Karl Hess: Presidential Speechwriter Turned Homesteader

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PLOWBOY: So no matter what the FBI might say, you now think that some elements of the left are a lot closer to the ideals of our founding fathers than most of us will admit.

HESS: When you get right down to the basic issues-the questions of individual responsibility and whether or not we should stick our noses, and our guns, into other countries' business-you'll find that the New Left has a great deal in common with Robert Taft and other old-fashioned American conservatives. There is a definite moral confluence between the Old Right and the New Left. And any right-winger who's fair and dispassionate about the matter will admit it.

PLOWBOY: Give me an example.

HESS: OK. Even though I was going through personal changes by that time, I was still Barry Goldwater's speech writer when he ran for re-election to the Senate in 1968. I was a member of the leftist Students for a Democratic Society by then, and Goldwater knew it but he didn't give me a hard time because he's a tolerant, open minded man.

So one day I read him the section on foreign policy in the Port Huron Statement-which is the founding document of the SDS-and Goldwater said, "That's really wonderful! Did that come from the Young Americans for Freedom?"

Now that was a laugh right there, because the YAF is a bunch of right-wing military groupies. Its members are not young, they're distinctly un-American, and they hate the concept of individual freedom they call it "license". What the YAF likes is order. Their idea of freedom is a hitch in the Army they all want to be lieutenant colonels or senators. Needless to say, they support the Pentagon a hundred-thousand percent.

PLOWBOY: What did Senator Goldwater say when you told him that the foreign policy statement he liked came not from the right wing YAF as he had supposed but from the leftist SDS?

HESS: Well, of course, he was stunned. But one of the great things about Barry Goldwater is that his thinking is not limited or directed by labels. And after a while he said, "I don't care who wrote that statement, it's right." A short time later, when he spoke at the University of Arizona, he began his address by saying, "I recently discovered that I have a lot in common with the anarchist wing of the SDS."

PLOWBOY: Were the authors of the Port Huron Statement anarchists?

HESS: Yes. And, curiously enough, it was the same faction that later became the Weathermen which seems logical to me. I'll bet you that half the original Weather people were old right-wingers who finally realized that they had been fed a big pack of lies about free enterprise and capitalism and their reaction was a violent one.

This new awareness of reality-although, thank goodness, it usually doesn't spark such a violent reaction-is, by the way, a growing trend among right-wingers. Here lately, I've even noticed some staunch John Birchers beginning to question the wisdom of laying down their lives to defend dear old Standard Oil, in the illusion that they're defending private enterprise. They're beginning to understand that corporate capitalism doesn't have anything to do with free private enterprise.

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