Vietnam: A Television History; Interview with Jack Hill, 1982

Oh. Thank you. Oh yeah. Oh I grow up and a little town in the Midwest Council Bluffs Iowa town of 45000 people I guess. The son of a religious family successful in business. But a small town family basically and I grew up with I guess all the prejudices that come with that of the of the affirmative sort that is. A belief that people are basically pretty decent. That America works that it's probably the best place in the world that's ever been imagined. And. That life is probably going to be pretty sweet. And it's a consequence in the early sixties it was easy really to maintain that belief. Up until the Civil Rights Movement when suddenly it became clear to me I mean I've grown up in you

know in a situation where everything was pretty spirity sweet. That suddenly to discover that for a great many people in America that I never really thought about very much ever really seemed very much that life was not only not sweet but that it was very very bitter. And as a consequence you put together that kind of optimism about what America can be. With that discovery that it's not what it what it says it is. And the first thing you have to do is just go out and change it. I mean that's it. There's no obstacle too great you just go change it. There's just this sense that. That what is right will happen if you just take a step and go do it. I think that marked a lot of the early civil rights movement. Also for me where my first involvement really was with farm workers struggles in in California and seeing what happened to farm workers and say wait a minute this isn't right if people knew about this is couldn't go on. So you go out to change it and it was very easy then to believe

that it was at a time when things seemed flexible After all we had a President John Kennedy who sort of embodied a lot of the best. Of that hope. It's it was hard for me to say that. When he was first elected I was grew up in a Republican family and I was a Republican. And. Then suddenly I saw in Kennedy the kind of. Reflection of those good values and that sense of hope that made me think well. What if we just said about it we really can can make this quite a spectacular event and even more spectacular place to be. And that's really how I came. I got to the late 60s but down a pretty smooth path. And one that was marked really with a sense of great hope for the future. What would you do.

Oh I think the optimism pretty much continues because as you say as has been suggested let me start that one over. Let me just start at the beginning so it isn't as you say. When Lyndon Johnson got elected it seemed clear that he was going to carry on the traditions it was very hard and I think everybody who lived through that time remembers precisely where they were the moment that John Kennedy was shot in the tremendous loss sense of of loss but but at the time it was before the other assassinations of the late 60s. It was at a time when assassination seem so aberrational so outside the stream of what was imaginable that of course what he was doing would simply be carried forward it wasn't a fundamental threat to the direction which he had set. And so the Voting Rights Act was passed really I suppose in part his memorial but could not have been passed without Lyndon Johnson support the tremendous optimism and enthusiasm about the early days of the Great Society the sort of beginning rumblings

underneath. Are there overseas things were really right. It wasn't something that had been focused on a lot but about that time a great deal of discussion about Cuba about the United States invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1964 all suddenly we began to sense that wait a minute. Whatever was continuing things were not what they pretended to be right. Well and in 1968 I think it's reasonable to say in print more accurately in 967 it's reasonable to say that most people who were concerned to try and create a political alternative to Lyndon Johnson because of the war in Vietnam. Didn't much care who the presidential candidate was as

long as it was somebody who had a chance of winning. And it seemed quite clear that the only presidential candidate who really had a chance of winning. Who also might reasonably be expected to run. Was Bobby Kennedy and that therefore he was the best vehicle if you will to carry forward a political opposition to the war in Vietnam and I think there's no question but what if Bobby Kennedy had been the candidate. We would have been in a stronger position. By December or January the way it was. Alan Steen went and talked to him about it and for a variety of reasons some of them personal and some political. He chose not to run. He then began to look around OK. If the most obvious and potential winner isn't available who is around. And there was discussion with George McGovern and two or three other people and with Gene McCarthy and Gene McCarthy was the

one who said you're right there ought to be a political opposition. And the way to express it is by having a candidate for president. And I'm your person. Who knows why McCarthy or anybody who pretends to to explain who Gene McCarthy's motivations in any given moment is likely to be somebody who's never spent any time around them or paid any attention to the history of the last 30 years. I have no idea why Gene McCarthy decided to run he clearly had a deep and abiding moral commitment about the war ended and a very great concern and I think it's fair to say that a great many of the people who were most deeply involved in the end I war movement came to it out of moral concern so there was a sort of congruity of of concern between McCarthy and the people who went to talk to him. There was a there was a moral outrage and a sense of moral obligation to do something. And I suppose that's as close as I can speculate as to why Gene

