UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Interview #137
ROWEN, JAMES E.

ROWEN, James E. (1945- )
Undergraduate and Graduate Student, English
At UW: 1963-1969

Interviewed: 1978	
Interviewer: Laura Smail
Length: 1 hour, 42 minutes
[See Index for Keywords]
Interview Session (1978)
Tape 1, Side 1
00:00:00  Start of Interview
LS:  	--James Rowen, Jim Rowen, uh this is September 20, 1978, and he’s in the process of running for Mayor. But he’s taking some time out to do this. Um, to begin with, tell me where you came from and why you came to the University.
JR:   	I came from Washington, D.C. I was born in Washington, D.C. in 1945, and moved to the Maryland suburbs in 1951. I came to the University of Wisconsin primarily on the recommendation of my father and many of our family friends, some of whom had attended the University of Wisconsin, and all of whom were suggesting to me that it was an exciting place to go to school, a progressive university. I was anxious to go to school out of state. I took a trip around half a dozen universities to which I'd applied, but the University of Wisconsin was too far to reach by car, so we never came here. I didn't like any of the other schools I had applied to, so when I was accepted here I thought it couldn't be any worse than the schools I had seen.
LS:	And it turned out a lot better. You said you would be happy to spend the summers sitting down on Union Terrace
JR: 	Oh, yes. It's turned out to be an excellent choice and I decided after I finished school here to stay in Madison, and have been here most of the period between 1963 and 1978.
LS:	You told me your father had been a reporter for Newsweek.
JR:	Yeah, my dad had been a reporter and later an editor for Newsweek, and in 1965, moved over to the Washington Post, when the Washington Post purchased the magazine. I was interested in writing, but he had never encouraged me, however, to go to a journalism school.  He had always felt that a broad liberal arts education was far more desirable for a writer than a journalism school program. And, again, he encouraged me to come here since its liberal arts college had a good reputation.
00:02:39
LS:	Is that why you majored in Political Science?
JR:	Well, I think I majored in Political Science because I thought it was somehow related to the study of government, and I was always interested in government.  I really didn't have good reasons for majoring in Political Science.  I accumulated more credits in English and went to graduate school in English. So it's funny, I don't even think of myself as having majored in Political Science.  For some reason, I feel and always felt that I was spending more time in school studying literature than I was in my Poll Sci classes.
00:03:22
LS:     Well, what were your politics when you came? Which was 196--
JR:     	1963. When I came I would have described myself as a liberal student. I had been involved in civil rights activities in my high school and felt that, politically, Madison and the university campus would be a good place to come because of its liberal reputation.  I mean I wasn't picking a school based on my politics, and I didn't really have real clear politics, but I would have described myself at the time as a liberal.  My parents had always voted democratic and I had worked in the presidential campaign of President Kennedy.
LS:	So you had been quite active.
JR:	Yeah. When I was fourteen, my older sister, who was sixteen, and I founded a Kennedy for President Club, and went out and raised some money, and worked very closely with the Democrats in our neighborhood.  So, I guess I have political involvement that goes fairly back.
LS:	Many people who came were really quite converted here. They’d start off even as Republicans. 
00:05:00
	Well then you wouldn't have been particularly influenced by any of the faculty members to change your views. For instance, Bill Williams, seems to have influenced --
JR:	Well, he was a very strong influence on me, even though I only took one of his courses. He - I guess I wasn't familiar with the term at the time, but I would suppose that he is a revisionist historian. And I wasn't at all familiar with, very much, the history of American foreign policy, and I had really no political analysis of America's role in the world, and was only vaguely aware of American intervention in places like Latin America and Southeast Asia. And it was Williams, whose course I took in 1965, who really began to open up a whole different way of thinking to me. I was very impressed with his course. It's funny, I still go back and look at my notes from his course and from some of Harvey Goldberg's courses. Goldberg's courses I was never enrolled in, but I used to sit in on most of his lectures. You get compartmentalized here, even in the liberal arts college. I was taking Political  Science courses, English because I was interested  in  it,  and then there was a science or language component  that you  had to take,  and I only took a couple of history courses for credit, one of which was Williams' and one of George Mosse's courses. But by the time I was graduating, and during the time I was a graduate student, I spent a lot of time sitting in on history courses. I was sorry that I hadn't taken them, and I was probably sorry that I hadn't been a history major, too.  But I think that what was happening in the Sixties was something that happened to me and to other students, too, which was that there were events going on which were forcing you to think things through, and there were professors on campus whose courses and lectures helped you to sift through what was happening and try to come up with some kind of analysis. So I think some professors did influence me in that way.
LS:	Were any of the Political Science professors of any particular interest?
JR:	Well, let’s see. A lot of the Political Science courses I took were just really very traditional studies of government and sort of spheres of power and spheres of influence analyses. Almost apolitical. Now, I did write a thesis as an undergraduate as a way of getting 6 credits. And I wrote the thesis under a professor from whom I also took a couple of courses, so I think I must have generated almost half of my credits from one professor whose name was  Ken Dolbear,  who was a  pretty strong influence on me and my roommates.  We were all taking his courses together. I think what were mostly impressed with about him was not necessarily his political analysis, but it was his brilliance.  He was an extremely bright guy and he was just an interesting person to talk to about a number of things.   But he was a Republican and he used to work in campaigns for Republicans here. I can remember he was very involved in Bill Smith’s campaign for Congress against Kastenmeier right at the height of the Vietnam War. We couldn’t for the life of us understand why Dolbear would be working for Bill Smith. We asked him one day he said something about Kastenmeier being sort of a safe-seat Democrat. So we weren’t really impressed with his politics. Now his politics have changed a lot. I have been in touch with him briefly in the last few years, and other friends of mine have been as well, and now he’s a different kind of person. So I guess I would have to say that he Dolbear was an influence. He was an influence in the sense that you would try and be like him, you’d try and emulate him. We weren’t necessarily enraptured by his political stances. 
00:10:14
LS:	You said you had participated in student demonstrations and sit-ins, and that sort of thing.  But you didn't get involved in the sort of organization until 1967?
JR:	’66 and ‘67 were the years that I was involved in the Draft Resistance Union as a senior.     But no, I really wasn't involved in organizations. I was just sort of a typical student.  I had my classes to go to, I had a girlfriend, Susan. I spent time with my friends and I wasn't living in a dormitory.  I was sort of an independent student, and it wasn't until the sit-ins at the Administration Building in 1965 that I began to meet people who were involved in organizations. And it was at that point that I began to see that if you really were serious about political activity you had to do more than just show up when somebody else called a demonstration. You should be part of the process for getting the demonstration off the ground.  There were civil rights demonstrations in the early Sixties that I was involved in, too, yet I never went one step farther. I would go to demonstrations that Friends of SNCC would call, but I never went to a Friends of SNCC meeting.  It wasn't until later that I began to go to meetings of one kind or another.
00:12:04
LS:	What do you think made you go? Because that's quite a step.
