Reason Magazine - Staff

Writer on the Storm

info@reason.com (Bill Kauffman) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 12:00:00 EDT

In the 1960s there emerged a New Left. Until it was infected with the viruses of violence and Leninism, it was contemptuous of the Old Left’s embrace of bureaucratic centralism and committed to “participatory democracy,” civil rights for blacks, and, above all, the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam.

Carl Oglesby was the Middle American—and emphatically libertarian—voice of this New Left. The Akron, Ohio, native and son of a rubber-factory worker was a 30-year-old playwright laboring for a defense contractor in Ann Arbor, Michigan, when a series of events thrust him into the presidency of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the largest and most influential bloc of the student protest movement. Through marches and teach-ins and protests, SDS kicked up a ruckus in what Oglesby called “the assembly-line universities of this Pepsi Generation.”

In his influential 1967 essay “Vietnamese Crucible,” Oglesby praised “the libertarian tradition” and insisted that the New Left draw nourishment from the heritage of “humanistic individualism and voluntaristic associational action.” He disdained socialism, for as he explains in his most recent book, “In the eyes of a generation raised on George Orwell, big government seemed too much the suspect of choice in contemporary crime to be trusted as the manager of social progress.”

Oglesby parleyed and parried and partied with everyone from the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre to the libertarian economist Murray Rothbard to a young Wellesley activist named Hillary Rodham. He had the time of his life. But by 1968, SDS had splintered into rival factions. Oglesby represented what he called “SDS’s freewheeling participatory democracy” against the violent Weathermen, whose public face was the cheerleader turned bomb-cheerer Bernardine Dohrn. The Weathermen won the competition by losing: SDS was destroyed, in Oglesby’s words, by “the toxic blend of road rage and comic book Marxism…of the Weathermen.” The blast that shattered the student left was detonated on March 6, 1970, when three Weathermen died in a Greenwich Village townhouse after their homemade nail bomb accidentally went off.

The movement splintered; Oglesby burned out. He went on to record two folk albums, suffused with a kind of Beat Americana and elegiac—and nonpolitical—lyricism. Always haunted by the assassination of John F. Kennedy, he analyzed elite politics in The Yankee and Cowboy War (1976), in which he viewed American history from the JFK assassination to Watergate as a struggle between Eastern (Yankee) and Southwestern (Cowboy) interests. Oglesby would write two more books about the Kennedy killing.

Oglesby has recounted his experiences as the libertarian soul of SDS in a new memoir, Ravens in the Storm (Scribner’s), which he wrote with the research assistance of his 4,000-page FBI and CIA files. A septuagenarian now living in Amherst, Massachusetts, Carl Oglesby spoke with author Bill Kauffman in January.

Reason: How does a young aerospace supervisor at Bendix go from toiling for the military-industrial complex to president of SDS in the space of a year?

Carl Oglesby: Easy. The steps were simple, logical, nothing strange about what happened. I went to work for a congressional candidate [Wes Vivian, in 1964], and he wanted a position statement on Vietnam. I drew the short straw, so I started researching the war and wrote a paper for him, which said, “Wrong war. Wrong place. Don’t do it.” He said, “I’m not going to say anything like that: It sounds like appeasement.” So I withdrew from his campaign. About that time, New York SDS fought a big battle to get a subway poster that showed a picture of a burned Vietnamese kid and asked the question, “Why are we burning, torturing, killing the people of South Vietnam? Get the facts. Write SDS.” People had to fight to get the poster up because the city didn’t want to do it. That created a stir, the poster did go up, a few people wrote to SDS for the “facts,” and SDS didn’t have anything to send out. I had come across SDS people at the University of Michigan teach-in, and my paper became the document that got sent around when people wrote to SDS responding to that poster.

Reason: You go from supplying a position paper to president. That’s a meteoric rise.

Oglesby: You’ve got to remember that SDS was a very new organization, and the fact that I had just come in the door was not unique; a lot of people were in the same position. There had been a movement to get rid of the national officers on the grounds that to have a president, a vice president, a national secretary, was inherently elitist. I spoke against that, saying that SDS was going to be a part of the world and needed to have spokespeople it could hold to account. That position won out, somebody nominated me for president, and the winner turned out to be me.

Reason: You called yourself a libertarian while active in SDS. How significant was the libertarian presence within SDS and the New Left?

Oglesby: There was a strong presence but not dominant or majoritarian. Remember that SDS was founded to be a democratic organization, not to be socialist. Its most basic slogan was “People Should Be Involved in Making the Decisions that Affect Their Lives.” That was what SDS was about. Whatever decision gets made, it should be democratic. It was on that basis that SDS cut through the whole argument about socialism vs. capitalism. We simply said that whatever economic formation we adopted should be adopted democratically and openly.

Reason: In your 1967 essay “Vietnamese Crucible,” you quoted libertarian sorts like Frank Chodorov and Garet Garrett and asserted that “the Old Right and the New Left are morally and politically coordinate.” How did you come to that conclusion?

Oglesby: Just by looking at the things that those right-wing guys said. I can’t say that mine was the majority view within SDS in terms of that question, but I always thought that principled conservatives had as solid a reason to oppose the Vietnam War and to oppose racism as anyone within the conventional left.

Reason: Assessing the New Left from 40 years later, was it “morally and politically coordinate” with the Old Right?

Oglesby: Not in any active sense. There were very few connections between SDS and right-wing organizations. I can’t say that ever panned out. On the other hand, SDS was never a socialist organization. That doesn’t deny the fact that most people in SDS, if they had to make a choice between socialism, liberalism, and capitalism, would have called themselves socialist.

Reason: But not you.

Oglesby: No. I was always suspicious of government-operated systems.

Reason: Were there particular libertarians who helped open your eyes to the Old Right/New Left congruence?

Oglesby: Murray Rothbard, with whom I had several very delightful conversations, was one of my favorites.

Reason: You proposed that SDS cooperate with the right-wing student group Young Americans for Freedom [YAF] on some projects. Did anything ever come of that?

Oglesby: I got denounced within SDS for that. In Southern California, some YAF guys did respond to the call and took part in our demonstrations against the war.

Reason: SDS finally collapsed, and out crawled the Weathermen. What was your experience with the Weathermen?

Oglesby: A good many of them were close friends. The ones who got killed in the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion were especially close. Diana Oughten had been a babysitter of my kids. Terry Robbins had been the one guy in the world who listened to the lyrics of my songs and helped me figure out what I was trying to say. I remember talking about existentialism with Teddy Gold, spending a whole afternoon talking about Sartre and Heidegger and De Beauvoir.

I was close for a while to Bernardine Dohrn. I used to stay with her when I visited New York. Thought the world of her. Still like her, by the way. Jeff Jones was another Weatherman I was close to. I never thought they were right; I thought they were pushing the envelope in very destructive ways and were probably going to wind up hurting themselves and hurting SDS, which they now would acknowledge. Bernardine, early last year at a conference at Brown University, apologized for the role that she played. Very simply she stood up and said, “I’m sorry.” She didn’t have to explain what she was sorry for or why. She just said “I’m sorry” and sat down.

I had it pretty tough from the Weathermen for a while. I was seen as a despicable liberal. But I never felt impeded by the Weathermen. I was sorry that they destroyed SDS. Their view was that SDS had done what SDS could do and that now the struggle needed to be escalated. It was time to pick up the gun. And the Weatherkids thought they could get somewhere by doing that.

Reason: You quote Emma Goldman to great effect in the book.

Oglesby: “When you pick up the saber, you hand it to your enemies.”

Reason: The general view of the Weathermen today would be that they were nihilistic brats playing at violence. Is that unfair?

