1 THEODORE KENNEDY July 14, 2000 Jeff Charnley, interviewer Charnley: Today is July 14, the year 2000. I'm Jeff Charnley, interviewing Dr. Theodore Kennedy for Michigan State University's Oral History Project for the sesquicentennial to be commemorated five years from now, in the year 2005. Dr. Kennedy, you can see that we're tape-recording this session. Do you give us permission to record his interview? Kennedy: Well, yes, I think so. [Laughter] Charnley: I'd like to start first with a little bit about your educational and professional background. Would you tell us a little bit where you grew up and where did you go to school? Kennedy: I grew up in the state of Indiana, in the western central part of the state. Educated in public schools, partially educated. Attended Wabash College, graduated in 1941. After that, I had a year of graduate study, majored in speech at the Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. I decided I wanted to get out of the Midwest for a while. That was very interesting. Then the University of Wisconsin gave me an assistantship and I got my master's degree there in 1943. Then followed various things. I did a little radio announcing. I taught a year of high school senior English and coaching debate at Brookings, South Dakota. I got a graduate assistantship at the State University of Iowa, Iowa City, and after a year there, Michigan State offered me an instructorship, which I accepted and joined the faculty here in the fall of 1945. During summers mostly I completed my residency at Wisconsin, which took a lot of time, and I got my doctorate there in 1953. 2 Charnley: In what field was that? Kennedy: Speech, and a minor in American history. I had some great teachers at Wisconsin at that time. Charnley: Who were some of those? Kennedy: My favorite was Professor Hesseltime [phonetic] in the history department. Had a terrible voice, but he surely gave fascinating lectures. Charnley: William Hesseltime? Kennedy: William, yes. He's, unfortunately, not nearly as interesting a writer as he was speaker, but he was more entertaining than any movie. Charnley: What were his courses? Kennedy: History of the South. I had a good time with him. Charnley: During World War II, did you serve? Kennedy: No. In the summer of 1940, I was working out in California, as I tell my students, in the managerial department of the pick and shovel. [Laughter] Working on--I guess it's Yurba Buena Island in the middle of San Francisco Bay. We were clearing a fire trail across the island. I looked down and there was a destroyer sliding 3 through the water, because there was a naval station on the island. The Congress had just passed the Selective Service Act, and for the first time I said, "By golly, this war is going to affect me." It was quite a sensation. But that fall I had a suspicion I wouldn't qualify, so I asked them for a physical exam so if I passed, I wanted to enlist in the Navy or Air Force. But I was made 4F. I had a leaky heart valve, so they decided I wouldn't be a very good serviceman. I was never called back. Charnley: So you started here as an instructor first. Kennedy: Michigan State had just the year before created what they called the Basic College, which then consisted of seven departments, and only one was required for all freshmen, called written and spoken English, and that's, of course, what I taught. I taught a course similar to that at the University of Iowa as a graduate assistant. The other two departments, if I can remember now, were physical science and biological science. The student had a choice of those two. Had a choice of--let's see. History of civilization. This is all in the record, of course. And literature and fine arts, social science. Oh yes, and then a rare course called effective living, which wasn't much of a course. We had a transfer student I knew of from MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology]. They thought he ought to take a course in the Basic College in effective living. Well, he had an eight o'clock class in the summer. He managed to pull himself out of bed one morning about the second week of the term. This is an MIT man. And the teacher was explaining how you figure your grade point average. [Laughter] He never went back. Charnley: So you taught written and spoken English. Kennedy: About four or five years later, they changed the name to communication skills. It's a better name for it. Charnley: When you first came to Michigan State, what do you remember about the campus or some of those first visits? 4 Kennedy: I remember staying at the Olds Hotel, now the office building in downtown Lansing, and took the bus out to East Lansing, which dropped me off near the Collingwood entrance. I was walking across to the auditorium, where Mr. [Paul] Bagwell, the department head, had his office. I looked around and I thought, boy, this place has great potential. The irony is that the spring I retired, I was walking across the same route, really, past the Natural Science Building, and I thought, gee, this place has great potential. [Laughter] Charnley: So at least one constant there. How was the campus different when you first got here? Kennedy: Well, about the only thing south of the river was a log cabin used mostly for parties and Spartan Stadium. It was then Macklin Field, I guess they called it, and Jenison Fieldhouse. Oh yes, and that building, I forget what they call it, across the street from Jenison, was used mostly by the ROTC. Charnley: Demonstration Hall. Kennedy: Yes. That's all that was over here. Otherwise, just field. Where the parking ramp across from the big dormitory named after the president who preceded [John A.] Hannah, [Robert S.] Shaw--there was a big dairy barn there. Charnley: So the physical site of the campus expanded greatly. Kennedy: Yes. Enrollment was a little under 6,000 students. It had been higher than 6,000, a little higher, a year or two before, but in the fall it was just under 6,000. I think it gained with the end of the war, August '45. I think it gained at least 1,000 enrollment each term. The quarter system then. So it ended up, of course, about 8,000 students. 5 Charnley: How large were your classes in teaching the introductory courses? Kennedy: The idea was that the Basic College courses would be primarily teaching courses, and the emphasis was going to be on good teaching. In our course where the students has to both write and speak, the idea was to keep enrollment down to twenty students. Well, we didn't do it. It went up to twenty-two. Of course, the next term it was twenty-three or four, and so on, and eventually there were routinely from twenty-eight to thirty students. Charnley: That basic course that you taught, did you balance between writing and the speaking, or did you, because of your background, emphasize the speech? Kennedy: No, most of us did both pretty evenly, because we had a syllabus. It didn't spell out what we were to do day by day. They tried that the first year and it didn't work. In fact, the first year they had separate instructors for teaching speech, teaching writing, and they were supposed to be closely coordinated. They didn't coordinate worth a darn. Charnley: Looked better on paper. Kennedy: The theory was, the students would read the assignments and then write a paper and then further refine their thoughts into a speech. Well, of course, what most of them did when they spoke, they just gave their paper orally, so the theory didn't work out too well in practice. Charnley: Who else was involved in the department at that time? Who was the chair? Bagwell, you said? 6 Kennedy: Paul Bagwell was head of the department, and that was the official title, head. They were the boss, no question about it. Bagwell was a fairly young man. He was in his low thirties when I came here, and he had been crippled, I don't know, by polio or a football accident, I'm not sure, maybe both. Very charming fellow, delightful guy, and extremely conscientious in carrying out his instructions from on high. He was a good head of the department. He brought a lot of fine people here. There was Fred Reeve [phonetic], a Ph.D. from Princeton, and Rob Renwich [phonetic], a Ph.D. from Harvard, came later. Sam Baskett, a Ph.D. from California. Never had anyone from Yale. Well, let's see. I guess Henry Silverman was from Yale, came later. He had good people from all over. He also attracted a few nuts. Not you and me, but 5 percent, maybe. [Laughter] Of course, there was a lot of turnover in the department. That was one of the problems. It's hard work to manage. You have 75 or 80 or more students and they're writing a paper every ten days or so, and you've got to schedule the speeches and all that. It was a very demanding teaching job, and when more attractive job offers came along, as they did for most people, why, they'd leave. Charnley: So you had a lot of turnover in those early years. Kennedy: Yes. Charnley: What difference did you see in students from early in your career to later? What were some of the differences? Kennedy: Where, first term here, I was kind of shocked at how--I don't want to say how poor the students were. It was more a matter of attitude. They seemed to view it as just another year of high school. I hadn't been used to that at the University of Iowa, nor at Wisconsin. At both places I had taught as a graduate assistant. At Wisconsin 7 I had only sophomores and upper classmen, which makes a different. But at Iowa I had freshmen, and they were serious students there. So many of them didn't seem to be here. But with the year following, '46, '47, was the most dramatic year of all the forty I taught. That was when the veterans were discharged. They were a special bunch, and, boy, they were great. I don't know exactly when it was. I think it might have been in the fall of 1946, registration took place in the auditorium, and there was no ramp in the auditorium, the floor was flat. I went over one afternoon and went up on the balcony on the west end, looked down, and right down below me there were five of my colleagues in my department, two tables almost side by side, at which two men were sitting there, and behind them was a third table with one person and a whole bunch of these IBM enrollment cards, and extending almost all the way across the auditorium was a double row of students waiting to get enrolled in our course, most of them still wearing Army uniform, and all of them with that pin, discharge pin, they called the Ruptured Duck. I couldn't believe my eyes. These veterans would hand their schedule to one of these four men. They'd look at the schedule and find the course that would fit this person's schedule, and he'd turn around, call the number to the person behind, he'd hand him an IBM card, and that was it. And they were putting students in classes that didn't exist, they didn't have a teacher for, they didn't have room for, or anything. "Come to this place on Monday morning. Get your room assignment." They took care of the whole bunch. I'll tell you one way they did it. Normally a teacher would have three classes, and they would meet, those three classes, each four times a week, four hours a week. It was two one-hour sessions and one two-hour session. The two-hour was supposed to be a writing laboratory. Then in addition, there was a lecture. So I had my three classes. Very quickly they called, "Would you mind taking a fourth class?" Okay, fine. And then a day or two later, "Would you mind taking still another class?" For about a month, I had five classes, meaning I was twenty hours a week in the classroom. It was a crisis and you were delighted to do what you could, and I'm sure most of the members of the faculty taught extra classes. After about a month, we'd begin to get teachers who were discharged veterans. Ben Hickok [phonetic] was one. Ben Strandness was another. Harold Sponberg [phonetic] was a third. Bob Lemansk [phonetic] was another. 8 So after about a month, I was down to four classes. Bob Wright was another veteran who joined the faculty then about that time. So it was an interesting time. These students, these veterans, for one thing, most of them were anywhere from twenty to twenty-five years old, and they were mostly enlisted men. I just had never discusses this with them. I had a hunch that they had seen their officers, and the only real difference they could see between themselves and the officer was the officers had been to college. Almost all my friends, not all, but almost all who were college graduates became officers, and even those that didn't became sergeants. So this was a great opportunity for them. The GI Bill made it free for them. They got all their expenses, including out-of-state tuition, a living allowance, and they were so eager to catch up. And they were also, having been in the military, they were so tolerant of conditions. A great many of them were sleeping in triple-decker bunks in Jenison Fieldhouse. Charnley: It was probably an improvement over sleeping in the mud and the rain. Kennedy: I was talking to a doctor who did some work for me, and he told me his father had been here and was sleeping in those triple-deckers in Jenison. Charnley: I don't thing students would stand for that today. [Laughter] Kennedy: No. But no matter how bad it was here, it was better than the Army. [Laughter] Charnley: Very true. Do you remember anything about the students who were here prior to the veterans coming, how did they respond to the vets coming back? Kennedy: I think they were overwhelmed by it. For example, I remember when I was being interviewed with Mr. Bagwell, and he asked me if I'd excuse him for a half hour and then we'd go over and meet the dean. He told me 9 about the Rose Garden which then was just outside the east end of the auditorium. I said, "I'll go out and smoke a cigarette." A kind of funny look came on his face. He didn't say anything. I wondered. Well, it turns out the tradition on the campus, except in the Union Building, there was no smoking on the campus north of the river. That lasted about five minutes after the veterans arrived. [Laughter] Charnley: Many of whom were smokers. Kennedy: Oh yes. The minute class was over, they'd have a cigarette. So that tradition went by the board. It sort of lots its effect when someone reported that in the older days the penalty was you'd get thrown in the river if they caught you smoking a cigarette. But instead, some alumnus talked about sitting on the steps of the old Forestry Building or one old building and they all chewed tobacco and had spitting contests. I think everybody agreed cigarettes were preferable to that. [Laughter] Charnley: Some of your own personal scholarship and research that you were interested in, what ultimately did you write your dissertation on? Kennedy: I wrote the dissertation on Senator Arthur H. Vandenburg [phonetic], who had a long career in the U.S. Senate. He was first appointed to fill a term for a very short period, I think, as I recall now, 1928, and he promptly got elected to a full term. He came up for reelection, my recollection is, in 1934. Well, that was the year the Democrats struck almost everything. [Franklin D.] Roosevelt's New Deal was in full swing. But he squeaked through; he got reelected. After 1934 or '36, I've forgotten now which one, I think '36, the Republicans only had sixteen senators and something like eighty-five members of Congress. So he made a terrific leap in seniority because there were so few Republicans left. 10 Charnley: He'd been there just a couple of years. Kennedy: And he was considered the vice presidential nominee in 1940, but he declined it, perhaps not too tactfully. He was running for reelection and was pretty certain of reelection, and no one was very confident about beating Roosevelt in 1940. So four years later when he might have considered the nomination for President, the bosses said, "No way." But he had been kind of a leading isolationist in the 1930s, and I remember his saying, when the Lend-Lease Bill came up for vote in 1940, after the election in '41, he said, "I consider that we are now voting yes or no on whether this country gets involved in the war, whether this country goes to war," which he was dead right. But when