Uncommon Knowledge classic: The Sixties with Hitchens and William F. Buckley

welcome to uncommon knowledge i'm peter robinson our show today one decade the 60s let's begin with a little history quiz what's three and a half inches by two and a quarter inches and divided an entire generation of americans here's a hint every american male between the ages of 18 and 35 was required by law to have one in his possession a draft card hundreds of thousands of the young men who obeyed the law and honored this card found themselves shipped overseas and ended up carrying one of these hundreds of thousands of other young americans disobeyed the law many burned their draft cards they stayed home or in some cases went north to canada and many of them ended up carrying one of these the vietnam war protest movement often turned violent on college campuses across the country administration buildings were occupied trashed even burned at the same time though there was another protest movement taking place one that was generally peaceful the civil rights movement two enormous protest movements the after effects of which continue to shape american life even today our guests christopher hitchens a contributing editor to vanity fair magazine and william f buckley jr editor at large of national review magazine as young men during the 60s hitchens and buckley took opposite sides and today 30 years later they look back on the left and the right you were in chicago during the democratic convention of 1968 and you wrote afterwards quote chicago was seething with tension what my wife and i had heard 14 stories high in her in our hotel was f lbj f mayor daley now just 15 years before the korean war had taken place without protest what had changed well there were to begin with a few uh tripwires the assassination of of kennedy and the assassination of bobby kennedy and martin luther king so that the atmosphere was was going to be getting very tense that that exploded in conjunction with the heightened hostilities on the whole vietnam issue i'd add that perhaps beginning with the warren commission which i agree was one of the trip was there had arisen i suppose it happens in every generation but i think it was very salient in this one um a belief that the government was lying or rather the recognition the sudden the shock of recognition that that was true that the government would lie to you openly and blatantly and on and on a major thing i think that was a big discovery of that yeah in 1968 when mr buckley was in a hotel room listening to chance you were in cuba as an agricultural volunteer helping to plant coffee now uh what i want to excavate here is what on earth were you thinking by the time one englishman had arrived in cuba a million cubans had fled wha what were you thinking you were thinking to call the coffee market well um actually it's true that um were you identified they needed some coffee um and they still do as matter of fact it's still rationed there in spite of my best efforts um i was a dedicated marxist i was a member of an organization that was actually anti-caster right organization if you really was in my personal history you have to get some sectarian minutiae in i was a luxembourgish trust guest organization and we sent a delegation of people to see whether or not the cuban revolution was as advertised um a break with the soviet model a new start and all of that and this was remembered shortly after the death of the much controverted ernesto che guevara and it was a very interesting time to be there because i was there during the invasion of czechoslovakia so which was um the point at which it became evident that castroism was not going to live up to the advertised hopes so very it was a you were how old christopher i was then 19. 19. and you were in oxford at that time i was you know the end of my first year in oxford right now what i'm interested in is to the extent to which you're thinking was in some way representative of the thinking of your generation that is to say those protesters in chicago those people planting beans in cuba were you an outlier were you especially ideological or was there was there a hard ideological core that we felt in our little corner of the left that the great thing about 968 was exactly that both of the cold war camps were undergoing a convulsion and our great hope was which was disappointed was for a convergence between those two things your great hope as a as a member of this small organization or your great hope your generation's great hope well i think it was this was this was held in common by a lot of people who were completely new to politics and quite naive about it right well bill you were as you read the kids who were in the street protesting how much of it was relatively sophisticated ideology they weren't just rejecting the straight-laced lives of their parents but the whole notion the whole cold war notion that communism was bad we were good good and how much it was just kind of naivete romanticization of the commies and so on well you you've asked the hard questions the fact the fact is that there was a kind of a listlessness uh in in the 60s and that listlessness called for a kind of masturbatory relief people wanted to find if they could go ahead and get their kicks in in some way that they hadn't been getting them and the more so if they could wed them to some to some ideal in fact what it was was was primarily self concern and uh an attempt to to to cast a noble perspective on what it is that you were up to you were engaged in narcissism christianity quarrel um literally as well as metaphorically with mr butler's characterization of it as masturbatory actually was quite celebrated for going the distance um perhaps um one of the great things about it was that it was the first generation or perhaps one of the less great things about it but anyway one of the true things about it one of the first generations to take the separation of sex and procreation for granted which i think led to a great deal of jealousy incidentally not to say envy among proceeding generations the pill came into wide use just about that i think i think it might be worth making a distinction uh between being as it were a 68 or suassant is the more pretentious of us call ourselves and a sixties person because anyone born in the right boom bracket can claim to have been a sixties person and the way it's all represented now retrospectively airbrushed and rewritten is beads kaftans exactly as mr buckley says make love not war woodstock nation all that now that was sort of common generationally as common as say james dean had been a bit earlier but the p the what we're talking about i believe is the 60s left you know was the attempt to uh block what we thought of correctly in my view still as an imperialist and aggressive and unjust war the war in vietnam you oppose it on uh moral and ideological grounds as aggressive and imperialist yes now so my question is you really believed that you thought that the united states was the the united states was the offending party i would affirm it now in fact with greater knowledge and um infinitely larger depth of evidence to draw upon yes that the chinese the soviets supplying the north vietnamese were the good guys in this one i think the hardest thing for you to get people to remember now even though they must remember it at the time or should is that the official reason given for intervention in vietnam well there were several and they kept changing but one of them was that it was to stop chinese expansionism into the indo-chinese peninsula that's