David Goldenberg ‘68
Dartmouth College Oral History Program
Dartmouth Vietnam Project
May 15, 2020
Transcribed by Karen Navarro
LUCAS: I’m C.C. Lucas. I’m a Dartmouth College junior in the Class of 2021, and right now I’m at my home in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I’m here with David Goldenberg, who’s Class of ’68, and you’re in Cranston, Rhode Island right now at your home. And we are conducting this interview in the morning of May 15th, 2020, for the Dartmouth Vietnam Project. Yeah, so thank you for being here this morning.
GOLDENBERG: In the middle of the Covid crisis.
LUCAS: Yeah, I know. It is very worth noting that this is in the middle of the pandemic keeping everyone at home. Yeah. So that’s kind of like the biggest thing in people’s lives now. Yeah, thank you for being here and agreeing to talk with me this morning. So, I’d like to start off by asking you to tell me when and where you were born?
GOLDENBERG: I was born in Washington, DC, on November 5th, 1945, at George Washington Hospital.
LUCAS: Did you grow up in Washington, DC, or… because I know you lived in a few places?
GOLDENBERG: Right. I lived in Washington just until the age of two, and in December, 1947, my father was assigned to be one of those setting up the Marshall Plan in France, and actually we left for France about seven or eight months even before the official Marshall Plan was passed by Congress. So, he was actually on the team that defined the thing in Washington. And then, we went to Paris and lived there until I would say the summer of 1955, so seven-and-a-half years. And then we were assigned to Bonn, Germany, for a year-and-a-half, and came back to Washington beginning of 1957, I think it was. So, I grew up basically bilingual, because I was learning French and English simultaneously, going to French schools until about the third or fourth grade.
And I’d say part of the, I guess one important thing to note is just it’s obviously a very different childhood from most Americans. We grew up, I grew up seeing the destruction of World War II. Paris wasn’t harmed, but it was a grey, dirty, run-down city. The effects of the war were still around. I had relatives… My father actually was born in the Ukraine. Well, it’s complicated. It was Russia when he was born there, it was Poland when he left, and now it’s the Ukraine, the same town. This recalls an old Jewish joke about the man who lived in 11 countries but never left his house in Central Europe. But, so we had relatives who had survived the Holocaust in France, and so, I saw them a lot and I knew a lot directly about their Holocaust experiences.
And I don’t know what else, how much more you want me to say about that. It was also in some ways a life of privilege because my father was a high ranking official. We lived in a house that was owned by a niece of the Czar, [laughter] of the late Czar of Russia, and the Countess and her husband lived up in the attic while we occupied the house, which was an incredible turnaround for my father, of course, who was born a very poor person in Czarist Russia.
LUCAS: So, what was growing up for the first almost decade or so of your life in that house like, with some living upstairs? And also, just being in France?
GOLDENBERG: Well, yeah, we actually lived in several different houses. That was one of them. Well, as I say, it was a certain life of privilege because we had servants, we went to fancy restaurants, we mixed with very high ranking French officials and, you know, my friends would be kids from other diplomatic families. Of course, there was a certain sense of displacement because I knew I was an American, but I didn’t really know much about American life. We would come home every two or three years on home leave, take these ocean liners across the ocean and visit for a couple of months. So, I’d see a little bit of American life, and then go back to France. So it wasn’t until I was 11 that I actually lived in America. But, and I have some other friends who grew up the same way, and almost all of us ended up in some kind of international life, because I think all of us lacked a sense of knowing exactly where we belonged.
Yeah, my mother had grown up in America. She’d grown up in Chicago. And, but my father, of course, he had left Europe as a young adult, so he was very much foreign by his background, and then here we were, you know, spending my formative years in Europe, and that’s probably why I ended up spending a number of years in Africa for as to find my own identity.
LUCAS: Yeah, so you were not actually living in America until you were 11. So yeah, so the later part of your life you’re saying was somewhat defined by being introduced to and having a relationship with other places outside the US?
GOLDENBERG: Yes, exactly, exactly.
LUCAS: Can I quickly ask you to name the members of your immediate family and their relationship to you?
GOLDENBERG: Sorry, my current immediate family?
LUCAS: Oh, your family that you grew up with.
GOLDENBERG: Oh, okay. So, my father’s name was Leon Goldenberg, and he was quite an extraordinary… Do you want me to talk about that a little bit or…
LUCAS: Yeah, I would love to—because he was a diplomat and his involvement in the Marshall Plan is very interesting.
GOLDENBERG: Right. So, yeah, he grew up in this small town, about 20,000 people, in what’s now the Ukraine. I have visited there. And he grew up speaking a number of languages, which is typical of people who grow up in an area like that. It’s also typical for young kids in Africa who grew up knowing several languages. And he could learn a language in about two or three months fluently, and he spoke probably 12 languages in all, without accent. And the most I ever got to was six, and I’ve forgotten two of them.
And he left what was then Poland in the early ‘20s, and he worked his way across Europe going to different universities. He started at Warsaw University, and went to Berlin for a while, got a bachelor’s degree from Liège in Belgium, and then he came to Chicago, where he had, his mother’s brothers were living there, and got a master’s from the University of Chicago, and then a Ph.D. from Northwestern [University]. And then he came to Washington before the war started actually, in 1940, to work for the government. And during the war he served—actually he ran a unit that bought critical goods from neutral nations to keep them out of the hands of the Japanese and Germans. So, it was a form of economic warfare.
And he lost several of his family, a number of his family members in the Holocaust. His mother was killed in 1942, a sister; in that town, a sister and her child. Another sister was living in France and she was sent to Auschwitz. And then, several of his siblings luckily had emigrated to Israel, or to Palestine, in the ‘20s and ‘30s. So, the largest surviving parts of that family are in Israel.
My mother grew up in Chicago in I guess a sort of middle class business family. She was a very accomplished actress at the University of Chicago, but when the Depression struck her father lost everything, and she had to drop out and work. And it’s in that period that she met my father and they were married. And she was somebody—it’s too bad—she really could have been a professional actress. A number of people she acted with at the University of Chicago went on to professional careers, and she was, she had a long career as a sort of amateur actress. She acted in Europe and back in the States.
I had a sister named Judith. My mother’s name was Natalie. Natalie Gordon was her birth name. A sister named Judith, who had a back and forth life herself. She of course, she was older than I was. She was about five-and-a-half years older. And, so when we went to Europe, she was already seven years old, went to an international school in Paris, and so, of course, they were very formative years for her in Paris, as well. And she ended up pretty much going back and forth for the rest of her life to Paris. She went to Vassar College [Poughkeepsie, NY], and then right after that went to Paris and worked for several years, lived there. Then she came back to Washington, taught for a while, and then eventually got a job at the US Embassy in Paris working for the defense attaché’s office, and lived there for seven or eight years, always maintaining—had an apartment there that she kept for the rest of her life. She was working for the Defense Intelligence Agency, the DIA, as an analyst. And there’s a shocking part of this. In 1996, she was on a work trip to Cairo and she was murdered.
LUCAS: Yes, I’m very sorry about that. If you don’t want to talk about that, we can move along.
GOLDENBERG: Well, I’ve dealt with it quite a bit through the years, obviously. Right. I mean, I don’t know, if it would be treated differently now, but it was she was murdered by somebody who had just been released from an insane asylum the day before. So, just as she walked into her hotel, which is a place where I knew very well because I used to stay in the hotel right next door to it. I worked in Cairo a lot myself. Somebody must have put him there, but they never established all of that linkage and whether it was just because she was a Western woman or was it specifically because of her role? That was never really clarified. Anyway, so that was—that threw our life into complete upheaval. And anyway, we had to deal with that, and bring my mother up here, who had been living with her. So…
LUCAS: Had you moved to Rhode Island at the time, just to clarify?
GOLDENBERG: Yeah, yeah, no, I had been living in Rhode Island, though traveling for my work a lot, since the mid-‘70s, so something like that, yeah.
LUCAS: Okay. I wanted to ask about, and we can move on from France soon, but it is very interesting. This is an interview for the Dartmouth Vietnam Project, and Vietnam had been French Indochina, so it was a part of a sort of colonial system under France for a long time preceding the Vietnam War. And I don’t expect that that necessarily played into your actual childhood experiences a lot, or even necessarily your impressions of the place. But, I was wondering if you have any ways that might have colored your view, either of France or Vietnam, or the war, or even just colored what you went on to become interested in, anthropology and what-not?
GOLDENBERG: No, actually I have a very, very specific memory. So, it was 1954, and we were living in an apartment on the Avenue Victor Hugo, which is one of the streets coming off the Etoile, where the Arc de Triomphe is. And we had a maid who lived in the apartment, in a, it was a giant room with these grand hallways and so forth. And I remember going to see the maid in the kitchen, and her fiancé was visiting in uniform. He was in the French Army, and he was on leave from Indochina. He was actually fighting in the Indochina War, and he went back just a few days later. And it was about a month or two—I don’t know, I don’t have the sequence exactly right, but it was a month or a couple of months later when the Battle of Dien Bien Phu took place, which was the war that really defeated the French, and he was apparently part of that battle.
And I remember looking at [inaudible] and one of these magazines; you know, all of this was of course tremendous news coverage in France about the war. And so, yeah, I mean, even as a whatever I was then, seven, eight years old, I knew about Vietnam and I knew about the war. And, of course, I’m sure that that colored some of my perceptions. And also… I don’t know, it’s an interesting question, I have to think about it, to what extent I had a notion about colonialism and its effects?
I’ll tell you one story. I was in I guess second grade, I think, in a, it was a public school, French public school, but interestingly, it was, I guess it was in a kind of mixed neighborhood. I mean, we were living on the Boulevard de Clichy in a really nice apartment. I think the Premier lived in the same building. But, nearby, I think, they were low-income neighborhoods. So, this classroom had a mix of students. It had at least one African, maybe a couple of African students, a Chinese student, and there was also one other, there was a French Jewish kid in the class also. And the teacher was a virulent racist, and he would make comments to the students, and I think he would make anti-Semitic comments. They would say a Catholic prayer, I think, to start the day, and the other Jewish kid and I would be sent into the courtyard while they did that, and then came back in. You know, there was a lot of…
LUCAS: You’d be asked to leave during the prayer?
GOLDENBERG: To leave, yeah. We’d be asked to leave. I don’t know if maybe that might have been initiated by my parents even, but… And I remember getting into fights because I remember once they were really attacking this other Jewish kid and I stepped in and there were fights about that. And this teacher, [laughter] I learned my multiplication tables because he would walk down the aisle, first thing when he came in in the morning he’d walk down the aisle and he would just come up behind you and he’d go, “[speaks in French],” and then he’d slap you if you didn’t answer immediately. So…
LUCAS: You had to learn some…
GOLDENBERG: Yes. You’d better learn them and learn them fast. And he had a collection of 14 wooden rulers on his desk, I think they were the kind with the metal thing, and he would throw them at us. Anyway, I just—it really raised my sensitivity to racial discrimination, and of course the way he treated me, but also even worse, he was to the minority kids in this classroom. And, you know, I think I could see how the position of, there were a lot of Algerians, of course, and North Africans from the colonial period living in Paris, and the kind of jobs that they had sweeping the streets and so forth. And I’m sure that my parents also sensitized me to that, particularly my father, of course, because having grown up Jewish in Eastern Europe, he would be very sensitive to all of these issues. So, yeah, that’s important background, I think, to my response to several things that happened in the ‘60s.
LUCAS: Yeah, no, I can completely see that. Wow, yeah, that’s a very vivid sort of classroom experience to have so early. Can I ask about what it was like transitioning back to the United States and to Washington, DC? Or first of all, what year did you move back, just to reiterate?
GOLDENBERG: So, early 1956. I guess I can mention, I had a sort of transitional period because we moved to Germany. My father was the atomic energy officer at the embassy in Bonn in Germany, and of course, that was quite something. Here he was dealing with all these senior German officials, you know, less than, or whatever, 10 years after his own mother had been murdered and other members of his family by Germans. He was fluent in German.
Anyway, so we lived in this American diplomatic community on the Rhine called Plittersdorf, just south of Bonn. So that was kind of my first semi-experience of living in America was this little apartment complex, and they had a, there was a little, you know, like New England white church and there was a Shop American sort of styled shopping center with a kind of drugstore and a movie theater where they would show American films with a 1940s like Batman serial before each movie at the Saturday matinee. So, that was a strange experience. And there was a country club even. I went back there. By strange coincidence my wife’s best friend from Philo, Ohio—she grew up in this little town on the Muskingum River in Appalachian, Ohio, 700 people—her best friend was in the foreign service and was living in that community years later, so we went to visit her, and the country club was still like it was in the ‘50s. All the trees were bigger, but it was still there. Anyway, so that was a kind of strange transition.
So I was really looking forward to coming back to America, and then I came in, we came in ’56, and it was—I don’t know what I expected, but it was a difficult adjustment. I thought it would be… You know, when we would come back, we’d see, you know, we’d fly into New York—or not fly—we’d take these First Class ships into New York, and arrive and there’s all this gleaming stuff. And Washington was nice. I don’t know, I was very disappointed. I missed Europe almost immediately. I felt pretty displaced actually.
And then that was compounded actually. We were there a couple of years. I guess my father would have been on a three-year rotation, I think. He was running the Western Europe branch of what would now be AID [US Agency for International Development]. It was called International Cooperation Administration in those days. But he told me we were, we’d probably be going to either Somalia or Ceylon as his next assignment. And then he died. He had a heart attack, probably brought on by a combination of the overwork that he did during the Marshall Plan and all those fabulous French restaurants he ate in. He was way overweight, you know. He didn’t curb his habits. And, so yeah, he died. He was 54. Died in 1958. So that changed our lives, of course, quite a bit. And so I stayed in Washington for the rest of junior high and high school.
LUCAS: What were those years like? Or what were you going to say?
GOLDENBERG: Well, I mean, you know, those years are tough for most kids, so of course it was hard. It felt like a real economic decline. My mother was very much shaped by her Depression experience, by her own father losing everything, and so, we always lived like we were still in a depression. She would have been right and ready for this situation, you know. She always had a closet packed with canned goods. And…
LUCAS: She’d be very ready for what, the pandemic?
GOLDENBERG: For the pandemic. She already had been stocked up, yeah, yeah. And I kind of carry that habit from her. We were a bit ready. But we did… there’s a sort of strange part of it all. My parents had a lot of close friends who ended up having very high positions in the Kennedy Administration, old friends mostly from Chicago. And I don’t know, it’s quite possible that he would have had a high position if he had lived. So, in those years we would go to parties with very high ranking officials or go to events with his… Just about his best friend was a man named Arthur [J.] Goldberg, who he was named Secretary of Labor under [John F.] Kennedy, and then Kennedy appointed him to the Supreme Court, and then [Lyndon B.] Johnson convinced him to leave the Supreme Court to be UN ambassador, which was a big mistake. And he did it so he could name a good friend of his named Abe Fortas to the Supreme Court. But, you know, as an example, we would go have a Passover Seder at the Goldbergs with half the Supreme Court.
