Richard Hendrick, a Veterans for Peace member and filmmaker, will be speaking on Thursday, February 18th at 1:30, following the Farmer’s Table lunch. The Peace and War class has invited him to share his experiences and perspectives.
Richard Hendrick says about his presentation:
I will speak from a personal perspective about a journey from the son of Vietnam War-supporting Republican parents to a radical peacenik. I will also talk about the role of the media in allowing and even promoting war.
Here is a bit on my background: I was drafted at the end of my sophomore year because of an administrative error on the part of Princeton, where I was an undergraduate in Politics. Because my brother was in Vietnam at the time, I was not sent there, but rather to Germany, where I worked in a Corps headquarters. This army experience tended to radicalize me politically and when I returned to Princeton three years later, I participated in many anti-war demonstrations, including those which culminated in shutting the university down for the rest of the year in April of 1970.
I was admitted to the Doctoral program in Human Development at Harvard in 1976 and it was there, with the creators of Sesame Street, that I became interested in producing television for children. I taught at Dartmouth for fifteen years, including courses in the effects of television on children and the society, how schools socialize children, how education serves the economic system, and a range of developmental psychology courses. I was also producing television at this time and in the eighties wrote and produced the award-winning children’s series The Voyage of the Mimi (starring, incidentally, a young Ben Affleck).
I have produced documentaries for PBS, Turner, A&E and European television. I am now raising money for a documentary on America’s military bases abroad.
I have continued my peace and human rights and environmental activism and am a member, as you know, of Veterans for Peace.
