Robert Torricelli page 2

MG: Kennedy comes along. For a lot of us, politics wasn't boring anymore.
RT: My parents, being liberals, were decidedly for Stevenson. But certainly, no one in my generation can claim to be unaffected, positively or negatively, by the Kennedy experience in politics. He made it appealing to be in public life, and he made it seem possible to make a difference. I remember coming home from school and being in my home alone and watching press conferences on televisions. Each of those events of the Cold War are a memory that will never depart us. I remember the Berlin crisis, Kennedy's speech in Berlin. The Cuban Missile Crisis was one of the most vivid experiences in my life. Watching the television and waiting for the reports of whether the Russian freighter was going to reverse course. Going to the supermarket with my parents, and they carried that list from the newspaper of the things you needed to have in the basement if there was a nuclear war. I remember that on the list was a plastic garbage can to keep water, and when we got to the store there were no plastic garbage cans left. Then my parents set up a battery radio and cots and sleeping bags in the basement, things to store water and a lot of canned food. I think some of it stayed there until we sold the house in 1986.
MG: Space shots?
RT: The school would always have us gather and watch. It was exciting Not only our pride in the country, but the sense of competition. A challenge both against the unknown and against real enemies. It was a defining experience.
Another one is the air-raid drills. The early memories in grade school of huddling under desks or in hallways, away from windows, being taught to keep our hands over our eyes or ears for protection against a nuclear blast. And during the Cuban Missile Crisis, I remember this so well, we were going through these drills every day of kneeling under our desks, with our hands over our eyes to prepare for atomic warfare. And I remember my mother telling me that if the sirens go off and you are told to go under your desk, you are to disobey your teachers and run home. They are telling you that you'll be safe in that school against nuclear war, and it is not true. No one will be safe. Get home. That was '62. I was 11.
MG: Mom was telling you, "They lie."
RT: Yeah. My parents did not have confidence in the American suburban public school system of those years. I think in retrospect it was a fairly good school system, but it was not challenging. I think the academic standards were not what they had experienced, my father in the New York City public schools or my mother in her own community, and they were very conscious of the fact that it was very narrow-minded.
The worst experience I ever had is, one day a teacher asked everyone to raise their hand and describe where their ancestors were from. She was trying to demonstrate the breadth of the American experience. Most were from England and many from Holland, some from Germany; then there was me, and I said, "Italy." And the teacher said, "Class, you'll notice that Robert's ancestors are not from Europe." As much as I always liked politics, geography was my passion. I remember raising my hand and said, "Excuse me, Italy is in Europe." And she said, "Only technically." What she was pointing out is that everyone else was from a Northern European experience. They were Anglo-Saxon. I went home that night and said, "Did you know Italy is only technically in Europe? It's not really a European country." My father said, "What?" I said, "Yeah. Italy is not really a European country." And my father said, "Where did you hear this?" And I told him the story. My father was in that classroom the next morning. He went to see the teacher and asked for an explanation. I'm sure it never happened again.
MG: There's a story your bedroom walls were papered red, white and blue and you had a bust of Lincoln.
RT: My parents were very concerned. Part of growing up in the Cold War experience was a tendency towards excessive nationalism. I haven't thought of this stuff for years. But you know, being from the New Deal and having lived through the Fascist experience, my parents were not enthusiastic about my early politics. I was raised in this conservative rural community in the midst of the Cold War; my world was about nationalism. And my first political instincts were all very anti-foreign and extremely conservative. And it was to the endless concern of my mother.
MG: Was it peer pressure?
RT: No. I just responded to the environment. We talked about this. The Space Race, the problems of Communism.
MG: I have a clear memory of 1962 as the height of American civilization, that it never was better than that, that America was where we lived, that it had this young President and this glamorous First Lady.
RT: I think on the surface that was all true. I think that the movie script of American life was at its ideal in 1962, though in reality it's now far better than it ever was.
MG: There were cracks under the surface.
RT: Deep cracks. We were entirely unaware of it.
MG: So you became a super patriot, in essence.
RT: Very conservative. All the way through the middle of the Vietnam War. I was strongly in support of the Vietnam War. I went to boarding school in '68-'69 or '69-'70, and I wrote a letter in support of Richard Nixon on the Vietnam War. I always thought someone would find that letter when I was in the early primary contests within the Democratic Party. No one ever did their research properly. Anyway, it was part of this very early conservative foundation.
When my parents added on to their house, my mother told me I could have my room any way I wanted it. I said, "Any way?" She said, "Yes." So I ordered red wall-to-wall carpeting, painted all the walls blue and all the trim white. My room basically was a library. It had a bed, a desk, and every wall was lined with books. I would get all the duplicates. Publishers would send the library advance copies of books, to see if she wanted to buy them, and any duplicates or books that were misprints that she'd get from the publisher, she'd bring to me. So I had a better library than some small public schools; the entire library was in my bedroom. I had a bust of Lincoln that was very large on my desk, all these books, and then it was red, white and blue. Then on the top was bunting, flag bunting that I draped.
MG: Oh my God.
RT: Well, then, worse: One day in the closet I find this very large flag. Huge. This is great. So I use it as a bedspread. I must have been 10. My mother comes home, and I remember hearing her gasp. It had been her father's coffin flag. She said, "That's it. I will not tolerate any more." This is where I draw the line.
MG: Despite this super-patriotism, you're also getting these lessons in social progressivism from your mother. She's pointing out homeless people.
RT: Yeah, my mother brought me to the Poor People's March of '68. But she was losing. We would have bitter political fights sometimes on these things. I was rooting for the Democratic candidates that Dad was for, but my instincts were decidedly conservative.
She took me to Washington several times. And earlier, I insisted on seeing John Kennedy, and I made her stand outside the gates of the White House most of an entire day waiting for him to come out, and I remember the helicopter landed, and I saw him get off the helicopter. I stood at the gate, which was then open (it's not any more) between the White House and the Treasury Department -- the social gate. You could stand there and look through the fence. I stood there, I saw the helicopter land, he got out, waved to some people and walked in.
MG: So you were getting mixed messages from your parents about patriotism. Kennedy's assassination, did it affect you?
RT: I remember standing and changing classes in school, and in the hallways the rumors sweeping down, much of the information inaccurate, but the terrible essential truth of his death being reported, and school immediately being dismissed. Everybody was being sent home. Mostly I remember that a neighbor's child telling us that it was a good thing, and I was startled that people took their politics to that degree. Then of course, that whole weekend sitting with the family was a shared experience of watching the funeral.
MG: You go from November '63 to February '64, and bang, the Beatles are on television, Bob Dylan is picking up an electric guitar -- things are starting to change very rapidly.
RT: It didn't reach me for a long time. I considered the early Beatles an intrusion into American culture. I'm an enormous Beatles fan now, but I don't remember being captivated by it initially. And the whole Dylan thing I recognized early as part of a subculture with which I didn't really identify. That all came much later. Everyone will deny it now, but at the end of '65 and '66, the Vietnam War was being followed for its progress because most Americans believed in it. I don't remember any people in our community being against until '66.
On the wall of our home room into high school, I remember there being a chart indicating the growth of the number of American troops in Vietnam, and the upward spiral of that line was recognized as a positive development. I had a map on the wall of my room of North Vietnam where I would put pins where there had been bombing raids. There are other Americans who now claim to have been against the Vietnam War who I suspect saw it as a positive element for a long time. For me [a change first] happened with getting out of the community, and going to boarding school.

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