Just As I Thought
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1. One of those who resigned is Anthony Lake, National Security head in the first Clinton administration, and recently tormented by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in hearings about his possible new job as head of the CIA (which he didn’t get).
Everybody Tells the Truth
1. Bruce Anello was a young soldier who kept a heartbreaking diary of his days in Vietnam and whom our movement was not strong enough to save from death—along with over 50,000 others.
2. In protest against the widening war, in 1965 Norman Morrison immolated himself.
Conversations in Moscow
1. Ramsey Clark was the federal prosecutor in the Benjamin Spock conspiracy trial only a few years before this conversation. He was the U.S. Attorney General.
Cop Tales
1. Chair of the War Resisters League.
Pressing the Limits of Action
1. An interview with Grace Paley by Meredith Smith and Karen Kahn.
El Salvador
1. MADRE is a New York–based nonprofit organization dedicated to developing political and material support for the women of Nicaragua and El Salvador.
2. The North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) publishes the bimonthly Report on the Americas and sponsors research on political, economic, and social developments in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Some Notes on Teaching: Probably Spoken
1. Really?
Imagining the Present
1. It turns out that—according to his tapes—Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1964 also thought the war might not be a good or workable idea.
The Gulf War
1. Dr. Otto Nathan, Einstein’s executor, an economist, said sadly to me one day, “You know, it isn’t guns or butter. If THEY wanted it, the country could have guns and butter.” When I mentioned this to other smart economists, they disagreed. The thirty years of simple American malice since then have inclined me to agree with Dr. Nathan.
2. Vermont, where I now live, elected an independent socialist, a terrible shock to the U.S. Congress.
Connections
1. I quote myself—from “The Gulf War.”
2. This paragraph is almost exactly the same as the one that concluded “The Gulf War.” I thought it necessary to this talk.
How Come?
1. I suddenly and for a short paragraph liked that description. It was certainly real in my mother’s time.
Publication History
These essays have also appeared in the following publications: “Injustice”: Global City, 1955; “The Illegal Days”: The Choices We Made, 1991; “Six Days: Some Rememberings”: Alaska Quarterly, 1994/1995; “Traveling”: The New Yorker, 1997; “Peacemeal”: Greenwich Village Peace Center Cookbook, 1973; “Other Mothers”: Esquire, December 1995; Feminist Studies, 1978; “Two Villages”: WIN, 1969; “Report from North Vietnam”: WIN, 1969; “Everybody Tells the Truth”: WIN, 1971; “The Man in the Sky Is a Killer”: The New York Times, 1972; “Thieu Thi Tao: Case History of a Prisoner of Politics”: American Report, 1974; “Conversations in Moscow”: WIN, 1974; “Other People’s Children”: Ms., 1975; “Demystified Zone”: Seven Days, 1980; “Some History on Karen Silkwood Drive”: Seven Days, 1979; “Cop Tales”: Seven Days, 1979; “Women’s Pentagon Action Unity Statement”: Seven Days, 1982; “The Seneca Stories: Tales from the Women’s Peace Encampment”: Ms., 1983; “Pressing the Limits of Action”: Resist Newsletter, 1984; “Of Poetry and Women and the World”: TriQuarterly Review, 1986–87; “El Salvador”: A Dream Compels Us, 1989; “Some Notes on Teaching: Probably Spoken”: Writers as Teachers, Teachers as Writers, 1970; “One Day I Made Up a Story”: War Resisters Calender, 1985; “Note in Which Answers Are Questioned”: WRL Calender, 1977; “Christa Wolf”: What Remains, 1992; “Coat upon a Stick”: Jewish Publication Society, 1987; “Language: On Clarice Lispector”: Soulstorm, 1989; “Isaac Babel”: By His Side, 1996; “About Donald Barthelme: Some Nearly Personal Notes”: Gulf Coast, 1990; “Thinking about Barbara Deming”: Prisons That Could Not Hold Spinsters Inc., 1985; “Feelings in the Presence of the Sight and Sound of the Bread and Puppet Theater”: WRL Calendar, 1983; “Claire Lalone”: Long Walks and Intimate Talks, 1991; “The Gulf War”: The Gulf Between Us, 1991; “Questions”: Pictures of Peace, 1991; “How Come?”: Fourteenth Moon, 1991; “Upstaging Time”: Lear’s, 1989; “Life in the Country: A City Friend Asks, ‘Is It Boring?’”: Long Walks and Intimate Talks, 1991; “Across the River”: Seven Days, 1978; “In a Vermont Jury Room”: Seven Days, 1977; “Introduction to a Haggadah”: The Shalom Sedevz New Jewish Agenda, 1984; “My Father at Eighty-five”: New and Selected Poems, 1991; “My Father at Eighty-nine”: New and Selected Poems, 1991.
“Like All the Other Nations” was a talk given at a Tikkun Conference in December, 1988; “The Value of Not Understanding Everything” was a talk given at Barnard College in the mid-1960s; “Imagining the Present” was a talk given at the Teachers & Writers Collaborative in 1996; “Kay Boyle” was a talk given at a tribute to Kay Boyle organized by the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994; “Connections” was a talk given at Harvard University in 1991.
Also by Grace Paley
The Little Disturbances of Man
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
Later the Same Day
Leaning Forward
Long Walks and Intimate Talks
New and Collected Poems
The Collected Stories
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
19 Union Square West, New York 10003
Copyright © 1998 by Grace Paley
All rights reserved
First edition, 1998
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eISBN 9781466883970
First eBook edition: September 2014