LET'S GO BACK TO THE BEGINNING OF THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION, RANDY. WHAT WERE YOU DOING BACK IN, YOU KNOW, AS REAGAN GETS ELECTED?

What was I doing?

YES.

We were organizing a referendum here in Western Massachusetts, which we began in January of 1980, so nine, ten months before he was elected, in which we put on the ballot the question of whether or not the United States and the Soviet Union should mutually halt the nuclear arms race. It turns out this was the freeze, the classic freeze proposition, although at that time it was called a moratorium. We later shifted the name "moratorium" to "freeze" because it was a better term. So I was organizing that first referendum here in the western part of Massachusetts. We put it on the ballot in something like 62 cities and towns all over the western part of the state, and waited until November to see how the voters would vote on that.

I THINK I HAVE TO GO BACK EVEN FURTHER. I THINK YOU HAVE TO TELL ME -- YOU HAVE TO GIVE ME THE CONTEXT, LIKE WHY, WHAT MOTIVATES THAT DRIVE? WHAT STARTS THAT PROCESS?

Okay. Let's go back to the Fall of '79. I was working with a community peace center here in Western Massachusetts called The Traprock Peace Center. We knew we wanted to focus very strongly on the nuclear arms race, but the question was, how do you talk to people about something that is seemingly so abstract and complex that you can't really get a handle on. And it was in that period of Fall 1979 that I heard about, in the context of the SALT II debate in the Senate at that time, a proposition that called for the US and the Soviet Union to halt all testing, production and deployment of all nuclear weapons across the board together, in a mutual, verifiable way. And that very simple idea occurred to me, as a local community organizer to make a lot of sense. It was something that I could imagine talking to my neighbors about. I could say, "What do you think about this?" you know. "How about if the US and the Soviet Union both, together, stop and then they begin to negotiate reduction together?" I thought that might really go over well at the local level, among ordinary citizens. So then we got the idea, "Okay. How do we take it to ordinary citizens?" Here, in Massachusetts anyway, we have a very strong tradition of putting questions on the ballot in the form of public opinion advisory referendums. So we gathered all the signatures, put the questions, the question on the ballot. And that, of course, gave us a marvelous tool for educating people. We had everything from house meetings to rallies, to TV spots, to all kinds of literature that was passed around in various forms, in which we argued the case for this bilateral freeze. That brought us to the November elections. I should say one thing. Okay. Fall of '79, I was working here in Western Massachusetts for a local community peace center, The Traprock Peace Center. We knew we wanted to focus on the nuclear arms race as an issue that, for us, raised questions about the whole way in which we are proceeding as a nation in the world today. And we knew we had to somehow be able to talk to people about the nuclear arms race but the problem is, it's a very, on the surface, a very abstract and distant and complex issue that people don't think of as something that they can easily get a handle on. So it was in the Fall of '79 that we heard about a proposition, in the form of an amendment that had been introduced in the US Senate to the SALT II Treaty. It was an amendment introduced by Republican Senator Mark Hatfield, and at that time, it was called the "Moratorium Amendment." It later became the "Freeze Amendment." But the proposition in this amendment was very simple: It was that the US and the Soviet Union should mutually and verifiably agree to a complete halt to testing, production and deployment of all nuclear weapons. And, you see, this cut through the whole complexity of the SALT debate beautifully. And the SALT debate had everyone in a quandary. On one hand, you hated to oppose it because it would mark some progress; on the other hand, it marked, it would mark so little progress that it might have the effect of fooling people into thinking that there had been more. So nobody knew quite what to do. Hatfield came through with this amendment which he had, as I understand it, taken very much from some of his advisers, including people in the Sojourners Community in Washington who had been very close to him. They went to prayer breakfasts together and so forth. And they, in turn, were part of discussions that had been going on for a couple of years with people like Randy Forsberg, Pam Solo, Mike Gendresic, others within the peace movement. So here came this amendment for a mutual, bilateral, verifiable freeze between the US and the Soviet Union; and, as a local organizer, I said to myself, "This could go somewhere. This is something I could talk to my neighbor about." I could say, "Look, what do you think? How about if the US and the Soviet Union both agree to stop, with verification and so forth? Then once they have stopped, and at least the arms race isn't getting any worse, they could negotiate reductions and, hopefully, get rid of nuclear weapons." So this would be a first step. And right away, we characterized the freeze as an essential, verifiable first step. So we decided we wanted to test out the proposition of the freeze with the local populace around here. We happen to have, in Massachusetts, a very fortunate tradition of referendum politics, putting questions on the ballot so that voters can actually say yea or nay with regard to them, on all sorts of issues. And it's a fairly simple thing to do; you have to gather a certain number of signatures. So we spent the early part of 1980 gathering signatures to put this freeze proposition on the ballot in about 62 cities and towns in Western Massachusetts; essentially, Silvio Conte's First Congressional district and parts of Ed Boland's district, neighboring district. Then we spent the remainder of that period between January 1980 and November 1980 doing everything we could to educate people about the freeze and the arms race, and why it needed to be stopped and so forth. And, of course, having something on the ballot is a marvelous way to educate people. It legitimizes an issue. It democratizes an issue. It says to people, "Your opinion counts. You're going to have a chance to vote on this. That matters. This is something that you and I and citizens everywhere should be debating and discussing and voting upon. It is our business." And so, suddenly, we could talk to people. We could knock on a door and say, "We would like to talk to you about something that is going to be on your ballot in November, that you will have a chance to vote on." People immediately open up to that and say, "Oh, what is that?" and we get a discussion going. So we had a wonderful educational campaign. The interesting thing is, of course, that this was the very time when Ronald Reagan was running against Jimmy Carter, it turned out. It was a time when all the pundits were saying, "There is a tremendous rise of the right going on." They were associating this rise of the right with a shift in public opinion, away from peace issues toward building up a stronger defense and all the kinds of things that Reagan was promoting. Indeed, when Reagan won the election, handily, in 1980, again, the pundits and Reagan, led by Reagan himself, can we call him a "pundit", said what his election shows is that there is a popular mandate for a stepped-up arms race, for a stepped-up military buildup and for superiority over the Soviet Union, as the Republican platform had called for. At the same time that Reagan was elected, and, by the way, elected by the majority of cities and towns in this part of Massachusetts, which tends to be more conservative than the Eastern part of Massachusetts, by a two—to—one margin, the same citizenry said, "We want a freeze. We want to halt the nuclear arms race. We like this idea of a verifiable, bilateral US/Soviet Union halt across the board, testing, production, deployment, all weapons at once, a complete halt. That appeals to us." And immediately, we thought, "This punctures that myth that the November election of Ronald Reagan is a, supports a mandate, is indication of a mandate for a stepped—up nuclear arms race." Of course, the story, it wasn't a story. We tried like hell to get the media all over the country to pick this up, and we were ignored everywhere. I remember I was on the phone until 3:00 in the morning after election night, calling every major news outlet in the country, saying, "We've got a story for you," and being told, "That's no story." Only The Nation magazine, as typically, carried it, and a few peace journals, and religious journals and so forth. But, somehow, the story did spread, and it was picked up by peace activists around the country who said, "Maybe this election isn't a mandate for a stepped-up military buildup, and maybe we should take the same, very simple, clear freeze idea," which, again, cuts through all the complexity of the SALT business, with specific numbers of weapons, up and down and the same, years and so forth. And so people began organizing around this freeze idea all over the country, and the rest of the story is, I mean...

