WOULD YOU EVER GO ON VACATION TO A PLACE LIKE THAT?A conversation with Thomas Frank
Tom Frank is a chronicler of American politics who loves his hometown of Kansas City, its barbecue, sturdy citizens, and hiking in far-off places. He has a PhD in history from the University of Chicago and next year will publish his eighth book. He lives in suburban Washington and is a contributor to Harper’s Magazine. It is always fun to break bread and talk politics with him, as you will see below. [Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.] Seymour Hersh: I went back the other day and reread your book Listen, Liberal from 2016. I just want you to know: Nothing changes. You were attacking the Democratic Party for everything you can attack the Democratic Party for today. Thomas Frank: Okay, but can I tell you why I did that? I don’t want to make it sound unfair. I wrote a book about the Republicans, remember? What’s the Matter with Kansas? I wasn’t sorry that I wrote that. I thought I described the Republicans’ Three Card Monte game very accurately. But the Democrats have their own game. And so there’s these two big fat targets out there. One is the Republicans, and admittedly, they’re worse, right? SH: But it’s strange that what you said about the Democrats nine years ago is same thing that could be said today. TF: They aren’t in power anymore. Trump-ism has shattered the system in a lot of ways. And it’s left the Democrats looking pretty obsolete. SH: But the Democrats are still talking technology. TF: The Democrats love the word “innovation.” Obama, in particular, he used it constantly. Republicans, especially Reagan, really liked the word “creativity.” It’s this weird divide between the two. And Trump, you know what word he likes? “Genius.” That’s his word. SH: He means himself. TF: To get back to the Democrats, their machine—it worked, right? It was a system that worked for a long time and now it’s broken down and they cannot figure out what to do about it. They can’t really understand what went wrong because that would require introspection. SH: In the Clinton mode, everybody’s going to be a Harvard PhD. TF: Yeah, well, that was Obama’s cabinet. Do you remember Obama had the most amazing cabinet of all time? It’s like they had every prize. He had a Nobel Laureate in his cabinet. He had Genius Grant winners. He had Pulitzer Prize winners. I think Biden, and I hate to say this because it came to such a bad end. But there’s only a handful of people in the Democratic Party leadership that understand what’s gone wrong. And Biden was one of them. Biden is old enough to remember, not the New Deal, but certainly the tail end of all that in the ’60s. He knew what the Democratic Party used to be. A lot of these people don’t. SH: They have no idea. They don’t read anything. TF: But he wasn’t able to turn it around. I mean, he was obviously not the man for that job. SH: My theory about Biden anyway, is that his decline came earlier than people know—during the second year. And the Mandarins, the Ron Klains and the lawyers and the Donilans, they’re running the government. Why tell the world he’s defective when they’re running the government? In Obama’s years, he made the decisions. So everything was on his desk. He was very hands-on. And Biden then sort of left it to the boys. And my theory is that the real reason they didn’t own up to what was going on is what a chance they had. They could run it, make the decisions, all of them bad. Anyway, so here we are. TF: The Democrats are still caught up in the respect for expertise. They’re still lost in that. Liberalism is a class _expression_. It’s an _expression_ of this highly educated elite group. And lots of people understand that now. What the Democratic party can’t do is figure out a way out of that dead end. And I don’t know if, I mean, there has to be a way out. But it feels like now their only strategy is just to wait for the Republicans to screw up. Which they do. SH: There is a big worry, of course, about the coming Congressional elections. TF: Well, Trump’s plan to make the economy go is ridiculous, right? It’s like we’re going to like fossil fuels to the max. Put the hammer down. SH: You can’t talk that way about a genius. TF: Genius president. SH: His argument is, we failed in the recent elections because I wasn’t on the ballot. And look what happened in New York City. TF: The Democrats are always going to do fine in New York City. What bothers me is this turning of working people away, towards conservatism. I wrote a book about Kansas because that’s where I grew up. But there’s other examples that are much more poignant. West Virginia. This is really sad. When I was young, oh, my God, there was no more democratic place than West Virginia up until the ’80s or ’90s, and now it’s flipped. If I were running the Democratic Party, I would make them all go on bus trips there, do a huge project where they have to investigate, find out what went wrong. And really find out, not just invent a reason that is flattering to themselves. But to actually look into it. And you look now at North Dakota—it wasn’t all that long ago that North Dakota had Byron Dorgan as a US