So, and also I went to a high school in northwest Washington called Wilson High School. It’s another very strange situation. It was, I mean, you know Washington is—well, I don’t know what the racial proportion is these days. There was a point when it was about 75% black, but northwest Washington was entirely white. So, Washington in those days had something like 13 high schools, and they were, let’s say, 11 or 10 that were completely black, there were two that were 60/40, something like that, one called Coolidge and the other one was Western High School, which was in the Georgetown area. And our high school, Wilson High School, had one black kid.
LUCAS: Just one?
GOLDENBERG: Yeah, just one, because it was neighborhood schooling. There was a little tiny enclave, like four or five houses that dated from post-Civil War that were black families that lived off Wisconsin Avenue, and those were the only black people in the school district. So yeah, there was this one black kid. And that all changed the year after I graduated. But it was a very, so it was a very elite school. I think at the time it had the highest Ph.D. production rate in the country. So, it was the business community a very high proportion Jewish; diplomats’ kids, it was about 10% were foreign students, diplomats’ kids; and the Cabinet kids. The son and daughter of the Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, whose son was in my class. And, you know, so we had all these connections. The parents who would come and give us little career talks were the Secretary of State or, strangely enough, Red Auerbach, who was a—I don’t know if you know who that is—he was the coach of the Boston Celtics, the greatest winning coach in history. His family lived in the neighborhood.
And so, in high school, we were, even though we were in this really privileged situation, we knew it, and we started to look around. And a bunch of us got, organized ourselves. I forgot whether I—I must have started in my sophomore year—we formed an organization called High School Students for a Better Education, and it was an organization across the high schools of Washington to lobby for more money for the schools in the black neighborhoods, because, you know, our high school was fine, and of course it had a parent association that would channel money into the school. But, we’d go visit these schools that just had—the books were terrible, the physical conditions, leaking pipes and all kinds of bad physical conditions.
And in those days, there was no DC city government. The budget was passed directly by the Senate and House District Committees. There were committees that formed the budget of the city. And of course, who’s running the Senate, who’s the chair of the Senate District Committee is Strom Thurmond, who was this total racist segregationist from South Carolina, I think. So, we would go and do a lot of publicity, we’d get the television stations and the newspaper to cover the stuff we were doing. And we actually testified before the House and Senate committees about this stuff. And it actually, when I had my—I had my dints of timing—I had my Dartmouth interview, I remember, with these two kind of young Dartmouth graduates, and yeah, it was like the day before I was going to testify. So, that made a certain impression.
LUCAS: Wow.
GOLDENBERG: And then, a bunch of us actually from Wilson said, “Hey, we want to transfer to a black high school.”
LUCAS: You said… [inaudible]
GOLDENBERG: Sorry?
LUCAS: When you were a senior in high school?
GOLDENBERG: Yeah, I think I was, yeah, that might have been the beginning of senior year. And they wouldn’t let us do that. And by then I was also, I was a member of the Congress of Racial Equality, CORE, which was a civil rights organization, and so we would go and do different kinds of activities. We’d check out whether businesses were equitable in their treatment of customers, whether restaurants are opened to black people or mixed couples. We’d have demonstrations in front of businesses. And yeah, that actually was, I spent a lot of my time doing that junior and senior year. I actually was pretty heavily involved in manning phone banks before the March on Washington the summer of ’63. People were calling from all over the country. Stuff like that. So that, yeah, that was a lot of the background before coming to Dartmouth.
LUCAS: How did your interest in Dartmouth begin? Was it when you were in high school?
GOLDENBERG: Yeah. For some reason… I guess a number of students from previous classes had gone to Dartmouth, so there was a very favorable view of the school, in the high school. I remember I had a job in a supermarket and I remember working with a guy who was like a year or two ahead of me who went to Dartmouth, and he loved it, and he was from my high school. I had a really… I don’t know, I didn’t get good adult guidance on making college choices. But of course, my mother didn’t want me to go away at all, and she didn’t want me to go someplace that was going to cost any money.
But, I got it into my head, you know… Many, if not most of my friends in high school were girls, were women, and somehow it got into my head that if I really wanted to study hard, I should go to a male school, [laughter] yeah, that I would apply myself better. And that was just a gigantic error. So I applied to all these male schools: Trinity [College, Hartford, CT], Hamilton [College, Clinton, NY], Wesleyan [University, Middletown, CT]. And, you know, even, I had… Arthur Goldberg was at the Supreme Court and this little group came through touring from Hamilton College and he said, “Oh, I just wrote a recommendation for David. I better be nice to these people and talk him up a little bit.” Well, I didn’t get into Hamilton. And it’s a little bit of a mystery that why wouldn’t get into a place like that rather than Dartmouth? I don’t know if you’re aware, but at the time there were what was called a “Jewish quota,” which was that schools really limited the number of Jewish students they were going to take. It was kind of the period when it was being phased out, and it wasn’t in place at Harvard, which meant that Harvard… You know, it was the same phenomenon as all the concern about Asians, overrepresentation of Asians and Asian-Americans at schools now. But, the rumor was that Dartmouth’s quota was about 14%.
LUCAS: Was that considered to be high or low?
GOLDENBERG: Well, considering that I think the Harvard population at some point was like, the undergraduates were, I don’t know, 35% or 40%. It was ridiculously high at some point, yeah. And that’s what they were worried about. And of course, what do you call it, legacy, of course, doesn’t work for Jewish students, because there were hardly any in earlier generations. Anyway, so, but that was part of the picture.
LUCAS: So you ended up… That’s very interesting. So, were you aware of these factors while you were applying to and choosing college as something that was dictating where you would end up?
GOLDENBERG: No.
LUCAS: Or it more in retrospect?
GOLDENBERG: No, I wasn’t aware of it at the time at all. Only when I got to Dartmouth and started talking to other people, and also heard anti-semitic remarks, that I did become aware of it. And also started to puzzle out, you know, why would I not—why would I get into Dartmouth, but not into these other places that are not at all as, you know, that were easier, I suppose it would be easier for most people to get into, you know?
LUCAS: Yeah, less competitive.
GOLDENBERG: Right, they were less competitive, exactly. Right.
LUCAS: You attended Dartmouth starting in the fall of 1964, through 1968.
GOLDENBERG: Right.
LUCAS: You want to talk about your time there? Because I know that you had a very interesting career there and a lot of opinions you mentioned like of the school while you were there. So, if you just want to talk about your general impressions of Dartmouth… [inaudible]
GOLDENBERG: Yeah, so, I never visited the school before I came.
LUCAS: It was far.
GOLDENBERG: Yeah, it was far, you know, and it was expensive. And I didn’t actually get any financial aid from Dartmouth, because my mother didn’t know how to play the game, you know? How to… She didn’t—we were still renting—she didn’t buy a house, which we all know now is you build debt to get a scholarship. So I had a real close friend whose father owned this gigantic pharmacy in Los Angeles. He was on a scholarship because his father’s money was all tied up in the business. [laughter] So, there I am. I only, I had an Optimist Club of Northwest Washington scholarship, $500 a year, which was a quarter of my tuition.
LUCAS: Your tuition was $2,000 a year?
GOLDENBERG: That’s right. Right. So, when I arrived, I actually, I grew a beard the summer before I came, and when I arrived, I was probably one of maybe 10 students on campus who had a beard. So, that immediately—you know, I was this beatnik—that immediately marked me. And what else can I remember? I ran… You know, I’d been elected to some student offices in high school. Of course, you know, everybody who comes to Dartmouth, you come, everybody’s a star where they are, so you come to this place where everybody’s a star, been a star.
And it’s funny. What I remember, one thing I do remember is the summer before, between my junior and senior as a high school, I went to a National Science Foundation summer program for the social sciences. And that just was fantastic. It was at Goucher College [Towson, MD], north of Baltimore, and it was faculty members teaching us anthropology, economics, sociology, I think that was it, yeah, and exposing us to ideas and works, and it was great. And especially in that summer of civil rights and everything that was going on. So, I was so charged up to go study.
And then, Dartmouth sent out books for us to read, and one of them was Andre Malraux’s Man’s Fate, and it was this terrific book. And you arrive and, you know, you’re going to have, the first thing is during the orientation week you’ve got to meet and talk about the book. So I remember there was that, there was that exciting intellectual challenge that was coming. And then, they have this freshman rally where they’re shouting all this stuff about how, you know, “We’re the greatest class in the history of humanity, with more football captains and more merit scholars than ever was seen before.” You know, it sounded like a Trump speech. And then everybody goes roaring out onto The Green screaming, you know, “We’re the Great ’68,” and all this nonsense.
LUCAS: Was this on homecoming? I was just wondering.
GOLDENBERG: No, no, no, this was during the freshman orientation week.
LUCAS: Oh, still orientation, correct?
GOLDENBERG: Right. So we’re the only ones on campus. And what I’m trying to get across here is the contrast of this intellectual stimulation, which is what I was really excited about, and then this kind of jingoistic macho buildup which dominated things for me at Dartmouth. It was a real push-pull thing, you know? That you’d try to identify with this how great we are and what a great school it is and…
LUCAS: Did you identify with that?
GOLDENBERG: Well, sure, I could get out there and scream with the rest of them, you know. But, I think it was a struggle through… And it just sparked another memory, which was of… So, right after that, the upper class—so, we had to wear beanies in those days. Do you know about this?
LUCAS: No, I don’t think I know about this.
GOLDENBERG: You don’t know? Okay. Gees, I must have it somewhere. I still have my freshman beanie. It was like a crew hat, kind of short thing, and it says “1968 Green and White,” and you were required to wear that all the time, so that you were marked as a freshman. And what that meant was, when the upperclassmen arrived, when you were walking around campus, they could just grab you and make you carry their things up to their room when they were moving into the dorms, or grabbed you and forced you to do some other kind of task. It was kind of like hazing, but it was to reinforce your freshman status. I mean, I don’t know if you heard—there’s a long-standing tradition at the military academies where the plebes have to do all these things. Well, it was like that. So, you know, suddenly you had…
And you had to wear that beanie all the time until the weekend of the Harvard game, when there was a tug-of-war between the freshman class and whoever else wanted to show up from the other classes. And if you… Only the year before, a lot of upperclassmen showed up and the freshmen lost, which meant that they had to wear their beanies for like another extra month.
LUCAS: Oh, my goodness.
GOLDENBERG: Oh, yeah, yeah. And before I forget, there’s another whole… So, it was all just part of this macho manliness thing. In the spring there was this other ritual where you came out of classes and they suddenly announced, I don’t know what it was called, but basically the freshmen had to run through a gauntlet of upperclassmen who whipped us with belts. Yeah, and that was all fine, but one guy was using his buckle, so he got chastised. That, you know, that was just a little above, too much. But, yeah, here we were running down this gauntlet while these guys are whipping us. This is making us men, making us the Dartmouth men.
LUCAS: Did you feel like that was explicitly the message behind why all these things happened and appeared to happen without any pushback from administration? But, was that sort of… The idea was that you’re turning these students into men?
GOLDENBERG: I think so. I think so. That was just very much part of Dartmouth tradition and, along of course with all this misogynist stuff of, you know, “Dartmouth’s in town again. Run girls run! Dartmouth’s in town again. Fun girls fun!” And it didn’t take long for me to feel like I made a big mistake here. I mean, I was torn. I was very torn. The academic part was great. I loved my classes. I had some really good relationships with faculty members. You know, I could see—I’d go visit my friends at Harvard, and of course, they’ve all got girlfriends, they’ve got women in their classes, they’ve got a city. But on the other hand, they’re being taught by graduate assistants. And I could see, Well, wait a minute, I don’t think that what they’re getting is quite as good as what I’m getting, from an academic standpoint. But, yeah, I was not happy.
And I was in a suite in one of those, in the Choate dorms. There were seven of us in there. I had a guy from New Hampshire from a prep school. I’d never met anybody from a prep school before in my life. And we didn’t get along at all. He was my roommate. And then, you know, everybody got drunk and threw up the first weekend except me and there was one other guy in suite who grew up—he had just come from Singapore. He grew up in Asia his whole life. So, we sort of, we formed a bond. But, yeah, it was a very troubling environment. And yeah, and I remember going to talk a lot to the—there was a faculty advisor for the dorms, a sociologist, guy named Tario, and I remember going to talk to him a lot, just because of my sense of displacement.
On the other hand, this was the first time I’d ever lived outside of a city, you know, so I loved nature, I loved the beauty of the area, and yeah, it was a lot, there were a lot of other things to like, yeah.
LUCAS: Yeah, you mentioned that you had a little bit of exposure to anthropology, which is what you got your bachelor’s degree in, before you were at Dartmouth, but you said that the academics were pretty stellar, or at least what you needed. Do you want to elaborate on your academic experience?
GOLDENBERG: Yeah. Well, I guess what sticks with me eventually was, of course, because my father was an economist, I thought that’s something I might major in, and my mother thought I should major in something serious like economics. [laughter] But, I took a lot of… I’m trying to remember things that particularly influenced me. History of religions courses, fantastic literature courses with a guy named Peter Bien, who I kind of, I knew socially actually some years later. He was a translator for [Nikos] Kazantzakis, the Greek author.
And then, I gravitated towards anthropology, and it was a funny little department. There was a real Dartmouth, classic Dartmouth, you know, Dartmouth grad, Dartmouth type archeologist, Elmer Harp [Jr.], who to me just represented the kind of classic Republican Dartmouth faculty member and all the Dartmouth values, and an old ethnographer named Bob [Robert A.] McKennan, who studied the Athapascans in the tundra in Canada.
And then, this guy named James [W.] Fernandez, who was an Africanist, and much younger than these other guys. And he became my advisor, and actually I almost became part of his family. I would spend a lot of time at his house, you know, and that was a big, big part of my survival there, I think, and part of that idea that ended up with my proposing in the middle of my junior year, “Let me go do independent research in Africa,” which I think I should mention that Dartmouth was training Peace Corps volunteers in those days for West Africa. And, so they…
And I’m not sure how this exactly worked, because I knew I would overlap with them, so probably it was mostly during the summer, but there must have been some other overlap because… maybe I met some of the staff people and stuff when they would be there before the training. Whenever it was, I met them and, you know, that gave me the idea of going to Senegal, because there was somebody on the staff who was going to be in Senegal and could help me out when I got there, and also give me some context.
