RS: And Daniel Ellsberg was there, but he was introducing another award, and --
JK: Yeah, he was introducing the ProPublica award. But we got to sit next to each other. And --
RS: Yeah, they got a journalism award. And then Ellsberg was supposed to have -- for those who don't know, because we don't teach all that much in all the schools about our history -- Ellsberg, of course, is the person who had been in the Marines and had been a real hawk in the national security establishment in Vietnam, and then he was drafted to work on the Pentagon Papers, which was an in-house Pentagon history of the Vietnam War. And in working on it, he came to realize the justification for the war was a tissue of lies. And then he released the Pentagon Papers, first in The New York Times and then to the Washington Post.
JK: That's right.
RS: But the other night, he was also there -- again, PEN is, ironically PEN is an organization that very early in its history received CIA funding --
JK: Yes. [Laughter]
RS: -- through the Congress [for] Cultural Freedom, as part of the whole fight between our country and the Soviet Union for the war of ideas. And PEN somehow survived that attempt to corrupt it, and has been probably the most important writers', defense of writers' rights organization in the world. I think they have 140 chapters throughout the world. And anyway, that night, Ellsberg was supposed to have a conversation with Edward Snowden somehow, but that didn't work out. So he went off on a speech in which he discussed you in great detail.
JK: Yes.
RS: And it was interesting; so here's a guy you heard about when you were six, and as you say your parents weren't political at all; why did they support Ellsberg?
JK: My parents opposed the Vietnam War and supported the Civil Rights Movement. And I used to ask my mom, when I was a teenager, why weren't you ever arrested marching? And she said, are you kidding? I had three little kids to raise, and I didn't have time to go out and get arrested.
RS: Where was she raising them?
JK: Ah, western Pennsylvania. Newcastle, Pennsylvania, north of Pittsburgh, about an hour.
RS: This is a rural town?
JK: Yes, it's very heavily Amish, yeah, very rural.
RS: How did they make a living? She was a schoolteacher?
JK: She was a schoolteacher and my dad was an elementary school principal. Both public school.
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