senator. SH: South Dakota had McGovern, remember? TF: Yes, yes. And now look where they are. What the hell? SH: And by the way, North Dakota has as many senators as New York State. Talk about a democracy. TF: A lot of the problems are baked into the Constitution and there’s no way out of it. Trump would not have been elected in ’16 without the Electoral College. It’s that simple. SH: And it’s happened before. It’ll probably happen again. And he doesn’t pay a price for what he does. That’s the thing that bothers me. He doesn’t pay a price. TF: I feel like we’re now so far beyond that. I was looking at fundraising. I was trying to remember who Clinton’s and Obama’s top donors were in 2008, 2012, and 2016. And then I went to the present, and the numbers were not that large—like a couple of million dollars or something like that from Silicon Valley. Obama fundraised a lot from Wall Street banks and universities. But then you go to the present, to the latest round, Trump 2024. Elon Musk gave Republicans $290 million. It’s just off the charts. The numbers are so large. The price tag is so great. There’s no accountability. We’re in a place where they just retreat into their money. SH: Thank the Supreme Court for that. TF: Citizens United. Do you remember the ACLU filed a brief in support of what the court ultimately decided? What an incredible mistake that was. I mean, what a costly mistake, I should say. SH: Terrible. Opened the door. So what do you think the vote in New York means? TF: Oh, I like Zohran Mamdani. If I lived there, I probably would’ve voted for him. I didn’t follow it all that closely. I don’t live there, but it’s the mayor of New York. Of course, the Democrat won, right? And Cuomo is damaged goods. Look, Mamdani has new ideas. That’s good. I like new ideas. SH: My old newspaper the New York Times really hated him. It shocked me. They really didn’t like him. TF: Why? SH: I don’t know why. I used to know some of the people on the editorial board when I was there. It was much better, much different. I don’t know them now. The coverage of him was basically nasty. TF: Yeah. Isn’t it amazing how much of the media in general is just one puff away from propaganda. SH: It’s changed a lot. I consider you a political expert. So what’s your take on the politics of today? TF: The Democrats are not a left-wing party. They’re a centrist party, but the left is their heritage. They were a party of the left from William Jennings Bryan up to Lyndon Johnson. And you can’t have a party of the left where the main constituency that you care about is highly educated people, experts. It just doesn’t work. The party has to be organized around the aspirations and the needs and so on of ordinary people. SH: But you’ve been saying this, and you’ve said this before. Does anybody listen to you? Do you still get calls? TF: Oh, not anymore. No, I’m completely forgotten now. Which is fine with me but that’s not because the argument didn’t ring true. It did. The argument succeeded. I mean, the argument of Listen, Liberal, is that the Democratic Party has become this thing that I’m describing. This party of highly educated, white-collar professionals. You see that argument all the time now. All the time. You see it in reporting. You see it in op-eds, you see it everywhere. You see it in tweets. It’s become part of the air we breathe, and I’m happy for that. I’m glad that argument caught on. But the media—everything has changed so much. If you’re not tweeting constantly, then people don’t know about you. So no, nobody calls me. And that’s fine with me. Nobody asks me, and I don’t tweet. And neither do you. SH: No. TF: But you write a Substack. SH: I write a Substack only because I had a story about the Biden White House role in the destruction of Russia’s Nord Stream pipeline that I knew if I took to the newspapers, they would not publish it. And the problem now is I don’t think we can take three more years of Trump. I really don’t. I think it’s going to be too destructive. He can do what he did to the White House. He can do what he did to the Constitution—basically emasculate it in the name of the whacko Russell Vought and the unitary executive. And he’s doing it. TF: I think he’s uniquely dangerous, but I think we’re going to have three more years of him, and unless he screws up really badly, we’re going to have his successor. This guy will stop at nothing to make the economy roar. He will stop at nothing. He will do anything. Look at how he was trying to get Jerome Powell to lower interest rates, and he finally got what he wanted. SH: He’s turned it inside out that goddamn office. TF: He will do anything to make the economy go faster for his people. I think the Democrats can come back, but they have to rebuild, and I think all their moments of rebuilding in the past were brought about by catastrophe. So the Great Depression, all this stuff in the 1890s. That’s when parties remake themselves. When they rebuild themselves and try to understand where they came from and change direction. SH: So what happens after the crisis? TF: They are in the grip of the centrist ideology, you know? If Trump does not screw it up, then you’re looking