Bill Moyers Journal

by Bill Moyers

  Do you think torture’s still going on?

  I’d have to say my own view is that there has not been systematic torture at Guantánamo. I think it was isolated to two or three cases. I think the Guantánamo facility violates international law in many other ways and is wrong in many other ways, but I don’t think that there was systemic torture at Guantánamo. I think there was probably far more systemic torture in Afghanistan, at Bagram and in Kandahar, but not in the military. And I think the military has now stopped. But it’s important not to forget that although the military has apparently stopped, there remains the other side, the dark side, as Vice President Dick Cheney called it, the CIA. President Bush has vetoed legislation which would prohibit the CIA from using the very techniques of interrogation that are the subject of this book. And I think that has disturbed a lot of people.

  But truth has consequences. In that congressional hearing, Representative Steve King of Iowa said to you, you’re hurting the war on terror. You and all the critics, all the journalists, all the people who are trying to stir up this debate, and expose what happened in the inner workings of the administration.

  I think he has no sense of history. He’s revealing his lack of understanding in other contexts, where similar analogous situations have arisen. I come back to my own experience in Britain. I was a kid growing up in London when the streets of London were being bombed by the IRA. For a period during the 1970s, the view was, “Let’s hit them hard. Let’s hit them very hard.” And it soon became clear that that is not a technique that works. Over time, Prime Ministers John Major and Tony Blair tried a different approach. And the different approach is, you understand what’s at the root cause of the conflict. You talk to these people, sometimes secretly.

  You try to reconcile errors that have been made. And that is a crucial part of bringing closure to a painful past. It happened in South Africa. It happened in Chile. It’s happened in many other countries around the world. So I directly contradict the views of Representative King. Until you begin to come to terms with the past, and accept that if errors were made, that they were made, and who has responsibility for them—not necessarily in a prosecutorial way, but in some appropriate way—without that, you can’t move on.

  A noted Arab scholar said that if you walk the streets of Cairo today, stop at the bookstalls, stop at the bookstores, you see, looking out at you everywhere, photographs of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. That this torture, these enhanced interrogation techniques, this cruelty, has seized the imagination of the Arab world. And that long after all of us have gone, including the torture team, the next generation of Arabs will live with those images. What’s your own sense of that?

  I travel in the Arab world, and it’s sad but true. The image of the United States today is that it’s a country that has given us Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Now, that is not the America that I know. I’ve spent a lot of time here, you know. I’m married to an American. My kids were born in the United States. I know what the true America is. And for me, this is a distressing story, because it has allowed those who want to undermine the United States a very easy target for doing it. It’s even worse than that, Bill. In a globalized world with the Internet, the legal advice that has been written by people like John Yoo at the Department of Justice and the memos written by Jim Haynes that were put on the desk of Donald Rumsfeld have gone all over the world. They’ve been studied all over the world. Other governments are able to rely upon them, and to say equally, “Look, this is what the United States does. If the Unites States does it, we can do it.” It has undermined the United States’ ability to tackle corruption, abuse, human rights violations in other countries, in a massive way. And it will take fifteen or twenty years to repair the damage. That’s why, irrespective of whichever next president happens to hold that high office, there will be a recognition of a need to move on. And moving on means recognizing that errors were made.

  I think we’re all going to be wrestling with this. And I think we have a responsibility to wrestle with it in a constructive way precisely because we do face real global challenges. And the threat of terror is real. And the importance of putting the spotlight on the past is to make us learn for the future and to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

  Working on this book, I learned an important lesson, which is that you can’t always deal with materials as they appear in newspapers or in documents. You need to take the trouble to go and spend many, many hours with people, talk to them, get to know them, understand what motivated them, understand that these are not people who wanted to do bad things. These are people who found themselves in a very difficult situation, under intense pressure from the top. I think once you’ve spoken to people, you begin to get a clearer picture. And I hope I have accurately conveyed the conversations in a fair and balanced way. There are people I like, there are people I didn’t like. There are people whose views I shared, there are people whose views I didn’t share. But I thought it was terribly important to lay out in the book the range of views that were expressed, and often not even to comment on them, but to let people’s views inform the reader, and the reader can then form a view as to whether they agree or disagree. I have put the other side of the argument against my own argument. And there will be many, I’m sure, who will disagree with me. That’s fine. Because that’s what our societies are about, debating these important issues. I know what I think, though. What happened was wrong, and it needs to be sorted out.

  HOWARD ZINN

  Tears welled up in Howard Zinn’s eyes as he talked about Genora Dollinger, the twenty-three-year-old organizer who rallied women to “stand beside your husbands and your brothers and your uncles and your sweethearts” who occupied a General Motors factory in Flint, Michigan, in 1937 and refused to leave. Sure enough, when the police moved against the strikers, Dollinger’s summons brought waves of women into the battle zone. Zinn and the actor Matt Damon, who as a kid was the historian’s next-door neighbor, turned Dollinger’s story into one of the most compelling sequences in their History Channel special, The People Speak. The TV show was based on Howard Zinn’s work, including his most famous book, A People’s History of the United States, the epic story of heroic, everyday men and women who stood up to organized power.

