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his name is Saul Alinsky and there are still many to whom the name is meaningless, but to millions now he has looked on as a savior. And these are the so called have nuts. The culturally deprived the abject poor, they love him. And they asked him

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into organize their weakness into a strength and power that has become a frightening threat to the establishment. I suppose given a choice, I think I would pick hell. The reason I picked hell is because that's where all the have nots are. He is disarmingly mild when

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you meet him. But there is an implacable ferocity about him which is directed at many forces he considers to be at the root of human suffering and misery. I'm all for it. I think our air force and our army should, after they finished in Vietnam should

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come back and bomb the hell out of Mississippi. You know, what would it be? Southern Mississippi instead of Northern Mississippi. So we can all get freedom and equality down there too. He has called the war on poverty, political pornography and says, those who run the program

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represents the greatest feeding trough that has come along for the welfare industry in years, there are always repercussions. Whenever Saul Alinsky moves into an afflicted ghetto with his industrial areas foundation perhaps because it has felt he may get some results quicker than the established authorities whom

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he ridicules for their boondoggle, he can be scornful of an entire city with one scathing comments, if you ask me one thing which Los Angeles really needed above anything else. I would say what it needs is a massive enema. He is one of the few men

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who appears to be absolutely fearless, especially when it comes to the constant threats he received by telephone and in the mail. Death threats. I'll probably get knocked off. I think with all this notoriety and all the stuff that goes off, there's always some cookie crackpot whole

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site, you know, I'll get national headlines by knock them off, which he will. This then is an opening frame that we put around the self portrait of one of the most controversial figures in today's gallery of american radicals on this KPI X report. Saul Alinsky will

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share with you his searching personal assessment of himself as he did with us. In this exclusive half hour titled, I'd organize hell. My name is Jack. We'll journey to Carmel California to meet Saul Alinsky in just a few moments, there is no nice way of getting

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things change and it's time that a good part of our country began to wake up and live in the world as it is rather than the world as we would like it to be. Saul Alinsky has become a national byword synonymous with poverty. He is the

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severest critic of the so called establishment and its handling or mishandling of enormous sums of money intended to alleviate the misery of the poor. Alinsky is Executive Director of the Industrial Areas Foundation, a business that will upon invitation from the poor and from religious groups move

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into a ghetto area and literally organized the poor into a powerful, articulate force, demanding a voice and a hand in the administration of their own welfare tonight on KPI X reports, it is our privilege to have as guest commentator, john h Benzel, whose television series the

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american voter won a national award, author of several volumes on american politics and an associate professor of political science at SAn Francisco State College to comment on the impact Saul Alinsky has already had and may have on the future. I first came across Saul Alinsky through

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his books readily for radicals, which came out in 1946, Saul Alinsky now looms as a controversial titan nationally and in recent times, notably in Oakland, his shadow has loomed. Thought $200,000 was raised by the Presbyterian Church with the intent of inviting Alinsky's industrial areas foundation to

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come in to organize the poor. But in our exclusive meeting with Saul Alinsky some weeks ago, the issue was in doubt. However, his comments on it were characteristically pungent. He lives in the Carmel highlands in an area that is in itself characteristically opposed to his own

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activity. We met him at his home and our first question is concerned the then likelihood that he would make Oakland the scene of his next organization of the poor. I have stated about any question about our coming into Oakland is purely academic unless there was an

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across the board bona fide invitation from the local people themselves, We're not one of these colonial powers like your community funds or I don't know what you call them in san Francisco crusades or something we call them. The white feather funds. There are simple representatives of

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the establishment. Uh they operate on the basis, but they know what's good for the poor people and and by God, the poor people are going to get it whether they like it or not, even if it kills them, we're gonna dome God. And just like most

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of these agencies, they're put into these communities without people being asked where they want them when they don't want them precisely like a colonial power would operate as far as as moving into a well primitive country, so to speak. Mhm. Now we do not do this.

