteers, pretty much, and they were beginning to draft. The first time in their history, they were beginning to draft, and so, I guess, they thought, "Well, here, the blacks want to be Marines, so, we'll take some in, but, first of all, we'll put them in an all black unit, and they're all enlisted," even guys who have a Master's degree in mathematics, now, which is much better educated than I was, or almost anybody in my squadron, right. All the officers were white Southerners. "They're the ones who know how to handle them." That was really the Marine Corps's opinion. In fact, Wilson told me all about this, he said, "My CO is from the Citadel." Oh, my God, a Citadel man? That's the end of the world. You know about the Citadel, don't you? I think it's the end of the world, anyway. [laughter] ... I think it was the West Point of the Confederacy, wasn't it? It and VMI, anyway. So, I went over to see the commanding officer, a major, of the defense battalion, and I said that I had this experience with this corporal, and I was very impressed, and he said, "Well, ... I'm a regular Marine. I've been in the Marine Corps all along, ... and I've had troops before, and ... this is the finest troops I've ever had in my life." They were all college graduates. They were all college graduates, mainly the black colleges, but, you know, Fisk, and Tuskegee, and, you know, the traditional black schools. They were all college graduates. Of course he had the best troops he's ever had in his life. These were all very bright men and very well put together, I mean, mentally and everything. Anyway, that kind of experience I had, plus, growing up in Somerville and etc. So, I was very distraught when the trustees [revolted], and it became, in the newspaper, a front page story in the Dallas Morning News, big headline, "Saint Mark's Admits Black Student To Summer School." So, the trustees insisted, and this was so embarrassing to me, ... that really caused me to have severe doubts about staying there, even though there were many wonderful people in Texas, and there were wonderful people on the board who stuck by the decision, but, they got a compromise that the director of the summer school would sit at a table outside the auditorium as the people came in for orientation to summer school, offering to return any fees that anybody had paid, once they looked and found there's one black kid sitting in the auditorium, and do you know that not one parent asked for any money back? not one, but, I was totally distraught and embarrassed by the behavior of the board that it really kind of ruined the romance, you might say, at that moment. So, I decided that that would be my last year. I'd begin looking around, even though I had all this money and wonderful people to work with, but, I just felt that the general atmosphere, and, perhaps, I had lost something, some of the edge, my edge had been damaged by the reaction of the trustees to the situation. Anyway, so, I left in '63. Luckily I left, because, in November of '63, of course, John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and, at that time, Dallas was getting to be a very tough place, politically. It was really getting to be a tough place. Adlai Stevenson spoke at the municipal auditorium and people spat on him, being a liberal from the East or whatever they said about him, and it became very trying, and Johnson, Lyndon Johnson, had arranged for John F. Kennedy to come to ... Texas to show that he was the popular, young President that he was, and, of course, the people of Texas responded in kind, but, in Dallas, the Dallas Morning News ran an ad, I don't know if you know your history of this at all, but, ran an ad on the second page of the first section saying, "How dare Dallas invite this Yankee Socialist traitor to come to town?" They accepted this ad and it was a post office box ad. They never were able to find out who had placed it, by the way, ever. So, they took an ad that was scurrilous to begin with and put it in the paper and that's the kind of atmosphere ... that was there in Dallas. So, when I heard, on the street, that Kennedy had been shot, I assumed that it was kind of the right wing sickness that had caused it. Little did I know that it was Lee Harvey Oswald and his own peculiar sickness. By the way, and just to complete that story, we weren't there. We had left. We left in July. ... [We had] a lot of friends there and a lot of people called me on the phone. The editor of the afternoon newspaper and I had a running correspondence about it and he felt the same way I did, AC Greene, a wonderful guy, but, anyway, that happened, and it so happens that the same man who was director of the summer school was the head of the Modern Languages Department, and he had hired Ruth Payne, who was the woman, Quaker woman, lived in Dallas, who spoke fluent Russian, and he had hired her to introduce Russian as a language in the school. She was teaching at the school. I never was there when she was there, but, I agreed to her hire before I left, and so, she was there, but, she was the one that took care of Marina Oswald, the wife who couldn't speak English, because she heard ... about this Russian wife, new Russian wife, came to Dallas, who couldn't speak any English. So, she took her in and Lee Harvey Oswald was living in the Payne house with his wife at the time he shot Kennedy. So, the school was indirectly involved in that. [laughter] Isn't that something? It's all in the Warren Commission Report, I mean, the whole thing. They questioned Ruth Payne mercilessly, because of her Russian, being able to speak Russian. She was just a wonderful Quaker woman. ... They were suspicious that Oswald had gone to the Soviet Union, you know, and so forth, and had left, and ... the Castro thing, and the like. So, it was all in the Warren Commission Report, about the school, about her involvement with the school, and the like. That's sort of interesting, isn't it? Well, I missed all that, thank God, 'cause I think I would have been ... [traumatized]. It would have been so traumatic, I don't know how I would've responded, I really don't, ... because I supported Kennedy, and, you know, I had defended Kennedy among too many of the business types and the board. ... I got a little tired of that, but, the black thing, that really ... broke me. So, I left, yeah, voluntarily.
SH: Then, you moved to North Carolina.
TH: No, no, no. ... These are steps in all of one's life. So, I got an offer to ... come to Princeton, to be the founding principal of what's called the Princeton Day School, which is a large day school operation in Princeton, now. In those days, they didn't have it, ... and they'd been given a lot of land and some money to build a school out in the country, more or less, and a wonderful donor, who wanted to do this, and they wanted to merge the little boys' school and (Miss Fine) School, which is a girls' school, merge them into a new school, more like St. Mark's than anything. So, they heard about me and I was from Princeton, originally, and so forth. So, I got hired in that job, to be the founding principal. Well, ... being the head of schools and stuff like that, again, the promotional side, I don't mind, but, ... being all things to all people gets a little wearing, and I was worn out before I took it. I didn't realize that I was worn out, and so, I came there, and I found that the trustees were way ahead of the faculties of the two schools. They had not prepared the faculties for this merger at all, particularly the women in the Miss Fine School. They had not prepared them properly. They had not, and I ran into a buzz saw, and so, I did that for two years, and ... planned the school, architecturally, with the architects and all that stuff, and ... promoted it a lot, and we're doing all right, and that's how I raised a lot of money for it, but, ... I just got worn out. I got ... authorization from the Eli Lilly Foundation in Indianapolis. They have a foundation, and I had ... met one of their program officers, and he invited me to submit a program request, which I did. I told them ... what I thought a kind of school like this could do, and so, I get about a 300,000 dollar grant, and, back in 1964 or '[6]5, [that] was a considerable amount of money, still is anyway, but, I mean, then, especially. So, I went out to Chicago, and I met with him, and we arranged it, and he would take it to his board. He was sure I was gonna get it, so, there was no problem about that. So, I was all full of beans. I was coming back with 300,000 dollars of program money, dollars to do some experimental stuff that I wanted to do, and I came back, discovered that there was a rebellion, from the faculty, and they had used the parents, their relationship with the parents. ... The trustees were having a terrible time, because they were getting battered by these people, and I said, "Well, you don't need me." They never got the grant, by the way, because it was really dependant on going ahead with that particular program that we had designed, but, so, I said, "The heck with that," and, at that moment, I was blessed, because I had met the National Affairs Director of the Ford Foundation, Paul (Eldersacker?), and he said, "Why do you want to do that kind of work?"