at a President JD Vance or something like that. SH: In your earlier work, you made a point of how it was when the crisis happened, the whole collapse of the economy, basically at the end of the Bush administration, that Obama got in. And Obama, what did he do? He did exactly the wrong thing. TF: Yeah. Well, not exactly the wrong thing. He did pretty much what Wall Street wanted. He didn’t do the imaginative thing. He didn’t do the bold or what was his phrase? “Audacity of hope.” He didn’t do the audacious thing, and I don’t know why. I don’t think anybody knows why except for him, why he chose to go on the course he did. A lot of it was because he had only been a senator for four years. He wasn’t all that sure of himself. The people that he chose as advisers were people like Larry Summers. The greatest economic authority in America, the former president of Harvard University and— SH: The friend of Epstein. TF: I know, I saw that. That’s who was advising him. One of the really interesting things about Franklin Roosevelt is that by the time Roosevelt became president, all the orthodox economists were discredited. So Roosevelt couldn’t go to the orthodox economists. They were all flat on their backs. They’d made fools of themselves, and so he had to turn to people with unorthodox ideas. Obama didn’t do that. Obama went right to the guys who had been running things. SH: Obama, I think he fooled us. The first thing he did was announce publicly that he was going to shut down Guantánamo. Which is by any definition, a recruiter, the major point recruiting for opposition to America in the Arab world. He didn’t do it. He also went head over heels in Afghanistan. Everything we thought he wouldn’t do, he did. TF: He did stop the Iraq War. I’ll give him props for that. He ended that. Biden should have run in ’16. He probably would’ve been elected. SH: I never liked Biden. I was a reporter who knew some senators pretty well, and I worked for Gene McCarthy when he was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And I got to know a couple of senators who would gossip with me a little bit, Democrats. And there’s a story there, because out of all of this emerges Harris, the one appointment that probably would not win. And so what happened there? There’s something that took place when Biden got ill while on a campaign trip to Nevada and dashed back to his beach home in Delaware. I know Obama was in the play and had a meeting with him after four or so days. I don’t know what the play was. But the end result was candidate Harris. TF: Oh, I don’t know either. But then again, I’ve lost interest in it. I used to care a lot, but, sorry. You’ve got to remember something about the Democratic Party. They really don’t trust their own rank and file. If you had an open convention, they could choose anybody. Anything could happen, and it could easily slip from the control of the leadership faction. SH: You knew what’s coming, if you’re a Democrat anyway. I’m sure there’s a lot of Republicans who admire Trump. Not only the wealthy class, but what are we now? It’s not even, what’s the word for a government run by billionaires? TF: Oligarchy. SH: Yeah. There’s another one. TF: Plutocracy. SH: So what’s going to happen in Gaza is they’re going to plow up, all the bombing and all the damages, and you can regenerate. You can take an old building and make new concrete out of it. The money’s going to flow in. The billionaires are going to come. TF: Are they though? I mean, would you ever go on vacation to a place like that? SH: There are a lot of people that apparently will. TF: That’s like visiting the battlefields of World War I, you know? I mean, I’ve done that. Right? But you don’t go on vacation there. You do it to pay respect to the people who died. SH: The plan is that they’re going to rebuild it. It’s going to be wonderful buildings, fancy apartments. The beach is beautiful. Will they get a golf course there? He’ll try. TF: You don’t really think this is going to happen, do you? SH: Oh, I think they want it to happen. They want to make it and they’re going to get the rail line. There’ll be a whole new generation of people. The Turks are in it. And the Palestinians will be the workers. They’ll rebuild it. There will never be a Palestinian government. TF: Who will administer it? SH: You’ll get the consortium. The Egyptians and the Saudis and the Jordanians even, who disdain the Palestinians. Either be that or it’ll be nothing. And by the way, the hunt for Hamas will continue. They won’t stop until they’re all dead and it’s like another world. It’s not going to be a Palestinian state. And there will always be terror. There will always be Israeli military operations. The idea is that it’s going to be a plutocratic state managed by trusted outsiders. That’s the plan right now. I don’t know if it’s going to work. Is anybody saying, “We’re going to build a lot of very good hospitals for the poor”? I don’t hear that happening. TF: Sy, I’m going to defer to you. I don’t know anything about it. SH: So how do the Democrats win the Congressional election? What do they have to do? TF: Well, they probably will, just automatically, because