JR:	Well, the Draft Resistance Union was a group that was organized to counsel people about the Draft, and to organize direct opposition to the Draft, and it seemed to me to make sense that an organization could actually accomplish certain things as far as Draft resistance that an individual couldn't. I think a lot of us in the same position were beginning to get some degree of political enlightenment which was, you could do certain things on your own, but you had a better chance if you did them together with other people. It’s the basic theory of organizing. I didn't have a revelation one day that I had to work in an organization. It just sort of became clear that organizations could get you certain things that you couldn't do as an individual.  I don't remember exactly why I went to a Draft Resistance Union meeting. I remember the roommates I had at the time had a friend named Dan Swinney, who was one of the major Draft resistance organizers in town.  I met him and I guess I went to some parties with him and just sort of began to get interested in Draft resistance as an activity.  So I suppose the influence of friends is important, too.
00:13:48
LS:	I suppose you felt pretty strongly about the war, too.
JR:	I think that I can say that I was... I can remember having an argument in the Memorial Union with a friend of mine who was a freshman in September of 1963, because we'd only been at school a couple of weeks.  We both came from Washington, and we were still sort of checking out the Union. We were sitting at a table in the Union and we were waiting for another friend who was from Washington. We were all sort of sticking together because we were a little overwhelmed by being here, and we didn't know people. And while we were waiting for this other friend to come to the Union,   somebody had left a New York Times on the table, and I was reading about -- there was a little article about President Kennedy sending some advisors to South Vietnam. I remember saying to this friend of mine something to the effect that that was ridiculous.    Why would President Kennedy, this guy we had worked for, you see, be sending American troops to some country that I'd never even heard of.   I don't think I even knew where it was.  And this friend of mine said something to the effect that if Americans are doing something somewhere in the world, it must be good.  I said I thought that was crazy and I didn't see why we would be sending troops overseas. Nobody had declared war. I've always thought I could date my opposition to the war in Vietnam back to 1983.
LS:	That’s very handy. That puts you very early in it.
JR:	Very early. So, I was always opposed to the Vietnam War, that I can recall. I never had any equivocation of feeling about whether we ought to be there or not.   As time progressed I think I had more and more justification for being opposed to the war in Vietnam.  At some point it became a very personal thing, as it did to everybody who was threatened with either being drafted or having a child or a brother or a friend drafted.      So, as I began to become more and more threatened then I suppose my opposition to the War became less theoretical and more personally pragmatic, too.  
00:16:31
	So. What was the question? Well, I  had  reached the decision quite early that  if  I  was ever drafted,  I  wouldn't go. And the Draft Resistance Union began to organize a public statement around that principle, which came to be known as the We Won't Go Statement.   It was a full-page ad taken out in the Daily Cardinal by a group of us in 1967, if I'm not mistaken, stating that if drafted, we would not go, and we would urge others not to go.  We had a long, long series of really emotional debates about whether to do this or not. We were all very scared. We were counseling other people about the Draft, but we really didn't know what our own liabilities were. We didn't know whether we could be arrested for that kind of statement, whether we would be investigated, what the effect would be on our futures, our jobs, graduate school.  It was a great unknown step to take, and we thought it was a pretty big deal at the time, and we were all very worried. We decided to do it anyway, and it caused a great uproar in the city and among younger people. It got the Draft Resistance Union a great deal of publicity. It's interesting that now it's considered one of the acid tests of your political purity by people who are still around here whether or not if you were here at the time you signed the We Won't Go statement.  I have one friend who, every time we get on the subject, starts bitterly talking about how nobody told him the statement was being written, and he didn't get his name on it.  He's very upset about that.
00:18:30
	My wife's name is on that statement, too.  I think it was a mark of the progress of this group of people. It shows that the seeds of the Women's Movement were already around, or that people on the Left tended to be a little more progressive on this whole question of women's  rights and equality, because it was never debated whether women should be excluded from signing the statement since they weren't eligible for the Draft.  It was a statement of principle and a statement of support as well as a statement by men.  There was never any talk, for instance, of having a separate women's auxiliary group or statement of support by the women for the men. It was just seen as a statement that men and women could sign. So her name is on there, and a few others.
00:19:39
LS:     How many of you were there to begin with? 
JR:     I think there were about 70 signatures. 
LS:	But they weren't all members?
JR: 	No, I think the Draft Resistance Union really didn’t have member, but the people who would come with regularity to the meetings and do the work and the leafleting and all that probably number about 15 to 20 people. It was very small
LS:	Where did you meet?
JR:    	We met at people's houses, and then the Draft Resistance Union had a headquarters somewhere in what we used to call Mifflin.  It's now the Bassett neighborhood.     They've changed the name of the neighborhood. For some reason it seems to me that it was on West Gorham Street, near where the old coop was. Or maybe on Hamilton Street, my memory is vague on that.
LS: 	But not at the university. Because a lot of these groups seemto have met at the Union.
JR: 	No, this was definitely off campus. I think that some of the organizers were not students anymore. They had dropped out of school to do organizing, which was very common at the time. 
00:20:58
	My wife dropped out of graduate school and gave up a Vilas Fellowship to be a full-time political person, which now causes her some regrets.
LS:	When? What year did she do that?
JR: 	In 19 70. She was a history graduate student, and never in her years in graduate school   received anything less than a four point.  But she was so committed to anti-war organizing that she felt she couldn't do that and be in school at the same time, and something had to go, so it was graduate school. People gave up a lot at that time.  It wasn't uncommon for people to drop out of school and do organizing.
00:21:40
LS:	Hank Haslach was one of the Draft resisters.
JR:	Yes,   he was. I really didn't know him then. I knew who he was, but I didn't know him.     I didn't really become aware of Hank Haslach until the Dow demonstration.
LS:     So he really wasn't prominent in this early organizing.
JR:	He may have been, but I might not have noticed him. The person that I related to was a man named Dan Swinney.
LS:	I haven't encountered his name at all.
JR:	I think Dan was probably the organizer, the sort of Mr. Draft Resistance in town. To me he was always sort of an enigmatic figure.  I don't think he was in school, or if he was he was about to drop out. Very courageous.  His girlfriend shot him a couple of years later, and nearly killed him in some sort of domestic argument.  She's still around town. Her name's Gwen Gillan, I think.  She has a kid at the Red Caboose now.   I see her picking up her kid at the same day care center where my kids are. I always look at her a little askance.
00:23:02
LS:	The reason I ask about Hank Haslach is that I wondered about the tie between the Draft  resisters and SDS at that time.
JR: 	Well, I couldn't tell you much about that, because SDS was something that was going on but I wasn't involved in it. I was aware of it, but like I said, I wasn't involved in organizations. SDS I didn't get involved in until 1969. I forget what happened; something happened somewhere in 1968...  My wife and I were gone from Madison between the summer of 1968 and the winter of... Let's see, we were gone from June,   1968 to December of 1968.   I had graduated from graduate school, and I had my Master's Degree.
LS:	You got your Master's in a year, then.
