Section 1:
Q: Have people in Grinnell always
been receptive to taking those guests in?
A: Well, earlier in the late "60's, we had
some large groups. We had a group of
seventeen resident journalists representing
their countries in Washington. They were
there for anywhere from six months to about
five or six years. They came out to Grinnell
and they all spoke English. If they speak
English, I separate them because if you send
three people to one home, they all have got
the same experience. But, if you send three
people to three different homes, then they
all have the total experience because they
talk to each other. With seventeen people, I
arranged seventeen town homes, seventeen farm
homes, seventeen professor's homes, and
seventeen worker's homes. They were there for
four different nights. I think from that
point on, I never had any problems. It's an
educational thing, too. People are smart
enough to understand that somebody from a
foreign land comes and sits at their dinner
table, they are going to learn something.
It's a two-way street. A marvelous two-way
street. One of my hosts that I use a lot
makes a flag for every guest. If I tell her
what country it is, she makes their flag and
has that flag sitting there as part of the
table decoration. She just loves it. If I
don't call her, she calls me and says,
"When?" That's part of the newspaper's
contribution, too. Mine personally, too,
because my wife does the cooking. I don't. --
Section 2:
Q: In the late '60s, the Grinnell
College newspaper had a controversy. Remember
that? Over freedom of expression and
obscenity. Did you take a position there and,
if so, what was it?
A: There was a yearbook that they didn't
print. Did we take a position? Let me see. I
think we just simply reported it. We did not
editorially comment one way or the other. I
think that is what we did. It was a strange
thing. There was one guy there who seemed to
have it in for the president and was making
money out of the thing. That troubled me.
Playboy came out to talk to the students and
he had a girl primed. Right in the middle of
the guy's talk, the girl stood up and took
off all her clothes. This guy took pictures
and sold the pictures. They did have trouble
with the yearbook. The college sent the
yearbook to the printer first, and the
printer called up the college and asked if
they had looked at it. This was in the late
'60s. They called a lawyer, I think.
Q: What is the background of the
story?
A: Sixty-five to seventy-five was the
Vietnamese objection. Oh, God. Lots of
colleges suffered damage if you remember that
period. In Grinnell, there was one bit of
damage. The students took over one of the
houses that the college had bought and used
for the AFROTC, the Air Force ROTC, and they
were milling around on the porch. Somebody
backed up and hit a window and broke the
window out. The students, being Grinnell
students, took a collection up to have the
window replaced. They had enough money plus
twenty-eight dollars extra. Grinnell's total
physical damage was plus twenty-eight dollars
for that whole period. They did close early
the year of the Kent State shooting. They did
not finish the school year. The president
then was a guy named Glen Leggett and he has
written a marvelous essay about his ten years
as president of Grinnell. If you're
interested, I will send you a copy of it.
Grinnell students were unusual and they still
are. We look at the S and B, the college
paper, and maybe I can't keep up with today's
world, but it's freedom of the press and
freedom of speech, which is great. But you
must always remember that the same freedom is
given to idiots, too. The definition of an
idiot is somebody that doesn't agree with
you, I guess. Grinnell College has always
been very, very liberal and very open. As I
say, three of my kids went there and they are
liberal. I have a blind daughter who lost her
vision between eighth and ninth grade and
went through the blind school for three years
and then went to public high school and
finished in the Top Ten and graduated Cornell
College as a Phi Beta Kappa and then went to
Yale Law School. I think she is pretty
smart. She's a Republican and I explained to
my other kids that the only one among them
that can see politically is the one that
can't see. They don't agree with me. They are
basically liberal. I think my son in
Washington who is a press aide for what I
call the best congressman in the country, and
he's your congressman, Jim Leach. My son was
his press aide for seven or eight years, but
he's over in the Banking Committee now. Jim
is head of the Banking Committee. There are
good Republicans. The centrist Republicans I
call them. And I hope that's what I am. And
I know that's what Jim is. I admire him
greatly. He takes no PAC money and I think it
takes an awful lot to turn down all that
green that everyone else is picking up.
Q: Were there ever any instances
when your reporters wrote a story that, for
various reasons, you were forced to spike, to
kill?