So I went to the Anthropology Department and said, “Look…” And you’ve got to know, it’s winter at Dartmouth, I don’t like the place anyway, [laughter]. “Let me go to Africa.” And, of course, I spoke French. So, nobody had ever done this before, and Jim Fernandez supported me, and amazingly the administration agreed that I could, instead of paying them tuition, I could use the money for my travel and living expenses to go do this. And so, I took off at the end of winter term and flew to Paris, which was the first time I’d been back there since, so this is 1967, first time I’d been back since ’55. And stayed with old family friends and saw the family I had there. And then, I flew into Dakar Airport like at 3:00 in the morning, took a bus, an old country bus into the center of town, and sort of plopped myself down outside the American Embassy, which was just on this city square, and went in there to register and tell them I was here to do this.
And then I went over to the Peace Corps office and met somebody who let me stay with them, you know, somebody who worked in Dakar, and then suggested I go to this town called N’Jalal, where there were a couple of volunteers teaching. And I went down the coast, and these two teacher volunteers took me in. And then, I spent several months there doing research on religious life. And it was a very interesting area because it was—Senegal is about 85 to 90% Muslim, but it’s a very idiosyncratic form of Islam. There are great religious leaders called Mourides, kind of—they’re sects almost that are headed by these great leaders. And Islam typically is not hierarchical like that at all.
So, and then the area where I was, there was a little village that was an island in a sea estuary called Fadiouth, and that village was almost entirely Catholic, and as were a lot of the Serer people. So anyway, I did this research kind of on the interaction of how… what I found is that everybody used elements of Islam, Catholicism, and traditional religion in their lives, for different purposes. And so, as one of my interview techniques, I would go and interview people of power, and the problem that I would pose to them was: “When I graduate next year from college, I may be facing the problem of being drafted into the Army, and what can you do—and having to go to war—what can you do for me in your powers?” And so I would get a very practical application and answer.
And one person who had, an Islamic practitioner who had actually studied at the university in Cairo, he was going to do a very elaborate astrological chart for me to predict what would happen. And others, the people in Senegal and throughout West Africa, use what are called gris-gris, which are talismans. If you see children in pictures, they might have five or six of these things. Usually they’re covered in a little metal box on a necklace, and there’ll be a prayer inside in Arabic that protects them against a specific disease, or it may enhance their powers when they go to take an examination, or it may protect them from witchcraft. But you have to get something that’s very specific.
So, of course, Vietnam was very much on my mind when I was doing this, and I have my—I’ll show it to you later—I still have… I went to somebody who was a very recognized marabout, and he made up this gris-gris for me, but it’s a set of, it’s a collection of herbs stuffed into a ram’s horn, and then he attached his Islamic prayers to it. So he’s combining the elements of traditional naturalistic powers and Islamic prayers. And then it was all sewn, beautifully sewn. And it was, by local standards, quite expensive. So, this is supposed to protect me in the situation that I was going to encounter.
And some of the people that I interviewed would say, “Yes, this is not an unfamiliar situation to us because our men were drafted during World War II from Senegal to fight…” You know, first they were drafted by the Vichy, and then later by the Free French to fight in the war. “So yes, we know this problem and we’ll address it.” And of course, it worked. [laughter] So, I had it with me. I took it back to Dartmouth and I had it with me—I don’t think that I took it with me when I went for my Army physical. I’m trying to remember if that was the case or not.
Now, they warned me also that, you know, these things have a lot of power, and so, while this can prevent a lot of—you have to be careful, because this can prevent a lot of, the bad things from happening to you, but they also can prevent some good things from happening to you. That’s the nature of power. So, that part I don’t quite know how to interpret. I had it with me all my time in Kenya, and I certainly had it when I took a long motorcycle trip after my service in Kenya, all alone across Asia. But, anyway, that’s an illustration that by that time certainly I was thinking a lot about the war.
LUCAS: Yeah. It was sort of almost like the framework for your research, not your underlying research question, but how you did your research, so…
GOLDENBERG: Right. Well, it was a mechanism. It was a personal entrée into the powers and into understanding how people handle practical problems.
The other thing I wanted to mention at Dartmouth, I don’t know if this is going to be one of your questions, is about, you know, how early was my opposition, I guess, to the war? That would be one thing. Is that one of the questions you were going to ask? Or how were you going to phrase it?
LUCAS: Yeah. I was wondering what campus was like during the Vietnam era? And then also, once you were immersed in that space, you know, between ’64 and ’68, a lot changed in Vietnam…
GOLDENBERG: Right, right.
LUCAS: …how your perspective, and even like feelings and emotions might have transformed? And I also wanted to ask about your senior year. But I would love to hear about Vietnam and Dartmouth, and how those two worked together in your mind? Yeah.
GOLDENBERG: Right. Yeah, so, I think what I’d say is, when I got there, I found Dartmouth to be a very, very conservative place. It was very WASPy [White Anglo-Saxon Protestant]. The faculty exuded this Republican establishment orientation. There’s a certain arrogance. You know, I’d see these guys, there were particular economics and political science faculty who would go down to Washington and consult or testify, and there was something about living in this isolation that just exacerbated their sense of privilege and, you know, that they weren’t—they didn’t live in a city where a lot of people would question them. They lived among a bunch of 20-year-olds, 18- to 20-year-olds who didn’t question them at that time, right?
LUCAS: Yeah.
GOLDENBERG: And the whole fraternity structure seemed like a political reinforcement. Of course they’d have whatever, they’d have some little charity drive or something. But just the message that came out of those places was one of kind of brutality actually. Another part of the whole freshman year nonsense was that when the fraternities were doing their pledging, pledge drives, they would come to a dorm to kidnap a pledge, to put them through some kind of torture. And as freshmen, we were supposed to defend the pledge. That was part of the tradition. So that would get kind of semi-violent sometimes, you know, almost fights about this. So there’s this whole macho environment around all that.
And, you know, the Animal House, there was, whatever that was, TKE [Tau Kappa Epsilon] fraternity, his famous Animal House really did exist. That was the model for the film now, and the book that was about it. And a lot of drinking. You’d hear jokes about women getting drunk and being found in a closet, you know, in a fraternity house after a weekend, and just a lot of laughing about what essentially was rape. It wasn’t called that in those days. It was just all good fun. So, all of that to me, that was the dominant ethos on campus.
Now, not to say I didn’t get caught up in the fantastic football season. We had an undefeated football season my sophomore year, and I went to games and I got all caught up in that, and I even remember playing catch with the star quarterback in the hallway of his dorm. But, yeah, it’s right. We were playing catch and he made some comment about “hey, you could be pretty good if you’d shave that beard off” [laughter] or some nonsense like that.
So, I think the overarching point I want to make is how the war really transformed all of that, the war and I think also to some extent the civil rights movement had an effect as well, because then we started to get visits. I mean, people couldn’t be immune to what was going on nationally, completely immune, although Dartmouth can be the kind of place where you can be really cut off from stuff. But, we started to have leaders of the civil rights movement who would come and speak. And I remember I was part of a committee that brought in Stokely Carmichael and several other people from SNCC [Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee], and we were sitting around having breakfast with them, and then a talk which, I’m trying to remember, you know, maybe a couple hundred people came. It wasn’t a big turnout. That started to have some influence.
And, now I personally had… you know, I was close to people in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, so I would hear, when I’d go home I’d hear their arguments for the war. But, I was reading critical things in Foreign Affairs and others, and yeah, I would have arguments with Arthur Goldberg, who was by now the US Ambassador to the UN, about the war. And on campus we started to have, it was a Quaker-sponsored lineup at, I think it was on Thursday at noon every week, where you would line up. There was a flagpole on The Green. There was a flagpole at the whatever that is, the Western Inn [Hanover Inn], the middle of The Green, the Western Inn.
LUCAS: Yeah.
GOLDENBERG: So, you would line up by the flagpole for an hour to… [pause in tape]
LUCAS: Are you okay?
GOLDENBERG: Yeah, all right. Yeah, I don’t know why that should make me so emotional, but…
LUCAS: Do you need to take a minute?
GOLDENBERG: No, no, I’ll stick with that thought. So we would line up, you know, and there would be several faculty members and a few students, and at the beginning it could be 12 or 20, you know, very, very, few. And this was a national demonstration every week. And of course, it grew, kind of week by week. But, I was part of that, I think, very early on. I remember also going to a little march in New York with Ginsberg, Allen Ginsberg. It was just Allen Ginsberg and me and about, I don’t know, 10 or 20 other people. That’s how small these things were in those days. In lower Manhattan somewhere. I can’t even remember what we all did, you know, walking, demonstrating about the war.
I do remember, and this must have been junior year, the Director of the Selective Service came and gave a talk, of the draft. You know, Selective Service is the draft. He was a retired Army general. And he was such a buffoon, really. I mean, he’d already been sort of a strange character on television interviews and such. But, I think that may have affected a lot of people, is to say, “Well, wait a minute. This idiot could be—is in charge of the system that is gonna determine my fate.” But I do remember that. And that was in the Hop [Hopkins Center], and it was a big—the place was packed. Everybody was interested. Because now it was getting personal.
Now, I knew friends who were in the ROTC program, and one of them was somebody I’d known in high school, who ended up serving as a Marine in Vietnam, you know, who were still, they were all in. They weren’t going to question. I also want to mention another incident that sort of reflects on the changes. So, you know what parietal hours are?
LUCAS: Not very well. I’ve heard, of course.
GOLDENBERG: You’ve heard of them. Okay, so, the regulation in those days that your women guests were allowed in your dorm room for whatever it is, like four hours or something on a Saturday. And we had been—this was junior year, and I was rooming with a guy named Myles Schlossberg, Jewish guy from Brooklyn, from a really tough section of Brooklyn actually, very big guy, 6’3”. I think his father may have had some Mob connections. And then, and the other roommate was also Jewish, named Jonathan Agronsky [‘68], whose father was a famous newscaster. And, you know, we had this suite, kind of corner suite that had two rooms and a little bathroom.
So, we were having girls coming, and even staying overnight. And we were aware there was some, several other—there was some strong anti-semitism in that dorm, several guys who didn’t like us because we were Jewish, and also because we had girls, I think. So one night, Myles had his girlfriend from Wellesley in there, and the campus cops came, and they said, “All right, you have to take her back to where she’s supposed to be staying.” And as he left he saw one of the guys that we knew didn’t like us quickly closing his door. So, Myles took the girl back to where she was supposed to be staying. He came back. He went to the door of this guy, knocked on the door and said, “Campus police,” and the guy opened up and Myles just creamed him. And the guy went running out to Dick’s House with a bloody nose. So, Myles came up for a trial on this charge of breaking the parietal rules. And prior to this, you broke those rules, you were expelled. That was the rule. And I don’t know what—does the Palaeopitus exist anymore on campus?
LUCAS: It does. It’s a non-secret senior society that does work on campus.
GOLDENBERG: Okay. But, in those days, well, it wasn’t secret. And I don’t know, I think the administration appointed who was on there. So, but they operated as the student court, and they were going to render judgment in this case. And so, here’s this, so here’s Myles and he’s facing this, I don’t know how many there were, like seven people, something like that, on Palaeopitus. And basically it was like five [inaudible] fraternity guys, Bob Reich [Robert Reich (’68)]. You know who Bob Reich is?
LUCAS: No. Who is Bob Reich?
GOLDENBERG: Oh, then I’ll have to tell you who Bob Reich is. Okay, and then a guy named Buddy Noel [Edmund F. “Buddy” Noel, Jr. (’68)], who was from our class who was black. And Bob Reich, he was in our class. Bob Reich was “Mr. Everything” in our class. He was president of our class, and then he went on to be the president of the whatever, student body. He did all kinds of incredible things as a student leader, he was a Secretary of Labor under [President Bill] Clinton, and he’s now, he teaches at Berkeley and he’s constantly commenting on the horrors of what’s going on in the Trump Administration. But, we all thought he was going to be President, despite the fact that he’s less than five feet tall. He had a birth, sort of birth deformity. And at the reunion, the 50th reunion, I was telling him this story. He didn’t remember it.
So, Schlossberg comes up for trial before this Palaeopitus, and you know, they normally would throw him out. But, Stu Bussey [Stuart A. Bussey (’68)], who’s a physician in California, and I mounted this defense and said, “Look, you throw him out, you’re sending him to Vietnam. Have you guys dealt with this before? Are you ready to take on that responsibility?” And, so they suspended him for a year-and-a-half, or yeah, something like that. A year, maybe a year and a trimester or something like that. And that was kind of the beginning of the end for parietals, because by a year later, everyone was ignoring them, and then I guess formally maybe the next year they were just abolished. But, that was all part of the social change that was going on on campus.
LUCAS: What would you say…
GOLDENBERG: Oh, wait, there’s an addendum to that. So, as I mentioned to Bob Reich, “So here you guys are putting him on trial for breaking the parietal rules,” I said. “The fact that he smashed this guy’s face in and sent him off to the clinic,” I said, “that never came up.” He said, “No, of course not. We probably would have rewarded him for that, yeah. That was Dartmouth atmosphere. You just ignored that kind of stuff.” [laughter]
LUCAS: It doesn’t play any kind of role.
GOLDENBERG: No, not at all. [laughter]
LUCAS: Well, it’s funny, I was going to ask you before what did you think the values of the college were at the time? So maybe, I kind of understand the value in terms of what they turned a blind eye to. What about with Vietnam happening? Did they seem to have stances or any way that they related to or against the student body as Vietnam grew?
GOLDENBERG: Well, yeah. I mean, we just started to have more and more on campus activities outside of classes that were discussions and education. We had outside speakers who would come in. And then, of course, in senior year was the New Hampshire primary. And I don’t know if you… Gene [Eugene] McCarthy, who was a Republican senator from Minnesota, was running—I’m sorry, Democratic, he was, yeah, no, a Democratic senator from Minnesota, was running against Johnson. And, of course, the New Hampshire primary in those days was still the first primary. So, I did not—the phrase was “come clean for Gene,” which was you were supposed to shave your beard—I did not shave my beard, so I didn’t go out to canvas or the public, but I did work in the office. And I think a lot of students got involved in that. So, that had a big effect.
Yeah, I could see things changing. I suppose, you know, as our class progressed through, and I do think we came in very much influenced by civil rights. I think that probably shaped us much more than a lot of previous classes. And it just was becoming such a different place, even by… So, when I left, you know, when those demonstrations on The Green, when I left in whatever that was, March of ’67, they were getting to be pretty long and well-attended. And actually, that culminated… I was away. I heard about this because I was in Senegal. By May or so there was a point at which the—and I’m sure other people have talked about this in interviews—there was a long, quite a number of people lined up. So, the call went out for people to line up for the war, and they came and they lined up opposite them. And then, sorry… It’s moving even though I wasn’t there. So, people came and lined up, and the story was, it wound all the way across The Green and then continued like through the campus, where people lined up on either side. And it was like half and half.
LUCAS: It was about half and half?
GOLDENBERG: Yeah. I mean, you have to remember, even throughout the war, the country was really split, and that was still true even… I mean, Dartmouth had its conservative traditions and, you know, had a lot of people who came from these kind of backgrounds, and so they weren’t going to go against their families. And of course, you know, this is leaping ahead a little bit, but this was replicated by our graduation. I guess we had green gowns in those days, right? They must still be in green gowns.
LUCAS: Gowns are black now, but they might have been…
GOLDENBERG: Oh, really? Yeah, no, they were green. So, at graduation those of us against the war wore, we wore black armbands. And the graduation was in front of Baker Library, right up close. The stage was like right in front of the library. And Jamie [James W. Newton (’68)]—I’m blocking his name now, I mean, I just saw him at the reunion—our valedictorian, he gave a really strong anti-war speech. And the parents and the alumni all started booing, and the sounds were just ricocheting because, you know, it’s kind of an enclosed space there with those side buildings, so it’s just the boos and the shouting, and we were all standing up shouting at them. You know, it was just like nearly a riot. And I don’t know how many there were, again, probably it was half of us, maybe more by that time, probably more, in the class. And here it was, the class against the parents and the alumni, you know, who were still supporting the war.
And then the guest speaker was Jacob Javits, who was the senior senator from New York. And he tried to—and he actually, I think, had already started to come out against the war himself, but he was just trying to reconcile, you know, when it came time for his speech, to find some kind of note of reconciliation, but there wasn’t any. You know, you were either against it or you were for it.
LUCAS: So, I mean, I’m sure you were not expecting that at a graduation?
GOLDENBERG: No, I think we were, because we knew about Jamie’s speech…
LUCAS: Before he gave it?
GOLDENBERG: Yeah, before he gave it. You know, and the other thing, of course, that should be mentioned in this is, you know, we had the great traditions. Do you still go to the Old Oak and smoke the pipes?
LUCAS: No.
GOLDENBERG: My goodness, you don’t…
LUCAS: No. Do you want to explain what that is?
GOLDENBERG: Oh, my God. So, there’s the stump of the old pine or whatever that’s the symbol on the Dartmouth crest, up in that area somewhere up behind Dartmouth Hall up on a hillside there. So, one of the old traditions was the class on that morning, you’d go up and they’d give out these long old 18th century pipes made out of clay, with a little tiny bowl at the end, you know, like that. And they’d give you tobacco. But we brought our own stuff to smoke, and I don’t know if the previous class had ever done this, but most of us were smoking dope, marijuana, out of those pipes. And then the tradition is you smoke the pipe, and then you smash the pipe on the old pine. [laughter]
LUCAS: Oh, so you’d shatter it?
GOLDENBERG: You’d shatter it, yeah. They’re made to be shattered. And it was this tradition. That’s interesting that that’s gone away, yeah. That was a quaint old tradition, I guess. As colonial gentlemen, that’s what we did. But, my point being that, of course, that was part of campus culture that had completely changed, was now the presence of marijuana. There probably was some LSD around, but not that much. It was prior to the… but there was a lot of marijuana.
LUCAS: So, okay, so this year of 1967—is 1968—is really, like it sounds like things are already very different on campus, or sort of maybe things that have been there for a while are at war with things that are coming into the campus culture and community. And then 1968, so much happens that year. You know, there’s MLK’s assassination, Bobby Kennedy, and the draft. You don’t have to speak to all of that, but you’re graduating into a big year. I know that junior year you had been living off campus with a family. So, how did you sort of see, between being in that environment, like living with that family, and being ready to enter into this world that’s changing a lot, especially in the US and it’s relations? What were your thoughts? What were you experiencing?
GOLDENBERG: So, I’m also thinking about something else, which was that that year I was in Senegal, I was still in Senegal in June when the 1967 war exploded in Israel. And the Senegalese had mixed feelings about it, it was interesting. You know, it was a Muslim majority, vastly majority Muslim country, but there was still some considerable sympathy for Israel. And I actually, after I left Senegal, I traveled through Europe and I went to Israel. I ended up in Israel in ’67, in August of ’67, the first time I’d been there, to visit my family there. And, of course, I had been just elated at the results. You know, it seemed like Israel was going to be destroyed, and then here they had this overwhelming victory in six days, and I got all carried away with everything.
But, when I went to Israel, I started seeing things that already started to disturb me a lot. I went and—I guess as background I should explain. My uncle and my father lived through the Russian Revolution, so they had been very much affected by that, because their status as Jews in the Czarist empire was very, very low, and there were pogroms and it was dangerous, and Communism really offered, seemed to offer at the time, tremendous transformation. So, when my uncle went to Israel, he carried with him—he didn’t ever join the party, but he had very strong socialist and Communist sympathies. And he lives on a kibbutz. My father, of course, I never got to discuss with him these things. I mean, obviously, I knew that he had friends who probably were Communists in the ‘30s, and but that he never was… and we were really sensitive to the McCarthy era.
But anyway, my first cousins, my uncle’s two daughters, they both joined the Communist Party in Israel, which actually the party split over that war, because before it was very much an Arab and Jewish joint party, and then suddenly because of the war it split. But anyway, he took me down to the Gaza Strip, and we could see all these Egyptian tanks that had been blown up and railway. I have a lot of pictures that I took. But, I also, I was really disturbed by how some of the Israeli soldiers were treating the population, and were bullying them and pushing them around. And, you know, I really, I started to think about what had happened to the Palestinians. And my own—the family itself, I think, they were quite clear about the… They had been very active in terms of the oppression of Palestinian citizens of Israel before that war. And that’s a continual theme. I mean, I’ve made films about this. And most of my family in Israel are very much on the left side of the spectrum, and against the government, and want a—well, a two-state solution is probably too late. Anyway, so that’s all part of this whole scene.
And I also think as I traveled through Europe that summer, I was getting a strong sense of how powerful the opposition was to the war in Europe. We were, Americans were becoming pariahs. I don’t know if it was at that point, you know, Americans, you would try to pretend to be a Canadian. You didn’t want to say that you were an American. Or if you were hitchhiking, you might want to put a little Canadian flag on your pack.
LUCAS: Did you know—was that something you realized or something you knew?
GOLDENBERG: No, I realized it while I was there, because I would hear, I would get into conversations with people who want to attack me. Well, I’m against the war. They just want to attack me because I’m an American. Because, you know, I met, as I traveled, I met a lot of international travelers, and people would be much more vocal there than they were here. I mean, you’d be vocal in demonstration, but I think you’d watch what you’d say in general public, because you don’t want to get into fights. So, when I came back September ’67, and I didn’t have a place to live on campus… I had been living in the international dorm the previous, before I left.
LUCAS: [inaudible]
GOLDENBERG: Yeah. And so, through my anthropology advisor, he connected me to the Notas, who were a faculty family. Lafayette Noda taught biochemistry in the medical school. And they lived off campus in Meriden, New Hampshire. It’s about 15 miles away. And they were Quakers, because during World War II, they had been interned. They lived in California. They’d been interned in the Japanese internment camps, and the Quakers were the only ones who supported the interned [inaudible] population. And they had become Quakers, and they had become very active as peace activists. So, you know, their house was always full of people connecting and communicating about anti-war activities.
And then, early on in the fall, a Dartmouth graduate who had lived with them before—they’d always had students living with them through the years—a Dartmouth graduate named Jim Longcope [‘59], who had lived with them years before, and had gone to Dartmouth medical school, and become a doctor… I forget, in those days I think you had to go finish somewhere else. You know, you had your first couple of years at Dartmouth. I can’t remember what the thing was. Anyway, so he came to live with us, and he had just finished his duty as a doctor in Vietnam. And he just shut himself in his room for days, weeks on end. He was just destroyed by his experience. And amazingly, I met his kids some years after he died, not that long ago. It was at a funeral for, when Lafayette Noda died. And they had no idea about this. He had never talked to them about this. He had never talked to them about his war experience and about coming back.
LUCAS: Did you learn about it while you were living on the same [inaudible]?
GOLDENBERG: You know, I can’t really remember how much he really talked to us about it. I mean, we could clearly see how much it affected him. But obviously, and he also, I think, became very involved in some of the stuff that the household was doing, the anti-war stuff. So, I was a little disconnected from Dartmouth because I was living up on this kind of mountainside in Meriden, New Hampshire, and I would just go in for classes. So I guess I’d go for some other events, I’d go see friends, but I also, I was a teaching assistant in French. I taught conversational French as a teaching assistant, I guess, for a French class, which was using the Rassias method, of course, which of course is the method that I used to learn Swahili in Peace Corps.
LUCAS: I had a question, wondering if being exposed to the Rassias method was helpful in language learning, or made Dartmouth more of a place where someone might be recruited for the Peace Corps? But, yeah, but go on.
GOLDENBERG: Yeah, that’s interesting. If you want, yeah, we’ll get back to that later. Anyway, so I was living off campus. The junior year I had been active in SDS, Students for a Democratic Society, gone to meetings. I guess I probably went to meetings, but, you know, I just, I really, I was pretty happy being off campus, to be honest, and living in this wonderful new second family. And I’m trying to remember other events from that period. I guess I do remember, I had some other friends who were living in a house over in Norwich [CT], and I would go and stay with them sometimes. And I remember I was staying there overnight when somebody woke us up that Bobby Kennedy had been killed. I certainly remember that. I guess I must have been in Meriden when the news about Martin Luther King broke out. But all of that was kind of watched at a distance. You know, you’re a little insulated at Dartmouth. I mean, I’m from Washington, and I didn’t see until I went back to see all the devastation of the riots down there. You know, it was off in a distance. But, when I went back for, I guess I must have gone home for spring break, and I went to the Canadian Embassy.
LUCAS: Do you want a minute?
GOLDENBERG: So I went and I got the papers to apply if I decided that’s what I was going to do. A friend of mine who graduated the year before named Ron Latell, from the Class of ’67, he was studying—he had gone to study chemistry at Harvard, and I had introduced him to my high school girlfriend, and they were living together down in Cambridge. And, so he—I forgot how—he must have come up to visit, and he told me, he said… No, his family had fled Germany in the ‘30s to England, and he’d grown up in England. No, actually, I’m sorry, he’d actually been born in England. So, he was now, he was younger and he was approaching 21, and he had a choice whether he could, to take his British citizenship and renounce his American citizenship. And he said, “That’s what I’m gonna do. And we’re gonna move to Canada.” And I remember particularly he said, “And I just went to see my grandfather, who said, ‘Well, you know, here we are again. We had to flee Germany, and here you go. You’re doing the same thing.’” And they’re still there. He went to medical school there and he’s still practicing.
So, this is all going on. And I had a lot of serious discussions with Jim Fernandez, my advisor, because another option he was suggesting was, “Look, I have a lot of good friends at the Sorbonne in Paris.” In fact, I think I had met one of them, an anthropology faculty member there. “I’m sure we can get you into the Sorbonne. And then, you know, you’d be out of here,” and then the possibility I was considering is to go to the Sorbonne, and then I’d emigrate to Israel. Now, if I had done that, I would have ended up in the ’73 war in Israel, and also, although I think my feelings were not so strong about—I mean, I generally supported Israel in those days, so it was something I seriously considered. And then, I had been accepted at Brown [University, Providence, RI] for the anthropology Ph.D. program, with a full ride, and I was looking forward to that because there was a guy here named Karl Heider who had participated in making this very famous ethnographic film called Dead Birds in New Guinea. And I was very interested in getting into anthropological filmmaking, ethnographic filmmaking. So that was part of my choice.
But, sometime during that year, and I think it was pretty late, I can’t remember when, they announced there would no longer be any graduate school deferments. I think there were some exceptions. I think engineering, you might have been accepted for engineering, but you would have been accepted for medical school, of course, but you’d still have an obligation to serve in that case. So, suddenly that all changed, because up to that point if you went to graduate school, you still had a student deferment, and so these choices all became very real. And that’s when I decided to apply for the Peace Corps, and I saw this program in Kenya that said they were looking for people who were anthropology majors, which turned out to be news to the people who trained us. [laughter] They didn’t even know about that at all.
LUCAS: So you applied for that. Did you see any patterns in what your peers who were also graduating in 1968 were choosing to do? Or like how the draft might have been affecting them? Probably in many different ways, of course, depending on…
GOLDENBERG: Yeah, you mean my Dartmouth peers?
LUCAS: Yeah, I suppose mostly your Dartmouth peers.
GOLDENBERG: Yeah, that’s an interesting question. I know, of course, Jamie Newton, who was the valedictorian who gave that famous speech, he was a Quaker all his life, and he was definitely going to apply for conscientious objector, which I believe he did get because he actually, you know, because he was a lifelong Quaker, and I think he did some kind of alternative service. Yeah, that’s interesting. I’m not… Well, I know, of course, yeah, one of my friends went, or several of them actually, they went to medical school. I think in their cases, because of the timing, by the time they finished medical school, then it wasn’t an issue; you know, after four or five years, six, whatever, it wasn’t an issue anymore. I think that happened.
I did know people who, of course, there were members of our class who were in ROTC, there were a number who were drafted, there were… I mean, I have a good friend who actually was, he was accepted to go in a Peace Corps program, and then he turned it down because he wanted to stay here because of some woman, and then she broke up with him, and then he got drafted, and he went to serve in Vietnam for a year. Just all kinds of stuff.
I do remember coming back for—I didn’t come to very many Dartmouth reunions—I do remember coming back for the 10th reunion, and there were 10 or 15 people who died, which was pretty unusual for that young a group, you know, and then, several of them in Vietnam, others drug related, suicides that could have been Vietnam related, just there was a feeling that it had been a big effect.
LUCAS: Yeah, so a significant number of people.
GOLDENBERG: Uh-huh.
LUCAS: So, ’68 is when you went to Bismarck, North Dakota, to take part in the training program for Peace Corps in Kenya. So, do you want to talk about when you started and when you arrived in Bismarck?
GOLDENBERG: Yeah, so we assembled in early July, 1968, in Bismarck, and we were there through early October, I think it was. It was a very specialized kind of group because it was for what was called an agriculture and settlement group, so there was a strong emphasis on certain kinds of technical skills. And imagine my shock to fly into Bismarck, North Dakota, and say, “Well, where are the women?” And they said, “No, sorry, it’s an all-male group.” Here we are again. [laughter]
LUCAS: Oh, for goodness. Was it entirely male? There were no women in the training?
GOLDENBERG: There were absolutely no women in that Peace Corps group. There’d been a couple in the previous year’s group, and there were some, maybe a couple, like a woman veterinarian in the next year’s group, but in ours, nope, not a single woman.
LUCAS: Okay, that explains a little bit to me, because I’ve seen pictures in the documentary you made, Swahili on the Prairie, of people in programs. There were women, but they must have just been there to hang out or something like that?
