American Libraries Magazine: Newsmaker

An Interview with Caroline Kennedy

Beverly Goldberg — Wed, 08 May 2013 15:45:46 +0000

May 2013

Caroline Kennedy has been a lifelong advocate for reading, literacy, and libraries. Her career has included work with the New York City Department of Education and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. Most recently, she spoke at the 2013 ALA Midwinter Meeting and served this year as honorary chair of National Library Week. Kennedy has written or edited 10 bestselling books on American history, politics, and poetry. Her latest work, Poems to Learn by Heart, was published in March. American Libraries spoke with Kennedy about her work, the future of libraries, and her love of poetry.

You’ve long been a strong supporter of libraries and librarians. How did you become involved in library advocacy?

CAROLINE KENNEDY: I have always loved going to the library. It’s one of those places where you always have an adventure. I loved storytime when I was young and I loved browsing the stacks when I was in college. When I started working at the New York City Department of Education in 2002, school libraries were a focus of our efforts to build private sector involvement and support for school libraries. In far too many schools, libraries were shut, antiquated, or underresourced. That’s unacceptable in a world where access to information is the key to success and libraries are the place kids go to read for fun.

Libraries are undergoing a rapid evolution. What do libraries have to do to prosper and what role(s) do you see them playing in people’s lives in the future?

Libraries have the power to create communities. Libraries can play a unique role in reaching out to people and bringing them together through programs and activities. For seniors, libraries are a social place; for kids after school, they are a safe space; and they can be a creative space for the whole community. Librarians need to make sure people know that libraries have information that is useful for job seeking, developing skills, accessing resources and benefits, and navigating complex technology, as well as books that can change lives. I think libraries will continue to play an important role in people‘s lives—but it’s a role that will change over time.

What differences are there in how your children regard/use libraries from how you do? Has technology affected their perception of what constitutes a good library?

My children have less of a need to physically go to the library than I did because so much information is now available online. They tell me they still use the library when they need to concentrate on their work and study for exams—but I suspect that they are secretly using it to socialize. The most beautiful people are all in the library.

You could purchase downloaded books instantly. Why are you still using the library?

I love looking through books at the library because I always find something I am interested in that I wasn’t expecting.

Which do you like better: print or ebooks, and why?

I like both, but I seem to remember what I read in a book better than what I read on a computer screen or e-reader.

You’ve spoken at length about your parents’ love of books and learning. How did this influence your library appreciation and your own publishing endeavors? Our house was full of books, and I learned to read when I was very young. My father told me bedtime stories, and my mother taught us poems to learn by heart. As a parent, if you love something and share it with your child, usually they will come to love it too. I hope that’s as true for my own children as it was for me.

How did you choose the selections in your poetry anthology, Poems to Learn by Heart? Why do you think people should learn these particular ones by heart?

I wanted to make sure that the book included poems that both boys and girls would enjoy, and that there were funny poems as well as serious ones. I went back to the old poetry books my brother and I had as children and collected the ones we liked best. I wrote to my friends and family and asked them for their favorites and the ones their children liked. It was a wonderful process. I got so many incredible poems. Then I enlisted four young poets from DreamYard Preparatory School, an arts-themed high school in the Bronx, to help choose the final poems. A poem they wrote for a poetry slam as a group, called “Voices Rising,” is included in the book. Learning a poem by heart is a great way to make sure that you always have it. You can share it and not have to give it away. You can call it up when you need it, and it will give you joy, comfort, strength, and wisdom.

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An Interview with Roger Rosen

Laurie Borman — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 18:02:52 +0000

March/April 2013

Roger Rosen, CEO of the educational house Rosen Publishing, calls himself a publishing brat. “I grew up in the business, packing books as a little boy and attending ALA conferences with my parents.” Lately, Rosen’s been making news as one of the first publishers to figure out a pricing and delivery structure for ebooks and databases, and as an advocate for libraries and librarians. “Librarians are the most trusted people in America,” he said. “I have never heard anyone talking about a librarian having an agenda to push information that in any way serves their personal interest. It’s unheard of. The notion that any citizen can consult a librarian and get unbiased information is pretty thrilling.” Rosen is confident and optimistic about publishing, declaring that he’s more excited about the enterprise now than when he first started. “The tools at our disposal and the kind of innovation that we can bring to the publishing process to inspire and engage kids is unprecedented,” he said.

American Libraries: Tell us about your work with ALA’s Digital Content and Libraries Working Group.

Roger Rosen. I’ve been a long-time supporter of ALA in an advocacy role and ALA’s American Association of School Librarians as well. But in this point in my career—I’ve been in publishing for US schools for 32 years, actually—it’s even more important to me to be engaged in the discourse, especially as it seems to me libraries and their role are ever more threatened and there’s ever more misunderstanding about what the library is contributing to society. The digital revolution is such that the library’s role has come under scrutiny and there’s some confusion on the part of the population as a whole, and certainly in the minds of our elected leaders, about its utility and value. When you add to that some of my publishing colleagues’ concerns about usage and practices with digital content, you have a real complicated scenario, a complicated relationship. But it’s one that we at Rosen are very comfortable with. And the reason for that is we really see the digital space as, in many ways, the virtual adjunct to the best practices that we’ve had in our print space and the relationship we have nurtured and developed with libraries, both public and school, since 1950, when we started publishing. That is the real mandate of our enterprise, which is to get the right content, the needed content, into the hands of those who will search for it, need it, be best informed by it, benefit from it. When there’s real goodwill to serve patrons and work with libraries toward that same goal we share, the solutions become evident.

How did you come up with ebook pricing and a model that works?

My basic jumping-off place was this: What is the virtual corollary to best practices that we had in print? And we were largely able to replicate that through the sales model, but with the appropriate hosting fees as needed under the appropriate circumstances. With the appropriate simultaneity and currency models depending on the value proposition that we were all looking for. So we have crafted individual arrangements for systems or individual buildings as needed. Everyone understands the variables here and I believe people of goodwill find the right method (obviously, because of our large institutional business, it is largely from a DRM point of view). Rosen Publishing does the hosting and there is IP authentication and user name and password access. So we have huge confidence in all of this, though of course we are moving to an HTML5 workflow that will allow an even easier adaptation or download to any sort of device, any tablet. So we’re moving forward with all sorts of innovations in the actual materials that we’re building, but these practices allow for this partnership with libraries. And I suppose in some ways, too, there’s a basic trust with this population that we’ve worked with, as I say, since 1950.

Describe the financial literacy database that you’ve launched. How did that come about?

We started about 10 years ago with our Rosen digital program, our database program. Maybe 12 or 13 years ago, we saw that anyone in reference nonfiction publishing really had to have a very robust digital strategy. We had certain impressions about where the world was going and we wanted to continue being vital and relevant no matter what the technological changes might be. So we invested quite heavily in a robust platform to support new content development.

We launched with Teen Health and Wellness, a database that has garnered so many accolades and has been very, very successful for us and has a renewal rate of more than 90% and is well deployed throughout the country and in English-speaking markets. From that basic platform, we were able to see what else seemed relevant and needed. We have published in print quite heavily in the financial literacy area and in personal finance as well as micro- and macroeconomics, and of course, those three items are mandated within curricula. Obviously, different school districts adopt different programs, but there is a fair amount of universality about what has to be covered. And certainly it is both personal finance and micro- and macroeconomics.

I think it’s even more important for particularly vulnerable populations. One could argue that the citizenry at large is a vulnerable population. We saw in 2008 that people didn’t fully understand some of the basics of economics and were particularly vulnerable to predatory lending practices. So we had a commitment, as we do with so much of our publishing program, to be of help. We think some of our core skill set is to take very complex ideas and render them into accessible language for whatever target audience we might have. With financial literacy, the material was essentially at a 7th- or 8th-grade reading level for 7th–12th graders, plus into the junior college population. Of course that also works for adults and patrons of public libraries, particularly those for whom English is not their first language. Rendering those complex issues in that way, we were really able to cover the waterfront with those three topics. And with all of our databases being continually updated, we’re able to reflect news as it unfolds. That makes our databases extremely relevant resources and they certainly trump whatever a textbook can offer. And we’ve had a tremendous response.

As a result, everyone recognizes the need for financial literacy. It’s becoming ever more a mandated part of the curriculum. And, you know, our timing, as with, say, Teen Health was extremely good. We just have a real sense of the zeitgeist, the needs, and we publish to those needs. So it’s been very, very gratifying to see the response. And we’re talking with various groups, both in terms of public library usage, but also getting elected officials within a community behind libraries. We are talking to that nexus between elected officials, local banks, and the public library, to all partner together to potentially disseminate this resource. And obviously, discoverability is a key point, so we have also financial-literacy programs, both in terms of professional development and promotion.

Tell us about your company’s relationship with schools and libraries and how it developed your product lines, such as the interactive books, and what’s in store for that format.

We started as a company in 1950. My parents founded it. They were part of a circle of innovative educators and they had this real ethos about there not being any taboo information—that information was worth having and could be virtually any topic and that it could be constructive so that it would resonate or be accessible to any population. In the late 1950s, in fact, they published a book, The Teenager and Venereal Disease, which was really quite innovative during that period for not shying away from the topic. There was a certain justice that just 10 years ago, when we launched our first database, we chose health and wellness because we are kind of the gold standard—a trusted resource among providers in the educational space to cover everything from self-mutilation to date rape to teen suicide and everything in between; we know how to navigate those subjects in a very non-polemical way. So that was the ethos of the company.

My parents started out as exclusively young adult publishers. I moved into the K–6 space, and even pre-K. But increasingly we publish very much with an eye to curriculum correlations to support the curriculum, and that has been a guide to our program, as well as high-interest material. We’ve done graphics, but we have a very keen eye for essential knowledge, what is being studied. And now of course very, very keen understanding and interest in the Common Core. To your point about the interactive ebooks with e-content creation tools, which is a very innovative and unique bit of programming and software that we’ve embedded within these active ebooks, that is very much in response to the mandates of the Common Core, which basically state (among many other things, and we do regard it as a very elegant document) that students become not just passive consumers of information, but also creators of information. And being creators of information would also mean that they demonstrate a certain mastery of the content.

So in addition, they need to be 21st-century learners, and to be “transliterate.” We can define transliteracy as being very fluent in many different modes of communication, particularly those modes that came into existence in the 21st century, such as social networking and the like. And so we wanted to make all of that come together in a very meaningful way. I innovated these content creation tools that draw upon the content of a book and allow these students or readers to demonstrate their mastery, to utilize the content and make it their own, and do so in 21st-century modalities such as blogs and wikis and social networking profiles. And we’ve gotten fantastic responses as a result of our doing that.

It’s a revolution. I really think we are living through the most amazing revolution in the history of civilization in terms of the dissemination of information and what can be accessed. I’m more excited about the profession than I was when I started, and I was very enthusiastic when I started. The tools at our disposal and the kind of innovation one can bring to really inspire kids and engage them is unprecedented.

Are print books doomed?

I don’t think so at all. I mean, there are a number of issues here. First, there’s the big issue of equity of access. I mean, it’s in question partly if we look worldwide. We do a lot of business in South Africa, for instance. It’s a country that’s not wired. I’ve heard it said, and I agree, that if Gutenberg were to have had his invention at this moment in time, it would be heralded as an extraordinary innovation and as an amazing delivery system. And I still believe that about the book. It is extraordinarily efficient and economical and I just don’t see it going away. I see multimedia—the interactivity—having a place, being very dynamic. It can do so much. But there is a personal relationship with the book, a kind of intimacy, a place for thought and imagination that may be special to the print book. The economic drivers are such that I’m convinced that the book is certainly valuable and will be here to stay.

How have the educational reform movement and charter schools influenced your business model? And how do you feel about school reform?

