Francine Prose on What 1974 Can Teach Us About 2024

Novelist Francine Prose joins co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to discuss her new book, 1974: A Personal History. Prose talks about her relationship with Tony Russo, who in collaboration with Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, a whistleblowing act which revealed decades of government lies about U.S. involvement in Vietnam; how the politics and progressive activism of today compare to those of half a century ago; and why that year was politically pivotal. She also reflects on how in 1974, the idea of government dishonesty was shocking, whereas today it’s a given. Prose reads from the book.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at 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 that “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 a way, the ’60s were kind of like a dream. I mean, they were kind of like a good dream. And it takes a while to wake up from one. You know, the Patty Hearst kidnapping, which I still think was a big deal, because it somehow allowed the media to cast revolutionaries as these, you know, thugs kidnapping this innocent, white billionaire girl. So that actually happened in 1974, but what was happening was that all those kinds of ideals of, you know, justice and no more war and getting out of Vietnam, etc… It was becoming clear that they weren’t going to happen. They just were not going to happen. And by 1974 you kind of got it that that was the situation. I mean, certainly I got it. So that was kind of a turning point.

V.V. Ganeshananthan: So one person who embodies the anti-war and counterculture spirit of the late 60s and early 70s in your book is Tony Russo, whom you meet in ’74 and end up marrying. Can you talk to us about who he was, why he was anti-war royalty, and what you found attractive about him in those days? 

FP: Yeah, he’d been trained as an aerospace engineer. He was from the South, and he went to work for NASA for a while, and he was a radical. He was already a radical. One of the things that people thought then was that you could – and now it seems really, like, such a dream – but that you could change the culture of an entire institution from the inside. So he decided that he would get hired by the RAND Corporation, which was, of course, a contractor that was working very closely with the Defense Department and the Pentagon. Working there, somehow Tony thought that he would just transform RAND. So he went to RAND, and they sent him to Vietnam to take part in this motivation and morale study, which was designed to figure out what made the North Vietnamese tick and why they didn’t just completely give up and why they were still fighting, etc. And he became even more radicalized. Also, he was working on the Agent Orange and the defoliation program, which was a shocker. I mean, it was pretty shocking. So he became even more radicalized. 

He came back to California, and he was back at RAND, and he met Daniel Ellsberg, who had also been in Vietnam for RAND. Ellsberg had possession of this secret Defense Department report, the so-called Pentagon Papers, that just showed that the American government, the American presidents, had been lying to the American people, just flat out lying, for four or five presidencies about why we were in Vietnam, and what we were doing there. 

Now it seems so historical to say, but people thought that the idea that the government was lying was such a big deal, that it was going to change everything and people were going to take to the streets and the war was going to end. And now it’s a joke, I mean, someone in the government lying. They just run these simultaneous fact checks when politicians are talking because it’s taken for granted that it’s lies. I mean, you don’t run a fact check unless you assume that the person is getting it wrong purposely, or not.

WT: We’re recording on the 11th of August, and former President Trump just gave a long news conference from Mar-a-Lago where he said that his crowd at the insurrection was the same size as Martin Luther King’s crowd during the “I Have a Dream” speech. And that’s just one of many, many lies during that thing, and nobody seemed to do anything at all about it. 

FP: I know, I watched it. For some reason, I’ve become more obsessed with him than I ever have been because it’s just watching something go very badly wrong. I mean, it’s a terrible impulse to want to watch it, but I can’t help it.

VVG: It’s interesting, because the Harris campaign actually fact-checked him by releasing a statement after. I mean, certainly I wouldn’t assume that the Harris campaign or the Biden administration is entirely honest, either. It seems very clear to me, actually, that they’re not. But I thought it was interesting that it’s now normal procedure for the opposition to fact-check you, you know. You give us a speech, and if you say stuff, then they’ll try and say otherwise, but now we have such a decentralized reading culture. Back in the day, you would think if The New York Times ran something, a lot of the public was reading it, and now I’m not sure that that’s true.

I was listening to a friend of mine who’s also been a guest on this show, Sam Freedman. I was talking to him about this interview, and telling him that we were going to chat with you, and he pointed me to a terrific NPR series called Ground Truth that aired three years ago that has all the details of how the Pentagon Papers were leaked. It mentions Tony several times, and it talks about them calculating, ‘We need to tell the public, and there’s a way to do this.’ I was listening to this, and I was screaming. What’s the way now? How do you do that? My Squarespace blog post is not going to do it.

FP: It was a massive scandal. And it went to the Supreme Court. I mean, it became the landmark First Amendment case, and Tony went to jail. I mean, they were initially accused under the Espionage Act, which didn’t happen, but he went to jail for contempt because he refused to testify unless it was an open court. Because, again, he was so messianic about his beliefs that he believed that it was worth it if he could turn the trial into a teaching experience for the American public to tell them about Vietnam and what was going on there. Now, when I look at it, I think no one in Iraq was really doing that. I mean, there wasn’t very much of that that you heard that someone was saying, this is what’s happening there. And now the news is so slanted and so awful that you don’t have people coming out and saying, I was there, and getting a lot of the same kind of attention. I mean, it just doesn’t happen.

WT: The Pentagon Papers revealed, among other things, that the Gulf of Tonkin incident, this supposed attack on a U.S. warship that was the excuse for starting our involvement in Vietnam, although we’d already been involved there, was fake. 

FP: It didn’t happen. I know, I know, it was completely staged. And it’s like Hollywood, like, Wag the Dog, or whatever that movie was where, you know, you just staged these historical events and interventions, and then things follow. No, it’s completely bogus. Tony would just talk and talk about it, and he was very—  It had been years, this was ’74, so he’d gotten back in ’70 or ’69, he’d been back for a while, but he was still very engaged 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. You had a few people like Tony, who were zealots of a certain sort, and then these other guys were just saying, you know, we need to bomb more, we need to drop more napalms.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Vianna O’Hara. Photograph of Francine Prose by Frances F. Denny.

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FRANCINE PROSE:

1974: A Personal History • 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 • J.D. 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” • Ground Truth | NPR • Journey to Italy • Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb • Cato Institute • Pentagon Papers • Espionage Act • Comstock Act • Wag the Dog • Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon