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ORAL HISTORY OF UTAH PEACE ACTIVISTS UTAH VALLEY UNIVERSITY OREM, UTAH

INTERVIEW WITH BONNER RITCHIE

06/06/2007 Orem, Utah

Interview Conducted by Dr. Kathryn French

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Interviewee: Bonner Ritchie Interviewer: Kathryn French Date: June 6, 2007 Subject: Utah Peace Activists Place: Orem, Utah

KF: This is Kathy French interviewing Bonner Ritchie in my office, June 6, 2007. Describe yourself.

BR: Oh, dear. I’m a person who loves to get involved in controversial issues. I always have been. I’m not a goal-oriented person; I’m a process-oriented person. I go with what’s fun, exciting, stimulating, at the moment, and don’t work it into a long term goal or a long term objective of some sort. My education has been the same way. I never decided to get a Ph.D. I just loved to study and loved school and finally ended up with one. Being process-oriented when there is something that violates a process like injustice or discrimination or exploitation or violence or manipulation or abuse, of some sort, that’s a process variable that’s interfering with a human dignity of someone. Then I get incensed and I want to take action. I define myself, in professional terms, as an organizational philosopher. I try and understand the forces that operate an organization, the way organizations evolve, the way they change, the way they fail, the way they manipulate or defend or abuse, and therefore, try to work the other side to make them more humane, more supportive, more helpful, more respectful of people rather than to abuse and use people. Early on in my career as a professor of organizational behavior I think my goal was helping people protect themselves against organizational abuse that comes from any source, a government, a supervisor, a teacher, a parent, whatever, to help people protect themselves from any abuse that comes through the use and abuse of power. So that’s kind of my framework. My background is sort of curious. I grew up on a farm in Heber City, Utah, and when I was twelve years old my father came home one day and said, “We’re moving to San Francisco.” My mother said, “What? What are we going to do?” He said, “I don’t know but we’re moving.” He was tired of rural Utah, and tired of farming, and tired of sort of a parochial world, I think. He never said that but I know he was tired of the farm work and those things. So we moved to San Francisco when I was twelve years old, and San Francisco is different than Heber City. It’s a big city. It’s diverse, it’s multicultural, and a vibrant place, and I loved it. Of course I went to school with all these kids who were very different than I was, and I decided at that time that I had been very biased, very racist, very bigoted, in my limited orientation. I didn’t have much opportunity to demonstrate that with respect to a minority person because there were none in my sphere of activity, but there were in San Francisco. So I started to learn about people. This was the end of WWII and I became concerned about a group that I barely knew about, that was getting some press, and that was the Japanese-Americans who had been put up and put in camps during WWII. A lot of them came from San Francisco. A fair number of Japanese and Chinese were from the city and people were talking about it, and I decided this was 3

troublesome. As a boy I would look out and see the Golden Gate Bridge, and I decided I wanted to build a bridge someday like that, a bridge to Tokyo so we wouldn’t have another war. That was my vision of what I wanted to do. So I became a civil engineer. I went to school to build bridges. Then I found myself in Germany commanding a nuclear weapons unit, in between 1959 and 1963, when the Berlin Wall got built. At that point, when we armed our nuclear weapons to blow up the Soviet Union, I decided there had to be a better way. That was not a good way to solve problems. If you read the accounts of the Soviet generals, they came very close to war as did the US. I think it’s a miracle that we didn’t have an all-out war. This was the height of the Cold War. I decided I needed to do something different, so I went back to school to try and understand behavior and conflict and power. I couldn’t find a place to do it. I tried psychology and sociology and political science and all those things, and I finally ended up with a degree in economics, a Ph.D. in economics, with an emphasis in labor issues on conflict negotiation and bargaining theory. And then I went to Michigan to teach and was fortunate enough to be part of the beginning of the field of organizational behavior, the applied social science. Again my focus became helping people protect themselves against abuse and make the world a more humane place. Then I came out to BYU in 1973 and retired in 2000. In the meantime I had visiting appointments all over, Stanford and other universities in the U.S., and several times in the , at the University of Jordan, and other places.

KF: How did you first get started in the Middle East?