LET ME ASK, DO YOU HAVE AN EXPLANATION FOR WHAT APPEARS TO BE A DICHOTOMY BETWEEN A TWO—TO-ONE VOTE FOR REAGAN AND A TWO-TO—ONE VOTE FOR AN EARLY FREEZE IDEA?

Okay. In this area, it wasn't a two-to—one vote for Reagan. It was, Reagan won narrowly, but he won, but it was a two-to-one vote for the freeze. Actually, in this town where we are sitting right now, in Colrain, Massachusetts, it was probably close to a two-to-one victory for Reagan as well as a two-to-one victory for the freeze. I think people didn't associate the two issues. I mean Ronald Reagan himself was an issue, as Jimmy Carter was. Ronald Reagan was a positive in people's minds. He represented, I think for erroneous reasons, strong, new leadership. Jimmy Carter represented a discredited, misguided leader. And the fact of whether, what we should do, the issue of what we should do with nuclear arms, I don't think, was part of the calculation. And I think that once people realized that there was a sensible way to approach this nuclear arms problem, once they realized there was a problem in the first place, they went for it. I mean, the beauty of the freeze was that it was a very commonsense idea, and even if you were highly, highly skeptical of the Soviets, even if you were really a profoundly anti-Soviet red-baiter, it was hard to argue, unless you were Richard Pipes or somebody in the Administration who could concoct these erroneous figures with misleading interpretations. It was hard for the average citizen to concoct an argument against the freeze. In fact, news media, doing early stories, used to come to us and say, "We can't find anyone to take the opposing side against the freeze, among local people." But how can you argue against a mutual, bilateral, verifiable halt that would give neither side any advantages and from there, balanced neutral reductions?

SOMETIME AFTER THIS, YOU GOT INVOLVED WITH WHAT BECAME A FORMAL NUCLEAR FREEZE MOVEMENT.

Right.

CAN YOU TELL WHEN WAS THAT AND WHAT DID YOU DO?

Let me say, I heard that Randy Forsberg was moving ahead strongly on this same freeze proposition after I heard about the Hatfield Amendment to the SALT II Treaty. In the Spring of 1980, I believe it was, Randy issued the Call to Halt the Nuclear Arms Race, which was a, really, was the founding document of what became the National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Movement or Campaign. When she issued that, we, here in Western Massachusetts, who had already begun organizing locally for a freeze, putting it on the ballot, we naturally hooked up with Randy and her effort. She was thinking much more broadly than we were, in terms of organizing, and trying to put together the beginnings of what became a national campaign. It hadn't been taken locally anywhere yet, so it was a nice sort of complementary couple of efforts. We were really trying to test it out locally, and she was laying the groundwork for a national campaign. So I became involved in that effort, starting in the Spring of 1980, and started going to meeting in September of 1980. I remember we held what I think of as the first organizing meeting for the National Freeze Campaign in, at the building across from the United Nations. It had great symbolic value, at least to me. We stood there on the seventh or eighth floor of the, it's called the Church, what's it called, the Church UN Building, right across from the UN, and there were people from all over the Northeast and a few from other parts of the country. And Randy led the meeting; she organized it, and we talked about organizing an actual national campaign. We planned to have a National Founding Conference in, a strategy conference in March of 1981, which we did have. And from that time forward, September 1980, up until that first Founding Conference in March of '81, I was very active, not only locally, but in the national organizing.

HOW DOES REAGAN'S, HOW DOES THE RAPID BUILDUP OF MILITARY FORCES, PARTICULARLY STRATEGIC FORCES, BY THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION, HOW DID THAT AFFECT THIS BURGEONING MOVEMENT?

Well, I think there is no doubt that Reagan's rhetoric and the actual buildup that he moved forward spurred the movement tremendously. Somebody quipped, at some point, "Every time Reagan opens his mouth, the freeze campaign doubles in size," and that was true. I mean here he was talking about warning shots over Europe at one point, and limited nuclear wars in Europe at another point, and tens of thousands more nuclear warheads in our arsenals at other points, and every time he said these things, people just went crazy. And the logic of a halt that would prevent him from doing that, prevent him from escalating the arms race, for modernizing the nuclear forces to bring in all these new and more dangerous weapons, the logic of the halt, the freeze, became more and more evident. So there is no question that we, the freeze campaign profited, if you will, and grew from that; but not only from that. I mean that was one factor. The demonstrations that took place in Europe in the Fall of 1981, I think it was, the largest demonstrations, peace demonstrations, they'd ever had in Europe, three-quarters of a million here, a million there, in Bonn, in Amsterdam, in London, all over the place, were on the front pages of our newspapers here in the very time that the National Freeze Campaign was just getting underway; within six months of our first Founding Conference.

