Anne ---Email Interview, February 11th , 2013

I was born and raised in Manhattan in the 1950's and 1960's and I attended public schools. I have a Bachelor's degree and a Master's degree and have completed all the academic requirements for a second Master's degree. Some of my graduate work was done at an Ivy League school and I distinguished myself academically as an undergraduate. A turning point in my life was when I worked for the Parks Department for about six months during my college education at Tompkins Square Park during the height of the counterculture's appearance on the scene.

My reaction to the murders of Dr. King and Robert Kennedy Jr. was considerable, especially since they came in the wake of the assassination of President Kennedy. I remember waking the morning of Bobby Kennedy's murder with a pain in my neck and feeling the personal nature of the loss. Our Camelot, our gentler, kinder culture - or so we thought - was being ripped from us icon by icon. Many of my friends were members of SNCC and I think they felt the murder of Dr. King more than I did, though. I had always been warned as a child of the gang activity in my neighborhood and I had been a victim of it once or twice. These murders confirmed that the world was no longer a safe place, not just for girls in Manhattan but also for important men, who seemed so powerful. Charles Manson confirmed our suspicions that the world was definitely tilting off its axis. My mother used to visit me in the park during working hours and she never really understood that the Old Socialists had one corner of the park, the gangs had another, and the newly minted Hare Krishnas had another. As she would walk through the park and the sweet smell of marijuana wafted toward her, she thought it was body odor and remarked that "those people" hadn't bathed in a long time. I think Charles Manson was the epitome of the wild-eyed, wild-haired druggie, the kind who bordered on the insane by virtue of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, as we all were. To some extent, we thought that it was the world that was changing and that we had no control over these events. The evil of Manson proved that even movie stars were vulnerable and it gave us a profound sense of insecurity. I never heard of Bobby Hutton, although I had ties to the Black Panthers when I worked at Tompkins Square Park. and after I moved to my first apartment near the park. The Panthers were kind to me in that they shooed away some really bad people who wanted to harm me personally for something I had said. There seemed to be a kind of turf war

and the Panthers won it, however, briefly. I felt distanced from Kent State, having a brother who attended school out of town and being too scared to think of his vulnerability, but there was a protest on my own campus and I took part in it briefly. As far as I remember, I was fighting for the trees that the administration wanted to take down to build new buildings to accommodate the new equal opportunity students who would be coming to campus. I was pretty apolitical and I had my head in books most of the time. A few years later, at an Ivy League school where I did my graduate work, a group of us were walking to class one day when the President of the University, who had been recruited from a California school, walked with us as we passed the law school building. Someone had posted the slogan "Get the F**K out of Vietnam" and the president said, "Thank goodness. I thought it said get the f**k back to California." We were more intent on our professional goals than in taking time out from our very important and expensive training to protest. I felt more in tune with the students and I just wanted all the violence to go away and let me have my safe world again. I erroneously attributed the violence to the government. The key issue was the Vietnam War. Friends were drafted. The Vietnamese people, whom we viewed as innocent and childlike, were having their world turned upside down just as we were. It was easy to identify with them. I'd read on the history of US involvement in the war and I found out that Saint Kennedy was responsible for getting us there and for creating as much human misery as once could imagine. By the time Johnson came along, I was singing with Pete Seeger's music about the Big Muddy and the Big Fool who said to press on. I was at that time working as a volunteer in a free clinic for children and for me the most explosive issue of the time was the advent of the Great Society and its entitlement programs, things we take for granted today. The Great Society defined poverty as a quantified entity and I objected strenuously to legislation which produced Social Programs. This socially engineered pseudo-solution to poverty formed me politically to this day. I worked under the Nixon administration to monitor the effects of one of these social engineering programs and found conclusive proof that they didn't work. Even more than the Vietnam War, I think the War on Poverty and the Great Society were more explosive issues. They affected the kids I worked with and they created new classes of Americans, the bureaucrats who ran Programs and the Program recipients. Until very recently, when I stopped working with people in ghettos and bound by poverty, I heard about the purported saving power of Programs, funded by The Government, something I knew would not bring people prosperity or happiness. I think the advent of The Program was the ultimate legacy of the sixties, the commitment to the belief that government exists to provide for the people's material good rather than to protect and defend its boundaries and make it safe for citizens to pursue wealth. To the extent that I believe that, the sixties made me a

conservative while it made my contemporaries liberal and progressive. I think the Nixon administration returned us to the values of the childhood I had just lost. Yes, it restored my confidence in government to act as the protector of the nation. Despite the lies and the deceptions it gave us stability. With hindsight it is possible to see that every administration had hoodwinked the people and the criminal activities of Nixon were hardly egregious except that they were....uh, criminal! I think Nixon was the consummate statesman and his talks with China paved the way for Reagan and the fall of Communism.