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We only go in upon the invitation and the request of the people so that no one can ever say to us that we're outsiders, No one can ever say to us who asked you to come in here. No one can ever say to us, what's your

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racket? We can say to people in the community, We're here because you asked for us to come in here in Rochester New York out of a population of 35,000. we received individual petitions individually signed petitions More than 13,000 people out of 35,000. And you figure the

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number of Children that make up a total population of 35,000. You can almost say that every negro in Rochester signed the petition, every civil rights group requested are coming in, Every church within the negro community here in Buffalo New York where the budget is about $175,000.

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A budget which has been raised now I'm going to buffalo this week. Uh, the negro community, the low income negro community out of their own pockets, Put up more than $30,000 in that budget. But why? Because they want this, this is their own. When we go

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in there, we, we organized them so they can have power and by power. I mean exactly the way Webster's unabridged describes it as the ability to act where they can become citizens or because because of our power, thank him, have a place at the decision making

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table, have something to say about their own future, the future of their kids and as a consequence, be part of the american family Now, this basically is where a lot of the controversy comes out of a lot of the heat while it comes out of a

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lot of things. For one thing I do, the unforgivable you can attack the establishment and get away with it. Hello, I make a teed off that you can insult them and still survived, but I laugh at him and this is one thing they will not tolerate.

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It's gonna be an interesting situation because I'm going to keep on laughing at him, as long as I've got breath to laugh on him somewhere in his background, Saul Alinsky developed an attitude towards life that has permeated almost everything he has done what might be called

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an outlook of realism in the sense that he feels it is better to expect the worst of conditions, if not of people, because life usually works out that way. If he is sometimes a cynic about the present state of affairs, he is not by nature or

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commitment of pessimist in his comments on the kind of world people would like to have and the world that we really have, at least as he sees it, one gets the feeling that he believes he can have some effect on political trends, particularly where any war

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on poverty is concerned in the world as it is, people move primarily because of self interest and the world as it is. Okay, the real question has never, has never been more the sort of silly one about the un justifying the means. It's always been. Does

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this particular end justify this particular means? And if you understand that, that it explains many things around in the world as it is you were. You have to start from where you are enough from where you would wish you would be. And this doesn't mean that

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the fact that you accept the world as it is the slightest sense that it negates or dilutes the desire to strive towards the world that you would like it to be. But if you're going to have any kind of a chance of achieving the kind of

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world you would like it to be, then you have to begin with the world as it is when we're fighting for low income groups having their their own economic opportunities and having the power which is which is theirs by right as american citizens. Ah uh this

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this is what is basic in the civil rights revolution. This is basic with low income rights and frankly all that we're doing is assuming that the american revolution began In 76, but it still goes on, it's going to go on for a long time. And this

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country is all divided, notorious and radicals just like it was and they're still fighting it out on the same issues. I'm gonna look at the issue of representation. We may talk about the fact that the poor should have political equality and that we respect them and

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so forth. But we don't in fact, emotionally we consider them a bunch of poor slobs and what do we do? We go out and we scramble the works up in Vietnam for a home rule and for independence on South Vietnam. We don't have it in Mississippi.

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We don't have in our district of Columbia, I'm all for it. I think our air force and our army should, after they finished in Vietnam should come back and bomb the hell out of Mississippi. You know, what would it be? Southern Mississippi instead of Northern Mississippi.

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So we can all get freedom and equality down there too. We were impressed by the fervor of Saul Alinsky. Whenever the subject of poverty, deprivation, justice and injustice entered his comments, the history of the world would clearly have been very different had Saul Alinsky been in

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a position of supreme power at the end of better say, the Second World War. This becomes clear from the comments he has made about others who are also high on his list of the arch enemies of humanity as a jew. I have a certain amount of

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force, a congenital social protest inside of me. My people have been pushed around. Well, you know, from the beginning of time we're getting when I suppose when the concept of of love came on this earth, why they burned us at the pairs of the inquisition, they