Speaking of the demonstrations in Europe, I remember in, I guess it was early, very early '82, before our Second National Conference, before the freeze became big headlines and so forth, Randy Forsberg and I paid a visit to the State Department. We were just interested in finding out their perspective on things. And we sat with a guy who, I think, was head of Military Affairs for Europe, or Political Military Affairs, or whatever; a very cocky guy, as I remember, who sort of leaned back in his chair and said, he said, "I'd be kidding you to say that the demonstrations in Europe this past fall aren't a little frightening to us and that we don't have to take them seriously." Then he sort of puffed on his pipe and said, "But anyone who's a student of citizen movements and popular protests knows that these things pass by very quickly. They're all flashes in the pan, so that if we simply wait this one out, I'm sure it will go away." Randy and I are looking at each other like this, saying, "There's another one about to happen, fellow, you know, get ready," because at this time he had not a clue who we were or what the freeze was all about.

I WAS GOING TO ASK YOU FOR ANOTHER ANECDOTE, I MEAN A DIFFERENT KIND, REALLY, IN A WAY. THAT IS, I WONDER IF YOU COULD KIND OF GIVE ME A SENSE OF WHAT IT WAS LIKE. I MEAN YOU'RE SITTING IN AN OFFICE SOME PLACE, ORGANIZING, AND SUDDENLY, YOU KNOW, REAGAN MAKES SOME STATEMENT AND, YOU KNOW, IT BLOSSOMS. I MEAN, JUST TELL ME IN KIND OF A NITTY-GRITTY SENSE, WHAT HAPPENS. DOES THE PHONE RING, PEOPLE RUSH, I MEAN HOW, GIVE ME A FEELING FOR THAT.

Well, I don't think that we saw, saw it quite as dramatically as the media portrayed it, especially in retrospect. The fact is, our ranks were growing very quickly. I remember, I was the first staff hired for the National Freeze Campaign, and we immediately located our national headquarters in St. Louis. And I remember the early days in, at the end of 1981, early '82, when we couldn't possibly keep track of the number of groups calling themselves "freeze groups," at the state and the local level, springing up all over the country. Somewhere people had the notion that there was a group of us, probably led by the, or influenced by the, directed by the KGB, who was creating these groups. Not only were we not creating them, we couldn't even keep track of them. We could never have a list that was up to date enough of all the groups. We would get the list to press, and 15, 20, you know, 100 more groups would make themselves known to us by the time our list started to get out. And it was the same way with raising money. I mean it was the only time in my life when we would have people calling us, both individuals and foundations saying, "To whom do we write a check?" And I would say, "Well, don't you want a proposal? Do you need a letter of, do you need a fund appeal?" "No, no, no.", they said, "Don't bother with that. We like so much what you're doing; just tell us where to send money." I mean, and this was the period when Ronald Reagan was making all these rash statements. So I can't hook it to a particular statement, but it just kept happening like that. It was an unbelievable phenomenon that I may never see again as long as I live.

WHAT KIND OF PEOPLE WERE SENDING MONEY?

Well, we had the whole range of contributors. We, early on, before we were known, and I would say we became known, the media picked us up in early '82, when the Vermont town meetings, hundreds of them, all were voting on the freeze on the same day, I think it was early February 1982. And then Kennedy and Hatfield introduced their freeze resolution in the Senate, and members of House in the House in March of '83 '82, sorry. Then we were known. But before that, the media first picked us up in a big way very suddenly with the Vermont town meetings, which all happened on a single day, hundreds of meetings, hundreds of towns in Vermont, all voting on the freeze, I think it was something like February 5th, 1982. And, as far as the media was concerned, this grew out of nowhere. It was a sudden expression of concern that was fantastic. They couldn't explain it. They didn't know anything about the years of organizing that led up to that. So that happened in March, sorry, February of 1982. And then March of '83, Kennedy and Hatfield picking up on this, held a huge press conference in Washington at American University... And then following the Vermont town meeting episode, Kennedy and Hatfield, in March of the same year, 1982, a Freeze Resolution in the Senate, preceded by a big press conference at American University, a lot of hoopla. They were harkening back to John Kennedy's, President Kennedy's 1962 non-proliferation I've forgotten what it was now. You should get this, but it was, what was it?...So then we had, in March of the same year, 1982, Senators Kennedy and Hatfield, Republican and Democrat, holding a huge press conference at American University to introduce the Freeze Resolution in Congress. So now, even more so, the media was onto this whole thing and, again, describing it as a "sudden phenomenon, out of nowhere, this explosion of citizen concern," ignoring the fact that the Freeze Campaign itself was, by then, almost two years old, and there was lots of organizing preceding even that. So things caught on. At that point, people were, groups were springing up all over the country. They, the media attention really helped us. It spread the word faster than we could spread it. And it was then that we, especially had a hard time keeping track of the number of groups that were organizing on their own, with no help from us, calling themselves "freeze groups," and doing what they could to promote the freeze in their local area: having freeze referenda on the ballot, getting their city councils or their county governments or their state legislatures to pass freeze referenda. All that sort of stuff just really took off in early 1982.

WHERE IS THE MONEY COMING FROM?