Reform through the Race to the Top and the Common Core. Well, you know, the charter schools and school reform is obviously a very polemical question. Rosen Publishing is not as involved in the charter school movement as much as it is in public education. We’re working toward state, national, and district curricula. We have found that often within the charter school movement, they are creating their own resources internally. So it hasn’t been a space in which we’ve spent as much time. But certainly as everyone looks to the Common Core and how that will inform so much of instruction, we celebrate the Common Core because we do see it as a triumph of supplemental resources—the notion that there should be a multiplicity of sources from which kids get information and a multiplicity of genres from which they get information. And that is antithetical to the big backdoor stopper–sized textbook that has predominated, with an adoption cycle of five years, despite information changing so quickly and the ability of digital resources to constantly update us in the case of e-health and wellness and our financial literacy product. We applaud that most elegant document that is the Common Core, which we see as very much in sync with our own philosophical beliefs about education and publishing. The notion of holding kids to a greater rigor, having them stretch with respect to the text, deeper dives in analysis, points of view—these are all things that we have always embraced as a supplemental publisher.

Perhaps this is the beginning of a golden era for our way of doing things and what we believe in. When we talk about Race to the Top, the potential we’re all seeing is an ever-greater emphasis on Big Data and data-driven results. We have ever more as part of our programs a portion of assessment, of interactivity in terms of child response, be it quantitative or qualitative. And we have many programs being developed internally related to aggregating the student-response data into larger learning management systems that districts have. So teachers and administrators and superintendents can obtain from us the data they want to aggregate. We’re committed to being vital members of the community, and in order to do so we have to be participants in this electronic echo system—the Learning Resources Management Initiative—and we are.

What came first, your regard for libraries or becoming a publisher?

Well, they’re sort of inextricably linked. You might call me a publishing brat. I grew up in the business, you know, packing books as a little boy. I went to library conferences when my parents attended in many cities throughout this country. Librarians have been a part of my world from the beginning. My local branch growing up was the New York Public Library’s Epiphany branch on 23rd Street, so it’s a building I know well and still walk into frequently. It’s an institution that, you know, has been front and center in my consciousness and I was certainly raised with a great respect for what the institution does. The library is one of the greatest democratic institutions. It serves as a portal for people of all economic backgrounds and levels the playing field in terms of opportunity. One need only pass through those doors to have access to the world’s knowledge and be secure about the accuracy of that knowledge.

We as library advocates need to push the message that really, one could call the librarian the most trusted person in America. Who would you trust more? Our lawyers and our doctors and our bankers have come under scrutiny because of hidden agendas in some cases. I have never heard anyone talking about a librarian having a hidden agenda to push data that in some way, shape, or form serves their personal interest. It’s unheard of. It’s not on the table. So the notion that any citizen could go into a space and get unbiased information, get help in searching for an answer—for the truth with a capital “T”—is pretty thrilling, actually. And that a public servant is there, dedicated to that enterprise, needs to be promoted. I’m certainly committed to that.

What would you say to convince the general public and funders once and for all that libraries are indispensable?

It’s essential that people of influence and power and those who elect such people recognize that there are many different realities in this country. One must recognize the number of people who do not have access to broadband. They might not have computers at home. There is a huge divide in this country, and one of those divides is in equity of access to information. That gap can increase even more as the technology gap widens. I think the institution that has the best shot that’s already established with a superb structure to address this is the library. People who have technology at their fingertips and can buy any book on Amazon in a millisecond don’t recognize the reality for so many of our fellow citizens who have not been able to keep up technologically, be it through education or economics. Who perhaps have lost jobs and no longer have the ability to pay for internet access, who do not have laptops, and whose children do not have laptops. These same people might be looking for jobs or are job changers or elderly. Where are they going to go? You cannot apply for a job in this country any longer unless you do it online. Well, if they don’t have access to the internet and maybe don’t know how to craft a résumé online, where are they going to get help?

Those people who have been most on the frontline of this gap issue are our magnificent librarians. They are conducting seminars and providing internet access and workstations for anyone who needs that. They’re also conducting basic life skills, job searching, and financial literacy classes. Frankly, I consider librarians unsung heroes of our society because they really are the ones addressing these problems. Not to mention the fact that the library increasingly helps to build community and continues to be the communal memory in terms of keeping archives of local newspapers and local publishing. This would be so easily lost if the institution is not sufficiently appreciated.

What initiatives would you like to see libraries pursue?

I want to come back to this notion of the community, libraries as community centers, and involving elected officials and other members of the community, including those with special skill sets, to provide seminars about issues like financial literacy or car repair or résumé building or networking or cooking or any number of topics that can be housed at the library as part of a community program and content acquisition. And this is something I’m very involved with in a number of cities—making the library the nexus between elected officials, community leaders, and patrons. Within the public library setting, it’s very important that the branches of a public library system have their own robust web presence. Often, I’ve seen that there is just one website for a library system, generally the main library, with links to local branches that might not list anything much more than opening hours and travel directions. I think there has to be a real focus online about what the branch is doing with respect to the community—to make each branch a center and drive community involvement and have the website be a place where that would be one of the first places to go—that tells you what’s happening, what the events are, what the new resources are, what you can get and learn there, and how you can contribute.

I just would say that, you know, it’s been very gratifying to spend my career in publishing for libraries and schools. I’m committed as an advocate to making sure that the library, as an essential democratic institution, grows and remains a robust resource. I’m very committed to that.

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An Interview with Jenica Rogers

Sanhita SinhaRoy — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 02:35:38 +0000

January/February 2013

In 2012, Jenica Rogers, director of libraries for the State University of New York at Potsdam, drew attention in the library community for announcing candidly in September that she would not be renewing her university’s annual subscription to the American Chemical Society’s (ACS) online journals package because of ever-increasing subscription costs. Rogers’s stance sent shock waves throughout the community and brought up questions concerning new business models and the challenge of open access. American Libraries spoke with Rogers in November about the outcomes of her decision.

AMERICAN LIBRARIES: What have been the effects at SUNY Potsdam over your decision to cancel ACS journals? Was there backlash?

JENICA ROGERS: No, no backlash. I was extremely conscientious in making sure everyone was involved in the discussion up front. Anyone who would be interested in it knew what was happening.

How did the American Chemical Society react?

They have not chosen to reach out to me. Their initial press response was from Glenn Ruskin, their vice president of sales, marketing, and web strategy. You can read about it online if you choose to. In response I called Brandon Nordin, vice president of North American sales, and told him that ACS was exceedingly inappropriate and that I was very disappointed. Nordin said he would like to come to Potsdam to talk with me to try and find a better solution for us. I said I would be happy to meet so long as there was a true chance that we could come up with a better pricing solution for small institutions. I’m not interested in making a better deal just for Potsdam; I want there to be a better deal for institutions like mine.

You met for seven hours with ACS representatives to come to an agreement. What were some of their arguments?

They had a clean and acceptable counterargument. They said they had been working very hard for the past several years to standardize pricing across all institutions and that they had been trying to build the kind of pricing model that librarians say is important—based on use at your institutions, the size of your institutions, etc.—that is “fair and accurate.” The challenge is that they then apply all those “fair and accurate” factors to a base price that is completely unacceptable. And they are not willing to negotiate on that base price. So we ended up nowhere.

You have said that it is hard for librarians to say no to price hikes. Why is that?

We are really good at providing excellent service, and when your main professional goal is to connect people to information, we’ll bend over backward to find a way to afford things, even if it’s a really foolish decision in the long run. Because in the short term, we want to give people what they need, right? That’s what we do: We help people find information. So when we say “no” to a price increase, we’re making it harder for people to get access to information. Philosophically that’s really hard.

What is your ideal model for academic libraries?

It needs to be sustainable, whatever it is, for all people involved. It needs to be sustainable for scholars; it needs to be sustainable for libraries; and it needs to be sustainable for publishers. Sometimes that will be an open-source solution, and sometimes that will be a paid solution. But what we have right now is not sustainable.

You blogged about this experience as a call to action. Did it work?

It’s too early to tell. But I hope it encouraged people to try or start trying. Libraries don’t work quickly, particularly not in academia. We have fiscal-year constraints. For some libraries that moment has come and gone. They are locked into their contract for the coming year. There are many libraries that are very inclusive in their decision making. That is one of our cultural things and so there are a lot of people to consult about decisions. Part of what I was hoping to encourage is for librarians to truly engage their faculty in the discussion.

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An Interview with John Chrastka

Beverly Goldberg — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 16:42:16 +0000

November / December 2012

John Chrastka, ALA’s director of membership development from 2003 to 2011, didn’t leave library advocacy behind when he resigned from ALA to devote more time to his start-up consulting agency. First, he was already on the Berwyn (Ill.) Public Library board (where he has served for six years). Now, in characteristically maverick fashion, Chrastka has launched a national library political action committee (PAC), EveryLibrary, to help public, school, and academic libraries get ballot initiatives passed in 2013 and beyond. Chrastka discussed his vision with AL Senior Editor Beverly Goldberg on October 5.

AMERICAN LIBRARIES: What inspired you to take on such an ambitious endeavor as forming the EveryLibrary PAC?

JOHN CHRASTKA: There is a gap in library advocacy that can only be addressed by a PAC. The gap happens because of IRS regulations about political speech by 501(c)(3) groups and associations such as ALA, the Urban Libraries Council, OCLC, and the Gates Foundation. They cannot say “Vote yes on Measure L.” State libraries—and the local library itself—cannot use tax money to fund a get-out-the-vote campaign. Under current law and regulation, the library community needs a national PAC to support a local library when it is on the ballot. From my years as a library trustee, as a former ALA staffer who knows the advocacy ecosystem personally, and as a political junkie, I am in a good position to make it happen.

Has anything like this been attempted before?

When I started planning EveryLibrary, I commissioned a white paper covering the last 10 years of library PACs to make sure I wasn’t encroaching on any existing national projects. The research confirmed my hunch: A national PAC focused exclusively on ballot initiatives like bonds, millages, levies, and referenda, is new to the library community. I was inspired by a PAC from outside the library world called the Conservation Campaign. Since 1996, it has acted as a 501(c)4 to help local communities do voter education and fundraising for land use, open spaces, and parkland ballot issues. The Conservation Campaign has, by its own account, helped local communities secure $2 billion in funding through bonds and taxes at the ballot box. It is amazing what national support can do to inspire a community and educate voters about an issue.

How many staffers will EveryLibrary require?

EveryLibrary will grow our staffing over time. Political campaigns are seasonal and the need for people “on the ground” is going to vary depending on when libraries are on the ballot each election cycle. We plan on staffing and bringing in consultants in a way that is cost effective and leverages talent, local connections for fundraising, and prior success for libraries.

How many library campaigns do you expect EveryLibrary will be able to support in its first year?

Every single one that is on the 2013 ballot through the new, free, and fully customizable campaign tools we will create for library campaigns. We plan on print, email, and surface-mail templates, telephone and door-to-door canvassing scripts, web-quality video and audio files, and high-resolution art for yard signs and billboards. We also plan to rally volunteers to help staff phone banks for certain library campaigns. As we build funding, we will add voter segmentation and analytics to the tool kit.

What would be a good test case for EveryLibrary to try first?

There are three I’d like to see us focus monies on in 2013: (1) A library that had a previous ballot measure fail. How can we help turn that around to a win? (2) A library asking for a construction bond for the first time in a long time. How can we help them talk about the value that a new building will add to a community and how librarians will help the community? (3) A referendum for a new library district. How can we help make the case to voters that a new library taxing authority is an opportunity for education, business development, and community building?

Do you have any concerns about local governing authorities misconstruing EveryLibrary as an outside special interest?

EveryLibrary will work to support the local library ballot committee or PAC with the funds they want and the political consulting they need to succeed. In every case, we will not be coming into a district independent of the local library committee. We will, however, not be shy about talking to local government about how libraries build communities and change lives; about how librarians are partners for local businesses, educators, and parents; and how, as a country, we are better off when a local community has a library with the right funding, staffing, and collections. It’s not rough-and-tumble politics. It is the truth about how important the library is.