now considered so ridiculous and it's so self-evidently untrue um that it's hard to remember that that was one of the official alibis are you saying that it was untrue and known to be untrue at the time well whether or not mr rusk say believed that a south vietnamese post-french colonial buffer state guaranteed and underwritten by the us was an insurance against chinese expansionism or not i don't know but i do know that that's what he maintained it seems fantastic doesn't it but the the the godfather of that uh impulse was a containment the doctors contained what had been around since 1945-46 czech slovakia had provoked a re-invigoration of it i.e they must go no further and the behind that uh impulses to be sure that a perfectly raw uh colonialism which is everywhere displayed but also the threat of china doing their what they did in korea ten years earlier um on this containment question yes as well as containment in other words the reaction to the stalinization of eastern europe there was also something that had been going on during and after the second world war namely the and unnoticed because it could be assimilated under the rubric of containment or anti-communism which was the united states becoming without a vote or really much of a debate on the subject the successor stage to the former european empires okay to the british in um part of the mediterranean in the middle east especially after suez and 56 to the french and india china which is my main point you're not going to let me let him get away with calling us an empire but also to the culture the french the belgians in the congo to the french and portuguese and even in the dutch indonesia remember the coup in indonesia in 65. now the the origin of the what sometimes called the morass or quagmire in vietnam is the decision by eisenhower in dallas to inherit french colonial rule in vietnam that's really the situation the united states put itself in the position of being a classical colonial imperialist i don't i don't myself believe that they had a prayer reversing that verdict by continuing to bomb and destroy more of vietnam than they actually did and remember they covered it pretty much from end to end i don't think we really say there wasn't enough violence used on the vietnamese well it was it was suggested to president by that we intervened to prevent yen benfu and hebrew he said no so in in that sense he said french colonialism has to look after itself but the looking after itself is different from being colonized by another entity to it a soviet against which we were globally engaged and it mattered enormously when looking down on the old vietnam it appeared that vietnam the north was supposed to be the aggressor to the south threatening all that lay in the west closing questions on vietnam do you wish from this vantage point that we had simply never gone in yes you do christopher let me ask you what you wish between the fall of vietnam and the fall of the berlin wall i counted them up and there at least nine countries at least nine that fell under soviet domination do you feel as a coffee planter in cuba and a trotskyite any responsibility for the period of misery those people the people of those countries endured any personal responsibility yes actually any personal responsibility you want you and the and the generation of 68 the protesters i i really think it would be grandiose of me to accept any um but i also all right symbolic morally no of course i don't because i was a i wasn't you were right there always was a vocal opponent of that and um i consider the revolution of 1980. of the soviet union yes what do you regret that you did let me ask that what do you regret that you did in the 60s i think that i regret the there was a slogan that was painted on the walls of paris at one point in the great upheaval of may 68 which said take your desires for reality i think there was a certain um uh hedonistic utopianism around which though i tried to you grant bill's point about the self-indulgence oh i thought i did so except by substituting fornication for masturbation i thought i'd already clarified that all right saying no we went it was going all the way it wasn't uh it wasn't online and what do you regret that you did well i regret that i didn't uh sooner than we did um come forward with a countdown on the vietnam war we were always being told in 1950 uh 68 69 70 victories around the corner and uh they they tend to say that persuasively a lot of people were persuaded i went to vietnam three times and wrote back that it looked good i was told it looked good you regret trusting the government of the united states well it's that's what's the government i trust it is uh in individual people working their own perspectives now you can call that government if indeed you say well he works for the government but i i saw them and i thought i saw making individual i spent a night in a bunker with general abrams and and he wasn't giving me two and a half hours talk for the sake of of confusing me he this is what he thought and i haven't seen an awful article mcnamara is the great exception we've gone around saying during that whole time we were simply feeding american journalists and american surveyors stuff we knew wasn't true i think it's greatly to the credit of the united states that the government felt it had to lie to the people about this war from the beginning my main regret is i didn't do more uh than i did to help the anti-war movement it's still what little i didn't do is still a great cause of pride to me but i think and i'm not searching for common ground and saying this believe me but i should have thought that one thing we do perhaps share is feeling that uh widespread distrust in the government isn't a bad thing the fact that there was great disillusionment at that point may have struck you then as being a defeat but surely um from the conservative point of view there must be something sanitary about that i keep saying this the presumption is that the state is in the business of aggrandizing its power and and ought to be watched but the presumption taken to a certain point blinds you if in fact you simply refuse to listen to what is being said and then make your own evaluation barry goldwater went over and i saw him the day back he came back he's a pretty experienced fellow and he he thought this was 1967 he thought that the enemy couldn't continue to sustain uh the casualties are dead now that's a reasonable thing to say you might have been said that don't be sad there will never be any lack of people who will rise up and volunteer to commit suicide on behalf of a free vietnam you'd have been right but it would have been it would have been romantic for me to assume that you were right the image of the anti-war protesters is the captains the self-indulgence of fornication and so forth but civil rights quite different marches the march on montgomery martin luther king modeling himself on gandhi thrown in jail he says unearned suffering is redemptive now the civil rights movement gave rai was concretized in the civil rights acts and the big civil rights act of 64 and 68 65 actually is when it was enacted in 68. the big hullabaloo was over the act as it was coming to a vote in 64. barry goldwater opposed it i flipped through old copies of the magazine you edited at the time national review and national review speaks of the act in language that is in places just dripping with disdain why did you oppose those that act well we we oppose that act um on the grounds that uh it asked for constitutional liberties uh in an age in which