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Out to Lunch with Bob Follett, publisher,
veteran, former Republican committeeman
--- Aug 27, 2003, Summit Times
In this series of interviews, I talk to Summit County
residents about how they feel and think about politics. This week I had
coffee at Inxpot with Bob Follett, who was the Republican Party’s
committeeman for the Seventh Congressional District of Illinois, and
who published the first integrated textbooks in the country - and lost
money doing it. Follett currently sits on the board of the Keystone
neighborhood association, and the Snake River Homeowners Association.
He first skied at Breckenridge in 1965, bought a condo in
Keystone in the ’80s, and retired from the publishing company that
bears his name to live lived full-time in Summit County in the early
’90s.
Talty: You were in the army, in ’51 during ….?
Follett: The Korean War. What’s interesting is that the
Korean War, the Vietnam War, and now the Iraq war, we’re going through
the same kind of thing. It started out ‘it’s the right thing to
do, we’ve got to deal with the invasion of South Korea, of South
Vietnam, we’ve got to deal with Saddam.’ It didn’t take very long
before we got ourselves in a lot deeper than we wanted. Iraq is much
more quick than Vietnam or Korea that we’ve got people saying ‘what are
we doing there, how did we get sucked into this?’
Talty: What did you do in the Korean War?
Follett: I was sent off to Ft. Reilly, Kansas, to help start
the Psychological Warfare Center. The army, in the Second World War,
had done various kinds of psychological warfare in a half-assed
fashion. So, they said ‘we’ve got to get serious about that,’ and they
said we’re not really serous about Korea, it’s Europe. We were in the
middle of the Cold War, the Russians are at the Berlin War, so we have
to develop the ability to deal with all these captive populations. If
there’s going to be a war, we want them not to be cooperating with the
Russians.
Talty: Then you started a training facility for special forces, like
the Green Beret?
Follett: Yeah. They really came into their own - they worked
in Vietnam but you didn’t hear that much about them - when they worked
in Afghanistan, and did all the things just like we talked about
- you know, a hundred years ago (actually 50).
Talty: Have we also gotten better at psychological warfare?
Follett: I don’t know if we’ve gotten any better at it. We
did a lot of it in Iraq, a lot of broadcasting, leaflet dropping,
various things. My observation, from a long distance, is that we didn’t
understand them well enough to really do a good job. In the case of
Eastern Europeans there were all kinds of people in this country that
had come over from there recently, so the culture was understood. You
understood that there were differences, that the Slovaks were different
than the Czechs, and the Eastern Slovaks were different than the
Western, and you had people that understood the religious differences.
It didn’t sound like they had as good an understanding in Iraq.
You also didn’t get ahead in the state department or in the military by
being an expert in the Middle East. We’re always a war too late.
Talty: A year ago, were you thinking we’ve got to go get Saddam?
Follett: I thought we were squeezing on him with the
sanctions, we had inspectors in there, and of course the people in
Washington were convinced that there was stuff there and we should be
finding it, but it seemed to me that as long as we had inspectors on
the ground and we had the opportunity to increase the number - he’d
already agreed, but he’d agreed very slowly. It seemed to me that we
ought to just keep pressure on them.
Talty: You disagreed with the president?
Follett: Yeah. I spent eight years on the Republican State
Central Committee and going to Springfield, so I know a lot about
Republican politics and I know a lot of Republican politicians. So,
with that background, no, I don’t agree with Bush and I think he’s
doing a crappy job, and I will be happy to vote against him in 2004
when he comes up for re-elections.
Talty: What’s Bush doing a crappy job on, besides Iraq?
Follett: I think his way of dealing with environmental issues
is 100 percent opposed to where I would be on it. There are two things,
partly he’s from Texas and Texas is not a very environmentally with-it
part of the country, and secondly he’s involved with corporations and
he is convinced, at least in his own mind, that we need to put these
fifteen thousand gas wells in the middle of the wilderness and so
forth, but I just don’t agree with that.
And I’m rich, and I don’t agree with the tax cuts for people like
me.It’s been my experience that the way things get changed is at the
local level and you can really make a difference at the local level.
Talty: In the past, were political people more tolerant of the minority
opinion?
Follett: Yes, no question about it. No, I take that back.
It’s a funny thing, we live in a time not that much different than the
past, but take the issue of homosexuality. Large numbers of people in
this country feel very strongly that it’s a bad thing, the bible is
against it, or whatever. But they know homosexuals, because homosexuals
have now come more out of the closet, and they don’t hate those people,
“that’s my friend, yeah, he’s okay.” There’s a disconnect between this
global view and the people that you know.
Talty: So, with local politics, we are still tolerant of the minority?
Follett: Yeah. There’s a tolerance, a willingness to see it,
a way to work things out. Again, on a local level, a lot of this can
happen. Once you get to the state level it’s very difficult, and
when you get to the national level, everybody is setting up straw men
and talking about symbols, all the issues are de-personalized, you can
hate this, and you can love this, but you’re not dealing with real
people any more.
Talty: Is there a way to fix this?
Follett: It happens, but really slowly. One of the advantages
of living a long time, is that you recognize that change occurs, but
particularly cultural, social changes take a long time. An example is
our attitudes about homosexuality have changed enormously over that
past 10 or 15 years.
I went through the civil rights movement. One of my friends was
with Martin Luther King’s movement. I knew him when he was walking
across the bridge at Selma fearing for his life. Things has changes so
much - it took a long time - he does a lot of work in the south now,
and he doesn’t think two minutes about renting a car and driving out
into the rural south.
Talty: So, those weren’t such good ol’ days?
Follett: We have come an enormous way. And the biggest
revolution that has happened in my life - and it took a while -is the
change in the status of women. And when you compare the status of women
in this country with those in Muslim countries, the contrast is so
enormous, and yet, when I was a kid growing up, it probably wasn’t that
much different. A woman’s place was in the home. The husband was the
only one that had the right to sign legal documents. That’s an enormous
change. All to the good. It took a long time, and the politicians
mostly resisted all these changes. But they happened - I’m not sure I
can define exactly the process, but people’s hearts and minds changed -
because a few brave people got us involved.
Talty: In a few years it will be okay to pay taxes?
Follett: Not if people’s views of their political leaders
don’t change. Government is wonderful, we’ve got to have it. But, the
real changes that are important happen at an individual level.
Talty: What will be the next, slow revolution? Rights for all
animals?
it Follett: I’ve wondered about that. We’re certainly
figuring out,
certainly in the case of primates that they aren’t that much different
from us. I think we’ll gradually see that change; and absorb the
meaning of what being done in molecular biology, and the like. The
average person is still trying to figure out what all that means,
cloning and all these kind of issues. It hasn’t really had time to sink
in, you have people like PETA, I think they’re going about it the wrong
way. Every revolution needs somebody out there screaming and shouting
and yelling about it, but they’re interfering with medical progress and
that makes it tough for people to get behind.
Talty: Other things that will change?
Follett: Take the recent Black-outs in the east.The answer is
not a better power grid that takes care of half the country. The answer
is hydrogen generators that you can have in your home or community. The
power generation become local.
When I was growing up there was no such thing as a farmers’ market. Now
every town has a farmers’ market. We’ve begun to narrow down; we have
more local activity. I see that as a long-term trend.
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More Out to Lunch
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