Who are your key partners in this endeavor?

Each of our individual donors is a key partner because they are helping to put the idea of political action and voter outreach about libraries into action. EveryLibrary is a 501(c)4 PAC that is independent from any other association or organization. We are, however, in coalition with organizations dedicated to library advocacy.

What kind of reaction has there been from ALA leadership to your vision of a nationwide library PAC?

Several are personal donors. EveryLibrary is in a position to act specifically in places that ALA, as a 501(c)3, cannot. I want to see ALA’s Office for Library Advocacy succeed and I fully support the Washington Office, but neither can say “Vote yes on Measure L” like we can. United for Libraries [formerly ALA’s Association for Library Trustees, Advocates, Friends, and Foundations] has initiatives that train trustees on effective campaign planning, but by statute public money stops once a measure hits the ballot. EveryLibrary will be able to help fill in those gaps.

What criteria will you use to determine EveryLibrary’s effectiveness?

Fundamentally, by whether we helped move more library measures to the “win” column. Whether we have inspired libraries whose previous measures failed to try again now that there is national support. Whether there is a new or energized infrastructure for political action in the communities we have helped.

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An Interview with Karen Keninger

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 18:27:42 +0000

July/August 2012

By the Editors

Karen Keninger became director of the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS) at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., in March. She is the first person who is blind to direct the Braille and talking-book program. Keninger is former director of the Iowa Department for the Blind, a provider of vocational rehabilitation and independent-living programs and library services for blind and visually impaired individuals. She spoke with American Libraries in June about how her she plans to turn her lifelong patronage of the NLS to the advantage of its other users.

American Libraries: Tell us briefly about the services offered by your agency.

KAREN KENINGER: Our mission is to provide reading materials for people who can’t read standard print because of a visual or a physical disability or certified reading disability. The National Library Service is responsible for providing the equipment that our materials play on and the audio materials—and also Braille—that we provide to a network of 56 libraries and some subregional libraries. Libraries in the states distribute those materials to eligible individuals throughout the country.

Does your personal experience present special opportunities for programs offered for disabled readers?

Yes, I think it does. I’ve been using the National Library Service materials—books and magazines, both audio and Braille—since I was 7 years old, so it gives me a very deep and broad patron perspective that I would not have if I had not actually been a blind person using those materials all of my life. Because of that, my focus is very much on patron service.

Does today’s emphasis on online services present new opportunities for individuals who are blind or visually impaired?

It’s a double-edged sword. There are more materials available, but the experience and the skill that a blind person needs to access them is not insignificant. It’s much more difficult, or at least more complex, to use a computer with a screen reader, for example, than it is for someone to use it with a mouse. They have a much steeper learning curve. That means that some blind people are able to take advantage of all the online services that are out there, but the majority are not really able to do that in an effective way at this point, partly because many of the people we serve are elderly and their computer-using days are over, if they ever used computers at all.

Where would a blind or visually impaired individual go to learn how to use the online services?

There are rehabilitation agencies and independent living agencies throughout the country where that training can be acquired, although it’s not universally accessible because you have to be looking for a job in order to qualify for many of those services. And if you’re not looking for a job, then it becomes more difficult. That’s an area that really needs a lot more work.

You transitioned the state library program in Iowa from analog to digital talking books and players. How far along are other states in this area?

I would say probably 80%–90% done at this point. There are people still using cassettes, and they’re still using the cassette players that we have had for the past 30-odd years. But we are getting more and more people transitioned to the digital talking book systems, which are much better than the cassette systems. Some people just don’t like to change, and there’s still much material available on cassette that’s unavailable in the digital format because we haven’t been able to transfer it all. So some people want to use that as well.

How have technologies improved over the years for blind and visually impaired people?

The cassette players that we had were much better than the records we had before that, because the cassettes actually held up better than the records. But the system was complicated. You had to put the cassette in, listen to it for an hour and a half, and then turn it over and listen to it again. Then you had to turn it over again and flip a five‑selector switch to listen to the next two sides. There were four tracks on the cassette. This was kind of complicated, particularly for elderly people who had trouble understanding that concept.

The audio quality of the cassette machines, although it was pretty good, did get worse as the cassette got older. The new player is very simple. You just put a cartridge in. It only goes in one way. You push it in and it’ll start the machine. You can actually do it with your elbow. It’s designed so that it’s pretty easy to use if you have severe arthritis or other kinds of disabilities that make it hard to handle something. The sound quality is fantastic. The speaker is better. The digital recordings are much clearer. So for people with some hearing loss or even people who don’t have hearing loss, the sound quality’s a lot better.

How is your funding situation?

We received additional funding to do the digital transitions, and that helped to purchase the machines, but the fact that our budget is limited, as everyone’s is, means that we are only able to produce about 2,000 books a year, which is only a tiny fraction of the number of books published in a year. We are not able to convert all of the old cassette books that we had, a lot of which were classics and really good stuff, into digital format as quickly as our patrons want because it is expensive. Our network libraries are funded primarily by the states and LSTA grants, and they are suffering significantly from the cutbacks in state funding.

What can individuals do to help you?

They can lobby their legislators for additional funding for their state libraries, because most of our programs are located in state libraries. At the national level, we are funded through the Library of Congress, which is a legislative issue.

Last year NLS celebrated 80 years. How has time changed what is offered by the agency?

When we started out in 1931, we had Braille and that was all. And then in 1937, I believe, the long-playing record was actually developed for the National Library Service. That’s an interesting little detail for those of us who are old enough to remember. My grandmother’s 78 rpm records didn’t play long enough, so the NLS developed the long-playing record, which was your 33⅓ rpm. We had them as albums when I was a teenager. And then of course we moved from those to smaller records, and then eventually to the cassettes and now to the digital. The number of materials that we are able to produce now is, I believe, significantly more than we could in the early days. There were fewer books that we were able to produce then, judging by the number that we have. So I’m kind of guessing at that, but it looks like we made progress in that regard.

Another thing that changed is that in 1996 the copyright law was amended so that we were able to do the work that we do without having to request permission for each book from each publisher. That’s called the Chafee Amendment, and it allows us to produce books in a specialized format without having to get permission from American publishers. That has helped us tremendously. It’s really saved a lot on the workload for both the publishers and us.

So it seems as though publishers have come a long way in determining that this is an important service.

I think that they have. The reason is partly that my predecessor had always been very, very careful to make sure that we did not in any way violate our trust with regard to the work that we do, so that publishers could very much count on us to keep the materials that we produced safe for use only by qualified people. That’s a very important thing for the publishers, and we’ve been very careful to maintain that.

Do you have any favorite library or librarian stories that you’d like to share with our readers?

Our regional librarian in Iowa when I was growing up was named Florence Grannis, and she believed very strongly in the work that we do. She actually started that library. She made sure that, whatever a person asked for, she found a way to get it for them. When I was in high school, I asked her to send me everything she had about Russia. I’m not exaggerating when I say I got a truckload of books in Braille about Russia so that I could do some social studies project. I always appreciated that—even though my mailman probably didn’t—and I’m not sure my dad did either, because he had to haul them back. The thing was, she made that all available to me. She didn’t say, “Here’s one or two books that you can have.” She said, “You can have everything you want, everything you need.” That’s a legacy that I hoped and tried seriously to continue when I was librarian in Iowa, and want to find ways to continue here as well, so that the people that we serve can have whatever they need.

How can librarians assist your agency in spreading the word about the services you provide?

One of the best referrals that the network libraries get is from our local librarians. The people who are library users to begin with are our most avid users when they stop being able to use their local public libraries. They have been readers and now they can’t really see the standard print. So then they’ll go to read all the large print that the library has. When they lose the ability to do that, they’ll go through the library’s audio collection. Meanwhile, we’ve got probably 70,000 or 80,000 titles available in audio format that we would be happy to mail to them.

So if a local librarian sees that someone is dealing with a visual or hearing impairment and can refer that person to the regional library, that would be a tremendous service. You can find us on the web at www.loc.gov/nls. All the regional libraries are listed there, as well as all of our services and lots of other information.

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A Day Before Disgrace

Sanhita SinhaRoy — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 20:48:01 +0000

By Claire Bushey

A Q&A with Jonah Lehrer

[EDITOR’S NOTE: American Libraries conducted the following interview with writer Jonah Lehrer on July 29, one day before news broke that Lehrer was resigning from his position as staff writer at The New Yorker. It was discovered that he had fabricated quotes from singer-songwriter Bob Dylan and had included those quotes in his bestselling book Imagine. American Libraries sought follow-up comment from Lehrer, but his publicist declined the request.]

Jonah Lehrer is author of three books about the brain, including his most recent, Imagine, an exploration of the biochemical processes that constitute human creativity.

American Libraries: How did you get interested in writing about the brain and its thought processes?

JONAH LEHRER: I’ve been interested in those three pounds of meat for as long as I can remember. Originally, I wanted to be a neuroscientist, and I worked in a neuroscience lab for about five years, until I realized I wasn’t very good at it; I was a bad experimentalist. I was lucky enough to get a scholarship to study at Oxford, where I studied 20th-century literature and philosophy. Then I realized I missed science. That’s when I thought about becoming a science writer—I naturally gravitate toward subjects involving the mind or the brain. It’s always struck me as this big, fundamental mystery. Here’s this piece of meat inside our heads that’s responsible for all our love, all our desires, all our decisions, every new idea, and it just strikes me as a pretty grand question to figure out how it all works.

I’m assuming as a writer you have your own individual creative process. Did researching this book explain anything about it to you, like “Oh, that’s why I do that?”

Mostly the moments that I had were, “Oh, I’m doing it exactly it wrong.” My old approach when I was stuck, when I didn’t know how to begin a paragraph or end a story, I would literally just chug caffeine and stay up all night. Then of course you wake up in the morning and realize your fixes haven’t fixed anything, and now you’re just exhausted. Now, because of research involving where we have our moments of insight, and where we have our big breakthroughs, I’m much more willing when I’m stuck to take a break, go for a hike, lie on the couch and read a novel. That’s not guaranteed. Sometimes I’m just wasting time, and perhaps this is just an absolute rationalization for my laziness, because I do love reading novels on the couch, but I have found that sometimes that’s exactly what I need, that I will figure out how to end that story a mile into that hike. And that of course jives with the research on moments of insight and alpha waves and how sometimes when we’re daydreaming our best ideas come to us. So I’ve given myself permission to be even lazier.

The other way writing has changed my process is it’s made me more interested in making human connections. A lot of the research on creativity shows that many of our ideas don’t arrive when we’re alone, they arrive when we’re making small talk with strangers. And so I’m really making an effort. I’m a shy, introverted person—that’s probably why I became a writer—but I really do make an effort, when I’m on a plane, to make small talk with the person next to me. When I’m at a library, just striking up conversations while waiting in line to check out a book. Just trying to embrace those random connections because it’s those kinds of connections that often lead to our best ideas.

Do you have a collaborator? A trusted editor, another writer you show your work to?

I’m not one of those writers who keeps everything close to the chest. I send out just embarrassing drafts. I have very little dignity as a writer. I’m just constantly trying to get all my friends, writers and nonwriters, to read the drafts, to look over it. I know it’s asking a lot of people to make lots of notes, especially when the draft itself is still rough, so I ask them to make check marks wherever the book is getting boring—where it’s tedious, if they don’t understand something. Just a little check mark in the margins. And what you often find is there’s tremendous consensus on where those check marks go.

Did you have any periods of frustration or fallowness while you were writing Imagine?

Yeah. I’m not one of those people who loves sitting at my desk, so most of the time the entire process felt like a period of fallowness or frustration. In particular I remember working on the beginning of chapter three, which is basically the part of the book where I say—it’s the most obvious idea—creativity requires hard work; it requires us to focus. Sometimes we just have to chain ourselves to our desk, put our butt in the chair and grind it out. That’s not a surprising idea, and I couldn’t figure out how to do it. I couldn’t figure out how to structure it to make it a little bit surprising.