BR: That’s a fun story. I was walking down the hall one day of the administration building at BYU and Bill Evenson was the Associate Academic Vice President who was responsible for the BYU Jerusalem Center that had just been finished in 1989. Bill said, “How would you like to go to Jerusalem?” I said, “Oh, sometime that would be fun,” not thinking too much about it but I said, “That would be fun sometime.” A few weeks later I got a fax from the director saying, “We’re delighted to learn that you and your family will be moving to Jerusalem this year.” This was in about April of 1989. I went back to Bill and said, “You were serious.” He said, “Weren’t you?” I said “Yeah, but not now. It’s not a good time.” He said, “Well, think about it some more. Let’s talk some more.” So we talked and, actually, we had a meeting in Salt Lake with some of the members of the Board of Trustees who said, “We need you to go to Jerusalem to build bridges to the .” So that was it. In the fall of 1989 my family moved to Jerusalem for a year, and I started working with Palestinian groups. I did training programs and various things but I got acquainted with a lot of people, including Yasser Arafat, and most of the PLO leaders, and the Israeli leaders, Sharon Peres and Ehud Barak and others were very involved. I really worked hard to try and facilitate the process. I worked with the PLO in preparation for the Oslo peace negotiations in Tunis. A lot of things worked reasonably well but then as time goes on one thing breaks and then another. It is very disappointing and very frustrating to see all your work sort of be—It’s not for naught, but you just don’t accomplish all the things. But that’s how I got started in 1989. Then as a result of the contacts and involvement there I’ve spent about six full years since 1989 living in 4

Jordan or Jerusalem or working in or Egypt, and all around the Gulf: Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait.

KF: When you say there were some disappointments, what difference did your work make?

BR: One thing that was kind of fun is on the Christmas following the negotiations that were in 1994, I guess, I got a Christmas card from the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. He sent me a card. He’s not a Christian, he’s Muslim, but he sent me a card. It’s a picture of on the cover, of Bethlehem and the Church of the Nativity where Christ was born. He sent me a picture of that and put a little note in it that said, “Thanks for all your help. We couldn’t have done it without you.” The reference was I helped them change their paradigm, their framework of thinking. This came to me in kind of a funny way. I had been working with some Palestinian groups and some Israeli groups and realized that for fifty years, since the creation of the state of in 1947-1948, at that point the Jews accepted the state of Israel and the all rejected it. For the Arabs it was all or nothing. “It’s all our land.” For the Palestinians, “It’s all ours. The Jews are welcome to live here but we will not accept the Jewish state, the state of Israel.” I said, “It’s interesting you had an all or nothing strategy and the Jews had an incremental strategy. They’d take whatever they could get and see what would happen later.” I said, “So their strategy is incremental, yours is all or nothing. It’s fifty years later, they have all, you have nothing. Maybe you need a new paradigm, and maybe you need an incremental paradigm rather than an all or nothing. There’s nothing to negotiate if there’s nothing to talk about. You’re doomed.” I said, “You have to compromise. You don’t like that but that’s what you have to do.” I think that was the turning point, in terms of the way they thought about it, and ever since it has been a negotiation strategy, especially for the Palestinian Authority, Arafat’s group. Hamas, right now, isn’t much in the negotiating mood and they’re in control of the parliament in Palestine. But even they will come. They will negotiate. They will come because people have to live and they have to eat and they have to go to school and they have to have medical care. There is a point at which the violence and the disruption just becomes too much. But that’s what happened, and really it was changing paradigm. Many of my former students are now in important positions in the Palestinian Authority and the government of Jordon and other places, they were all very grateful for helping me change the paradigm, the way we thought about the world and the all or nothing strategy gives way to a reasonable negotiation and compromise.

KF: So you met a lot of them while you were teaching at a University?

BR: Yes. Birzeit University, in Palestine, is the best of the Palestinian schools, and is generally regarded as kind of the training ground for Palestinian leaders. And then in Jordon, at the University of Jordon, I taught at the Jordon Institute of Diplomacy, which prepares Jordanian and other Arab diplomats for diplomatic purposes. I taught conflict resolution negotiation skills, and many of those people are now in important positions, chief of staff in Jordan, chief economist, various groups there, various individuals. It’s really fun 5

to see what they’re doing and how they’re gradually changing the overall mind set in the Arab world. At the same time, the sad part and the disappointing part, is that there is a small number of violent and vicious people on the other extreme who don’t want to negotiate, who don’t want peace. It’s a small group but they’re very noticeable and very powerful. So that’s sad part. And they came about because reasonable people didn’t do reasonable things when they could and should have, which would have prevented the violence and the terrorism and the in-fighting. So we missed the opportunity. We were so late in doing the things that should be done we let it go for fifty years and the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza were reflecting a foreign policy that was a disaster. This carried over to Iraq, Jordon, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, et cetera.

