Re: Who are you?

Description: The genesis of Adelman's political views.

Question: Who are you?

Transcript: Ken Adelman

Originally Chicago, Illinois. And now Washington, D.C. and Aspen.

Well I was born in middle class, or lower middle class on the south side of Chicago. And it was wonderful. We had a neighborhood school. We took our bikes to school. It was very unpretentious, and very good neighborhood. And people say, “Well you didn’t have much money.” We didn’t know we didn’t have much money. There was no one there to tell us. We were relatively middle class or lower middle class, so we never thought about it. Anything we ever wanted to do we could do.

Question: Who and what shaped your political views?

Later on it was Ron Reagan. And I was comfortable as a conservative before that. And I think part of it was when we went over to Africa. We lived in Africa from 1971 to ’75. And hypocrisy between, you know, the kind of liberal approach of African where we gotta help them so much, and we have to do this and do that . . . and the leaders in Africa. I was there during _______ in Zaire. They were ripping off a lot. They were trading with the Apartheid regime in South Africa, and then voting at the U.N. that no one could trade with South Africa. We’d go . . . when we lived in _______, we’d go into the store in _______ and half the goods were from South Africa just at the time when the United States was trying to be holier than thou and cut off . . . you know, have sanctions against South Africa. In the idea that all the socialistic attempts throughout history by Mao with a great leap forward, collectivization that probably killed 30 million people. Stalin’s collectivization that probably killed seven billion people. Even in Tanzania under Julius Nyerere, who was a wonderful human being but a miserable leader . . . he had his _____ villages . . . All these attempts at social engineering of human beings of collectivization of telling them how to lead their lives. I could see and feel that they all turned either ineffective; or far worse to be totalitarian, harmful and killing a lot of people. And so that reinforced me in my conservative ways early on very hard, very strong. So when Ron Reagan came along and said that totalitarianism dictatorship is going to end up in the ash heap of history, Communism was going to end up in the ash heap of history, intellectually I very much disagreed with him. I thought it was impossible that Communism . . . And I remember arguing with Reagan about this personally. But in terms of sentiment, I thought it was just beautiful. But the fact was he was not only sentimentally right, but he was factually right. And none of us could ever tell that.

Recorded on: 7/2/07