the war came, he realized the role of this country was different, our position was different. Already in the 1930s, during the appeasement of Hitler and all that, no one consulted Washington or FDR; they just ignored this country and didn't think very much about Russia either. It was all Britain, France, Germany, Italy a little. So Vandenburg realized the situation had changed, so he changed his position on international cooperation. He was the leader of the bipartisan foreign policy. He had virtually an absolute veto over any legislation having to do with foreign relations, because if he said no, all the Republicans who were much stronger then, and a good many Democrats would just turn the thumbs down on it. If he approved it, they'd generally go along with it. Of course, from '46 to '48, Republicans were in the majority, and he was then third in line for the presidency after [Harry S.] Truman took office. The Speaker [of the House] was second in line and he was third. So he was very influential in his role, a delegate to the United Nations Conference. There's an interesting anecdote that I must somehow get into print. I went over to Grand Rapids and interviewed his personal physician, who also was his close friend, and he told me about one incident when Vandenburg had been director of Grand Rapids Bank, and at that time the directors were liable to assessment equal to their stock holding. Vandenburg had $50,000 investment in that bank, and when the assessment was levied, he had to come up with $50,000 cash to save the bank. Well, the great danger was a run, people getting scared and taking the money out. 11 Dr. Smith, his name was, told me that he was in a brown study that night. After an hour or two, he said, "I think I have the answer." He went to the telephone, called up President [Herbert] Hoover and said, "These bank runs are caused mostly by small depositors. If we could ensure their accounts, the banks would be save from a run." Well, Hoover didn't really go for the idea because this had been tried before on state levels and hadn't worked, had gone bankrupt. So it didn't get anywhere under Hoover. When Roosevelt came in, they'd had the Banking Act. Vandenburg convinced Senator Glass of Virginia that this was a great idea, and the irony is that Roosevelt threatened to veto the banking bill if it had this insurance featured in it, and Carter Glass said to Vandenburg, "What about that?" He said, "We'll pass it over to veto." [Laughter] And so that's how they got Federal Bank Deposit Insurance. But the other incident I'll tell you about had occurred about 1948, in that era. Vandenburg was coming through Grand Rapids, spending the night there and flying on to Washington. Dr. Smith said, "I said to him, 'You know, listen. Why don't you just let me drive you down to Detroit Airport, to Willow Run, and we can have a good visit on the way. My chauffeur will take us down. You won't lost any time.'" Okay. That was fine with Vandenburg. So the car took off, but when it was parked, it wasn't at Willow Run, it was right in front of the University of Michigan Hospital. Vandenburg, "What's this? What's this?" And Smith says, "I have everyone here all prepared to give you a complete physical examination. It normally would take two or three days. They'll do it in one day." And Vandenburg, "I have to get back to Washington." He said, "They're all ready for you. It will take you just one day." They put him through, and they saw a spot on his lung. Dr. Smith said to him, "You'll have an operation right away." Vandenburg said, "I've got to get back to Washington to get this NATO treaty through. That's more important than a life." And I said to him, I was interviewing him a year, year and a half after Vandenburg died--I think he died in '51--I said, "Do you think if he'd had the operation then--" 12 He said, "He'd be alive today." So there's a guy who gave his life for the job. I always think of that when I read people saying cynical things about their members of Congress. Those guys often give a great deal. Charnley: Did you ever meet him personally? Kennedy: I did not. I had a little correspondence with him. He was too sick at the time. Charnley: Did you continue on, after he died, with any of this? Kennedy: I stupidly did not. I was so fatigued when I finished, and bored with the subject by that time, that I thought, "Well, I'll give myself a rest." And I just never picked it up. It's a bad mistake. I could have had two or three nice articles at least out of it. It came in somewhat useful, because in 1956--I'll back up a bit and say that Mr. Bagwell, I think he began to get kind of bored with his job early in the fifties and became active in Junior Chamber of Commerce. He got elected the national president of the Junior Chamber of Commerce. Then he got interested in state politics and he ran, I believe in 1956, I wouldn't swear to it as auditor general, which was then an elective office. He ran a good race. In fact, I think he led the ticket. He called me in the office one day. This was in '56. "Ted, you're a Republican, aren't you?" I assured him I was. He said, "Well, do you know Chuck Chamberlain, who's running for Congress?" I said, "Well, I've met him." "Well, he needs help with his television program. Do you think you could help him?" I said, "Well, I don't know anything about television. I work in radio, and I suppose it's similar. I'll help him if I can." 13 So anyway, I met the Chamberlains, and the poor guy, I met him, he and his wife were both there in the office, big dark circles under their eyes, looked like a couple of raccoons. [Laughter] I thought, gee, if I could help these people, I sure want to try. So I kind of pitched in, wrote a couple of speeches for him. [Begin Tape 1, Side 2] Charnley: When the tape ended, we were talking about Paul Bagwell and Chamberlain, who was running for Congress. You had indicated that you had helped them with his TV campaign. Kennedy: Yes. Chuck wanted to know what he could pay me, and I said to him, "Look. If I were rich, you'd expect me to give you some money, wouldn't you?" He said, "Well, yeah." I said, "Well, I don't have any money. I've got a little talent. Consider it a donation." He said, "Well." So anyway, the morning after the election, he called me up. We had stopped at his house the night before, late. He said, "Ted, how would you like to go to Washington with me?" I said, "What?" He said, "I just talked to President Hannah." I thought, "Oh, my god." [Laughter] So I took a leave of absence from the university and went to Washington, worked there for eight months. That was an education. That was at least equivalent to about two years of graduate school, at least. Charnley: What year was that? Kennedy: That was in 1957. 14 Charnley: How long was Chamberlain in office? Kennedy: He was there for eighteen years. I won't say he fired me, but it was sort of by mutual agreement. I quit after eight months, because it was really the dog's life. I had to work five and a half, six days a week, sometimes more than that, sometimes evenings. I had so little time, I didn't get down to Mount Vernon till the last Sunday afternoon I was in Washington. I just took time. So I think if I had stayed in that job, I'd probably have been dead in about a year. I remember Senator Griffin, congressman at the time, asked one day at lunch, "How are you getting along?" I said, "I've never worked so hard for anybody else in my life." [Laughter] But I think Chuck appreciated me more after I left than he did while I was there, because he kept trying to get me to come back. In fact, I did work for him off and on all the rest of the time he was in Congress. Charnley: What were your main duties? Kennedy: Writing the occasion speech, which I'd do at home at nights and weekends and things like that. That was the main thing. But in the summers, sometimes his wife and children were up here and it was lonesome down there, so he'd have me come down and live with him while he was there. He also, in his last race, he kind of tricked me into coming back and working for him full time. I thought I was just