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Well, my hero is not Jules Feiffer, nor is it Lenny Bruce. It would be Mickey Mantle, be¬cause he continues to do what he does despite unbelievable physical problems. And he does it well. Another heroic character - even though I may disagree with him - is Lyndon Johnson, be¬cause despite tremendous hostile public opinion, he does what he thinks is right. That makes a man heroic. It's easy to do what people want you to do. It would be the easiest thing in the world for Johnson to say, "We're pulling out of Vietnam." Everyone would applaud. But heroism is often the ability to brave public opinion. He's not popu¬lar, so he'll hardly be considered great until his¬tory finally looks at his record. But I'm not a hero-worshiper, and when I find, by definition, Johnson a heroic figure, that doesn't mean he's my hero.
A large number of people in the 50's didn't like Eisenhower. So it wasn't heroic for Mort Sahl to be anti-Eisenhower. It would have been more heroic for him to be pro-Eisenhower. For ex¬ample, a heroic writer would be a guy that writes a pro-segregation play. We always judge heroic figures as those whom we agree with.
You have two camps today, the pro-Viet¬nam camp and the anti-Vietnam camp. Almost all writers and performers are anti-Vietnam. But that doesn't make it right. It's always easier to be anti-war than pro-war. Roosevelt had that in the. 30's when he was trying to get America in¬terested in doing something about Hitler. He found that a large number of people, including many high school and college students, branded him a warmonger.
I think that the term heroism today has very little meaning because most of us define heroism as the thing we agree with. For example, a John lurch member thinks he's a heroic person be¬cause he's fighting against Communism. On the other hand, a person like Joan Baez believes she's heroic because she's maintaining a stand against Vietnam. And they do not even consider the other side. Heroism today is a very lucrative profession. If Paul Krassner suddenly came out and said that maybe some of the sexual laws have some reason, he would lose a large number of his readers.
I say that a heroic figure - by the nature of heroism - is an unpopular figure. Take the theo¬retical figure of Christ. Christ was an unpopular figure in his time. He was popular only to a small group of people. Hence, he could be defined as a heroic figure. In the 30's, for example, when Winston Churchill was warning the world about Hitler, he was a heroic figure, but au unpopular figure. He became popular when it became ob¬vious that Hitler was evil, but what if Hitler had turned out to be a good force in Germany? Churchill wouldn't have been a heroic figure. So it took history to tell that. Now history is begin¬ning to revaluate Truman, and he becomes a bet¬ter President in the light of what we know now. Only 20 years have passed, and people can see that many of the things that he fought for made him right, and heroic.
I suppose a lot of people define John Ken¬nedy as a heroic figure, hut an act of fate doesn't necessarily make a man heroic. Kennedy was tre¬mendously popular, hut he wasn't especially effec¬tive. Whenever people tell me that Kennedy was a great President, I ask them, "Okay, what did he do?" And they're at a loss to answer. The fact is, he really didn't get much passed, and he didn't do much. Brit he was incredibly popular, a great performer in an age of show-biz politics. I just wonder whether Kennedy would be considered a hero today if he had been short and fat and if he had worn thick eye-glasses.
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