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Warren Beatty
Speech printer friendly version 2 3 4 5 6 7 p1 Thank you, Norman, not only for your kind words about me, but for your contribution to political discourse with People for the American Way and for your unique work in film and television, all of which have won you the President's National Medal of the Arts Award earlier today at the White House. So thank you for jumping on a plane and whipping back to Los Angeles to present this award to me. Lila, I want to thank you and the Americans for Democratic Action for honoring me. Of your founders, I've already been greatly honored with the friendship of Hubert Humphrey and Arthur Schlessinger, Jr. I've revered the late Walter Reuther as I do Mr. Galbraith. But the woman, other than my mother, I always admired most in my childhood, Eleanor Roosevelt, I never got to meet. Although had I been a little less wary one day in New York in 1961, it's possible I would have. My first movie had just come out, I was walking up Fifth Avenue, a boy from Virginia unused to being recognized, when out of nowhere there burst a rather frazzled, hyperactive, overly intense man in his 20s who yanked me by the arm, and with what seemed to me a crazy glint in his eye, whispered, "Mrs. Roosevelt wants me to talk to you. I'm going over to see her now. Come on, you want to see Mrs. Roosevelt......." I said, "Oh sure, thank you, thank you, I'd love to see Mrs. Roosevelt but I'm a little late for a... I have a; uh; a thing." Now he grabs both of my sleeves, sweat streaming down his face, and said, "No, no, Mrs. Roosevelt is a friend of mine. She says you should do my book. She's a friend of mine." I said, "Well, I think that it's very nice that Mrs. Roosevelt is a friend of yours. Say hello for me. But if you don't mind, would you let go of my sleeves?" And as I pulled away from him, he shoved a book in my hands and said, "Read it. Read it." As soon as I got a safe distance up Fifth Avenue from him, I slowed down and opened the book. It was called "Brutal Mandate" and sure enough there was a blurb on the inside cover by Mrs. Roosevelt. The guy who had stopped me was the late Al Lowenstein, later to become a Congressman and the president of your organization and a good friend of mine. You remember him well, I know, and with great affection. Al had the ability to lead. He was the person most responsible for beginning the movement protesting President Johnson's policy in Vietnam. There was no more effective organizer of dissent than Al. For those of us who shared in that activism, there is a lot to be proud of. Insofar as it changed our policy in Vietnam, it was a success. What we didn't succeed in doing, sadly, was to get a fair shake for the domestic policies of Lyndon Johnson because the country couldn't afford to pay for those good programs and that bad war at the same time. The cost of the war in Vietnam brought into question the cost of food stamps at home. |
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© Janette Rainwater 1997-2004 All rights reserved.
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