Novelist Francine Prose talks with co-hosts VV Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell about her new book. 1974: A personal story. Prose discusses her relationship with Tony Russo, who worked with Daniel Ellsberg to leak the Pentagon Papers, a whistleblower that exposed decades of government lies about U.S. involvement in Vietnam; how politics and progressive activism today compare to that of half a century ago; and why this year was politically pivotal. She also reflects on how the idea of government dishonesty was shocking in 1974, while it is now commonplace. Prose reads from the book.
Watch video excerpts from our interviews on Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.
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From the episode:
Whitney Terrell: You write: “By 1974, the ground beneath us had shifted and split along fault lines that opened up everywhere.” What do you mean by that? And why was 1974 such an important year of division and change?
Francine Prose: Well, in some ways, the ’60s were like a dream. I mean, they were like a good dream. And it takes a while to wake up from a dream like that. You know, the Patty Hearst kidnapping, which I think was still a big deal because it kind of allowed the media to portray revolutionaries as these, you know, gangsters kidnapping this innocent, white billionaire. So that actually happened in 1974, but what happened was that all these ideals of, you know, justice and no more war and getting out of Vietnam, etc. … It became clear that they weren’t going to happen. They just weren’t going to happen. And in 1974, you kind of realized that that was the situation. I mean, I certainly got it. So that was kind of a turning point.
VV Ganeshananthan: One person who embodies the anti-war and counter-culture spirit of the late ’60s and early ’70s in your book is Tony Russo, whom you met and eventually married in 1974. Can you tell us who he was, why he was anti-war, and what you found attractive about him at the time?
FP: Yes, he was an aerospace engineer by training. He came from the South and worked for NASA for a while, and he was a radical. He was already a radical. One of the things that people thought at the time was that you could – and today it really seems like a dream – change the culture of an entire institution from within. So he decided to get hired by the RAND Corporation, which of course was a contractor that worked very closely with the Department of Defense and the Pentagon. While working there, Tony kind of thought he could just transform RAND. So he went to RAND, and they sent him to Vietnam to take part in this motivation and morale study designed to find out what drove the North Vietnamese and why they didn’t just completely give up and why they still fought, etc. And he became even more radical. Also, he worked on Agent Orange and the defoliation program, which was a shock. I mean, it was pretty shocking. So he became even more radical.
He came back to California and was back at RAND. There he met Daniel Ellsberg, who had also been in Vietnam for RAND. Ellsberg had a secret Department of Defense report called the Pentagon Papers, which showed that the American government, the American presidents, had lied, flat out lied, to the American people for four or five presidencies about the reasons for our being in Vietnam and our activities there.
Now this sounds so historic, but people thought the government lying was such a big deal that everything would change, people would take to the streets, and the war would end. And now it’s a joke that someone in the government is lying. They just do these fact checks at the same time politicians are speaking because you assume they’re lying. You don’t do a fact check unless you assume the person is intentionally wrong or not.
WEIGHT: We’re taping on August 11th, and former President Trump just gave a long press conference from Mar-a-Lago where he said that his crowd at the insurrection was the same size as the crowd at Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. And that’s just one of many, many lies throughout this thing, and nobody seemed to do anything about it at all.
FP: I know, I’ve seen it. For some reason, I’m more obsessed with it than ever before, because it’s just about watching something go very wrong. I mean, it’s a terrible impulse to want to see it, but I can’t help it.
VVG: It’s interesting because the Harris campaign actually fact-checked him by releasing a statement afterward. I mean, I certainly wouldn’t assume that the Harris campaign or the Biden administration are completely honest. It actually seems very clear to me that they are not. But I thought it was interesting that it’s now normal procedure for the opposition to check your facts, you know. You give us a speech and if you say something, they try to claim otherwise, but now we have such a decentralized reading culture. In the past, you would have thought that if The New York Times published something, a large part of the public read it, and now I’m not sure if that’s true.
I was listening to a friend who was also a guest on this show, Sam Freedman. I talked to him about this interview and told him we were going to chat with you and he pointed me to a great NPR series called Basic truth that aired three years ago and has all the details of how the Pentagon Papers were leaked. Tony is mentioned several times in it and it talks about how they calculated, “We have to tell the public and there’s a way to do it.” I listened to that and screamed. What’s the way now? How do you do that? My Squarespace blog post is not going to do that.
FP: It was a huge scandal. And it went to the Supreme Court. I mean, it became a landmark First Amendment case, and Tony went to prison. I mean, they were initially charged under the Espionage Act, which didn’t happen, but he went to prison for contempt of court because he refused to testify unless it was a public trial. Because, as I said, he was so messianic in his beliefs that he believed it was worth it if he could turn the trial into an educational experience for the American public to tell them about Vietnam and what was happening there. When I look at it now, I don’t think anyone really did that in Iraq. I mean, you didn’t hear much of anyone saying, “This is what’s happening there.” And now the news is so biased and so horrific that you don’t have people coming out and saying, “I was there,” and getting much of the same kind of attention. I mean, that kind of thing just doesn’t happen.
WEIGHT: The Pentagon Papers revealed, among other things, that the Tonkin incident, the alleged attack on a US warship that served as a pretext for starting our involvement in Vietnam even though we were already involved there, was a fake.
FP: It didn’t happen. I know, I know, it was completely staged. And it’s like Hollywood, like, Wag your dogor whatever that movie was where you just stage these historical events and interventions and then it happens. No, that’s utter nonsense. Tony just talked and talked about it and he was very — it had been years, this was 1974, so he’d come back in 1970 or 1969, he’d been back for a while, but he was still very invested in the personalities there and what had happened there and the events there. And some of them had been so dramatic. It must have taken a certain kind of person to work for RAND. There were a few people like Tony who were a certain kind of fanatics, and then these other guys just said, you know, we’ve got to bomb more, we’ve got to drop more napalm.
Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Vianna O’Hara. Photo by Francine Prose by Frances F. Denny.
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FRANCINE PROSE:
1974: A personal story • A changed man • Blue Angel • Anne Frank: The book, the life, the afterlife
OTHER LINKS:
The Heritage Foundation • The Sixties: Big Ideas, Small Books by Jenny Diski • Opus Dei • JD Vance • Patty Hearst • RAND Corporation • Daniel Ellsberg • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 6, Episode 46: “Samuel G. Freedman on what Hubert Humphrey’s fight for civil rights can teach us today” • Basic truth | NPR • Trip to Italy • Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb • Cato Institute • Pentagon Papers • Espionage Act • Comstock Act • Wag your dog • The Rainbow of Gravity by Thomas Pynchon