Well, early on, let me say, before the media discovered the freeze, we had to work some to get the money. This was a new idea, it was not well known, and we got most of our seed money, I think, from relatively few individuals. I don't even think there was any foundation support, that I can remember, in the very early year or so. But some wealthy individuals, particularly in the Boston/New York areas, who were attracted to the idea of a citizens campaign based on this freeze proposition put forward, I think $40,000 was our budget for the first year, for example. It was very minimal. But after the explosion of publicity, people were coming to us, wanting to give money; and that was the amazing phenomenon. And we couldn't keep, we didn't have time to even write funding proposals before money was coming to us, or people calling and saying, "Where do we make out the checks?" So it was a phenomenon without parallel, in my organizing experience, and I may never live to see that kind of thing again. But, again, the more important phenomenon was that groups, they were like mushrooms, you know, after a rain, were just cropping up all over the country, at the local and state level, so that by the Fall of 1982, six months, let me go back a minute. By August of 1982, we had our first test in Congress. We came within one vote of winning a Freeze Resolution in the House of Representatives, with virtually no preparation. I mean we hadn't even begun to set up a real lobbying network around the country, as we did in later years. So the whole agenda, the schedule sort of leapt ahead of us, faster than we had ever imagined. And suddenly, we were on the docket in the House of Representatives, and it was an extremely close vote. I think of that, in a sense, as our real peak in Congress. There were no amendments as later were attached. It was the clear, what I think of as the pure freeze, was right there, and it missed by one vote, with virtually no work on our part.

Then in the Fall of 1982, in a way, I think our strongest expression at the popular, at the local level, surfaced in the form of what was the largest public policy referendum in US history, composed of ballot initiatives in ten states and 39 cities and counties, including big ones, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, for example, in which a total of one—third of the US electorate had an opportunity to vote for or against a mutual, verifiable US/Soviet freeze. And never before had so many voters had a chance to vote on a public policy issue at one time. So we were quite excited, as you can imagine. And we won, that vote by, again sort of a two-to-one or a five-to-three margin, I can't remember exactly. Nine of the ten states voted in favor of a freeze; something like 36 of the 39 cities and counties voted for it. And we thought it was, we had what was an undeniably clear popular mandate. I, for one, was also a little naive in those dates because I thought that popular, expressions of popular mandate, of popular will, get translated into public policy a little more directly and more quickly than, in fact, they did. What really brought me up short, I remember, was after winning that referendum, we compiled a, composed a, put together a delegation to go see Ronald Reagan, President Reagan, to talk to him about what had just happened at the ballot. It is not clear, of course, that he even noticed what had happened. But it was a very impressive delegation. It included at least one Catholic Bishop. I think it included Mayor Coleman Young from Detroit. Randy Forsberg was part of it. There were several scientists, probably a Nobel Laureate or two, all part of this delegation, who wrote a letter to the White House and said, "We would like to come and talk to you about the meaning of this ballot referendum, the first time in US history so many people have voted on this issue and have voted overwhelmingly for a freeze," in fact, by a larger margin than Reagan had been elected in 1980. We waited, we waited, we called the White House. We had members of Congress try to push it and find out what was going on. Finally, we got back a form letter, about one paragraph long, that said, "Thank you far your support of the President. Unfortunately, the President has a very busy schedule and will not be able to meet with you." This was the largest referendum in US history.

LET ME GO BACK FAR A SECOND TO THE REFERENDUM. WAS THERE, AT THAT POINT, ORGANIZED LOCAL OPPOSITION TO THAT REFERENDUM MOVEMENT?

Virtually none. That was the remarkable thing about it. Oh, there were pockets of opposition from the American Security Council, for example, but they aren't a grassroots group. I mean they are a Washington—based group. And most of the opposition came from Washington—based groups. So there was a lot happening at that level, that was from the Heritage Foundation and, again, the American Security Council, and groups like that. But, again, our strategy was a local strategy, and it mean to, meant to oppose it, you had to have something in place locally, and there wasn't that much in place locally to oppose it. And furthermore, unlike what happened to the freeze at the Congressional level, where it was partisanized quickly, as the Democrats seized hold of it and the Republicans shunned it, by and large, with a few notable exceptions. At the local level, it was truly a nonpartisan or bipartisan effort. And, in fact, public opinion polls showed that there was not a significant difference between Republican support far the freeze and Democratic support, in all geographic areas of the country. It did not break out along party lines. So it was hard to muster local opposition to this, again, very commonsensical approach to the arms race.

WOULDN'T IT BE FAIR TO SAY THAT IT, ONE, DIDN'T GET LOCAL OPPOSITION BECAUSE IT WASN'T TAKEN AS BEING SIGNIFICANT, ONE WAY OR THE OTHER?

I don't think so. It's hard for me to say. I mean perhaps there were people who felt that way. But, usually, when there's a lot of people who feel something is significant, be it, even though it's a nonbinding referendum, which it was in most cases, there are other people who feel that it's significant, for the opposite reasons, and oppose it. So either you would have had nobody taking it very seriously, or the pros and cons both taking it somewhat seriously.

I WANT TO ASK THIS AGAIN. NOW, THIS IS IMPORTANT. I THINK WHAT YOU ARE SAYING NOW, AND I HADN'T THOUGHT ABOUT THIS, IS THAT, IN GENERAL, I MEAN IN A GENERAL AND NONBINDING REFERENDUM SITUATION, IS THERE OPPOSITION TO, IS THERE AN OPPOSITION? ARE THERE TWO SIDES TO THE ISSUE, OR IS IT FREQUENTLY THE CASE THAT ONLY ONE SIDE COMES OUT ON THESE KIND OF SENSE OF THE POPULATION?

It depends on the issue. I mean here in this area, for example, last year we had a referendum on a nuclear power plant, completely nonbinding. The utilities came in and outspent the no-nukes folks ten to one, because it had great symbolic meaning for them. I just think that, you know, the local, the locally based strategy of the freeze was hard to oppose, at least in the short term. Now, over time, they could say, "We got to get something in place in all those little towns and villages and counties and cities to appose this thing," but they didn't have anything really in place.

WHEN WERE YOU FIRST AWARE OF GENUINE OPPOSITION, EITHER ON A NATIONAL -- MAYBE FIRST AT THE NATIONAL OR LOCAL, WHICHEVER. WHEN DID YOU, AS AN ORGANIZER, FIRST BECOME AWARE THAT THERE WERE FOLKS OUT THERE WHO WANTED TO STOP THIS?