going to be a help to his AA, who was a good friend of mine, but he'd fired him and I was suddenly it again. I didn't know any more than I'd known the first time about that job, so that was a real scramble. But then the last time I took leave to work for him was in the fall term of 1974, because I asked him what he was going to do with his official papers. He said, "Have a big bonfire." I said, "No, you can't do that." "Well, then you have to come down and sort them out." 15 Charnley: You'd written a lot of them. Kennedy: Yes. So he blackmailed me, in a way, to come down. So I took the fall term leave, and right after Labor Day until mid-December he had 150 cartons of documents stored, plus additional, I'd say, filing cabinets in his office. I didn't get through many of those. Got through the main storage ones. But I reduced everything. Then I came back here and worked till the first of the year in his Lansing office, again going through all the files and written things. Reduced the 150 cartons and all the rest of it to about 50 cartons, and labeled and filed and so on. So I always thought he should give them to our archives here. I think he will some day if he hasn't already made another distribution of them. Charnley: He's still living? Kennedy: Oh yes. Charnley: Is he in the Lansing area? Kennedy: No, he didn't come back to Lansing. He joined a law firm about a block and a half from the White House and concentrated on making money, I think. He became a full partner in Webster Chamberlain, the name of the firm, the last year he was in it. Of course, down in Washington, practicing law mainly means lobbying, knowing who to talk to and what to say. Charnley: Is there anything that you learned from that experience in Washington? 16 Kennedy: Oh yes, sure did. It relieved me of a lot of illusions about law-making. I said that sometimes it's like having a ringside seat at a great big circus with a lot of clowns. [Laughter] What I say may sound kind of cynical when you first hear it, when I say that the members of Congress are 98 percent concerned with reelection, but at the same time that simply means they're trying to affect the will and the wishes of the constituents, which is democracy in action. There's an awful lot of compromise. If there's any one secret of our government, it's compromise, adjustment. The loser never has to flee the country. You realize that if the other party wins, it's not going to be a catastrophe, because there will be some accommodation for the minority's positions. When these committees here hear witnesses and go over the legislation, they do their best not to just simply ironclad impose their will on the opposition. It's an accommodation so far as they can. You can see this going on all the time in current legislation now, on prescriptions for the elders, an adjustment. That I think more than anything else preserves the stability of our government. I don't know if very many academics recognize this. Charnley: The ability to compromise. Kennedy: To compromise, to adjust, to accommodate, to listen to the other side and take their views into account. When visitors came to Washington, I would often look up and see what committee hearing was going on that morning and recommend they sit in there, because it's more interesting and informative than certainly listening to these canned speeches on the floor. Those are almost always for home consumption, for the record. Vandenburg only gave one speech in the Senate where it was generally recognized that he changed people's views, and that was the confirmation of the nominee, whose name I cannot recall, for head of the Atomic Energy Commission. There was a lot of Republican opposite to him, but Vandenburg persuaded them to accept him. But that's the only speech. Charnley: You mentioned Bob Griffin, who was a congressman. Did you meet the President? 17 Kennedy: Yes. That first summer, an invitation came to meet President [Dwight D.] Eisenhower. So the last morning I'm in Washington- I didn't point out to him I was leaving--about eight o'clock, parked on the oval drive and met him in the Oval Office, with about fifty other secretaries. In fact, I wrote a little article about it, because what astonished me was how fluently and beautifully the man spoke. We were accustomed to listening to him in press conferences, where he was often very hesitant and sometimes ungrammatical and so on as a person normally is, but he talked to us in an understanding way about how difficult it is to be an assistant, an aide-de-camp, a secretary or whatever, and try to serve the boss, because he'd been in that role himself plenty, and he knew what he was talking about. Charnley: Serving MacArthur. Kennedy: He talked to us for eight or ten minutes, just perfect presentation. A colleague, Mert [phonetic] Babcock, was editor of the Journal of Communication or something like that, and I wrote it up for him. Let's see. I met--I can't remember too many of the other senators. Charnley: How about the other Michigan delegation? Kennedy: Yes, yes. Charnley: Jerry Ford? Kennedy: Almost all of them, yes. Jerry Ford in his office. There was some petition circulated for a nominee to the Supreme Court from Michigan, and I took it around to all the Michigan Republican congressmen to sign. Also sometimes, especially in the summer, when Chuck and I were by ourselves, there would be late legislation on the floor, about five o'clock or so, Chuck would unlock the safe and take out the booze. [Laughter] 18 We would have a snort or two and we'd go over to the Capitol for the vote to come up, and there were other congressmen there who had also imbibed. Quite convivial. I remember Chuck used to enjoy introducing me as "his Ted Kennedy." A congressman from Ohio, who was head of the administration committee, later on got in trouble by saying, because of the booze, "Well, I hope you're better than that other S.O.B." [Laughter] That was fun. Saw Speaker Rayburn, of course, and one morning I was over there and Speaker Martin came in. What was interesting, though, one afternoon I had an errand to go over to the Senate Office Building, and I was going to the subway to go to the Senate Office Building, and there's Jack [John F.] Kennedy. This was in '57, and, of course, everybody knew he was going to be a prize nominee for 1960. He was standing there, and someone was yakking at him, a bunch of people. I almost had to squeeze past him. That's the only time I remember seeing him. I did notice how poor his complexion was, very yellow. I've since read that he probably would not have lived through a second term from, I think, Bright's [phonetic] disease. I talked to Bobby [Robert F.] Kennedy on the phone once. So, yes, there were lots of names and faces. Charnley: What was it like coming back after leaving Washington? Kennedy: Decompression. It was funny, I sat in my office, and, gosh, you know, what should I be doing? [Laughter] It took about a month before I could slow down and relax a bit. Charnley: Were you married at that time? Kennedy: Oh yes. Charnley: But your wife wasn't with you in Washington? 