Background

Professor Heyman, welcome back to Berkeley.

It's a pleasure to be back.

Where were you born and raised?

I was born in New York City. And I was raised in New York City.

And how did your parents shape your character?

It's really hard to say. I had a father who was, in many ways, an expansion ... Had lots of expansion, had lots of ways in. Was a man who children liked a lot. Young children in the family, over time, spent a lot of time with him, found him to be a person you really could speak with. One who was quite sympathetic to what your viewpoints were and what your problems were. I had a mother who was a beautiful woman, who was a school teacher for thirty-five years. Both parents were very interested in charitable undertakings, especially a charitable camp. I was an only child, and I was the product of people like that. But it's hard to say in the abstract what shaped me coming from that union.

Are the roots of your commitment to liberal values to be found in your home?

I think, down deep, my father was really a liberal, although you wouldn't know it by his political affiliation. He voted for Roosevelt the first two times, but not the third when Roosevelt ran against Wilke. Both my parents were very involved with the Progressive movement in New York City and were great supporters of LaGuardia. They had gotten themselves into local politics quite a bit. But my father was a person who believed in inclusion. While running an office [he] believed that the employees ought to have a stake in it. So he had a lot of the kinds of values that I think are at the core of liberalism.

My mother was disassociated from that. As a school teacher she taught in a poor neighborhood in New York, in the lower West Side, which now is pretty ritzy in the Chelsea District but at that time it wasn't at all. In the era in which she taught, she not only was the school teacher of the fifth grade, but she was sort of the social worker in the neighborhood.

Any books that you read as a young person that affected you and that you still remember?

Oh, I do. I remember some of them. I read voraciously as a young teenager, especially. I read a lot of books that explored the pathos of poverty and folks who were at that end of the spectrum. I read a lot of Theodore Dreiser. A lot of Thomas Wolfe. I read Steinbeck. I read those kinds of authors. And either they fed a predisposition or they formed in me a set of political attitudes.

Where were you educated before you went to college?

I went to a public school in New York and then I went to a public junior high school in New York. Then I went to the Bronx High School of Science, which is a public high school. And then for the last three years, I went to a private school, a prep school, to enable me to play basketball, football, and baseball, and be on the swimming team.

So what did you learn from all those sports activities?

I liked it a lot. I was very tall when I was very young. I wasn't the most coordinated fellow, but I was probably better coordinated as a big fellow in that era than most. And so I played athletics quite well. I think height meant a lot. It reinforced my position in leadership, which really did occur at that time, and I did quite well in athletics.

Then for college you went to Dartmouth.

I went to Dartmouth.

Any teachers there, or any subjects that took your fancy that stand out?

Well, two people I remember with great fondness and who were very formative for me. One was a fellow named Bob Carr who taught in government. He taught public law, mostly constitutional. My first constitutional law course. And then a fellow named Don Morritson who was also dean of the faculty. He also was a government professor, and he taught mostly administrative law. But he was the fellow who found and resurrected a fellowship at Dartmouth that, in the end, meant that I went to Washington for my senior year and worked in the United States Senate.

And what did you do there?

I started out as an intern with a Republican senator from New York, and I ended up as his legislative assistant. It seems odd in these days, but the substantive staff in that office consisted of his administrative assistant, his executive, his secretary, and me. That's for a senator from the most populous state in the United States. The reason I didn't go or seek to go with Senator Lehman, who was the Democrat, is that Lehman was quite wealthy and he had brought on, oh, thirty people or so from his own assets, and I thought I'd get lost there.

So that was your first encounter with private financing of the public sector. But then you went on to law school. Why? Other than the influences we've already discussed, why did you decide to become a lawyer?

I really enjoyed the law-related courses at Dartmouth. But I think it was primarily my experience in Washington that indicated to me that if you wanted to play a public role, at least in politics, it was very advantageous to be a lawyer. Not only in terms of the subject matter, but because the career permitted you to be a self-starter. You could serve either in administrative or in legislative politics. And then you could get out, but you could work because you had a skill that was portable.

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