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put us in the gas ovens and dot com and so on. Maybe it was that maybe it was something maybe it was a rejection of my own father. My own father's values were we're strictly on the dollar side. And so maybe I rejected materialism on that

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fine thing for me to be signing with my son sitting and standing here, you know, I'm sure he's rejected certain things because of what I represented. Maybe it's uh, maybe it's because I grew up in the slums and I hated poverty. I don't know, I do

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know, but every time I saw anything, whether it be a people, the sharecroppers, or whether it be people on strike or people and suffering and they shouldn't be well, I get very, very angry about it when I got angry and do something, Let me let me

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say this to me, the most immoral, the worst kind of person, the nature of of just human rights as a kind of person who doesn't do anything. I believe very firmly in the old Edmund Burke's statement that evil only triumphs when good men do nothing as

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much as I hated the Nazis, and I don't know anybody who hated him more than I did. I wanted everyone from a block captain up shop. Once the war was over. Even in those conversations with the editors of harper's, I was questioned about my feeling on

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the bomb, and I pointed out that one of the feelings I had was it had been dropped in the wrong place. It should have been dropped in Berlin instead of on Hiroshima. But unfortunately, we didn't have it ready at that time. You know, you should have

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seen my West german mail on that one, if anyone thinks Nazism is dead. But as much as I hated these nancy's, I hated far more of these good people would look out their windows, see these political prisoners being put into the vans public curtains turned to

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each other. Um, point out how horrible and moral and awful it was, but they did nothing. And you can always tell these characters they go around with the mark of CAIN on them. You can always recognize this branded across their forehead and either reads reads one

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of two ways. Either, I agree with your objectives, but not with your tactics that it absorbs them. Then you ask them, well, what would you do? Well, we'd like to think about it because they haven't got any answers. Saul Alinsky has been called a jewish atheist,

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which he vigorously denies, even though he admits his religious convictions are unconventional. There is a certain fatalism in his almost contemptuous attitude to the threats that continue to be made on his life. What he has to say now, however, is underscored by his awareness that change

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is a law of life and that the social consequences will be felt by all of us like it or not. Okay, death threats. I'll probably get knocked off, I think with all this notoriety and all the stuff that goes up. But there's always some cookie crackpot,

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whole site, you know, I get national headlines by knock him off, which he will, you know, I just don't have the the fortification of a religious faith in the conventional sense. I wish I did have one. Then you have the answers. However, I've long since learned

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Not too long in the last 10 years or so I've learned to be able to live comfortably without answers without definite answers because I don't know what whether there are such things as answers. Take the business in the hereafter. Maybe there is, Maybe there isn't. I've

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never seen the evidence one way or the other. I don't expect to see it during my lifetime. But if there is, I suppose given a choice, I think I would pick hell. The reason I picked hell is because that's where all the have nots are. You

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know, the currency of the realm shifts over here. It's money over there, it's virtue. But either way, if you have got it, you're stuck and I've spent all my life with the have nots and and once I got in the hill, well I'd start organizing just

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like I do down here and then I'd be in heaven personally, you know, because this is the thing that gives me the greatest happiness in life and look out heaven. Here we come. I think I'm sure there are a lot of grievances that people down there

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have, It should be worked out one way or another. Well, I suppose another thing which causes a lot of eight real hate on me is it isn't so much what I say, it's the fact that I say it out loud. These are the things that people

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know, but they just, it isn't considered taxable to talk about it. You know, it's sort of, it's like doing your toilet in public well, life's too short to horse around that way as far as I'm concerned and I think that this things will be a lot

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better if a lot more people did their turn it out in public. I think for example, take san Francisco. If you ask me san Francisco Oakland. Well let me, let me play it safe. Let me make it Los Angeles, If you ask me one thing which

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Los Angeles really needed above anything else, I would say what it needs is a massive enema. You know. Now you can read into it just what what what what I'm saying, but you know, and there isn't a guy in Los Angeles who doesn't know that he's

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going to be honest on it. That is a guy who wants to who wants to say Los Angeles become more than just a possible pictorial representation for an essay on Sodom and Gomorrah wherever Saul Alinsky goes And he has helped organize more than two million people

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in 40 for communities Over the last 30 years. He digs into what he calls a morass of resignation hopelessness and despair, providing tactical advice and technical consultation. He works with the local people in as he puts it rubbing raw their resentments and agitating to the point

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of conflict. But in this personal assessment of himself, Alinsky also reflected on other themes, Let me talk about something else for a moment. I think that our country has faced with and is infected. What's the worst subverting infection that it has ever experienced in its history.