GOLDENBERG: There were women on the staff who worked in various roles, the training staff or the support roles, or they were also a spouse perhaps of a training staff member. So, they may show up in some of those pictures. And of course, there were our girlfriends from Bismarck. That was a whole other story. But, you know, it was very clear that the vast majority of us were there because of the draft. There were some who said they were planning to join anyway, but the draft was still a concern for them. And here there was a generational gap with the, particularly John [E.] Riggan, who was the Assistant Director who was my direct supervisor, and he was from this old generation, this purist early generation where you joined the Peace Corps with only the purest of motives. And as I say, as he said in the film, he said he gave this speech thing, “You shouldn’t join the Peace Corps if your motives aren’t pure. And we gave him hell.” He said, “I really was completely out of touch. I was working in Africa and I just really wasn’t following what was going on.”
But, for me it was a complete life changer. First of all, to come from—I came from this very elite intellectual high school, and you know, I go to an Ivy League school, and suddenly my close friends are mechanics and farmers and engineers, and they start teaching me skills, you know, how to repair a motorcycle. I never tried to do anything like that before in my life. And yeah, it really changed the trajectory of my life, you know, in many ways. I mean, it changed what I did, but it also changed my attitudes and the kinds of people who would be my friends for the rest of my life. It was a complete democratizing kind of experience.
You know, it’s not to say, it’s interesting, in the film the guy who ran our training, he said we were a mix of intellectuals and farmers. Well, that’s a bit of a disservice, because some of these, like one of the farmers actually had gone to Amherst, and you could be both an intellectual and a farmer. And then, a number of these farmers went on to get higher degrees. You know, it changed their lives in the other direction. Some of them went on to international careers. And the same thing with the engineers. You know, an engineer who then became a foreign service officer and a high ranking diplomat.
LUCAS: And would you say, like those sound like things that they would not have anticipated themselves doing before joining the Peace Corps.
GOLDENBERG: Right. Right. No, I don’t think so. I mean, you know, there were a few of us who probably would have gone into international careers anyway, but maybe in a very different way. But, you know, it’s always, people always talk about how, that this is one of those effects of war, but usually they’re talking about the Army. People in Israel talk about this a lot, because everybody has to—every male has to serve, well, every male except the religious, extreme religious, has to serve in the Army. So, you’re forced to spend three years with people who are just not from your milieu at all, and, you know, so Tel Aviv hipsters and intellectuals have to mix with religious types or people from desert working class communities, and they serve with them in the reserves for years and years. So, it’s always been a kind of saving grace for Israel that it forces the population to mix. And you hear a lot about that from previous generations of people who were in the Army. And I think it was, it was specific to this group because, you know, before that most of the those who joined the Peace Corps were people like me, who’d just graduated from a good college. They weren’t—they didn’t bring in so many of these other types of people.
LUCAS: So, do you want to… I know a bit about the program that you went through that summer, but for people who maybe listen to this in the future, do you want to explain about just how it worked, what it was for, where it was exactly, things like that, what you did?
GOLDENBERG: So, are you talking about the training program or the Kenya program?
LUCAS: The training program for going to Kenya.
GOLDENBERG: Okay. So, we were brought together on this old cavalry Army base outside of Bismarck, Fort Lincoln, and they had brought a number of Kenyans and Tanzanians to teach us Swahili. And the first six weeks, formerly we weren’t supposed to speak English. I mean, it was the Rassias method, definitely the Rassias method, totally conversational, nothing in written form at all. They used some visual aids, some pictures, pantomime sometime. And then, you know, even in our off time we were not supposed to speak English, but that didn’t hold up. Some of us tried for a while.
But, it was a fantastic language program. I mean, of course, people had different levels of ability to learn language. I had a distinct advantage because I was already bilingual. But others, you know, like my engineer friend from New Jersey, who had an amazing Swahili accent with a New Jersey accent, his Swahili was excellent. Unfortunately, my Swahili was the best it ever was when I left Bismarck, because in Kenya you have differing levels of Swahili. The people who live on the coast will speak it as their home language, and everybody on the coast speaks a very fluid Swahili which has a lot of tenses and a complicated grammar. But if you’re working up country, then it’s like, you know, going to some cockney, East End cockney London neighborhood and trying to speak in the Queen’s English. People won’t understand me, and they’ll also think that I’m being a snob. So, I had to really tone down my use of the language, and I lost facility in it. I mean, I still can speak it, and I’ve used it when I go back to Kenya, but it’s not as good as it was after training. So, that was the language training.
But, they also exposed us to, you know, there were a number of farmers, but there were a lot of us who had no agricultural background, so they actually had animals for us to take care of. We had to milk cows, we had to inoculate sheep, do some other things. The engineers had to learn about taking measurements for using gravity systems because we were going to be installing water systems. So they had people who were technical experts there to train us for our particular job.
I was supposed to be working on a cooperative. They were setting up cooperatives on settlement farms, and Kenya was doing one of the most extraordinary land transfers in history at the time, where they had taken what was originally a million acres, I think it grew to more than two million acres. With World Bank and British funding, they had bought out the European farmers who owned this land. So, from just prior to World War I, the Kenya Highlands, which is this wonderful high altitude, mostly very fertile area, had been farmed by Kenyan farmers. I mean, if you've seen Out of Africa, Karen Blixen, and all of that crowd, and they led this incredible life using Kenyan laborers to farm large holding farms.
But now a lot of that land was going to be broken up into 15 acre parcels for medium scale farmers, and they had to grow crops. They wanted them to grow not just subsistence crops, but to grow cash crops that enabled them, because they were getting loans to buy this land, to pay back the loans, but also to feed into Kenya’s economy, so that they’d be growing maize, they’d be raising milk, they’d be raising cattle for milk, pyrethrum, which was a natural insecticide they were growing, vegetables for the markets, and they needed cooperatives in order to channel the produce to the markets, and also to make sure that they repaid their loans. There’s all kinds of complications to this, but…
And, so a lot of our group were going to be working on setting up water systems so that they actually had water spigots at their homesteads, rather than having to walk several miles to a stream to get water. And, so there were people doing the water systems. I was training to do the cooperatives, to help run the cooperatives. And then at the last minute, somebody who was supposed to do—there was always a job running a visual aids unit that supported the ministry that did the settlement, and they produced extension materials so that the farmers could learn how to do these techniques that they didn’t know about the best ways to raise certain crops, and the importance of raising high grade cattle rather than the typical lower grade native cattle.
Anyway, the guy who was supposed to—this job had existed for about five years—well, no, three years before, and it was always run by a pair of volunteers. So, one of the guys in our group who was supposed to do this didn’t think he could work with the guy who was going to be his partner, and he ended up getting released from the program, and he did come to Kenya as a teacher, but that’s a whole other story. Anyway, so I was nervous. I didn’t know if I’d be such a good person on the coop job. I was getting some pushback about my anthropology background from the language teachers, who said, “Oh, he just wants to come and study the natives.” So, I wasn’t sure if I was going to be selected.
But when this guy dropped out, and I didn’t know this—I didn’t know this until I landed in Nairobi—they didn’t tell me anything about this—they slotted me in to replace that person to help run this visual aids job, because I was an amateur photographer and I actually was taking a lot of pictures during training, and I’d even set up a darkroom on campus. I have no idea where I got that equipment. But I was, you know, clearly knew what I was doing. And I even had a Super 8 camera. I was taking some film.
So, when I landed in Nairobi, they said, “Oh, you’re gonna be living in Nairobi. You have an office with a staff.” And for two years we went out, and it had two elements to this job. One was the one I talked about, which was the agricultural extension part where we’d put on field days for farmers, and we produced posters and booklets. I pioneered a kind of—everything before I was there was based on drawings, so I used my anthropology background and I went out and I started interviewing farmers about whether they really understood these drawings, because most of these farmers were illiterate, and being able to understand a drawing is something you get with literacy. It’s not just natural. So, they didn’t understand a lot of these things.
So then I said, “Well, wait…” but I see they’re all reading this kind of very popular detective series. It’s made up of, there’s a term for it in Spanish, it’s a series, it’s like a comic book but made up of photographs with speech bubbles. So, people would read them, the speech bubbles, and they could follow the story. That was something they were familiar with. So we did a couple of things like that that totally changed the approach. And then, I gave that technology to friends of mine in India, and actually it became quite an important way of communicating all over the world after that. I don’t know if I can take sole credit for it, but I think it had quite a bit of influence.
Anyway, and the other part of the job was going all over Kenya. They had these agricultural shows which would bring together farmers in each region, and we would put up a stand showing how great the work was for our ministry. And we preferred not to do that. That was a very political kind of work, but that took up a lot of our time. Do you need to take a break?
LUCAS: Oh, no, I think that’s your… is your phone ringing?
GOLDENBERG: Yeah, that’s a land line.
LUCAS: Okay. No, if we want to take a break, we can do that. It’s [inaudible] it’s helpful to just even like… Do you want to?
GOLDENBERG: I’m okay, yeah. I’m still… Tell me if you’re getting worn out.
LUCAS: Oh, no, I was just looking because I wasn’t sure somebody was ringing...
GOLDENBERG: No, that’s a land line that will occasionally. Actually, I could… That’s all right. We don’t get many calls on that. Let’s see. Let me talk a little bit about being in Kenya during the war, I think.
LUCAS: Yeah, I would love to hear about that, because especially one thing that I was wondering about was how you were sort of physically removed from, like you asked early through the course? Then also from ways you might typically get new communications?
GOLDENBERG: Right. There was no television in Kenya at the time. We could get Voice of America, but we wouldn’t listen to that because it was all propaganda. Mostly we would listen to the BBC. There were two daily papers in Nairobi and, I mean, mine was not a typical Peace Corps experience. I would come down to the office, you know, if I was in town working, I’d come to the office, check in, see what was going to—you know, stuff for the day. I’d go across the street to this little cafe and have a cappuccino and read The Daily Nation, the more, I don’t know if it was a more left wing of the newspapers, actually, not so much left wing as the more African of the papers. The other paper, The Standard, was still sort of dominated by the European community that still had a lot of power in Kenya in those days. And, you know, and then we’d get news magazines, Newsweek, Time, the Herald Tribune, International Herald Tribune would be flown in.
So, there were five of us who actually were working out of Nairobi or in Nairobi, so we were pretty connected. The people out in the field, it was a different story. Some of them had radios, some did not. They might see something every week or two in a newspaper or a magazine. But they’d have a general sense of how things were going. But I was certainly aware of what was going on.
There was an interesting point when, and I can’t really remember when this was, the Secretary of State, William Rogers, made a visit to Kenya, and so we decided to organize a demonstration against the war while he was there. We asked to meet with him to voice our opposition. And one of my neighbors in Nairobi where I was living, and my roommate, he was working in a… My roommate had an MVS [Master of Veterinary Sciences] from Harvard, so he was working as a senior advisor in the Ministry of Agriculture, reporting directly to the Minister of Agriculture. And one of our neighbors—we were living in this little, tiny house, I think it had been like servant quarters for a bigger house, but a neighbor was the Associated Press reporter, so I told him, “Hey, we’re gonna organize this demonstration. Come give us coverage.” And we did do a demonstration. It may have gotten some international coverage. I don’t know if it got local coverage. Now, there were one or two in our group who really were scared. They thought, Wait a minute. They might throw us out if we do this. But, at the end, nothing came out of that.
I should say, of course, you know, the draft was kind of still hanging over us, and that was particularly brought home. There was one of our guys who, he was working up in the Turkana Desert, and he had about the most remote job of any of us in Kenya. I mean, this is a place that is really dry, dry desert. The people’s way of life is, you know, they’re herdsmen with hardly—they may trade—I don’t think the environment doesn’t even allow you to grow any crops. He was up there digging water wells for these people. And when there were visitors to Kenya, like Congressional delegations, they would take them up to see this guy’s work, you know, because he was that important.
Well, several months into his service, his FBI report comes in. Now, I have to backtrack and explain that when you were—I don’t know if they still do this for Peace Corps, but certainly in those days you got an FBI check, background check, before you were accepted in the Peace Corps. So, in my case, they came on campus and they interviewed my advisor and maybe some other faculty members.
LUCAS: At Dartmouth?
GOLDENBERG: At Dartmouth. They may have interviewed maybe some other students. And I remember my advisor said, well, he [was] asked, “Okay, so has he been active…” something about my opposition to the war, and he said, “Well, you know, probably he’s just like every other student,” which may have not been correct, but anyway… So, one day I was up at the house where I was living with a family, and this government car pulls up, and they are there to interview the family I’m living with about me. [laughter]
LUCAS: Unbeknownst to you?
GOLDENBERG: Right, right. Yeah, they just show up out of surprise. They don’t warn you. And so here, I think maybe it was just one guy, one FBI agent, so here’s this guy in his suit and his hat, and so, Mamie, who was she was just this incredible character, she brings him into the kitchen, sits him down at the table, and gives him some coffee and whatever, some muffins or whatever, and then, all these kids from the neighborhood who are kind of long-haired teenagers, long-haired little hippie kids from the potter who was down the road, they all start running up to the house. And this poor guy is sitting there with like 10 of these teenagers staring at him [laughter] during this interview, while he’s asking Mamie, who is, you know, extremely—I’m sure they have a massive FBI file on her, asking her about me. And I think I may have even just sat in on the interview.
But, to get back to this poor guy, Rich Foley, so the same thing had gone on on the Tulane campus where he was, and for some reason his report came in late to Peace Corps, like five—I mean, now we’re talking really late, I mean, it’s almost a year or something. It’s ridiculous. And there’s some mention in it, somebody said he might have used marijuana. Well, who wasn’t using marijuana at that time? But, suddenly Peace Corps Washington said, “Now, this guy has to come home.” And the director in Kenya fought like everything to keep him. He was doing really important work.
So he came home, and he had to join the Navy. And as he says, in a real—you know, in order, because those days you could do two years in the Army and you might go to Vietnam, and the Navy was three years, but you weren’t going to be on the front lines. But as he says, in an incredible turn-around of karma, he got assigned to the firefighting crew at Pearl Harbor on Hawaii, and he was in Hawaii for three years. And he says the only boat he was ever on was the harbor ferry. And he learned how to scuba dive and fly, and he said he had a wonderful time. [laughter] But it could have turned out otherwise.
So, we knew that was kind of hanging over us. And looking back, I’m just amazed at how many risks we took, because we broke just about every rule in the Peace Corps pamphlet. We were not supposed to own our own vehicles. We had motorcycles and I had a Land Rover for work, but, you know, you used that just for work. But, a lot of us went out and bought our own cars and motorcycles. Of course, you were not supposed to be smoking marijuana. People were buying it by the bagfuls. It’s all good high jinks, but looking back, it shocks me how much risk… And I’ve talked to older volunteers in the Kenya groups before us, and they’re shocked at our behavior. They didn’t engage in any of this stuff, and they weren’t under the draft threat that we were. But, you know, I asked the—I think the staff were conscious of the implications, and they weren’t going to—if we were doing our jobs, they weren’t going to crack down on us.