KF: Like being passive bystanders.

BR: We weren’t even passive bystanders, we were enemies. We did negative things. One of the interesting things is, whenever I bring up sort of a peaceful negotiation process or whenever I’m questioned by Arab diplomats or leaders, we talk about what needs to be done before reconciliation and compromise and every time they bring up, they say, “What about 242?” UN Resolution 242 is the resolution that demanded that Israel withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza.

[15:00]

They say the United States has always been so quick to implement any UN resolution that goes against Arabs. Iraq is a classic example, of course. They always are very consistent on enforcing UN resolutions, and yet every UN resolution against Israel you never support or take action and so your bias, in support for Israel, negates, and interferes with your effectiveness in brokering peace over fifty years, and you’ve alienated Muslims. All Muslims, 1.3 billion people, they’re not all alienated but they are all very critical of the policy with respect to the Arabs, and especially with respect to Israel. Every time a Palestinian kid gets tear-gassed, or picks up the tear-gas canister that says, “Made in the USA,” that’s not passive, that’s very aggressive and seen to be against the interests of the Palestinians.

KF: Were you ever given an opportunity to work with American policy makers as you’ve…

BR: I’ve made plenty of speeches but never in a direct way. No. I’ve done some briefings with State Department personnel, I’ve met with State Department personnel from time to time, but never really a formal process. But for the most part the bureaucrats in the state department aren’t interested. They think they know what needs to be known and they think that those of us who are trying to tell them what to do are pushing a private agenda rather than an enlightened diplomatic agenda. I’ve been very, very, critical of State Department people involved with the negotiations. We seldom have an accurate perspective. That’s a loaded statement, but I really do think some of our presidents were disastrous in terms of understanding this. Most Secretaries of State—we’ve had 6

some good Secretaries of States, some good ones—and some presidents. Jimmy Carter did some pretty good things with the Camp David Accords, and Clinton tried to do some things in Camp David and with The Taba talks in Egypt, but it was too little too late. We haven’t been very successful in our foreign policy. One of the things that’s kind of rewarding to me is, whenever I’m in an Arab country, just last week in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, people are very critical of American foreign policy, of American government, yet they’ve always been very kind and very supportive of Americans as individuals. I’ve never felt attacked, I’ve never felt any hostility, any rejection or any threat against me as a result of being American. Of course they know I don’t support American policy. But they do attribute it to the government and not to the people for the most part. However, the really extreme groups will go after any American as a symbolic statement.

KF: What were you doing the last trip?

BR: We were working with two groups. One is the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority which manages the portfolio of oil revenues in the United Arab Emirates. They want to change the company, to have more local employees. They want to Emiratize it. They want more Emirates rather than Americans and Brits and French [and] German executives. Our goal is to train the Emirate managers to become top leaders and manage the oil revenue for the country. They have a lot of expatriates. The population of the Emirates is 6 million, 4.8 million are foreign non-nationals. 1.2 million are native born. So the foreigners run the country. They don’t run the country, they manage the country. It’s run by a royal family cabinet, but they don’t have managers and democratic leaders to do the job. So that’s what we’re trying to do with the leadership training, leadership development. The second thing is working for Brad Cook, whose job as President of the Women’s College in Abu Dhabi, is education for leadership excellence. For his students, for the women students, and then for the larger group of Arab women that want to work in management in the larger sense, the education [is ] for leadership development. The Emirates are a good place for this because there are more women in positions of leadership than most other Arab countries. The Minister of Education is a woman, and the top entrepreneur in Dubai is a woman. And so, there are a fair number of women, and there is a lot of openness, a lot of opportunities. So to develop leaders from there is kind of a challenge to create a force for change in society.

KF: Wow. That sounds fascinating. When you come back to Utah, do Utahns have a sense of what you’re doing to build peace?

