EBA: "Creating the condition you describe?"
Magazine photo: three kids sitting out on the stoop in the Haight-Ashbury, smoking a joint, wearing rough clothes, kind of street-wise looking -- looking like they're their own people. Caption underneath, "These poor misbegotten abandoned children..." Who cares what the caption says? Anybody, any kid looking at that picture, knows: San Francisco, you can dress how you want, you can smoke dope, you're out on the street, you're free. That's creating the condition you describe.
...All you have to do is describe it. No matter what judgement you try to put on it, no matter what spin you try to put on it, it gets the message out there.
So, in a way, [Washington] is where things first came together for me. I understood how the game that was described, the politics of America that was described, was not the real game. The media was insatiable for news and consequently vulnerable to manipulation -- as every president has discovered who's ever given a false story, or manufactured the Gulf of Tonkin, or [discovered] a car, conveniently with Nicaraguan passports, machine guns, and ammunition, caught in El Salvador.