Spectator's Journal/Hollywood's Mr. Antinuke: A Conversation
Marks, Marjorie Lewellyn
the Justice Department released during the 1980 trial of two top FBI executives charged with bugging and burglarizing relatives and friends of Weather Underground fugitives, the FBI in a...
...You'd go directly against your opponent, you'd challenge on your horse or even in the field with your rifle against somebody else's...
...Shows that deal with 'what is courage, what is~ toughness,' are dealing with conflict resolution...
...We also see the self-aggrandizing notion that the fulltime activists, the revolutionaries, are the engineers of utopia, generalissimos of revolution, building a movement, charting grand strategy for the global struggle...
...Ret...
...But the idea of our son getting drafted and pressing a button and setting cities on fire and having people looking for morphine at the end of the world--your search for water and morphinemwhat courage is there in that...
...There's lots of movies-of-the-week that have dealt with this issue...
...Eastland accepts the premise that "remedies" are needed for what he calls "segregation" and "discrimination" in the realm of "civil rights...
...Getting the networks to go for shows that embody Fleishman's points-of-view is by no means a cinch...
...whether they'll become Communistic or capitalistic we don't know at this point...
...Diane Fleishman regards the whole disastrous, uncertain phenomenon of wondering where you'll be every morning when you wake up as a "lot like life itself...
...Great movie...
...Norman Fleishman's wife, Diane, matter-of-factly mentions that the house, along with several others in the neighborhood, is in the process of sliding, along with the hill itself, toward the ocean...
...Norman Fleishman, however, believes there are some things he can change and he has set out to do so...
...she said to these entertainers: 'You're the most powerful people in the world.' She was just great...
...As our opponents continue to hammer away at us, it would help if conservatives would take the time to look up from their typewriters and see what the Department has done under Smith, and then join the battle o f ideas where it counts...
...Boudin regards "third world people in the U.S...
...He is Norman Fleishman, a loquacious, intense, 52-year-old native Californian, who wants to make sure that Americans don't forget what he considers to be the single greatest issue of our time: the risk of nuclear war...
...She understood...
...Elsewhere"] . . . . As a kind of young successful couple who know a lot of people, they could get a great crowd...
...as "the plow which has opened up the possibility of change for the whole country," a bit of manipulative smugness right out of Chernyshevsky...
...Pursuing the question, I drove out fog-shrouded Pacific Coast Highway toward Malibu at dawn one recent Saturday morning to interview Marjorie Lewellyn Marks is a media analyst and free-lance writer who #ves in Los Angeles...
...Most of Lazarre's essay is standard sob-sister, feminist empathizing and leftist angst...
...Maybe a few cockroaches will survive...
...The Justice Department's jurisdiction in the criminal area is slight, as it is in the appointment of federal judges...
...Tom Bethell replies: I would like to believe that everything is wonderful at Justice, but I still have reservations...
...A t a recent "social seminar" highlighted by Carl Sagan's appearance as guest speaker, "we had about 90 people squeezed into the very small home of actress Blythe Danner 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1984 and producer Bruce Paltrow ["St...
...Her parents were Communist party members...
...and another meeting hosted by actress Susan Sarandon, also on the subject of the nuclear threat...
...He has become a self-styled "gentle lobbyist" for the entertainment industry which, he says, with some awe, "reaches 80 or 100 million people every night...
...Too much macho...
...Seventy-five years may be what she'll need to sort it all out...
...It cannot solve problems...
...Too much total inflexibility and reliance on force rather than being smart and empathic and understanding of the other pers o n . . , finding something entertaining and brilliant to move people along with," he says...
...Near the end of his talk he said, 'It may be that we will all die of testosterone poisoning,' which means too much macho...
...And what Sagan said in our meeting is that if we destroy them, even in the first strike, that the amount of debris that will go into the air from just a first strike, if we destroy the irredeemably evil Russians there's enough debris to bring on a nuclear winter that will send the earth below freezing for three or four months and kill everything on earth...
...He might instead have wondered why the Reagan Justice Department continued to hound these innocent establishments, against which there has not even been a claim of discrimination...
...He seems not to realize that the meaning of "civil rights" has been changed from specified limitations of government power to a rationale for expanding such power, and his acceptance of the need f ~ such "remedies" tacitly legitimizes this change of meaning...
...It was hilarious and loving and wonderful and, my goodness, it just dealt with it...
...Gene La Rocque...
...Courage, he notes, "is admitting you have fearmlet's admit we're afraid of the Soviet Union, for i n s t a n c e . . . War used to be courage...
...How many movies have you seen where you gradually build up anger at the bad guy until it's okay to just absolutely massacre, push him o f f a building, send him through a glass window, impale him on s o m e t h i n g . . . We've all been nurtured and grown up on that way of solving problems...
