Karl Hess: Presidential Speechwriter Turned Homesteader

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

PLOWBOY: You seem to admire your mother very much.

HESS: I certainly do. She's the best lady in the world. She taught me how to read, which is a hell of a lot better than having money. She even let me leave school when I was 15, because I found it so dull. And that was the biggest mistake of my life: I waited too long. I should have quit when I was ten. I doubt that a school can teach a child anything after the age of eight or ten that he or she can't learn better at the public library.

PLOWBOY: Your mother must have been quite lenient.

HESS: She was just great. Actually, she was a very strict Catholic-a daily communicant-but when I came home one day and told her I'd been thinking about this religious business

and decided I was an atheist, she didn't get upset or send for the exorcist or anything like that. Which was kinda nice because I haven't made a career of being an atheist. I just am one.

PLOWBOY: Are you anti-religious?

MESS: Not necessarily. I've met some awfully nice Christians. I used to think that was a contradiction in terms (chuckle), but-since moving to West Virginia-I've met several people who go to church every Sunday and who don't steal. So I've concluded that you can maintain a high moral standard despite the handicap of being a Christian. But I've just noticed that in this area (soft laugh) I haven't observed this anomaly in very many other climates.

PLOWBOY: What did you do after your mother let you quit school?

HESS: I continued to read a lot. And I went to work for the Mutual Broadcasting System. The brass there didn't know I was only 15 and they hired me to write Fulton Lewis, Jr.'s, news program. That was a shame in a way because I was interested in chemistry at the time and I had figured out a way to get into M.I.T. without a high school diploma. And then I wrote this damned radio script as a test and Mutual hired me on the spot. And it was so easy! I thought to myself, "Why should I go to Cambridge and spend four years learning to be an industrial chemist when I can write for an hour a day and spend the rest of the time in the library?"

PLOWBOY: Did your employers know you were only 15?

HESS: No, but they found out after about six months when I was sent downtown to meet some hotshot and got arrested for double parking. Although the police were amused to discover that I was too young to be driving an automobile, Mutual Broadcasting didn't think the matter was very funny. My superiors dug out all the news scripts I'd written and went through them to make sure they weren't contaminated with some sort of infantile corruption.

See, that was when I learned that nothing makes any difference to bureaucrats except official forms. Everything was OK as long as they didn't know I was only 15 years old but when they found out, the whole place collapsed. It's a good thing that nobody in the Atomic Energy Commission ever learned that Albert Einstein was a failure at arithmetic.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print