He said, "Why don't you do something useful?" [laughter] So, he said, "Come and be a consultant with me, and then, we'll see what turns up." That was lovely, to be a consultant with the Ford Foundation. Holy smokes; they paid me handsomely, and they sent me all over the country, and they got me interested in anti-poverty, and all the stuff that they were working on, and urban education, and all kinds of new life stuff. ... Finally, he said to me, "I need you to go to North Carolina, because we gave five million dollars to the North Carolina Fund," which was a five-year program to seek ways to eradicate poverty in North Carolina, "and the executive director is a wonderful man, but, he's having real trouble with his staff. He's got a large staff of people working on this and the deputy director for program is a real problem. ... He's really causing the executive director to have an awful time and he said [that] he's really after his job, and so, there's a delicate political situation going on there, in the staff," and he said, "What I want you to do is, I want you to go there, because you're representing us, Ford, to be deputy director for program. Replace this man, so [that] the executive director can fire him. Fire him, and then, replace him with somebody from Ford." So, that would be one way to get the staff to accept the fact that, rather than go out and hire anywhere from the country, ... you know, I would be the person hired, right directly from the Ford Foundation, and it took ... a lot of the political wind out of the sails down there. So, I said, "Gee, golly, [it] sounds exciting to me, but, the trouble is, my daughter, second daughter, would be a senior in high school, and we didn't want to move her again." So, he said, "Well, see what you can arrange." Well, we arranged, my wife and I arranged, that ... I'd commute the best I could, which is a terrible way to live, but, I went down there to do that and accomplished it. I did. I accomplished it. It worked and that was an exciting time down there. It was a pretty good time. It did work. One-third of the staff was black, one-third American Indian, one-third white, and it was really a hot operation, and it was very controversial. ... I got targeted with being a carpetbagger by Jesse Helms. Jesse Helms owned the ... television station in Raleigh, and he used to do nightly editorials, news, Jessie Helms, the same Jessie Helms that you know, and I was the target of his attacks, off and on, for the whole year I was down there. He picked me, because the executive director was from North Carolina, so, he couldn't call him a carpetbagger, and he couldn't call the black people working [there]. The other deputy director, for administration, Nathan Garrett, was a well-respected public accountant from Durham and he couldn't attack him, Nathan. So, I was the one to attack, because this was a wild, theoretical bunch who had decided that ... poverty among blacks was partially caused by the fact that blacks had no political representation whatsoever. They had no role, so that if they couldn't have a role, politically, in the state, it would be very hard for them to have an economic role; a little bit here, a little bit there, but, not fully. So, that was controversial, extremely, a lot of race stuff, and then, the American Indian, Lumbee Indians, too, the same thing, but, not quite as bad as the blacks, because the blacks lived all over the state. Lumbees tended to be down in Robeson County, down in one section, near Wilmington, but, it was an exciting year. I mean, I had a great time. That was my job. The Governor of New Jersey, Richard J. Hughes, ... had gone fully into the anti-poverty program and he put the Office of Economic Opportunity in the Governor's Office. Richard Hughes was in the second term of his governorship and ... I knew him. He lived in Princeton, I knew him, and ... he asked me, he said, "Why are you in North Carolina? Why aren't you here?" [laughter] Well, I had my wife and children in Princeton and I thought, "Well, why am I there?" I'd done what I was supposed to do, literally. I really had accomplished exactly what they sent me to do. I can't even remember the name of the man I replaced, neither could any of the staff after six months, so, I mean, all [of] the rebellion was over and everything. The thing was running as smoothly as it could. So, I decided to come back to New Jersey, because it made sense. I got a good job offer from the Governor and I decided to do that. So, I came back to New Jersey. ... See, that was in '65, ... '66, I guess. It was in '66, because, probably, in the Summer of '66, I came back, and Hughes had two-and-a-half more years to ... be Governor, and there were a lot of things going on. He was a very innovative Governor, did many wonderful things. So, it was sort of a new change for me, ... and part of my routine was to deal with the black people in New Jersey, particularly in Newark and other such cities, and here [New Brunswick], Jersey City, and ... that was fun. It was good, but, you see, all of a sudden, ... the Department of Community Affairs was established. Paul (Eldersacker?) became the first commissioner. He was the man who hired me at the Ford Foundation. So, the Office of Economic Opportunity was brought into the Department of Community Affairs, taken out of the Governor's Office and put in the Department of Community Affairs, and, in '67, a year later, after I came back, in February of '67, ... Paul asked me ... to have a taskforce to look into the situation in Newark, because there was rumblings there. It seemed like black unrest in Newark, right? So, I did. I concentrated on looking at the black unrest in Newark and it was serious. As a matter-of-fact, I came back to him and told him, "Look, this is tough stuff," ... because Newark was run by crooks then. Hugh Addonizio, the other mayor, went to jail for being a crook. It was run by crooks, and the blacks, the responsible black people in Newark, knew that the crooks were stealing the city blind, and that they felt that they had no political say at all on what happened there, and that they wanted a say. They wanted a say, so that they could govern, not that they wanted to steal the same way Addonizio and that gang were stealing, but, that they'd run it and maybe even improve it, improve the lot of many blacks who were living in Newark, ... because Newark had really changed from a predominantly white city to a minority-majority city, ... by that time. So, I said, "Gee whiz, this is a serious thing," because the responsible blacks were very upset and having them upset means that the other black people are upset, too. They feel that. Well, they're upset anyway, ... in poverty and other things that they got problems with, and even the housing, you see, in Newark, the public housing. Newark had more public housing rooms per population than any city in the country, any city in the country, so that the politicians, though, ran who got into the public housing. ... They did. Black politicians, at that time, were part of the Addonizio gang. They ran the public housing and it was a corrupt system. I mean, the only people who would get the apartments would be those who [were] politically connected to get the apartments and it was a scam. A lot of it was a scam. People who didn't qualify were getting apartments and the like, so, it was a mess. The school system, my God, the school system was beginning to change, changing from a predominantly Jewish system to a black system. ... The place was in a turmoil, really, literally, and, yet, the same crooks were stealing