McCarthy chose to be a candidate for president. Well McCarthy in New Hampshire first it needs to be understood that there was a big fight inside the campaign. A lot of people thought I was crazy to go to New Hampshire a traditionally conservative state a very tough place to work. We didn't really have any money we thought we had to go someplace where there was a natural liberal constituency and base to start. So the decision to go to New Hampshire was one about which a great many people were very skeptical of initially. And it was in that mood that we the people arrived sort of not quite certain that what we were doing made sense anyway. And then to get there and discover sort of rattling around

some motel in Concord New Hampshire that actually more accurately in Manchester New Hampshire the Sheraton wayfarer to be more precise I mean one hotel where everybody. Which in presidential years as a live in all the press is there and everybody's running around doing interviews and everybody else and you walk in and Gene McCarthy can go in and sit out and eat dinner by himself and nobody stopped at the counter to have a cup of coffee with him. And for the people who came there to work and then it's cold and it's barren and the roads in New Hampshire are terrible because they've never taxed themselves so there's no road there's no road scrapers that you know the places to get there is impossible and when you get there it's a pothole. And it was it was pretty grim. So and then in order to get cheered up you'd go to the headquarters and discovery you know you were one of three people at the headquarters that first week it was a sort of barn of an office and in concord with

a basement and nobody there. I mean sort of two telephone lines and somebody that was so thrilled to see you walk through the door they didn't care who you are and they were going to promote you the minute she walked through the door. It was really easy to do to get a high ranking position in New Hampshire where you had to do is be there. Oh I think you know. All that well since we didn't have any other kind of resource in New Hampshire we had to use what we did have which was proximity the vast array of New England colleges and the base of people in those colleges who were opposed to the war so we couldn't go to television we couldn't go to radio we had to go door to door.

So we did. It was a very pragmatic decision in fact to use the resource we had so that formerly barren office in Concord New Hampshire with no one in it just turned into a complete madhouse every weekend for the last I guess four or five weekends before the primary. The buses would be organized people would come up there would be an introductory speech about what we expected of people. And that speech included that. We were there to win votes and to change people's minds. And if by people's physical appearance they were going to offend an affront and frighten people. Dan we don't want to go talk to people unless they wanted to wear real Lyndon Johnson buttons I suppose and go talk to people I was better be ok. So there was a long lecture which said basically you have to clean up Iraq the mean people have been told that before because when the bus organizers basically were told don't put people on the bus we don't want to have people's wasting their time and ours coming up here who are going to be able to work when they

get here. Occasionally of course who has got somebody with some guy with hair down to his waist in the need to expresses some. Left outrage at the State of the world and fortunately we had a basement in the building and we had boxes and boxes and boxes of three by five cards from previous canvassers who brought back the information from each door about the implication of the person that they had talked to whether they were for us or for Johnson or someplace in between. And each weekend we always seem to manage to accumulate a core of people who didn't quite understand the rules about cleaning up their act for the. For the situation. And they got to sort cards for that we can sort of keep track of file cards and make telephone calls in the last week and we had some large telephone banks and if the newspapers had ever gotten pictures of the telephone banks the Clean for Gene myth would have

gone right out the door. What you doing. Right. I'm a nice person right. When the canvasser got to the door they were instructed that we were not there on a holy crusade. We were not there to convince people about the morality or immorality of the war we were there to elect the president who had a view on that issue. And as a consequence the opening introductory segment was always one of I'm a nice person I'm here working for Gene McCarthy because I care deeply about his candidacy. I'd like to talk to you about it. Do you have a view on it it was a sort of open solicitation for their views. Now that is does not mean that people were discouraged from talking about the war in fact people were rather thoughtfully briefed beforehand to release we thought it was thoughtfully briefed beforehand about what his position was on the war. And

people were it was explained to people that if they felt the need to argue that their personal view of the of the war with every voter in New Hampshire then that wasn't what the McCarthy campaign was about it was about electing a president of the United States. And the way you do that is to convince people. To do at home what we were failing to do abroad the get the win people's hearts and minds. You're no you are you. There is no winning candidates are not in America necessarily popular. The underdog remains of a very strong image in American life and so it was important to McCarthy to be seen as the underdog. It was also important because I think if Johnson had decided to come in full force and spend the kind of resources that were

