Overtime - Episode #437: J Edgar Hoover, Chelsea Manning, PC Colleges

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

AKA Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Moff.

Okay, here we back are.

Here we back are.

One of you literary lions is tell me how to speaking.

Rehearsing for Yoda?

Yeah.

Tim Gunn, what was it like for your father working with J.

Edgar Hoover in the FBI?

Yes, I read that in your book.

Your father worked in the FBI, and you have some interesting stories about him.

Well, he was there for 26 years.

He was an agent, but he was primarily Hoover's ghostwriter.

He wrote his books and his speeches.

Agent provocateur.

Yes.

Right?

But have you heard my crazy story?

Oh, I'd like to tell it to everyone.

Well, just briefly.

My sister and I were big I Love Lucy fans, and we would visit Dad at his office once a year and take the FBI tour.

It was a big Washington thing.

And one day

we were there and Dad said, would you like to meet Vivian Vance?

Ethel,

Mertz?

Who wouldn't want to meet Vivian Vance?

Ethel Mertz.

So we went into Hoover's office and met her, and she was gracious and wonderful.

And many years later, and my father was gone,

a lot came out about Hoover cross-dressing.

A lot.

And it was all very interesting.

My mother didn't believe any of it and said, rightfully so, this would have killed your father.

It probably would have.

But when it came out,

I said to my sister, Don't you think it's a little strange that Mr.

Hoover wasn't in the office with Vivian Vance?

I mean put a fright wig on him.

But of all the people, if you weren't cross-dressing, why would you dress as Vivian Vance?

Wouldn't you want to do it somebody more gladly?

He's size 22, is he?

Yeah, I mean, Jay Edgar Hoover looked a bit like an English bulldog.

So, sorry, apologies to Vivian Vance.

But what's interesting is

Simon ⁇ Schuster's legal team investigated everything in this book, and they looked into this, and they talked talked to Vivian Vance's two biographers who had never heard or knew about a visit to the FBI.

Then they checked the visitor logs.

No Vivian Vance.

So, interesting story.

Did your father know this?

You know, Fran, I'll never know.

I'll never know.

But you have theories that maybe your father was.

I think my father was such a homophobe, I'm confident he was a closet case.

And I think that may have been true of all of the upper echelons of the Bureau.

It's a very interesting collection of men.

The show has gone so well up till now.

Brett Stevens, what do you think of Harvard's decision to hire Chelsea Manning as a visiting fellow, and then they withdrew the offer today?

Hmm.

Yeah.

That's a loaded question.

A visiting fellow, what?

Look, well,

they invited her up to talk.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They invited her up to give a...

Oh, just to give her a speech.

Yeah.

I don't think the invitation should have been issued, but once it was issued, it certainly shouldn't have been rescinded.

I think that...

Because you think Chelsea Manning's a traitor.

Well, I think Bradley Manning put a lot of human beings in danger by what he did, by his disclosures.

I don't even think that's debatable.

But...

Bradley, Chelsea Manning, spent seven years in prison.

His sentence was commuted by the President of the United States.

He's free.

She's free.

And she should be able to live her life.

And if Harvard wants to invite her and hear from her,

they should hear.

I mean, I think the whole business of disinvitation is a sickness in this country.

I agree.

Hearing people is a precondition for being able to disagree with it.

And also that everybody has to be fired the second you don't like one thing they said.

Right.

And they certainly go after me with this.

It happened to you when you went to the New York Times.

The White House is asking for this ESPN reporter to be fired.

Right.

Because there's no other problems in the country.

Right.

You know, or the world.

The world is a placid Eden.

So he can concentrate on this.

I know, but it's not just him.

I mean, everybody seems to go immediately to you have to disappear altogether if I don't like one thing you said ever, as opposed to what we used to do, which is just, oh, I didn't like that.

What's on the other channel?

I had some experience of people wanting me to disappear forever with the

best.

and you won all right friend so far so far knock on what okay besides New York are there any American cities you describe as great

Chicago yeah I love Chicago

I mean Chicago is the only other American city that feels really like a city to me you know I mean there are you know San Francisco, it's an adorable little town.

LA is very spread out, doesn't have

any helium density.

But Chicago really feels like a city.

I like Chicago.

But you're not really saying that LA is lacking in intellectualism, is it?

Because that is such a...

No, I was saying it's not densely populated.

It's spread out.

That's what we like about it.

That's what you like about it.

It's what I like.

Exactly.

But it doesn't feel like a city.

It's not urban because it's not

dense enough.

To me, it's just not normal to live in a building.

I don't care how nice your apartment is.

