Frank Manciewicz

Frank Mankiewicz was an American journalist born in 1924. He was president of National Public Radio, regional director for the Peace Corps in Latin America, campaign director for 1972 Democratic president nominee George McGovern, and a press secretary to Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, when he was tasked with the job of announcing Kennedy’s assassination. Mankiewicz’s role in politics earned him a place on the master list of Nixon political opponents in 1973 while he worked as a syndicated columnist for the Los Angeles Times. He was also a major force in halting the 1970s metrication effort in the US (a movement towards widespread use of the SI metric system instead of customary units). Mankiewicz received a B.A. in political science from University of California, Los Angeles in 1947; a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1948; and an LL.B. from University of California, Berkeley in 1955. The Mankiewicz family are known for their significant contributions to Hollywood screenwriting, producing and acting, as well as appearances on television and radio. [2022 note: Frank Manciewicz died October 3rd, 2014].

Spectator Magazine: So, you were born in 1924 and this is September of 2009. You’ve seen a lot of America and you’ve seen a lot of changes-any nuggets of wisdom you’d like to share about America then and America now?

Frank Mankiewicz: Well the huge difference is when I was active in politics with Robert Kennedy, George McGovern and some other candidates, you really only had two news circles. You had the evening news on network television, and then you had morning papers-some afternoon papers-but basically it was newspapers and evening news. Now there’s news all day on cable. And it makes a big difference and I don’t think it’s a very good difference because it makes news and events much more celebrity conscious. Much more interested in the quick exciting story rather than the depth that you might get in print. So that’s a tough problem and that’s getting worse. It’s going to be yours to solve.

SM: Any nuggets of wisdom about where America is going?

FM: Down, I think, because others countries are coming up too. The last 10-15 years have not been very good for us. We’ve been backing the wrong people around the world, been in wars we shouldn’t have been in, our reputation is nowhere near what it was 50 years ago or even 25 years ago, I question whether we can get it back. What that will lead to, I don’t know.

SM: Do you think history marches at an even pace or are there tipping points?

FM: I think Vietnam was a tipping point and I think mass communications was a tipping point. I think television- mass entertainment- without significant advances in education has been a terrible mistake. We don’t take very much seriously anymore, other countries do. I don’t know, I’m not very optimistic about the future of the United States.

SM: Do you think America is at a tipping point now?

FM: We may have passed it. Do you know the phrase-the entertainment business phrase “jumped the shark” meaning to do something completely out of character and that sort of is your tipping point for a TV show-and it’s become sort of a tipping point phrase for almost anything.

SM: And what might the shark have been for us?

FM: Vietnam maybe. Maybe Iraq. Maybe Guantanamo-hard to say, but I think something happened in the last 20-25 years that has made people in the world think differently about us.

SM: The comedian George Carlin once told Bob Costas he thought we jumped the shark after World War II when that great generation came home. After all that you experienced- going through the Depression, fighting, World War II- there was a shift in consciousness from we to I; the vets came home and suburbia got built, and everyone settled down to a mortgage and a lawn to mow. It was a qualitative shift.

FM: Well, I think there’s a good argument to be made for that happening after World War II, and I think that another event was the maintenance of a huge military. I mean we’ve been at war ever since World War II one way or another, and if we haven’t been in a war, we’ve been looking for one. And that’s changed us, and half our budget goes to weapons. Not just for ourselves but for anybody else in the world we can sell them to or give them to. And that’s an outgrowth of World War II-I mean, we certainly didn’t retreat after we won that war and say ‘Alright, now we’re going to be a peaceful country,’ we started right in with the Cold War.

SM: Would your point be that we continued the manufacturing apparatus full scale after that war and we didn’t just gear up for a war like we did against Spain or the Indian Nations, for instance, and then stand down afterwards?

FM: Yeah, and those were small too. We had 15 million men under arms in World War II out of a total population of 120 million men, women, and children. I mean, that was no skirmish with the Indians, even the Spanish American War was a serious war and once they were over we demilitarized. We didn’t have any reason to have a huge army. At the start of World War II our army was like 50,000 men and when it ended it was 15 million.