Well, I think the first opposition, and always the strongest opposition, came from the national level. I suppose it was at the first point when news people could get Ronald Reagan to acknowledge that this existed, and that's when he immediately branded it as a commie—dupe exercise in Soviet manipulation. He said the KGB had, he had evidence that the KGB had infiltrated this thing, the Freeze Campaign, and that we were all dupes of the KGB, and so forth. And the fact is, after he said that, and it got a lot of headlines, the FBI decided to look into it, held an investigation, conducted an investigation, as did the House Select Committee on Intelligence, the Boland Committee. And neither the FBI or the Boland Committee came up with a shred of evidence of KGB involvement in the Freeze Campaign. They presented reports to the President to that effect. But, of course, the President went right on saying it. And it was picked up, so that then, suddenly, you had that being echoed at the local level by people on city councils, to whom we were bringing freeze resolutions, or in state legislatures, where we were debating the freeze. And they would quote others, whether it was Cap Weinberger or George Schultz, or whoever now was mimicking this line about KGB infiltration. They would also then get to another level of sophistication: they would begin to quote Pentagon White Papers that showed that the Soviet Union was vastly ahead of the United States in nuclear weaponry and, therefore, a freeze would, as they put it, "lock us into inferiority," and that became the major opposition rallying cry. So we heard that over, and over again. But, again, it came from Washington and then was picked up locally.

HOW DID THAT AFFECT, DID THAT ATTACK FROM THE PRESIDENT AND THE ADMINISTRATION, DID THAT AFFECT VOTING PATTERNS AT THE LOCAL LEVEL?

I don't think so. I mean we didn't, we didn't notice any shift. In fact, the public opinion polls didn't start out at 70 or 80 percent for the freeze. I think they climbed from low '60s up to high '80s at the very peak, during the very time when Reagan and his people were attacking us most vociferously. The arguments that were coming out of Washington, that the Soviets are ahead, or that the freeze couldn't be verified, or that we're KGB dupes, I don't think took hold among the general populace. They were picked up and repeated by various people, locally as well as nationally. But in terms of the broad spectrum of voters, of the citizenry, just as many, and more, were continuing to vote for a freeze, or to indicate their preference for a freeze in these public opinion polls.

I think the big event for us right after, soon on the heels of this media explosion in February and March was, of course, the great precedent-setting June 12th disarmament rally in Central Park in New York, when we had, according to whose account you trust, 750,000 to a million people assembling with...I think the next big event, looking back an the history of the Freeze Campaign, after the February, and March '82 explosion in the media, was, of course, the great June 12th, 1982, disarmament rally in New York City where three-quarters to a million people assembled in Central Park, demanding an end to the nuclear arms race. The banner slogan for that rally of nearly a million people was "Freeze and reverse the nuclear arms race." And if you look at photos of the thousands upon thousands of people coming down the avenues and the streets, all heading for Central Park, freeze banners and posters were everywhere. "The Freeze Campaign from Southern Indiana says no more to the arms race," and the Freeze Campaign of Florida and the, they were all ready at that point, with the National Freeze Campaign being officially little more than one year old, these freeze groups from all around the country who had assembled there. Now, I don't want to, the event itself was not a freeze event, in the sense that it was just the Freeze Campaign, or that that was the only issue. That would be a distortion. But, clearly, if there was a lead issue, it was clearly the freeze and halting the nuclear arms race. So that tremendously buoyed everyone's spirits. And, again, now looking back on it, I think it gave people the false impression, as the referenda that would follow also did, that we were on the verge of victory. There were many points. In fact, you could mark them: whether it was that immediate explosion in early '82 or the June 12th march and rally in New York City, or the largest referendum in US history in the Fall of '82, where a third of the electorate had a chance to vote for the freeze, and voted overwhelmingly for it, or the passage of the passage of the Freeze Resolution, finally, after one of the longest debates in Congressional history in the late winter or early spring of 1983. At each of these points, I think many freeze enthusiasts, particularly those who were newer in this whole business, new to political campaigning, in general, felt, "Aha, we surely must be on the verge of victory. The Administration cannot, much longer, hold out against such an enormous popular expression of the public will."

WAS THERE, I WANTED TO ASK ABOUT THAT, BECAUSE WAS THAT, WAS A GENERALLY HELD FEELING, IN TERMS OF NOW THE CONGRESSIONAL DEBATE AND THE CONGRESSIONAL VOTE, THAT THIS WAS AN EXCITING PART, THAT YOU WERE ALL TAKING PART IN A HISTORIC EVENT, OR WAS THERE ANY CONCERN THAT, IN FACT, YOU WERE BEING CO-OPTED AND, SOMEHOW, THE MOVEMENT WAS BEING WEAKENED AS IT BECAME A POLITICIAN'S ISSUE AS OPPOSED TO A PEOPLE'S ISSUE?