people turn against the party in power in the midterm elections. The Democrats know all the arguments for doing nothing. Everybody knows what they are. The arguments are, he’s going to screw up somehow, just like he did last time with COVID. Remember, Trump was riding high, and then COVID came and totally destroyed him. That’s why he lost in 2020. SH: Temporarily. TF: Then people forgot, and he came back. SH: I’m trying to think of another word for billionaires running a government. Kleptocracy? TF: Kleptocracy is when they steal. SH: This government’s like thieves. TF: We’re close to that. Trump said a very interesting thing: “It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it.” But oh my God, is he ever doing this! They have their crypto, right? The Trump family crypto coin. SH: It’s making money every day, but the other thing I know, from people who work in advance on his presidential trips, is that wherever he goes around the world, a day later, his two sons show up. TF: And what are they doing? SH: Making business deals, and it’s not even hidden. TF: My subject now is recent history, from World War II to the present, but I used to be fascinated by the ’20s and ’30s, the interwar period. The Republicans, in the 1920s, had this idea they were going to have a businessman president someday, and the closest they ever got was Herbert Hoover. It’s never been much of dream, right? We’re going to have a businessman president, right? But this has always been their fantasy, “We need to have more business in government.” Remember the Chamber of Commerce used to say, “Less government in business, and more business in government,” right? This was their motto for years, and so the Republican Party always wanted to have a businessman president. Well, they finally got it. SH: Wow. TF: They got their wish after all these years. They almost got it with Mitt Romney, but now they really got it with Donald Trump. How’s that working out, guys? I mean, after tearing the Republican Party completely apart and the Bush family. SH: Amazing how easy that was. I watched the primaries, and I thought, “Oh my God. He’s killing them. He killed the Bushes.” TF: Who’s going to do that to the Democrats? I thought Bernie Sanders, at one time, but Bernie’s moment has come and gone. They stopped him. SH: I don’t see who’s coming. There’s some people in the House that aren’t bad. TF: But what they’ll probably look for is another really charismatic centrist like Clinton, like Obama. That’s what has succeeded for them in recent years, and they’ll find such a person. There’s a lot of them out there. There’s a lot of Democrats who are sharp. SH: I love the guy from Illinois. Governor Pritzker. He’s a little too plump. He doesn’t fit the picture. TF: But there you go. I mean, that’s an example. Newsom is another one. They’ll find a guy. SH: I think it’s going to be Newsom, I guess, at this point, because he carried through the election. TF: But it’s exactly what I’m talking about. They don’t have to change anything. They don’t have to change direction. They don’t change what they believe in. They just find a much better person, a figurehead for the party. It is not Joe Biden anymore. By the way, it could have been Harris if she’d had a little more practice. Harris would’ve been fine. SH: But she wouldn’t cross Biden. TF: No, I know. She didn’t change anything, but what I’m saying is, what they’re looking for is a charismatic centrist who’s good on their feet, eloquent, all that stuff. She fits the bill. What hurt her last time around is that she didn’t seem to know what she was talking about when asked about anything having to do with the economy. That was bad. SH: She also refused to criticize him. “Would you have done anything differently than Joe Biden?” She said, “I can’t think of anything.” I’m thinking, “You’re losing the election.” FTF: I know. I know. Yeah, you come up with something. SH: And the vice president pick, she could have picked somebody else. Tell me about Kansas City. TF: It’s the best place in the world. Everyone knows that. Washington is not a happy town. This is a town where people scream at you. I ride my bike every day now to go over back and forth to the house. People scream at me. Every day, somebody yells at me. There’s honking, anger. We’re here in downtown Bethesda. People are honking at each other. The streets are clogged. Did I ever tell you about the moment where I realized the thesis of Listen, Liberal? It just all came to me. So, if you go back and look at What’s the Matter With Kansas?, I understood then that Republicans attacked the Democrats for being a liberal elite. They did it all the time in the old days. They did it all the time, but I didn’t really understand it. Then, one day I was walking down N Street in Georgetown, and looking at the people, and it’s all the people here in Washington, almost all Democrats. SH: You’re telling me average people live on N Street in Georgetown? TF: It’s not average people. It’s super upscale. It’s like this place where we are right now, Bethesda. It’s like hyper-upscale, and I’m looking around at these people, and all of a sudden it hits me that this is the