Oglesby: They weren’t nihilists. They were true believers. They had a passion for ridding the world, or the United States anyway, of a peculiarly odious form of cryptofascism, or militarism at least. They always were clear that they were fighting the militarizing of the United States and American foreign policy. They weren’t just into violence for violence’s sake. They were doing the best they could in their limited imagining of the situation to fight the people who were making things bad for Americans and Vietnamese and others around the world.

Reason: Did the Weathermen and SDS contain many federal agents provocateur?

Oglesby: Many? Who knows. Some, certainly. If there were no agents among us, then as taxpayers we would be well within our rights to demand to know why not!

I don’t think anybody ever objected to surveillance. People assumed that surveillance would exist; you just had to live with it. People were also willing to assume that surveillance would be honest, and that the government would not create, out of whole cloth, a pattern of abuses that it could attribute to us and use against us in the courts of public opinion and of law to destroy us. That was playing dirty.

I was not one of the first to see that the government played dirty. It took me a while to come to terms with that—if I ever did. My thought was, let the informers inform. If they’re honest, what they’ll inform is that we were an open, democratic organization with no hook-up to any foreign groups, no hook-up to the Communist Party. If you establish that, everything else is inconsequential.

But I was naive. The government had its own reasons for wanting to destroy SDS. We were messing up their plans, and they didn’t like us. So they did what they thought they needed to do to tear us up. That’s one of the reasons the Weathermen formed. I wouldn’t be surprised if the government had something to do with the Weathermen. [Johnson adviser] McGeorge Bundy said that the best thing they had going for them was the “violent doves.” It was to the government’s advantage if SDS undertook violent tactics: It turned the public against us, and it opened up the gates on police action.

Reason: In Ravens in the Storm, you recount a series of fascinating exchanges with Dohrn. “I’m not sure I know where you’re coming from,” says Dohrn. To which you reply, “Ann Arbor, Kent, Akron, Kalamazoo.” Not to frame the question too tendentiously, but did you represent a kind of hopefulness about America, while Dohrn and the Weathermen had given up on the place?

Oglesby: I had more faith in the country’s system, its decision-making apparatus. I had more faith in democracy. The Weathermen lost faith in democracy, if they ever had it. They decided that in America, democracy was a kind of ruse. I never agreed with them about that. They were convinced that no good decision was ever going to be made by appeals to American democracy, and so they tried to step into that moral gap with a set of decisions that they’d already reached. From then on, that was that. The decision to take up weapons, to become violent—that was not a democratically reached decision. Nobody ever put that to a vote. Obviously there would be special difficulties in debating something like that in a open organization. But there was never any particular constituency that was formed or sought out on the question of political violence.

Reason: There is a tension in your book in your exchanges with Bernardine Dohrn. Were the two of you ever an item?

Oglesby: We were very close.

Reason: Romantically linked?

Oglesby: What can I say? We were very close. But those were days in which a lot of people were serially linked. It was a period of open if not blatant sexuality. I was never her only squeeze. She was never mine. My marriage had broken up, so I was kind of a loose cannon.

Reason: You’ve said that the SDS “had the best parties, the prettiest girls.” When did the Left lose its sense of fun?

Oglesby: A good benchmark would be the explosion that killed Terry and Diana and Teddy. There was, as you can imagine, an enormous sense of loss and shock when they killed themselves. The Weathermen didn’t give up on violence after that. They just tried to be more careful in how they used their dynamite.

Reason: A young Hillary Rodham is said to have read with avidity an essay of yours in a magazine for Methodist youth. As a result, some of the dimmer bulbs on the anti-Hillary right assert that she was “deeply influenced” by the “Marxist/Maoist theoretician Carl Oglesby.” First, are you now, or have you ever been, a Marxist/Maoist theoretician?

Oglesby: I refuse to answer on the grounds that it may incriminate me! No, that’s just slinging mud.

Reason: Tell us about your relationship, as it were, with Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Oglesby: It was a friendship, a comradeship, within the context of the movement. She and I, for a while, were warm with each other. She and I were semi-close. I always liked her. I thought she was bright and had a lot to say. A friend of mine mentioned me to her not long ago, and according to him she got a case of the shakes. I think it was because she could imagine if any of her considerable enemies on the right wanted to do her in they would be happy to discover a relationship between her and me. Especially given this lie that I was a “Maoist.” I mean, no way! I was the last thing from a Maoist!

Reason: Did you see her when she was first lady?

Oglesby: I wouldn’t begin to be in touch with her now. I know what her enemies would do with a piece of information like that. They would defame me and defame her. There’s no point in it.

Reason: Is there today within her a trace of New Left anti-imperialism?

Oglesby: You got me. I don’t know much about her positions. What I think I know about Hillary Clinton is that she is honest and she’s good-hearted. She’s smart and she has lots of energy and she’s tough. I’m all for her. It’s too bad she and Barack Obama are having a faceoff. Both are good people. But she’s my guy.

Reason: Your own odyssey into American radicalism seems to have begun on November 22, 1963. Had Kennedy not been shot, do the ’60s and the New Left happen?

Oglesby: I don’t think so. If Kennedy is not shot, I think there’s not a Vietnam War and there is more energy put into civil rights. So to the extent that the movement of the ’60s was about the Vietnam War and civil rights more than any two issues, I would have to say that it was the assassination of JFK that swung that door open —or closed.

Reason: In The Yankee and Cowboy War, you theorized that “JFK was killed by a rightist conspiracy formed out of anti-Castro Cuban exiles, the Syndicate, and a Cowboy oligarchy, supported by renegade CIA and FBI agents.” Thirty years later, is that still your view?

Oglesby: These days I wouldn’t be so detailed. I still believe in the basic split between the Yankees and the Cowboys. The South, as it continually promised, is rising again. That’s a lot of what Bush is about.

Reason: But Bush is descended from Yankees.

Oglesby: He’s tried to adopt the Cowboy look. He is a Yankee, went to all the Yankee schools, had Yankee money in his blood. He goes to Texas, buys himself a pair of cowboy boots and a Stetson hat, and tries to speak with a bit of a drawl. He’s a phony. He’s a bad actor. He’s no more a cowboy than you or I—probably a good deal less. But his handlers grasped that there is a basic collision between the neo-Union and the neo-Confederacy. The Civil War is not over; its issues continue to echo. Bush II emerges from that process. He is a Cowboy, as I use that term, and represents the movement of the Confederacy from the East to the West.

Reason: Do you buy the Oliver Stone thesis that JFK was a late-blooming peacenik who was planning to extricate us from Vietnam, and that LBJ was somehow implicated in the assassination?

Oglesby: I think all those things are possible. Least likely is that LBJ was involved in any positive role. He wouldn’t have had to be. His people would have been able to make a decision to promote him to the presidency without any special advice from him. The Yankee and Cowboy war continues, and the JFK assassination was part of it. The JFK side—the neo-Union side—achieved a great deal in the way of a holding action in stamping out the original desire to depict Lee Harvey Oswald as a Soviet agent. If that doesn’t work, Oswald becomes the cause of World War III. If Oswald is tied to the Soviet Union, there is a cause of war. The assassination of a head of state by another state is a classical casus belli. Whoever was managing things around the Warren Commission did a good job in keeping that theory out.

The price of it was that Oswald had to be depicted as a loner—and that’s where so many lies and half-truths got drawn into the story. But better put up with a few lies and half-truths as to Oswald’s identity than to have him linked to the Soviet Union as an agent, which would drag the world into a nuclear war.

Reason: Just to clarify: You don’t believe that Oswald was a Soviet agent?

Oglesby: No, not at all.

Reason: You released two albums, Carl Oglesby (1969) and Going to Damascus (1971). Tell me about that period.