JR:	No, two years. I went to graduate school from '67 to '68, and finished my coursework.     We both left in '68.  We went to South Dakota to work in her father's Senate re-election. We left South Dakota in November and came back to Madison in December. Susan enrolled in graduate school and I went to work at the Cardinal, and I started studying for my Master's examination on my own, because I didn't have any classes left to do. That was between December of '68 and the summer of '69. I took my Master's Comprehensives I think in August or July of '69. So there was a little period there when we were gone.  When we came back in 1968, we got involved again campus politics. There was something going on and Susan and I were sitting around talking about it, and she said, you know SDS is really the only group on campus that's doing anything about it.    It must have had something to do with the War.  She said, you know if we really want to feel like we are involved in what's going on on campus, we probably ought to go to SDS. And, quite honestly, I can remember being a little uptight about that, because SDS had this reputation for being very heavy. This was after the convention. I didn't know anything about SDS here and I was a little nervous about doing that.  But we went anyway and found out that in fact Madison SDS was an independent chapter, one of the biggest  in the country. It wasn't affiliated with one of the two national SDS factions.
LS:	There’s an article about that in the Cardinal.
JR:	Yes,  and the two SDS factions were always sending people to Madison to try and convince the group to affiliate with one or the other, but Madison always was independent and always made sure to call itself Madison SDS, instead of just the SDS Chapter on campus. It probably didn't make any difference to 99 percent of the people who knew or heard anything about SDS, but we wanted to make it clear that we were not affiliated with and didn't endorse what the two factions were doing, particularly to each other.   o, there was some event that pushed us into SDS, but I don't remember what it was.

LS:	Some political event?
JR: 	Some political event. Something obviously related to the war in Vietnam. But like I said I can’t remember what it was. Um. So that’s how we got involved in SDS. Then, Yes, Hank Haslach was in SDS.
LS: 	Except he dropped out in ’68.
00:28:05
JR: 	Okay. But people that I knew in SDS were Bill Kaplan— I don't know if you've talked to him, you really should; he and his twin brother Michael were really leaders.
LS: 	That's right.  Wasn't one of them on WSA, or head of it?
JR: 	Yes, a student senator.    The Kaplan brothers and a fellow named Alan Hunter, who was a history grad student and got booted out of the university in  February or March of  1970  because a police informer claimed that he helped turn over a police car on campus.   In fact, he didn't, but he was the president of SDS and the university wanted to get him,   so they got him. This is a digression, but this was for many of us our first encounter with police undercover informants. The man is a detective on the police force now.  His name is George Croal.  I just saw him this morning directing traffic. George Croal got up at the trial and said that he saw Alan Hunter turning this car over and pounding on it and yelling for others to come turn it over. That wasn't true, because during the demonstration Alan Hunter and his girlfriend Lisa, to whom he is now married, and my wife and Steven Reiner who was the editor of the Daily Cardinal were standing about 50 yards to the west of where this little thing was going on, just sort of watching and saying these people are going to get in trouble.  And then a couple of days later we found out that Alan  had  been arrested for organizing or for leading this thing, and it wasn't true.
LS: 	Couldn't you do anything about it?
JR:	Well, Steve Reiner testified in court. I couldn't testify in court because I had also been arrested for allegedly throwing a rock at the Army Math Center at the same demonstration.
LS:     Was this the demonstration against the Army Math Center? There were several of them.
JR: 	It was a demonstration against the presence of General Electric recruiters on campus which then went over to the Army Math Center. But, anyway,  it was felt that I wouldn't be a credible witness since I was arrested too.  But we were all dumbfounded. There were six or seven  people who got up and testified that they had been with Alan Hunter,  Alan Hunter didn't touch the car, Alan Hunter got up and said the same, and the judge— I believe it was either Bensely or Bardwell— just simply found  him guilty. It was our first encounter with how powerful police witnesses were. It didn't matter if they weren't telling the truth or if a whole raft of witnesses were present to give an opposing story. We simply weren't going to be believed; we had no credibility. Anyway,  it was Alan Hunter, the Kaplans who were influential in SDS.  David Siff, a university professor whom you should interview. He is in New York City now.
00:31:30
Tape 1, Side 2
00:31:35
JR:	I was relating that David Siff was another important person in SDS.     David was an English professor, very popular on campus, very radical.   His grandfather had been one of Trotsky's tutors when the family name was Ziv, instead of Siff.  He and his wife,   Jenny, and their kids, Ivan and Ellen, were probably our best friends in 1969 and 1970.     David was run out of the English Department on a purge.
LS:	Did they know he was on SDS? He didn't attempt to hide it?
JR:	Oh, yes. He was very public about everything he did. And probably the thing that gained him the most notoriety was David and I and two mathematics graduate students wrote a pamphlet for SDS called The Case Against Army Math. And then I wrote another one called The Case Against ROTC.  So, when I was working in SDS I tended to be one of the writers and sort of propagandists. So David was well known on campus for that, and his presence in SDS really infuriated the university.  I mean, they couldn't control what these kids were doing, and they could always dismiss them as immature and anti-intellectual and crazy and drug-crazed or whatever else.  Chancellor Young could get away with publicly calling me a bum, but he couldn't get away with that to David Siff,   because David had a PhD and was a professor and had a whole cloak of legitimacy that students didn't have.   They really wanted him out, and they got David and the other people in the English Department.   So, David, who had been an actor before he was a teacher-- he was a little older than the rest of us, I think he is now 42 or 41. David then left after a while and went to New York with his family and started teaching again, but he also got back into acting and is now a professional actor in film and television.  He is really a genuinely nice person, and completely non-threatening.  The fact that the university didn't want him to teach here was a real tragedy.
LS:	What was his field?
JR:	His field was literature.  I don't remember exactly what. I should be able to remember that.  It's funny, when I would talk to David we'd never talk about his profession.  We would talk about his politics.  I think he taught a sort of contemporary survey course,   Freshman English teacher.
LS: 	You wouldn’t have taken any courses from him.
JR: 	No,   I never did.  I  didn't get  to  know him until I was a grad student, and then I was taking the usual  range of boring courses, Milton, Chaucer , pre-Shakespearean drama,  all of which I like, really I do, but at the time it was certainly not as interesting as reading an economic analysis of the labor movement, or something like that.
LS: 	Your thesis was on Melville?
JR:    	Well, I didn't write a thesis, but he was the person that I specialized in, took my seminars in, and probably retained more about than the other authors I read.  So we were talking about who was in SDS. Let's see, who else was in SDS... 
00:36:04
	By the very end of the Sixties, SDS had a regular core of about 200 people. It was fairly substantial. Anytime SDS had a meeting it was good-sized. It would fill a big classroom.
LS:	Mostly students?
JR:	Nearly all students.
LS:	Fill a big classroom, so they, they did meet on campus
JR: 	SDS met on campus.  It met at the Union and on campus, in B10 or B130 Van VIeck or  105  Psychology.
00:36:40
	Then what developed towards the end of the time that I was here, say from the end of '89 to May of '70 when I  left Madison again, was the evolution of a group called Mother Jones.  The full name was the Mother Jones Revolutionary League.  Originally it was going to be called Volunteers of America, until we found out that that was the name of the Salvation Army's group and we didn't want the same name. Somebody picked Mother Jones because she was a woman and a labor leader, radical. Mother Jones was designed to be an underground group, which was another so-called big step in the movement.