from it, and ... there's all this unrest. So, he said, "Well, you get a taskforce together." So, I asked for certain representatives of the state government to meet with this, and, of course, the cabinet officers who were asked always send some assistant who doesn't have anything else to do or would rather be someplace else, so [that] you don't get anything accomplished in those things in government. You really don't, unless they're a really tough, tough thing, and nobody took ... my advice seriously on this one. I'm not saying, "I was right. They were wrong," and everything, but, I predicted that there'd be trouble in Newark. I did. It's on the record. I did, and, by God, in July, it blew up, blew up, a big, major riot, as you remember, and, when it was all over, the riot was over, well, they sent me to Plainfield and New Brunswick. ... They wouldn't send me into Newark, because the National Guard was there, the State Troopers were there, the Governor himself, personally, had to take charge of Newark. He really did, because, otherwise, there would have been tremendous bloodshed, and Hughes was such an astute governor, he was such an astute man, that he was able to handle that situation better than anybody I can imagine, but, it ruined Paul (Eldersacker's?) chance to become Governor, because that was in the plans, that he was gonna become Governor after Hughes had to leave office in '69, that (Eldersacker?) would be the nominee. ... The riots ruined Paul, because he was Commissioner of Community Affairs, and he got caught in the middle of the damned thing, and the feelings in the state were intense, the black/white feelings were intense, everything, bad, cops versus blacks, bad, everything was bad. So, when it came time to do this, the report on the Newark riots and the recommendations, the Governor had appointed a blue ribbon commission that had subpoena powers and it was to do the investigation. It included top people from the State of New Jersey, I mean, really top people. The president of Seton Hall was a Catholic priest, the Monsignor, one of the leading judges ... in Essex County, the publisher of the Vineland Newspaper, I mean, it was a mixed gang of people, former Governor Robert Myner, Ray Brown, who was the black defense attorney from Jersey City, considered, at that time, to be the best in the United States as a defense lawyer. All kinds of people like that were on the commission, really a blue ribbon commission, and ... the Governor then gave a staff to the commission, which was headed by Sandy Jaffe, who runs the Center for Conflict Resolution over at the Bloustein School, I don't know if you know Sandy or not, but, he and Linda Stamato run that, and Sandy was the staff director, a former US Attorney for New Jersey, and a former newspaper editor and a reporter for the then New York Herald Tribune, myself, and a couple of other people, and we did the investigation of the riots and a lot of the background, and then, wrote the report, called "Report for Action," which was highly critical of what had not been done in Newark and ... why it was caused, and it had a momentary effect. It had a momentary effect, that report. It didn't last, because Newark was on the slide, a very serious slide, and it was impossible to reverse it. For instance, in the school system, just to give you an example, I estimated, with the help of the Newark educators, that it would take 750,000,000 dollars, the 1967 dollars, that's, you know, well in excess of a billion [today], to bring the Newark Public School System, physically, just physically, up to state standards.
SH: That is terrible.
TH: You cannot believe it. You cannot believe the depth to which it had sunk. The school where my mother and father met, in the sixth grade or wherever they did meet, ... the Central Avenue School, was built in 1867, still being used a hundred years later. Wood floors, how about that? How about lighting a match and all the oil floors? Have you ever been in a school building with wooden floors, where the janitors would take mops with oil on them? Can you imagine what'd happen if something like that catches fire? but, I mean, that was just typical of the problems throughout the city. Now, Newark, ... the State has talked to Newark in terms of a two billion dollar program to bring the school system up to snuff, physically, just physically. It's a two billion dollar thing, because one of my students here, from Rutgers, is the chief of staff for the School Superintendent in Newark at the moment. He tells me all about this. He's right in the middle of it. I said, "Why did you take a job like that?" He said, "Because it's the frontline. I want to be on the frontline for a while." He'd been an assistant commissioner of education in Trenton. I don't blame him. I think it's exciting, at his age, to do that kind of job; won't last forever, that's for sure. [laughter] If he survives, he certainly won't last forever. Anyway, that's sort of what happened in the interim, after leaving my precious, little, independent school life to being in the streets of Newark. [laughter] I mean, you know, it's quite a contrast and that was wonderful. That's why I came to Rutgers, because, when the report was finished and Hughes was a lame duck, I wanted no job in state government. I don't want to stay in the bureaucracy. It wasn't where I belonged. So, all the excitement was over, you might say. As it turned out, a Republican was elected Governor in '69, William Cahill, so, I wouldn't have lasted anyway, because I was appointive, not a civil servant. ... So, they suggested that Rutgers needed me. Why? because Rutgers was gonna move into a new era. It was going to become a diversified university, that after the riots, it had to recognize that the State of New Jersey had changed, that fifteen percent of its population was Afro-American, five percent was Latino, then, or ten percent, whatever it was. ... That meant that Rutgers had to have a diversified student body, and then, had to make way for students to come to Rutgers who wouldn't normally have qualified or even thought of coming. This meant aggressively going out for them, and who best to represent the state's interest in this, you know, or to present the state's interest, you might say? not to represent, because I was out of the state now as an employment. So, they got me a grant, from the Title 1 of the Higher Education Act, for seventeen months, a grant to come to Rutgers. It didn't cost Rutgers a cent to get me, and I arrived here, and, sure enough, Livingston College is being prepared to open in '69, and the faculty members [were] scrambling around, trying to figure out how they were gonna change the place, so that it could be more accommodating to all these new ... folks, and [I was asked], "Wouldn't you like to teach the people at Douglass at all? Would you teach a course?" and I said, "Yeah, I'd be happy to; I mean, wonderful." I taught a course over there on Newark, ... [had] a lot of people from Newark in to talk with the students and, "What was it all about?" and the students went ape over it. They were really excited, because they were hearing from, you know, ... the horse's mouth, you might say, from the people I brought in, and then, Livingston College, I was helping the dean there. I was helping the Urban Studies Center, down on Church Street, all three things, and so, Livingston College said [that] they wanted me to be there to prepare and to teach. So, they got me a faculty appointment and this was all back-door stuff. In those days, they were so scrambling that they had to do it. ...
