Is your book about modern heroes or about the lack of them?
It's really about my own search for the American hero. I am convinced that America doesn't have any; individuals have heroes, maybe, but we now have no national ones.
What started your search?
I had finished a novel and was looking to start a new book when I read an excerpt from mythologist Joseph Campbell, who says that all people in all times and cultures end up with similar heroes. There's no anthropological explanation, so the only explanation is psychological, rooted in men's dreams. I thought it would be an interesting journalistic exercise to wander among figures of today who, because of their positions, might have been heroes in previous times.
Did you have a definition of a hero?
Not really. I had hundreds of pages of notes and hundreds of definitions but no objective set of criteria that could be applied. The concept is very subjective, with different connotations to different people. I came out with a notion that a hero, in whatever guise, had to satisfy certain psychological needs of his people—that he had to be not just someone we admired but who somehow touched us at a subconscious level, like Lindbergh. Charisma was a necessary element, but only an element. Someone can have personal charisma without any real achievements or larger symbolic value. John Kennedy, for instance, had that symbolic value, which transcended his charisma.
How did you choose your subjects?
I decided they should be public personalities, not people who pulled puppy dogs out of lakes or brave firemen or policemen, because 99 percent of America would never have heard of them. I also wanted to go to the traditional sources of heroes—politics, the military, religion—so the book includes people like George McGovern, Eugene McCarthy, Ted Kennedy, Daniel Berrigan, Gen. William Westmoreland.
Who were some of the hero candidates you ruled out?
Again, it was subjective—Henry Kissinger, for instance, because I had the feeling Americans couldn't accept as a national hero someone with a German accent. I ruled out Ralph Nader because he seemed basically one-dimensional as a person. Some ruled themselves out by declining to see me, like Neil Armstrong.
You write that you caught the candidates "at the center." Does that mean the center of popularity?
I meant there had been a point in the lives of several of these people—McCarthy, Berrigan, John Glenn—when the path they had personally taken intersected with some public direction. When those paths met, a spark burst into something like traditional hero worship. Then the paths separated as the men went their own ways. It was like a moment in my own life—when I wrote The Selling of the President and met the public fascination with the packaging of Nixon as a candidate. But I didn't at that point go into TV or move to Washington and become a political reporter.
You imply then that these people did not ultimately achieve hero status?
In some cases, our perception of the traditional sources of heroes was different, as with Westmoreland, and Joe Hooper, the most decorated soldier of the Vietnam war. Had it not been Vietnam but World War II, Westmoreland would have come back a hero, and Hooper would have been an Audie Murphy.
What made the essential difference?
The central question became: was something lacking in the candidates or something gone from our perception? I instinctively sensed that the change was really in us as a people. The Greek definition of the hero as an "embodiment of composite ideals" didn't work after the '60s, because there no longer was any composite ideal in society.
Was it only the last decade that brought the change?
More generally, Nietzsche said that since Copernicus, "man has been rolling from the center toward X." Before Copernicus, man lived with the idea of his own immortality, of being the center of the universe, of having possible heroic proportions. After that, and the more we advance and the more we know, we become aware of our insignificance. As Joseph Campbell said, people are cut off by technology from the roots of their myth, from the question "What is life?" How many people today perform tasks they assume to be meaningful?
What is the difference between now and more heroic times?
A thousand years ago in primitive society, the sense was always there that people's daily tasks were tied up with their spiritual selves, their myth and inherent meaning. Now we have machines that can do both physical and mental functions. Take away the mind and the body and we have to scramble to find out why we're here. The growth of technology removed the aura of mystery.
Is it because of technology, as you say in the book, that there are no heroic acts left to perform?
I said that sort of tongue in cheek, but what acts could one perform alone today? Charles Lindbergh classically fit into the mold of the hero, challenging the elements alone. John Glenn orbited the earth, but he was the extension of a whole technological apparatus. Malcolm Forbes? Crossing the ocean in a balloon is a puckish kind of adventure. It's not an advance, but a looking backward.
Perhaps we no longer need heroes?
Psychologically, the need at the deepest level—as symbol—is always there. We've outgrown our juvenile attitude toward the public figure as a hero, the American adolescent approach to someone like Douglas MacArthur. After LBJ and Richard Nixon, we're not looking at the President as a possible hero. After Vietnam and Watergate, it's harder to sustain faith in heroes. The media are finding the flaws, even posthumously, as they're doing now with John Kennedy. Even when dead our heroes can betray us. After Secretariat won the Triple Crown, a woman told sportscaster Hey-wood Hale Broun that, after Watergate, Secretariat had "restored her faith in humanity." That really says a lot. People are constantly betraying our trust, but there's no ambiguity about the achievement of a horse.
Do you think there are still national heroes elsewhere in the world?
Sure. Look at Mao Tse-tung, or Fidel Castro. In totalitarian countries it's easier for governmental power to be used in the myth-making process, and there's nothing to mitigate against it. And, as with Hitler or Mussolini, there's also a predilection of the people.
Who was your childhood hero?
Notre Dame quarterback Johnny Lujack. He retired to Indiana and a car dealership. Sports heroes are overexposed now and become very human.
Why is there so much of your personal life in this book?
Heroes is a story rather than a historic discussion. The book is not so much a search for heroes as a means of coming to terms with life in the post-heroic society. If America has no national heroes, I have no personal heroes. The two are part of the same thing.
Do you think we might find heroes again sometime, perhaps in new arenas?
John Glenn said the frontier now is the human mind, or the psyche. Freud created the awareness of it, but it hasn't been conquered yet. The concept of a hero is in the process of being redefined, if not consciously. Campbell said that at a point in the history of India, the concept of a hero changed from warrior to prophet, and that's perhaps where we are now. Look at the recent interest in est and transcendental meditation. This is where people are searching for heroes now.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