LS:     Was it a split off from the SDS?
JR:	It was not so much a split as it was a recognition that SDS had informers in it, it had provocateurs in it, people who were really bent on causing trouble.
LS:	Not just police underground agents, you mean.
JR:	Well, I think that they were either working for one police agency or another, or we ended up attracting some real crazies who wouldn't be disciplined at all  about what we were doing,  and would go off and start some trouble, and then the whole thing would disintegrate.  So it was a recognition that if we were going to do some serious political  work— although we never did any that I  recall— we would have to be a much tighter group,  and  it would mean a certain  level of secrecy.  I was in Mother Jones for just a couple of months, because I didn't like that.  People were talking about doing security checks on other people, and there was such an atmosphere of paranoia. Meetings were held in people's homes, and you would never know where the meeting was until the steering committee called the meeting, and then you would have to go to a certain street corner and someone from the steering committee would come up and say that the meeting is at such and such a house, and this was a way to be absolutely security conscious.  It was sort of craziness. In fact, that's one reason why I left Madison and my wife wanted to leave.  Things had gotten so far out of perspective that it was hard to function here if you were a serious radical.
LS:	Let me go back.  There's a little article in the Cardinal about there being a split between SDS and the Draft Resisters’ Union. I wondered about that. Were you there or did you know anything about it?
 JR:	No, I don't. I was in the WDRU and then drifted out of it when I left here after the end of the spring semester in 1968. When I came back here in December of 1968 I was no longer involved in Draft resistance. I was  in SDS,  and then I had gone to work for the Cardinal and gotten involved in this  big personal research project  which  I  ended  up  printing in the Cardinal. So I didn't have time for WDRU.
LS: 	I wondered if that represented some difference in tactics.
JR: 	Probably.
LS: 	But then you say you helped organize Mother Jones?
JR: 	Yes.
LS:	But then, people in it had policies that you didn’t agree with finally?
JR: 	Well, yeah. 
LS: 	Was Susan in it too?
JR: 	Yes. The theory about Mother Jones-- it sounds so crazy now-- it was our analysis that there was a vacuum in leadership on campus. There was no single group recognized as leadership, meaning a group that would call demonstrations, organize strategy against the War and against university complicity with the War. We felt that the only way that we could ever assume leadership was to present to the anti-war movement a group that was very coherent, clear and serious, and really had it together. We couldn't do that kind of planning at public meetings because the informers were there.  We'd plan a demonstration and go out to have the demonstration and lo and behold the police would be waiting for us because they knew exactly what the plan was. So we went about setting up this sort of like a second level of SDS. People that were in Mother Jones were all in SDS.  But it was clear that if you were in Mother Jones, that was confidential and nothing was to be discussed about Mother Jones anywhere outside of Mother Jones meetings.
LS: 	So SDS members didn't know that you were members of Mother Jones.
JR:	Probably not.  Then, what would happen would be, Mother Jones would call these demonstrations, let us say, but nobody would know who Mother Jones, except it would be somehow understood that Mother Jones had come out of SDS.  Let's say a demonstration would disintegrate into violence and there was property damage, if Mother Jones had called the demonstration Mother Jones' leadership might be held accountable somehow. There was always the fear of conspiracy charges.  So the leadership of Mother Jones was to be kept completely confidential, as was the membership. I  forget the date, I think it  was  in  February or March of  1970,  there was going to be a big rally at night and a  big march, and our  plan was  to take control of the rally and take it a specific place, and make it clear somehow during that  process that this was Mother Jones surfacing, doing  its first  public thing.  We were going to do it well organized, and whatever it was we were going to do would be done well and everybody would be impressed with this new leadership cadre.  So we had this plan that the march was going to go up University Avenue to Charter Street and stop. The demonstration was going to be going one way and we were going to take it somewhere else.  This was a  huge demonstration, and at the critical moment where people from Mother Jones were supposed to get up at the front and say we're taking  it somewhere else, two of the people, a man and a woman on the steering committee, were going together, and they had this argument about tactics.  It was like vaudeville. Now that I look back on it, it must have been hysterically funny.  Here was this man and woman having a tremendous fight in the middle of this demonstration with all the rest of us standing around thinking, my God, this is awful. Having this argument about which route to take. Finally, the man — I'm purposely not using names, because  I'm still held to my pledge of confidentiality except for my own name— told  her to shut up because he was a man and she was a woman and she didn't know anything about tactics. The whole thing just sort of fell apart.  Then the police showed up and by that time the police were operating what they called [Affinity?] Squads, which were little groups of plainclothes policemen with blackjacks. They went through the crowd breaking heads.  That was a terrifying tactic they used because you didn't know if the guy standing next to you wearing a  lumber jacket shirt and a ski mask was a friend or a guy about  ready to knock you unconscious.     That process started and there was some rock-throwing on University Avenue, and that was it.  After that, Mother Jones had a meeting to engage in what was called criticism and self-criticism, and the self-criticism was very severe. I was completely disillusioned. My wife was so disillusioned she didn't go to the meeting.  I was so disillusioned I said this group was a farce and I was leaving.
LS:	You were disillusioned because of this breakdown of decision making.
JR:	It was that and it was clear that we were trying to do something that was totally impractical. You look at the internal contradiction of trying to have a secret group doing something publicly.   It just wasn't going to work out.  There was too much paranoia about being a member of this little secret society and I just walked away from it.  Most of my friends were in Mother Jones, and it was amazing.  I never knew what they did after that. I never asked and they never volunteered information.
LS: 	Were they close friends?  Did you see them in other ways?
JR:	I did, but this was in February and by May we were gone, so there wasn't much time.     It was a brief flirtation with an underground group that never did anything except sort of
inadvertent street theatre.
00:47:47
LS:	Were your articles on ROTC and MRC - the brief ones, the three demands - was that a  Mother  Jones thing?
JR:	No, the three demands was SDS.
LS: 	Did you approve of that, the Mother Jones people?
JR:	Oh, yes.  The three demands was the beginning of SDS trying to take the anti-war movement to a different political level on the basis of an anti-imperial political analysis that the war in Vietnam was not an aberration but in fact part of an anti-communist worldwide economic political strategy on the part of the United States that required bases overseas and protection of markets, and that the United States had chosen to make its major stand against communism in Southeast Asia.  We in SDS wanted the University of Wisconsin not to be involved with that process.  So the three demands were organized around the AMRC, the Land Tenure Center and the ROTC, each being related in some way to American foreign policy.
LS:	So Mother Jones was more how you did things and when and where than policy. Your policy was the same as SDS.
JR:	I would agree with that.  Mother Jones was a procedural vehicle. It was supposed to be action-oriented. These were crazy days. They really were.
00:49:46
LS:	But I should think you would have welcomed having police in the crowd with blackjacks because that would give you an excuse for having a demonstration.