SH: It sounds as though the expansion was so intense that people were struggling to keep up with the pace.
TH: Yeah, yeah, that's right, figuring ways to do it. ... It was very exciting; it was. We were preparing a curriculum, we were preparing admission standards, made a lot of mistakes, Lord knows, but, at the same time, it began to work, it did, and it changed ... Rutgers University overnight. It really did. In quick order, it changed it. It forced Rutgers College and Douglass into considering their share of students who needed special attention. A lot of these students did need special attention, no question about it.
SH: What do you mean by "special attention?"
TH: Well, tutoring and extra courses, to ease them into an academic world that they weren't prepared for culturally. They were culturally disadvantaged, certainly economically disadvantaged, but, we had money for that. That was easier to overcome than the cultural disadvantage. That was really tough stuff. If you've been to some of those schools, you're not ready to come to college. You don't know how to sit and take notes, you know what I mean? They had no idea what taking a note is. ... So, it meant a terrific effort on the part of Rutgers to do that and to do it successfully, and what Livingston did, which was very exciting, was, it switched from being [the] so-called "MIT of the Social Sciences," that was the original concept of this nice, new college out in Piscataway, Edison, although I guess it's Piscataway, ... to be a ... multi-racial college, and they had to go hire faculty, so, they went and hired [them]. There were some old-time faculty members who complained that ... a lot of undeserving people were appointed, but, they were appointed because, I'm sure, ... the Dean and other people there felt that, as the mission of Livingston changed, completely overnight, overnight, practically, the riot did that, you know, that ... he had to get a bunch of young swingers that could handle this. I mean it. So, he went out and he tried to find the brightest young people he could find in the country, who were willing to work in that environment. Well, he found a lot of them and they're around, still. ... He found some very good ones, some very good ones. Some of the stars of the Rutgers faculty came out of that. The computer science program came out of there, political science, history, ... English, especially. So, it really was a worthwhile effort, but, it was crazy. It was crazy. It was. It was so untraditional; it was crazy, it was absolutely crazy. I remember, just a personal thing, I began teaching and having a ball, and I could teach anything I wanted, by the way, so, I could pick and choose. ... So, the Vice-President for Academic Affairs, Henry Winkler, who was a historian, ... he said, "Oh, by the way, ... the Board of Governors just voted you tenure," and I said, "What?" He said, "Yes," and I said, "Well, I hadn't applied." "I know," he said, "but, I knew you wanted to stay here, so, I went and did it, and they voted you tenure." So, I got voted by the Board of ... Governors. They have the power to do that, but, I never went through a tenure process, never. I couldn't go through a tenure process. I don't have anything to tenure myself with, except teaching and service, you might say, to the University, but, that would never happen again. It could not happen now, as you know, never.
SH: Can you clear something up for me? Did you write for the New York Herald Tribune while you were serving on the Governor's Board?
TH: No, no, no. One of the members of the staff of the Select Commission on Civil Disorder was a reporter for the New York Tribune.
SH: How did you get involved in the Mass Media and Journalism School?
TH: Well, around 1980, roughly, President Bloustein, I was very close to President Bloustein, he had decided to unify the faculty at Rutgers, to do away with these federated colleges that had separate faculties and the like. There was a lot of duplication and there was no way in the world that he could justify, the President of the University could justify, asking the State Legislature for money when you had so much duplication. He had a professor of Spencerian English at Rutgers College, at Douglass College, at Livingston College, you know. "Guys, what do you guys say? Why do you have all these people all teach the same thing?" ... So, that was one thing. Secondly, he wanted to move his goal. Bloustein's goal was to move Rutgers into the American Association of Universities, the AAU, which means we would be one of the fifty great research universities in America. So, in order to do that, you had to have a solid faculty situation, where he could also go out and attract people to come to Rutgers, particularly in the sciences, because that's where New Jersey industry was most interested, the pharmaceutical industry, for example, most interested in the sciences, not the social sciences or humanities, but, you could do some of that in the humanities and social sciences, but, the strongest effort would have to be in the sciences, and to, all of a sudden, take Rutgers from a mid-level, public university, new public university, and move it up to the top level, and that's what he did, and ... he was a very smart politician, a very bright man. He got the senior faculty to agree and the Board of Governors, of course, agreed to this. So, they unified the faculty. It took away Douglass's independent status; they took away Rutgers College's independent status. They threw out a few SOPs, like admission standards and graduation standards, or some such nonsense as that, so [that] the places could think that they still had some independence, but, they really don't have any faculty independence, because the faculty is totally unified across the whole campus. You know that. It takes all kind of college people in your courses. ... That, still, is not understood outside, by the way. There are a lot of high school seniors in the state who think they've got to go to Rutgers College. We keep telling them, "You don't have to go to Rutgers College. You get the same faculty teaching you regardless of which place you go to. Cook, Livingston, Douglass, it doesn't make a difference. Get on the campus and you can take the same courses." "Oh, but, Rutgers College means so much more." There's one wealthy alumnus [who] complained to me, in the '50s, when he went to Rutgers College in the '50s, he said, "Now, ... all I know is, I'm a graduate of Rutgers University and that's all that counts." ... This guy made a ton of money. He's retired, at his age, but, anyway, that's what happened. So, at that moment, Rutgers College had done away with the School of Journalism at Rutgers. Jerry (Amante?), who was running a small journalism program at Livingston, ... he's retiring this year, he's very smart politically, too, he got an agreement that re-established the Department of Journalism and Mass Media, and so, he said to me, he said, "Hey, you can do whatever you want, whatever kind of teaching you want to do. Why don't you come and join me and we can have some fun?" he said, and I said, "Yeah, that sounds pretty good to me." He gave me a real good home, because political science would not have been a good home, even though I continued to teach in political science. Political science was too much a standard academic department now and, to survive in that, with all the fights that you get between people, and the scramble for promotion, and the scramble for tenure, scramble for this, scramble for that, I didn't belong in there. I didn't have a Ph.D. I got asked by political science, twice, to become a member of the department, but, I turned that down because journalism was a much more comfortable place to be, didn't have to have a Ph.D. to feel comfortable in journalism.
SH: You helped to develop SCILS.
TH: Yeah, but, ... I didn't have any role in that. SCILS was imposed on the Journalism Department. That was part of the agreement Jerry got with the University to get a department of journalism. "You bring it into SCILS, put it under one management system."
SH: How did that work?