constitutional liberties were being mobilized for this cause and that uh rather with with abandon and and we saw them addressing a situation which we doubted could be addressed in that way but i i have a very full perspective on life in the south in those days and it was life that simply assumed that uh whatever headway blacks made would be made within their own culture and that federal in interposition would be simply a renewal of civil war that was wrong but that perception was very very engaging and at what stage did you decide that it was wrong what i'm interested in did mark did the movement itself change your thinking and that of your family no but what what changed it was uh 10 or 15 years after it had passed i said to myself i don't think those constitutional arguments on which we relied were misspoken nor do i think them opportunistic but we got here a situation in which a better thing happens than would have happened by uh orderly pursuit of of a constitutional decorum i feel the same way about getting to the war against hitler i think it was full of deception hypocrisy i think that roosevelt did things with entirely different from what he intended and i'm glad he did you look with clear distaste on the protest that you saw from the 14th floor of your hotel in chicago in 1968 but you grant that the civil rights movement that aspect of the 1960s represents an achievement and a noble moment in american history no i don't think so you don't uh i think because i think the nature of what they did uh was um anti-thought anti-irrational the kind of thing that suck causes called socrates to leave seminars the demagoguery all right what did you make of the civil rights movement well um i couldn't phrase it better than you did i mean it seemed to me that it was the summer really especially dr king's leadership of what it was to take part in the movement that we called the 60s and i think probably the crucial moment for me and i remember very well was when dr king and his address at riverside church said that despite enormous lectures from the black establishment and the white liberal establishment too he was no longer going to remain silent by the vietnam war because and here's my third point about that war as well as about the movement all the energy that should have gone to the repair of uh legal racism and poverty in the south legally enforceable poverty and racism was going on the war i mean that johnson emulated his great society for that war and the connection between the two seemed so strong and self-evident as to be well with me still lyndon johnson broke his hump getting the civil rights bill through congress no burgess hump doing that precisely and broke his heart and other bits of his anatomy and other peoples as well in indochina and destroyed what had been going to be the great the advertised great society now we talk about lawlessness and the rest of it right the content for law what we only suspected then has been amply demonstrated since there was really quite high level collusion with crime and disorder and subversion and provocation by those who were sworn to uphold it either by the yes absolutely but by bugging by planting uh provocateur by stirring up incidents of violence by circulating false racist propaganda were the black panthers justified in engaging in violence well here here's another self-criticism at the time i certainly would have said yes and did say so because i thought it was very um stirring and i don't take all of this back either that there were blacks who didn't ask for anybody's permission anymore they didn't wait until the moment was ripe they didn't wait until there was a liberal consensus they said you know we want to do it on our own we have a perfect right to do that that struck me as a good thing and though it led to awful consequences in the case of the black panthers to gangsterism and um and so forth still i remember being i remember being more impressed by it now than i think i probably should have been to the extent even of saying by what by that kind of by that kind of black style by its courage and also make full self-criticism not recognizing um that the the king was the real revolutionary in other words thinking of him as really the moderate in the thing whereas when you look back on it he was the one who really took it on the chin as well as still in his 30s risking his life almost every day and refusing to threaten anybody else's for the rights of his own people so to speak but also also saying that moral statements had to be made about the war and about nuclear weaponry you saw you saw even the civil rights movement through the prison of vietnam and this tribe it's going to be very difficult not to see it that way because i certainly think and mr burkinaway confirms it that those who were on the other side saw the two things are somewhat linked as well as a challenge to a certain ruling order yeah your statement is that that they were seen by those on the other side we have a representative of those on the other side right here as a conjoined uh challenge to the established order yeah so the george wallace curtis lemay joint candidacy was in other words absolutely perfect the man who said we will level every work of man in vietnam the head of the bomber command and the man who said he would stand in the schoolhouse door yeah without coming up with the the placenta that fed fed the two movements and suggested that they were saying i think it's true the same people viewed the two phenomena uh as um in a sense link i a they were the causes of that time and that they drew the sympathies of the same kind of people meanwhile the conservatives were saying there are understandable strategic reasons for doing something about vietnam and in respect of the civil rights question we have to recognize that that progress goes slowly the progress has to build on the good nature of the community the final question on each of these issues civil rights you view that as a noble moment in american history and you bill what would your favorite impressed by how conventional of you that now is in some ways yes i think well bill's about to begin it may have may have masked from people how would you nobody really want what would your formulation be my formulation was that uh these civil rights programs were a uh a formulaic response to a real need and not by any means one that has proved as successful as an alternative means might have been and on vietnam bill a century hence will the american involvement in vietnam be seen to have done any good at all i i think it might be viewed historically as an act of constancy we had said that we were going to live by the doctrine of containment and we did our best we prevailed in korea we prevailed in berlin we prevailed in greece and we didn't prevail there but we gave the right signal that they might say and your view a century hence how will this be how will that war be seen much more as a crime than a mistake or a blunder much more consciously committed and as having done much more damage to american democracy than was recognized at the time as well as having betrayed even the vietnamese in whose name the american allied vietnamese in other words in whose name the war was conducted as a complete all-round textbook uh disaster and and crime christopher hitchens william f buckley jr thank you very much 30 years after the 1960s the united states is at peace abroad and at home but as hitchens and buckley demonstrated there's still something about that decade that won't quite let us go i'm peter robinson thanks for joining us