Oglesby: I started writing songs because I was no longer able to write plays. I had been a playwright before the movement came along. I’d written four plays that had been produced, the last being The Peacemaker, about the Hatfield-McCoy feud as a mirror onto the Civil War. It was about a historical character named William Dyke Garrett who tried to broker a peace between the Hatfield clan and the McCoy clan in the period after the Civil War. His wife, Sally, thought that he was doomed to fail and that the wisest thing to do was get out of that country and head west. He goes through a big crisis of conscience and decides that he can’t leave these people to the small war that they’re about to have with each other in the Appalachians. The Hatfield-McCoy feud did take place. Probably 50 to 60 people were killed over a handful of years. When I wrote that play there was a silly song: “The Hatfields and McCoys/Those feudin’ mountain boys.” Nobody took it seriously. You had to stop and reimagine it. These were real people who were shooting real bullets at each other. Was William Dyke Garrett right or just foolish to stay in the country and try to keep the shooting from starting?

Reason: Did this presage your role in SDS?

Oglesby: Like my hero Dyke Garrett, I was trying to do impossible things that I thought were right. Despite the sense of inevitable failure, I felt there was no way around the obligation to try to keep the damned thing from happening.

Reason: So why, four or five years later, couldn’t you write plays anymore?

Oglesby: There was always too much else to do. It’s not as if I broke all of my pencils. I just started writing books. And songs. Songs were fun. You could knock off a song in an afternoon if you were lucky. It was part of the movement’s culture: People had guitars and sang folk songs. So when the guitar got passed around at the party after the demonstration I would sing a few folk songs and then segue into one of my own. Word that I had written songs reached Maynard Solomon, who was president of Vanguard Records. He asked me if I would do an audition tape, so I did. He said that he wanted to do an album.

Reason: These two albums have been rereleased on CD. Perhaps there’s going to be an Oglesby music revival.

Oglesby: Don’t hold your breath.

Reason: Forty years ago, yours was the hopeful voice of American renewal in SDS. Do you remain hopeful?

Oglesby: It’s hard to imagine how the American citizenry could have put Bush back in for a second term. That goes a long way toward deflating one’s faith in democracy. Democracy only works if people pay attention and share some kind of essential commitment to values of honesty, truthfulness, concern for other people, and I just don’t see that anybody can make a decision about Bush without coming to terms with his failures in these respects. I can’t say I’m a pessimist; I’m just sitting back and watching it.

Clarence Thomas

info@reason.com (Bill Kauffman) — Sun, 01 Nov 1987 00:00:00 EST

Clarence Thomas, the chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, is that Washington rarity: a genuinely independent thinker.

Thomas's character was sculpted by his fierce, proud grandfather, Myers Anderson of Savannah, Georgia, who raised Clarence and his brother during the twilight years of segregation. Thomas went on to Holy Cross, where he was an angry black militant, then to Yale Law School, the Monsanto Corporation, and finally the staff of Missouri Republican Sen. Jack Danforth.

Thomas emerged as a leading critic of civil rights orthodoxy at the Fairmont Conference of black conservatizes in late 1980. He caught the Reagan administration's eye; a short stint as assistant secretary of education was followed by his 1982 nomination to head the EEOC. (He was reconfirmed in 1986.)

Under Thomas's direction, the agency--which is charged with overseeing enforcement of the panoply of job discrimination laws--has shifted its emphasis from imposing hiring goals and quotas toward protecting individual victims of discrimination. And Thomas has come under heavy fire from civil riqhts leaders for his heterodox vieuws.

The liberal and conservative establishments have never quite known what to make of the man. He is not your typical Reagan appointee: he flirted with the Black Panthers; he still respects Malcolm X; he cites the angry novelist Richard Wright and his laborer grandfather as major influences.

In a much-discussed profile in The Atlantic, Juan Williams recently painted Thomas as "something of a black nationalist, as well as a sad, lonely, troubled, and deeply pessimistic public servant. " Thomas disagrees.

And it is true that any melancholia lies beneath a friendly, engaging disposition. His candid conversation is punctuated by loud, hearty laughs; he is reputed to be a kind boss given to philosophical discussions with his colleagues.

Clarence Thomas was interviewed in his Washington office by Assistant Editor Bill Kauffman.

Reason: Ever Clarence Thomas profile I've ever read begins with a discussion of your grandfather.

Thomas: We're not going to start this one that way, right?

Reason: Do you view your professional career as a vindication of his life?

Thomas: It is a vindication of the way I was raised. Thank God I have had the opportunity to attempt to indicate it. The thing that bothered me when I was in college was that I saw myself rejecting the way of life that got me to where I was.

Reason: What were you rejecting?

Thomas: We rejected a very stable, disciplined environment. An environment with very strict rules, an environmenl that put a premium on self-help, an environment that did not preach any kind of reliance on government--there was a feeling that you had an obligation to help other people, but it didn't come from the government. For example, we lived out in the country during the summer, and so we'd shop once a month. We had chickens and hogs and corn and beans on the farm, but the staples we had to go to the grocery to get. When we came back my grandfather would go by people's houses, and he would just drop groceries on the porch. Or if we harvested something, he'd just put it there and leave. Somebody's house burned down, he'd go and start marking it off and we'd start building another house.

We rejected all of that--it was gauche. You weren't supposed to think that old- fashioned people who couldn't read and write had anything to offer.

Reason: Isn't there a danger of idealizing his environment? He felt the sting of racism, I assume, quite often.

Thomas: Sure, there is a danger of idealizing everything. I think unfortunately we've idealized the bad, particularly about the South. The myths that are created about the South, about the way we grew up, about black people, are wrong. The things that worked have nothing to do with the things that are being offered today. We've talked more about civil rights after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than we talked about it before 1964. I grew up in the midst of all that. My grandfather was very active: he put his property up to bail the protesters out. And all of us were members of the NAACP--the local NAACP. But my grandfather was more interested in raising a family. He had two little boys to provide for. Maybe there is a danger in idealizing. But I am defending what I know occurred, and what was important to us and what worked.

Reason: A number of scholars over the last decade or so have also been trying to revive that sort of ethos. The gray eminence of it all is Thomas Sowell. When did you first become acquainted with Sowell, and did you agree with him right away or did you think he was nuts or...

Thomas: I think initially I thought he was nuts. I was just starting Yale Law School, and someone had given me Blaclk Education: Myths and Tragedies--"God, you've got to read this crazy book. This guy is out of his mind." I picked it up and flipped through it. It really went against all the things we'd been indoctrinated to believe about the radical movement and the peace movement when we were in college. So I threw it in the trash.

I went on my merry way, challenging all sorts of things but not really aligning myself with anybody or any idea. I went out to Jefferson City, Missouri--if you ever want to be deprogrammed from any kind of a cult, go to Jeff City--and I just rethought everything. A friend of mine, I'll never forget it, called me up and said, "Clarence, there's another black guy out here who is as crazy as you are. He has the same ideas that you have. There are two of you!"

Reason: Better not get on the same plane, right?

Thomas: "I can't remember his name," he said. "It's Sowl or Sool or Sail or something." I said, "Oh my goodness." He said. "I've got the review of a book that he just wrote." So I immediately dropped everything I was doing and got the review of his book, The Economics and Politics of Race. It was like pouring half a glass of water on the desert. I just soaked it up. Then I tried to get ahold of him. I called UCLA. where he was--the word I got was nobodv knew who he was. So I didn't contact him. A friend of mine noticed that he was speaking at Washington University, so I left work and went over there. He was really great. I went up to him and begged him to autograph my book.

Then he moved on to Stanford, and I bugged him. I know I bugged the man. When I got to Washington I used to hold court every morning with some of the other black staff assistants and give lectures about these things.

Reason: How were they received?