SM: Do you think the enemy was manufactured or do you think that we need to keep-

FM: I think it was largely manufactured. I remember just before World War II, I went to a debate between two men you may have never heard of. One was Robert Maynard Hutchins, an educator, who was President of Yale and a real intellectual, not a fundraising president, and the other guy in the debate was Norman Thomas, who had been, for five elections, the nominee of the socialist party in the United States, a small party, but one that regularly contributes ideas to the major parties. And the question for the debate was whether we should get into World War II which was then going on between England, Germany, France and maybe at that point, Russia. And Thomas, I remember, said no. He was, what we call, a strong isolationist-wanted us to stay out of European Wars. And he said, ‘The trouble is, if we get into this war we will mobilize and we will never demobilize.’ And he used an interesting phrase, he said you take a used car dealer and make him a colonel and he’s not going to want to go back to the used cars business. And he didn’t mean specifically any one person but he meant generally it was the pleasure you get from power and rank and uniforms, and bands and wonderful airplanes and missiles-very hard to give up. I think he was right.

SM: And so that’s what President Eisenhower was warning people about in 1960 when he warned us about the military industrial complex?

FM: Exactly.

SM: And you think since 1960 it has insinuated itself more deeply into American life?

FM: Yeah, it gets worse all the time. Look at the percentage of the budget. I mean it’s shocking that we’re the only country in the world- the only industrial country in the world-that doesn’t have national health insurance, the only one.

SM: Obama said when people get afraid they go to God and guns. He caught a lot of flak for that. Do you think he was right?

FM: I do, I do.

SM: So between guns or butter, you’re a butter man?

"Like I said, we can get to the moon, but we can’t keep our babies alive. Last time I looked, we are 17th in the world in infant mortalities. Isn’t that shocking?"

FM: I’m very much a butter man. Like I said we can get to the moon, but we can’t keep our babies alive. Last time I looked, we are 17th in the world in infant mortalities. Isn’t that shocking? But we can get to the moon and set up a military base there, and I’m sure we will, but we have sick people who don’t have insurance. That’s a part of us that can be very damaging.

SM: Changing directions a little bit here: What is your assessment of the 60s?

FM: I think the 60s were pretty good. Taught us a lot. I think we came to respect the movements of younger people. We began the decade, I think, a very militaristic country; and we came through the experience of Vietnam to doubt military solutions to major world problems. I’m sure a lot of people now realize it wouldn’t mean anything. I wish someone would systematically poll the American people about our wars, ask them for instance what they think victory would mean in Iraq. And in Afghanistan. What are we fighting for? That these countries should become industrial countries that manufacture cars, radios, and TV sets? I can’t believe that’s what we want. Or that anybody thinks that’s seriously possible.

SM: A lot of people think we’re fighting for oil, and for American and global business interests like Haliburton.

FM: I don’t know what we’re fighting for.

SM: Back to the 60s: what was your relationship with LBJ? You worked in his administration, didn’t you?

FM: No, not really. Well, I was an official in the Peace Corps, but that was not really a serious part of the government. I was overseas in the Peace Corps when President Kennedy was killed. I came back a year later.

SM: So how did you then hook up with Robert Kennedy?

"I didn’t know what being a press secretary was but I figured I could learn."

FM: I was the director in Peru and then I came back to being the Latin America regional Director. And I was in Washington, in ‘64, when he was elected to the Senate. A year or so later he called me up at the Peace Corps and said that he was going to Latin America with a schedule the State Department had given him for the trip. It was awful. It was a typical State Department schedule. He was right to call. I asked him why was he going to Lima to do all that, he could do everything on that schedule in America. He laughed and said I was right; did I have another schedule in mind? So I made up a different one. When he came back from South America I went to see him about his trip and what he’d seen. And I even gave him a couple of ideas for a speech he was writing about Latin America that he was going to deliver later that summer. And then about a week later he called me up and said his press secretary had just resigned, and was I interested in the job? I didn’t know what being a press secretary was but I figured I could learn.

SM: You were Press Secretary for him when he was a senator from New York?

FM: That’s correct.

SM: What were the dynamics of his relationship with LBJ?

FM: I gathered from him and others that it was pretty bad from the beginning.

SM: Any idea why?

FM: I think he really was an idealist and I think he saw in Johnson a typical...politician. Bobby was manager of John Kennedy’s presidential campaign and Johnson opposed him very strongly, and maybe in that campaign he just decided he didn’t like this guy and vice versa.

SM: So, you think in going from Attorney General to Senator he felt like one of those colonels or generals we talked about earlier who returned from the war and did not want to go back to being a used car salesman?

FM: It probably drove him to the United States Senate, but I believe he was thinking about being president all the time he was there.

SM: Then why did it take him so long to come around to running in ‘68?

FM: Because he saw, ideally, that he would run four years later in ‘72. If you study political history, you realize that loyalty to one's political party is important, it really was, and the idea of running for president against an incumbent president from one’s own political party was not even thought of-it would have been real disloyalty. And I think he felt that it would cost him the support of all the big city leaders who owned a lot to Johnson. And it probably would have.

SM: So in ‘68 when Johnson bowed out of the race, and Bob- by entered at such a late date forfeiting so many early primaries, and you hopped on that roller coaster ride , it must have been tremendously exhilarating: coming from behind, motorcading through the streets.

FM: It was. Oh, it was. Yeah. Some of us had been pressing him to run for some time. In fact, the committee we lined up to get us on the ballot in California ended up missing the deadline, but another group we did not even know about had miraculously got us on! The race itself was very exciting, to see the way the country came together, really, I mean extraordinary crowds, it was frenzied.

SM: The film footage is electric. Massive crowds of urban poor, the rural south flocking out to greet him. It’s almost as if his grief had transformed the idealism of his former hardline politics into genuine sympathy for the suffering of other human beings- especially the downtrodden. He seemed to connect with people in a fundamental way he never did before.

FM: I think he did. And I think they saw they saw something in him, and he responded.

SM: And then the California Primary. Everyone must’ve been exhilarated but beat fatigue-wise. And the cameras are rolling and Bobby’s giving his vision for America, and then seconds later he’s shot. Can you describe that moment? Were you near him?

FM: Yeah, oh yeah. Well I always was. We didn’t have any Secret Service.

SM: Really?

FM: The standard protection he had was me and a guy named Bill Berry. He had been an FBI guy attached to Robert Kennedy when he was Attorney General. He was retired from the FBI and stayed with the Kennedys. And he and I would sort of stand on each side of him when we’d go places and protect him from the crowds, protect him going through crowds. But that was about it, and when we left the Ambassador ballroom that night, Kennedy had made a change of plans. We were going through the hotel to get to another room for a press conference, but he was too tired, exhausted. And somebody from the hotel, the maitre d’ said we could leave through the back of the auditorium and go through the kitchen to this other room. So we did that, and then as we were leaving- there was this platform about waist high that you had to jump down from. Bill and I were there with him. And he [Kennedy] was walking off with the guy from the hotel. Ethel was standing with us and says ‘Hey you guys, I need some help to jump down.” It was not widely known, but she was pregnant at the time. Two months, three months. So we helped her down from the platform, and then she said “alright now go on,” and we turned and by that time he was a little ways away with the guy from the hotel. And about then we heard the shots, so we weren’t really by his side when he was shot, we were on our way there, yeah.

SM: How were the next few days?

FM: Hard, but in a way it was a good thing. I had so much work to do, making decisions about how to get the body back. The President was going to send a plane. Where should the funeral be? Should there be a funeral? Who should be invited to the funeral? What provisions should be made for the press at the funeral? Keeping the press informed. So we didn’t even have time to think about everything else until we got back here.

SM: Wasn’t there a funeral train?

FM: There was. In fact, there’s a film coming out by a documentarian named Jon Blair, based on the Robert Kennedy funeral train; not the train, but the spectators. And he’s done a remarkable job of finding who these thousands of people were who were lining the tracks. I mean, it was 40 years ago.

SM: He’s tracking them down?

FM: He found about 100 of them… One of my problems on that train trip was that we thought he had killed three people. One couple died standing too close to the platform, and one guy, kinda nutty we thought, had climbed one of those trestles over the train tracks and was hanging there, watching the train go by, and was electrocuted somehow, burned. So my job, among other things on that trip, was to tell the reporters who these people were, and, you know, their ages and where they were from and all that news. Jon Blair found that man we thought was electrocuted. He wasn’t killed at all. He was badly burned, thought to be dead. Taken to the hospital, and he survived. But the interesting thing, a little footnote, this guy went through about two years of hospitalization at one time or another. The $200,000 bill from the hospitalization was quietly paid by Ted Kennedy.

SM: Wow. Senator Kennedy has just died, of course. What’s your take on Teddy?