  The book was inspired, in no small part, by his own experiences growing up in a working-class immigrant family in Brooklyn, New York. Zinn worked in the shipyards there before joining the U.S. Army Air Corps and becoming a B-17 bombardier. On his final mission in 1945, to take out an isolated German garrison in the French seaside town of Royan, the Eighth Air Force used napalm for the first time, killing hundreds of civilians. He returned to Royan twenty years later to study the effects of the raid and concluded there had been no military necessity for the bombing; everyone knew the war was almost over (it ended three weeks later) and the attack made no contribution to the outcome.

  Zinn’s grief over having been a cog in a deadly machine no doubt confirmed his belief in small acts of rebellion. After the war, he came home to work at a warehouse loading trucks while enrolling as a twenty-seven-year-old freshman at New York University. In the years that followed, he ran afoul of the FBI when he was anonymously—and wrongly, he said—accused of Communist proclivities, was fired as chairman of the history and social sciences department at Spelman College in Atlanta in 1963 because of his civil rights activities, and spent the remainder of his long teaching career as a professor of political science at Boston University. Zinn passed into popular lore in 1997 when the film Good Will Hunting was released. The title character, played by Matt Damon, praises A People’s History of the United States—“a real history book”—and urges Robin Williams’s character to read it.

  After I screened Zinn and Damon’s The People Speak, eighty-seven-year-old Howard Zinn came to New York for this interview. He died five weeks later. One of his longtime friends and colleagues wrote that “shifting historical focus from the wealthy and powerful to the ordinary person was perhaps his greatest act of re
bellion and incitement.”

  —Bill Moyers

  History and Hollywood: is this the beginning of a new career for you?

  I hope not. But I am happy it is a way of reaching a larger audience with the ideas that were in the book. The idea of people involved in history, people actively making history, people agitating and demonstrating, pushing the leaders of the country into change in a way that leaders themselves are not likely to initiate.

  What do these characters from the past have to say to us today?

  What they have to say to us today is, think for yourself. Don’t believe what the people up there tell you. Live your own life. Think your own ideas. And don’t depend on saviors. Don’t depend on the founding fathers, on Andrew Jackson, on Theodore Roosevelt, on Lyndon Johnson, on Obama. Don’t depend on our leaders to do what needs to be done, because whenever the government has done anything to bring about change, it’s done so only because it’s been pushed and prodded by social movements, by ordinary people organizing. Lincoln was pushed by the antislavery movement, Johnson and Kennedy were pushed by the southern black movement, and maybe Obama today will be pushed by people who have such high hopes in him and who want to see him fulfill those hopes.

  Traditional history creates passivity because it gives you the people at the top and it makes you think that all you have to do is go to the polls every four years and elect somebody who’s going to do the trick for you. We want people to understand that that’s not going to happen. People have to do it themselves.

  One of my favorite sequences is when we meet Genora Dollinger.

  She was a woman who got involved in the sit-down strikes of the 1930s, those very dramatic moments when workers occupied the factories of General Motors and wouldn’t leave, and therefore left the corporations helpless. This was a time when strikes all over the country galvanized people and pushed for the reforms that we finally got from the New Deal. And Genora Dollinger represents the women who are very often overlooked in these struggles, women so instrumental in supporting the workers, their men, their sweethearts. And Genora Dollinger just inspires people with her words.

  She was only twenty-three when she organized.

  Amazing. Yes.

  GENORA DOLLINGER (PLAYED BY MARISA TOMEI): Workers overturned police cars to make barricades. They ran to pick up the firebombs thrown at them and hurl them back at the police.... The men wanted to me to get out of the way. You know, the old “protect the women and children” business.... I told them, “Get away from me.” ... The lights went on in my head. I thought, “I’ve never used a loudspeaker to address a large crowd of people, but I’ve got to tell them that there are women down here.” ... I called to them, “Cowards! Cowards! Shooting into the bellies of unarmed men and firing at the mothers of children.” Then everything became quiet.... I thought, “The women can break this up.” So I appealed to the women in the crowd, “Break through those police lines and come down here and stand beside your husbands and your brothers and your uncles and your sweethearts.” ... I could barely see one woman struggling to come forward. A cop had grabbed her by the back of her coat. She just pulled out of that coat and started walking down to the battle zone. As soon as that happened there were other women and men who followed ... that was the end of the battle. When those spectators came into the center of the battle and the police retreated, there was a big roar of victory.

  What do you think when you hear those words?

  First, I must say this, Bill. When my daughter heard Marisa Tomei shout to the police, “Cowards! Cowards!” she said a chill went through her, she was so moved. I’ve seen this so many times, and each time I am moved because what it tells me is that just ordinary people, you know, people who are not famous, if they get together, if they persist, if they defy the authorities, they can defeat the largest corporation in the world.