Thomas: Let's just say it was a mixed reaction. At a point, both in Monsanto and on the Hill, there were some people who when they saw me tried to evade me: at 12:15 they were trying to catch a 12:00 plane! At any rate, I consider him not only an intellectual mentor, but my salvation as far as thinking through these issues. I thought I was absolutely insane. His book was manna from heaven.

Reason: Did you talk to him before taking the job ai the EEOC? Did he have any advice?

Thomas: Oh, I don't think Tom Sowell would tell anybody to join the administration. That's not his style. But I think his attitude has always been if it had to be done he'd prefer me to do it than somebody else.

Reason: I suspect that he might think that the EEOC ought not to exist. Why do you think that this agency should exist in a free society?

Thomas: Well, in a free society I don't think there would be a need for it to exist. Had we lived up to our Constitution, had we lived up to the principles that we espoused, there would certainly be no need. There would have been no need for manumission either. Unfortunately, the reality was that, for political reasons or whatever, there was a need to enforce antidiscrimination laws, or at least there was a perceived need to do that. Why do you need a Department of Labor, why do you need a Departmenr of Agriculture, whv do you need a Department of Commerce? You can g down the whole list--you don't need any of them, really.

I think, though, if I had to look at the role of government and what it does in people's lives, I see the EEOC as having much more legitimacy than the others, if properly run. Now, you run the risk that the authority can be abused. When EEOC or any organization starts dictating to people, I think they go far beyond anything that should be tolerated in this society.

Reason: Although the EEOC does issue mandates to private employers.

Thomas: No, not really. To some extent in the past there has been what I consider a social engineering phase of the agency. But what I believe is that if a person's individual rights or right to be a part of our economic system is violated under statute, we aggressively go after it. But we don't issue mandates to businesses that you've got to do this and you've got to do that.

Reason: Say I'm a private employer and I'm a racist, and no matter how qualified a black candidate is I don't look at him. Isn't it my right to hire whom I choose? Should the state force me to hire somebody?

Thomas: I guess theoretically, you're right. You say, it's my property and I can do as I damn well please. I'm able to choose my wife, I can choose my employees. I can choose where I live, I can choose where I want to locate my business, the whole bit. I think, though, that we've embodied the principle of nondiscrimination because we don't have a homogeneous society. And the problem is that we had state-imposed racism in our society. We had segregation and slavery that was state-protected, state-imposed, state-inflicted. The state can't undo the harm that was done, but I feel very strongly that if there is any role for the state, it is to protect us from others.

Let's look at it from the other side. When you prevent somebody from participating in our free society and the economics of our free society, I have some real problems. That's a right to me.

Reason: Well it's clearly immoral to do that, but should it be illegal?

Thomas: I'm torn. If I were to look at it theoretically, as you say. I would have to say I'd like the state out of my business. Putting it back in the context of reality, I can't say that. I have seen the devastating impact of the denial of economic opportunities to certain groups, including my race. For example, my grandfather--here was a man who worked really hard. He owned his own business 'cause he didn't want to work for anybody, and the state and other individuals ganged up to conspire against him. It sounds really nice and convenient to say that if he were in an equal bargaining position, if he possessed other options, he could have pursued those options. But when a group of whites who are not a part of government conspire to deprive him of that, what does he do?

Reason: You've said that quotas are basically for the black middle class. What do you mean by that?

Thomas: When you look at where the real problems are among minorities in our society, particularly blacks, it's at the bottom. It's the people who are in school systems that don't educate, neighborhoods where there is a lot of crime, drugs, the whole bit. You don't see them being affected by a quota system at IBM or Xerox or the Fortune 500. They're not going to have those jobs. They're not going to be the people who go to Yale or Harvard or Princeton. They don't even come up to the line to be included. To the extent that you should have any kind of efforts, it should be for those individuals who are on the bottom. Help the people who need help most, and don't just feed them this pablum of welfare and leave them in neighborhoods that are riddled uith crime, where nobody would start a business or would go to try to live. Don't shuttle them off into public housing, which in some instances amounts to concentration camps.

Reason:Is that the nub of your criticism of the establishment civil rights movement today--that it's essentially upper-middle-class blacks who've made it, presuming to speak for people on the bottom?

Thomas: I would not characterize it as the nub of my criticism. I think it's really out of touch with reality. I came from the people that they're leading; I didn't come from the leadership ranks, I came from among the people I'm most concerned about. So did Thomas Sowell, so did Jay Parker, so did Walter Williams. We lived in the neighborhoods that they've created myths about. My grandfather--that's the guy that got me out. It wasn't all these people who are claiming all this leadership stuff.

It really bugs me that someone will tell me, after I spent 20 years being educated, how I'm supposed to think. That is offensive to me; it was offensive to me in the second grade, so you know it's offensive to me now, almost 39 years old. And I don't think that government has a role in telling people how to live their lives. Maybe a minister does, maybe your belief in God does, maybe there's another set of moral codes, but I don't think government has a role.

Reason: So would you describe yourself as a libertarian?

Thomas: I don't think I can. I certainly have some very strong libertarian leanings, yes. I tend to really be partial to Ayn Rand, and to The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. But at this point I'm caught in the position where if I were a true libertarian I wouldn't be here in government.

Reason: In the early days the Black Panthers seemed to be very much decentralists, power to the neighborhood, and all that. You were sympathetic to them, weren't you?

Thomas: I was sympathetic to virtually all groups that wanted to get away from the old system. And I thought that the NAACP and the Urban League and CORE and the rest of those groups were aggressive enough. The Panthers offered for some of us who were young hot-blooded and ill-tempered, another way.

Reason: In retrospect was there something good about the Panthers?

Thomas: I really don't know. At the time, l9, 20 years old, we thought there was a lot. The positive was that it keep us thinking about change. The unfortunate thing was that it wrapped a lot of Marxist-Leninism and a lot violence. But I was also partial to the Black Muslims, primarily because of their belief in self-help.

Reason: It's odd that Malcolm X isn't a conservative hero, isn't it? He was very good on self-help.

Thomas: Yes, but he had some very strong things to say about whites. I' been very partial to Malcolm X, particularly his self-help teachings. I have virtuallv all of the recorded speeches of Malcolm X.

Reason: Then you still see him as hero.

Thomas: Let's say I'm a little bit more discriminating in what I accept and what I reject. There is too much sometimes of the antiwhite rhetoric. There is a lot of good in what he says, and I go throughit for the good.

Reason: Any writers who were real influential to you when you were young and still are?

Thomas: Richard Wright. I would have put him number one, numero un, Both Native Son and Black Boy reall woke me up. He captured a lot of th feelings that I had inside that you learn how to suppress. His novel Outside, which is his autobiographical flirtation with communism, was reallv good for me, because when I got to college you had a lot of radical groups that were trying to attract black students who were upset--and I was really upset and that novel sort of prepared me to not be swept away by this kind of recruitment.

Reason: There was a very interesting article--I'm not sure if you thought it was interesting-- by Juan Williams in The Atlantic where he called you a black nationalist. Do you agree with that?

Thomas: Nah. I think Juan stopped short--he got halfway to the destination and got off the train. He is certainly an excellent writer and a good person, but I'm not a nationalist. I have been angry enough in my life, and there are some points where I'm sure my attitudes approached black nationalism. I'm certain you could say the same thing about Malcolm X. But again, a lot of that grows out of that anger and that frustration and the feeling that you've got to do something, and you hear certain groups beckoning you on. You heard the Panthers beckoning you on, you heard the socialists or communists beckoning you on, you heard the radical students and the anarchists beckoning you on. The conservaties really didn't make an effort--they were hoarding the status quo.

Reason: Are there any areas where you think today that the civil rights establishment is doing really good work? By that I mean NAACP and...

Thomas: No.

Reason: None?