...And it was done with comedy...
...Betty Bumpers, wife of the Arkansas senator and creator of "Peace Links," a grass-roots women's group...
...Terry Eastland Special Assistant to the Attorney General Washington, D.C...
...Muses Boudin, "It was, after all, my concern about the preciousness of life that brought me into politics in the first place...
...Marvin Goldberger, physicist and president of Cal Tech...
...He hadn't heard of Blythe Dannet or Bruce P a l t r o w . . . but he came in there and he was up to the occasion and he respected them...
...Such figures are suspiciously modest, and rightly so, for the essence of Fleishman's lobbying consists of the occasional get-togethers he arranges, usually at somebody else's home, and attended by a hodgepodge of television writers, producers, actors, and featuring an eminent guest speaker from the academic or scientific world...
...With time to spare before our 7:30 a.m...
...Fay Kanin, former President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, introduced Sagan who then spent about two hours detailing the effects of the 'nuclear winter' that would occur in the aftermath of a nuclear attack...
...the Justice Department released during the 1980 trial of two top FBI executives charged with bugging and burglarizing relatives and friends of Weather Underground fugitives, the FBI in a 1956 briefing to President Eisenhower and the National Security Council identified Boudin as a secret Communist party member...
...We will not escape that...
...What's the 'other' point of view...
...The idea is that when the creative types are exposed to the academic or scientific types the metamorphic result will show up in the nation's favorite television shows...
...Jane Lazarre, like Boudin and Clark, is a former "red diaper baby" who grew up in Greenwich Village...
...Too much do what I say or I'll kill you...
...It will simply raise your awareness about an issue," he adds...
...His wife, Diane, injects, "The point is that the other side was being presented out of proportion alr e a d y . . , with police shows and so o n . . . I mean it's been very well documented0including by the Presidential Commission--that women were considered second-class citizens on t e l e v i s i o n . . . These insidious attitudes were beit/g very well represented on television and that's what we were bringing our children up o n . . . we wanted to present the other side...
...Steel and National...
...People don't think, people go on in their ruts and t h e y ' r e a f r a i d . . . " " I t was phenomenal," Fleishman told another interviewer recently...
...Okay, is it that the Ru~s - sians are terrible, is it that we need a strong defense...
...While Ellen Frankfort's feminist perspective proves sterile, a kindred feminist reporter provides interesting though unintended insight...
...He had been general counsel for the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, an identified Communist front, since its founding in 1951, and was a foremost strategist in the legal attack against the nation's internal security laws and counterintelligence apparatus...
...Clark has already been convicted and sentenced to 75 years...
...And she said to them that the most exciting moment in her life was when she saw that first picture of the earth, the United States, the little blue ball, and she said she'd never forget t h a t . . , she said, 'If you could just hold that little blue ball in the back of your head when you do your writing and come from the well-being of humanity, you will change the world.' She really understood how important these entertainers were...
...We see a classic "true believer" in the simple, seductive old Marxian fairy tale of the hero struggling through the long ordeal, "creating a more just and humane society," as Boudin dreamed it, with a typical pinch of messianic martyrdom: "I thought I would rather be a defendant than a defender-lawyer...
...Jerry Jampolsky, psychiatrist and specialist in attitudes of children toward death and dying...
...Don't need much else, for they have each other...
...In fairness to Mr...
...I came out of that movie and I thought, 'Gee, that's gonna reduce the nuclear threat a little bit,' which is kind of silIy in a way b u t . . , a great work of art can make you cry and think and re-evaluate your l i f e . . . " he says...
...Tom Saffer, atomic veteran and author of Countdown Zero...
...Just in Living...
...You can do it with facing up to emotions...
...It won't work anymore," he concludes...
...In the introduction Fay recalled that she had introduced Margaret Mead at one of my meetings several years before...
...These people have found this...
...William French Smith surely deserves to be judged according to what he has done while serving as Attorney General...
...It can get people to think...
...The Day After' could not have been done three years ago," he concedes...
...It was just beautiful, it was just wonderful and it got people thinking about that subject...
...Just what does that mean...
...What beyond that...
...His next efforts in this regard include meetings on ,"children's reactions to the nuclear threat and what is courage," to be hosted by Alex Karras and Susan Clark o f TV's "Webster...
...There is no happiness in that "Hive...
...David Hackworth, the most decorated U.S...
...That's not really a point of view-that's just an i t e m . . . "Now, if the conservative point-ofview is that the Russians are irredeemably evil, which is sort of what Reagan said in that one speech and it hasn't changed, then there's no answer but to destroy them...
...This is likely to increase the pressure for protectionism, against which the Reagan Administration has shown itself to be a frail reed...
...I have been in this town long enough to see that the administration does not always inform and cultivate conservative writers to the degree it should...