liberal elite. They’re talking about these people. This is why it rings true, and the thesis of that book came to me like that, like in a flash, and everything else was just follow-through. SH: So, now, your next book. Come on, tell me about it. TF: It’s a history of the ideology of this class, so we’re talking about this same class of people. SH: The N Street class, we can call it. TF: Well, yeah, that’s good, or the Bethesda people, the affluent, highly educated, white-collar elite. How do they think of themselves? Why do they think that they are so wonderful? How do they explain themselves to themselves? And the answer is creativity and innovation. That’s their class virtue. That’s what they have that other people don’t. They innovate. This is what they think. SH: Are you talking about the AI generation? TF: No. That’s what’s coming. That’s going to change everything. SH: It’s going to change the media, because— TF: It already is. SH: They rely more and more on it, and it’s going to be the devil. It’s going to be really problematic. TF: Well, the world that you and I grew up in is already gone, this world of granular, local knowledge. I think about Kansas City, to go back to the most important place in the world, Kansas City, which had a very good local newspaper. SH: It had a great newspaper, the Kansas City Star. TF: Yes, it was a great paper in its day, and then they had a lot of little suburban weeklies, and there were newsletters. If you wanted to go back and look into— SH: Forget that. You can’t even find a newspaper stand anymore. TF: I know, I know. SH: Anywhere. You can’t find one, I’m talking about a kiosk. TF: But you can read it online. The thing is, the Washington Post is still healthy, the New York Times is still healthy, the Wall Street Journal is still healthy. SH: I don’t think the Washington Post is so healthy, but the other ones are. TF: Okay. But anywhere else you go, Omaha, Des Moines, Kansas City, the papers are in this terrible state. Oklahoma City or Wichita, Topeka. It’s awful what’s happened. But this world of—the granular knowledge was important. SH: As a reporter, you had to start at those newspapers. TF: Among other things, yeah. But I’m speaking as a historian where you want to go back and you want to know what happened. So recently, I wrote a book about populism. And every small town in Kansas not only had a newspaper, they had more than one. They would be going at it hammer and tongs with each other. The disappearance of those newspapers is a tragedy and there’s nothing that can replace that. AI can’t replace that. Nothing can replace that. SH: The one improvement I think of modern life is the computer helps because you can do research more easily now. You can do original research. I don’t trust AI, but it’s handy sometimes. TF: Yes. I used it a lot writing this book for research purposes. SH: You have to really make sure you check the facts. TF: Oh, no, it lied to me all the time. I discovered its lying. SH: There you go. It simplifies things. TF: It lies all the time. No, it would give me false leads and I would spend hours on them. SH: Because I worked so many years at the New Yorker with fact-checkers, one of the very good fact-checkers I worked with, I hire for the column I write. And one of the guys who was my editor, who writes a lot for Harper’s, was my editor at the London Review of Books. I use really solid people, and it’s amazing how many mistakes I make knowing that— TF: These guys will catch you. SH: Well, not that. Just knowing that, knowing that I don’t want them to catch me, so I always look up things. TF: You have to check constantly. Your memory says one thing. SH: Yet you’re wrong. TF: I’ll go and look it up and it’ll be— SH: And how many times have I had the title of your book wrong? [Editor’s note: The things Hersh and Frank were wrong about have been cut or corrected.] TF: Yeah. So for years all anybody wanted was more on Russiagate. I’m like, “I don’t know anything about that. I don’t have any information.” SH: It’s a lie. It didn’t happen. TF: Sy Hersh just said, “It’s a lie. It didn’t happen.” I still hear people to this day refer to it as something that was real, that Trump is in Putin’s pocket, et cetera, et cetera. They say it all the time. SH: It’s just not true. TF: There’s also a fear that people don’t want to say anything that might advance what Trump says or that might make him look like he’s right about something. For example, the lab leak story. There’s a very good chance it’s true that COVID was an accident. An accident in a lab in China released it to the world. SH: I’ll tell you the story. It’s real simple. TF: Well, I know you know it’s true. But there was this time where you couldn’t say that because Trump said it. Do you remember? He’s such a jackass. He was calling it the Chinese flu or whatever. SH: My problem was, at any given time, there are, what, six, eight, 10,000 Chinese with master’s degrees in virology. China always has a problem with virology because they live so close to nature. They’ve always had viruses. TF: Yes. Isn’t it true that every year the flu starts in East Asia and then goes around the world. It’s just a