Thomas: I can't think of any. I'm the wrong person to ask, because of the malice with which they have treated me. There were grand opportunities for them to focus on the proper education of minority kids, the kids who are getting the worst education, and instead they're talking about integration. God--I went to segregated schools. You can really learn how to read off those books, even if white folks aren't there. I think segregation is bad, I think it's wrong, it's immoral. I'd fight against it with every breath in my body, but you don't need to sit next to a white person to learn how to read and write. The NAACP needs to say that.

You've got a situation recently where the president of the NAACP or one of his spokespersons is defending a kid who punched out a teacher. Give me a break! How in the hell are the kids going to learn if they can punch out the teacher? I would have died if I'd done something like that and I went back home to my grandfather--literally died. You've got to have some standards of morality, some strong positive statements about expectations--and those organizarions could do that. Instead, they spend their time telling minority kids that it is hopeless out here. Why is it hopeless? Because Ronald Reagan is making it hopeless.

When Ronald Reagan is gone, why are you going to tell them that it's hopeless? Because the government isn't spending enough money. It will always be hopeless if that's the reason. You don't have any control over that. What you do have control over is yourself. They should be telling these kids that freedom carries not only benefits, it carries responsibilities. You want to be free, you want to leave your parents' house? Then you've got to earn your own living, you've got to pay your own mortgage, pay your own rent, buy your own car, and pay for your own food. You've got to learn how to take care of yourself, learn how ro raise your kids, how to go to school and prepare for a job and take risks like everybody else.

Reason: Why do you think the NAACP has never really picked up on any of the opportunity themes that Walter Williams sketched in The State Against Blacks, like taxicab regulations? Why do you think they seem uninterested in things like that?

Thomas: They are pro-government. It's simple. My grandfather had an opporrunity to make a lot of money during the building boom after the Korean War and World War II. He couldn't get the license. These are things that I didn't have the read the The State Blacks to know. We saw it. A black person could not obtain an electrician's license. So what they would do is wire an entire house and then pay maybe $100 to a white electrician to connect the wire from the post to the box--about a two minute job.

Reason: I guess it's dangerous to speak about people as a block or a monolith, but do you think a large number of black Americans share your instincrive aversion to governmen?

Thomas: I think that a lot of black Americans have a lot of different opinions on a lot of different things. But I know that the vote of 9 out of 10 black Americans for the Democratic Party or for leftist kinds of policies just is not reflective of their opinions. The Republican Party and the conservatives have shown very little interest in black Americans and have actually done things to leave the impression among blacks that they are antagonistic to their interests. Even as someone who's labeled a conservative --I'm a Republican I'm black, I'm heading up this organization in the Reagan administration--I can say that conservatives don't exactly break their necks to tell blacks that they're welcome.

Reason: Is the solution for guys like you to assume really public profiles, maybe not as Republicans, but as independents or something and run for office?

Thomas: I don't think we'd ever win. Certainly the blacks won't vote for you --at least not now. And whites...I'd have to say there is still racism in our society and there are still attitudes based on race. So I wouldn't expect that that would work anytime soon. We've gotten beyond the point where we were totally ignored--"They're just pimples on the horizon. They'll disappear and everything will be all right. It's a passng fad. Like hula hoops or pet rocks." We haven't gone away. And I think the best thing we can do is not to go away. One of the things that it's forced us to do is to think through everything. I don't know one of my friends who is considered a conservative who has not had to go back and thoroughly think through everything. You do a lot of soul-searching--'cause we are not going to win any popularity contests.

Reason: You seem uncomfortable with the label "conservative."

Thomas: I'm willing to accept it for the sake of discussion so I don't have to spend a whole lot of time on definitions, etc. But I'm just Clarence Thomas. I'm an individual. Some people say well, you're something. Well I'm Clarence Thomas. okay? I'm black. I know it. I'm a male I know that. I know my biography up to a point and these are my beliefs now. If that adds up to your view of what a conservative is, fine.

Reason: You took this job in government, and all of a sudden people are saying terrible things about you--are you used to that now? Does it bother you when you go home at night?

Thomas: It doesn't bother me when I go home. Early on--you have to remember I was thrown on this scene. After we got back from the Fairmont Conference in 1980, it was a the first time I'd had any kind of articles written about me. All of a sudden my views, or at least the journalistic synopsis of my views, are in a major paper, the Washington Post. I wasn't used to this kind of thing. I never ran for office. I rarely raised my hand in college. And suddenly, my name is in the paper. And to hear the things they said about me--Carl Rowan and some of the others. It does affect you. But it is so bad and so offbase that you just have to shake your head.

Winston Churchill was asked, Why did you become prime minister? He said, "Ambition." Well, why did you stay so long? He said, "Anger." That's one of the reasons I went back up for reconfirmation. You're not going to run me out of town. I'm going to stay right here. If I'm not reconfirmed, I'll drive a truck. I'll work in a gas station. I'll work at McDonald's.

Reason: I guess it was at the Fairmont Conference that you said, "If I ever went to work for the EEOC or did anything directly connected with blacks, my career would be irreparably ruined. The monkey would be on my back to prove that I didn't have the job because I'm black.'' I assume you've changed your mind?

Thomas: No. I haven't changed my mind.

Reason: The monkey on your back, is it?

Thomas: I'll be honest with you. When I was asked to go to the Department of Education as well as come here you're dang right I was insulted. What other reason besides the fact that I was black? But then I had to ask myself, if you don't do it, what are you going to say about these issues in the future? If you had an opportunity to get in there and you didn't do it, what standing do you have to complain? As one friend put it to me, "Clarence put up or shut up." And I wasn't going to shut up. [Laughter] There is no way anybody was going to shut me up.

And since I've been here, I've thought a lot about the rights of the individual. If the things that are being done to the individual in this city were being done by one person, we'd all think that we were living under a dictatorship. We'd all be thinking in a rebellious way about how we were going to get out from under this dictatorship. The erosion of freedoms is incredible.

Reason: Should we be thinking about rebellion'

Thomas: Well, I'm not an anarchist. But I tell you what--we should all be thinking about going to Sears and getting ourselves a tent and a survival kit! [Laughter]

I do think that our freedoms are at risk. There are very few people in the private sector and the public sector who are talking about freedoms. We're talking about interest groups, we're talking about issues, we're talking about our piece of the action, my project, this building, that building. What about freedom? What about the system or the environment that allows us to mind our own business? To liv e our lives, raise our families? There isn't a whole lot of talk about that.

Reason: This isn't really a big-picture city, is it?

Thomas: Ultimately somebody has to think about that. What is there about this country that will lead people to crawl through sewers, get on innertubes and float across miles of water, to sneak out in the middle of the night, to cram in under trucks and buses and other things, risk their lives going across mountains, etc.--what is it about this country that people will do all those things to come in, and what is it about the Soviet Union or Cuba or the Eastern Bloc countries that would force people to do those same things to get out?

It's not so much that we're not asking ourselves the big-picture questions --we're not asking ourselves the simple questions about what is good about our society. And whether or not we are preserving the health of our society. Are we going to wait until we lose that health to be concerned about it?

An Interview with Eldridge Cleaver

lynns@reason.org (Lynn Scarlett) info@reason.com (Bill Kauffman) — Sat, 01 Feb 1986 00:00:00 EST

The Black Panthers scared the hell out of America in the 1960s. Emerging from the ghettos of Oakland, they scorned the establishment black leadership as Uncle Toms and took to the streets demanding "total liberty for black people or total destruction for America, " in the words of Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver.

In and out of reform schools and prisons since the age of 13 and an avowed "insurrectionary" rapist, Cleaver discovered radical politics and a flair for writing in Folsom Prison. Upon his release in 1966 he joined the fledgling Black Panther Party and started writing for the monthly Ramparts.

