Harold Willens, a political activist and entrepreneur, was the author of California's nuclear freeze initiative of 1981. I interviewed him in 1997, when he was 83 years old. He passed away in 2003.
“Much of my life has been directed toward awakening, what I consider to be a slumbering country and world,
to the dangers of nuclear catastrophe.”
“I graduated from Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights, in 1932.
The Depression was pretty much in high gear by that time, which is one reason that my father was finding it very difficult to find work. Fortunately, as I mentioned before, I was able to work in a family friend’s market and support our family with my $12 a week paycheck.
The Depression is something which I think must have stamped the lives of everyone who lived through it. I have retained that experience somewhere in the back of my mind, and it continues to make it very difficult for me to do things that are kind of wild, financially. Always back in my mind is that grim, bleak picture of the country at large, and our lives in particular, during those Depression years.
Another epochal event for me is the Second World War.
I volunteered to go into the US Marine Corps during WWII. I was trained to read, write and speak the Japanese language, and because of that, I became a U.S. Marine intelligence officer. I saw both Hiroshima and Nagasaki not long after both cites were literally obliterated, each by one atomic bomb. Those images never left me.
Most people living today, even well-informed people, don't understand the difference between atomic and nuclear. The atomic bombs that destroyed those cities, today would be like fire crackers compared to the nuclear weapons we have.
That's why much of my life has been directed toward awakening, what I consider to be a slumbering country and world, to the dangers of nuclear catastrophe, which see as a cancer on the global body politic. Cancer, in the sense that the only cure for this particular malady, which could be terminal, is prevention. Prevention is the only cure.
In about 1959 or 1960, I started to feel restless in my business involvement and felt the need for something else. Somebody introduced me to Robert Hutchins, the great academic iconoclast. He was president of the University of Chicago when he was just 30 years old. They used to call him the ‘Boy Wonder.’
When I met Robert, he was heading a think tank in Santa Barbara called the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. I went up to visit and we were impressed with each other. He invited me to join the board and I did. And there, I got my second and more important education—an education which transformed me from a ‘resident of the country’ to a ‘citizen with a capital “C”. What I learned there, especially about our involvement in Vietnam, transformed me from someone interested in thought and knowledge into an activist.
During the 1960s, I became quite friendly with a number of U.S. Senators and members of the House. One was Senator William Fulbright, who was Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at that time and who became my closest friend really. He opposed the Vietnam War, and thought it was a wonderful idea to get business people involved, because otherwise politicians could refer to anybody who opposed the war as either soft on Communism or soft-headed, period.
I followed his advice and in 1967, with the help of a few other people, I created Business Executives MOVE for Vietnam Peace. I became its spokesman and had lots of media attention because, as somebody once explained to me, what I was all about was a man bites dog story—one that was unexpected.
From that point, I helped form a number of other organizations, one which still exists today – the Center For Defense Information, in Washington, D.C. I have always been proud of my involvement in the CDI. The board of directors were largely business people, but the staff itself was headed by retired military people. That got a lot of attention and it's still a very viable organization today. I remember describing it in the early years as a place where the media and the Congress could get a second opinion on military spending, which was very important. Up to that time, the only information they had came from either the White House or the Pentagon.
The CDI had the same executive director got many years, Admiral Gene LaRoque and Admiral Eugene Carroll was deputy director. They were ostracized and criticized by military people in general, but it's surprising how much acceptance they began to get. In fact, almost every year for a great number of years, representatives, including myself, have been invited to the Pentagon to meet with them. Gradually, this came to be seen as much more mainstream and as a necessary adjunct to our democracy.
In 1978, President Jimmy Carter asked me to be a delegate to a special session of the United Nations General Assembly Meeting on Nuclear Weapons, which led to the establishment of The United Nations Disarmament Commission, or UNDC.
When I came back from that meeting, I met with two very close friends, Rabbi Leonard Beerman and an Episcopalian leader, Reverend George Regas. The three of us agreed that we should create an organization called the Interfaith Center to Reverse the Arms Race. It was very, very active and reached out to many people. In fact, we were told that the Catholic Bishops speaking out for the first time ever on the nuclear arms race was a result of the Interfaith Center.
A very important activity of my life was the 1981 California nuclear freeze referendum. It was a political campaign, the purpose being to freeze nuclear weapons completely. I was the chairman. I traveled around the State constantly speaking to voters and politicians. Our initiative was on the ballot, and it was vigorously opposed by President Reagan and Casper Weinberger the Secretary of Defense. All of Reagan’s hot-shots would come out here to speak against it. So, it was considered miraculous actually, when we won the vote. And this encouraged other states to do the same thing.
I've never referred to myself as a Peacenik. My thinking is very pragmatic on that subject. Peace has been something that everybody has been in favor of, since Jesus Christ or Moses so, who could be against peace? For me, it's the opposition to war and the more pragmatic steps to prevent nuclear proliferation. Those are the things to which I committed myself and I have found great empathy and vigor and dynamic cooperation from young people over the years; they could understand this was in their interest, as well as the interest of old folks like me.
These days, I occasionally still speak to groups expressing my concerns.
What I focus on are two things: one, that we are living through a historic shift, the influence of which, most of us don't even begin to understand. We are living at a time that could be described as a 'hinge point' in history, for many reasons– largely having to do with weapons of ultimate destruction. The Global Village is a phrase that captures to some extent the historical and weighty importance of the period that we're living through.
The second thing is reminding people, whenever I can, to keep calling attention to the potential danger of nuclear proliferation. I try to dramatize it in any way I can. Just think about a world in which 30 or 40 countries, including Iraq and Libya, have these weapons of ultimate destruction.
I also try to correct people and newspapers when they lump chemical, biological and nuclear weapons together. The first two are dangerous, of course, and they can cause a lot of damage. But only nuclear weapons can literally bring an end to human life.
Those are the things that run through my mind, whenever I allow it.
I still serve on boards and I'm an advisor to organizations, but now I try to curtail my activities and focus on majoring in Grandchildren!”
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