I spent weeks and weeks trying to figure out how to frame it, and of course the irony was I couldn’t get myself to work hard on the chapter about working hard. I kept on postponing it and dillydallying, trying to find some excuse to not focus on this because it seemed so daunting, and I finally came up with the thought of using W. H. Auden—one of my favorite poets—and really trying to investigate the drug habits of writers. Of course, they’re very, very dangerous, and Auden absolutely regretted taking amphetamines. Back then Benzedrine and the like were totally legal and frequently prescribed for things like asthma. Once I had that idea, I could imagine how the chapter might unfold.

What made Auden occur to you in the end?

It was just serendipity. I was reading Auden’s poetry. One of the things I do as a writer, when I’m stuck on words, I read poetry. Which sounds very pretentious and it probably is, but it also helps me get out of the clichés.

What are some of the ways librarians might use the concepts in your book to better serve their patrons?

One of the things that speaks directly to librarians is what a library does. Of course it’s about books. Of course it’s about giving people access to texts they may not be able to get on their own or afford on their own, and exposing people to the world of ideas. That’s essential. When I think of my own life, the number of ideas I’ve gotten from books … I think I’ve gotten all my ideas from books.

But in this world where we’re always staring at our phones, living in online bubbles, libraries are also places people from different walks of life can come together, especially in communities where that may not be easy. Libraries are one of the few places where people from all different classes, from all different backgrounds, where they mix and mingle. And I think that’s essential, to realize that part of the job of a library is not to be just a repository for dead trees, for books printed on paper; it’s also to give people a safe, comfortable space where they can share ideas.

I was recently at an academic library I sometimes visit, and without fail, I always end up having a conversation in line while waiting to check out a book, because somebody says, “Oh, that book looks interesting. What are you working on?”

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Chicago Public Library Commissioner Brian Bannon

Sanhita SinhaRoy — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 17:26:18 +0000

May/June 2012

Brian Bannon, the new commissioner of Chicago Public Library, at 37 already has a lengthy list of accomplishments under his belt. As the former chief information officer of San Francisco Public Library, Bannon was responsible for its digital and technology strategy. Bannon also served as chief of branches during his six-year tenure at SFPL, managing the staff of 27 neighborhood libraries and leading the design and construction process of its $200 million Branch Library Improvement Program—the largest capital improvement program in the library’s history.

Bannon, who earned his MLIS from the University of Washington in 1999, joined CPL in March 2012, succeedingMary Dempsey, who stepped down after nearly 18 years as commissioner. Now, several months into his new role, Bannon—who says he has “hit the ground running”—took a break from his whirlwind introduction to CPL and the city of Chicago to talk with American Libraries about the library’s recent controversy over staffing cuts and reduced hours; his vision for the future and the use of new media; and what makes a librarian a librarian.

You went to school and worked on the West Coast, in Seattle and San Francisco, for many years. What kind of adjustments have you had to make for life in the Midwest, and Chicago in particular?

BRIAN BANNON: I’ve been surprised by how warm, open, and inclusive people are in Chicago. I’ve already developed a personal and professional network in the city, and I’ve not even been here two months. What people say about Chicago—about it being this warm Midwest city where people are really open, welcoming in a really genuine way—I’ve found that to be true, shockingly so.

What’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned since you’ve been at CPL?

Mary Dempsey, my predecessor, was kind enough to give me a tour of some of the neighborhood libraries. Chicago has a great reputation in the library community for having strong libraries and having innovative programming.

Indeed, we have this incredible footprint in the city, a community that really cares about libraries and uses their neighborhood libraries heavily, and seeing a staff that truly believes in the work that we do—even though it’s been a tough couple of years because of the economic environment.

I met with each of our senior staff one on one, and we had a high‑level conversation about who they are, what brought them to working at the library. From our budget manager to our acquisitions folks to our public‑facing librarians on the senior staff, all of them talked about the mission of the library and how they love working here. It’s great to come into an organization that cares about the work. It’s a real testament to the leadership that Mary brought to Chicago over the past 18 years.

We have some great opportunities for growth. New media provides insight into where libraries are headed. If you look at the research that influenced the first iteration of new media, it’s about understanding where our users are—understanding how they learn, how they interact, and seeing that it’s all part of the process of connecting them to knowledge and ideas in a way that best resonates for them.

This concept of creating spaces for people to feel comfortable first, to then hang out and engage with one another, and then to start tinkering and exploring and seeing this as an important way of supporting independent learning as putting a book in a hand. That’s what we do in libraries.

New media has shown that there’s another angle to how we can continue to look at the work we do in a neighborhood library—to understand who we’re serving, how we build experiences and entry points to learning that are best aligned with folks in that community; that is really our charge.

What I’ve seen with the first stab at new media integration in some of our branch libraries reminds me a lot of what was going on 15 years ago, or longer, when libraries first started to introduce basic public technology into libraries. Our tendency then was to create special little rooms where we put computers and, you know, have all these barriers to getting in to access it because it was a special new shiny thing.

What we found long term, of course, is that public technology needs to be integrated into the fabric of the library and that you have to build systems around getting people signed up and using it. What I’ve seen with some of our first attempts at new media in branches is that all of the tools get locked into a closet. They’re brought out for programming. What we need to do in the longer stretch is look at how we can make these tools readily available throughout the day in the library.

Almost every neighborhood we have has a freestanding, city‑owned library with a meeting space. And the community really values that space. One of the things that has come up in the cultural plan is how can we better use our libraries as a performance and arts space for exhibitions.

One of the things I learned in San Francisco is that it takes just the right idea during the design process; it doesn’t usually take extra money. And if you can incorporate just a few small things, you can create a much better product.

In one neighborhood library, the library was heavily used for performance and arts. At some of our community meetings, there were basic suggestions. For example: how installing power-outlet bars in the ceiling would allow people to clip lighting in for a black box theater.

What we’re going to be doing over the next few weeks is assembling a group of people who have been engaged in the operations of new media. We’re going to bring them together with folks who have been working in our neighborhood libraries, as well as architects and some other key players, to take a fresh look at what we want a library to do. And hopefully we’ll make some interesting adjustments as a result that won’t really cost us any money but will allow us to support in a much more integrated way the work of new media.

You mentioned the economic hardship of the past few years and said this type of project isn’t going to cost much money. But how do you convey to an economically weary public or library staff that this is a necessary step?

What I’m talking about is quick and dirty—a group of people get together for an afternoon, walk through the building, and talk about the additional things they’d like. It’s more like a “lessons learned” type of thing, which we do already for our buildings. It includes more voices in that discussion.

The branch prototypes in Chicago have been designed with rethinking how to use space in mind. These prototypes are big, open, flexible buildings. The challenge is that if you don’t take a step back and look at the open flexible design, you could end up opening with, say, too many tables or not enough chairs. This takes a look at what’s called the functional building program. This is not redesigning a building.

What are your plans for the budget and collections?

Libraries are not unique in that we are large organizations that serve many people with a broad range of needs. Libraries—even though they’re nonprofit—have the same challenges. We need to be clear about why we exist, who we serve, and then prioritize that service.

Some of the work we’re doing on our senior team is answering those questions for ourselves. And those are really tough questions. A mistake some folks make is they say, “Well, we serve everyone.” And they use that as an excuse to not have discipline to really understand who they serve.

So it’s a much more complex question, and we have to start with who we serve, what they value and need, and then align the services that we provide around those. That’s a process we’re going through right now as a team.

There’s been a lot of transition at CPL with staffing levels and hours being cut. The ball was already rolling by the time you arrived. What do you make of all these changes?

At a macro level, this is as tough as it’s been for Chicago. This is a national issue. We’ve been through a tough economic moment, and libraries are not alone in the struggle of how to survive in tight times.

We’ve weathered the storm well in Chicago in that we continue to see our circulation go up [between January and March 2011 and 2012, circulation at CPL increased by nearly 228,000 items]. We’ve continued to see the number of folks who walk through the door go up.

I’m hopeful we can have some good news in the coming months about where we’re going next with our hours. But at this point, I’m in study-understand mode. Even within this belt-tightening moment, there are some opportunities that we’re really excited about.

You mentioned before the interview that you own an iPad. What are you reading on there now?

Most of the stuff I read on my iPad is work related—a bunch of downloaded PDF documents about the history of Chicago; a number of articles about different ways libraries have been looking at education. It’s literally a bunch of research. I use my iPad primarily for email, for reading PDFs. It sort of condenses all those things that I have to read into one little device. I usually read paper books or listen to books on my iPhone.

Fiction or nonfiction?

I like it all. Probably a little bit more toward nonfiction, but I like it all.

Have you found a favorite nook or a space in the library where you like to read? Or just find some quiet space?

I’ve been exploring the neighborhood libraries on the weekends. The other weekend I spent the afternoon reading in the Merlo branch reading room. One of the fun things about having such a big footprint throughout the city is getting to explore those neighborhood libraries and using them as a patron. Sometimes I’ve gone incognito, and they don’t know who I am.

I love the main library here [Harold Washington Library Center]. It’s just a beautiful, beautiful building. And it’s also where I come to work every day.

Where or to whom do you turn for professional inspiration?

In terms of leadership, Luis Herrera, who is city librarian in San Francisco, was a great mentor to me when I worked there. And his deputy, Jill Bourne, is also a great leader in libraries. Deborah Jacobs is someone who has been a longtime friend as well as mentor. She was the city librarian in Seattle and is now director of the Global Libraries initiative at the Gates Foundation. She’s someone who has helped me think through the full range of challenges of working in libraries—the professional, the political, the operational.

In terms of reading, I enjoy reading about management, philosophy, best practices, that kind of thing. I really enjoy all of Peter Drucker’s work. I often will reflect back on some of his writings, particularly when thinking through more of an operational leadership or management challenge.

What do you do en route to work every morning, and from work every evening?

Pedal.

You bike?

Yeah, I am either on my bike, in which case I’m not listening to or reading anything. If I take the El, sometimes I’ll listen to one of my favorite podcasts or a book or something like that. And if I walk, I like to keep my mind completely open. It’s a great way to prepare for the day, and decompress from the day.

Other than a degree, what makes a librarian a librarian?

A passion for learning and for people, and really caring and staying really true to what it is that we do in our work. The degree is a fundamental part of understanding the underpinnings of the work. And it’s important in the same way a teacher has to stay current with the trends in connecting kids to learning for the purposes of moving them through curriculum. Librarians must do the same. So it’s the degree plus a real dedication to continuing to understand how our society changes and how we realign the work that we do around those changes.

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Newsmaker: Jamal Joseph

Pamela Goodes — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 16:55:49 +0000

March/April 2012

One educator’s odyssey from the streets of Harlem to the halls of Columbia

In 1970, Jamal Joseph exhorted students at Columbia University to burn their campus to the ground. Today, he is chair of Columbia’s School of the Arts film division in New York City. His personal odyssey—from the streets of Harlem to Rikers Island, Leavenworth penitentiary, and the halls of Columbia—is detailed in Panther Baby: A Life of Rebellion and Reinvention (Algonquin, 2012). Charged with conspiracy as one of the youngest members of the Panther 21, Joseph was twice sent to prison. While incarcerated, he earned two college degrees and wrote five plays and two volumes of poetry. He sat down with American Libraries Associate Editor Pamela Goodes—before delivering the Arthur Curley Lecture at ALA’s Midwinter Meeting in Dallas—to discuss his book and about growing up with the Black Panthers. Watch the full interview here.

AMERICAN LIBRARIES: Your book offers so many lessons, especially for today’s youth. Is that why you decided to tell your story?

JAMAL JOSEPH: It actually is. I work with young people in New York and travel the country speaking to high school and college students. The book is written through the curious eyes and passionate heart of a 15‑year‑old who was trying to figure out the path to manhood as much as trying to be involved in the social activism of the late 1960s.