Cleaver burst upon the national scene in 1968 with the publication of Soul on Ice, a collection of his prison writings. Hip, revolutionary, and teeming with hatred for "everything American—including baseball and hot dogs, " Soul on Ice became the Bible of Black Power and Eldridge Cleaver the intellectuals' favorite black radical.

The Black Panthers' early rhetoric had been decentralist, but the organization soon degenerated into Maoist politics and senseless violence. On April 6, 1968, Cleaver participated in a shootout with Oakland police—'60s legend has it that three carloads of Panthers were ambushed while Cleaver was urinating in a side street—in which 17-year-old Black Panther Bobby Hutton was killed. (Cleaver offers a different version of these events below.)

To avoid being sent back to prison for his part in the Hutton shootout, Cleaver skipped the country, taking refuge in Cuba. He spent the next seven years wandering through the communist world, with sojourns in Algeria, North Korea, China, and the Soviet Union before finally settling in France. But in 1975, homesick and deeply disillusioned with revolutionary politics, Eldridge Cleaver came home. "Pig power in America was infuriating," he wrote upon his return. "But pig power in the communist framework was awesome and unaccountable."

The repatriated Cleaver was denounced by his former comrades as an apostate, a turncoat, even an FBI informer. His conversion to Christianity and anticommunist pronouncements combined to give him a right-wing reputation—a reputation, as this interview makes clear, that is a far cry from the truth. Eldridge Cleaver lives today in a modest apartment in Berkeley, California, where he is hard at work writing a history of the '60s. A large American flag flies from his front porch. His wife, Kathleen, his partner in exile, is a student at Yale Law School in New Haven, Connecticut, where she lives with the couple's children, Jodu and Maceo.

Eldridge Cleaver was interviewed at his Berkeley apartment by REASON editors Bill Kauffman and Lynn Scarlett.

REASON: What do you think is the legacy of the 1960s? Was it a positive period?

Cleaver: Well, overall, I would have to say there is a lot of positive. There is a lot of negative, also. You have three things going on—a cultural revolution, the antiwar movement, and also the black liberation movement—and they were a mix, but America has been completely transformed because of them. We've gotten rid of the system of segregation, and that's a plus for America. We've gone down the road to completely demolishing that whole mentality. And the war is no longer with us in Vietnam. So I think there are some pluses.

The minuses that I see—I think we went overboard ideologically. I live here in Berkeley where my old comrades are now in power, and I find myself struggling against them. And this is the legacy, that the left became so ideologically attached to anti-Americanism and pro-communism and Third Worldism that I believe that we have a problem on our hands.

REASON: How do you look back on your Black Panther days?

Cleaver: With amazement. I am writing a history of what I call "the domestic wars." It's a history of the whole movement that we've been talking about. And I am impressed by certain things, such as the small number of people who were killed in that transformation that took place starting with the civil-rights decision by the Supreme Court in 1954. It was a very economical process in terms of blood being spilled.

I learned during the period in the Black Panther Party that in America one bullet fired really has the impact that large-scale battles have abroad. It has to do with the diffusion of information; magnified through the media, one bullet is like a whole fusillade. So an incident can take place where there is a little shooting, and it was as though the whole country participated, and people drew lessons or reacted or made decisions not only in the locality where the shooting took place but throughout the country.

The process was confrontational, it was frightening, it was terrible; but in the final analysis I think it is amazing that America had that ability to jettison structures that were demonstrably untenable and, you know, to walk away from some of those traditions.

I myself really used to be obsessed with—I used to really plan on how to kill Ronald Reagan. I'm talking about hatred, hatred that was blind to any other influence. I don't have that hatred any more. I've had opportunities to kill Ronald Reagan going around the country, and it never occurred to me to do that. And knowing my own heart and how I've walked away from hatred, I think other people have done the same thing. This is the hopeful thing, and I think that people all over the world can do the same thing.

REASON: Did the Panthers try to provoke violence? Was that part of the strategy?

Cleaver: Sure it was part of the strategy. It was using the theories of revolutionary violence. A lot of people don't like to give us credit, but in America you had some of the best-educated revolutionaries in the world—even better-educated than some successful revolutionaries in other countries. We studied the experiences of these other countries and we knew the theories of guerrilla warfare and Marxism and Leninism and people's war, and we definitely were not sitting back waiting for the authorities to attack us. We used to lie about it, because the information was a weapon also. We would go out and ambush cops, but if we got caught we would blame it on them and claim innocence. I did that personally in the case I was involved in.

REASON: The Bobby Hutton case?

Cleaver: Yes. We went after the cops that night, but when we got caught we said they came after us. We always did that. When you talk about the legacy of the '60s, that's one legacy. That's what I try to address, because it helped to distort the image of the police, but I've come to the point where I realize that our police department is necessary.

REASON: I just read Soul on Fire, your 1978 book, and the police seemed terribly abusive and violent nonetheless. I mean, even if they were. . .

Cleaver: Sure they were abusive and violent. They were murderers. And they still are. But policemen are like dogs on a leash. I'm not saying this to put them down, but you take the leash off a dog and it sics you, and that dog is going to bite if it is an obedient dog. The police function under political direction. They go after whoever they are sent after, and that's where the problem comes in.

Now we had a situation where we are dealing with a tradition—black people were moving out of their traditional position in America. Nobody knew what to do about it. The white politicians were confused, the blacks were confused. We didn't know exactly how to go about it. And the police were told to go out, stop those civil-rights marches, scare those people, terrorize them, beat them, use cattle prods, use this and that, and they went out and did that. When you talk to police now who participated in that, you find out that they were in the same position we were in—just trying to find the right formula.

REASON: So are you saying that in a sense their position vis-a-vis the Black Panthers was justified?

Cleaver: I'm not saying justified. I'm just saying that part of the attitude was traditional—"Keep these niggers in their place." They were functioning under orders, they were also humans. You can condemn the tradition, you can condemn the excesses. But when we have no axe to grind, we are just trying to understand, we are looking at human beings.

REASON: The nation's top cop, J. Edgar Hoover, seemed to be obsessed with the threat the Panthers posed to law and order. Do you understand him in the same way?

Cleaver: Sure I can understand J. Edgar Hoover, because he wasn't inaccurate. We were the most militant black organization, and we were serious in what we were going about. He said that we were the main threat. We were trying to be the main threat. We were trying to be the vanguard organization. J. Edgar Hoover was an adversary, but he had good information. We were plugged into all of the revolutionary groups in America, plus those abroad. We were working hand-in-hand with communist parties here and around the world, and he knew that. So from his position, he had to try to stop us.

REASON: A lot of the Panthers seem to be, personally, pretty strong individualists, like you, and yet you espoused revolutionary socialism, collectivism. Did you notice the inconsistencies?

Cleaver: At the time I didn't notice it. It's one thing to study Marxism on paper, living in a capitalistic country where you have individual freedoms and so forth—you don't really see the relationship between the ideology and the form of government that comes out of that ideology. Now, when I had a chance to go and live in communist countries this individualism came into conflict with the state apparatus, and that's when I recoiled against it. But when I was here I was looking at Marxism-Leninism as a weapon, as a tool, to fight against the status quo, and you know, it's just a quality of human beings that when they are trying to tear something down they don't pay enough attention.

Just like in South Africa right now They went to visit Nelson Mandela, an they asked him, "Would you prefer apartheid to communism?" And his attitude was, Communism is better than apartheid. Because apartheid has him in prison and has had him in prison for 2 years. Well, you get a guy in a communist country who has been in prison there for 20 years, and he will tell you, "I would rather live under apartheid," because he could leave. But the truth is that any form of constraint on our freedoms is not acceptable.

REASON: There is an interesting debate going on today, with economists and social scientists like Thomas Sowell, Charles Murray, and Walter Williams arguing that government welfare programs actually hurt the people they're tended to help. What do you think?