BR: Some. Not many. Most are shocked or surprised. Some are critical and think I’m on the enemy’s side. Some are afraid; they think I’m doing dangerous things. They say, “Aren’t you afraid to go into these places?” I say “No, I’m careful. But I’m not as afraid as I am when I go to New York or Los Angeles or Miami or Detroit or St. Louis.” I have a much greater chance of being a victim of violence in any major American city than I do anywhere in the Middle East, I think. That does not include Iraq, I’m not going to Iraq, 7

but that includes Jordon and Palestine and Israel, Egypt, the Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain. In those countries odds of violence are very low. There is an occasional incidence, but not much. Most Americans don’t understand it. They generalize from limited news or extensive news of limited events to the whole. They don’t understand that…I give lots of speeches. I probably average a speech every week or two, at least somewhere in the area. I did a couple in Salt Lake recently. People are always surprised, often supportive, often pleasantly surprised, but for the most part totally uninformed, totally unaware. A person recently said, “You’re doing this work. God’s got a war plan in that area and you’re getting in his way.” I just kind of smiled at that position and said, “Well, if God wants a war he could probably deliver it. But, from my understanding, God doesn’t want war. The message I get is of peace. I think that I am more working for peace rather than getting in the way of war. But there are a lot of people who have that very violent string of message to me that we ought to kill all the Muslims.

KF: Here in Utah you hear that?

BR: Yes.

KF: Would you hear that elsewhere?

BR: To some extent. More here, there is more of an identification with Israel, more of a conservative sort of bias—using military might to squash the evil doers—more of a symbol of right and wrong, less nuance, less breadth in perspective. That’s why those people who are involved in peace movements and doing things are so much more important in this culture because there is such a great need. Of course, I’m also comparing to my background in San Francisco. It’s much more of an open, liberal world. Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I taught for many years, is much more of a multicultural, open environment. Those are part of the reasons I came to Utah, kind of on a cause, a challenge to do something about it, to change the world. There are enough people who do respond that it’s encouraging to me. Not as many as I would like.

KF: You came to Utah before you came to the Middle East?

BR: Yes. I came to BYU in 1973 from the University of Michigan. I first went to the Middle East in 1980, but I didn’t do much. It was a sensitizing time, I read a lot, and then in 1989 I went back, and started working in a more focused way.

KF: What was your sense of the change you were going to make here?

BR: Well, I’m very critical of right-wing zealots. I’m very critical of narrow minded thinking. I’m very critical of people who don’t appreciate the cultures and values of others, and I saw those as critical questions to those critical issues. How do you open people’s mind? How do you create critical thinking among people? How do you moderate a rigid value 8

system? How do you create more tolerance, more openness? And a lot of that was racial at the time.

KF: Here in Utah?

BR: Well, in the nation, but especially in Utah. The racism was very troublesome to me, and I had been very involved in the civil rights activities, in work with the community in Ann Arbor and Detroit. In the South, I got shot at while organizing black cooperatives and agricultural cooperatives, between West Point and Tupelo, Mississippi. I worked with Martin Luther King and various civil rights groups in Michigan, organizing black banks. I first met Martin Luther King when he was just moving to transition from strictly civil rights, African American issues, to anti-war issues. That was when I first became involved in a peace movement. I went to Joan Baez’s school, the Center for Non- violence, in Monterey, California. I went down and spent some time there, and on one occasion Martin Luther King was there. It was just before he made his famous Riverside Church speech against the war in Vietnam, and he was very hesitant to do it because most of his staff—Jesse Jackson, Henry Young, and Ralph Abernathy— said that if you take on the war you’ll lose the support of the administration. Because he had received a fair amount of support from both John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson in the racial issue. When Kennedy died, Johnson pursued the Vietnam War. They said, “If you criticize that then you’ll lose his support for your civil rights movement, and our movement will suffer.” It was very moving to hear him argue the fact that it was the right thing to do, independent of the consequences, and he felt that the consequences would be inevitable but he had to do this then because he had earned enough of a national reputation, as being a defender of right in the case of race, that people who listened to him felt connected. So he made his famous Riverside Church speech. One of the primary influences on the King was Joan Baez. She’d always been a peace activist. She was a good example for me. Her structure of being what you stand for was the one. And King and Joan Baez had gotten involved with Gandhi’s non-violent philosophy and other sorts of philosophical foundations for peace. Then when I got to Michigan I got very involved in civil rights activism, [with] various groups in Detroit—I was there during the Detroit riots—to try and to do training in cross-cultural communication. I worked with development programs in the South, to try and develop leaders and organize cooperatives, overcome racist economic and political oppression in the South. A few things along the way sort of evolved into a bigger program of peacemaking, which is the paradigm I’ve adopted away from conflict resolution to peacemaking, which is a more proactive, a pre-emptive strategy rather than waiting until a conflict breaks out and trying to solve it. If it does break out you need to try and do it, but you try and prevent it in the first place, hence the peacemaking philosophy.