available to the White House they could've not this completely out of the state. So from two standpoint it was very important for us to say we're just this struggling little group band of travelers out here trying to build from 6 percent to 8 percent and we sure hope to do well when in fact our poll shows pretty consistently all along the door to door canvassing. We were getting 35 40 percent affirmative response. We knew we were going to do a little better than other people thought we were going to do. Just get. On my car see. I don't know that movie use the right word

but he cut his own track and he was more likely to to reflect his mood at times even than the mood of the audience or the people around him unlike I think most people in politics who respond to the mood around him. When people got excited somehow or another it seemed to encourage McCarthy to try and calm people and to explain to them and rational terms what the future of the world should be. On other occasions he could get up and be magnificent eyed genius at being able to evoke emotions in the audiences of people who listen to him. But he was is likely to decide that there's been enough of a day in that he was going to do the next event. Well Senator Kennedy's campaign says it reflected to a great extent

the personality of the man it seems to me highly emotive tremendous amount of energy real presence there all the time. But it also reflected. A kind of I think many of us thought of times not as much clarity about some issues as McCarthy do. It didn't there wasn't the year of McCarthy's idiosyncratic genius could be as charming as the consistent strength and energy of a Kennedy campaign. But there's no question but what at times inside the campaign there was a tremendous. In view of that of the Kennedy campaign because they had this candidate who would go out and fire up the troops. I suppose one of the great disappointments of 1968

has to be Hubert Humphrey in two senses one in the sense that I think many of us felt that he could have expressed an independent position earlier that there was a willingness and even an openness and even an anxiousness to compromise on the substance of what was said. He could have given us the peace plank in the platform easily platforms are not much read by people anyway it would've cost him a whole lot accepted except that Lyndon Johnson seemingly wouldn't give that latitude and that would have done a great deal toward softening the feeling so at one level it was a disappointment. I suppose in Hubert Humphrey in an absolute sense of the larger disappointment for me I guess is the disappointment. About Hubert Humphrey in the in a relative sense that is that we never saw the genius in the humanity and and the wit

and the love that was in the man never showed up. And as a consequence we lost the opportunity to have him as president which he should have been. And which would have made a tremendous difference in the future of the country. But after the convention. There was a constant yearning for him to say anything which would give an opening for people to support him. There was a tremendous desire to want to support the man in spite of all. There is a lot of anger and a lot of things said Nader at the convention. Forget what said name to read conventions. There was a tremendous yearning I think of people to support him and the speech which he finally gave in Salt Lake City in which he moved the modestly away from the president I mean he didn't break with the president he moved modestly away from the president was applauded roundly. Body was too light. It was at a time when the strength that the McCarthy campaign

or the peace movement or whatever could have brought to Hubert Humphrey was the strength of people. That doesn't change in three nights you can't take the energy and convert it into votes in three nights it takes a month or six weeks for people to get involved and talk to their neighbors and change moods and and forgive and change attitudes. And we didn't have six weeks so we ended up with Richard Nixon president. Well I think the general view of the McCarthy campaign was that the organization for the events in the street in Chicago was likely to be a destructive one and that Daley was not a nice man and that he was not naive likely to react that nicely to people raining on his parade and that it was therefore important to try and keep people separated from the events of this in the street to the extent that it was possible that frankly was delusion. The idea that people who would put six or eight months of their lives into something and saw it all

falling apart would not look around for options to express their outrage and wouldn't join with the other people who are outraged. Is pure delusion. All right. Well Chicago was. A sort of sad time because. If you've been involved in the politics in the process of talking to people and going out talking door to door what was quite clear was that a great many of the American people in fact were sympathetic to the R1 movement and yet suddenly the image that they got was not of this nice young person coming to their door and saying Would you like to vote for Gene McCarthy. But of people shouting obscenities and disrupting the city. And it seemed to me reasonable to expect that if you were a person who works for a living and tries to do the best thing they can for their kids and wants to send them to school like a policeman might and the next thing you see is that same

child now college educated which most of the people in the streets were screaming obscenities back to begins to raise serious questions about your whole way of being and how you relate and you're going to react angrily and bitterly that's not to justify what the police did which was clearly unreasonable but it's to say that it's it's not an inhuman reaction that he got. You don't have to be very smart to know that. If you get a lot of people who are angry and put them in the street across from a lot of cops who are angry at them. That something unpleasant is going to happen. And to deny that and to say well we just brought people here and you know whatever happens happens is not only irresponsible in the extreme it is just dishonest. People