...Nevertheless," he says, "there's a lot of interest" in the new heroism...
...That worthy was Moscow correspondent for the Daily Worker who in 1957 broke with the CPUSA after the bloody suppression of the Hungarian uprising--now there's a reason to hate your father...
...But where else do we get people to think...
...Prof...
...But if Mr...
...He wrote a book on the subject THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1984 45 and as a result met Norman Lear, and later persuaded him to do a show about it...
...He cites examples of what he means: "Did you see Terms o f Endearment...
...CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 32) intent of Congress...
...Norman Fleishman asks, "What's the conservative point of view on the risk of nuclear war...
...That's what television can do...
...On antitrust, William French Smith should have communicated his admirable sentiments to the relevant assistant attorney general, J. Paul McGrath, whose initial ban of the LTV-Republic Steel merger discouraged afiother such merger, between U.S...
...Yet since Smith took office the Justice Department's conservative policies and successes in such areas as crime, antitrust, and civil rights have hardly been hidden under any rocks...
...Boudin, according to Lazarre, has deep regrets over the deaths of the policemen and guard killed in the Nyack robbery, and the fellow terrorist killed two days later by pursuing cops in Queens...
...We all search for love, peace, and giving...
...Margaret Mead did the same thing...
...Kosta Tsipis, M.I.T...
...Gordon Adams, military budget and weapons system analyst...
...encounter, I stopped at a local seaside landmark of the Topanga people for a cup of coffee and a taste of the local flavor...
...We did a show on 'All in the Family' where Michael got a vasectomy right on the show and I couldn't believe it...
...Was Clark rebelling against her father...
...Norman Fleishman, an early riser, at home...
...Smith can amend the Exclusionary Rule, so that society at large is no longer punished for the failure of the police to observe correct procedural etiquette, then I for one will cheer him...
...Eastland allows the Justice Department to take credit for the Supreme Court decision in the Grove City and Hillsdale College case...
...And he wants to accomplish his goal by using the single greatest mass communication medium that has ever existed: television...
...You know, Gloria had forgotten to take her birth control pill and he got mad and she turned around and got mad at him...
...Immediately adjacent to Topanga Canyon's renegade communal atmosphere is a wealthy cliff community overlooking the Pacific where the Fleishmans reside rent-free in actor John Houseman's sprawling, somewhat unkempt house whose living room is dominated by an enormous empty sunken swimming pool...
...In a sentence...
...We've had a million wars based on that old kind of masculinity and approach to things, which is you kill your opponent, you beat t h e m . . , and we've been nurtured on 80 years of movies and television where it's the John Wayne mentality or Starsky and Hutch or you name it...
...The networks have to get a sense of when people are ready...
...A civil right !s now a government right to treat Americans as defendants-guilty (e.g...
...Arthur Macy Cox, author and foreign policy expert...
...For all we know, Kathy may have been trying to win Daddy's approval...
...The ambiance of the place, spelled out by the framed prose hanging on the wall, may or may not be indicative of the caliber of the existing local talent, but is probably a clue to the collective local yearning...
...Smith, I gather that he withdrew himself from the decision to continue prosecuting this case because of his connection with the University 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1984...
...Fleishman is emphatic about the point of his work: "My job is not to put messages into entertainment, it's not to insinuate certain political points of view or certain positions--because it kills the show, it ruins the show," he says...
...Mutual friends arranged for Lazarre to interview Boudin in jail...
...Flanked by aging, clich~'d photos of California surfers, captured at their brief crests, one aphorism reads: There's a place on this Earth that I found to bring peace...
...MALIBU, CA.--Right down the road from the Elysium Institute in nearby Topanga Canyon, where oblivion already exists for the nu~lists encamped there, lives a man engaged in a unique occupation...
...There are lots of good things on television now...
...Fleishman, it says at the end of his monthly Emmy magazine columns, is "director of Microsecond, a non-profit educational organization that serves as a resource on [sic] conflict resolution for the entertainment industry...
...of "discrimination") until we prove ourselves innocent by signing compliance documents which subject us to further regulation and scrutiny...
...F o r any who wonder how balanced his influence is, Fleishman retorts: " I only have one point and that is that the world will not benefit from nuclear war...
...after five months of visits and correspondence, Lazarre published an 8500-word essay in the Village Voice in February on the eve of the Boudin trial, which is expected to last six months...
...Given Fleishman's skill in attracting luminaries to these meetings, it just may be an idea that is working...
...Finally, we see the Great MarxistLeninist Contradiction: Can you really build a better world by murder, torture, riot, and terror...
...The guy who wrote WarGames was there...
...It blew my mind," he said...
...There are a thousand ways to do that," he adds...
...What's the good side of nuclear war...
...He spoke of our need to 'outgrow technological adolescence.' Sagan understood the power of entertainment to deal with that subject...