TH: Well, my own personal opinion is that ... it worked well for SCILS, I think. ... The Department of Communication, the Library Science people, they have done pretty well with SCILS. It saved them both, pretty much, but, the journalism had suffered dreadfully, because it is considered to be at the same level as those departments, as far as academic procedures are concerned, like ... appointment and promotion. ... The best journalism schools in the country are ones where top practitioners are on the faculty. I'll mention Berkeley, I will mention Medill, and I'll mention Columbia; those are top schools of journalism and there're fantastic practitioners who were there. Here we are, forty miles from New York City, we could have the greatest practitioners going. I'll just give you this story. I went ... up to New Hampshire in 1988 with ten or twelve students for the primaries, primary election day, and we were following the Democrats, mainly the Democrats, because Republicans, Bush was gonna be the nominee in any case. ... They were doing something, but, the Democrats were really in a flux, and so, we were really attracted to the Democrats more than we're attracted to the Republicans, but, in any case, we had a great time. We had a wonderful time. The students were very interested. They chose to go. They had to pay something to go. We had enough money to get them up there and enough money to pay their hotel bills, but, the food and everything else, they had to pay for. So, we got up there and one of the men I saw was Roger Mudd, whom I'd met several times before. He was a famous NBC correspondent, working for PBS at this time, and I said, "Gee, Roger, you ever thought of teaching?" and he said, "Yeah, ... I've done a little bit. I'd love to do it," and I said, "Well, would you come to Rutgers if we could arrange something?" He said, "Yes, that would be ideal, right outside of New York, and I could do that easily." So, I came back, full of beans, tell everybody that Roger Mudd would agree to a teaching job with us. "No Roger Mudd will ever teach here; no Ph.D., can't get him an appointment." So, I figured, "What's the sense of fighting that fight?" Al Hunt, maybe you know who he is, he's theWall Street Journal bureau chief in Washington, he said, "I'll trade jobs with you anytime." He told me that at lunch. He said, "I'll be happy to trade jobs with you. I'd love to teach." [laughter] We can't get him. We can hire him as adjunct for 2300 dollars a course. You're gonna offer Al Hunt 2300 dollars? I mean, come on.
JN: How would you compare an up-and-coming school like Livingston College to a more traditional school like Princeton?
TH: It's totally different, totally different. Princeton has a diverse population, but, it isn't diverse at this level, you know what I mean? racially diverse, geographically diverse, but, it's a very restricted level. They don't have to really have a lot of special help or anything, 'cause the students they take can handle the work. Most of them do. They have a very high graduation rate, so, it means that ...
--------------------------------------END OF SIDE TWO, TAPE ONE-------------------------------------
SH: This continues an interview with Professor Thomas B. Hartmann on December 8, 1999, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, with Sean D. Harvey and ...
JN: John Neiman.
SH: We moved very quickly through your career at Rutgers, but, I would like to step back and ask, as a World War II veteran, what was your opinion of the Vietnam War? How did the Rutgers student body react to the war?
TH: I found ... [that] Rutgers, in my opinion, did not go through nearly the agony some other institutions went through over that period. ... I often wondered why. In 1969, the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Washington gave [the] Rutgers Urban Studies Center a grant to do a study of what state governments were doing ... to deal with [the] urban problems of their cities and ... I was told that ... I had to work on that. So, I said, "Okay by me, as long as I can pick my states," because I thought, "What the heck? I've got a couple daughters living in California and Seattle and, you know, why not?" So, I said, "I'll take the West Coast, so, California and Oregon and Washington." California and Washington were on the list of states they wanted done, but, I could do Oregon as part of that easily. So, I went out and did those studies. I did a questionnaire that they had, did the City of Los Angeles, the City of San Francisco, the City of Sacramento, Portland, Oregon, Seattle, Tacoma, you know, and the state governments in each of the states and had a ball. I had a ball, learned an awful lot. ... What was the question, back to why I mentioned that study?
SH: How did the students react to the Vietnam War?
TH: Oh, the reaction to Vietnam, yes. While I was in Berkeley, because the top local government political scientist in California was at Berkeley, I was gonna have an interview with him, and, while I was there, he suggested that I see, and he was very nervous, because Berkeley ... had had problems when Mario Savio was [there], the free speech movement and all that took place. Berkeley was very upset about People's Park, which the university wanted to take over this park that supposedly belonged to the people, they said. The street people said it belonged to the people. It belonged to the university and they wanted to put tennis courts and other kinds of recreation facilities on this park. It became a (cause for the Left?), plus, the Vietnam War, and that's when Reagan, that was '69, ... was governor. He gassed the kids in School ... Plaza, which is a major area in front of the student center and bookstore and everything on the Berkeley campus, and I was there. I wasn't on the campus. I was off campus, interviewing a city planner who had an office in Berkeley, but, ... we saw the helicopter flying over, you know, and everything, and, in fact, that helped make Reagan a national hero, when he did that. Well, Berkeley was going through terrible agonies. Rutgers never went through those agonies, did not have that, didn't have what happened at Columbia, just up the road, a private university, but, Columbia had really serious anti-Vietnam problems. I don't know what else here in the East. We had a little bit, who would lecture and who wouldn't, and passing resolutions in the faculty meetings, world-shaking resolutions about condemning the war in Vietnam and all that stuff. We had that going on, but, never did it reach the level that it reached in some other campuses, Wisconsin and so forth.
SH: Why do you think that never happened here?
TH: Well, I don't know of a reason for it. You know, I ought to know more; if I voice an opinion, I ought to know more about it, but, my guess was that public university was new to New Jersey. It was new and the people, a very, very high percentage of Rutgers undergraduates, were first-generation college. I think, and I may be wrong, but, I think Livingston was seventy-five percent or more first-generation college. Rutgers College, I think, was fifty-percent. Douglass may have been thirty-percent, something like that, but, it was a very, very high percentage of first-generation college. Now, these students were there, and it was an opportunity, in the minds of them and their families, so, they weren't cause oriented. They weren't gonna get out in the barricades. They were quite traditional, in a sense, and a lot of people felt that anything that the government decided to do on the international scene was the right thing to do and that there was a Communist conspiracy and threat, like all the other answers for, "Why Vietnam?" It's easier, in hindsight, to look back and say, than it was at the moment, why it was happening, but, my guess is that Rutgers represented a bunch of striving people who didn't want to get involved in politics. They weren't ... independent enough to get involved in politics. This was a new opportunity; that's my guess. I don't know how valid that is. I really don't know how valid that is, but, I had very little trouble over that. The only real trouble I had, ... watching, and observing, and participating, was when the Kent State killings [happened], and, of course, there, that spilled over. I mean, that was just the worst thing, that the students were actually shot by a National Guardsman and the like. So, that was hard, and then, there was a strike, and, you know, students were terribly upset, with good reason, so were faculty, I mean. How much the Vietnam War was blamed for that, I guess a large part of it was because of the Vietnam War, ... and Nixon called the people who were so called "rebelling" thugs. ... They got the feeling, the hard hats were wearing American flags on their helmets, and the cops were wearing American flags on their shoulders, and it was us against them. ... The privileged college kids versus the working class, and all kinds of mix, disruption, ... and I think, also, a strong residue of feeling about Kennedys' assassination, John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy's assassination, and the fact that a lot of people felt, in 1968, and I was at Rutgers at that time, that Kennedy would be elected President of the United States. He'd just won the California primary when he was assassinated, and that he'd win the nomination easily and would beat Nixon all to hell. ... He had almost warned us to end the war. ... His loss was tremendously felt, I think, by a lot of people, but, I felt this was a very relatively tame campus.