JR:	Well, I never believed in that.  There were a  lot of people who said what you've got to do is really go out and provoke the police, because the police will do their thing and that will radicalize people. But I never liked that, first because people always got hurt that way, and, secondly, whatever issue you were trying to demonstrate against would always get pushed into a secondary position behind the issue of police brutality. That's what happened at Dow, and it happened every other time there was police brutality.  People would of course be outraged at police brutality, and they'd spend all their time talking about whether or not the police ought to be on campus and whether police ought to carry weapons and why do police do what they do and was there really police brutality and who started it, were the police really violent or were people just resisting arrest. It always devolved into this argument about police brutality.
LS:	You didn't think that that helped the cause?
JR:	It may have.  I know that it did.  I would trace a lot of my own radicalization to the Dow demonstration and to being personally beaten by the police. But as an organizing tactic it's very manipulative to set up a situation where some innocent people are going to get hurt, and I never liked that.  On a grander scale there are people who will tell you that you aren't going to have any social change In the United States that is progressive or systemic until you go through a period of real fascism, and that that's what it will take to educate enough people to go out and change things.  I always thought that was preposterous.
LS: 	I guess I would imagine a good many people thought that that's what SDS wanted, to provoke brutality in order to arouse people. But this isn't necessarily true.  Some did, some didn't.
JR:     	I suppose some people did.  When we were in SDS we never discussed that as a motivation.   It may have been some peoples' personal little agendas.  I think that you had a certain set of assumptions about a demonstration.  A demonstration would be called and there would be a lot of publicity and there'd be a tremendous tension.     People were all keyed up and the cops were always keyed up, and it didn't take much to provoke a policeman in those days.  All you had to do was look at them in a strange way or call somebody a name.  They're much smarter now. They don't react.  But in those days you could curse at a police officer and he would likely knock or push you down. There were always people who were willing to go and fight the police. Then half a dozen policemen would come to the aid of the one policeman who was in the initial fight. It wasn’t as if you had to have a strategy to provoke a police response. Rarely did it not happen. 
00:53:45
LS:	I'd like to have you answer briefly whether you thought that the people who went off and organized the TAA and got involved in that were sidestepping the main issue?  Did you disagree with them?  Or were you against the TAA?
JR:	No.  I thought that some of the people organizing the TAA were trying to impose a belief in unions and unionism and union organizing in a situation where it didn't really fit. But that was because I wasn't familiar with unions very much at all, and the unions that I knew about were blue collar factory production line workers.  I just didn't have a good concept of white collar unions or public employee unions, which I think I do now. So I can remember thinking at the time that those people were going to have a lot of problems trying to organize teaching assistants, because in my own mind they didn't fit into a mental picture of what workers looked like. But that was my own ignorance more than anything else.
LS:	But you didn't mind that they had turned their attention from the anti-war movement.
JR:	No, because people had a limited amount of time. There were some students who were organizing within their departments. There was a history students' association, a comp lit organization, one in the genetics department, sociology. There were some kids who spent a tremendous amount of time just trying to organize students and faculty in their own department. That was sort of a narrow thing to do, but it made a contribution to a larger effort, to the whole anti-war movement.
LS:	But then was that diverted into the contribution of the TAA movement, or did you think that they fed each other?
JR:	No, you see the TAA happened at the time that the Mifflin Coop was happening, that Connections newspaper later called Kaleidoscope later called Takeover was happening. It was the same time that the Daily Cardinal was undergoing changes, the WSA Pharmacy was getting off the ground, there were some housing coops starting and the women's movement starting.  There was this really tremendous explosion of new alternative groups or institutions going on, and people on the Left took their political analysis and applied it to their own situation. The war in Vietnam was a catalyst for so many things, and these things came out of the anti-war movement.  The anti-war movement turned out to be directed as much against American society and traditional values here. Supposedly there was a sexual revolution going on at the time, which is debatable.  But there were people who were very concerned about that and nothing else. There was a whole campaign on to educate people about homosexuality. There was a smash monogamy movement, if you can believe that.  It was very difficult to be married and be a radical in that period.  You were under tremendous pressure from your friends not to be married, certainly not to get married. If you were married, people just looked at you like you were some sort of a relic because you had adopted an old way of thinking and acting and relating to people and organizing your life.
00:58:08
	This was a new period and everything was different and open to question.  Whatever it was that was established, the alternative was considered to be better.  For example,   homosexuality was considered to be better than heterosexuality; or a more honest way of living, because you had somehow transcended the male-female dichotomy or role.  If you couldn't do that, you certainly weren't monogamous because monogamy was an old way of doing things.  Anything that was an alternative to the status quo was considered more desirable.  So people went out and formed labor unions and alternative newspapers and alternative stores, coops, housing arrangements.  The TAA was a real visible example of people looking at the status quo and saying, we have to do something about that that's politically acceptable.  The answer is, we need a union.  The only difficulty I had with that was trying to figure out how you could unionize teaching assistants.
00:59:40
LS:	I was talking to Pat Russian and she was telling me how the women's caucus started in the TAA. She said that the men were very sexist and that her feeling was generally that the New Left was sexist.  The women really had to fight to get anything.
JR:	That's very true.
LS:	You said a while back about Susan signing the statement...
JR:	I see I've been caught in a little contradiction here. I guess both things are true.  But you have to remember that the Left was dominated by men at that time, because a lot of what the Left was doing was paramilitary or pseudo-military, and involved force.  There was a lot of very aggressive behavior going on that tended to bring out a lot of real macho behavior in men.  I can remember when the women's caucus in SDS was founded,   having a meeting at the Union in that part of the cafeteria that's on the side.  There was a guy named Paul somebody, a real hip guy. Somebody had put on the agenda Women's Issues and there was some discussion about it. This guy Paul finally stood up and said, look, I thought we were here to discuss the war.  When are we going to stop talking about this women's business and get down to politics?  The women just exploded.     They were saying that he didn't understand that this was a political question, too. He was run out of SDS.  It seems to me that Neil [Kauffler?] also made some kind of sexist remark and was literally beaten up by some women.  If you look at the leadership, the Kaplan brothers, they were very, very macho.  So it’s a valid criticism. I don't know that the Left was any more sexist than anybody else. We were probably more hypocritical than we thought we were.
LS:	I think that was the point.
1:02:45	End of Tape 1, Side 2
Tape 2, Side 1
00:00:00
JR:	Why don't I tell you how I got involved in the Cardinal. And I’ll try to make that brief. At the end of 1967 the Cardinal ran a little notice saying that they were going to have a competition for selecting columnists for the next school year. I'd always wanted to be a writer and I'd sort of fancied myself as a writer of comedy.  So I wrote a humorous column and sent it in as my sample. They wrote back and said, you're selected. They probably got very few entrants. Starting in January, the second semester of ‘67-'68,   I wrote this humorous column for the Cardinal.  I've read some of them since, and they're really awful. What happened, though, was that that was during a period of time that I  was getting more and more politicized, and finally I dropped the humorous bit and started writing more serious columns about the English Department and other kinds of political issues. So I was writing for the Cardinal then in ’68.
LS:	The Cardinal was not itself yet  radicalized, is that right?
JR: 	It was clearly moving that way.  But it still wasn't identified as a radical paper like it came to be in ‘69 and '70. Alright, so that’s the end of the spring semester, I was a full time columnist. And I went away for the summer and came back. 