[30:00]

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KF: And so you came to BYU to teach. How did you—I’m real curious about this because I’m a teacher, too—how did you teach the peacemaking and the critical thinking to your students.

BR: Well, it’s not easy. The first way you do it is to model it, is to behave that way yourself. I’m always intrigued at people who teach a value, participation for example, but yet resist any participation in their own process. When a student questions them, they destroy the student. They’re not willing to live and walk the walk. They talk it but they don’t do it. So that’s the first thing, is to be open, willing to change your mind, to take all points of view, to respect other people, to demonstrate that respect when you talk about them, behave with respect whether it’s gender or race or ethnicity or religion. I think that’s the first thing is to walk, but then you have to give people experiences. You have to get them in the field. You have to get them in a place where they’re doing something. During a few years we did a lot of work with Lincoln Elementary School in Salt Lake, which is one of the very most difficult schools; enormous turnover, dozens of different languages, and kids who don’t get any food anywhere, except school, and come to school with guns and 8 year olds with knives. So getting students working with those kids was a major, major, issue in loving, understanding kids from the South Pacific, Southeast Asia, Vietnamese kids, Cambodian kids, Tongan and Samoan kids, Mexican- American kids, and getting students involved with that kind of support, you have them read things. Every class I’ve taught for thirty years I have students read literature, novels, or historical accounts of a major racial issue. They don’t have to read about everything. Chinese, or Arab, Jewish kids, the Holocaust, whatever the issue, you try to balance it out over the long run so you’re looking at Native Americans, African Americans, so you read material that captures the essence of the conflicts, tension of those groups, and you talk about them. You have people come in and talk about them. They’re part of that ethnic group narrative. I use the book Blood Brothers, which was written by Chacour, a Palestinian Catholic Priest, a pacifist, a wonderful guy. They read his book, and then I bring in Arab students to talk about it, and to reflect on it, and Jewish students to talk about it, and the students get involved and start to understand. You read Gabriel Marquez, about Latino kids, and we’ll talk of Jewish kids, and Betty Bao Lord for Chinese kids. You try and capture what’s going on. The Kite Runner for Afghan kids, and the struggles of these cultures. But you have to read a lot of multicultural ethnic material to give students a vicarious experience. I can take them to Salt Lake but I can’t take them to Vietnam, I can’t take them to Egypt. We can do a little bit with Native American groups, but it’s critical that we read. Then we do a lot of things in the classroom. I try and role play, find out how the youth feel about a problem. I tell stories of other students. A student that came to me one time when I was teaching in Palestine. He said that he needed to talk. His mother had been offered $50,000 for him to become a suicide bomber. He needed to talk the thing through. I’d never had that in Utah or California or Michigan. That’s a brutal discussion with an eighteen year old whose mother (his father’s dead and he has a lot of siblings) feels that $50,000 would be an enormous amount of money for him to get on a bus and blow himself up.

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KF: His mother asked him?

BR: His mother was offered the money for him to do it, so yeah, his mother was willing to consider it. So, those kinds of opportunities. Most of our students here don’t have any firsthand experience with that kind of thing, so as you relate that and talk through it and have them read and think and push their assumptions, you can open doors. And then the critical thinking, same thing. The critical thinking is about the conflict, the leadership, the power, the multicultural issues, and so you teach the critical thinking as you analyze what’s going on in the world. You critique. And you show movies, you show videos of what’s going on.

KF: What courses did you teach?

BR: The course where I was most directly involved in this was an honors seminar, people I taught there every semester at BYU. And then the other was in organizational behavior class, for undergraduates. [That] was a place where an important part of the class was devoted to that material. My graduate classes were in organizational behavior, organization theory, where you really can get into those things, and ethics, business ethics, which opens the door to all the issues of discrimination and power and conflict and truth and advertising, various topics that relate directly to critical thinking and conflict issues.

KF: Do you think it made a difference in your students?