There were very few people, I think, in, between 1981 and 1983, who, within the Freeze Campaign, who charged that we were being co-opted. There were always those outside the campaign who thought the very idea of a freeze was a co-optation, for various reasons. But it was only after the Reagan Administration successfully outmaneuvered, I think with SDI and resuming the START talks and the change in the official rhetoric, as the Reagan Administration began to outmaneuver the freeze, that people then began to say, more and more, from the inside, from within our campaign, "We've, we're beginning to get co-opted here, friends." Let me tell a little anecdote, actually, in that regard, which is that, see, we had initially conceived of this campaign as having a fairly unique strategy; unique, because we saw it as an, essentially, grassroots, bottom—up effort. We had no interest in going to Washington with this thing until we felt we had a really solid base of widespread support among the citizenry all around the country. I mean those of us who had involved in political movements before felt that we were going to get creamed in Washington if we didn't have that. So we wanted to take the time to build it; and not, prematurely, have to do battle in an arena where we would surely lose without that kind of local, popular support. But, unfortunately, things moved faster, well, fortunately and unfortunately, things moved faster than we had anticipated. Randy Forsberg and I, for example, were on the telephone with Senator Kennedy the night after our Second Annual Conference in Denver, just after there had been this media explosion about the Vermont town meetings, but before Kennedy and Hatfield had done their press conference. And it was enormously exciting to think that we were talking to Senator Kennedy and that he and Senator Hatfield wanted to jump on board this thing and really give it a legislative expression and bring lots of publicity into it, and endorsers of high credibility from former Government officials to military people, and all this sort of thing. But it was also of concern to us that we were jumping ahead of our own strategy. We were torn about it and in, at the time, the circumstances seemed to dictate that we go ahead. I mean who was going to say no to Senators Kennedy and Hatfield and all this building Congressional support? So we let it go ahead; and we still felt all right about it. And, in retrospect, I'm not sure that we really could have done anything very differently. I think where we began, in my mind, to be co-opted, if you will, was when we started to confuse the difference between a citizens' campaign and a Congressional lobby. It's when we said, "We'll break the freeze down into little bite-sized pieces that the members of Congress, maybe, will go for because, clearly, they are not ready for the whale freeze," that we began to lose it. I think that's still a problem today. A legislative lobby has to work hand-in-hand with a citizens' movement, but they have very different roles. The citizens' movement has to hold out for the bigger picture, for the more dramatic improvement in the situation, for the more radical shift, whereas the legislative lobby has to work with the day-to—day situation in Congress, as they find it. But if the citizens' movement begins to scale down its own demands to meet the day—to—day necessities of Congressional lobbying, then this powerful force, which frames the issue and keeps defining the alternatives, is absent. And I think that's begun to happen in the last couple of years, as now the disarmament movement focuses...

YOU MENTIONED A LITTLE WHILE AGO THE FREEZE MOVEMENT. I'M SORRY, I MEAN YOU MENTIONED THE PRESIDENT'S SDI SPEECH, AND THAT IT HAS SIGNIFICANCE. I WONDER IF THAT IS HINDSIGHT OR AT THE TIME, IF, WHEN THE PRESIDENT MADE THAT SPEECH, YOU, AS A REPRESENTATIVE OF THE FREEZE MOVEMENT, FELT ANYTHING OR REACTED IN ANY WAY. IF YOU DID, TELL US ABOUT IT.

I have to say that when the President made his now famous Star Wars speech in early '83, I thought it was laughable. I thought it was a joke. I thought, "Nobody can take this seriously, especially once they have even an ounce of objective information about the technological infeasibility of this." I also don't think I gave it enough credit, in PR terms. It was only gradually that I, and I think others, too, that what he had done was to really one-up the Freeze Movement by saying, "We're going to go beyond just halting. We're going to abolish weapons and, at the same time, create this defensive shield so we won't even have to talk offense any more, this awful, get out of this awful nuclear deterrent situation." In fact, I remember when I saw the first SDI film, I was at the Republican National Convention, testifying in Dallas, in 1984, it was an amazing experience, to the National Republican Platform Committee, which was made up of Jesse Helms and Phyllis Schlafly, among other people. And Danny Graham was testifying right before or after me, I've forgotten which, General, Lt. General Daniel Graham, and he was showing a film about Star Wars. And after the first two-thirds of it, I said to, "He's got the wrong film. That's our film." Here was a film that said, in promoting Star Wars, that nuclear deterrence was bankrupt, morally and economically. I thought, "That's our argument." It said that, "The arms race has got to end in ultimate destruction. It cannot go on this way." I said, "That's our argument." And suddenly, and at that point, it shifted to arguing for this illusory defensive shield. But this was, this was the Summer of '84, and it, really, I think, took me almost that long to realize how cleverly they had gotten the jump on us, in terms of public relations.

DO YOU HAVE ANY SENSE OF WHETHER OR NOT, IN '84, '83,'84 AND '85, WHENEVER, THAT THAT MESSAGE GOT THROUGH TO YOUR CONSTITUENTS, THE AMERICAN PEOPLE? I MEAN, DID YOU EVER FEEL ANY POPULAR RESONANCE FROM THAT, PERSONALLY?

From the SDI speech?

YES.

No, I...

WELL, FROM THE CONCEPT, JUST THE WHOLE CONCEPT OF DEFENSE. DID THAT --

I didn't hear people talking about it. I wasn't aware that it would become a popular movement. When I began to get alarmed was when I started reading public opinion polls, not long after the March '83 speech, in which it turned out a majority, in some cases, nearly as much of a majority as had been supported the freeze, said they all supported this crazy Star Wars idea. And, of course, that was yet another lesson in the softness of public opinion polls. I mean they are accurate reflections of people's preference at the time; but so much has, what somebody prefers and what they are really willing to take some action in order to promote are two very different things. But these new public opinion polls were being quoted by the Star War proponents, and suddenly, there was at least the illusion of popular support for this thing that I think was, indeed, much, much softer, always has been softer than the popular support for the freeze. After all, there were no real local activists for SDI. It was just sort of Gallup polls, randomly selecting people to talk to about it. At least, the freeze had genuinely, genuine things happening at the local level: referenda and city council endorsements, and legislative resolutions and so forth. I've just lost my train of thought on that.

I THINK YOU ENDED IT. I THINK THAT'S ALL RIGHT. I HAVE SOMETHING,- UNLESS YOU HAVE GOT SOMETHING ELSE YOU WANT TO SAY.

Let me just think. Oh. The shift in support for SDI clearly, in my mind, came when the economic benefits began to be distributed, or at least talked about, and that has very much changed the situation. And in that sense, you now have activists for SDI, as we have had activists for the freeze all along, and for disarmament. I mean you have people who really want those contracts, whether they be in universities, or high tech industries, or members of certain labor unions. So there is now an active, organized, and carefully juiced-up constituency, if you will, promoting SDI, in the same way that there is also a very organized constituency promoting nuclear disarmament.

I WANT TO JUMP FORWARD TO THE ELECTION OF '84. IF THERE IS ANYTHING YOU WANT TO SAY ABOUT THE FREEZE ACTIVITY DURING THE ELECTION, YOU CAN; BUT I THINK, BASICALLY, YOU KNOW, IT'S A LOT LIKE WHAT HAPPENED IN CONGRESS WITH THE FREEZE, THAT IT BECOMES, IT BEGINS SUPPORTING CANDIDATES, IT IS HELPFUL WHERE IT HAS A ROLE. BUT WHAT I AM MORE INTERESTED IN, IN A WAY, GO AHEAD.