00:02:07
	There was a new Cardinal editor named Rena Steinzor, who’s also a bureaucrat now.   She's a lawyer with the Federal Trade Commission or the Justice Department in Washington. All of us Leftists are bureaucrats at one level or another of government.    When I came back in the winter of '68, I wasn't in school. I was studying for my exam. I had a lot of time on my hands and I had a little money from my grandmother. My wife had a part-time job. So I really didn't have to have a high-paying job. I went to work for the Cardinal on a paying basis, I think twenty-two dollars a week, which was not much money.  On the other hand our rent was forty dollars a month, so you could get by.  I decided that I was going to do a major research project on the Board of Regents. I worked on it from December of '68 to March of '69.  It started because I still held a grudge against Walter Renk, who was a regent from Sun Prairie. I had been at the Regents' meeting earlier that year in '68 when the Regents had thrown Robert Cullen out of the university for his role in Dow. They'd done without a hearing, and it was a railroad job and there was a lot of anti-Semitism involved in that.  I decided I was going to do an investigative research piece on this regent.  That led into an investigation of all the regents, who they were, their backgrounds, their business dealings. That led to an inquiry into the financial structure of the university, including where and how its trust funds are invested, how they’re invested. And that led to an investigation into several foundations that operate very closely with the university, and put money into the university. The same people were pulling a lot of the strings all the way around.  I really got into this.    When I finished writing it, it was a manuscript really, not a newspaper story.  It was about 250 pages.  It had uncovered quite a lot as far as university1andholdings, university investments  by the Board of Regents  in corporations which regents sat on as directors, sort of conflict of interest -- what I  would say were questionable leases of  property between the university and businesses with regents as directors.  The regents always approved the leases.
00:05:19
	So we set about to publish all of this in the Cardinal, in about a five or six part series.    The last part of the series had to do with the foundation that put up the money to build the AMRC, the WARF foundation.  As things went on campus, I think I can say fairly objectively that this series was a major publishing event. We called  it Power Elite 101,   like the name of a course in power structure analysis.  The Cap Times reprinted the one day's piece on Walter Renk, because it turned out he was one of their bad guys, too.    They even wrote an editorial saying the Cardinal has done a great thing, this was a real scoop and we give you credit for that. They had to write that because they took the article without paying us for it, and it was a copyrighted article. We had a little fight with Miles McMillan about it.  To avoid a lawsuit, he paid me a hundred dollars. 
00:06:45
	The Cardinal printed this series which caused a lot of comment. It started this process of people looking to the Cardinal for information that they were not used to receiving from it. And I stayed – the series was  printed, I think, in March of ’69, and starting in that fall. 
00:07:11
	After I had finished my comprehensive exams and I had my Master's degree, we stayed in town through the school year of '69 and '70 and I worked on the Cardinal full time. I was their only full time person. They gave me the title of contributing editor.   I had as much or more power on that paper than did the editor, who was a student. The university was not happy with that situation because I was a non-student, but I was on campus and working for the university paper, and the university paper was sort of independent, so it could hire whomever it wanted. We instituted some internal changes in the Cardinal; staff democracy, election of editors.   I spent most of my day either at the Cardinal or working on investigative reporting or organizing things with other people on the Cardinal.   I did some work with SDS, but mainly did my political work and journalism through the Cardinal, which became a political force in the anti-war movement, and more than just a student newspaper.
LS:	I didn't realize that it was you who was responsible for this.
JR:	I don't want to say that I am solely responsible for it. Part of It had to do with the fact that I was a little older than a lot of the people on the Cardinal, and I think that ended up giving me influence over people.  If we had a staff meeting and argued for wording of an editorial, my position would usually be adopted.   David Siff, who was not a Cardinal   person, who was a teacher, had tremendous influence over the Cardinal, just because of who he was, because he was older and respected for what he was doing. He had some sort of legitimacy, and I think I had the same thing. I had been around for a long time and I had done a lot of early work in the anti-war movement, all of that gave you clout. Together with Rena Steinzor, I think it's fair to say that Rena Steinzor and I were the heavies on the Daily Cardinal. And a lot of it was really getting pushy and forcing people to think and write the way you wanted them to.  In retrospect I certainly don't like a lot of what happened, but that's the way it was going down at the Daily Cardinal.
LS:	A lot of what happened?
JR:	The sort of intellectual bullying of people that went on. If people didn't agree with you, you could lash out at them and cut them to ribbons. That intimidated people.  By a certain point they wouldn't argue with you anymore, because they didn’t want to take that kind of...   There wasn't a tongue lashing; we used to call it gut checking. If somebody said something, and it didn't fit with your political analysis, you'd start arguing with them, but what you'd basically be doing is telling them that they were politically chicken shit, that they weren't willing to take risks and their politics weren't as good or pure as yours. The worst thing you could do was call somebody a liberal.    That was the worst insult, reserved only for special occasions when you really wanted to clobber somebody in a debate or argument in front of a group of other left wing people. Liberalism was synonymous with weakness, and if you could identify and label somebody as having done something liberal, it was a sneering term. Since I was older than a lot of these people on the Cardinal were just kids – eighteen or nineteen years old – and I was twenty-five, had a Master's degree, been around campus for five or six years, most of them who'd been there for 12 or 18 months.  And that's just the way it went.
LS:	In what spirit did you call someone a liberal? Were you friends saying, look you’re all screwed up, and why don’t you straighten your thinking out, or were you really putting them down? Could you say, you’re a liberal to one of these kids --?
JR:	I mostly took place down at the Daily Cardinal when we were writing editorials and the question would be, what line shall we take, what should we say about such and such.  And the Cardinal would always come out with a very heavy line. In fact, there were some things that Steve Reiner wrote when he was editor that I didn't agree with because they were so flagrant, so far out.   But, by and large, you see, there’d be this argument, or discussion, and then either Rena Steinzor or I would say, look, it really ought to say such and such, and that was usually it.  And if there was an argument,   It was sort of like who dared, who wanted to risk getting into an argument with one of the two of us. We really sort of worked as a team. None of this was conscious, I don't think, but that’s just the way that it came out. I never really understood this until...
00:13:45
	I had a friend and I was walking home with her one day at about 6 o’clock leaving the Cardinal.  I had a beard – I had beards on and off – and I had shaved my beard, and she said something like, you know you look better without your beard. I said, I don't  really think so, I sort of missed it.  And she said, well you look less frightening.  I laughed and said nobody has ever said that to me before, and she said, oh that's what everybody thinks. They’re just absolutely terrified of you. They're totally intimidated. I went through a real evolution after I left here, because I began to realize that I did  have this  reputation of being a foreboding figure politically and that wasn't the way I saw myself.     In many ways I was thinking of myself as a good conscienced liberal. I had applied for conscientious objector status on moral grounds. I looked at myself as a very moral   person, not an intellectual ass-kicker.  One of the reasons why I left Madison was that I wanted to get away from here and from this environment, and go somewhere and just cool out.  This was the second time I left. My wife felt much the same way about herself.    We had sort of gone around confronting everybody for the last year and a half.