19 Kennedy: Oh yes. Charnley: Oh, she was. Kennedy: Yes, wife and children, the whole, as they say, catastrophe. [Laughter] Charnley: Talk a little bit about the presidents you've had experience with here at Michigan State. President Hannah obviously was the first one you had, who hired you. Kennedy: Yes. Charnley: What are your recollections about President Hannah? Kennedy: He was concerned with civil rights, of course, and so one spring he was Chairman of the Civil Rights Commission. I was teaching one of these large classes of 200 students in it, and I wrote to him and asked if he would like to consider coming to my class and talking to them about this. After all, I thought it might do him some good to get in the classroom, for one. [Laughter] I didn't hear anything for about three weeks, and finally got an apology note from him, he said he was sorry, he kept hoping he could find time, but the schedule was just too full, he hoped I would give him a raincheck. So the next winter term when my class was giving a little attention to the Civil War and that era, I issued the raincheck and he accepted. He came over. It was in Wilson Hall, the big auditorium there. I had told the students he was coming and they could bring a friend if they wanted to. There was room available. So when the time came to introduce him, I said, "I don't know if I can say this or not, but we believe always in this course in facing the truth. Dr. Hannah and I have been colleagues now for more than twenty years, and 20 during this time I've had two promotions and he hasn't had any. I guess some of us have it and some of us don't." [Laughter] So that kind of relaxed everything. Charnley: He responded well to that. Kennedy: And I mentioned that for my sins I had been in Washington in 1957. He looked at me, "Oh, I can see. Oh, you're the one." [Laughter] Told him I was listening to the debates on the civil rights bill. I said, "There are many eloquent speeches on the subject. Adam Clayton Powell gave a powerful speech in support of the bill, but the House passed it anyway." Then a couple of weeks later, I went over to the Senate and was there when [Richard M.] Nixon, the Vice President, made the parliamentary ruling that let the Senate take the bill up instead of consigning it to the committee, judicial committee, where it would never see the light of day. He talked to the class, and it was very good, a lot of interesting things. A lot of lively questions came up. I think Hannah was a wonderful administrator, and I think he would have done just as good as head of General Motors as of Michigan State, maybe even better. He had one glaring fault. I mentioned when I first came here, I was kind of shocked at the attitude of the students not being very aggressive or businesslike. I don't think he ever understood what a dead weight a few dull students can be in a classroom, especially if it's a small class. His view always was to keep every student here as long as they could possibly be kept. So actually I jokingly once, my brother asked me, he said, "How many students are there at Michigan State?" I said, "About half." [Laughter] A cynical exaggeration. But I would say that about 25 percent of our students should never have been admitted or should have been ousted. I remember students telling me that they used to run a special train from Champaign, Illinois, up to Chicago at the end of the first semester for the students who had flunked out. And the same was true at Wisconsin. They flunked out of Wisconsin on mid-term grades. Anyone with a high school degree could be admitted, so they'd admit them, but they'd flunk them out wholesale. 21 That was pre-war, of course. Whether they're still severe or not, I don't know. But that's mostly what Michigan State needed, to get rid of the dullards and the playboy, the rioters, that sort of nonsense. We suffer for that. Later, I don't know, in about '61 or so, I worked for a while as an assistant to Newt Winburne, who was in the student affairs office for the University College. We had then a peculiar program, any student could stay here for almost two years. They had a minimum requirements, and if you didn't meet that, then you'd get some kind of a probation. Then they'd get final warning one and final warning two. Of course, if you flunked every course, you'd be out, but other than that, you could sit around here for two years. I said, "It seems to me this program, instead of letting them stay for two years and chopping their heads off," which you almost had to do because if they didn't have a pretty good average, they wouldn't be transferred from the University College to the degree-granting college. Every student that came in was in University College for two years. So we set up a step scale. At a certain level of credits you had to have a certain average, and by the end of two years you had to be at the two-point. So if they got below that step scale, we'd find it out much sooner. They could either do something about it or they'd be ousted. Hannah learned about this in due course sometime later, and they changed, to do away with this double hurdle of having to have a 2.0 average in two years and then the same thing at the end of four years. So they revised the scale to make it a four-year scale. Of course, the colleges that really count, engineering and the others, they still would demand a good record at even the end of one year. In other words, the one thing we had going for us to tighten up the academic standards here, he changed that. I think that was a bad mistake. I think the problem was, he'd never taught college himself, so, as I say, he didn't realize the heavy dulling effect of poor students in the classroom. Charnley: His emphasis was on expansion in terms of the university. Kennedy: Yes. He had the belief that any student would benefit from being on the campus, which is perhaps true. I don't know if it's universally true. 22 I heard a story about him once, that the admissions office had an arrangement whereby with some students who were borderline on admission, they would have them come to the campus and be given special tests and be interviewed. On the basis of those results, they would be admitted or not. Hannah said, "About how many area admitted?" "Well, maybe five out of a hundred." He said, "I want you to admit all one hundred and we'll see how they do." And they admitted the hundred, and ninety-seven of them didn't make it. Hannah says, "See? Three. I told you you were keeping some students out." [Laughter] The story may be apocryphal, but I don't think so. I don't remember whole told me. It was someone who would have known. Charnley: In the 1960s, student activism rising, changes that occurred on the campus. What's your reflection on that? Kennedy: Well, it was a pretty unhappy time. One recollection that's very vivid in my memory, I was teaching an afternoon class, and Walter Adams and his pal LaRue, [unclear] LaRue, were leading--these guys are both veterans of wars. They were leading about 100 or so students down Farm Lane and then they'd turn on Shaw Lane and head westward, and they were chanting. My class was over in the west side of a building. When they were over on the south campus chanting loud, I stopped, I said to my students, "You know, this is bringing back a memory to me. It sounds almost exactly like the radio broadcasts I heard in the middle 1930s by William L. Shire [phonetic] from Berlin, only then they were chanting 'Zeig Heil! Zeig Heil! Zeig Heil!'" I said, "I hated it then and I hate this now, because this is the antithesis of what a university should be doing, which is weighing instead of winnowing." I was just outraged at the holiday, although I guess President [Clifton R.] Wharton [Jr.] had to call it after the Kent State killings. 23 But as far as I could see, what we were dealing with was a generation of brats. They never really had to do anything they didn't want to do. You could hear their parents trying, "Come on, honey. Don't you want to go home now?" "No!" That sort of thing. The schools had been pushing them along, passing them, never disciplining them. The paddle had disappeared from the school room. They came to college, where there should be some discipline, and that had been brushed aside, too. But the U.S. Army was the discipline they were afraid of, and especially of the chance they were going to Vietnam, getting hurt or killed. Well, I can't blame them too much for not wanting to sacrifice their life. It was just a reaction. To me, it was a reaction of a spoiled generation. I think had the same kind of thing happened in our day, we probably would have objected, but it would have been a different kind of objection. There would have been public forums, speeches, letters, that sort of thing. Charnley: Were you surprised when President Hannah left, when he resigned? Kennedy: Yes, I was rather surprised. In fact, that may have been while I was on leave or right after I got back in 1969, spring term. I took a leave of absence and made my first trip to Europe. What surprised me, I took it because I just never had been there, I wanted to go, I felt it was almost part of a person's education. What a surprise how much use I made of that experience after I got back to teaching here, even though it's an American thought and language course. I made constant references to it. Anyway, I think that happened either while I was away or shortly after I got back. Very, very sad. Yes, I was surprised, because he had a long, honorable career, and I couldn't see that things were any different in '69 than they had been in '59, really. Charnley: Were you involved in any of the presidential searches? 