SH: We have discussed at length how the campus expanded and diversified in the late 1960s and early 1970s. How do you think race relations have developed over the years?
TH: Well, it has its ups and downs, or whatever you want to call it. It has a certain cycle, I guess, that, you know, ... insecure minority students will tend, always, to, just as insecure students themselves, whites as well, ... consolidate with people of like mind, cultural, for security reasons, for comfort reasons, you might say. It's hard to be on a campus if you're insecure, and strike out on your own, and do your own thing, and etc., etc. It's hard, if you're gonna be involved in the social aspect of the life of the community, so, blacks sat with blacks, right. They segregated themselves into social groups, Latinos, the same way, [it is] to be expected. Sometimes, it's worse than others, and, sometimes, you notice that you see mixed racial couples on the campus, you know, you see some of that, but, that's hard, because it's hard for both sides in this thing, because race does matter, as (Cornell West?) said, "Race matters," and that racial divide, as Bill Bradley said, and I'm going to see Bill Bradley in about four hours, he said that, "Until that divide is narrowed or even completely bridged, well, ... that constitutes a problem," and it's not been any worse in the Rutgers campus than anywhere else. It really hasn't been. There hasn't been that much, I don't think, that I know about, racial conflict of any sort, and Rutgers has done extremely well in appointing and promoting minority people to positions in the University faculty, for example, and to the administration. So, much to Rutgers credit, ... it's lived up to its commitment to this fact in our lives and it's very comforting to me that the University has done that. I have no apologies. Rutgers does not need to apologize to anybody.
SH: You are not aware of any faculty or student bias incidents.
TH: Oh, yeah. We had ... incidents over at Livingston, but, they weren't ... of a deep, serious note. They were more of social class difference, you know. How do you deal with the problem? Well, sometimes, for certain social groups, minority groups, you deal with it violently or you make a pretense of being violent. ... Whites may say, "Well, I'm gonna walk away from you, never talk to you again." That's about the extent of it, but, nothing serious, that I can recall, nothing really serious.
SH: What was that obscure incident that you were just talking about?
TH: Well, there was a [DeForest] Buster Soaries, [Jr.], who's one of the leading ministers of New Jersey, now, the Secretary of State in the Whitman Administration at the moment. The Rev. Buster Soaries has the big Lincoln Street Church over in Franklin Township, 2000, 3000 members. Buster is a very bright guy. He went to Livingston College and he was kidnapped, under machine guns, by a group and let out in Princeton, the main street of Princeton, Nassau Street. I don't know what the conflict was. Nobody knew, at that time, and everything, but, everybody was in an uproar about it. Lord knows what it was. Buster was not a dealer or anything like that. I don't know why they picked him of all people. He's a teddy bear, he really is. He's very bright, a very bright man, and we had some great minority students here at Rutgers, just great people. I know some of them are, still, and I see [them] regularly. One is a particularly good friend, the man who is the chief of staff of the superintendent in Newark. I see him weekly, almost. We have breakfast together. No, it's great. ... Rutgers really has a splendid record that way. Isn't that true? I mean, you know, I think you have a feel for that, I know. Certainly, in the appointment of women, it has been clear and it broke down those barriers very quickly, very, very quickly, much to its credit. That's my opinion on that, anyway.
JN: How did you first get involved with Bill Bradley and his campaigns?
TH: Well, ... about 1972 or '[7]3, next-door neighbors of ours in Princeton knew him pretty well, and he'd drop by there when he was on his way back to New York from Fort Dix, where he was doing some of his military obligation, and they invited ... my wife and me over to meet him. I'd seen him play basketball, but, that's all. So, we went over, and talked with him, and found that he had this deep interest in minority kids, playing basketball with minority players and everything, and that he's a very serious young man and a very nice guy. So, we chatted and I knew him, indirectly, through the man who wrote the first book about him, John McPhee. John McPhee and I are good friends. He lives in Princeton. He teaches at Princeton University, but, he's written about eighteen major non-fiction books, and the first one was A Sense of Where You Are, which is about Bradley as a basketball player, when he was in college, and they're very close. Bill Bradley and John McPhee are very close. So, I had those two connections with him, one through John McPhee and one through the neighbors. ... In 1977, he called me on the telephone one Sunday afternoon and he said, "I'm gonna run for the US Senate and ... I'd like to have you help me do that. ... I've just got one other person I've asked and I'm gonna ask you if you will help, because everybody tells me that you know the state very well, and that you have all these students interns around, doing things, and that you can be a big help to me," and I said, "Well, that sounds like a great idea, that you're gonna run," because we're gonna run against Clifford Case, who was the incumbent Republican Senator, who won by 750,000 votes every time he ran, a Rutgers grad, very nice, wonderful man, and Case was gonna run for reelection, and this was in '78, and so, I said, "Well, it's a tough race, Bill. ... Gee, I don't know, but, I'll be glad to help you." I said, "Yeah, why not?" and I said, "But, I insist on one thing; I have to have an insider's role. I'm just not gonna be a volunteer and [not] have an insider's role." He said, "Okay, fine, you have an insider's role." ... So, I had an insider's role, and we created a campaign for him, and we became very friendly through that campaign. ... His wife, Ernestine, was a professor at Montclair State. She was very nervous about being involved in politics and she asked me if I would accompany her on her first appearance for Bill, surrogating for him as a candidate in 1978; for the primary we're talking about now. So, we went to a large gathering and she just wowed them. She's terrific. I mean, she is just the best. She's a wonderful woman, wonderful person. She just wowed them and I said, "Ernestine, you don't need me, you don't need me." ... She's German, so, she has a bit of an accent, but, she's a good teacher, and she knows how to project and how to be with people, and she's so nice. So, I did a number of things. I