How did you begin working with the Black Panthers and why?

I was raised by a wonderful adoptive grandmother, Jessie Mae (“Noonie”) Baltimore, who made sure I was active in the church and in the NAACP Youth Council. Through dinner-table conversations about what was going on in the black community and what was going on in the world, I had that sense of purpose that our lives mattered more than just what was going on personally with the family. Then, when Dr. [Martin Luther] King was killed, there was was an outrage in the community. But there was also an attraction to what we had been seeing and hearing on television, in the streets, and on college campuses, from the Black Power movement and from people like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown.

One day I’m watching TV and I see the Panthers storm the state capitol of Sacramento in their Panther uniforms with guns and making this articulate and passionate bold defense of why black people should have the right to bear arms. I wanted to be that. It was the coolness and the badness of the Panthers that first attracted me, combined with that rage that Dr. King had been assassinated.

Once I arrived at the Panther office, I quickly learned that very day, that very moment, that the first weapon I would be given would not be a gun but a book and that the emotion of hatred and anger had to be replaced by a feeling of love for the community and a willingness to work hard for the struggle.

How important was reading in your development?

Reading was very important in my development. The value placed on education by Noonie, my grandmother, was paramount. She made sure that I read. This is a woman who herself had only a 6th‑grade education and came from the South, who worked very, very hard and was a domestic but understood the value of education in terms of the community improving itself and her grandson achieving his dreams.

She made sure I read. She made sure I did my homework. She would make me show her homework and would make me read and explain what she didn’t understand. I grew up going to honors classes and being a “smart kid”—a smart kid who hung out with the bad kids after school. I was kind of a puzzle to my family.

The Panthers were tough; they weren’t afraid. You studied. We saw these kinds of books in the Panther office: The Autobiography of Malcolm X; Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver; Before the Mayflower by Lerone Bennett Jr.; and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks and Wretched of the Earth—tough books to read and get through.

You saw people who thought they understood what was going on in terms of social activism, world power, and geopolitics come to grips with a deeper understanding by having to study and really work hard. Then we saw people who could not read when they walked into the Black Panther office but who later learned to read and write because Panthers would tutor them. The first lesson would be the Panther 10-Point Program. You would see people turning into brilliant writers and public speakers after coming in knowing they somehow wanted to be involved.

You don’t hear much about the Panthers’ focus on education.

It was primary, and it was the first thing you encountered when you came into the Panther office. The second thing you encountered was community service. First I got a stack of books, and the second thing I got, literally, was a pancake spatula because the Panthers had a free breakfast program. They also had free health clinics. A day in the Black Panther office was a day of service and work in the community. You’d spend 95% of your work studying and doing community service and maybe 5% on guard duty at the office because by then the offices were being raided each night. It was more of a protective posture. It’s easier for the media to get headlines if they’re writing about that 5% of people who dared stand up against the system.

It’s also easier for the government to attack you if it criminalizes your movement. It’s interesting that when you look at the FBI memos, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI were more concerned with the breakfast program and about the free books than they were about the guns. Truth be told, the period of history where the Panthers carried guns was actually a very short one because the Panthers carried guns in Oakland, California, where it was legal to carry guns. Those gun laws were quickly changed.

In most Panther cities, the Panthers patrolled the streets. They were unarmed. There were guns in the homes or in the offices. We had incidents like when Fred Hampton was murdered in his sleep and the Panther offices were blown up. In Philadelphia, for example, men were stripped naked in the street at one o’clock in the morning, exposed to the elements and indignities by the Philadelphia Police Department.

Is there a particular library or librarian that aided your growth, that provided any particular guidance as you grew up in this movement?

I have a friend who grew up with me in New York, who now lives in Dallas. We talked about those days when it was a great trip to go to our local library up in the Bronx, the Wakefield Library on 229th Street. It was such joy. That was the way that you got your videos. They would let us stay and read. They would let us check out books, and that honor system of returning the books was an amazing part of it. It was also school librarians, like Mrs. Johnson, who made us feel at home in the library. Then there were those books I read early that made me understand about the struggle for identity. There was that thing of understanding what books and literature had done for young black men who struggled with identity in search of their manhood, in search of their purpose in life.

You went from a public school environment to what might be considered a private education at Harlem Preparatory School. How did that affect you?

Harlem Prep was one of the schools that opened in response to the lack of education that was happening in the community. A group of educators came around to talk about community schools, or what we now call charter schools. There was this idea of community schooling—what the Panther Party called the Liberation School Program—that first started along with the breakfast program, where we would give out books and talk with kids in school about black history. Then it became a Saturday program and then an afterschool program. During the teachers’ strike in 1968, it became a program where parents brought their kids because parents felt like, “Well, maybe the teachers are on strike, but our children are not going to strike. They need to learn.”

Number five in the Panther 10-Point Program was about education. It points to “an education that teaches us our true history and our place in American society.” We take that for granted now, in the age of [President Barack] Obama, where there is a black president and where we have people who have made great achievements in politics and in education and sports. We take for granted that this is part of the ongoing curriculum. Not so long ago, it was as if black people had made no contributions to American history. We’re not just talking about contributions to black history but to American history. If you came up through the education system, you came up thinking only white people had made a contribution to what was going on. So what did this do to your image if you dared to dream of becoming a doctor, a lawyer, or a college professor, especially when you had no role models? Children often were not getting that encouragement in the classroom. People were saying, “You tested really well and you might be a good mechanic.” That’s what a teacher told me early on: “In that vocation, you tested really well. You should go to a trade school because you might be very good with mechanics.” The truth is that I’m now a college professor. I’m a writer. I’m a director. I’m a filmmaker. I do all of these things fairly well. I’m a terrible mechanic.

It appears that one of the turning points in your life was your involvement with the Actors’ Playhouse ensemble.

Because I love to tell stories and joke, people had always told me, “Oh, you should be an actor.” Then one day I was walking by a theater in Greenwich Village called the Actors’ Playhouse. It had a sign that read “Learn acting on stage.” I walked in, and Jack Ross, who ran the theater, was there. I told him I was interested, and he gave me a monologue on the spot to read. After the read, Ross nodded and said, “That was a very intelligent and sensitive reading. I’m going to let you enter the class.” Later I learned that if a German Shepherd came in and barked those lines, he would say the same thing.

Although Ross was trying to fill his class, the education I got was wonderful. I did learn acting on stage with the other actors. It actually planted a seed of a creative life that didn’t come to full fruition until later. I was a member of the ensemble, did a few plays, and learned a lot about theater. I didn’t know if I was going to be a full-time actor, but I knew I enjoyed theater.

While in federal prison, some of the guys had heard I had done some acting at some theater outside, although this wasn’t on my prison résumé. They knew I was a Black Panther leader, and a couple of them talked about me knowing karate, having been a black belt and performing in a couple tournaments. “You did theater?” they asked. I responded, “How did you know that?” I got a little worried and asked myself, Is that cool? Maybe I’m going to lose my cred. That’s not part of the convict code. They said, “No, man. We heard.” They looked real intense, and I thought I was going to get beaten up because I did some plays. “You need to do something for Black History Month,” they said.

I got a job in the prison library and, while there, went to the theater section because I had been charged with doing this play. There was only one black play in the theater section, A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry. Truth be told, there were only two plays in the whole plays section—A Raisin in the Sun and Romeo and Juliet. After reading A Raisin in the Sun, I went back to the guys and said, “I don’t know if I can do this.”

“What’s the problem?” they responded.

“This is a great play, but there are a lot of women in this play,” I said.

“Well, yeah. That’s not a problem. Look around the yard, pick out who you want, and we’ll put a dress on him,” they said.

So I wrote a play. This is how I became a writer. We started rehearsing. Prison is a dangerous and segregated place. There are sections of the yard, the mess hall, and every place you went where people just stayed together according to their groups. The Latino prisoners, the black prisoners, the white prisoners. And within those groups are these really strong gangs. They never leave unless it’s to do battle; or maybe there’s some business, such as gambling or something else. Here I am rehearsing with two guys, and into our rehearsal come two of the toughest Latino prisoners. These guys had killed a few guys since they were in prison. I thought, I’m doing life already. I’ll take more time. Do you want my license too?

They came in and now everybody’s nervous, and we’re looking over our shoulders. We’re trying to be cool. We’re trying to continue with our rehearsal because we’re thinking that these guys left this section of the yard and came all the way over here to the room. Who are they here to kill? Sure enough, as I’m looking over my shoulder, one of the leaders, Rafael, is looking very upset. I’m thinking, ;He’s working himself to really hurt somebody, to kill somebody.

After about 10 minutes, he jumps and points at me and says, “I got to talk to you, man.” I knew this was a bad idea and thought, Just talk to him man to man tomorrow and just stand your ground. See what he says.

“I’ve been here for about 10 minutes, and I’ve been watching you, homes, and I really got to let you know something,” he said. “The guy you’re working with, that ’effin guy. He’s not feeling his character.”

I responded, “Why don’t you get in and do it?” He got in and he was brilliant. I rewrote the play. The blacks and Mexicans started working together. The white prisoners were drawn in, including a member of one of those Aryan organizations. Through the power of art, we created the only integrated part of the yard. It happened through art, through literature, and writing plays. The guys got interested in that and started reading plays and doing other work. It became something that became the discovery of my creative soul in prison. I found that you can use the creative arts, writing, theater, and film, not just to bring about social awareness but to also help bring about social appeal.

What message are you going to leave librarians with here at the Midwinter Meeting?

The power and the importance of using art, education, and mentorship as a weapon, and how important the work is that they’re doing. While in prison, prisoners who were in their 60s and 70s who had been in for 20, 30, or 40 years would come around with the book cart. They would say, “Hey, young brother, you want to read this book?”

“No, I don’t want to read a book,” I’d respond.

“Let me tell you something: You’re here whether you like it or not, so you can serve this time or you can let this time serve you.”

If you paid attention, the thing that came behind that advice wasn’t membership in a gang. It wasn’t a little marijuana joint or anything else. It was a book—that very important weapon. When people talk about budget cuts, the first to go are schools and libraries. Prisons are opening up. In this country we have state‑of‑the‑art prisons and middle‑aged schools. Librarians, educators, and mentors need to understand that this is important work; this is frontline work. They can’t give up. They have to fight even harder.

Not featured

Daniel Ellsberg

Greg Landgraf — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 03:04:02 +0000

July/August 2011

The Vietnam War whistleblower holds forth on transparency and how the internet has changed civic engagement

Forty years ago, Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, documents that revealed the secret history of the United States’ involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. Since then, Ellsberg has been a lecturer, writer, and activist on controversial U.S. interventions and the need for patriotic whistleblowing. Ellsberg was a prominent guest at Annual in New Orleans, giving an Auditorium Speaker address and attending a discussion that took place after the screening of a documentary about his experiences, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. Former American Libraries Editor Leonard Kniffel and others from ALA interviewed Ellsberg after his speech.

What follows is a transcript of that interview, edited for clarity.

AMERICAN LIBRARIES The first thing I’d like to ask you is to recap for us your central message for the librarians who were in the audience, because there are a great many who couldn’t be here today in New Orleans. So what was your real central message to librarians?

DANIEL ELLSBERG Well, as librarians, they are custodians of history, to a large extent, and of journalism, which is the current history—the first draft of history, as they say. You have a lot of those books [of journalism]. And now, of course, the internet is in libraries, which means the entire output of WikiLeaks so far.

My message to begin with was that the situation today is remarkably similar to the one that the country was facing or the president was facing 40 years ago with the Pentagon Papers, and 42 years ago, and before that: namely, a question of what to do with respect to an unwinnable war that we were heavily involved in.