...I f you deal with something in artistic, universal terms, something brilliant, it will make you think...
...Take that, Pops...
...And I'll tell you something else...
...Indeed, they have loomed large enough for the Department--and Smith0to attract repeated attacks from the liberal establishmentmfor example, see, almost every other day, the editorial page of the New York Times...
...It won't persuade you...
...One needs no more...
...He just understood that this was an important thing that I was doing and it took me two years to get him to do that...
...physicist and expert on the physics of nuclear weapons...
...Lenin always enjoined Communists to use all "forms of struggle," both legal and illegal, including terrorism so long as it is part of a planned, coordinated strategy of overt and clandestine assault...
...That's it...
...soldier, now nuclear arms race opponent...
...Then she joined the terrorists' "aboveground" support apparatus and became chief plaintiff in a $100 million suit filed in 1978 against the FBI and former President Nixon for the burglaries and wiretaps designed to catch the people who had bombed the Capitol, Pentagon, and State Department...
...And no, I didn't raise transportation or give him any fee or anything...
...But, recounting twenty hours of conversations, Lazarre opens a window or two on Boudin's mental processes...
...her father fought in the Spanish Civil War with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and was imprisoned in Philadelphia "for political reasons...
...What about you, what about your responsibility?' she said...
...That Kathy learned her Lenin well and identified with her father's devotion to the revolutionary cause never occurs to Frankfort...
...there are a lot of women producers now in television where there weren't any eight years ago...
...Also a Weather Underground fugitive, Clark made the mistake of attending a movie in 1970 near FBI headquarters in Manhattan, encountered the G-man in charge of her case, and served a nine-month prison stretch...
...He, his wife and their four children live on the $30,000 salary he takes out of these grants...
...Last year's budget of Microsecond (the name derives from the amount of time it takes for a thermonuclear bomb to vaporize a city) was $53,214...
...I t ' s happening," he says...
...T e l e v i s i o n as an "educational" force struck Fleishman several years ago when he was director of Planned Parenthood in Houston where, he says, " I started the first vasectomy clinic in the country...
...We have a way to reach the whole human race and until a few years ago the only people we could reach were people within yelling d i s t a n c e . . . " Enthusiastically he continues, "There were 350 million people at the same instant watching the academy awards on TV and they heard the fellow who wrote Gandhi say we've got to find a way to end violence and solve problems in the nuclear race...
...How do you get across to people this whole question of the power of resolving conflicts, the enthusiasm to resolve conflicts, the kind of heroism that's based on saving humanity rather than the old kind of heroism of destroying i t . . . there's too much macho...
...According to the Chicago Tribune, "Over the years, Fleishman has received financial support from 9 or 10 by Marjorie Lewellyn Marks liberal organizations, such as the Stewart Mott Foundation...
...It's just down the road and around the b e n d . . . The people there are a friendly sort with plenty of giving and Dreams to share...
...Just living, in a world that he believes is on the brink of nuclear holocaust, is one thing Norman Fleishman is unwilling to do...
...That very morning, in fact, arrangements were being made for the neighbors to get together their shovels to shore up what they could...
...Another meeting that Fleishman recalls fondly was with Roger Fisher, the Harvard negotiations expert and author of a book called Getting to Yes...
...Admiral (Ret...
...Among the hosts have been producers Tony Bill (The Sting), Allan Burns ("Mary Tyler Moore," "Lou Grant"), Joanna Lee (writer/producer of many TV movies), and MGM-TV president Tom Tannenbaum...
...In Grove City College v. Bell, a cause c~13bre for feminists, liberals, and the New York Times, the Supreme Court adopted the Department's position that Title IX obligates only the specific program or activity in which federal funding is received, not the entire institution...
...Also missing from Frankfort's account is Kathy Boudin's fellow gangster Judy Clark, who was also arrested fleeing the roadblock shootout after her car crashed in a high-speed chase...
...When I saw it, all I could think of was all those nights I had driven miles to talk to maybe 40 Kiwanians about overpopulation...
...We have something that for a million years we never had...
...Once, California congressman Alan Sieroty was the guest speaker, and as Fleishman recalls it: "He looked out there at the audience of entertainers and said, 'Norman is doing the kind of education that makes my job easier by educating the people through entertainment, getting them aware of the issues, getting them to t h i n k . . . " Other speakers have included Alan Alda, Robert Scheer, the investigative reporter and author of With Enough Shovels...
...One-hundred-and-fifty people at, tended that meeting, including Stuart Stern, who wrote Rebel Without a Cause and The Ugly American, as well as a number of other screenplays...
...I mean I was thrilled that I could make that contribution of bringing him in to be with them, to answer their questions...
...Here we were reaching millions...
Vol. 17 • May 1984 • No. 5