A: My news editor is a crackerjack writer. He
also happens to be politically out here and
I'm here. Not there, but here. I don't think
I have ever killed an editorial that he's
written. Now, I don't think he accedes to my
wishes, and I don't want him to. I think he's
a hell of a fine writer and I think that he's
got a good mind. A little lax politically,
but we rarely kill anything. I have asked
them to let me look at stories that are
sensitive. We have those, and nobody wants to
have a libel or a slander suit. I can't
recall ever having done that. --
Section 3:
Q: I want to know why you went to
the North Pole and what you did there.
A: As I say, it was during the Cold War. Most
of you have heard of the fifteen minute
warning time. I went to the North Pole
because my friends in the Air Force called me
and said they were taking a group of newsmen
to the North Pole and asked me if I wanted to
go. I said, "Hell, yes." What we saw at the
North Pole was they had what they called
BMEWS, Ballistic Missile Early Warning
System. They sent out two beams in opposite
directions [different heights] and any
missiles off Russian property passed through
the first set and then through the second set
of beams and then they could tell exactly how
big it was and where it was going. That was
the fifteen minute warning that we had to
turn our thing loose so that the world would
be incinerated. That's what I saw at the
North Pole.
I must admit I am still a white-knuckler. We
flew in a prop job. We flew from Goose Bay
all the way up to Thule, which is where BMEWS
is. We got within fifteen minutes of Thule
and they had a whiteout. That's a lot of snow
but not new snow. It is just blowing off the
ice cap. They don't know how long they're
going to last, so they immediately diverted
us through Sondre Strom[fjord], which is
called the Miami of the Arctic Circle. This
was three hours directly south. It was my
turn to go and sit next to the pilot, which I
didn't want to do because I am a chicken in
an airplane. I went up there and sat next to
him and he wasn't doing anything but smoking
a pipe. I'm looking for oil leaks and
everything else. I finally spotted something
and I said, "Sam, which direction are we
flying?" The captain was Sam Ganci. I will
never forget him. He said, "Just as I
announced, we are flying due south." I
carried on the conversation a little. Thrice
before the cock shall crow. You know that
story. I wanted to catch him three times.
The second time, I said, "Now Sam, are we
going due south?" He bit a little harder on
his pipe and said, "Yes." The third time, I
asked him if we were going straight south. He
said, "I've told you twice. Why do you ask?"
I had him cold. I pointed to the compass and
said, "How come that compass doesn't show
it?" He took his pipe out of his mouth and
said, "Because the magnetic North Pole is
four hundred miles over there and we don't
fly by compass up here." So I said, "Fly the
plane, Sam."
Coming into Sondre Strom[fjord], there was a
radio thing right along side of me and I
could listen to the communication with the
base. We were designated Tonto 1, and they
would say, "Tonto 1, take a heading with us
and drop down to this level." All you could
see was the mountains and the snow. That's
it. Everything was white and God-forsaken.
Several guys crowded around and asked what
was going on. I would repeat every thing that
was said over the radio. All of sudden, there
was a long silence and they asked what was
going on and I said, "Nothing." They asked
what they were saying, and finally the guy
said, "Tonto 1, where are you? We have lost
you." I thought I would die in Greenland, and
that's no good. But we apparently had gone
behind a mountain or something. I don't know.
Finally, we straightened out an, "We have
you." I smiled like nothing at all had
happened. --
Section 4:
A: I went to Germany for the same reason.
My first trip was to Spain. When I wrote an
article, I was forbidden to write the word
"chromedome," which was the name of keeping
the B-47's in the air with the A-bombs all
the time. They would refuel them in the air.
When I flew over to Spain, it was my first
trans-Atlantic flight. I hate exposing myself
as an idiot, but I am. We took off from
Barksdale, Louisiana. If you look at the map,
Barksdale is here and then South Carolina and
then Spain is there. So, we had to coast out
over South Carolina someplace. I'm dozing
off, but I have the radio hooked up in my ear
and I hear the guy say, "We're coasting out
over Newfoundland right now." I knew he was
lost. Newfoundland to get to Spain from
Barksdale? You don't go that way. Yes, they
do. They fly the Arctic Circle or something.