LS:	Sort of  holier-than-thou?
JR:	Very.  Very arrogant, totally unforgiving.  A lot of it got taken out on family, parents, friends.  It wasn't until people started pointing it out that it became clear that that's the way I was. I won't speak for her, I guess.  But it happened to a lot of people.  You see what would happen when you were in the anti-war movement would be, you'd wake up in the morning, and you’d wake up angry, and you’d spend the whole day in a rage at the war in Vietnam, and Nixon, or Johnson, and Humphrey, and the bombing, and the killing, and you couldn't do very much about  it.  You were just in this rage all the time.     Angry at everybody and everything. I think it was necessary to get away from Madison.
LS: 	Then you had the certainty of  being right.
JR:	Sure, and I do believe we were right, I still don’t – I’ve never felt that the anti-war movement was wrong.  I mean certain things that happened were wrong, but I don't feel  that the war in Vietnam was right.  Oh sure, there was a great deal of self righteousness. 
LS:	 I mean sometimes you can be on one side of something and believe it very strongly and still know there’s another side, but I think it was a characteristic of being against the war that –
JR:	There was no recognition that anybody on the other side of the movement was right, that the war in Vietnam was a clear-cut case of right or wrong. We tried to brow-beat people into joining us. We didn't have any sophistication about how you could communicate with people to get them to come around to your side. 
00:17:54
	 There was always a great debate on campus about whether the anti-war movement ought to move off campus out into the community. The people who tried that came back and said, you know this whole anti-war movement on campus is just organized all wrong.   People in the community think it's violent and based on confrontation, not discussion.  And if you want us to go out to labor unions and community organizations and into neighborhoods to talk about the war, everybody's got to look different and act different. Not much of that happened, and that's too bad.
LS:	We always thought that, of course, out on the edge, that you'd alienate everybody by looking that way.
JR: 	I know that now, but we didn't know that then.
00:18:44
LS:	Well why did the people that you were browbeating at  the Cardinal take  it?  
JR:	Well I think ‘cause they were scared
 LS:	And did they feel that you were right and that they really were chicken?
JR:	I may have left an incorrect impression.  By the time 1969 rolled around, you didn't apply to work on the Cardinal unless you were radical.
LS:	You say that there wasn't a big change. I had thought somehow that there was a crisis of who ran the Cardinal and that it changed from one to another.
JR:	In the academic year of   ’68 to ‘69, Steven Reiner was the editor. And Steven Reiner was the last editor chosen by the Cardinal Board of Control, and he was the last person who ever – well, say, the last person between that period and maybe now because I don't know much about the Cardinal now – the last person who ever had this dream of running the Cardinal as the editor with a staff of flunkies, according to some movie image of what the editor would do. At the end of Stephen Reiner's term, which would’ve been March of ’69. (Note:   Reiner's term was from 4/69  to 4/70) the Cardinal had really been  taken  over by radical interests. And he was sort of in the middle, sort of a radical, but he wasn’t. And he was a prima donna.
LS:	Well you say it had been taken over by radical interests—
JR:	The radicals on the Cardinal asserted themselves - demanded staff democracy.  You see, it used to be that the editor would sit in his office all day and contemplate the world and then write an editorial.  The staff wanted to write the editorials at some point on democratic grounds, they were all equals so those titles didn't mean anything.  Towards the end of his term, Steven Reiner gave up his prerogative because he was forced to.    And then the staff voted to select Rena Steinzor as the next editor of the Cardinal.
LS: 	Were you in on that?
JR: 	Oh,   yes.  And we told the Cardinal Board of Control, this is the editor and you can  rubber stamp our selection if you want. But we have chosen and we'll  go on strike and there'll be no-newspaper, and they capitulated.
LS: 	Were they gracious about it?
JR:	No,  they were not  happy about  it.  We weren't gracious about it,  either.  It was a confrontation.  We had also decided to spend about $2000.00 of money out of the Cardinal's trust fund when the Board of Control was supposed to control  that money. We went to them and said, we vote, it's our money. This is what we want done with it, and you must sign the checks, and they capitulated again.  We voted to give a thousand dollars to Broome Street Theatre and a thousand to the Black Panthers in Chicago after the raid on the headquarters. They were very symbolic gestures, but it went to the heart of who controlled the Cardinal. Did the staff or the Cardinal Board of Control? And I think they still have election of editors. Finally there was a referendum on campus, '70 or   '71, which the student body approved, giving the power to elect editors to the staff.  So I guess there was a change and it had to do with events and personalities, too.
LS:	Was any of this --
00:23:06
JR:	The point I  was trying to make was that I didn't want to give the impression that there was a group of kids down there and a couple of older radicals telling them what to do.     By a certain point, especially1969, everybody who was on the Cardinal staff was an SDS sympathizer, or an SDS person, or clearly against the war in Vietnam. And very few people really would ever have described themselves as conservatives or liberals even.    It was also clear that there were some people on the paper who -- even though it was supposed to be a democratically-run group, there were some people who really had  influence.  Rena Steinzor was one, I was another, David Siff was another.  
00:24:00
LS:	What was his position?
JR:	He didn’t have one. He was just, somebody would say, you know, I talked to David Siff today and he thought we ought to write an editorial on such and such. And half an hour later there'd be an editorial set up in type.
LS: 	The Board of Control does have two faculty members on it, doesn't it?
JR: 	Yeah, but they have hardly anything with the day-to-day operation of the paper.  They meet once a month.
LS:	There wasn't any deliberate policy In SDS saying, let's take over the Cardinal.
JR:	No, there didn't need to be.  
00:24:43
	People on the Left knew that the Cardinal was going to pretty much support the anti-war movement and the three demands.
LS:	In  1967, it didn't yet, though.
JR: 	No. Well see in 1967, you had editors like Joel Brenner, and they were, you know, Joel Brenner was sort of the young journalist-editor, writing editorials himself. You had to understand the way the old Cardinal looked. There was a great big area where the presses were at one end,  and the layout tables were in the middle, and the desks for all the reporters were at the far end towards Henry Mall And there was one little office with a door on  it and glass walls, and that was the editor's office.  There was tremendous prestige to be the editor of the Cardinal. There was a typewriter in there and you were supposed to knock on the door before walking in.  The editor would stroll in.  You should meet Steve Reiner. He's extraordinarily handsome, sort of beautiful. He always had a tan, and he had a beautiful dark red dog.  He would sort of stroll in and there was always a little scene, you know, he’d stroll in and ask are there any messages for me, and then he'd walk in and close his door. He'd sit in there for an hour working on an editorial.  Well, that's a very different procedure than a group of fifteen or eighteen kids all crowded around, arguing about who ought to write an editorial, who was the correct person; what was it going to say. That person would go out and do a draft and bring it back in twenty minutes.  It just struck me that the debate once there was this staff democracy, that the actual ongoing debate about what kind of editorial was to be written would still take place in that  little office.  It would have been much easier to meet outside where there was plenty of space, but everybody would crowd into that one little office and bring in chairs and sit on the desk and argue it.  It had to be done in that space. Steve Reiner was very bitter towards the end of his term as editor about the evolution of staff democracy.  He used to say it ruined being editor for him.  He'd always wanted to be the editor of the Cardinal and he'd put in 3 or 4 years of work, and it meant that all the prestige was gone. It was very hard for him to accept. But the next editor, having come out of that process, was very into it. So there was a change then.