had to have known as the organization of that went on the confrontation was inevitable and at least in the minds of some people I don't know that that was a majority of the organizers or anything but the minds of some people radicalizing confrontation to build a broader term movement in the country was an acceptable tactic. It wasn't to me then and I regard it as unconscionable. Now right from here you know. You know well the notion of the moratorium was a pretty straightforward one which was that we had to take the anti-war movement off the campus and build it back into the community so that it begun to some extent the year before and the McCarthy campaign and before that with some local efforts around the country. But what seemed clear was that we had to do that on a massy basis. I mean

you had to have language that was moderate not strident in. And off putting. That to middle America. That you had to have people of Vince which moderate people could participate in and be assured that they weren't going to get dragged into something that they didn't want to be a part of. It had to be locally organized so that people knew the people who were organizing and didn't feel like they were getting involved with a bunch of crazies from Washington or New Yorkers someplace but sort of heartland folks had the feel that it belonged to them in a fundamental sense that they owned the movement so the choice of the word moratorium rather than strike was designed very consciously strike as a tough hard angry word moratorium is a sort of nice let's put things aside for a day and reason together forward. And at every level that was the attempt at least of the moratorium or newspaper advertising was a picture of a father and a son

with their arms around each other the sun with hair down to his waist in the father with a crew cut in the cut line under it said fathers and sons together against the war. I mean everything was designed to appeal to the broadest mass of the American people. Oh at the time I thought pretty much it hadn't because the war didn't end in a time I'm sorry at the time my judgement was that the moratorium had really succeeded because the war didn't end but in some ways I suppose that's an unreasonable standard by a more reasonable standard. It broaden the base of the anti-war movement. I brought in people who had been involved in it before it allowed the offense in Topeka on the morning Council Bluffs and Cleveland and a whole wide range hundreds of other places where no one I wore activity had ever taken place before. In that sense it was a tremendous success.

How did you know. Well a month after the moratorium there was an organization putting together a march in Washington. The new Mobilization Committee Against the War new Moby's is commonly called. I think there was general skepticism among people in the moratorium about a centralized event which ran contrary to everything we had worked for in the last month. Months before that that was likely to have speakers on it who contrary to appealing to the broad mass of the American people tended to be fairly narrow and sectarian and special interest which instead of being concentrated exclusively on the war tended to hang have a sort of Christmas Tree of of every left cause in America attached to it.

But there was also a concern on the part of the people who organized the moratorium that the worst thing that could happen would be to have a huge march with no moderating influence in it with no middle influence. So after a tremendous debate and a lot of internal dissension we made a decision to endorse that march and to work to try and do some of the things that hadn't been done to make sure there were enough marshals and nonviolent training and toilets and all the things that are necessary to make an event occur in a nonviolent fashion that's not to say the intent of the organizers was previously have been and have been violent but simply that the planning in order to maintain nonviolence requires an immense amount of logistical as well as sort of psychological conditioning of the participants you know. Oh well there were some there were some people involved in the most clearly whose desire

was to have confrontation with the police. There was an organized attack on the Justice Department on that night which resulted in a lot of tear gas so here we had half a million people all day long. And when the evening news showed it was half a million people got 45 seconds and then 300 crazies attacking the Justice Department got 45 seconds because it makes a good film and the entire day was lost in that now some of us think thought then and I think today that there were probably agents provocateurs are involved from the government standpoint but a tremendous effort was made when there was a march the night before to occur which was to be a march on the Vietnamese embassy. And we organized actually Wavy Gravy in the Hog Farm commune organized a a kazoo concert and we distributed. You know. One hundred gross of kazoos or something and invited everyone over to a kazoo concert

and diverted maybe 10 or 15 thousand people who otherwise simply out of boredom would have gotten involved in what turned out to be a rather substantial confrontation. People between events really between the moratorium and the mobilization March was when the major play began from the White House to try to appeal to the very constituency that the moratorium had attempted to appeal to and the language which was used was that of the silent majority with the purported notion that the vast mass of people in fact the den of FIDE with the president and wanted to support it. Well I think at one level Astro the vast mass of the American people do identify with the president and do want to support him. All of us in a fundamental way want to support and want to believe in and care about and support the president. And particularly in time of war. But that language became a very

divisive language and unfortunately I think the anti-war movement to some extent played into it by allowing the images which we projected to validate in people's minds the words which Richard Nixon used to describe this. Well we had Bill there a bit of careful building of a moderate image and suddenly Richard Nixon claimed that he was the only moderate left in the country and that anybody who disagreed with him was not simply mistaken or misled or something else but was un-American didn't belong in America was destruct he wasn't a crazy radical probably supporting the Soviet Union I mean wild kind of talk coming from the president of the United States.