BR: Oh, yeah. I have lots of evidence of students who write back a year later, five years later, ten years later, and told me what they are doing, and how I’ve affected them, and why they’re doing it. I have five or ten of them that have sent letters and messages; a lot of them are very involved in international work. I have many students who are international negotiators and facilitators, and working abroad, having gotten involved in U.S. companies abroad, or local companies in Japan and China, Vietnam, Egypt or something. Just last week, I met this former student who is on the faculty at American University of Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates, a wonderful person, and often you trace it back to some experience, something in class. You know, after 9/11 I got emails from students in Palestine and Jordan. One student wrote saying, “You and Mrs. Lois (my wife) are the only Americans I know. I just had to tell you how sorry I am and how sad I am. This does not represent the Arab world or the Islamic world that I’m part of. I just wanted you to know that we also want to eliminate the violence.” Those kinds of messages are nice to get. We have lots of them. That’s better data than a test score at the end of a semester.

KF: You were born in Heber City, lived twelve years there, moved to San Francisco. Lots of people have lived in Utah and California, surely LDS. Not very many have become a peacemaker to the level that you are. What made you different?

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BR: That’s hard to say. There are a thousand events that contribute. I guess I would attribute it primarily to my father. My father was not educated. Education was not part of our culture but he was a very sweet, very tolerant, person. He always went out of his way to help people to do things. My mother was more of an intellectual, not in the academic sense, but more of the life of the mind. She pushed me hard on academic issues. It was a nice combination. Dad pushed me to love and serve and reach out and understand people and be tolerant and patient, and mother pushed me to be rigorous and precise and analytical and to get good grades and so forth. Dad was a liberal Democrat, mother was a conservative Republican. Mother was ultra-orthodox, Dad was pragmatic and flexible. So I grew up in that home with a kind of tension, a kind of fun tension, a kind of tension that could have been negative, could have had a negative consequence, frustrating and lack of focus, but instead I’ve tried to pick up both, I think. When I went to college, my mother wanted me to go to BYU, and to her dying day she felt that one of her biggest failures in life was not making sure that I went to BYU, that would have made me a good person, but instead I went to Berkeley, and she felt that was my ruin. Dad thought that was pretty neat but she thought it was my ruin to go to that evil school. But I went there, and I had classes from people who were absolutely brilliant, and moved me to care and do things.

[end of tape 1, side A]

[45:00]

[tape 1, side B begins several minutes into side B]

KF: So you had professors there.

BR: When I went to Berkeley—Of course, growing up in San Francisco opened a lot of doors and opened my eyes to a lot of things, and I learned to really appreciate the world and to love diversity, and that was an important part of it. And then I would see that violated, and it would hurt. I saw the gangs in San Francisco. I saw the Mexican- American kids and the Chinese kids and the African-American kids and that, for some reason, affected me more than it did a lot of my friends and colleagues. I felt more strongly about it, and I think, partly from my dad. Then I went to Berkeley which was a very exciting place, a very aggressive place in terms of ideas, and creating critical thinking, and creating a view of the world. I had some wonderful teachers who influenced me. Then I was commissioned as an army officer, and was in Germany at the height of the Cold War. I saw the negative forces there, and I felt so strongly about how easy it is to break down rational thinking and humane values, how quickly it can disintegrate into a world of violence and chaos, and decided I needed to understand more. Then I went back to graduate school to learn more and to try and make a difference. I always wanted to make a difference. I never knew how to do it, or never knew exactly what I wanted to do in order to make a difference, but I just knew I wanted to. So then I got caught up again with an incredible mentor, Ray Miles, at 12

Berkeley, whom I worked with extensively, and that became important. That’s when I got involved, when I met Joan Baez and Martin Luther King. It was the beginning of the civil rights movement. I met James Farmer and Eldridge Cleaver and the things they were doing with CORE and the Black Power movement, and the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. I was elected president of the Doctoral Student Association during the Free Speech Movement. We formed a union, a local American Federation of Teachers. We didn’t know what we were doing but we set up a picket line on campuses, and teamsters honored it, and we closed down campus. I saw what you can do if you really organize, and have power, and care, and want to do something. Part of it was accidental but sometimes that’s all you’ve got. Then I accepted a position at the University of Michigan. I was in Detroit during the Detroit Riots in 1967. I worked with black groups there and I tried to organize. Each time, each place I’ve been, there’s been a major event that opened a door, and I could have gone through it or not, and I always chose to go through it. As you suggest, doors are open for other people and they don’t go through them. I’m not sure why. It was interesting, just before my father died I had just come back from a period in the Middle East and I went to visit him. He was living in Phoenix at the time, and we were talking—and dad was almost ninety—and he said, “Now I know why we moved to San Francisco,” because I ask him every time and he says, “I don’t know. I just wanted to do it.” He says, “Now I know.” He says, “I doubt that you would have had the opportunities to do the things you’ve done if we had stayed on a farm in Heber City.” He said, “So.”