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And what I'm referring to is something called Medicine avenue public relations. Middle class, self righteous moral hygiene effects are domestic way of living. It affects our foreign policy as well. That makes us almost look moronic. You know, you watch tv commercials and you get a picture

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that the only thing that the american people and particularly american women are concerned with is whether they're washes wider than if somebody else's wash or whether they smell prettier than somebody else. And ah whether well, this is what has become has become sort of a d

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authorized the sterilized kind of culture. And the whole issue is to avoid controversy. Even johnson comes out with them. Policy of consensus. You know, no controversy, controversy is bad. Well, consensus, regardless of whose mouth it comes out, it was nothing more than a huge pile of

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Madison avenue manure. When you get right down to what it does, it's been a withdrawal. It goes deeper than that. It's the kind of withdrawal that says, well, I can't I can't figure out the answers here and it's it's just too damn bothersome. So we'll let

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johnson do it, you know? And then johnson as a consequence gets much more authority and can get away with more things than than any president and any other situation except the war period could get away with because people don't want to challenge. You know, it becomes

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too complex. So you say, well, well now, what are we really fighting for over there? Right. Have you ever had a free election in South Vietnam? Is this a free country? Do they know what we're talking about on freedom? Well, well then, the answer always says,

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when I you talk that way in your you're giving aid and comfort to hanoi, you know, his son comes, he can't get into discussions on the thing. Ah you get did you get a situation also where as part of this whole consensus deal, there's a very

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bitter vindictiveness of seeping into the country where if you oppose somebody ah there there there will be sharp retaliation against you. Almost reminiscent in its own way of the old senator McCarthy days in Wisconsin, except on lower levels. In many ways they would make old Senator

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McCarthy seem sort of honest, you know, at least he was open on it. Ah That's a you see, this is a problem that we have because our culture too is so suffused with that protestant ethic of self righteousness and there's nothing worse than a combination not

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only power but of self righteousness. I think this is a point that Fulbright was trying to reach across to one thing for the Romans to try to conquer the world, but they never expected them to love them and they weren't making any bones about it. We

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were taking over power because we want the power instead of. We're doing it to free you. You know, we're doing it for you whether you like it or not. Were we going to the Dominicans? How we didn't even know which side we were on that for

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the first few days I think are going to the Dominicans was exactly on the same par word for word comma for comma and iota or iota as the Russians going into Hungary. I don't think there was one damn bit of difference. Saul Alinsky has a lot

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of opponents, certain church groups support him. Others attacked him claiming his organization, insights, class and racial antagonism responsible men accuse him of erecting a power structure, dictatorship based on slum dwellers, Julian levy of the University of Chicago accuses him of emulating the techniques of lynch mob.

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The so called establishment Alinsky attacks represents chosen city, state and federal government officials and agencies including the Office of Economic opportunity. No assessment of this professional and self styled radical would be complete without recognizing the great and respected forces that opposed everything. Alinsky stands for. Saul

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Alinsky is a symbol and perhaps a by product of our times which are characterized by forms of revolt against many established concepts. While this man is certainly a dramatic protagonist on the stage of american drama. Only history can adequately assess whether or not he is as

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significant as he might appear to millions in presenting this glimpse of Selenski titled I'd organize hell. We have had a meeting with a man who has already rocked the boat on at least one of our Bay Area community fronts and may figure prominently in others, KPI

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X reports Saul Alinsky.