I always know there's somebody on the other side of that wall, and they're farting and cooking cooking and fighting, and it's just wrong.

I'd rather live in the shittiest little single-dwelling house than live in a building.

But in houses outside axe murderers.

And no doorman.

Horrible cobination.

Sal, what is the antidote to political correctness on college campuses?

Axe murderers.

The antidote is to ignore it and

to speak severely to people who want to propagate it.

You know, and I mean, actually, I have to say, in my experience of the American Academy, which is now getting on for 20 years, I have never had a student say to me that he wanted a trigger warning or she wanted a safe space.

I've never had, I mean, I hear that it happens around the country.

I have no personal experience of it, so I don't know how much of it there is.

But you know, what's missing, I think, is leadership.

I think too much of too many campus administrators are basically cowed by small minorities of totalitarian-minded students who just don't want to hear anything except what they're disposed to agree with.

And the job of grown-ups is to behave like grown-ups and say, no, intellectually, a college is not a safe space.

Intellectually, a college is going to be a place where your ideas are harmed and perhaps even destroyed, and that's as it should be.

I agree.

A college should be a safe space for thought.

Yes,

not a safe space from thought.

Right.

And if you go to college and you never hear anything you haven't thought before,

then you may as well have stayed home.

And people who think that they should never hear things that would upset them should go somewhere else and leave that space available to somebody who can benefit from what is called education.

And as a teacher, for 29 years, I saw a large part of my responsibility to be to provoke and challenge.

Absolutely.

That's what a teacher does.

Okay.

Does the backlash against Hillary's book have anything to do with sexist attitudes about women expressing anger?

Is she expressing anger?

Well, there's certainly been a lot of men telling her to shut up.

Or men explaining what she did wrong.

For the first six months, men were constantly saying, here's what Hillary Clinton did wrong.

And it just enraged me because Donald Trump didn't win because he did something right.

He won because he did something wrong.

Yes.

I mean, it was, you know, I didn't know there was a big backlash against your book by all the political.

Well, you know, probably.

Every politician, winner or loser, writes a damn book.

Right, exactly.

Gets paid $6 million for the books sell four copies.

Yeah.

And publishers think this is worth it.

Right.

You know, I mean, I want to know how that happens.

I'd like to be paid $6 million for books that sell four copies.

All right.

But I said it last week.

I'll say it again.

I think future historians will be just so puzzled why so many people in America found Hillary Clinton to be this polarizing.

I mean, I could see why you wouldn't vote for her.

You wouldn't vote for her unless it was Donald Trump, right?

I mean, you wouldn't vote for her.

And in the situation, you wouldn't have, you know, McCain or Mitt Romney.

I mean, there's nobody else in the Republican Party, practically, you could probably think of.

No, on the contrary.

Oh, really?

I could never have voted for a guy like Mike Pence.

Really?

Yeah.

You would vote for Hillary over Mike Pence?

Yeah, probably.

You are my hero, but be the

problem with.

You see, they come out here to California and we.

No, but the problem with the difference between Trump and Pence is that Trump is an authentic

fraud, right?

And Pence is, in a sense, exactly the opposite.

He's a fraudulent, authentic.

You know, and when Pence sort of attests to Donald's goodness as a man, and you know he doesn't believe a word of it, but he's saying this with this kind of pious, oleaginous

fake sincerity.

Right.

It's terrible because you know he knows with Trump, you never know that he knows that he's lying.

But it's right.

Because there's always the interface of

the manic personality disorders, but Pence is a man in his right mind.

Yes, and that's why he's preferable.

I've seen Mike Pence before.

You're right, he's a typical arch-conservative Christian hypocrite.

And we've seen them before, and to use your phrase, it's a survivable event.

I could do Mike Pence.

Yes, but you asked me whether I would vote for him.

Yes, whether he's a survivable event.

No, I'm very surprised to hear you say that.

Is there anybody else you think I'm on the right who you would prefer Hillary Clinton to?

Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee.

Mike Huckabee, wow.

I don't like this hyper-piousness in Republican politics.

I mean, the Republican Party,

at its best, in a dream world, the Republican Party would stand for aspiration, opportunity, and inclusion.

That's Democratic.

That's what it should be.

That's the Democratic Party.

But especially on the aspiration front, it is a right-to-rise party.

Now, we can have an argument, perfectly sensible whether their solutions are right, but it's aspirational.

It means going from lower middle class to upper class, from Joni Ernst to senator, for example.

Shut those bags off her feet.

But

shoving someone else's Christian piety down my Jewish throat is not kosher.

Well, it's not going to happen tonight.

All right.

Thank you, everybody.

Thank you, pal.

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