I’m speaking primarily of Afghanistan now, but also a number of other wars that we really have been involved in, whether the president calls them wars or not, such as Iraq—where I think, by the way, fighting may well expand again within the next year—Pakistan, Yemen, and other places where we really are involved in hostilities with drones and [in] other respects.

And the question is whether to extricate ourselves in one way or another, unilaterally or through negotiation, from one or more of those wars; whether to expand them markedly, as the military is advising in some cases; or whether to do what president after president did in Vietnam and President Obama is choosing right now, and that is essentially to prolong the war, to keep it from ending while he is in office, which might expose him to charges of being weak, unmanly—even foreign, in his case—but an appeaser, and a man who had chosen to lose a war that the military said was winnable.

And however foolish that promise was of winnability and however foolish and unrealistic the charges are of being a loser and a quitter and weak, the president doesn’t want to hear them.

And typically in Vietnam, and I believe now, the assumption, the hypothesis is very similar. Presidents prefer to send men and women now to die and to kill rather to be called names themselves, rather than risk re‑election, rather than risk their place in history.

And that’s a very typical choice, cynical as that may sound, by presidents in the past. I don’t think that President Obama is worse or different from the others. But that’s not a justifiable cause. That’s not a legitimate reason. And it’s practically the only reason that we are still involved with over 100,000 troops and 100,000 mercenaries in Afghanistan right now. It’s not good enough.

It often seems to me when I was listening to you talk that the question that doesn’t get asked in situations like Afghanistan, as it seems to me in Vietnam, is what would a win look like?

Well, actually a win is not that hard to define. It’s just impossible to achieve.

My boss in Vietnam, [Assistant Secretary of Defense] John McNaughton, is in the Pentagon Papers defining in some detail what a win in Vietnam would be like, claiming at that time that was our objective: Namely, all northern troops in South Vietnam would go back to the north and take with them the southerners who had gone north after Geneva in ’54, and then come back. All people under the command of the Communist leadership of the resistance there would go back to North Vietnam. The remaining people, the southern guerrillas, would lay down their arms and do it visibly. Not just bury them, but give up their arms, or amalgamate and accept the discipline of the South Vietnamese troops that we supplied and trained and funded and everything else.

You could define conditions just like that in Afghanistan. The Taliban are pretty indigenous. But if there are any al‑Qaeda people, they all leave. The Taliban join the Afghan army that we’re funding or they give up their arms. All coded communications on the other side must cease. All communications will be in the clear so we can hear them and hear there’s no covert call to continue arms and so forth.

In other words, the authority of the regime in the capital that we support and fund and back, that serves our interests, shall be extended to every corner of the country. And that doesn’t mean there’s no violence anymore, but it does mean that violence is reduced to a point where his mercenary soldiers can be paid with the drug money and the money we supply in order to pursue those few remaining holdouts indefinitely without the need for American troops.

So we have indefinitely a regime in the capital whose authority is extended to the whole country without the need of American troops, just with American firepower.

We never really aspired in Vietnam to a situation where they didn’t need our air support. We didn’t tell the public that. But that was Nixon’s game and that was Johnson’s game.

So that continues now with drones, but then it was planes entirely, from carriers or bases outside the country.

We could support the mercenaries that supported us, essentially. And they could control the whole country without our presence there. That’s a victory. Even though there might be some remaining violence, no one would argue with that being a victory. It just was far, far, far beyond our capabilities.

Vietnam was called the first war that was televised. Do you think that now that we have the internet, what we’re learning about the war and various [other] wars that we’re involved in has changed the game at all?

Television did have a big impact in Vietnam. Remember that public opinion didn’t have that much impact on the president’s policy. The majority of the public was against the war in Vietnam by 1968, years before the Pentagon Papers came out. That was increased by the Pentagon Papers, but it was already a majority. That didn’t stop the president.

And the fact that you see different figures—between 56% and 71% of Americans now think we should be out of Afghanistan as soon as possible—does not mean we will be out of that war any time soon.

I said that people had that opinion in ’68. The war went on for seven years, and troops remained there for five years. We could be in Afghanistan indefinitely, no matter how many people are against the war.

But it is true that the more you can see it up close on television, the more public opinion will be affected. But remember, without American troops dying, the YouTube material, which now is available and wasn’t available then, from cell phones, doesn’t get on our mainstream media.

My later-to-be-wife told me in ’66 that when she returned from Vietnam, she was seeing more of the war than anybody in Saigon was because she saw it on the television every night. We didn’t see that.

But now with no Americans dying—“no” meaning only a few thousand—you don’t see it on television.

WikiLeaks did put out on the internet that video of the helicopter [firing on and killing civilians on the ground in Iraq]. And I think it got, of course, an enormous number of hits. But I think that my understanding is that [WikiLeaks founder Julian] Assange felt later that he was mistaken not to make a deal initially with a mainstream television network and get it out on mainstream. And that’s why later he worked with the New York Times directly and the Guardian, because he knew he’d get greater coverage that way.

You mentioned, when you were talking yesterday, that you didn’t really think that the draft was such a big factor in the Vietnam War.

It was a big factor. But I’m saying that it wasn’t the whole factor that everybody speaks about now.

It surprised me because I always thought that if there were a draft right now, you’d see a great deal more resistance to the war.

You undoubtedly would, no question you would. But you’d also see much bigger wars. I think that if we had a draft now, we’d have big demonstrations, we’d have a lot more talk about it in Congress and the press, and we’d see several hundred thousand men and women in Afghanistan right now and in Iraq.

You just can’t do that without a draft. No way to do it. And we couldn’t have put 500,000 men into Vietnam—which, remember, they got there in ’68 after years of demonstrations. We were up to 550,000. You couldn’t have done that without a draft. So I’m against the draft.

Yes, it would be more fair. And if you could have a draft where the total number of soldiers remained the same, I’d be for that. It would be fairer. That’s not the way it’s going to work. If you have a draft, it’s still going to be the poor people who are in the front lines. That’s the way that works in every army. And you’re going to have a lot bigger armed services. And so we’ll have more men and women now to “spend.”

By the way, I don’t see how a draft can avoid drafting women at this point. That wasn’t even a question before. But with the current correct attitude, there isn’t any way you could draft men and not women. So you’ll be sending them over there.

There’s where I differ with a lot of my close friends on that—like [former Congressman] Pete McCloskey or earlier Ted Kennedy (he wasn’t a close friend, but an ally)—who were very much for a draft for that reason; but I disagree with them on that.

If I had top secret information that could stop the war in Afghanistan, what would you tell me to do with it now?

I would say, first, I would go to the New York Times, first, in hopes that they would print large amounts of it, large amounts of documents. No other paper really offers to print pages and pages of newsprint on something.

But I wouldn’t wait for months, as I did, without being told that they were actually working at it right away. If I had gone months without knowing that they were working away on it, I would now then have gone to other papers; and if that didn’t work, to WikiLeaks.

So I wouldn’t go first to WikiLeaks. Or if I did, I would do it on the understanding that they do it the way they did now, which is a pretty good model—that they coordinate with not just one paper, but several papers, creating that competition, so that no one paper feels they can bottle it up by sitting on it the way the New York Times did.

Here’s a question that just came to me as you asked your question. What if the people who gave the information to the Times in 2004 about the warrantless wiretaps by the National Security Agency, which the Times sat on for a year—[Executive Editor] Bill Keller should have been fired ultimately when it came out that he had suppressed that news for a year at the request of the White House. News that should have been out, absolutely should have been out, he finally put it out because of competition from his own reporter James Risen, who was about to put it out in a book. And rather than be scooped by Risen, he finally got it out in the Times and got a Pulitzer Prize for it.

Fine, let him have his Pulitzer Prize, in jail. Jail isn’t the right thing. Firing is what I mean. If he could have been impeached, he should have been impeached for that. His Pulitzer Prize, which he could enjoy with [former New York Times reporter] Judith Miller somewhere, his former protege.

But supposing, then, that the people who had done that had simultaneously given it to WikiLeaks or to another paper so that Keller knew he couldn’t sit on it for a year, that’s the way to get it out. And that’s the way WikiLeaks got it out. Because each paper—the Guardian, Der Spiegel, El Pais, and the Times and Le Monde—all knew that if they didn’t put it out the others would, using that competition very effectively. That’s what I would tell you to do.

And I would say that the people right now who are talking to Bob Woodward about his next book now—I suppose that includes [former White House Chief of Staff] Rahm Emanuel again and [U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl] Eikenberry, who is leaving Kabul and so forth—rather than wait a year or two for that to come out, it would be better if they gave the documents supporting that information to WikiLeaks right now.

And as a matter of fact, I would call on Woodward to give WikiLeaks all the documents he was given for that book. I’m not asking him to put them up, because he would get prosecuted. Even he would get prosecuted by Obama. And it wouldn’t serve any great purpose. Give them to WikiLeaks anonymously. Let us read them. So he isn’t the only one who gets to read these top secret documents.

If I were Henry Kissinger sitting across from you right now, what would you tell me?

Oh, God. Actually, there’s a couple people, including [former Secretary of Defense Robert] McNamara and Kissinger, now only Kissinger is alive to tell the tale about some of the decision-making, so, really, my interest would be in trying to get him, at last, in the closing years of his life, like mine, to come clean about what he was up to in certain cases that we really don’t know about.

When did he decide that the U.S. could, after all, get along with the unilateral withdrawal of troops from Vietnam? The public was led to believe that Nixon and Kissinger intended from the beginning what finally happened: Saigon becoming Ho Chi Minh City after a decent interval. I know that’s not true. They had no such intention. They were forced into that position. The question is: When and why did he finally decide that they would have to put up with and try to do with air power alone—that was his intention—without troops?

I’d be very interested in that—to see if he possibly would even tell me. Nothing he would tell me would be the last word, but it could be very interesting.

BRAD MARTIN, Cognotes You spoke near the end, I believe, about lessons learned and not learning lessons, or actually remembering the past and still doing the wrong thing? What lessons do you think would be learned by someone like Johnson, or even Obama, or anybody in that position, from the release of the Pentagon Papers? What might they have learned?

The last time I saw Kissinger—I saw him in the fall of ’70—it was to urge him to read the Pentagon Papers. And if he couldn’t read them all, which takes too long—he couldn’t even read a large part of it—I said read the summaries. Because those add up to about 40 single-spaced pages. That’s readable. You learn a lot from reading the summary—four or five pages—to each of the volumes.

I asked him if he had a copy. He did, in the White House. So I said, you ought to read it. And have your staff person put it in order, go over it, and summarize for you some messages from it.

He says, “Do you really think we have anything to learn from this?” I said, “Well, yes, I do.” He says, “But after all, we make decisions very differently now.” I said, “Well, Cambodia didn’t look all that different.” He was pretty nervous; he said, “Cambodia was done for very complicated reasons.” Meaning things like they were punishing Congress for having rejected [Supreme Court nominees Clement] Haynsworth and [G. Harrold] Carswell, and I could name other domestic political reasons that were going on.

I said, “Henry, every rotten decision in Vietnam in 30 years has been made for very complicated reasons.” And they’re usually the same reasons, the same kind of reasons—an election, this or that. It’s always domestic politics. And I said something about the people who resigned from his staff over Cambodia: Tom Schelling, who is in the movie, my old thesis adviser, who was a close friend of Kissinger’s, Ernie May, and others who worked on the Pentagon Papers. He said, “What? They didn’t have clearances." I said, "I had the clearances.” “Oh, you, of course, I know,” so forth.

I’m just remembering this conversation. I told him what I thought his policy was. And I thought it’s really very much like [former Under-Secretary of State] Walt Rostow’s policy. “Walt Rostow’s a fool.” “Well, that may be, but McGeorge Bundy [National Security Advisor to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson] is no fool.” He says, “No.” NMcGeorge Bundy, who had been his dean. "McGeorge Bundy was no fool. But he had no sense of policy."