And unfortunately that's a powerful bully pulpit and a lot of people listen to those words. And I think it set back substantially the efforts which have gone on prior to that time it was a very successful campaign from the standpoint of the White House in terms of breaking the anti-war movement from its newfound constituency. And so over the months ahead December and on it became increasingly clear that the momentum which had been which had been building really was pretty much destroyed by January and February and and was then reborn after the Cambodia bombing in April of that year all of a sudden there was a phoenix like the strength of it rose back again but up to that point it really for four or five months dealt with almost a death blow to the peace movement. Camel 5 0 0 7 0 5 0 3 11 8.

Well those were hard times a lot of the leadership of the anti-war movement was young I include myself certainly in that. There was a certain self righteous indignation about the state of the world and I and a good deal of assurance that if we just had an opportunity to run it we wouldn't. We do it better and the self-righteous isn't self-righteousness is not a particularly attractive quality to most people and I think probably there were some people that were offended by that. I think if you add to that a couple of very fundamental errors one the notion of no enemies on the left that never criticize anybody who is who shares a view about ending the war that anything goes as long as it's designed in the war in spite of the fact that many of us didn't agree with that there was never the courage really to stand up and say hey wait a minute. We disagree with those people we don't like those people we are against the war we're not against America we're not against the American people. In the

case of I think many of the people most of the people involved in the moratorium are actually down right like the American people and trusted their judgment as against the judgment of the government believes that the people were substantially better than the government they had. And the failure I think to articulate that to make some distinctions they have the courage to draw those distinctions. Cos the anti-war movement very deeply. It may have cost us in a fundamental sense the ability to build a majority movement to end the war in Vietnam. And to the extent that that's true it cost the lives of Americans and it cost the lives of the Vietnamese. In retrospect it's easy now to look back at the mistakes made 14 years ago and particularly with the wisdom of being 14 years older.

But I think that we made some of those judgments at the time and been willing to live with them and enforce them. We might have been able to end the war a lot sooner than an end. Who are you. Well it needs to be recall that the war was not fought by the people who were opposed to the war or by their peers in large part. There was economic injustice is so in Demick in the society that it reflected that it's reflected directly in who ends up in the military in particular humans up dying in time of war tend to be less well educated. More my own. A larger percentage of minority people a larger percentage of people from the south and Appalachian states and we never somehow or another figured out we'd end our war movement never really figured out how to to speak to the parents of those

children who were fighting the war who are actually fighting the war and who thought that we were undercutting their children cnt chance of living and we never really figure out I think how to articulate. Our opposition in a way but they could identify with it very clearly. And in fact quite the contrary I think frequently people who struggled all our lives so their kids would have a better chance then saw their their their kids slapping back at them. And so instead of helping to unify generations against the war there was a tendency to split generations and leave a generation supporting its natural. Position which is the country and the president. And I think that was exacerbated tremendously by the stupidity of whoever first said. Never trust anybody over 30 I mean cutting generations off from each other. In the name of some higher good can only be destructive. You can't

good cannot come from that sort of vicious sentiment. It seems clear to me that absent the opposition to the war if it had just gone on and wound down the American people had been made as conscious of it as they were by the anti-war movement. We would almost certainly now and in the intervening time have been engaged in military adventurism in the southern part of Africa and Goler Mozambique that we would now be looking at military action in Nicaragua or El Salvador that are sensitivities to how little influence we can have for the first time discovering that we who had always been able to play the biggest kid on the block suddenly we have to deal with

all these other people who also live on the block and that we can't always get our way is a tremendous change in America's sensitivity about itself and about the way we have to learn to deal and live with the rest of the world that we can own it and run it that it's not ours that it's theirs and we have to learn how to live with the political leadership of other countries in a sensitive way. And I think those two things a reduction in military adventurism an increase in stupidity to the to the constraints of American power have been tremendously important to the country in the years since. It got down there with the camera.