KF: He was proud of you.

BR: It wasn’t the announced decision, process, or the goal but, in retrospect, he felt that he was inspired to do it for the benefit of his kids.

KF: That’s pretty amazing.

BR: It’s a good story for me, personally.

KF: Are you still active LDS?

BR: Yes.

KF: You are one of two active LDS people who have been interviewed out of the 48. Emma Lou Thayne was the other one. Do you know Emma Lou Thayne? Oh, gosh. Many who are no longer active have been interviewed, including some who have been all over the world with parents in the State Department even, and very active parents. Why is there that phenomenon where so many leave the Church and yet some of you don’t?

BR: It’s a good question, and it’s really a subtle thing, I think. For many people the Church is a very rigid, black and white, good/evil, top-down authority, high compliance kind of system of organization. For those people, when things don’t quite fit, when you’re on 13 the edge of social or economic or political or theological issues, they can’t reconcile, they can’t handle the dissonance. I have always liked dissonance. I have always found it very motivating. Others find it very frustrating, very negative, and they have to avoid it. In the dissonance reduction-process they go one way or the other, either they go full in and don’t do anything else, or full out and do whatever else. For me it’s never been that way. There are no absolutes in my world. They may be there but I just don’t have them. For me, everything is relative. For me, the Church has always been a core kind of foundation of values, of community, of commitment, of service, of love, and those values work well in what I do. The hard-line, rigid interpretations don’t work well for me, and I’ve never been bothered by them. Part of it is the tolerance for ambiguity, the idea that there are lots of shades of grey and lots of areas where it’s not right or wrong, but you’re choosing between two goods. You’re interpreting on your own. I think there are very few things that are core to a theological position. Other people think there are a lot of things. For me there are very few, and I take my cues from the Savior, who is a pretty powerful teacher of peace, and love, and tolerance, and making a difference, and reaching out, crossing bridges, and building bridges. So those are the values I’ve internalized. To be in an organization of conflict not only doesn’t bother me. It’s kind of exhilarating. For other people it’s very negative, very frustrating. I don’t mind disagreeing with people. I don’t mind if people disagree with me. One of the reasons I came to BYU was because all of my friends thought I couldn’t stand it, and all my enemies knew that BYU couldn’t stand me, and I had to prove them both wrong. I can transcend. I think that’s probably the key issue is that I’ve developed a lifetime of transcending issues, conflicts, people, theology, teachers who I didn’t like, or who didn’t like me, countries, leaders, deans who liked, or didn’t like me, and [I]had to transcend. I never let a person get in the way of me doing what I wanted to do or what I thought was right. I never let a supervisor—I never blamed anybody else. I never let them get in the way of me doing what I wanted to do or thought was important. I did learn at a very early age how to manage organizations. That is one of my skills. I do know how to organize through, or around, or within, or between organizations, how to get what I need out of it, and how to prevent the rigidity for effecting. That’s a rare kind of thing. There are other people who know how to do that but most are intimidated, or victimized, in that process. I know when I served as Dean everybody was either blaming me or they didn’t take responsibility for their own behavior, for their own success or failure, they had to be blaming somebody else. You have to learn how to take responsibility for yourself, learn how to manage the systems you put forth, but I don’t have any better answer to the question. A lot of it is just idiosyncratic, people are different. I don’t know why so many people are so troubled by living with dissonance, living with ambiguity, in accepting responsibility for what they think and do rather than deferring to somebody else. And that’s the danger of a top-down organization. It’s the conflict of the Catholic Church, with the Pope and his pronouncements; any authoritarian system has real problems. People who need structure and need answers have to go all in or all out, they can’t compromise. And to be an effective person, in a conflict world, you have to be able to adapt.

14

KF: It makes sense to me.

BR: You have to decide, with all the organizations you’re a part of, how much of it you accept and how much of it you don’t, how much of it influences you and what doesn’t, how do you take out of it what is good and what is bad? And that’s a big problem with Islam in the world. How do you take out of it what is good and somehow suppress that which is bad? How do you find the good in any system? We’re seeing this now in the national political system with Mitt Romney and the attacks on Mormonism. It’s accepted by so many people that [Mormonism is] a vicious cult wishing to make one of them fit to be president. It’s an interesting debate. It’s an interesting issue in the way people raise it in the way they talk and the things they say. To me it’s very interesting to observe this process. It’s hard for most people to do that.