went with him around. I introduced him to people all over the state whom he had not met before. We drove miles and miles, and hour after hour, to these meetings in nursing homes, and bowling alleys, and everything else. Election night, running against Dick (Leone?), who was the State Treasurer and the, supposedly, establishment candidate for the Democrats. I knew Dick very well, too. ... Bill had his election returns at the Hilton Hotel in Secaucus, Harmon Cove, and so, they asked me, the campaign director, Susan Thomases, who's a great friend of Hillary Clinton, you may recognize the name, ... asked me to run the VIP room, because, you know, she wanted all the regular Dems who came there, because Bill Bradley is a celebrity, that they'd taken care (of them early?). We go up there, and, all of a sudden, we find out that Clifford Case was beaten in his own primary by Jeffrey Bell. Who is Jeffrey Bell? Nobody had the slightest idea. Jeffrey Bell came from Delaware. He didn't come from New Jersey. He won the primary against Clifford Case for several reasons, one being that Clifford Case didn't campaign, because he didn't think he had a problem, and, secondly, because Clifford Case ... was a very moderate Republican, and he was beaten by the right wing, who were the only ones who came out and voted, ... the right wing. It wasn't a general election; this is the primary I'm talking about. He didn't realize that, in 1973, ... William Cahill, the incumbent Republican Governor, was beaten in the primary by Carl (Sandman?), who was a very right wing Congressman from Cape May County. The last person who stuck with Richard Nixon during the impeachment was Carl (Sandman?) and he beat the incumbent Governor. It ensured the election, in 1973, of Brendan Byrne, the Democrat. So, the Democrats won the State House back. The same thing happened in the Senate race. Case was beaten by Jeffrey Bell, an ideologue. He's like [Gary] Bauer, who's running for the Republican ticket now, same kind of candidate, and we knew that Bill Bradley was the next Senator. We knew he was gonna win, sweep. We knew. So, he said to me, "Would I stay on for the transition from being a citizen to becoming a US Senator?" and I said, "Sure," and I arranged to get leave from Rutgers to do it, and I stayed with him, and then, they asked me if I'd be a member of his staff, as a trouble-shooter, free-wheeling trouble-shooter, and I said I would, but, I would not accept any pay for it, because I wanted to keep my Rutgers appointment, and I didn't want to be a paid member of the staff, would be a volunteer member of the staff, and that was fine. They paid for all my out of pocket expenses, my trips to Washington and stuff like that, hotel rooms and things like that, but, I didn't get paid any salaries for it, and so, I did that for twelve years, from 1978 to 1990. ... We were very close friends as a result of that. ... I'm helping him raise money now, and tonight will be the last money raising reception he's gonna have, and I think, probably, he maxed out for the Federal Primary Grant, ... you know, the federal matching [funds]. I think he's at max now with the amount of money he's raised, so, he doesn't need to raise any more until we see whether he wins the nomination or not. When he wins the nomination, it'll bring a whole new cycle of money raising, but, he doesn't have to raise an awful lot, because he has already raised it. So, I'm sure he's pretty close to getting the max for the general election, if he were to win the primary, the federal monies. See, George W. Bush is not accepting any federal funds for the primary, so, there's no matching money involved in the Bush campaign. That means he can spend an unlimited amount of money on the primary. If he decided to do it in the general election, he can do the same thing, whereas it would be pretty tough for a man calling for campaign finance reform, like Bradley, to suddenly say, "Well, I'm gonna do it on my own, you know. I don't need the federal money." That's impossible. I don't think any Democrat could ... run on that. He has to stay within the sixty-five million dollar, whatever, limitation there'll be for the federal election, the general election. ... That's all I'm doing. ... The last time I saw him, he said that he'd got his scenario, and he's gonna follow it, he's not gonna deviate, and he said, "I'm not gonna be reactive to anything that happens. I'm gonna just stay the course, bang." He said, "I've made that determination." He's the most relaxed I've ever seen him in my life. I'm sure there will be many ... tense moments, because nobody is gonna give him the Presidency easily. They're gonna make it very hard for him, but, so far, so good, ... and Gore is completely off-stride, because I don't think he thought this would happen to him. [I am] not criticizing Gore in this; he just was caught and he didn't realize that Bradley's celebrity status still holds. It still holds. Even though the generation that remembers the Knicks of '69 and '73 is getting older, it still remembers and little kids heard about it. ... You go around with Bradley to places where there are fathers and sons, and mothers and daughters, and mothers and sons, and fathers and daughters, they want their pictures taken with him. They want a basketball signed by him. So, you don't knock that, you know. He's got the leg up. He's the only celebrity running. George W. Bush is something of a celebrity, and his father was President, but, he still doesn't have the same celebrity status that Bradley does. Bradley transcends politics with his celebrity status. It's the black people, the black players, I mean, Earl Monroe and those guys, Dick Barnett, they worshipped Bill Bradley. They call him the "White O," the white Oscar. He was the white guy who could play like Oscar Robertson, and they really admire him, and they like him, so that they have gone all over and helped campaign with him. So, he's got that crew. He's got Cornell West at Harvard, who is the most articulate black academic in the United States. He thinks Bradley is great, and he and Cornell talk all the time, and so, in the race side, he's very strong. ... He's got those kind of things going for him, plus, he's kind of Abe Lincoln-esque, you know. He's tall and gangly and sort of direct. You don't get the normal political clap-trap from him, ever, ever. He's very serious. He's a scholar, he's a true scholar. He's got yellow pads like you and he takes notes on all those readings. ... I think he's a great candidate. Myself, I think he's going to win the primary. I think he's going to. I'm not saying he's going to win the general, but, I think he's gonna win. So, that's my Bradley story, going full circle here.
SH: How do you think Bill Bradley will do on the West Coast?
TH: Excellent.
SH: Why?
TH: Because the West Coast is a celebrity state.
SH: That is his appeal there.