But, it scared the hell out of me. I was very
sensitive, so I fell asleep again. Then I
heard the pilot say, "Pilot to nav, pilot to
nav. Is that Dallas-Fort Worth I am picking
up on the radar?" The guy said he thought it
was. I'm thinking we left Newfoundland, what
would we be doing over Dallas-Fort Worth? A
sergeant came by and I asked him what was
going on. "The pilot said to the navigator
that Dallas-Fort Worth was down there." He
told me to wait just a minute and he walked
away. He turned his back to me real quickly
because I don't think he wanted me to see him
laugh. He was gone an awful long time. I am
sure they had their fun up there. He came
back and he said, "Things get boring and they
were just waking each other up and we are
still heading towards Spain."
Those guys asked me to take a flight the next
night to refuel the plane and I really
chickened out. It would have been a great
experience, but I said, "No," because
half-way across the ocean I asked a guy how
they did that. It turned out to be a dumb
question. He said, "I'll show you." He takes
me back to the back of the plane and we go
down and we lay down on a glass window and
the ocean is right there. I'm looking at the
ocean and he's showing me how he flies this
little hose out and he told me to move it to
the left or to the right. I am saying to
myself, "I wish he would stop talking. I want
to get up." It was a very frightening
experience. --
Section 5:
I had a great experience and I wrote about it
and I had a lot of good comments. Then, in
'75, "People to People" was a big thing and
they asked me if I wanted to take a group to
Russia. The Cold War was still on and I said,
"Absolutely." I got a group together and if
you got the group together, your trip was
free. With six kids all in college at one
time, college and grad school, that was
clever. I took this group and went to
Stockholm, Helsinki, Moscow, Kiev, Budapest,
Zurich, and Lucerne. In Russia, I couldn't
believe it. We stayed in the Rossia Hotel.
They have a thing over there about the
world's largest. Rossia is the world's
largest hotel. We walked about five minutes,
we were at Red Square, the world's largest
square. And facing Red Square is the GUM
Department Store, the world's largest
department store. We went inside the Kremlin,
which is inside the walls of Red Square, and
they showed us the world's largest cannon.
And down aways were the world's largest
cannonballs. Somebody explained to us that
the world's largest cannon was never fired
because the world's largest cannonballs
didn't fit. It was a marvelous adventure and
I wrote about it. It was a real plus and it
didn't cost me anything. I was gone for three
weeks.
Again, I am a chicken and I hate admitting
this. We went up in the Alps and the buses
there are really long and when the wheels
turn, part of the bus hangs out over the edge
of the cliff. Since I was the den mother for
the group, I had to sit in the front. You
would look down. That was the part that was
hanging over. You would see a little splotch
of blue, a little splotch of red, people who
didn't make the turn. I'm thinking there was
no earthly way I was ever going to do this
again. We got to the top of the mountain. I
told the rest of the people that I was going
to drink a whole bottle of wine by myself and
you guys can have whatever you want. So, I
ordered a bottle of wine. They thought that
was funny and they started nipping at my
wine. I pushed it over and I drank a whole
bottle of wine for lunch. We started down
and, the first curve, I was right back where
I was before. I said, "Ugh." We got down on
flat land and I looked up and said, "Thank
you, God, for getting me here safely." The
guide was saying, "Now, we're going to do the
Rhone Glacier." I had this magnificent mind.
"Glacier? That's high." We went back up
another mountain. The Rhone River, I was
inside of it where it is ice. We went inside
the glacier. People have a big thing about
showing me the insides of ice. I was inside
the glacier. When we went to the North Pole,
they took us up to the ice cap and there was
a big tunnel and we went back a quarter of a
mile in there and there was some little
Japanese guy performing some experiments back
there. There was a whole barracks back there
and they were trying to see whether troops
could live back there. They were explaining
all these various things. They had a slit
trench for bathroom functions. They said that
in the thousand years from now when that
comes to the edge of the glacier,
anthropologists are going to wonder what the
hell is going on. Excuse me, I have drifted
away from newspapers.
Q: Why don't we take a fifteen minute break.