natural course of things. SH: Anyway, the upshot is that a lot of Chinese people got master’s degrees and some of them went on to PhDs here in virology. Some of the schools, like North Carolina State, are famous for their programs. So you’re the CIA and you’re pretty smart. Hey, why not approach one of them and say, “You’re graduating, you’re going to go back to the lab in Wuhan. While you’re here, how would you like a condo in Pacific Heights and a checking account?” They recruited people. So they knew very early on. I actually wrote this. Nobody cared. I don’t know why, because it was against the flow. But I’m telling you, I know. TF: Because you wrote about it long after it had stopped being controversial. Now, nobody cares. SH: Well, maybe you’re right. I waited a long time because I was worried about— TF: Well, you want to get it right, of course. SH: No, just protecting sources. They knew it was a lab accident very early. The intelligence community did, and so did this president. TF: Well, those two, Russiagate and the lab leak, it’s crazy. SH: Putin did not have anything to do with that election. TF: Well, he might have. Wait a minute, they did put those Facebook ads. Do you remember that? There was some Russian campaign, but it was very small. But I wrote about those ads at the time, because they’re funny. Have you ever seen them? They’re hilarious. SH: There were a bunch of people who were doing little stuff online, but with most of them, we knew what they were doing. We were monitoring it. TF: But it was so small scale. It was like $100,000. SH: It was nickel and dime stuff and nobody went to prison for it. Remember? They indicted them all, but they never convicted anybody. They indicted a bunch of guys and the case fell apart. It just wasn’t enough. You couldn’t really connect it. TF: But the idea that Trump himself was, in some way, a pawn of the Russians, remember? Which really caught on. Everybody was saying that. SH: He was being peed on and stuff and stuff like that? TF: Yeah, that they were manipulating him. SH: That was out of the dossier. TF: Yeah, I know. But everybody was saying for about two years. SH: The dossier was a creature of the Democratic Party. TF: Sy, I know that. SH: Okay, so there we are. So then, you have to go back to that story, which I’m doing now. I’m going back to it. And nobody’s going to care because, who cares? But I care. TF: It’s a funny world in that the people who say that they care the most about expertise, fact-checking, and all that stuff get things wrong on this momentous scale. SH: Certain truths you just can’t see anymore. There’s no place for them anymore. TF: I go down to the public library. It’s right near my house. I go down to the public library to catch up on my magazine reading. They don’t have them anymore. They don’t carry them anymore, the physical paper magazine. This has effects. I don’t want to sound like too much of a liberal here, but people really do live in a world of conspiracy theory, because it’s fun. Conspiracy theories make everything fit together. I listen to a lot of podcasts now, both liberal and conservative. And they always go back to Hitler. It’s like they know one thing about history, and that’s Hitler, right? They know that the Nazis, who were bad, used to rule this country called Germany, right? They know that. They don’t know anything else. Let’s talk about the Franco-Prussian War. Let’s talk about the Duke of Wellington. I don’t know, let’s talk about the Middle Ages. No, they don’t know. No, they know this one thing. And they might know something about the Kennedy assassination, but they certainly don’t know about the Cross of Gold speech. They certainly don’t know about Franklin Roosevelt. SH: Then you get the other thing, which is that out of it, there’s always a documentary or a TV show that’s based on the premise: what if Hitler won in World War II, and what would America be like? There was a great series about that. TF: Yeah, that’s right. But there’s endless movies about Nazi Germany that keep coming out year after year. It’s like, think of something else. SH: They’re set in the ’30s with a lot of long-legged girls at dances and all that stuff. That also sold. Hollywood knows that. TF: By the way, one of the things I really loved about your documentary Cover-Up is the stock footage that they found of the ’60s, like all the reporters in a row at the Pentagon. SH: Great stuff. Being lied to. TF: I was a child. I was an infant then. But I remember watching TV and that’s how people looked. That’s what reality looked like then. And then, when we go to make a movie about that, Hollywood controls our understanding of the past because we don’t have books and we don’t have newspapers, et cetera. All that’s gone. It’s now just this one source for understanding of the past, and they give you this really distorted vision of the past. But I love actually looking at the real thing. It’s wonderful. SH: Or Lyndon Johnson saying, “It goes down, then it goes up.” TF: That was good too. By the way, what he did in Vietnam, catastrophic, terrible, the worst thing ever. Have you ever thought about Lyndon Johnson minus Vietnam? He would’ve