LUCAS: One thing, before we get… I know we’re sort of talking about Bismarck, but this is just to remind me so that I do want to touch on because there’s a lot there in that training program that summer. Even then, you’re talking about this possibility of being drafted or doing things that could jeopardize your ability to work with the Peace Corps. That existed that summer, too, as not only a training program, but sort of an element that we’re testing you and your peers to see how fit you might be in the views of psychologists and the people who were running the program to actually go to Kenya. So, I was wondering if you wanted to speak at all to talking to psychologists, assessing your peers. You moved in with a host family at Standing Rock for a little while, and that was sort of a test of adaptability. So, if you just want to speak to that a little bit, and how the draft may have been at the back of your mind, or maybe not, even then?
GOLDENBERG: Right. Well, I mean, the draft and the war were on our minds all that summer. And, of course, you know, there were growing numbers of demonstrations all over the country during that period, and I guess—that’s funny, I’m trying to remember if we—I know we read newspapers. I’m trying to remember, there must have been… yeah, that’s an interesting question whether there was a television. I don’t remember watching a television during training. But, we were certainly aware that that was going on. And, of course, we were in a very, very conservative environment. It wasn’t going around in North Dakota. And the placement… Peace Corps still has this as part of their training. In fact, it’s an even bigger part nowadays, because training these days is all in country, and generally during the language learning part of it, you’re living with a host family, so that could be for six weeks or so, or two months maybe, that you have to live with a host family. My daughter who was in Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic did this.
And, so, for us, they put us on the Standing Rock Reservation, which was to the south of us, for a period of two weeks. And they placed us with families and said, “Okay, here’s some free labor,” and also they paid them a stipend to feed us and to have us, to put up with us. And, of course, even there was a guy in our group from North Dakota, and he says growing up he didn’t have contact. They were a hundred miles away. He never had any contact with Native Americans. So, that was a very eye opening experience.
I mean, you know, we were certainly aware of black poverty, very much aware of black poverty at the time. We were aware of white Appalachian poverty. But, we weren’t as connected to what was really going on on Indian reservations. And people lived in very, very basic circumstances, a lot of them without running water, or even without wells, not even running water with wells. A number of people living in very crowded conditions, you know, two-room houses with 8 or 10 people. This is a factor right now. There’s outbreaks on those reservations with Covid.
And, of course, you know, it was a two-way experience. Those families had never had a white person living with them. And the family I was with, I think, was comparatively well off. They actually had two separate houses. I was living with a son in one house, and his parents and the other two siblings were living six miles away, and we would ride every night over for dinner. And it was a great experience. I mean, I was herding cattle and pulling up hay bales for two weeks.
But, I got a taste of anger. I could see, when he got drunk when we were at a rodeo, he was dripping his beer on these white people in front of us, and they weren’t going to do anything about it because he was a big, big guy. And other people had other encounters where they’d go in with their host to an Indian bar and get elbowed, or go to a house and have a door slammed in their face.
But the other part of it was, and it really struck me in particular, we went to a powwow on a weekend, which involves the traditional dances. And in the middle of the traditional dance there was this dance of honor for the warriors, the veterans who had come back from Vietnam with all their medals. And so, here in the middle of all this poverty and oppression, you know, they are the most patriotic of all Americans, and not just a generation or two past the slaughter at Pine Ridge or the murder of Sitting Bull, which was—in fact, just behind the family that I lived with, the mother was a granddaughter of Sitting Bull, and he’d been killed just behind the house. And yet, they’re all out supporting the war.
So, several of us remembered actually sitting—the family I was with, they had a TV, and we watched the Democratic Convention with them, and the demonstrators getting beaten up by the Chicago police, and the family I’m with, they’re cheering the cops on and saying, “Beat the shit out of those scum traitors and cowards.” And I just, you know, I couldn’t say anything. I wanted to cry, but I was just holding it back. And there were several other people who had the same experience.
So, another little part of that summer was that Richard Nixon, just before we left Bismarck, Richard Nixon flew in on a campaign visit to Bismarck, and I have photographs and some film I took of him, you know, and the whole town turned out. They were going to cheer for him.
LUCAS: It’s 30,000 people in the town, right? Pretty small.
GOLDENBERG: Yeah, it’s a small city, a small city. Its population was 30,000. When we premiered the film in Bismarck in January, at the showing there were two sisters who are in my pictures. They’re actually with my Kenyan roommate who visited them on their farms, a picture of them together. And so they shouted out, they recognized themselves in the pictures, and we talked afterwards, so I said, “Well, were you at the Nixon rally?” And they said, “Oh, no, no, our mother was a staunch Democrat. She would never have let us to go to that.” So, there were dribs and drabs of opposition, but on the whole it was a really conservative Republican town.
LUCAS: All right, so Nixon came, and then, yeah, so soon after—but when you went to Kenya, which you already were talking about a little bit, but you were there from the fall of ’68 until ’71. And yeah, you were already elaborating on your job being a director of a visual aids unit, right? for the government ministry there?
GOLDENBERG: Uh-huh.
LUCAS: So, yeah, one thing that I was interested in that you were getting to a little bit was this sudden transfer of a lot of power and authority to you, and a lot of the other men working for the Peace Corps down there.
GOLDENBERG: Right. Well, we basically were the inheritors of colonialism, because as you may know, the regimes in Africa did not prepare, the colonial regimes did not prepare their countries for independence. So, there was a real lack of essential higher end skills. Most of the job of Africans is to farm, to work in menial positions on a railroad, or maybe as the line people in the police force and the army, but not from positions of responsibility. And, so the people who taught us Swahili, they were that first generation that was actually getting their degrees there in America and England and other parts of the world, getting higher education. And there was a need for people with our skills.
And what we became aware of very, very early on is, of course, it was a country that was used to white skin equaling competence. So, you know, there are some of us who got put in positions where there was somebody working for them where that guy actually, the African could have done a much better job, but the assumption was that this white guy with a degree, he’ll be better suited. And we fought that, I think especially our group. We said, “Wait. Look, we’ve been doing these jobs.” And this happened in my job. “It’s time for a Kenyan to do it.” And so, in our last year we had a Kenyan university graduate and we were training her to replace us, which she did. And then I reconnected with her through the years, and she actually became quite influential in Kenyan women NGOs [non-governmental organizations]. I ran into her at a big international UN world conference on education in Thailand in 1990, and so we stayed in touch.
And that was, some other people were also trying to do that with their—like the water guys, these guys were not educated, but they didn’t have to be to do these jobs. And they turned them into professional water officers after they left. But, you know, you come from America, you don’t know the heritage of colonialism. You don’t understand it. If you’re from Europe, you would; you’d be sensitive. The people who were working out installing the water systems or being coop officers, where did they house them? Well, when they broke up these farms, they created, most of them were, as I said, these 15 acre small plots. So there might be, like a big farm might have a settlement scheme, you’d have 500 families on the small plots, and then they reserved, because there would be the house of the farmer, probably with some outbuildings also, that was created as a special medium-sized farm which some wealthier Kenyan should take that over and farm it in a bigger way. But, meanwhile, they have to safeguard these houses.
So, here we are, these 22-year-olds, living in 7, 8, 10 bedroom houses with porches and views out on this incredible landscape. No furniture. [laughter] Or hardly any furniture. But, there we were living the great colonial lifestyle. And we all had, because some Peace Corps programs I think may have an issue with the volunteers hiring servants, but because we were doing such responsible work, we didn’t have time to be shopping and cooking. We really were, most of us, working flat out 8, 10 hour days. I mean, in my case I’d be often working until midnight to go off to do one of those agricultural shows the next morning. So, we all had servants. And we inherited these servants who knew how to bake wonderful muffins and bread and these old British dishes. [laughter] And there you have it. So, some of the staff people who would come out from Washington would be a little shocked sometimes to pull up and visit the volunteers living in their mansions.
LUCAS: Yeah. So you said that it was fairly likely that Europeans were sensitive to colonialism, and even sort of like physical skeletons of colonialism, you know, the mansions and the structures in place, but Americans were less likely to be. Did you notice any differences between you and your peers who were also volunteers? Because you spent a lot of time in Europe growing up.
GOLDENBERG: Oh, I see. No, I think, humm…
LUCAS: And you may not have. I was just wondering.
GOLDENBERG: That’s interesting. That’s interesting. I remember catching myself. I remember like being in some situation where I started to get pissed off at a waiter about something, and I said, Whoa, whoa, wait, stop. Don’t do this. You know, this is just how… because we would still see whites, because there were still—they didn’t break up all these farms, because they were critical to Kenya’s economy. So, there were still some very large European farms that were still operating, and Europeans who were running businesses in Nairobi, and also the Asian community was running the commerce in Kenya and small industry. We would see how they would treat Africans and treat their servants and speak to them. So, yeah, no way we were going to fall into that.
And then, the Kenyans would see that their relationship—you know, they had been used to working with whites who were just commanding them around, and now they were working with whites who spoke to them as equals and brought them into decision making. But, you know, it is a daunting level. I remember there was a guy who, you might remember from the film a guy named Dennis, who unfortunately he died some years ago, but he’s the one, he was from New York. He didn’t even have a driver’s license because he grew up in New York, and the guy he was living with in Kenya had to teach him how to drive a Land Rover in Kenya, you know, with right-hand drive and mud roads and so forth. Anyway, this guy, he’d gone to Georgetown University, he was actually a friend of Bill Clinton’s there. They were in the same class. And he was kind of a, you know, had long hair and he was kind of a Georgetown hippie type guy. I didn’t see that he had any qualifications for the job that they assigned him to except that he was very tall. You know, somebody must have decided, “We need somebody very tall who kind of exudes authority.”
Turns out that he was incredible in his job. He was—there were three of them on, there was a sugar scheme. It was a very strange one of these schemes where they divided up the land, but because it was sugar cane, everything had to be done on scale. You can’t harvest sugar cane, you know, three acres at a time. So they had to have vast machinery. He’s supervising like 3,000 workers, you know, this guy who just graduated from Georgetown University. And he turned out to be just an incredible manager. People would come, politicians would come and try to pressure him to harvest their mother’s plot first, and he would just say, “No, not ‘til May, forget it.” And, you know, they would threaten him, threaten him to evict him. Anyway, this guy, he went on to run like the largest UN refugee camps in the Middle East. But, I don’t know how they discerned how he could be so good at what he did, because nothing in his background spoke to that.
LUCAS: That’s very interesting and surprising. This was also the Kenyan independence in 1963, correct?
GOLDENBERG: Actually, the first element of the full independence wasn’t until December ’64. Yeah.
LUCAS: Oh, okay. Yeah, okay, I think I was reading that somewhere actually. So, really recent [inaudible] development. Yeah, I was wondering, there was sort of a very small, but still significant publication written by the Peace Corps saying that as Kenyans became available to operate in positions that Peace Corps volunteers were doing, they would replace the volunteers slowly as part of Africanization. So, that was part of a movement that Peace Corps was trying to perpetuate. And you were there sort of still in a very early post-independence Kenya.
GOLDENBERG: Well, I think what you meant to say was it was replacing European people who had, they were colonial officers who had proceeded us in some of these jobs. And actually, we still had to deal with some of these types. They were still around, right. So, eventually, there were still high ranking government officers who were white and who were carryover from the colonial period. And it wasn’t just in the civil service. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was white. He may have—see, some of these people stayed on as Kenya citizens. They were white, but they had the option to stay on as Kenya citizens. The commander of the Army was still white at that time. And my direct supervisor was this guy named Petey Abrams, who was originally from South Africa, and I didn’t know this at the time—and he was just a classic colonial type. But I guess he did his job.
I mean, there are some very funny stories about him. He would go out to the field to supervise, or to hold what’s called a baraza, a meeting, and he would show up in his colonial shorts and his… khaki colonial shorts, khaki—it was a district officer uniform—shorts, high socks, khaki jacket, and a pith helmet. [laughter] And this is still, you know, he’s supposed to be working for the government, but people still wore… In fact, there were Africans who still wore that uniform, because that’s the uniform even a high ranking African tribal officer would wear. So, you know, it was all around us.
I’ll tell you a little story about that guy, which may not be relevant, but which I didn’t know until I interviewed our assistant director. He said he sat down with this guy with a booklet of who was coming from our group, and to talk about what jobs we would go to. And he said they sat there and the guy said, he kept saying, “Ah, I don’t want that guy. This one, I don’t want him.” And John said, “Well, no, they’re all coming. They’re all coming. It’s all about where they’re gonna go.” But he would keep doing that. He’d keep saying, “No, not this one.” And then he realized that all the names he was naming were Jewish. And I had no idea and he was my direct supervisor for two years.
LUCAS: Was that surprising to you, then?
GOLDENBERG: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I had no idea. I mean, he came down on my case often, sometimes for good reason, [laughter] because we decided that it was much shorter to drive through a game park to our next assignment rather than driving way, way all the way around, and that seemed to make a logical sense, but that seemed to be some violation to drive through a game park. So, we got into some trouble for that.
But, yes, so Africanization was a big issue, although at some point we started to worry that the Kenyatta government, because tribalism and tribal competition was already a big issue, the Kenyatta government was using us to keep qualified African Kenyans out of these positions, because they might potentially be from a tribe that was in political opposition to the government. Now that was never overt, but it was just something that we felt was a possibility. And, of course, we were free. They didn’t have to pay us anything. The US Government at least paid our support. Kenya, yeah, they’d supply us with vehicles. Well, I guess actually, I mean, it was a cross. They’d pay for our meals and hotels, and at least in my job I had those paid, hotels when we’d go to work.
Let me get to one other thing before I forget, because it’s sort of central to your theme, which is the draft lottery in April ’69—no, December ’69.
LUCAS: December ’69 is right, yeah.
GOLDENBERG: Right, right, so okay. So, up to this point the draft is hanging… because Peace Corps is only a deferment. It was not in place of going into the Army. And so, there were people in our group who did serve all the way through—there was one guy who served all the way through, and then was drafted, and then they rejected him because his malaria was so bad, they didn’t want to take him in. So, he came back to Kenya. He re-upped the Peace Corps and came back. He ended up spending a full five years. But anyway, that was all there. You were still in danger.
So then, of course, we all heard about the lottery. And I was out in a place called Sotik, which is like 300 miles from Nairobi, and we heard on the radio, but they only announced, you know, like the first number—we were getting a news broadcast about it—they announced the first number, and then whatever, you know, like another number, and then the highest number. So, they didn’t announce my date. So, the next morning, I just jumped in my Land Rover and tore off for Nairobi, and I got to this news stand before 4:00 when it shut, and they had the International Herald Tribune, which was flown in from Paris every day, and that had the full list. And my birthday was number 310, so I was safe. They would never get to that high a number. It depended on your draft board. And, so all over Kenya our guys are wondering, you know, and I guess I must have sent that copy of that article or something, sent it out to people so they could see where they stood. Now, it wasn’t immediate, because we still had another year to serve.
