Robert Torricelli page 3

MG: Isn't there counter-culture in your home town in New Jersey?
RT: A little bit. It starts to enter, and of course, the reaction of the community is abject horror. But it is a decided subculture.
By 1968, a confluence of events changed everything in my life. My father became quite ill, and I was removed from public school. There were real strains in my family financially and personally because of his illness, The relatively rural community was now fully suburbanized. Catholics and Jews entered into the community in great numbers. There was a new affluence in the community that had come with the economic development of the region in the '60s. There was a mix of ideas and pressures and outlooks that I had never seen before. Within months, if not within a couple of years, I can remember being terribly confused and feeling the world spin around me. By the time I landed in boarding school in September of 1968, with a small class, but from students all over the country and to some extent around the world, I was aware that a veil was being lifted in front of my eyes.
MG: Where did you go to school? Where was the boarding school?
RT: Storm King in Cornwall, New York.
MG: So practically speaking, how does this lifting of the veil affect you? You've been the President of your class every year since fifth grade, right?
RT: I think...to be trite about it...this is where the strength or the failure of a parental relationship becomes a real value. The way my world was spinning around my head, I was either going to be destroyed, or survive and be much the stronger. I was removed from the only community I ever knew. There were all these social and political changes. Much of my perception of the world was now being challenged. And I land in this new environment with people I'd never met before. Other than at a bus station I had never known anyone who was African-American. There was one Jewish guy in our community. The whole world was now changing. And so many people that I knew either dropped out academically or had real problems with narcotics, or got involved in the subculture and never survived. I witnessed that every day. Anybody who lived in 1968, in those years, witnessed that among their friends in our generation.
Johnny Carson's kid was in our class, and I saw him show up in September with close-cropped hair and blue blazer and tie, and leave in a few months in a scandal and military fatigues, with his hair to his shoulders, and everything in between that could have been wrong, was wrong. I witnessed that a hundred times. That never happened to me.
Essentially it was through the strength of my relationship with my mother that I was able to hold myself. I never participated in narcotics. I had strong feelings about them. I started to recognize some of the untruths about what I had seen of the world, and began to grow intellectually and develop politically, gradually enough that I could accept the change. I didn't fall off a cliff.
Because I think for all the instability in life, a strong parental relationship will help a child do almost anything. I came to believe a lot of things in my life were not as I perceived them. But I believed in that relationship. I never wanted to disappoint my mother. And it was a center of gravity at a time when very few people in our generation had any center of gravity. I was a conservative growing into a liberal. By the spring of 1970--Kent State was what, May 1970?--I'm the President of my class, and I organize a boycott of classes. The headmaster finds out about it the night before, and he has me, two other students and a faculty member in his home at 8 o'clock in the morning before we can organize. The boycott is supposed to start at 8 o'clock. I walk in, and my mother is sitting there. He'd called her during the night. He says to her, "Your son tried to organize a boycott of classes today in reaction to Kent State. We're not going to tolerate that in this school. He's suspended for two weeks." My mother just listens, never says a word, I don't say a word. We get in the car, we start driving home, and she says, "You did a good thing, it was the right thing to do. You have two weeks. Relax, enjoy yourself, you need a rest." And we never talked about it again until the day she died.
MG: So you had in the course of two years...a change was complete here. You joined the rebellion. You left the Empire.
RT: I'm a reflection of everything that happened to our generation at that point in the country. I became against the Vietnam War not because I thought it was wrong to fight the North Vietnamese. I remained strongly anti-Communist. By 1968, to me, the War wasn't worth the price. We were spending American lives to save a country that was not worth saving. So it made me anti-war, but for really a very different rationale.
MG: How did you come to that analysis?
RT: I started seeing people from Franklin Lakes who had been drafted. I followed the news carefully. I was also very caught up in Bobby Kennedy. I was anti-drugs, I was anti- this new music; I didn't like the subculture. It was so alien from our community. So I had a resistance to Eugene McCarthy. But with Robert Kennedy it was different. I didn't feel he was undermining the basic things I believed in in the country. We shared the cultural experience.
MG: He'd had a parallel journey to yours?
RT: Actually identical. I read an interview with Robert Kennedy where they asked him, "You've become this big fighter for civil rights. Well, how come you didn't do this before it became fashionable? You were never a big supporter of civil rights." He said, "I was unaware that there was a civil rights problem." Now, that's a startling statement to make. But you know? That's me!
MG: In boarding school, I assume that as in any collection of adolescents, there were a bunch of cliques. There were the hippies and the druggies and the jocks and the preps. Where were you? Who were you?
RT: That's exactly the way boarding school is. Boarding school had the most intense politics I've ever witnessed in my life. Running for the House of Representatives or the United States Senate, even the internal politics of the Senate, do not compare to the politics of a private men's boarding school. Because you succeed politically in that school, or you are destroyed. I saw students who emotionally could not deal with the social pressures, who became outcasts, who were ostracized. It is a real struggle. It is "Lord of the Flies."
I was aware of it from the day I arrived there. I was saying to myself, "I've got to survive here." And I did it by running for Class President. I ran within two weeks of when I arrived in the school, because I felt I had to. I was in this environment where I didn't know these people.
There was nobody like me, I thought, in the school. Divide and conquer. There were the Arab kids, there were the Oriental kids, there were a lot of Jewish kids, there were the Americans, there were the foreigners, there were the new kids, there were the old kids, there were 15 sub-groups. It was a very small school, with only 140-some students. I allowed each to relate to me. They were each threatened by each other to some extent; none were threatened by me.
MG: Did you worry about being drafted?
RT: I remember talking to my friends, planning how long it would be until we could go. And in athletics, and in our physical conditioning, we related that to this. In my junior year in public school, in a career paper, I wrote a career paper about being a Marine Corps officer. That was my career goal. My mother saw this, and I remember her telling me, "You should see your doctor about your migraine headaches." I said to her, "I don't have migraine headaches." She said, "You're going to get them. It's genetic. You should start seeing the doctor." I'd never had a migraine headache in my life. I remember the doctor saying to me, "What's the matter?" I said, "Nothing." He said, "Well, your mother tells me you have migraine headaches." I said, "Doctor, I've never had a headache in my life." [laughs] And I could see it occur to him, as it slowly began to occur to me, my mother was creating a medical record.
She'd been in the Red Cross in a Navy hospital after the war, and God knows what she had seen. And she knew how the war had psychologically affected my father. Anyway, as it turned out, by the time I was in college, I had lost my enthusiasm for the Vietnam War. But there was a lottery, and I had a very low lottery number.
I painted houses every summer through college. I had a painting company with a friend of mine. We were all on top of ladders painting the second story of a house in Passaic, listening to the Lottery, none of us taking it seriously. It was of no particular consequence. We weren't afraid of the war. We would have preferred not to have to fight, but we weren't upset about it either. I remember those lotteries, and I remember one friend of mine got a very high number, another a very low number, and mine was fairly low. I think they were drafting up to around 10 or 20 or something, and I was in double-digits, so I was gone. But then in '72, Nixon eliminated the draft. They stopped taking people because they had enough volunteers. I missed by a year.
MG: One of the raps against the boom generation is that we were just a bunch of chickenshits who didn't want to go to war, and we were against the war because we didn't want to get drafted, and that once there was no draft, we stopped being political.
RT: Right.

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