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 494,347

Rating: 4.8560944 out of 5

Keywords: HooverInstitutionUK, 1968, Vietnam, war, politics, protests

Id: FIbdbrN9cwo

Length: 24min 52sec (1492 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 16 2010

Reddit Comments

[u/eattherich_]

In addition,

Race Relations/Law Enforcement:

Watching the latest in L.A. video-whereby you may recline in your own home and view a selection of white policemen as they put the leather (and the billy club and the stun gun) to Mr. Rodney King-I thought, by God, the L.A.P.D. has really kicked the Selma syndrome once and for all. Yes, sir. Conversation among enlightened friends has tended to focus on the essential part played by the rear-guard cops, those who formed a thoughtful audience for the beating. Apart from the fact that they seemed to confirm the essential normalcy of the crime, in that the pounding officers knew that they need fear no informer or critic, these chaps evidently cared nothing for the good name of the white male. They were unaware that moralists from Dante to Sartre have stressed the culpability of those who are complicit by silence or inaction. Or for that matter, complicit by applause and enthusiasm. In a deadpan report from Los Angeles dated March 18, The New York Times accidentally provided the perfect metaphor:

Surrounded by yellow ribbons hung on hls behalf at police headquarters, Chief Gates told a crowd of cheering supporters that he would not heed widespread calls for his resignation following the beating on March 3 of Rodney G. King.

This could scarcely be bettered as an illustration of the latent symbolism of the yellow ribbon: a celebration of the essential cowardice and bluster that accompany a chauvinistic confidence in overwhelming brute force.

Source: Minority Report. April 8, 1991 - The Nation

[u/VageGozer]

Lets make something clear: protest good, riots bad. With every random store that gets their window smashed in and looted, and every assault on innocent people, the movement is losing supporters.

[u/[deleted]]

https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm

This is the MLK speech Hitchens refers to.