Cleaver: I've come to basically the same conclusions. My life, I think, spans the whole era of the welfare state. I was born in 1935. I remember when people were ashamed to be on welfare and receive state aid and all that, but we developed a situation where black people to a large degree and a lot of other groups such as elderly people, children and a lot of poor white people ended being harnessed by political forces, particularly the Democratic Party. In return for the federal appropriations that we now dependent upon, our leaders were obligated to get out the black vote for the Democratic Party. So this put us in a negative relationship with the economic system. We were dependent upon the federal budget—a very precarious situation, because when the political winds change, we get our living cut off.

REASON: How do you break that dependence? Something like 90 percent of blacks voted for Mondale.

Cleaver: Ninety percent of voting blacks. A majority of the black people didn't participate in the election and never have. But I think that the only way to break the cycle is to give—not give, but make it possible for black people to have a stake in the economic system, where they earn wages, salaries, interest, and dividends. This is the only way you can break that. You're not going to pull your living out of the air. If you can't get your living through participation in the production process, then you are going into dependency on the consumption process. I would like to see black people flood into the productive process.

REASON: Are problems of poverty things that the government can solve, or do they have answers elsewhere, through different institutions or the private sector?

Cleaver: It would have to be the private sector. But at the point where we are right now, the government can't just bow out. This is one of the problems Reagan had. He scared the hell out of people because he started cutting programs, but he didn't spend enough time talking to people about how to replace them. So people had this idea that he was just throwing them aside.

What we have to do is organize people in free institutions that can put them to work, and then they can draw their living out of our economy, not out of the federal treasury. Because the federal treasury doesn't produce anything. It gets what it has out of the private sector.

We need entities where people could belong to organizations that are not controlled by government. The organizations could come up with projects that would benefit society and then they could earn money that would come out of that national product and not filter through the state. If we do it through the state like, say, President Roosevelt did it with the New Deal, you augment the power of the state. But if you do it through decentralized structures that are controlled by the people, then we maintain our freedom, within a free institution. I don't want to see the government get control of the economic system as a whole and the livelihood of all the people, because I have seen that, and it's a no-no.

REASON: Aren't private ventures of this sort what people like Muslim dissident leader Louis Farrakhan are after? What do you think of Farrakhan?

Cleaver: I know Farrakhan. You know, he taps a deep chord among the people because people want to be involved in some enterprise, they want to have money that they can control and get some benefit out of, something that the government doesn't control. The same activity that Farrakhan is talking about doing could be funded in other ways. But because we don't have any provision for that, he goes to Qaddafi. The problem with that is that Qaddafi is not giving away anything. He has some strings attached.

REASON: Is Farrakhan a dangerous man because of his Qaddafi connection?

Cleaver: Certainly he's a dangerous man, because he will do things for them—intelligence things, but also military things.

REASON: When you were living in exile in Cuba and Algeria, what was it that started to make you rethink your view of them and their government?

Cleaver I had a great burning desire to help enlarge human freedom and no desire at all to increase human misery or totalitarianism, so I stood up in America to fight against what I saw as the evils of I our system. Then to go to a country like Cuba or Algeria or the Soviet Union and see the nature of control that those state apparatuses had over the people—it was shocking to me. I didn't want to believe it, because it meant that the politics that I was espousing was wrong and was leading toward a very bad situation. So, I tried to figure out what was wrong.

You know, the communists teach you that the dictatorship is a transient phase—that once capitalism is eliminated, then the state will wither away and you will have freedom. Well, when you look at those governments up close and see how they treat their own people, you can't believe in that. You see that people are using that preachment of the withering away of the state as their excuse to justify their own dictatorial power. The way that the goods and services of the economy are distributed, the way that the power mechanism is organized and the monopoly on power by the Communist Party, the control of the Communist Party apparatus by an elite—these things struck me as dangerous. And then when I had a chance to get to know people and see what the experiences had been in these countries since their revolutions, it made me realize that a new form, a worse form, of totalitarianism was creeping into the world and that it was necessary to sound an alarm against it, stand up and protest it—without sugar-coating anything that's wrong over here.

That's been the mistake made by a lot of people in assessing what I have said. I have never intended to say that we can rest on our laurels or we can stay right where we are. But I wanted to point out that we had better be careful where we jump when we jump out of the frying pan.

REASON: A lot of American intellectuals have gone, say, to the Soviet Union or China and come back full of praises. What you saw in Cuba, Algeria, China, or the Soviet Union, somehow they just overlooked. Do you think it's because usually these things are short, they just scurry right through? Or what was it that made you able to perceive...

Cleaver: It was exactly that—the shortness of it, the duration of their experience and the depth and quality of it. See, I lived in those kinds of places and I got to know people and made friends. I got to know the governments, the people in the military, people in the Communist Party or whatever they called it. That gives you a different perspective.

When I first went to those countries boy was I impressed. If you would read some of the things I wrote then! I was full of praise, because I got that standard tour that they give people to impress them. I took the same tour that Barbara Walters took in Cuba, and Senator [George] McGovern, but after the tour I had a chance to meet other people and have a different experience. If I had gone only on the basis of how the governments treated me, I would have continued praising them, because really they did treat me well. They gave me a red-carpet treatment in those countries. But when you get off the red carpet and step down in the mud where the people are, you get a chance to talk to them and hear the stories that they have to tell, over and over again.

I lived out there for eight years. I lived in Cuba, I lived in Algeria, and I lived in France. I traveled throughout Africa, throughout the Communist world, and I had a chance to be a part of different cliques, and I got all of their criticisms of the other groups. When you get a chance to see behind the scenes, behind the rhetoric of international solidarity and world revolution and all of that, there is naked national self-interest. You see the Soviet Union jockeying for power against China. You see the Koreans and Vietnamese trying to stay out of the clutches of both of them. And you begin to develop a little realism or cynicism.

REASON: In your book Soul on Fire you say that of all the communist groups you associated with, it was the North Vietnamese that you most liked and felt were more akin to what the ideology seemed like it should be.

Cleaver: Yes. You could sympathize with them, because they were struggling against the Soviet Union and China trying to dominate them, and they were also struggling against Chinese racism. So they had an antiracist attitude, and they had an anti-big-power attitude. When we went to Hanoi and started talking about their problems, they started with the Chinese. They regarded America as a small interlude—they had been struggling against the Chinese for thousands of years. They would ask us to say things in international forums, things that they couldn't say. They would ask us to criticize the Soviet Union and the Chinese because they have tried to control them. So there was a real sympathetic vibration that I felt. If you could eliminate the war against America you still could sympathize with them, because of the other plight that they were in. People called them the niggers of Asia.

REASON: Many conservatives now call the Vietnam war a noble cause. You opposed it then. In retrospect do you feel it was a noble cause?

Cleaver: I think the idea of stopping communism is a noble cause. However, don't agree with the way we go about doing it. The old thing that Lenin said about communists being able to buy their ropes from the capitalists with which to hang the capitalists—this is something I have thought about for a long time. Conservatives often talk about this and try to have boycotts and cut off trade. But the way to destroy communism is through our technology and through open trade. It is hopeless to try to get businessmen to stop trading and not make a buck. If they can't do it legally, they are going to do it illegally. It's just like the drug traffic. So my disappointment and my disagreement with conservatives is that they are forced into a position of hypocrisy.

REASON: What do you think about intervention abroad—for example, in Central America? Do you think intervention in other people's civil wars and struggles can stop the march of communism, or is that wasted energy and also perhaps wrong?