KF: Anything else you would like to share?

BR: Oh, dear. One thing that has been very helpful to me is the U.S. Institute of Peace. I would suggest that to people. [John] Paul Lederach is a fellow of the U.S. Institute of Peace. It’s kind of a quasi-supported organization by the government, but it’s very independent and they do some really some really good work in conflict resolution, and peacemaking, and solving world problems, and research. Their publications are superb. Paul’s book on peacemaking is one of the best things I’ve read.

[1:00]

When I read something—I read a lot, that’s another variable. You’ve got to read at least two books a week to begin to understand—but Lederach’s book on peacemaking, maybe it’s peace building, whatever it is, but the U.S. Institute—its usip.org—has a wealth of information, and Lederach happens to be a Mennonite who is translating his Mennonite philosophy of non-violence and pacifism into a worldwide strategy of sustainable communities. Good guy, really good guy.

KF: Is that in D.C.? The Institute?

BR: Yes, it’s in Washington D.C. I almost accepted a fellowship there a few years ago, but I didn’t want to do the routine, because I’m my own person. I don’t like to be limited. Maybe I made a mistake, maybe it would have been helpful but it’s a very good organization to be involved in. People ought to know about those organizations, Save the Children, and organizations like that, that reach out to make a difference on the ground. Peace Now with Israel, a combination of Jewish and Palestinian people, headed up by two key individuals, Elias Chacour—and I talked about the Palestinian Catholic priest—and Yael Dayan, Moshe Dayan’s daughter, a member of the Knesset, a Labor Party peace activist who is really good. Her father is one of the most famous generals in Israeli history, and she is just becoming this very articulate, passionate spokesperson for peace. Organizations like that, I want people to become acquainted with, trying to 15

understand the organization. They have to seek it out, and it doesn’t come to without that. You have to be very aggressively pursuing these options. You have to care to reach far and wide and build bridges of understanding. That’s probably enough.

[Tape interrupted]

KF: Bonner just talked about working in camps in Jordan.

BR: The interesting thing about the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan is that Jordan is the only Arab country that gives Palestinians citizenship, and people in the camps can vote and can be a part of a larger country’s political process, which they can’t in other places. The camps are better served there. The government is much more proactive. You saw, just in the last weeks, the last days, about violence in the refugee camps in Lebanon up north by Tripoli. I’ve been to the camps in Lebanon, and they are the saddest camps anywhere in the world. It’s truly ironic that in an Arab country they treat the Palestinian Arabs so poorly. The living conditions are a disaster. They’re not great in Jordan but they’re much, much, better and there are opportunities. The schools are really pretty good in the camps in Jordan. The healthcare is, not great, but at least it’s reasonable. It’s not the case in the camps in Gaza, it’s not the case in the camps in Lebanon, and other places. The schools are really quite good, the healthcare is reasonable. There are working opportunities for people in the camps. They’re quite open camps. People can move in and out.

KF: Can move into the communities?

BR: Yeah, which they can’t do in other countries. Jordan does not try to keep the camps hostage, and the other countries do. They use it as a hammer to beat Israel in the world dialogue about the abuse in the Arab countries by Israel and the United States, and Jordan doesn’t do that. In the camps they provide education and all the other opportunities for camp members. Some of the people stay in the camp because they still have a dream of going back to their homes in Israel, in what is now Israel, in Palestine. That’s an interesting story. A lot of people still have the key to their door of a house that was destroyed fifty years ago, or their house is there and occupied by Jewish inhabitants now. But their stories are very touching and very telling. There are some camps in Jordan that are not quite so good. And Zarqa, which is the home of Zarqawi where the Arabs say he was killed, and he was a Palestinian in a Jordanian camp. The Zarqa camp is not a very pleasant place. There is a lot of violence there. But, for the most part, the Jordanian camps are really pretty good, much more positive, and more opportunities there.

KF: Aren’t there Iraqi refugee camps in Jordan, or not?

BR: There have been Iraqi refugee camps. In fact, one of the people I’ve worked with extensively was Rebecca Salti, who was a Mormon activist in Jordan, she’s a Bennion, 16

from Salt Lake, and her husband was an Arab banker. Rebecca has done a lot of really creative work. After the first Gulf War she set up refugee camps and processed a million Iraqis through there and did a really good job. She is a very impressive person.

KF: And she still lives in Jordan?