LUCAS: Oh, yeah, I see. So, really briefly, how did the lottery work? Because you said your number was 310 and it was too high. The lower numbers were the ones that would be…
GOLDENBERG: Right, so basically they just took every calendar year, the lotto balls came out, and whatever it is, you know, “May the 2nd is number 1.” Well, you’re guaranteed to be drafted if you’re number 1. So, depending on what kind of a draft board you had and how large their population of draftable young men was, your number, you know, in one place if they had a lot of them, could be 120, but if it’s in another place where there’s a lot of kids going to college and who are deferred, then the pool of people who are left over who are not in college is smaller, so now they’re going to go up to 220 maybe. So, you didn’t know.
And one guy in our group—this is another story—so a lot of the guys who had to deal with this, with a low number when they went home, did apply for conscientious objector. So, by now it’s 1971. And one guy went into his conscientious objector hearing, and he had a whole thing prepared. This is the guy who’d been a stock car racer and a mechanic. He spelled out his argument. Then he realized they were not listening or paying any attention and he just blew up at them and stormed out of the hearing. Then it turned out that this same board actually governed two different draft districts, and they were interviewing him for the wrong one, and actually his number hadn’t come up. [laughter] So, he was saved. But, you know, by this time, by that ’71, very few people…
You know, in ’68, very few people got conscientious objector. Now, our guys who came back, almost all of them got it, were approved for it. And that meant they had to put in service. They went to work in community organizations or youth centers or something for a year or two, or teach. One guy, you know, I think that guided several people to going into Teacher Corps, which was an option. You could join the Teacher Corps, and then get your qualifications and teach. So, a number of people who maybe hadn’t even thought about becoming teachers became teachers because of that. But yeah, so there were quite a few people who had to come home and actually deal with the draft after service. I knew I was free and I would never get called, so I bought a motorcycle, shipped it to Bombay, I took this 10 or 12 day ship, a real dump steamer with all these poor, the Indians who worked, who lived in Kenya, but going home to India to visit families. And then I drove all around India and across Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, spent the winter in Israel, then up through Italy and France. And then I came home in, not until June of ’71.
LUCAS: So you immediately left Kenya and made your motorcycle journey across Asia?
GOLDENBERG: Right, when I finished my service, yeah. Yeah, I did that, correct.
LUCAS: Did you do that solo?
GOLDENBERG: Yes, I did that alone. I had some friends. The only people I knew were some friends who were working for CARE in New Delhi, and I stayed with them. No, and also there was a Sikh friend from Kenya, and I visited him in a Punjab. I was supposed to attend his wedding. He was coming home from Kenya to have this, it was an arranged marriage, and he was coming home for that. But I arrived at his house in a Punjab. He had bad news for me, which was that his bride had run off and had a love marriage. [laughter] So, the family had to mobilize to get him another bride. He said, “I’m very disappointed because I really liked her father.” But, he’d never met her. Anyway, but I couldn’t hang around, because I had to get through the mountain passes in Turkey before the snow closed them for the season. So, and I ended up having to drive through some snow.
LUCAS: What did that look like? Because, yeah, I mean, you’re crossing snow, and also just like such a variety of terrain. I’m just curious what that was like for you?
GOLDENBERG: Well, it was great. It was a different period. I mean, I’ve been back to a lot of those places. There was hardly any traffic in India. I’d be riding on these, they were like one lane roads where, there were a lot of these in Africa as well, where when the cars or trucks meet, each is supposed to go half off as they pass each other. You keep one tire on the tarmac, and then you go. But the trucks weren’t going to do that with me, so I had to kind of hang on the edge while the truck came blasting by. But, there was hardly any traffic. It was still this rural agrarian, beautiful place, very little pollution. It just, you wouldn’t do that today. And, of course, you can’t go—you knew you needed to get it off the road by nightfall, because in India there were dacoits who would stretch a rope across the road, catch you. Or in Afghanistan, they would just come out and shoot you. But during the day, you were fine. And people were very, very hospitable. I’d stay in little government guest houses or tiny hotels.
LUCAS: And you got back to the United States how exactly?
GOLDENBERG: I actually, I do want to add one kind of point from this business about this trip, which was, all of us who were in Kenya kind of expressed this thing about, somehow you had a confidence that you could do these things, but a lot of that had to do with our trust in the people, in the populations that we were with. I mean, we had a lot of situations like that in Kenya where we would be out in the middle of nowhere and break down, and somebody would take us into their house, you know, or come along and help us fix our motorcycle, or feed us for the night. I mean, these people had nothing. And, I mean, when I took off on this trip, it was with that same sense of confidence and feeling because that’s how the world was.
So, yeah, so I finally ended up in Paris where my sister was living, and I stayed with her for a while. And then I parked my motorcycle in front of the American Express office in Paris, which was in those days when you traveled, that’s where travelers went to get your mail. You would mail it to—you didn’t know where you were going to stay, so you’d mail it to an American Express office. And finally, some guy agreed to buy the bike from me, which was all complicated because it was still registered in Kenya. And then I flew to London for a few days. I remember one thing I did, I went with my sister to the equivalent of a thrift shop in Paris, except they had really fashionable clothes, so I got these ridiculous 1970s wide lapel jackets, new flared pants. You know, I was going to go home in style. And same thing, I bought a couple of things in London because London was just the hip center of the world at that time with fashion and music.
And then I fly into New York to JFK Airport, and you go through—yeah, the first thing with part of passport control is a guy, he’s up on a big tall desk with this enormous book. And as I come up, I hand him the passport, and he leafs through this book. And I said, “Well, what’s that for?” And he said, “What do you think it’s for, Davey Boy?” And I thought, Woah, something’s really changed here, you know. And I was bearded and I was long-haired. So, you know, he’s looking through to see if, am I a draft dodger, am I on a wanted listed as an activist SDS, or yeah. It was not a friendly homecoming after three years.
LUCAS: Were you surprised by that, though?
GOLDENBERG: I wasn’t ready for that. Yeah, I wasn’t—I didn’t know about the level of animosity by, you know, it was they were working class people and people in the police force, towards young people. Yeah.
LUCAS: And then, so did you move to Rhode Island then and begin your Ph.D. program in anthropology right after that?
GOLDENBERG: Yeah, yeah, I mean, I spent a little bit of time in Washington, and kind of reunited with some Peace Corps people actually. There was a community of some people from my group who had come back, and there were some from an earlier Malawi group, because there was a woman who trained us from that group, so we had all become sort of friends. So, that was a connection that persisted for years. But then, yeah, I headed up to Rhode Island to start doing some summer research actually under the grant that I was on, looking at ethnic groups’ activities in Rhode Island.
I guess one thing to say about that was here I’d been away for three years, I’d had a really responsible job, I’d done actual research for my work. And then, when I got into the anthropology program, they weren’t interested. Any time I tried to raise something from my experience, it was totally irrelevant because it wasn’t considered like certified academic research. And I just said “okay”. I just shut up about it. You know, that part of life had no bearing now suddenly in this world for some reason. And that’s not very dissimilar from the experience of a lot of—and still to this day, when people come back from the Peace Corps, as some of my friends say, “And they say, ‘How was it?’ they want like the one word answer.” They don’t want to really…
LUCAS: Why do you think that is?
GOLDENBERG: They can’t relate. They just, they can’t relate. The guy I mentioned who was there five years, he was a farmer from Connecticut, believe it or not, western Connecticut dairy farmer, and he came back to his home community because his parents were aging and he had to stay there and support them. He never left there the rest of his life. And then, interesting he kind of had trouble, you know, he had to take jobs that were way below what he should have done. He’d had five years running a big irrigation program in Kenya. And what he said was—you know, but he stayed there for his parents—so, he said, “Sometimes I’d be in a bar or something and suddenly realize I was speaking in Swahili.” And, you know, of course people couldn’t relate. He was still—he’d snapped back there. And this is somebody who really… We think that he had, basically had a local wife. We never saw him when he was there. But yes, I think it’s that.
I had this later in my career, because I spent my whole life going out… You know, I would fly out from here, and I would be in a village, in two days I’d be in a village in the middle of Indonesia somewhere working, and I’d be there a few weeks, and then I’d come home, and then go to a dinner party. But, people didn’t really want to hear about it, talking about politics or local things. But, I learned to keep my mouth shut.
LUCAS: Was there a particular moment when you started to realize that people didn’t want to hear about it, and it sort of like hit you?
GOLDENBERG: Well, it was more, it was that experience in graduate school, that experience that really should have been relevant. You know, this is amongst… anthropologists are people who go out and live in other settings, so they should have been accepting of that experience, but it didn’t fit into their narrow definition. I did end up going back to Kenya to do my doctoral research. And that’s when I really lived like a Peace Corps volunteer because I moved into a mud hut in a rural area by Lake Victoria.
LUCAS: On a mansion.
GOLDENBERG: Not a mansion this time, or not living in Nairobi with a car. Well, I had a vehicle, but…
LUCAS: Yeah, so that was your, was it your thesis project for your Ph.D.?
GOLDENBERG: Right. Yeah.
LUCAS: Okay. And what was your exact project?
GOLDENBERG: I was very interested in, for some reason I was very interested in the Kenyan elites. I was interested in the generation like our language teachers. They were people who grew up probably on a farm, but through an accident of history, they were in that generation that was able to move from being children of uneducated people, progress through an education system, and actually get to a university and elite status. And they, as it turned out, it was like a very short window of opportunity. So, I was working with a lineage of a tribe called the Luo, who are the second largest tribe in Kenya, and they’re in the far west of the country next to Lake Victoria. And what I did was I went back and forth between the elite people who had come from this community, from this clan actually, and were now in Nairobi. But, there’s an incredible amount of communication back and forth, and all these people retained ownership and membership, and they keep houses in the rural area as their place of identity, and it’s also for many of them a means of access to political power, because they’ll run for office from there. So they’re educated people, but living in Nairobi and working in Nairobi, but if you want to run for office, then they’ve got to run from there.
So I was looking at just how that whole network operated, and how they managed to handle the demands of their much poorer relatives, which was a very difficult thing to do, because here they are, they have their own nuclear family, but they also have to try to help these thousands of people that they’re related to, and it becomes, in some ways for me, it symbolized how Kenya, which is an extremely sharply divided country in terms of wealth, how cohesion is maintained, because everybody thinks they have some kind of stake in the system through their connection to someone up the scale there. Other tribe members, other tribes cut those ties, and they have more success.
You know, I look at, there was a guy who ran a little health clinic locally. Well, he lived right in amongst all his relatives, but he had his house surrounded by a fence because otherwise they’d all be demanding free service. So, basically he was doing business in this area, but he couldn’t maintain the normal relationships because he’d drown under all the demands. So, looking at all the set of complications and those sets of relationships…
But, I do want to say that when I was accepted at Brown in ’68, you know, I was very much thinking that I was on a path to either an academic career or making films, or maybe, it’s usually you have to combine the two. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do when I got there in ’71. The guy I had wanted to work with had moved on to Stanford, so the film option wasn’t immediately available anymore. And it went away for whatever it was, 30 years or something, because I finally did come back to it very late in my career.
But, I think by the time I came, after I came back, when I was finishing—I don’t want to go into a lot of detail—I had an experience in Kenya because the people I was working with were members of this tribe, the Luo, who were basically in opposition to the Kenyatta government. And we got word that the police were going to come and raid my house and plant germs on me and arrest me in order to embarrass them. But we had our own sort of spy in the police who warned us of this. And so, I actually had to go hide out for about a month in game parks, I was driving around, until they said, “Okay, you can come, but you can’t… You can go visit there sometimes, but you can’t stay.” So, it all ended badly and I came home.
I wasn’t sure I had enough for the dissertation. And I came home and I taught for several years in an adult degree program at the University of Rhode Island, which was a terrific experience. I loved it, working with mostly adult women who were coming back to school after raising children. But, you know, at some point there I realized, I don’t want to be just writing an article that 25 people might read in academia. I’m used to doing something that affects a lot of lives, and eventually led me to go into doing some federal research, and then working for NGOs internationally, and doing things that affected thousands or millions of lives. So, that detour that I took in ’68 really did affect my life.
LUCAS: Yeah, that’s what I’m hearing, and tell me if you wouldn’t agree, but is that you became sort of acclimated to impact an audience that didn’t seem as like present in just limited types of academia when you came back. So you were like “I would like to do stuff that’s more—that reaches outside the realm of just academic cultural anthropology”?
GOLDENBERG: Right, right, right. Yeah, and that has real life implications and broad impact. Yeah. And working directly with people. I think that’s another part of it, yeah. I mean, I used a lot of the skills they gave me. I just spent my life interviewing people, you know. Or, I also had to develop skills they didn’t give me because anthropology wasn’t quantitative at all in those days and I had to learn to run surveys. Grad school didn’t prepare me for that at all.
LUCAS: So you worked in education also a lot, is that right?
GOLDENBERG: Initially I worked in…
LUCAS: Oh, yes, go on.
GOLDENBERG: Yeah, so initially I taught as an adjunct faculty member for the University of Rhode Island, and I actually ended up as the sort of dean of a 600-person adult degree program, but as an adjunct. And they reached a point where they said, “Well, you’ve done such a fantastic job that we are now gonna replace you with a tenured faculty member.” [laughter] So, that sort of forced my hand, and that’s when I went out and got a job with a federal health research group, which then finally led to a connection to an NGO, and then about 25 years of working for CARE [International] and Save the Children, and mostly for a large children’s one called Plan International.
LUCAS: And you began making films. So, you have a film company of your own called Narravideo, is that right?
GOLDENBERG: Yes, yes. I mean, “company” sounds quite large because I’m the company. Right.
LUCAS: Yes, I knew that. But, the company of one. But you began making films in 2000, is that correct?
GOLDENBERG: Yeah, approximately, yeah, right.
LUCAS: So, how did you start that, start filmmaking?
GOLDENBERG: Yeah, I started—you know, when I was younger I fooled around a little bit with editing 16 mm film and shooting some Super 8 film and editing that, a long time ago. And when, around ’99 or 2000 I suddenly realized the importance of digital film and digital video and the fact that you could just now just do it on a computer, so I took a class at the University of Rhode Island, and then I took a couple classes up in Boston with a group there, and then after that it was, you know, basically just self-taught. And I started making films. I was still working in the field at this point as a consultant, and I would always try to convince—when I would go out to do an evaluation, for instance, I would try to convince them that “in addition to a report, let me make a film, as well.” And only in one or two instances did I actually succeed in that. One was the evaluation of the health intervention with the health ministry in Guinea in West Africa, in French, and when they got the report and then the film—and then actually I did the film without asking them, in fact, and they ended up using the film much more than they ever used the report.
