Lewis Lapham Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Let's stay with your career for a while. What led you to become a writer? We'll get back to this political stuff shortly.
I developed an early love for reading and for words, and I couldn't imagine anything more exciting to do than to try to put words on paper. When I left Cambridge University I had thought I might become an historian but I didn't have the patience for the scholarship. So, I came back from England and went into the newspaper business in San Francisco, and I thought that would be a way to learn to write. There was a tradition in the thirties of important American writers, people like Ernest Hemingway, starting as newspaper reporters, and I thought, okay, this is the way you learn to do it. I was assigned by the San Francisco Examiner to the Oakland City Hall and my first four months on the paper were in the pressroom. The pressroom was in the City Hall, together with the courts and the mayor's office and the police station.
My first assignment was to cover a flower show somewhere in the foothills of Oakland, and I wrote 4,000 words on that. [audience laughter] I brought it in to the bureau chief in Oakland, a man named Crowley, who wore a hat, and he read it and he said, "These are the most beautiful 4,000 words I've ever read." "I almost wept," he said, "but do me a favor. See if you can cut it in half." And so, I did and I brought it back, and then he said, "These words are so beautiful it's hard for me to say this, but try to cut it in half again." [audience laughter] We did. It came out as one paragraph [audience laughter] in the Sunday newspaper.
So, did this encourage you to pursue that career further?
It taught me a certain economy of language.
I read that your father wasn't the happiest person about your becoming a journalist. Is that fair? He wanted you to test out other careers or at least talk to people in positions who could tell you about what their job was like?
Yes. My father had been, like myself, a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner in the early thirties, when William Randolph Hearst was still alive and still running the paper from San Simeon. Our family was also in the shipping business, and he got into the shipping business, eventually became president of the shipping line called the American Line Steamship. We had fifty-two ships [with] the home port in San Francisco, at four big piers in China Basin. We had fifty-two ships on December 7, 1941, and the government took them on December 8, and all but two were sunk in the North Atlantic during World War II. We did not go back into the shipping business because by that time it had been nationalized and the government paid only15 cents on the dollar, which was not enough to rebuild a fleet.
So, my father went east, became the president of Grace Line, which was still a shipping company, eventually became a banker, and was trying to encourage me as a youth that there was no real future in newspaper, it was not the way into the uplands of the American establishment. He would try to introduce me from time to time to people who could explain the true meaning of capitalism. [audience laughter]
He introduced me to a man named Wyker who was the heir to the Squibb pharmaceutical fortune and by that time he had reached a fairly advanced age. I saw him on a beach in East Hampton, and Wyker was trying to explain to me capitalism, and he explained it as follows. He told me a story that after World War II, or in the early fifties, after the Shah had come to power in Iran -- we, of course, placed the shah in power in Iran -- and ...
We forget about that sometimes.
Yeah. We had displaced the duly elected democratic leader of Iran, Mossadeq, and replaced him with a shah who was more in line with our oil companies.
Squibb was one of the early globalization companies, they were building plants around the world to make simple medicines, and they had one in Iran which made aspirin and minor anesthetics -- fairly common medicine. They were taking 100% profit on the product, and the Iranian government was taking 100% profit on the product. And this was okay from Squibb's point of view, but from the Iranian government's point of view not enough. They wanted another 100%, and the Iranian health minister resisted that. The day came when the Iranian health minister had a sudden attack of appendicitis, and he was taken to the hospital and laid out on the operating table naked, and the surgeon leaned over, had a scalpel in his hand, and he explained to the minister that because of the high price of anesthetic they didn't have any and they were now going to do the operation without anesthetic. It was explained to the minister by the surgeon with a scalpel in his hand not to worry because the pain would be so great that he would go into shock which would be just as good as anesthetic. And the health minister, under those terms, agreed to the extra 100% raise in the price of drugs in Iran, and Wyker at that point slapped me on the knee and said, "Now that, my boy -- that is the way to do business!" That is capitalism.
And based on that experience, you chose another route.
Well, I was still passionate about writing and I went from the newspaper business in San Francisco to the Herald Tribune in New York, and then became a contract writer first to the Saturday Evening Post, then to Life, and then to Harper's magazine.
I did want to mention that you also were interviewed for the CIA. Is that true?
I was interviewed for the CIA.
And that was another choice that you decided against. What was that experience?
I graduated from Yale in June of '56, went to Cambridge University in the fall of 1956. I had not been particularly engaged in foreign affairs as a student at Yale. I'd been reading the works of Berthold Brecht and Albert Camus, and obscure medieval poets, and I had not been following the newspapers. But suddenly, the fall of 1956 is the year of the Hungarian uprising (it's also the year of the Suez Canal crisis) and a number of young men that I knew in Cambridge had gone to Budapest to show support for the uprising, and two of them had actually been killed. Suddenly, I was having to justify and explain American foreign policy to some very angry English undergraduates, and I didn't know anything. So, I began to read newspapers and books.
When I came back from Cambridge, having given up the idea of being a historian, I stopped in Washington on the way to San Francisco and had an interview with the Agency. Yale was a recruiting outpost for the Agency during the late forties and the fifties, and a couple of my English professors had sort of mumbled over drinks at Morrie's that if I was ever at a loose end in Washington to call this number. [audience laughter] So, I called the number and I went. The CIA in those days did not yet have its offices in Langley, Virginia, it was in temporary headquarters which were quonset huts down near the Lincoln Memorial.
The examinations went on for about a week. There were physical examinations, mental examinations, and psychological examinations. I got through those and finally I got to the interview, and the interview was with what the Agency called some of the "younger guys." I was twenty-two, I guess, 1957, and these guys must've been in their late twenties, early thirties. There were three or four of them, all Yale and all George Bush kind of Yale, I mean, from that Defense Club, EKE -- it was that preppy tone. They were very pleased with themselves, and it was like being interviewed for the best fraternity in the world, and I was going to get to play the big varsity game of the Cold War.
I had studied for this exam. I hadn't quite written things on the cuff of my shirt, but I was prepared to tell you how many roads there were through the Ardennes Forest, and where was the Fulda Gap, and the Romanov dynasty, and the tragedy of the Hapsburgs, and Lenin's early life. I was up for that kind of question, and the first question was, "You are standing on the thirteenth tee at the National Golf Club links in Southampton. What club do you hit?"
That question tells you A) are you the right sort that would have known where the National Golf Links was, and B) how good a golfer you were, because it was a short hole, and depending on whether you hit a four iron or a seven iron would place you in the hierarchy of golfers. My answer to that question -- I knew that question. [audience laughter]
Second question was, "It is late August, six o'clock in the evening and you are on your final tack into the Hay Harbor Yacht Club on Fisher's Island. What tack are you on?" Yeah. I knew that one.
Third question was, "Does Minxie Haines wear a slip?" Minxie was the great nymphomaniac figure of the Ivy League circuit in the fifties. She was a wild thing, as the expression had it. And I said, "I can't answer that question. My information is secondhand, rumors. I have a rumor of Belgian lace but it's unconfirmed." [audience laughter] And I said, "Beside that, clearly I have made a mistake. I apologize for wasting your time," and I got up and walked out.
I have never been surprised at the blunders of the CIA since that day [audience laughter], because these people were deeply self-absorbed and they were not really going to learn much, so that when they got it wrong about the end of the Cold War and they got it wrong about Vietnam, that didn't shock me.
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