But the last conversation I had with Kissinger was some months later at a conference at MIT, where I asked a question that could very well be asked of Obama right now or of his national security adviser. It was a conference called Runnymede, the name Runnymede being where the barons had confronted King John I. [There were also] MIT students and their parents who felt they were confronting the king, the monarch, confronting him about Vietnam.

And I knew I had time for only one question. So I asked him, I said, “What is your best estimate of the number of Indo-Chinese under your plans who will die in the next 12 months?” And he said, “You are accusing us of racism.” I said, “No, no, no. Forget the word Indo-Chinese. How many people will die if your plans are carried out as planned? What’s your best estimate? I know we have estimates for the number of rubber tires they’ll bring down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, how many bombers, replacement bombers, how many troops. How many people will be killed?”

He said, “That is a very cleverly worded question. What is your alternative?” I said, “Dr. Kissinger, I know very well”—because I worked for him for once—“I know very well the language of alternatives, options.” I wrote the options paper, the first one he submitted. I said, “I know the language of options. I’m not asking for that. I’m asking you for your estimate, if you have one, of the consequences of your chosen course of action.” He just paced back and forth. And finally the student who was running things said “Well, he’s answered enough questions for tonight. And he has to get back to Washington.”

And so he did, by the way, because earlier on somebody had asked him something or other and he had burst out and said “You’re asking as if we were widening the war. We’re not widening the war. We are winding down the war.” So he goes back to Washington. I won’t go through the whole story, but I’ll tell you that what turns out is, he goes back to supervise the pre-invasion bombing of Laos, which extended the war. The next day, while he was talking. But I was pretty sure that he simply did not have an answer to the number that had been killed.

MARTIN I don’t know the timing of it, but there’s also the moment on the tapes where Nixon is actually asking him a similar question, asking Kissinger, if we bomb here … .

I know that. “How many have you killed?”

MARTIN “How many killed if we did this and this?”

“How many did we kill in Laos? How many can we kill in Laos?” “Oh, 15,000, 20,000.” Nixon says, “No, no. No, I think now we should hit the dikes. Hit the dikes. How many would that drown?” “Oh, about 200,000.”

“No, no, no, I’d rather use a nuclear bomb. Got that, Henry?”

“Oh, I think that would be just too much.”

“Too much, Henry? Nuclear bomb? Does that bother you? I just want you to think big, for Christ’s sake.” That’s the passage.

MARTIN That’s almost word for word.

And that’s the way it sounds.

What I’m saying now is that it would be a very good question to ask of Obama right now, next press conference—or of [Secretary of Defense Leon] Panetta now, [former Secretary of Defense Robert] Gates before he left—what’s your best estimate of the number of Afghans who will die under our plans in the next year? What’s a range? What’s the range going to be? And what was it last year? And how accurate was did that turn out to be? Et cetera.

Now in the case of Kissinger, I had been almost sure they didn’t have an estimate. And the reason was that I had proposed doing a study of that a year-and-a-half earlier under Kissinger. And I knew that they had not done it. Kissinger said we have asked them enough questions now, we don’t have to ask that.

So I called up Winston Lord, his then-deputy, just before I asked the question at MIT. I said “Winston, do you remember that study I proposed a year-and-a-half ago? Did you ever do a study of how many we were likely to kill?” He said no, never done. So I sort of knew the answer, that Kissinger didn’t have an answer to this question.

Interestingly, now they’ve learned a lesson. Now they’ve said openly, “We don’t count bodies.” That’s Vietnam. “We don’t do that.” Well, that turns out to be false, as usual. WikiLeaks showed they were counting civilian dead. And it added up to 60,000. Now, that’s undoubtedly a huge underestimate, but it’s 20,000 more than Bush had said. And, interestingly, the 60,000 they counted—looking at the Times and the coordinates and everything else—the Iraq Body Count [independent database of civilians killed in Iraq] realized that included 15,000 that the IBC had not included in their estimate of 100,000 dead that’s based largely on newspaper reports.

So here’s an extra 20,000, which I would regard as noteworthy from WikiLeaks, some significance. But the question is: The American people do not demand and Congress does not demand, unfortunately—I can’t blame it all on the president—they don’t demand to know how many people we are killing in this collateral damage.

And the truth is that when they take credit for killing a terrorist here and a terrorist there—the Taliban—what they don’t tell is how many people they killed in a hunt for that particular terrorist. The same calculation. In some cases, to get this guy, it took 78 other people who had to die here, he wasn’t here then, we hit the wrong place, here was a whole collection of people we didn’t know were there, and so forth. And it adds up. Time over time. And finally we got him. Well, you killed 78 people or 17 people other than the one you were after. And their families joined the resistance.

AMERICAN LIBRARIES Have you made an effort to advise or reach out to President Obama?

No.

Why not?

Oh, because I do hear about people who do have access to him, like Kissinger and the others. My impression is that he’s a very busy man, of course, obviously, he’s got a very difficult job, a very complicated job. And when he talks to outsiders who don’t have current clearances and don’t have—I won’t specify it further, but who aren’t in the loop at that point—his only interest, like that of any president, is what he wants to hear from you, what he wants you to think he thinks or listens to or whatever. I haven’t heard of any useful interchange whatever.

A number of people that I do know, friends of mine, went to see him about transparency recently, and to get into the door they did something that was actually really bad, really shameful. These were open-government groups of various kinds, I won’t even name them here, but mostly friends of mine. And they were induced, to get in the door, to offer him an award for transparency.

The American Library Association could probably get in with him by giving him an award for increasing the number of National Security Letters that they’ve been presented with. And the ACLU could give him an award for closing Guantanamo. Then you get a conversation. But it doesn’t really affect policy a great deal.

They made a mistake on that one. And so here they give a transparency award to the guy who was transparently the most secretive administration we have yet had. And that’s some heavy competition. He is actually using the state secrets privilege more promiscuously than even George W. Bush. He has run almost twice as many prosecutions for leaks as all previous presidents put together. And they’re boasting about it.

I’ve been announcing that for the last year or so, and people are astonished, saying “What? Really? Yes?”

It’s a small number. Five versus three for all previous presidents put together. But his new Department of Justice person, [Lisa] Monaco, who is getting hearings now to get confirmed and will be in charge of these prosecutions, she’s boasting about it. She says “we’re doing twice as many as previous presidents, look how tough we are and how determined we are when stuff leaks.” And this is the man they gave the transparency award.

I don’t really have any confidence that what he would hear from me would serve a purpose. I don’t have the clout. I don’t have a large campaign contribution, and I don’t have votes in Congress.

What do you make of our preoccupation with sex scandals? Is this some sort of distraction?

Human. Most of us are men in this room. Maybe even women download the stuff. But the gender bias isn’t downloading Anthony Weiner’s material. I don’t know if we’re interested in that or not.

Do you think it really distracts us? While we were so absorbed in the Clinton scandals, all sorts of things were just … .

Well, on the one hand, who wouldn’t rather hear about some sex scandal than something like this horrible stuff about what we’re actually doing in the world? The number of people we might kill. Or whether climate change is going to kill us all. So you can’t blame people for wanting to be distracted, I would say.

But on the other hand, you can blame people for just totally neglecting every other responsibility they have to inform the public or to discuss with each other or act as citizens.

Humans are capable of rising above this. The point being, though, that we’re so easily distracted, that nothing else is available, really. That’s not excusable.

I had a similar-type question, which is—and again it’s a little lessons learned–related—why is it so hard for people to learn or understand the connections of history—for example, our involvement with the mujahideen and that whole thing?

Here’s something I would have liked to have brought out for the American Library Association if I had had time—a piece of history that I’ll bet most people in the audience did not know. And I only knew recently. And I found one of the most shocking and unsettling revelations ever in my life. And I read it on the internet as a quote from Le Monde Diplomatique, I think it was. No, another French journal [Le Nouvel Observateur]. And earlier, then, I found I had on my shelf Gates’s memoir—his earlier memoir, before he recently became secretary of defense—both saying the same thing.

[Former National Security Advisor Zbigniew] Brzezinski said in this French journal in 1998—you can easily find it, Brzezinski on Afghanistan, on the web, 1998—that in 1979, middle of ’79, six months before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, he had urged President Carter to fund, through Pakistan, extreme jihadists to oppose the Marxist pro‑Soviet regime in Kabul in order to provoke Soviets into invading Afghanistan.

And then six months later—this is in the same interview—Brzezinski says on Christmas Eve, when the Soviets finally did it (and the main provocation was, by the way, Soviet fear that we would overthrow that regime in favor of a regime that would let us do covert operations into Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, the other Soviet states that later became independent, that had a lot of oil) that the Soviets feared that we would use Muslim extremists, like al‑Qaeda types that were still fighting, to unsettle their own regions; and so to stop that, they would go into Afghanistan.

Now why did we want them in Afghanistan? On Christmas Eve, when they invaded, Brzezinski wrote a memo to Carter saying, “Now we have the chance to give them their Vietnam.” And so we did. 10 years later, they’d lost 13,000 men and got out.

And we had given the Afghans, by supplying [them] this entire time with money, finance, creating al‑Qaeda, foreign jihadists from all over the world we were helping fund indirectly—most of them didn’t even know the money was coming from the CIA—through Pakistan, through Saudi Arabia, into Afghanistan to fight the Soviets and bleed the Soviets, we gave the Afghans their Vietnam.

They had been at peace before that. There was a lot of controversy. The regime in Kabul was very controversial. There was another Communist party, more Maoist, that was fighting the Moscow‑oriented Communist party. And there were others. There were all the people who were there. There was controversy. There was no war.

From ’79 there was a war that we had fueled for the next 10 years and then beyond that. I won’t give the rest of the history. A million people died. A million died from various causes during that war, Afghans.

Now, I, at 80, remember—let me just ask you, frankly, and don’t say it just because I know it—are you aware of what I just told you? Did you know that history?

I was more aware of the Reagan administration expanding it.

No, this is Carter.

But I didn’t realize it was Carter. No, not Carter, no.

Okay. Let me just ask: Go look at Gates’s memoir, I forget the name of it [From the Shadows]. Look up Afghanistan in the index. Look up Brzezinski on the internet, Brzezinski, Afghanistan, 1998. I think you’ll find it quoted very exactly.

And the French interviewer says, “Well, do you have any regrets now?” That was in 1998. There had already been the al‑Qaeda attacks on some of our people before 9/11. He said, “No. You’re asking me to regret? That was one of the best things we ever did. In the eyes of history, which is more important? The end of the Soviet empire or some stirred-up Muslims?” That’s three years before 9/11 and everything else, right? Brzezinski, very smart guy, not one of his smartest or best moves or assessments here altogether.

Here’s what that said to me. I remember very well when the Soviets went into Afghanistan Christmas Eve. I saw that as aggression. I was told it was aggression. But Carter, remember, said at the time … . Do you remember that? Can you remember? Nobody here remembers?

Which are you talking about?

Come on. You’re not that young.

But I remember … .

Carter canceled our participation in the [Moscow] Olympics because the Soviets had done this. And he said “I have learned more about the Soviet Union.”

Carter, you know, is in many ways one of our better presidents, looking back on it, which is better than he looked at the time; but at this point he says, “I learned more about the Soviets in the last month than in years before to see their real face.” Like the time they shot down KAL 007, that’s what Reagan said: “Now I see who they really are.”

And Carter brings back [military draft] registration, cancels the Olympics. He starts the rapid deployment force. We’ve got to protect the Persian Gulf from the Soviets, and the Indian Ocean.

I took that all for granted, and I couldn’t even understand why the CIA was doing this all as a covert operation. He’s resisting an invasion. Why don’t we do it openly? The American people would support this. I would have supported it. Why did it have to be a CIA operation?

So of course we’re totally reaping the fruits of that operation today, you know, totally. That was Pakistan. That was accepting the Pakistan nuclear program in order to funnel the money through Pakistan. It was backing the Haqqani group that we’re talking about fighting today, right now. That’s who we were backing. The Pakistanis were backing the Haqqani group and so forth. So those were blowback consequences.

