The unpublished Bill Clifton interviews (2004), # 35

Opnieuw een deeltje in het doorlopende interview met Bill Clifton. Langzaam maar zeker lopen we naar het einde van datgene wat we destijds met Bill hebben besproken. Deze keer vertelt Bill verder over zijn Russische reis (waar de vorige aflevering mee eindigde). Ook interessant om te lezen is het gedeelte over de periode dat hij werkzaam was in het Peace Corps. Ik ben zo vrij geweest om een en ander iets aan te vullen met extra informatie en context. Veel lees- en luisterplezier!

Russia trip and Peace Corps

Transcriptie:

…who worked, whose Russian father, worked in Hollywood? And The McCarthy hearings had fingered him as a communist and wanted him out of the United States. So Vladimir and his father had to leave the United States and move to Russia. And so Vlad had gone to work for one of the news organizations. I wanted to say Izvestia but I don’t think it was Izvestia. What was the other one called?

Pravda? That was the name of the leading newspaper. It may be that I pronounce it differently so [please] spell it for me. (P-r-a-v-d-a). Yeah, that’s it. And he had all the radio people, and so forth, under his thumb. So when I got there I already knew that I was going to be able, or at least I think I already knew, that I was almost certain that I was going to be able to do a program for Radio Moscow. Well, I was asked to do a couple of programs for Radio Moscow but one of them was for the domestic service, which was the one that Vlad was doing and Bill Bailey, who was a Canadian who married a Ukrainian wife, was living in Kiev and he wanted me to do it for the international Radio Moscow. Well, I didn’t trust myself to do that. I thought: ‘I don’t dare do that ‘cause I don’t know what I’ll say or how they will edit the program before they, you know, broadcast it or anything’. (And if it ever winds up at the McCarthy hearings). Right. Trouble so I refused. I went to see Bill Bailey when I was in Kiev but I told him that I absolutely could not do it. The only paid thing I did was the one I did with Vlad Posner. Who now, by the way, has moved to the United States? You might know that. (No).

After the break-up of the Soviet Union. Back to America I should say. And he’s an addition to the American community and his father, I think, was a communist. And Vlad, you do what you have to do to live, you know, and that’s what he had to do. So he did. But overall I heard a lot of music there and I also went to see a pioneer palace, which I thought was fascinating. Of course I realized they showed me the best one they had. When I first asked them to see a pioneer palace they said, yes, they would show me one, but not today. So they arranged for me to see one like three days later. And the one I saw was absolutely fantastic. I mean, they had all these kids doing movies, for example. Where they write the script for the film, they do the acting for the film, they produce it with the lighting and the sound and the whole thing. They were just kids. They were sixteen and seventeen year olds! And I thought: ‘If we had something like that in America. Wouldn’t it be great, you know?’ So I got all through that trip which took about six weeks, and I was camping out the whole time. I decided to cancel a tour I had in the West Country, which was ill paid anyhow, when I got back to England. And just go to see the State Department in Washington and tell them they needed to send Bill Monroe & The Bluegrass Boys to the Soviet Union, in 1966. And: ‘Well, interesting thing’, they said, ‘Very interesting, but, you know, the language’. And I said; ‘Language will mean nothing. Believe me. I’ve been over there and listening to their music, language means nothing. I don’t know what they were singing but the sounds that they’re making, they’ll be fascinated with bluegrass, with Bill Monroe & the Bluegrass Boys.’ ‘And Bill will do it’, I said.

How long hadn’t you seen Bill, three years? Well, I hadn’t seen Bill for three years but I just knew he would. And when I did talk to him he said, yes, he would. And Mike Seeger said: ‘Does he know that’s Russia?’ Because everybody in the States always talked about, you know, they didn’t talk about the Soviet Union, they said Russia. They said: ‘Russia did that’. So it’s always Russia, it’s not the Soviet Union. That’s something else. But Mike was amazed to hear it when I told him Bill had agreed to do it. And they said: ‘No, well just send a modern dance team. You don’t have to know the language to watch that. Dixieland Jazz and that kind of things, it’s got no words.’ I said: ‘The words will make…’ ‘No, no, we can’t do that. I tell you what; while you’re here why you don’t have lunch with us? We’re gonna go to lunch with a guy who’s just come back from the Peace Corps and he’s just been to the Philippines, so well have lunch together’. I said ok. Well, I went to lunch and there was this guy from the Philippines, he had come back from the Philippines and I didn’t know anything about the Peace Corps at all because I had left there before… Kennedy had been elected but I didn’t know Sargent Shriver or anything about his project, which was the Peace Corps. That it had gone bad under Kennedy. I hadn’t read it in the British newspapers. I’m sure it probably was mentioned but I just didn’t pick it up. And so I sat at lunch and listened to this guy talk about the Peace Corps. And he turned to me and he said: ‘I don’t have a replacement in the Philippines. Why don’t you go and replace me in the Philippines?’ And I said: ‘Well, I wouldn’t have any idea of what I’m supposed to do’. And he said: ‘No, you’re just the right guy, you’re just the right person to go and replace me in the Philippines’. I said: ‘Well, I don’t know’. ‘Well, you just come on back with me after lunch and I’ll give you all the Information. And you have to fill out a few papers because they have to do an investigation on your security and all those kinds of things’. To make a long story short: I ended up in the Philippines after that. So that s why I left Britain. It was all a chance luncheon with a person just coming back from the Philippines and wanted to replace himself and here I was and I was just the right guy.

Was he right or not? No, he wasn’t really. I was very disappointed in the Peace Corps because I thought it was… He was very enthusiastic; he was one of the first people to go out there under Sargent Shriver. And it was flying by the seat of your pants, you know. Do everything just according to the way it has to be done. By the time I got there the man who was the head of the program in the Philippines was a twenty-year veteran of the U.S. Foreign Service. And he did things according to the book, and that’s all. And when I would hear things, I mean, one of my peer group, I was in charge of a, I had a, I was administering; I had a desk job. I was not a volunteer; I was paid. And my job was to oversee volunteers in Mindanao, which was the southernmost island of the Philippines.

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