LS:	That’s very interesting.
JR: 	I haven’t thought through this stuff. Well, I guess I did when I talked to you before, but it’s, this is a real old period for me. Ten years ago.
00:28:22
LS:	How did you do your own research for these articles?
JR:	I spent a great deal of time in the administration building going through different  records,  stock transfer records. 
LS:	They let you do it –
JR:	Well, they did, and after a while, they began to close the access off, because there was no public access law as there is now. Nobody'd ever done it before, and they didn't really ask any questions. I became such a familiar face down at the administration building that the secretaries would say, go on in, you know where the records are.
LS:	They thought you were a student?
JR:	No, they knew I was working for the Cardinal, but they'd let me go through the travel vouchers.  
LS:	Isn’t that amazing.
JR:	Yeah, well, I don't think they’d even do that now. I think they’d make you say what information do you want and they’d bring it back to you. It was just a great time.  I used to go through the Army Math professors' travel vouchers, which were interesting  because they were always from far flung  places around the world, and they were always making the university pay for things that I thought were ineligible.  One guy, I remember, made the university pay for a boat trip through Niagara Falls for his kids.   Somebody else needed to rent a tuxedo for a dinner.  But it was mostly through researching records, and I'd come to this building and go through the land transfer records and registered deeds office, a lot of records at the Secretary of State's office on corporate control.  A lot of research just in libraries with research books. There's a research book in this wor1d for everything. It was interesting.  The process that I was going through was nothing more than gathering what was already public information in disparate locations, and organizing it, and putting it in the Cardinal.  Then we had other sources,  people who'd bring us information. There were people who worked at the AMRC, for example, who were against the war in Vietnam, and had come here several years before.
00:31:48	End of Tape 2, Side 1
Tape 2, Side 2
00:31:52
[Repetition from last minute of prior side]
00:31:07
JR:	(continued) They hadn't  really thought about  It very much, and then felt very uncomfortable.
LS:	Now this is students, not faculty?
JR:	This was faculty. And so they would send us.
LS:	You mean people like Anatole Beck?
JR:	Not it was never Anatole Beck. No, I never had much contact with him. In fact, I don't even think he was at the AMRC.  I think he was in the Math or Computer Sciences  Department.  There was one particular professor who was originally from out East, who was very upset.  He didn't like the fact that  he was being paid by the army. And he used to send us everything, you know – [break in tape]. 

LS:	Well I didn’t check what we missed there, so maybe you’d better to back to saying, the professor from –
JR:	So there was a professor from the East Coast, who uh, was uncomfortable working at the Army Math Center and didn’t like knowing that his monthly paycheck was an army paycheck. It actually was a WARF paycheck, but it was from the grant from the Army.      So he would send me documents from Army Math, he would send me memoranda from the staff.  So we had good information.
	Some of the other articles that I ended up writing in the Cardinal about other things on campus did...  There was one person who claimed to have been an informant for  [PNS?]  who gave us some information  once.  Then there was another fellow named Michael   McClaren who, in May, 1970...   The last thing I ever wrote for the Cardinal was a 5  part series, triggered  by – there had been an informant who wrote an article in the Washington Monthly Magazine about spying on campuses, domestic  intelligence gathering. And so this fellow here, Michael McLauren, who was a university student came to me and said, well you know, I was one of these people, too, and I’d really like to get this off my chest. So, after checking him out, we did a long tape-recorded thing with him, and then I wrote a 5 part series about this guy and the intelligence that he had gathered at Notre Dame and other universities in Indiana in the Sixties.  So information came from people as well as from documents and sources, written sources.
00:33:58
LS:     	Do you feel that your, the facts that you got, the conclusions you drew were accurate?
JR:	I think that the facts were always accurate because things were always checked and double checked, and usually there was a documentary source.  We would print that Army Math people were consulting at Army bases, and the director of AMRC would say that's not true. Then we would print exactly where they were and what days they were there and what their expenses were. I think that the Cardinal had more credibility than Army Math did. Probably the most interesting thing we ever did was to get a copy of one of their annual reports, which had been heavily censored. In fact a whole section was simply omitted and it said something like ‘confidential information.’ We obtained it through Senator Proxmire’s office. But they hadn’t taken out the table of contents, which showed subject area cover in the portion that was censored. So we printed all of that. And Army Math had always claimed that all of its material was open to the public, its publications were available to anybody who wanted to read them or buy them, and that therefore they shouldn’t be seen as simply an organization working for the government with military purposes in mind. And I think that short a pretty big hole in their argument. 
00:35:39
	The conclusions that we drew, you know those are subjective conclusions and they’re political conclusions. There were some people who said, just because you've shown that Army Math works for the Army and  has military connections doesn't necessarily mean that  it's  bad; it could be good.  There was a whole school of thought that most of the people who worked there were themselves good, liberal, anti-war people, and that you needed those people sort of on the inside to make a rational case for you.  So the conclusions that were drawn, you know, those are always subject to discussion.
LS:	I guess I really meant the fact, obviously the conclusions were –

JR:	Yeah, I’m trying to remember if...  I think I made a factual error once. I said that  Bernard Harris had consulted at a particular  base, and he wrote an infuriated letter to the Cardinal  saying  he had never  been there, and I had the name of the base wrong. Or an arsenal. One of the two.  And  I corrected the error, and said  yeah you’re right.

LS:	It was another base?
JR:	It was another base. I know the director of the Army Math Center, and I don’t know if you’ve ever interviewed him, Rosser, would tell  you  that all we printed was  lies,and we never knew, we never took the time to find out the truth about Army Math. And that we said there was secret research going on, and weapons building, when there was nothing of the sort.  And I think that's a question of interpretation.  I never felt that  we were factually misleading people.
LS:	Did you have people speaking out, saying that these were accurate, people of the government, in the AMRC?
JR:	No.  They would never talk about it.  What they would say, was sure we went to such and such a base and gave a such and such a seminar. Or, of course we went to consult at such and such an arsenal or nuclear weapons factory.
LS:	Did anti-war people who were disturbed about the AMRC and who knew something about  it ever come out and say yes, these are accurate?
JR:	No, not really, not that I can remember.  There were sometimes indications, that the other faculty, especially after the article about the censored report, that there were other faculty who were disturbed about that, and felt that the academic freedom argument had really been punctured and that maybe AMRC really was different from other departments.
LS:     There was some faculty pressure against it.  I think in the English Department.
JR:	Yes,  the English Department did,  and I think some in the Math Department,  I  think Mike Leecher and others were opposed  to  it.   
LS:	Uh, yes. You know it’s almost three and you said you had to stop.
JR:	I have to stop at three. I have a meeting at three fifteen. Where did we go? 
00:39:19	End of Tape 2, Side 2. End of Interview
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