But the image of what our policy was, who our allies were, who was going to discover that what the Soviets had done is what we had predicted they would do if we did the illegal things we were doing. They weren’t entirely illegal. [They were] helping, covert operations.

But we wanted that invasion. We wanted it. And we provoked it. Of course, they say nothing about what it meant for the Afghan people. Carter doesn’t. Brzezinski doesn’t. Gates doesn’t.

That meant as of this year, or last year, that we have been involved in fueling war in Afghanistan not for 10 years as we read every goddamn day, but for 30 years. And by the way, it does go back earlier because Eisenhower was involved and so forth. We weren’t fueling a war, though.

We’ve been fueling a war for nearly all of 30 years as we did in Vietnam. There would have been no war in Vietnam had we not fueled it, one side of it, with money and everything else. There would have been controversy. There would have been killings. But there would not have been a war.

And in Afghanistan, there was a small period where the Taliban were in charge where we probably weren’t the major cause of what was happening. It was a matter of a few years. But for most of 30 years we’ve been doing that. And that’s what I was saying today: I read that not only was the policy totally different from what I thought, but that it was a wicked policy. That it was a cruel, ruthless policy.

And when Brzezinski said “But it brought down the Soviet empire!” Well, that’s a good thing on the whole, that development, better for some people than for others but not a bad thing. But on the backs of a million Afghan dead? No. We didn’t have any right to do that. And it was wrong. And it’s wrong right now.

And I’m saying that when President Obama, who I voted for, and if I was in Florida or Pennsylvania or Ohio when it was a close election, I would certainly vote for him again without any question. Would I rather have McCain? Or a McCain equivalent, who now wants to go even higher? No.

But in the case of Johnson, he did have a smaller war than Goldwater would have had. He wasn’t entirely the same as Goldwater. The Vietnam War could have been worse, much worse, if we had done what the military asked us to do. We would have been at war with China. And we would have used nuclear weapons.

The antiwar movement did have an effect. And the effect was not to shorten the war very much, but the effect was to keep a lid on the war. And some people will say “Well, that kept us from winning it.” Maybe they’re right. I think they have their head up their ass. I think they’re wrong. And I’m glad we didn’t find out.

But, anyway, I’ll take responsibility for that. I did what I could to keep that war from being larger. If I’m wrong, then I’m guilty of that; that’s my responsibility. But I think the antiwar movement did accomplish that, and that was a good thing.

Right now, we still have it ahead of us to prevent not an invasion, but an air attack by Israel on Iran. We can’t prevent Israel, but [we can prevent] the U.S. from backing an air attack on Iran by Israel. If Israel is crazy enough to do that, the chance that we will stop President Obama from backing that crazy idea is as small as it could possibly be. But it’s not quite zero. Yes, we do have a monarch. And he’s close to being an absolute monarch. But he isn’t quite an absolute monarch yet. And there never were absolute monarchs; they lost their heads in the end. But we still have enough to give us some responsibility here.

It would be a disaster if we attack Iran. And we can try to build obstacles to that right now with some possibility of success.

The escalation or the continuation in Afghanistan is inexcusable, even though practically any president who would get to be nominated would be doing the same. It would be all wrong. And it’s happening right now. It’s unjustified homicide. And unjustified homicide is murder. It isn’t first-degree murder necessarily, but there are degrees of murder. And it is reckless endangerment. It’s manslaughter. Its woman-slaughter and infant-slaughter.

When people used to say to LBJ, “How many kids did you kill today?” that was regarded as inexcusable, meaning wrong. But a perfectly fair question. He was killing kids every day and he didn’t have a right to do any of that.

I’m told it’s time to wrap up. But I would like to ask you just one last question if I could. And that is, when you look back on the Pentagon Papers and you look back on your life and your activism, can you tell me why you didn’t say, as so many of us do: Let somebody else do it?

That’s a very good question, which I’ve never been asked in 40 years. Congratulations. Good question. Well, I’d certainly said that a lot—not so consciously, but in effect I had. My first leak was really in 1968.

And what caused that was seeing the example of a very, very efficacious, consequential leak by somebody else who leaked that the president had asked for 206,000 more men on top of the 550,000 that he had. And that was in March of 1968. And Congress rebelled at that news.

My book [Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers] tells what I did then. I did a number of things as a consequence of that. But I wouldn’t have done it without saying, “My God, that was the right thing to do.” That was a really very consequential thing. So I had the example.

And the second thing is, then I thought I would lose my job, my career, and probably be found out. And I wasn’t, just kind of by a bureaucratic glitch that fell through there. They were going to prosecute me, but it got aborted, and I continued to have access—another mistake. So a year and a half went by.

But meanwhile, then, I had read Martin Luther King Jr. and I had read Barbara Deming, Revolution and Equilibrium. I had read Gandhi and Thoreau, and Thoreau’s line “Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.”

But the key thing was that I met people right before I copied the Pentagon Papers in late August of 1969 who were on their way to prison. I saw that here are people just like me—one of them, Randy Kehler, had gone to Harvard just like me, a young man then, and he was going to prison because that was the best thing he could do to protest war.

I think I may have been the only person I knew who had met a draft resister who had gone to prison. Just a different world. They didn’t interact [with us] at all.

I wonder if Obama—well, I’m sure that Obama has never sat in a room with a draft resister [or] with somebody who refused to go back to Iraq and was in prison for it, like Camilo Mejia, or Ehren Watada, who refused to go to Iraq and was then court-marshaled for it. Or I could say Jeff Patterson in the Gulf War. Matthew Hoh didn’t go to jail, but he resigned from the Foreign Service as the highest Foreign Service officer in one of the provinces in Afghanistan for all the reasons I’ve given. He had been a Marine, a company commander, earlier, in Iraq. Like me, he agreed having a Marine company is the best command, the best job you can have, perhaps in the world, almost—best job I ever had. And he loved that job.

Then he became a civilian [joining the State Department and assigned to Afghanistan] and resigned that, saying it was hopeless, it was counterproductive—what we were doing was corrupt, this and that, everything I would have said.

Matthew Hoh. He came back, ready to testify. He was offered a job by [U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl] Eikenberry, who agreed with him. Offered why? To keep his mouth shut? No. Because he’s such a good, terrific officer and person. As was Watada.

Then he comes back here and is debriefed by [special adviser on Pakistan and Afghanistan] Richard Holbrooke, who offers him a job in the White House. For that, he accepted. How can you refuse? And then he realized: Wait a minute, this is going to shut me up, I can’t say anything here. He resigned that after a week.

He offered to testify before Congress. He was not asked. Right now is not too late for President Obama to pull in Matthew Hoh and sit down with him, and whoever else he wants in the room, and Hoh won’t pull any punches. He’ll learn a hell of a lot, but actually he’s hearing pretty much the same from [Vice President Joe] Biden and from [National Security Assistant Tom] Donilon and everyone else. So I’m not sure it will make that much difference.

But has he actually met someone who has given up a career for this reason? Who would say to him what Hoh could say? Or what I could say—but it sounds self‑serving, but let’s say what Hoh could say—is “Mr. President, winning the next election is important for all the things you want to do: for your legislative program, for keeping out these crazy people who want the job, crazy people in Congress. It’s not some unimportant thing. But it is not the last word. It’s not a sufficient reason to kill people at a large rate. You should reconsider whether what seems self‑evident—that the only thing that matters is holding this job so you can do good things in the future at the cost of any number of lives—is not actually a justification. It’s not an adequate reason.

See also the video of this interview.

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Christine Wigfall Morris and Barbara Sorey

Pamela Goodes — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 16:58:10 +0000

March/April 2011

Christine Wigfall Morris, affectionately known as Miss Chris, was hired by the City of Clearwater, Florida, in July 1949 as its first African-American librarian. Prior to working for the city, she had never been inside a public library because local segregation practices did not encourage African Americans to visit one. Now at 88, she has recapped her lifelong Florida history and her 33-year career as a librarian in Christine Wigfall Morris: Stories of Family, Community, and History (PublishAmerica, 2010), cowritten with local author Barbara Sorey. Morris helped to spearhead the opening of the facility designated as the Negro Library in April 1950, located in a storefront. An innovator even then in terms of library services, Morris implemented a voter registration program, began a tutorial program for residents preparing for high school equivalency exams, and started a summer program for children featuring storytelling, movies, and puppet shows.

American Libraries: Why did you decide to write this book?
CHRISTINE WIGFALL MORRIS: I had so much to put into the book and not all of it is in there. I also thought that it would be nice for other people to learn about the family and its history in the community.

Was there a controversy when you were hired by Clearwater in 1949?
MORRIS: Before I was hired, Afro Americans or blacks could not go into the main library. You could take books back for some of the families, but there was no place for us to go. That was the reason why a number of concerned citizens went to the city commissioners.

What about the reaction from the staff?
MORRIS: Some liked it and some did not. They had heard so much about Afro Americans. They wanted to feel my hair to see if it was kinky. There were certain things that they had read about Afro Americans, blacks, or Negroes that wasn’t true.

What role did you play in the opening of the Negro Library in 1950?
MORRIS: I was everything: the sweeper, the keeper, the book checker, and the storyteller. And it was a joy to know that I could hold my head up and do some of these things.

How important was your role in using the library as a place for voter registration, tutoring, and summer programs?
MORRIS: It was very important because it involved the whole community. We would host festivals and involve children from other cities. My two great-nieces started the program, and it really shone the limelight on the city of Clearwater.

How do you feel about the naming of the collection in your honor?
MORRIS: I feel good about it, though several people have said that it should have been the library that was named in honor of me. But the city commissioners said that I had to be dead. It gives me more honor to see the collection than to be dead and not see the library.

What is in the collection?
MORRIS: Information about the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King, Afro-American cookbooks, spirituals, pictures, and CDs.

What are some of your favorite sections in the book?
MORRIS: I don’t have any favorite parts; all of it is good. What really impressed me about the book was to see the pictures of my family and my high school classmates, and to know that I have served all these years under so many presidents.

What advice would you give young people of color about a career in librarianship?
MORRIS: The library gives you so many sources that you can use: books on history, English books, and children’s books. I have one young lady, now living in Illinois, who said that I was one of the people who influenced her to go into library science. She was very impressed. And I know a couple other ladies who are in library science who have said that I pushed them into that, to see what the world is all about and to meet different people.

Why should people read your book and what will they gain?
MORRIS: I’ve had good reviews. And most of the people have enjoyed the book. Some said they would have never known anything about my life, about the city of Clearwater, or about what happened some 30-odd years ago when I was in the library. The book has been reprinted for the third time.

How was it writing this book with Miss Chris?
BARBARA SOREY: It was a pleasure. I had invited Miss Chris to a women’s history program at the Dundee Library. There was a book signing for my second book Florida Girl and afterwards I said to Miss Chris, “Miss Chris, do you want me to write your story?” She said yes! And I said okay. We got started in March 2008 meeting once a week at her home and we’d record her story. We gained a new friendship. It’s like she’s my mother, and I just love her.

Tell me a little bit about you.
SOREY: I was born and raised in Clearwater. I really didn’t start writing until 1999. It’s been a long journey. I wrote and published my first book Know Where You’re Going? You Gotta Know Where You Been! which includes stories of growing up in Clearwater, basically as something for my family. I researched my second book, Florida Girl: Short Stories of Family, Community, and History, 1804–1969, by going into our main library and looking for any kind of articles on African Americans. I knew there were many outstanding African-American policemen and nurses in the community, but when I went into the Clearwater library system to look for something, there was nothing. I was floored; it’s like we were an invisible people.

It was just wonderful writing Miss Chris’s stories and finishing this book. When the Negro Library first opened, there weren’t any books. All of them had to be donated by the main library downtown and by people from the community. The same building that housed the library is still standing, but now it’s a children’s Head Start facility.

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