Actually, there is one point in '83, I think we ought to cover briefly.

GO AHEAD.

And that is, it was early May of 1983 when, after one of the longest debates in Congressional history, the Freeze Resolution was finally passed by a two—to-one margin. Now, it is true that the freeze opponents claimed victory because they said that the amendments that had been attached were weakening, to the effect of essentially nullifying the meaning of the freeze. I don't think that's the truth of it. I think you can look at those amendments today and see that the freeze was basically intact. The more significant thing, in terms of if there was a nullifying effort, happened a few week later, when the same House of Representatives voted, by a large majority, or significant majority, for the MX missile and other new, nuclear weapons, which seemed like a tremendous contradiction. And, of course, freeze supporters were absolutely incensed, and the phrase "Freeze Phony" was coined at that time for those who had voted for the freeze in early May, and at the end of May had voted for all these new weapons. Technically, of course, there was no contradiction because the Freeze Resolution was non-binding. There was no Soviet involvement in it. It was just an expression of intent to have a freeze, whereas these new weapons were right there, being voted on at the time. But I think what it pointed out to many of us was, number one, the Congress is always quick to jump in front of what they perceive as a popular mandate, but always quick, then, to balance it, so that they don't lose their support from the other side, with a vote that goes the other way right afterwards. I mean this is a pattern you can see right straight through voting on many, many issues. The other thing, I think, that it showed me is that Congress, members of Congress were not really in favor of a freeze all along. I think of the, let's say, 250 that voted for the freeze in early May, my guess is that fewer than a hundred, maybe 50, only, really thought that the idea of a freeze was a good idea. Others voted for it because they thought it would never happen, because their constituents were pressuring them. And so here was a free, throwaway vote which would have no consequences, which would not prevent them for voting for the MX, as most of them did later. And so, immediately, I think, instead of saying, "We had two-thirds of the House of Representatives with us," we needed to be saying, "No, no. We had two—thirds voting for a non-binding resolution but, in fact, many, many fewer supporting a freeze." This is by way of my own critique of what went on. We, what I am trying to saying is, there was an illusion that we perpetuated, as much as anybody else, that two-thirds of the House was in favor of a freeze. Two—thirds of the House was never in favor of a freeze, I'm convinced of that, and still, to this day, is not.

I WANT TO GET THERE NEXT, BUT I HAVE ONE THING TO ASK FIRST, AND MAYBE YOU'RE AT THE POINT THERE. THERE SEEMS TO ME, THERE MUST HAVE BEEN A POINT, AND MAYBE THIS IS JUST MEDIA AGAIN, BUT THERE MUST HAVE BEEN A POINT AT WHICH A SENSE OF DISAPPOINTMENT, OF DISILLUSIONMENT, OF, I DON'T WANT TO MAKE IT TOO STRONG A WORD, BUT SOMETHING WHERE THAT THE PROCESS REVERSES ITSELF IN THE MINDS AND THE EMOTIONS OF THE PEOPLE WHO ARE ACTIVISTS, THAT HAS BEEN A TRAJECTORY GOING FORWARD AND UPWARD, AND GAINING MOMENTUM, AND MORE MONEY, SUDDENLY, OR SLOWLY, OR WHATEVER, GOES THE OTHER WAY. I WOULD JUST LIKE YOU TO GIVE US A FEELING ABOUT THAT.

Uh huh.

THIS IS NOT THE LONG PERSPECTIVE FROM TODAY. THIS IS LIKE THE IMMEDIATE FEELING AT THE TIME.

Right. That's right. Well, I think there was definitely a feeling of unraveling that began to happen, not when the media first pronounced the freeze over. The media said that we had had our day in the limelight after, on June 12th, 1982. And they said it again about the referenda, this largest referendum in American history, in the Fall of '82. And they said it again when we had the victory in the House in May of '83, and followed by the Bishops, Catholics, the pastoral statement which also endorsed the freeze, and so at various times. But I think when we began to first feel it strongly was...I think it is worth noting that the media and various pundits pronounced the freeze dead or dying at various points all along the way, every time we would have a big burst, whether it was the June 12th, 1982, rally in New York City, or the freeze referenda all over the country in the Fall of '82, or the vote in Congress in May of '83. But when we ourselves, I think, began to feel that our influence was really beginning to ebb and the political effort was beginning to unravel was after Reagan's reelection, I think, in 1984. Up to that point, I think, again, despite what the conventional wisdom said, and despite the fact that we were no longer in the media as much, the media phenomenon had ended. We were larger, by every account, whether it was money being raised, or numbers of local groups, or lobbying networks or whatever it was, city councils in favor of a freeze, than ever before, going right into the '84 elections. And, in fact, we thought, our hopes were raised high in the '84 elections, when it looked as though we were actually going to get the Democratic nominees for President and Vice President to carry our banner. I remember, I remember meeting with Walter Mondale face to face and grilling him, really, on the freeze. He wanted a meeting with peace disarmament leaders, and we had one. And I liked what he said, and I thought, "He's with us, and he's going to go out there and say that." But he didn't go out there and say that. He minced words whenever he was front of the general audience. He said what we wanted to hear in front of us, and the same was true, I'm sorry to say, with Ferraro. And then when they got, when he got in the debates with Reagan, it was even worse. And, in fact, Reagan came out looking like the peace candidate, and Mondale, in an attempt to sound tough and so forth, sounded worse than Reagan. It was terrible. And then after Reagan won and Mondale was wiped out of the picture, I think were hard for us. And yet, even then, if I think back to our National Conference in December of 1984, only a month after that, month and a half after that election defeat, we had the largest number we had ever had at the conference. People did not stay away. And it was really clear, people were not giving up. Here we were faced with four more years of Ronald Reagan, and I was amazed. And I remember visitors coming to that conference, expecting a bunch of dejected people, who couldn't believe that there was, they thought, "This is either the ultimate in naïveté, or else these people are really determined and dedicated and ready to see this through." And I think what was beginning to happen by then, and this has happened much more now, is that there was a shift in our own consciousness from a short-term perspective on stopping the nuclear arms race to a truly longer term perspective that was consonant with the job at hand. Many of us said, who were more experienced organizing organizers, said at the very beginning, "You can't stop 40 years of nuclear arms racing, institutionalized arms racing, with powerful vested interests which have been created to keeping this thing going forward, you can't stop all that in a few years." And yet, our very success and all the attention that had been given to signs of success tended to fool even some of the most experienced of us, myself included, so that we thought, "Well, maybe this time we are going to sort of defy history and we'll make it happen faster." By '84, however, I think we were coming to our senses again, those of us who understood the longer perspective in the first place, and the newer people were beginning to change their perspective. And there really has been, I think, an increasing sense of, "No, it takes much longer to make the kind of profound change that we're talking about." This isn't a minor adjustment, stopping the nuclear arms race, in American foreign or military policy. This is the centerpiece, in many ways, of not only our foreign and military policy but of domestic policy. If you look at the military budget and the way we've structured our economy around producing weapons, it's even the centerpiece of the way we think about the world, in terms of the US/Soviet relationship, the relationship to the Third World, the way we use resources, our role as the world's global cop. All of that is bound up in the notion of the nuclear arms race. So I think as we became more and more aware of the enormous implications of just stopping, let along nuclear disarmament -- just stopping that 40 years of momentum, we ourselves realized that it's going to take longer than we had thought.