been a great— SH: Fantastic president. TF: He would have been a great president. SH: I actually worked with Dick Goodwin later because he left the Kennedys and joined the McCarthy campaign. I went to work for McCarthy. I really believed in America to the point where I went to work for a senator running against Johnson for the Democratic nomination. And Bobby Kennedy would not. Bobby didn’t want to take the chance. But anyway, Goodwin joined us because he also cared. He had written a lot of that famous speech on civil rights. Those were the days. I’m waiting for Caro’s last volume on Johnson. Because his Master of the Senate, it’s more than I want to know. But he was great. I have a great memory of the Senate. I got to this town as a reporter. After I quit law school and got through the army, I became a reporter. I worked for the AP wire service, and all that stuff. And I got to Washington for the AP and the war was on, beginning then. I got to know the Vietnam War pretty well. And I’ll never forget, with Senator Fulbright, I was just a wire service kid, but they would talk to the reporters. You can’t get this kind of conversation anymore. You could call him up and say, “I got a question for you.” “Well, come on in.” And the secretary would say, “He’s so isolated.” Here’s chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. And I was there moping about the fact that everybody was worried about the— TF: He was also an unusually good senator too, wasn’t he, Fulbright? SH: Yeah. It was all about the anti-ballistic missile—the ABM treaty. And I went to see him and I said, “Senator, I got a question for you. I talked to people in the Pentagon. The real issue is MIRVs, Multiple Independent Re-entry Targetable Vehicles, putting eight warheads on a missile.” And I said, “Why are we talking about the ABMs?” And he said, “Well, Sy. Is that what they call you, Sy?” And he said, “I’ve just taught the committee a three-letter-acronym word, and now you want me to get them to learn a four-letter acronym.” He said, “Are you kidding?” He said, “That won’t happen, son.” TF: Oh my God. You got that kind of stuff from the Senate. SH: It was really interesting as a kid reporter. No sources like that now. I knew who was a womanizer, I knew who worked, I knew who was lazy. And you just knew stuff like that. It’s different now. It’s all muffed up. Anyway, you’re a throwback. TF: I loved your movie. Your movie was really great. SH: A lot of the details, I either didn’t know or had forgotten. Like the kid who came home, what did his mom say? “I gave them a good boy, they sent back a murderer.” TF: That was so powerful. SH: You know what I did with him? I don’t think I said this. If I did, it was too self-serving. He’d had his leg blown, foot blown off. And I’d learned something a long time ago from being involved with kids in the war. You talk about their injuries. The first thing I did when I went, he was living in a shack next to his mom’s place, a wood shack. And I said, “Take off your boot. I want to see your stump.” So we talked. TF: Did you really do that? SH: Yeah, I did. He showed me the stump. He spent five months in recovery. He was very acutely depressed. And then I said, “So what happened?” TF: You could tell that from the footage that he was depressed. SH: Oh, really upset. TF: What did he do once his words became on every protest sign in America? SH: He was mad at me. I talked to his brother later. He told me that he wouldn’t talk to me again. I wanted to talk to him and tell him, “What did you think would happen?” TF: He told you the truth. SH: Yes. TF: Really, like a self-incriminating— SH: He had to do it. He had to do it. I’ll tell you what isn’t in the movie. His wife, who later left him, she was a lovely woman. It was very interesting. He wasn’t a dumb kid. He was a farm kid, but he had some con in him. You know what I mean? TF: Yeah. There’s nothing wrong with farm people. SH: Nothing wrong with farm people. They live off the land. And he used to go squirrel hunting. His brother told me later that he wouldn’t shoot squirrels. But he could shoot babies? TF: How’d we get on this subject? We were talking about Hollywood. We’re talking about falsehoods. SH: No, we’re talking about politics. TF: We’re talking about everything. SH: Because it’s too depressing to talk to you about politics. We did this a year or two years ago, it was great. [Editor’s note: They did it last year and the year before.] TF: But it’s just gotten worse. Everything’s gotten worse. I have a French editor that I write for sometimes, and he comes over to America. He speaks excellent English and knows everything about our politics, but has an unusual take on it, because, of course, he lives in France. And he comes over every four years and goes to the conventions, and I go with him. That’s how I wind up being at all these conventions. Some years ago, he said to me, “I come over here every four years, and every four years, it’s a little bit worse.” SH: That’s the end. We’re done on that bit. Goodbye. Invite your friends and earn rewardsIf you enjoy Seymour Hersh, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe. © 2025 Seymour Hersh |