  When I was last at the National Portrait Gallery in London, I was struck all over again by how the portraits there were of wealthy people who could afford to hire an artist. It’s like Egypt, where you see the pyramids and the tombs and realize that only the rich could afford to consider their legacy and have the leisure time to do what they want. We know almost nothing about the ordinary people of the time.

  Exactly. I remember when I was going to high school and learning, it was such a thrilling story to read about the Transcontinental Railroad. You know, the golden spike and all of that. But I wasn’t told that this railroad was built by Chinese and Irish workers who worked by the thousands. Long hours, many of them died of sickness, overworked, and so on. I wasn’t told about these working people. That’s what I tried to do in A People’s History of the United States, to bring back into the forefront the people who created what was called the economic miracle of the United States.

  One of the producers of this film was Matt Damon. And I understand that when he was in the fifth grade, he took a copy of your book in to his teacher on Columbus Day and said, “What is this? We’re here to celebrate this great event, but two years after Columbus discovered America, a hundred thousand Indians were dead, according to Howard Zinn. What’s going on?” Is that a true story?

  Not all stories are true, but this is true. Matt Damon, when he was ten years old, was given a copy of my book by his mother. They were next-door neighbors of ours, in the Boston area, in Newton. And Matt says that he and his brother, Kyle, would wake up sometimes in the middle of the night and see the light on in my study, where I was writing this book. So they were in on it from the beginning.

  What about people today, doing what Genora Dollinger and others did in the past?

  I think there are people like that today, but very often they’re ignored in the media. Or they appear for a day on the pages of The New York Times or The Washington Post, then disappear. There are those people recently who sat in at this plant in Chicago that was going to be closed by the Bank of America, and these people sat in and refused to leave. I mean, that was a modern-day incarnation of what the sit-down strike was in the 1930s. There are people today who are fighting evictions, fighting foreclosures. There are people all over the country who are really conscience-stricken about what’s going on. But the press is not covering them very well.

  Several people in the program have talked about populism. How do you think of populism?

  The word populism came into being in the late 1800s—1880, 1890—when great corporations dominated the country, the railroads and the banks. These farmers got together and they organized in the North and South, and they formed the Populist movement. It was a great people’s movement. They sent orators around the country, and they published thousands of pamphlets. It was a high moment for American democracy.

  Well, if populism is thriving today, it seems to be thriving on the right. Sarah Palin, for example, and the Tea Parties. One conservative writer in The Weekly Standard even said that Sarah Palin could be the William Jennings Bryan of this new conservative era because she is giving voice to millions of people who feel angry at what the government is doing, who feel that they’re being cheated out of a prosperous way of life by forces beyond their control. What do you think about that idea?

  Well, I guess William Jennings Bryan would turn over in his grave if he heard that. William Jennings Bryan was antiwar, and she is not antiwar, she is very militaristic. But it’s true that she represents a certain angry part of the population. And I think it’s true that when people feel beleaguered and overlooked, they will turn to whoever seems to represent them. Some of them will turn to her, some of them will turn to the right-wingers, and you might say that’s how fascism develops in countries, because they play upon the anger and the frustration of people. But on the other hand, that anger, that frustration, can also lead to people’s movements that are progressive. You can go the way of the Populists, of the labor movement of the ’30s, of the civil rights movement, or the women’s movement to bring about change in this country.

  You mentioned the women’s movement, and there’s another remarka
ble moment in your film of Susan B. Anthony. She’s on trial for trying to vote when she and other women didn’t have the right.

  JUDGE HUNT (PLAYED BY JOSH BROLIN): The sentence of the Court is that you pay a fine of one hundred dollars and the costs of the prosecution.

  SUSAN B. ANTHONY (PLAYED BY CHRISTINA KIRK): May it please Your Honor, I will never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty. All the stock in trade I possess is a debt of $10,000, incurred by publishing my paper—The Revolution—the sole object of which was to educate all women to do precisely as I have done, rebel against your man-made, unjust, unconstitutional forms of law, which tax, fine, imprison, and hang women, while denying them the right of representation in the government; and I will work on with might and main to pay every dollar of that honest debt, but not a penny shall go to this unjust claim. And I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women to the practical recognition of the old revolutionary maxim, “Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.”

  I think what that says to people today is you must stick up for your principles, even if it means breaking the law. Civil disobedience. It’s what Thoreau urged, it’s what Martin Luther King Jr. urged. It’s what was done during the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Susan B. Anthony thought it was right for her to try to register to vote. And yeah, people should defy the rules if they think they’re doing the right thing.

  You have said that if President Obama were listening to Martin Luther King Jr., he’d be making some different decisions.

  Well, first of all, he’d be taking our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and he’d be saying we are no longer going to be a war-making country. We’re not going to be a military country. We’re going to take our immense resources, our wealth, and we’re going to use them for the benefit of people. Remember, Martin Luther King started a Poor People’s Campaign just before he was assassinated. And if Obama paid attention to the working people of this country, then he would be doing much, much more than he is doing now.