TH: You bet. ... Just to tell you an insider, okay, the Democratic establishment in California is for Gore. The Governor, he's for Gore. The leading officials are for Gore. They're all announced for Gore. The State Treasurer, who's elected, he had the largest plurality of any Democrat running last year, he thinks Bill Bradley is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Now, when push comes to shove, that's what I think will happen, particularly if Democrats like that assume that Gore could be beaten by George W. Bush or McCain, if McCain happens to beat Bush, which is not outside the realm of possibility. If they feel that Bradley would be a stronger candidate against Bush or McCain, I bet you that Gore will have a hard time holding those votes. That'd be true of the rank-and-file union people, too. I don't think organizations ... have the control over votes they used to have. People are more independent than they used to be and I think that that will be in Bradley's good stead.
SH: The women's vote is now crucial in national elections.
TH: Yeah, absolutely crucial.
SH: How do you think Bradley will fare among women voters?
TH: Well, if you saw the interviews, ... and this is politics for you, this is also America in 1999, if you saw the interviews on the Today Show with Ernestine Bradley and ... Katie Couric, you would have thought that Queen Victoria was in town. I mean, I have never seen [anything like that]. They're pretty tough anchors, running those morning shows. Bryant Gumble, he stumbled all over himself. I mean, you get all these people who ... just can't believe it. Now, Tipper Gore is a wonderful woman, and she's great, but, Ernestine is a new breath. She's ... [the] author of a very, very important book that's just been published on liberal German writers and their treatment of the Holocaust. It's a magnus opus. It's a wonderful book. It's gotten rave reviews. That's her life's work. This is her major, major contribution in the world of scholarship and when have they had anybody like that before? They never had a First Lady running who has her own credentials like that. Sure, Hillary was a good lawyer, maybe, ... but, there's a lot of lawyers. There aren't many academics. ... Professors are very respected people, one of the nice things about my job at Rutgers. Being a tenured professor at a research university is the best job in the world, and the public thinks that you're something when you have a professorship, and that's true. She's got that. So, he's got ... a strong wife. By the way, they had an agreement, you know, somebody told me, "Oh, he's gonna be attacked because Theresa Ann came down to Washington to live with him while she was going through school, and that's a terrible way to bring up a daughter," and I said, "Hey, wait a minute, the reason they did that was that they made a pledge that one of the Bradleys would be at supper with Theresa Ann every night. Every night, one of them would be." That would be, if Bill had to be out of town, ... he'd schedule it so [that] Ernestine was in Washington to have supper with Theresa Ann. She was never without one of the parents, often with both of them, particularly on weekends and times like that. So, they really brought her up. She's a very shy, young woman, she's terrific. She graduated from NYU this year, and she has her own life, and, if you've noticed, there has been none of the stuff about her, like Chelsea, none of it. Poor Chelsea had to suffer through all those agonizing months of being followed all over, in the newspaper, all over, but, Theresa Ann is completely anonymous. I think that's probably true of the Gore children, too. As far as I know, they have done the same thing about their children. So, that's a plus and I think the women will recognize that. Another way, ... Bradley has always done strong, but, ... Bradley has always said that he is for choice. "Don't come in and lobby me, don't even bring up the question, I will not change my mind. I'm for choice." We started that in 1978, by the way. That was out front, and that's there, and so, he goes down as the choice candidate. Now, the Republicans have a problem and their problem has been, every election shows it, ... that if they take an anti-abortion stance in their platform, they can't elect the President. That's why Ronald Reagan and George Bush, Sr., both waffled on that question to the nth degree, the nth degree. I mean, they just waffled completely. Bush, in '92, was forced to take a stronger stand. In '88, he didn't have to take a stand. In '92, "Read my lips," came back on him, on the tax thing, you know, and so forth, so, ... in order to placate the conservative vote, he had to come out with a strong anti-abortion platform in the Republican platform in '92, and Clinton didn't, and Clinton won a big majority of the women's vote. He did again in '96, when Dole had to do the same thing. To get nominated, you have to move way to the right in the Republican Party and you lock yourself in a position there. Now, you've noticed, George W. Bush is trying to waffle, so [that] he doesn't get identified. McCain is strongly for choice. So, it's a real problem. The Republicans have a real problem of a candidate if they have one who's anti-choice, because, my opinion is, the American women, whether they approve of abortion or not, do not want the government to dictate that question. They don't, and I think that's a loser, and I have good Roman Catholic friends, women friends, who tell me that, that they'll vote for the choice person, because, even though they disapprove of it, for any number of reasons, wouldn't do it personally, doesn't make any difference. It's a matter of denying a ... woman a choice and a lot of the anti-abortionists are men, as you know. So, I think Bradley is clear on that and I think he's got that support. It's a long answer to your question about women. ...
JN: You wrote on your pre-interview survey that you were involved with the American Veterans' Committee?
TH: I was.
JN: What did you do with the Committee?
TH: Nothing, just a member.
JN: Are you a member of any other veterans' organizations?
TH: No. The American Veterans' Committee was created as an alternative to the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars. "Citizens, First; Veterans, Second," was the motto. As a matter-of-fact, we defeated the state referendum for a veteran's bonus after World War II. The AVC did, and I worked on that, and that was late '40s, I guess, and early '50s, and we defeated it. The veterans wanted a cash pay out. Our theory was that ... the country couldn't afford that and the veterans didn't deserve it. They didn't deserve a bonus. ... Out of twelve million people who served in the Armed Service, maybe one million saw any combat, so, you're gonna pay a lot of people a bonus for non-combat service and it seemed wrong. Anyway, that's the only thing I really did in the AVC.
SH: Were you involved with Professor Lloyd Gardner's efforts to establish the New Jersey Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in Holmdel?
TH: No, no, no, just as a friend, ... nothing official, no, just as a friend. We have lunch one day a week. I lived through all the miseries he went through, [laughter] dealing with all the veterans groups, ... and he did a good job. ... They did a nice job, a political settlement. Most people walked away quite happy with it. Lloyd walked away happy, too, but, it was a struggle for him to have to deal with all these people. He wanted to be historically correct and that meant he had to say that there were real questions about the authenticity of the war in Vietnam, written seven books about it, so, you know. [laughter] Is that it?
SH: Is there anything that we forgot to ask about?
TH: No. There are probably a thousand things, but, you get too long in answers and run out of tape and patience, and somebody's got to listen to this stuff.
SH: We are always glad to have it.
TH: Yeah, I know. It's a good idea, what you're doing, and I hope you get a lot of relevant information and come up with some real findings. ... I don't know what they'll be.
SH: This is invaluable. We thank you very much.
TH: You're welcome. I enjoyed it very much, fellows, thank you, thank you.
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Reviewed by Shaun Illingworth 10/31/01
Reviewed by Sandra Stewart Holyoak 11/8/01
Reviewed by Martha Hartmann 5/12/09