IT'S THE END OF THE REAGAN ERA NOW, IT'S OVER, AND YOU'RE LOOKING BACK AT THE FREEZE MOVEMENT, HOW WOULD, PUT IT IN PERSPECTIVE. I MEAN HOW WOULD YOU, OR HAVE YOU JUST PUT IT IN PERSPECTIVE?

Well, I would look at the, look at the freeze itself as the beginning of a longer term movement, focused initially on nuclear disarmament, but increasingly of broader scape, as people themselves realized the larger implications, as I was just implying, of stopping and reversing the nuclear arms race; realizing that you can't do something that dramatic in a vacuum, that it does affect domestic economic policies, for example, and overseas international economic policy, and foreign policy, and so forth. So the movement got an early beginning, thanks to the impetus of the freeze idea, the freeze campaign, the freeze organizing. And now it's in the, it's in an illusionary process, I think, that is actually, is very helpful. There are mare groups today than there ever have been doing disarmament work or, more broadly, peace work of some kind at the local level all around the country. And that's where it has to be implanted. I mean you can't just have a good Washington lobby. The people in Congress know who they have to listen to, and it's the voters back home. So at that level, we're stranger than we've ever been. There has been a taking—on of other issues, related issues. The Central America intervention question, for example, looms very large, and many people who were working very hard on the freeze back in the early eighties are now putting most of their effort into stopping aid to the Contras, for example. But the nuclear disarmament issue has not gone away for people, I don't think. And if you look back, you say to yourself, "Well, did the freeze fail, or succeed?" and the answer, to me, depends on what the objective was. If the objective was simply to raise consciousness, number one, and to begin to build a citizens' movement that, in the long term, could make those profound changes in military and foreign policy, then I think the freeze was an enormous success. If however, you say the objective was, as we ourselves had initially defined it, to stop the nuclear arms race within five years, then it failed, it clearly failed. We now see, I think, that that objective was unrealistic, that it would take, we see it will take much longer than that. And I think we are all beginning to appreciate what, in fact, the freeze really did succeed in doing, and continues to succeed in doing, as all those thousands of groups around the country that got started as freeze groups evolve into a broader perspective on the issue of nuclear weapons, nuclear disarmament and foreign and military policy, in general.

LET ME ASK YOU THIS AS A KIND OF A FINAL QUESTION. PUTTING YOURSELF 20 YEARS IN THE FUTURE, BUT THINKING OF YOURSELF AS A PEACE ACTIVIST ON THE GROUND, AND LOCAL ACTIVIST, HOW WOULD YOU SUM UP, IN ALMOST A CARTOON BRIEF WAY, THE REAGAN YEARS?

I think I would probably say that the Reagan years were years in which the American people were taken for a ride. But by that, I don't mean that they are not at fault. It's a ride that they paid their money for, knowingly, and jumped on board willingly; nevertheless, the driver was Ronald Reagan and his Administration. I would like to think that things almost had to go in what I consider to be a very negative direction, on almost all fronts, in order for people to be sufficiently awakened to make the kind of profound changes that needed to be made, even before we got Ronald Reagan. In other words, Ronald Reagan, to me, was the, I would like to think was the final cap of a whole era. Let's call it at least a 40—year era, dating it from the beginning of the nuclear weapons development. Ronald Reagan was an 8-year, final, almost hysterical ending to what had to end anyway. It was a risky ending because, at any moment, things could have gone so awry that the whole thing could have gone up in smoke. But I think it may be, in retrospect, what we needed in order to bring people to their senses. I think people are now realizing that we can't live in a world in which we go it alone; that we can't get our way through military, military superiority; that, as Einstein said, that the, the atom really has changed everything except our manner of thinking, and that now our thinking is beginning to shift, and we're understanding that we live in a, an interdependent world, I mean it's a cliché, but a global village, indeed, in which we have to either learn to play a part, in harmony with the other peoples of the earth, or none of us are going to survive. I would like to think that the Reagan years have set the stage for a whole new paradigm through which we see the world, and I would label that paradigm "common security." That is to say, it's a paradigm in which we understand that no one can be secure unless we are all secure. If, if the nuclear weaponry is in the hands of just one party, then everybody is at risk. So, somehow, the days of going it alone have got to be over; they just won't work. I mean in an objective, from an objective point of view, we have got to find a way to make peace with the fellow inhabitants of the planet or there will be no peace for us, as well as the others.