LUCAS: You’ve also, so you made films that sort of carry out what you know about cultural anthropology into practice, which is kind of how you were able to make that film, just by observation and doing that. So, you made two or maybe more films about the Peace Corps and about Vietnam, to some extent. One is Swahili on the Prairie, and the other that I know about is life in Kenya. Do you want to elaborate on making those, and when you made them?
GOLDENBERG: Well, the group that went to Kenya in ’68, we had had a couple of reunions, but the last one was the 25th reunion. So now it was coming up on the 50th, time for our 50th reunion of our departure. And, so people started to communicate, one guy in particular got to be fantastic at tracking people down. He even found a guy who had come home from Kenya and changed his name entirely. But he found him. And, so as we prepared, getting organized about a year before the reunion, then I decided, okay, I’m going to go make a film about our experience, and so I started on the East Coast and I drove around to, you know, I had to track some of these people down and drove around to interview people.
And then, I took a major trip, flew out to Texas with my friend who was the mechanic from New Jersey who became a diplomat, who is now retired. And he drove, and we went through New Mexico and Arizona and California and interviewed a lot of people. And that’s the bulk of the interviews. I did a couple of them on Skype. So, we covered a wide range of topics during the interviews. So, the first film I made was about that very eventful summer of ’68 and our training experience and our relationship with the people of Bismarck. Oh, and I also did track down my girlfriend from Bismarck, North Dakota, who, as I had suggested to her, went to California, and has been living there ever since.
LUCAS: Wow, yeah, there was a woman in the film who said, “My boyfriend told me to go to Berkeley when I asked him what to do with my life,” and she did.
GOLDENBERG: Yeah, she did. She did, and at Berkeley she met a Jewish guy from Brooklyn and married him, and had a good life with him. And unfortunately, I found her through his obituary, because she hadn’t changed her name. So, he had died a couple of years before I contacted her, but she got a degree from Berkeley as an artist, and stayed out there. A couple of the other girlfriends came out there. There’s a lot of stories. Also left and came out there—their lives didn’t turn out as happily as hers. But, you know, it had an impact on people’s lives that summer.
And so, in the end I ended up making, I think it was about 12 or 15 short films. You saw the one about living in Kenya. There’s one—we worked for two different ministries, so there’s, one’s about the work for the Department of Settlement and the other for the Department of Agriculture. There’s a whole one about what I mentioned before about breaking the rules in Kenya. And so I’m going to make another film about our Kenya time that’s going to be more difficult because I have to pull pieces from all these short films into it, that theme. And part of that theme is how the draft still hung over us during our time there.
There’s also, there’s a lot of stuff that was going on in the politics of Kenya. While we were there the Vice-President, Tom Mboya, was assassinated, and we found ourselves in the middle of riots. I had to drive. I was actually at an agricultural show in his home area. He was a Luo. And the Luos started to riot, and we drove out towards the north to get out of the Luo area, and we’re driving a government car. You can tell. It’s got a government license plate. So people were stoning us as we drove. And then a few days later I was back in my office in Nairobi and I walked around in the middle of the riot in the city talking to people. And we thought we were going to have to evacuate and we thought the whole country was going to blow up, so people had instructions about keeping tankfuls of gas and they had special extra tanks in their Land Rovers, and assignments about picking up other Peace Corps volunteers like teachers if we had to evacuate to Uganda. But, that didn’t happen, thankfully.
LUCAS: So, making those films, I mean, clearly you’ve thought about all these things that happened. Did talking to other people sort of change the way you think about or maintain a relationship with the Peace Corps or with the times that you were making a documentary about even? Did sort of like digging that up change things in your mind about your experience in the Peace Corps?
GOLDENBERG: That’s an interesting question. So, I had about 25 or 30 interviews like this that, you know, each went on for several hours, because I also would interview them a little bit about their family backgrounds, which that was interesting. I used that a little bit in my film then. And none of us really knew much of anything about each other’s background. You know, I don’t think any of them knew I grew up in Europe, and then, you know, there was another guy who was born in China. I had no idea that his father was a missionary in China for 45 years. So, that unveiled a lot. It was interesting that as young people, we were just living in the moment, I guess, and not really reflecting on our past. But, I think that was a revelation to all of us, because nobody really knew much about each other’s backgrounds.
And then, of course, everybody wanted to talk about how Peace Corps had affected their life, because it did, you know, in very different ways. And a lot of the people went on, yeah, actually, some people came back. Some of them had surprised me. They came back and, like the guy who lived there for five years and was so completely immersed in his village and local culture, he never went back. And he’s still not even in touch with them. I don’t quite, I don’t understand. But, I was surprised by some of the ones who never went back. A lot of us did go back. A lot of us—some guys in a way didn’t leave. They actually took on other jobs. And there was one guy who he’s there now. He’s been going back and forth all his life. He’s farmed there. And now he just had a child with a woman on the coast. Here he is in his 70s, but yep, he’s still at it. And that’s the guy from North Dakota.
LUCAS: Oh, wow.
GOLDENBERG: So, yeah, there was a lot of learning about, in that part, I think, about the effect on people’s lives and those differences. I’m trying to think about… I was in a unique position to know a lot about other people’s lives there because of the work I did, which was to travel all over the country. So, I would stay with volunteers in those houses when I would go out, or I would see them when I would go to these agricultural shows. And that was an unusual experience because most of them were cut off from each other, and they would be in touch with just a couple other people. So, in that way I already did know something about what their experiences and lives were like, I think.
You know, it was very interesting to interview the guy who was our supervisor there, who’s a very impressive guy who is still active. He’s still going back. He just turned 80. He’s still going, supporting small business programs in Tanzania and Kenya. The guy who ran our training, Tom Katus, who’s the one you would see who’s interviewed on Skype, he’s stuck in the Philippines right now. He went for a visit just before the outbreak, so he’s been there two months on an island in the Philippines. Can’t get back. Can’t get out. But, he’s been very—he’s still been active on the Indian reservations. He’s done incredible things like bringing Australian aboriginals to visit Native Americans on Pine Ridge Reservation and talk about their respective similar issues with the colonial population.
And then, the other guy who was interviewed on Skype, he was, with some support from our group, he just got himself elected two years ago when we had the reunion, got himself elected to the South Dakota State Legislature as a Democrat from Sioux Falls, with a lot of votes from the Somalis and Kenyans and Sudanese who work in the meat plants there. So the guy who appears in the film who’s a Somali who was our language teacher, he went out to campaign for him out there. And now he’s going to try to run for Congress, so we’ll see if it works. It’s going to be very tough, but maybe after all this nonsense, who knows?
LUCAS: Yeah… Anything can happen. I was thinking, so just with all these connections to the Peace Corps, I was thinking back to Dartmouth, and this is just one of my sort of final questions that I’ve been thinking about. You’ve gone back. You mentioned going for a reunion recently.
GOLDENBERG: Yeah, I did go back for the… I went, I think in that case I went to, I may have gone to the 25th, which I hated because it was all… The people who had all stayed in touch had been in the fraternities. I’d never been in a fraternity, and I felt really isolated from them. 50th was different. It was good. We’re at that point in life when all that former stuff doesn’t matter. So, I had some good conversations. But, mostly my connection has been through other people. The family that I lived with, I’m still very close to the daughter of that family, who lives in—now she’s living in Kendal Village actually, but she was still living on that farm in Meriden. And then, another friend, a high school friend of mine actually lives in Norwich. So, I come up because of those connections really.
LUCAS: Have you had a chance to reconnect with—so, aside from those people, have you also reconnected with any ‘68s and learned things about where they went in their lives?
GOLDENBERG: Yeah. That was certainly part of this 50th reunion experience was, we had a nice dinner table one night for some of us who had been, we’d been in the international dorm and we’d been anti-war activists, and it included the guy, Jamie Newton, I mentioned who was the valedictorian.
LUCAS: [inaudible]
GOLDENBERG: Yeah. And talking to them. But I must say, it also—I had some really good talks with people that I didn’t remember knowing, but we’d just start talking about those days because we all had that bond of dealing with the war. So, there was a lot of commonality in that with strangers, or relative strangers. And then, there was a—I went to that session. You know, there was a session that Ed Miller was a participant in, which was mostly organized, I think, by the veterans in our class, who kind of dominated that session. And it was important for them to talk about their experiences. And, so it was a little harder for the rest of us to express our views in that particular session, but, you know, I shared a little bit about the Peace Corps and about the general sense of displacement of all of our kind of life expectancies at the time being put on hold, you know, some who had to go to service and others who it worked a different way. So, yeah, I did find some value in the sharing. But, it was interesting, some of the richest was actually with people I didn’t remember at all. You know, we would just start a conversation. Trying to think of something else that was related to that, but…
LUCAS: No, that’s good. You mentioned also, I know we haven’t talked about your immediate family, like your wife and children, right? But you mentioned that your daughter went to the Dominican Republic with the Peace Corps.
GOLDENBERG: Yes, she did. She went for two years. She got a degree from Washington University in St. Louis in education, following her mother’s footstep, who was an educator of the deaf. And then, she ended up staying an extra two years teaching in the Dominican Republic, but not in the Peace Corps, but teaching privately. And then she came back to Rhode Island, which we would never have thought our kids would stay in Rhode Island, but they both have. And she works in a dual language school. She’s actually a coach now, supervising a bunch of teachers, and in the middle of this Covid trying to work, train both teachers and parents in two languages how to cope with all of this. And then, she’s also, she had to take over—one teacher just couldn’t cope with it at all, and she’s had to take over her fourth grade class, so she does that in the afternoons. What they do is she always—the way this system works is, she taught this way for years, is she would teach in Spanish and she had a co-teacher who’d teach the same kids in English, and they’d switch back and forth, through grade five. But now she’s a coach to those teachers, and then, of course, trying to make it work online with a lot of kids whose parents only speak Spanish or, you know, the internet connections are terrible and all kinds of stuff. It’s really hard. She thinks only a third of the kids are really benefitting right now. But yes, clearly, right, that affected her life.
LUCAS: Did you hear about her—did she say that she chose to go to the Peace Corps, like that had something to do with you and your experiences in Kenya?
GOLDENBERG: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think, you know, she saw it as a good way to get education experience, because then she was able to come back and get immediately hired in an urban dual language setting. So, you know, it wasn’t just… And her experience, of course, it was nothing like mine. She wasn’t in a country like Kenya. I mean, we didn’t even talk about, if you have to go to some place to sit out the war, here’s a country where, you know, I’m living in Nairobi, which is at 6,000 feet, which has the mean high is like 75˚ every day, there’s fabulous game parks that we can go to on the weekend, it’s mountains, it has fabulous beaches, it has a very credible ethnic population, it has an Asian population with its cuisine. I mean, we were in paradise, you know, for us. I use that term. Somebody reminded me no, it’s not paradise, of course, for a lot of people, but it was paradise for us. So, the Dominican Republic was not like that. [laughter]
LUCAS: Is there anything else that you want to talk about? Like anything at all? Peace Corps. Vietnam. Filmmaking. Or anything that you’re thinking about?
GOLDENBERG: Well, I guess one parting thing is to… we’re going to have a situation coming out of this crisis in which lots and lots of young people are going to need something to do, and also, there may be a need to patch this country together again. And, you know, a lot of people are talking about the revival of some sort of mandatory service requirement that would accomplish these things that, you know, that you go do, Peace Corps, I mean, survival in the Peace Corps is… Whoop, are we still on?
LUCAS: Yes.
GOLDENBERG: Okay. I was suddenly the host. Okay, but we’re still connected by phone, right? Okay, so anyway, so yeah, my point was, I mean, as an aside, of course, the survival of Peace Corps is in danger because there’s a bunch of Republicans that are always trying to kill it. But, beyond that, there’s going to be a need to revive something like the Civilian Conservation Corps from the Depression, to get people to get out to work in national parks, to have people working on a volunteer basis in inner cities, to have health support volunteers. I mean, that probably should start even soon. And, to organize—somebody’s got to be organizing. I’m seeing all the people of my generation sitting around twiddling our thumbs, when perhaps we could be providing tutoring support for these kids who are having a hard time with their online learning. But, there is a need to—there’s going to be a need to revive volunteerism on some level and support it, you know, on a massive scale, I think. Because as in the Depression, there’s going to be a population that needs to be employed, and work to be done.
LUCAS: Do you think that—can you think of ways that doing that will maybe affect or change what the country is going to look like after the pandemic sort of fades away, that after young people have their world shaken and gone, yeah, the kind of work you’re talking about?
GOLDENBERG: Well, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, you know, I think I already worried about what this world’s going to look like for my grandchildren. You know, the kind of… from working class people who can’t count on factory jobs with union benefits to company employees who are just hired as consultants all the time, it was already a shaky kind of situation. And so, whether there’s a change now where people come out and realize that they have to—that their own future depends on working for the common good, that they can’t just be lining up that financial job on Wall Street or, you know, whatever else looks promising. I’m hopeful that there’ll be a real transformation. And it’s going to be years getting out of this thing, and some people have to come up with some creative ideas.
LUCAS: I agree.
GOLDENBERG: Right. Yeah, yeah. I must say, you know, in contrast, when, for all this kind of turmoil that we had in our time, we still had a confidence that okay, once this is over, there are jobs out there. And it was that still I would come back from Kenya and I had the entirety of my graduate studies were all paid for by national grants. That stuff doesn’t exist anymore. And yeah, hate to paint a bleak picture of it, but yeah.
LUCAS: It’s a valid picture to paint. Is there anything else that you want to say?
GOLDENBERG: Oh, I think that’s enough. [laughter] That’s enough. If you’re interested in some of these other subjects, you can take a look at some of those other films. The little film I made called Whatever Happened to Steve Hamil was about the guy I replaced, right? He was the one who turned down that job. And he went on to live every scenario of the ‘70s in the US. His was quite a journey after he made that decision. You know, that was something. And yeah, I’m trying to—you know, I want to get the Swahili film, I’m trying to get it out to a larger audience. I’m not any good at the marketing part of this thing. So, I’m sharing it with Peace Corps groups. I’m just… whatever. I’d hope to screen it at Dartmouth. We had talked about that.
And I’m also trying to do that with, you might take a look at the film that I’m proudest of in my life… You know, this is the very first thing, project that I ever did that actually had me as part of the film. I’d never done that before. The film that I'm proudest of is called Return to Haifa – The Other’s Story, which is about an Israeli play. And I was actually under a lot of pressure not to screen it, and so now I’ve decided I’m just putting it out there and letting people watch it. It’s one that a lot of Palestinians don’t want screened and it’s one that a lot of Israeli right wing and American right wing Jews don’t want screened, because it talks about a point of kind of looking at each other’s mutual suffering.
LUCAS: And these are all on your…
GOLDENBERG: Yeah, they’re all on the video site, yeah.
LUCAS: I do want to check those out, and I think that I will. Yeah, thank you for telling me about them.
[End of Interview.]