24 Kennedy: No, not directly. I was acquainted with a member of the committee who was, strictly personal arena, nothing on the campus. All the things that appeared in the press are not entirely true. There were at least two applicants for the job who desperately wanted it, tried their best to persuade the committee to recommend them. One is Walter Adams and other was Mennon [phonetic] Williams. I have that directly from a member of the committee. And both publicly demurred. But the thing got tangled up. The Republicans, I think, were in the minority. They had only two members of the board of trustees. Then one of the members, the local dentist, a former football player and a great person, whose name I can't remember-- Charnley: Blanche Martin. Kennedy: Blanche Martin. Of course, when Wharton came along, that's the one he wanted. The Republicans saw Wharton as the best choice of those being considered. So it was kind of a stalemate. I guess four of them wanted Wharton, but they needed a fifth vote. Finally, a member of the UAW put on the [unclear] as an official of the union. He voted for Wharton. The union wanted Mennon Williams. For doing that, violating that, he promptly got fired from his union job, and for a year or two he worked up in Minneapolis. So it was strictly a political fight, and I don't suppose it would make a whole world of difference which one would have been picked. A president or any other administrative officer can do harm, but they have a limited capacity to do good. If they do good, it's gradual over a period of time. Charnley: What was your assessment of the Wharton presidency? Kennedy: Well, I think Walter Adams put his finger on it. He said, "It's almost not like having a president," that and the fact that our building didn't get cleaned very regularly for a while. There was a pinch in money, and it was really depressing to come in and find the floors or the steps, stairs, the hallways just filthy dirty, I guess cleaned maybe once a week. In the winter term, the kids are tracking in snow and grime. 25 There is one other thing. I made my only contribution to Michigan State University while Wharton was president. I was teaching a class from 11:30 to 12:20, and the first day of the month at 12:00 o'clock, a damn siren blasted away and it went on for about a minute, then a brief pause, then it went on for another minute. This happened to me many times over the years. I was just furious, angry. I went into my office and I wrote a letter to the president and said, "You know, I think it's stupid that sirens have to be tested every month. We went through World War II and only had them tested once or twice a year." [Begin Tape 2, Side 1] Charnley: This is tape two of Theodore Kennedy interview. We were talking about the sirens going off outside your classroom. Kennedy: Yes. I said, "If they have to go off on the first day of the month, for heaven's sake, do it at 12:30 when the classes are changing, or if they have to go at 12:00 o'clock, then have it the first Saturday of the month." I was pretty testy in the letter. I got a reply from Wharton, soothing somewhat. They're for storm warnings, tornado warnings. But also directing whoever was responsible hereafter to blow them at 12:30. [Laughter] So that's my single contribution to Michigan State. Charnley: Oh, I think there's probably more than that. Within the department or University College, did you have any administrative duties? Kennedy: Well, I worked for a time in academic advising and on departmental committees. I served on about every committee except scheduling and social at one time or another. 26 The interesting interval, though, is when they built Case Hall. The provost had seen all the kids running around, all the time and energy all these people are wasting, so he thought why not put classes in the dormitories, where they don't have to walk around. So about half a dozen of us from the University College were assigned over to Case Hall, where we had our offices, and they arranged classrooms for us to meet in. That was in, I believe, fall term. No, I'm sorry, it was in winter and spring term, I believe '61. Bessey Hall had just opened, so I had one term in Bessey and then I went over to Case Hall and had an office on the fifth floor of the girls' wing. The idea of men and women in the same dormitory, although the north wing was for women, the south wing was for men, and the only shared accommodations were the recreation room, the dining hall, and so on, that was a still pretty shocking idea in 1960. Anyway, for the two terms we were there, just Case Hall, nothing else over there except the fire station, it was like having a small college right on a large university campus, just terrific. We had a separate schedule. Our classes started from 8:00 to 8:50, and then the next class was 8:55. Then there would be a twenty-minute break, is how it worked out. It was just wonderful, because we could teach a class and then go into the coffee area. If the students wanted to, they could come along with us and we'd sit down and shoot the breeze after class. If they wanted to see us, all they had to do is take the elevator up to our office. We had isolation, more privacy, in a way. We had offices connected by showers in these residential rooms, intended to be. On a hot summer day, a time or two we'd strip down and take a shower. [Laughter] We ate our lunches in the cafeteria with the students, often with them. And this was just Case Hall students. So, again, it was like being in a small college, having it there. Well, the next fall, Wilson Hall opened and they intermingled the students. They had classes in Wilson, too. Wilson students could take classes in Case, and vice versa, and that ended it. It was just like being here. And the year after that, they opened Wonders Hall, so then it simply became a large university, just a segment of it. Charnley: So the residential concept was good at first, but then expanded. 27 Kennedy: It certainly was, yes. But, you see, you have to have enough association with the students to get to know them, and if you only see them one hour or three hours a week, or four, it's not going to happen. Charnley: What would you say in terms of your own classroom, in your teaching over your career, what did you find to be most gratifying about teaching? Kennedy: Well, not as much as I would have expected before I became a teacher. Wabash College is a very small school. When I was there, its enrollment was about 400 men. It's now about 800 men, so it's doubled. But I expected more contact, out-of-classroom contact with students, which didn't happen here very much. This may be a factor of my own personality, because I know Steve Ellison, a colleague, is always having students around to see him. He's a delightful fellow and obviously made them fell welcome. He also has an amazing memory for student names, which I didn't. I always tried to learn my students by sight, by name, and usually succeeded to get them all by the end of the term. There were a few that took longer than most. But then next term comes, it's just like erasing the blackboard. But Steve, he could see a student he had in class a year or two before, and he remembers his name. So he's great in that way. Charnley: I always like the question they ask you, "Do you remember me?" and the answer is, "Oh, of course I remember you." [Laughter] Kennedy: Well, I did remember them by face. Oh, I suppose the greatest gratification is having contact with a student who's been in your class a year or two or three before. I'm still in touch with a few, not many, two or three, I suppose, former students. Charnley: You were the official historian of the department, is that right? 