Cleaver: The way we do it is wrong,because from Chiang Kai-shek down to Somoza we have been losing. How is it that such a powerful country can be defeated like this? It has to do with a mixture of motivation. No one talks, say, about the real ideological basis of the Monroe Doctrine. It was not meant as a bully doctrine to keep these guys under our boot heel. The Monroe Doctrine in its inception grew out of a vision of the unity of the Western Hemisphere, and we didn't want these other powers coming in because they would frustrate that unity. Simon Bolivar and all these people, too, wanted to unite Latin America or South America, and on that basis the Monroe Doctrine made sense. But it turned into a bully doctrine.

We need to revive that attitude of uniting the Western Hemisphere and keeping other powers out. The Soviet Union has penetrated this hemisphere, and as long as we deal with it as we are now dealing with it, we are delivering it to them. So I am not for intervention with the same old mix, because it just gets a lot of people killed. I think that ideology is primary. The armies of communism are the instruments of the ideology and not vice versa.

REASON: Are you saying that we should use the ideology of freedom, always intervening in support of people who are fighting against totalitarianism, but with the voice of liberty and freedom and human rights?

Cleaver: Sincere freedom—not to try to replace Somoza with another culprit, you see, but to really help those people develop their lives and their economy and their political and institutional freedom.

REASON: The way they choose?

Cleaver: They would choose to do it in the classical model of free institutions. Nobody chooses slavery. But they get pushed into these positions, because here we are offering the status quo and the communists are offering guns. If you are being oppressed and you can't feed your children, you get so angry that you want to kill whoever is in power, and what you don't see is that the guy giving you the gun is also putting a chain around your leg. You will see it later, but then it will be too late.

We are in a position where everything gets filtered through this confrontation that we have with the communists. And what happens is the communists are able to get the best of all the arguments. Right now in South Africa they get the best of the argument because they stand up and support the people. I am incensed with Jessie Jackson and Jerry Falwell. This shouldn't be a black versus white issue—not for the American people. We should have an American attitude toward that situation, and then I think we would come down on the side of freedom. But to be arguing in favor of the South African government leaves the Soviet Union to support the people over there, and they win the favor not only of the majority of the people of South Africa but of all of Africa, all of the Third World, and even the majority of the American people. It is really very blind and ignorant.

REASON: You spent a number of years in prison in the United States, and in Soul on Fire you mention how tormenting that experience is. Does prison have any useful function?

Cleaver: Prisons are necessary because we have to be able to isolate certain kinds of behavior. If we can't get people to behave in a social manner, we can't let them run amok and harm other people. But I think what we have in this country right now is a total breakdown in the whole concept of penology. It has to do with the death penalty. Now imprisonment, first of all, is isolation. It's increasingly severe measures of isolation, all the way down to solitary confinement, death row, and the ultimate isolation, death. So the death penalty is a spearhead of this whole thing. But what we have done is lop off the spearhead, you see, by getting rid of the death penalty, and so the tension in the whole penal code is removed. Because people don't fear it.

REASON: You said in one of your books that in order to be rehabilitated in prison, your personality has to be destroyed. Was your personality destroyed? Why don't you commit crimes any more?

Cleaver: It's a process of education. I think no one should be let out of prison if they don't admit what they did. Because that's where the process of rehabilitation starts, with the person recognizing what they did was wrong. I used to do things and never would admit that it was wrong. I always thought I was justified in doing these things. As long as I felt that way, nothing could penetrate me. But what I did, those rapes—okay, I didn't get sent to prison for that, I beat it in court. But it was in my own heart of hearts, when I confronted my own behavior, that I admitted that that's not right. That's the beginning of rehabilitation.

REASON: Do you look at the Eldridge Cleaver who committed rapes as a different person?

Cleaver: Not really. I can't say a different person, because there is a continuity. I could even say I committed worse crimes against women after getting out of prison than before I went in. Not that I raped them, but I became more skillful in manipulating them. I think what changed me was getting married and having children. That may be the best rehabilitation of all, yet there are married people with children in prison, too, so it's the individual case. You've got to transform that person's value system and that person's attitude toward other human beings.

REASON: The prisons are largely filled with people jailed for drug-related crimes. Should those laws exist?

Cleaver There's no doubt in my mind that our present attitude toward drugs is wrong—it's self-defeating, and it's not going to solve the problem. I would like to see the profit taken out of the drug trafficking. Otherwise we're going to be overwhelmed. We already are overwhelmed. The DEA, the Drug Enforcement Agency, already has admitted that stopping drugs at their source or in transit is a failure. So now we've adopted a catastrophic tactic in urging corporations and business entities to adopt random mandatory testing, which lets Big Brother in through the back door. We are giving the government the right to test our body fluids—it's inevitable. The government is going to have to take it over just to ensure fairness, because of the 14th Amendment. And so the same way that we got J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI out of Prohibition, we're getting what I call the Piss Police out of this whole drug situation. It's absolutely catastrophic in terms of our freedom.

REASON: Do you think that by legalizing it…

Cleaver: Where people could get it in drug stores and pharmacies, okay.

REASON: So it comes down to its real cost?

Cleaver: Yes, because its inflated cost is feeding a criminal culture. And because, frankly, I don't see drugs as being as bad for the individual as we make them out to be. So I would take the profit out of drugs and educate people to show them what they are doing to themselves. I started smoking weed when I was 13 years old. It's not because of the cops that I don't smoke it now. It's because I don't want to be unproductive. It's not out of fear of the cops that I don't go around snorting cocaine. It s because I don't want to be living like that. I know a lot of people who have done drugs in their life and who have quit because of the quality of their life.

REASON: What are you involved with these days?

Cleaver: Mostly writing. I was involved in political campaigns around here, but my main thrust at this time is writing, and I have been doing screenplays.

REASON: Any success yet?

Cleaver: I'm waiting. I got a winner, but I haven't sold it yet. I'm looking for a good agent who can help me.

REASON: Do you see any of the other Black Panthers or contact any of them?

Cleaver: I see Huey Newton. He used to walk down this street every day at 3:45 when he was in the hospital here in one of those dry-out programs. But if you sit around up on College Avenue you can see Huey Newton every once on a while.

REASON: But you don't really. . .

Cleaver: He won't talk to me.

REASON: How about Bobby Seale?

Cleaver: I talk to Bobby Seale over the phone. And a lot of the other people who were in the Black Panther Party are all over the place, and I talk to them. We had a split in the party. People on my side of the split, I'm on good terms with. People on the other side, I'm not on good terms with, and they've gone on to other things. The Black Panther Party doesn't exist anymore—there's nobody running around talking about the Black Panther Party. But they're in other political activities. In the governments in Oakland, Los Angeles, and here in Berkeley there are a lot of ex-Black Panthers.

REASON: Have they generally pursued a socialist or leftist. . . ?

Cleaver: Anti-American kind of leftist, I call it. Really a hodgepodge ideology, because a lot of people haven't rethought it. Like Tom Hayden—when he comes up here and talks on the campus, you'd think he was still back in the '60s, yet he's on the public payroll. I did what a lot of people didn't want to do, and that is to back away from the whole mix and let the chips fall where they fall. When I first came back to America, Huey Newton was in Cuba, Bernardine Dohrn and those people were still fugitives, and they all denounced my coming back. Then, when they saw me working out my own legal problems,- Huey Newton came back. The other people like Bernardine Dohrn and many others came back, but they still made the same kind of statements. Bernardine Dohrn is waiting to be admitted to the New York Bar, but you ask her what she thinks about America and she'll say nya, nya, nya. I think that's an unfortunate attitude.

REASON: In exile, you rued the fact that your son didn't play football. Does he play now?

Cleaver: He's a hell of a football player! I brainwashed him from the time he was a baby. I had a pair of football shoes that I always kept hanging in my den. These football shoes were mine at Abraham Lincoln High School in Los Angeles. I never had a chance to use them, because I got busted. But I always kept them. My son has them now, and from the time that he was first born I always talked to him about football. I think it worked. He loves football.