FM: I think he was the best senator in the 20th century and probably the 21st. I mean it’s been 9 years into this new century, but I think he’d already done enough in those 9 years, he was quite something.

SM: Looking at Obama, where would you rank him among the presidents you’ve seen in your lifetime?

"I think he’s obviously an enormously intelligent man, probably the most intelligent president we’ve ever had."

FM: I haven’t ranked him yet. I think he’s obviously an enormously intelligent man, probably the most intelligent president we’ve ever had. He’s the only politician I’ve seen who, when he starts a sentence, knows how it’s going to end. I mean that’s rare. The verbs agree with the nouns and the adjectives fit and… he says something and goes on and says something else. He’s remarkable. But as a president I don’t know. He seems a little too inept as to how things function here. Someone said to me the other day “I wish he had a little bit of Lyndon B. Johnson in him.”

SM: You haven’t seen that yet?

FM: No, haven’t seen it yet.

SM: Have you seen any Franklin D. Roosevelt in him?

FM: A little bit yeah.

SM: A little John Kennedy vision maybe?

FM: Maybe. Roosevelt always had a thing where he’d try something and if it didn’t work he’d try something else. He never was committed to any of his particular remedies. I’m waiting for Obama to be tough. I’m waiting for him to say to some senator violently, “Look, I need this and if you can’t vote for me on this bill, health care or climate, whatever it is, then don’t, but don’t expect anything from me in return. You’re not going to get any judges appointed. You’re not going to get any air marshals. Your cousin’s not going to get that contract.”

SM: What do you think the generals told Obama about Afghanistan? Were you surprised that he thought we needed to commit more troops?

FM: I thought he was fulfilling a campaign promise really. But I think it’ll be a mistake. He’s on the record with that… I think he’ll come in with maybe 20-25 thousand troops.

SM: Before we wind up, a couple questions about your early life. You lived through the Depression.

FM: Well my father was a screenwriter-he won an academy award for Citizen Kane in fact- and the movie business was almost the only business that was not affected by the Depression. The movie industry was never better than it was in the 30s. In 1945, 90 million people went to the movies per week, the population was only 120 million. It’s never done that well since. I went to Beverly Hills High School!

SM: What about World War II? What was your life like then?

FM: Well, I was a good soldier.

SM: What theatre were you in?

FM: Europe: France, Germany, Belgium.

SM: The Battle of the Bulge?

FM: The Battle of the Bulge.

SM: And what did you think during that?

"I was scared. It was freezing cold. Spent nights in a fox hole with the ice water up to your shins. You don’t sleep very well."

FM: I was scared. It was freezing cold. Spent nights in a fox hole with the ice water up to your shins. You don’t sleep very well. That was from the end of 1942 to February 1946.

SM: Again, what would make a great generation put their lives on the line, whereas today not even our leaders or their children ever serve?

FM: I don’t know. We had to serve. I mean, people lied to get in. We said we were older than we were; we ate a lot of stuff if we were underweight and dieted if we weren’t.

SM: Last question. Pericles's generation in ancient Greece was another one of those great generations. Do you remember the speech Bobby Kennedy made in Indianapolis when he quoted the Greek poet Aeschylus while announcing the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. It’s such an eloquently beautiful speech, so perfectly sculpted, hardly a misplaced word- but wasn’t that speech extemporaneous?

"Whenever one American takes the life of another American, for whatever reason, the whole nation is degraded."

FM: Absolutely off the cuff. He loved Aeschylus and the Greeks. I have a picture in my office of the two of us on the airplane where he said to me, “Write some things down that we’re talking about, no speech, just some ideas.” I did. But later that day, by the time the bus I was on got to the place, he was already on stage and I couldn’t get past the police perimeter. It was a beautiful speech that he delivered that night, but not as beautiful as the one he delivered the next morning in Cleveland. It was an astonishing speech about the different kinds of violence. Not just the physical violence of guns and bombs in the night, but the violence of institutions that foreclose, the violence of indifference, the violence of the “slow destruction of a child by hunger.” He said whenever one American takes the life of another American, for whatever reason, the whole nation is degraded. He ended by saying we’ve become a country where we look on each other as aliens with whom we share a city but not a community. And we should become a country of fellow men who become brothers and countrymen once again. It’s quite a speech.

--Frank Mankiewicz for Spectator Magazine, 2009