28 Kennedy: Yes, I guess for a while. Yes. Charnley: When was the transition made to American thought and language? Kennedy: That happened--I can't be positive on the date, but about 1959. As I say, I think Mr. Bagwell ran for auditor general in 1956, then two years later he ran for governor, and ran a pretty good race. I guess Mennon Williams. He gave him a good race, so good, in fact, that Williams left in 1960. He had a job in Washington from Kennedy. His lieutenant governor, Swensy [phonetic], ran in '60, and Paul again ran for governor and didn't win. Well, I think after about 1959, he was ousted as head of the department, chairman, and they gave him an assignment on campus, because you don't fire the possible future governor. [Laughter] Then after the 1960 race, or maybe even before, I think, he left the campus. He made a lot of money very quickly and lost most of it, and died rather suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage. His wife, a lovely lady, very attractive, died two weeks later, same thing. Just amazing. Charnley: And he wasn't that old. Kennedy: No, he wasn't terribly old. Anyway, to get back to your question, I believe Ed Blackman, who was then in the humanities department, the dean picked him as our new chairman to succeed Bagwell. He came in with a new course, which was to do away with speech, public speaking training, which was fine with me, even though my training had all been in the field of speech, I was a major in it, because freshmen don't have very much to say. It's just a waste of money. They'll do so much better and they'll learn so much more if they're even a year older, a year or two older, because by that time there's a little more confidence, a good deal more confidence, and they know the practical value of it. At any rate, he proposed this course where we, in a sense, take American intellectual history as the framework for our composition course. That was a challenge. It was very stimulating. Most of the speech majors 29 left the department. Not all, but most of those. So it became a very exciting course. I was kind of involved in the shaping of the curriculum when it was being drafted. Had a very fine committee. I was more an observer than anything else, a practical man. I have to tell of something that made the course for me more than anything else. In the 1960s, maybe early seventies, I've forgotten now just when, I was asked to be a lecturer at a conference for beginning college teachers, and it was a program being run out of the University of Iowa. It was a two-week conference, at least initially. So I was given a lecturing assignment, I don't know, I guess on how to be a good teacher, I guess, was the point of it. So I told them about the problem I had faced when this new course was being set up. It started out we were going to study puritanism. Puritanism! Here were these young healthy animals in the late twentieth century. You're going to teach them about sixteenth century theology, for God's sake? I thought to myself, how in the world am I going to--I was concerned about offending people, because my knowledge was pretty skimpy to begin with. Here we have all these students who are graduates of these parochial schools and Catholic parochial schools, and then we have youngsters from the Dutch Reform churches in western Michigan that probably know more about Calvin than I do, and everything in between. How in the world am I going to avoid offending somebody? I could see myself trying to walk a high wire for this time. Then I suddenly thought, instead of worrying about offending this group or that group or the other group, why don't I offend them all. We had a little preliminary unit before we got into puritanism. About the end of the second week, on a Friday, because I wanted them to stew over the weekend, I came in and pointed out to them that this being a tax-supported school, it would be very wrong for me to try to impose any religious views or opinions on them, and that's not my intention at all. However, in order to understand our society today, we have to look at the puritans, because they had so much influence in the way we live today. In order to understand the way they lived and thought, we have to understand their theology, their religious beliefs, and to understand that, we need to appreciate, we need to know the views of a man named John Calvin, Jean Calvin, whatever. "So it's only fair for me to warn you that when I have explained to you the truth about the relation of God and man as set forth by John 30 Calvin, you will probably be compelled by the sheer force of his logic to give up whatever other mistaken religious beliefs you have heretofore held." [Laughter] And you do it all with a straight face, which is the hardest part. I tell you, it's like looking at roomful of half dollars. [Laughter] Open like this. So I go through the theology, the total depravity of man and the omnipotence of God and all that. They're sitting there like they're hypnotized, taking this in, and then I always ask for questions. The questions always came. I explained to these young teachers that if they would ask twentieth-century questions, I'd give them sixteen-century answers. [Laughter] And it was a very frustrating time for everybody. Of course, the smarter ones smell a rat, a big rat, and the others would stew about it and didn't know where they were. So from then on, I just assumed they were all puritans. [Laughter] Charnley: But if you brought puritans to life in the classroom, at least to get them to think. An interesting technique. Kennedy: A couple of weeks later then, I gradually slid into deism, pointing out some of the shortcomings of Calvinism, and here is a great pitch of deism. They were thinking, "Oh, he's not really a puritan, he's a deist." [Laughter] Charnley: At least from the third week of the course. Kennedy: Yes. At that time we also, I think, covered transcendentalism in the first term, and, of course, you get into that, the same thing again. One spring, I don't know why, I got to thinking about these twentieth century writers we get into, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, the whole bunch, not an unorthodox Christian among them, really. It was Holy Week and there was Passover and there was Good Friday. I mentioned this to my classes, maybe both of them. These were, again, these big 200-student classes. I said, "On Friday, while it isn't necessary that we give the 31 devil equal time, it seems reasonable we give him some time. So on Friday you don't have to come to class if you don't want to, or you can bring your religious advisor if you want to, but I'm going to give a lecture on twentieth-century atheism." And I did. And it was all right. It wasn't as successful as it could have been, should have been. But at the end of the term that year, I was asking them for questions about the final exam, and one student, a little red-cheeked kid from the western part of the state, he said, "Mr. Kennedy, last fall you had us believe that you were a puritan. Then you had us believe you were a deist. Then this winter you convinced us you were a transcendentalist. Then you turn around and give us a lecture on atheism. Now would you tell us what is your religious position or belief?" And I thought, oh, my God. I said, "Well, you may ask." [Laughter] "And I will answer. I am a hypocrite." [Laughter] It was a great time. I have to mention one other class. The teachers always tell you about the great success, but I don't remember which year, the middle sixties, about '64 or maybe a little bit later, when Michigan State had put Gordon Sabine [phonetic] in charge of recruitment, former dean of communications. He did a terrific job. We had, I think, 135 Merit Scholars in the freshman class, three times as many as Harvard. I was given an honors class that met at night, two nights a week, in a seminar room here in Bessey. This was the most terrific teaching experience of all my years of teaching. I don't think