A Conversational History of Modern America

Richard D. Heffner started interviewing major newsmakers on television when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president and Charlie Rose a toddler. Heffner, whose illustrious career includes co-founding New York’s WNET and serving as chairman of the motion picture ratings board, has hosted The Open Mind—the longest-running public-affairs program in television history—since 1955. Now he is drawing on forty-seven years of those televised conversations, as well as his own thoughtful perspective on the last half century, to mold As They Saw It. Drawing on the template established by last year’s Conversations with Eli Wiesel (drawn from the twenty-two Open Mind programs he and Wiesel have done together), Heffner has woven nearly five decades of provocative and thoughtful discussions with everyone from Malcolm X to Donald Rumsfeld, Eleanor Roosevelt to Norman Mailer, into a unique and authoritative Terkelesque history covering the major stories of our time. As They Saw It is a conversational history of the past fifty years, as spoken by the figures who made and lived that history. It is a treasury of never-before-published material from a dazzling array of figures—both tremendous reading and a major new source of material for students and historians alike.