Lewis Lapham Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Welcome to Berkeley. Welcome back to the Bay Area.
Thank you.
Where were you born and raised?
I was born and raised in San Francisco, born in 1935, lived there until 1948 when I was thirteen. My grandfather was mayor of the city in 1942 to '46, so I sometimes got to go out with the mayor in the launch to one of the navy ships in the bay. I can remember being piped aboard a carrier and saluting Admiral Halsey at some point in the middle forties.
So, from early age you were ready to command!
I wasn't ready to command, no.
Grandfather was also mayor when the UN charter was written in San Francisco, and I was excused from school to attend some of the plenary sessions in the [Opera House].
Looking back, how do you think your parents and this background shape your thinking about the world?
San Francisco seemed to be the center of the world in the 1940s, certainly to a boy of eight, nine, ten. It was where the Pacific war was being directed. My grandfather was involved in public affairs, he had a very strong sense of the public good and public service. After being the mayor he was the [audio drops out] by the Marshall Plan to go to China. I got a sense of the public realm as a young boy.
Where were you educated? In San Francisco, or did you go away to school?
I went to grammar school at the Town School for Boys in Pacific Heights, in San Francisco, and then I moved east when I was thirteen and went to a boarding school in Connecticut, the Hotchkiss School, then Yale and then for a year to Cambridge, England.
How does a son of the Establishment become such a political maverick -- or are you a political maverick?
I don't know!
I can remember the beginning of the UN, I can remember the liberal ideas of Franklin Roosevelt, the Four Freedoms, I can remember when Harry Truman came to San Francisco in June of 1945 and there was the biggest crowd that had ever been turned out in the history of the state. I developed a rather old-fashioned idea of the government as the servant of the people rather than the people as the servant of the government.
So, I don't think of myself as a radical. I think of myself as somebody who's trying to remember the principles on which this country was founded.
So, you're radical in the sense of opposition to what America is becoming or has become?
I would say that, yes. To my mind, America over the last fifty years, and more rapidly over the last, say, twenty, and since the Bush administration, the last six, is beginning to drift away from what my sense of the American idea is, to drift toward statism and drift toward more money for property and less freedom for individuals.
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