I ever worked as hard, had such an intense class. It took intense effort, because these kids were sharp. You asked a question and you had to listen to what they were saying carefully and analyze it, and at the same time be anticipating your next question, which usually is easy, but not so easy with these kids. Well, I used the same gimmicks with them I did with others, only they began laughing much quicker. We met in that classroom two nights a week, and along toward the end of the term, I had it over at my house one night. We met over there. There were twenty-five students in that class. Twenty-three of them were back the next term, and one of those had left to go home and get married, a girl. I don't remember who the other dropout was. And I think there were twenty-three As in the class. At that point we had the 4.5, the A-plus grade, and I 32 think at least a half a dozen of them got that. It was so delightful to know them. We got along just great. So I had them for two terms. Well, the next spring term, it was no longer going to be a night class, and I thought, well, they ought to have the experience of somebody else anyway in teaching, so I told them I really didn't want a night class the next term, they should have somebody else. I went down the list, and when I got to my class, I said, "[unclear]." Two members of that class got married. They came back and took independent study with me one term and then later got married, and then later after that, got divorced, unfortunately. I'm still in touch with the girl by e-mail. But that was a marvelous time, but, God, it was hard work. It was really demanding. Charnley: When did you retire? Kennedy: 1984. I came back that fall, taught one class that fall and the next fall. Charnley: Since you've been retired, how have you been spending your time? Kennedy: Not very efficiently. I've written. I've gotten more things published since I retired than afterward, which is no coincidence. The same thing is true, I'm sure, of Marilyn Culpepper. She's published a couple of books, very prolific. You just don't have time, if you're a conscientious teacher. Dave Anderson has no children. Mert Babcock, another prolific colleague, I think he had one son, pretty much grown then. These are men who just can devote great chunks of time available. Most of my colleagues, I think, just don't have that. And also maybe they're getting more fatigued from teaching. I do an awful lot of reading. I'm a great reader. I read probably thirty to fifty books a year. And I'm not a very fast reader, either, so it takes me more time to get through. Charnley: What have you read most recently? 33 Kennedy: I just finished reading a book called A Soldier for Napoleon, of all things, a Bavarian soldier. Not really a very good book, but the interesting part were his letters home. He was involved in 1812, 1813, including the invasion of Moscow by Russia. His unit didn't go very far into Russia, but they were there. Their outfit dissolved, too, along with the rest of Napoleon's Army. Boy, what a catastrophe. He took a half million, nearly half a million men, and I'd say eighty percent of them didn't get back. My interests are everywhere. I have a biography of Frederic II and a biography of Alistair Cooke waiting. My preference is history and biography, mostly. My hobby is--standing in Windsor Castle, I believe it was, looking at Queen Mary's dollhouse, and friends of ours, good friends of ours, had a very late baby, a little girl, and she was about eight. I thought, my golly, her parents have a beautiful home. I'm going to make a miniature of their home, which was kind of stupid, because if you make it one inch to the foot, it turns out to be a heck of a big house. It would cover the end of this table. At any rate, it was quite a project, and I made that for their daughter. My wife said, "Why don't you make one for our own granddaughter?" So I decided to make her a miniature of our house on Beach Street. She is now about twenty-five or six years old, and I've almost got the house finished. She had it for a couple of years when she was the right age, and they moved and I brought it home to do more work on it. Charnley: Just in time for her daughter. Kennedy: Yes. She's just gotten engaged, so maybe it will work out that way. I used to enjoy that so much. I'd just go down to the basement and go to work, and time would just evaporate. But I'm not a very skilled or very fast workman, and I haven't done much work on it in the past year or two. Charnley: In looking back at your career, what would you say are maybe some of your most vivid recollections? You stayed here your whole career, pretty much, after you came. 34 Kennedy: Yes, I did, except for these intervals in Washington. Well, I don't know. I don't think I'd do it again. I remember when I was a senior in college, thinking about my future, and I looked at what seemed to me to be the role, the nature of the work of the Wabash faculty, and seemed to me a pretty nice life. Well, I was right. It is a nice life. You don't get dirt under your fingernails. And it certainly beats farming by eighty miles. But you just don't accomplish as much as you feel like you should. At least I don't feel I did. You never know. You just never know. I was in a doctor's office a month or so back, and just leaving, a man spoke up to me, addressed me, and he's a former student. He's now on the law faculty here at Michigan State. But a teacher is writing in water, really. I think the best you can do is probably to contribute to the experience, along with other teachers, other things. Charnley: Sounds like you've had an impact on most students. Kennedy: Well, some, I suppose, yes. I suppose. I think, I hope that some of them learned or came to understand that learning can be fun. I mentioned Hesseltime [phonetic] at Wisconsin, whose lectures were so enjoyable. In fact, I plagiarized from him frequently whenever I could. My last class I had with him was in summer school, and a book had just come out about the governmental operations behind the Iron Curtain. I think the title of the book was something like The Bureaucrat and the Flunky, the guy who did the routine work. He had a very harsh voice like this [demonstrates], and he said, "Our course is organized according to modern socialistic principles. We have a bureaucrat who is in charge of things, and we have the clerk who does the humdrum routine work. Mr. Brown, my graduate assistant, is the bureaucrat. I am the clerk." I was thinking, yeah, bureaucrat, 55 bucks a month they paid me as a graduate assistant. I blurted out, "Who gets paid the most?" [Laughter] And the shock of my fellow summer school graduates. "What's this?" I repeated it. "Well, compensation is based upon socialistic principle to each according to his needs, from each according to his ability." I screwed it up; he had it 35 right. And everyone roared. He smiled at me the whole rest of the period. [Laughter] From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. A time or two when I was introducing my readers, I used a version-- [End of interview] 36 Index Adams, Walter 23, 25, 26 Anderson, Dave 34 Babcock, Mert 18, 34 Bagwell, Paul 4, 6, 9, 13, 29 Basic College 3, 5 Baskett, Sam 6 Bessey Hall 27, 33 Blackman, Ed 30 Case Hall 27 Chamberlain, Chuck 13-15, 18 Culpepper, Marilyn 34 Demonstration Hall 4 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 17 Ellison, Steve 28 Hannah, John A. 14, 20-24 Hesseltime, William 2, 36 Hickok, Ben 8 Jenison Fieldhouse 4, 8 Lemansk, Bob 8 Macklin Field 4 Martin, Blanche 25 Michigan State University Academic standards 22 Basic College 3, 5 Board of trustees 25 Campus in 1945 4 Coed dorms 27 Smoking prohibition 9 Student enrollment 5 Student unrest in the 1960s 23 University College 22 Veterans of World War II enrolled as students 7, 8 Reeve, Fred 6 Renwich, Rob 6 Sabine, Gordon 33 Silverman, Henry 6 Sponberg, Harold 8 37 Strandness, Ben 8 University College 22 Veterans of World War II enrolled at MSU 7, 8 Wharton, Clifton R., Jr. 24-26 Williams, Mennon 25, 29 Wilson Hall 28 Winburne, Newt 22 Wonders Hall 28 Wright, Bob 8