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RICHARD HEFFNER ’46
COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY
COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY RICHARD HEFFNER ’46
Heffner circa 1930 on Broadway and West 108th
Street, near his childhood home, and (right) in his
College graduation photo.
PHOTOS: COURTESY RICHARD D. HEFFNER ’46, ’47 GSAS
Heffner and his wife of 62 years, Elaine ’51 SW, at the
1949 Tanglewood Music Festival, a year prior to their marriage,
and on vacation in Sydney, Australia, in 1996.
PHOTOS: COURTESY RICHARD D. HEFFNER ’46, ’47 GSAS
Then, too, circulating through the crowd, shaking hands, quietly
accepting congratulations, was the courtly, slightly stooped,
silver-haired fellow who had interviewed them all — and hundreds
of others.
The celebration at the Mutual of America building in midtown
Manhattan on June 30, 2011, marked the 55th anniversary of the
weekly, half-hour PBS talk show Open Mind, the unique legacy of
Richard D. Heffner ’46, ’47 GSAS. From its debut on May 7, 1956,
Open Mind has been a forum where guests, as the opening narration
once put it, are “free to examine, to question, to disagree.”
For Heffner, that philosophy has animated him across two
professional generations and multiple media identities: communications
consultant, broadcasting expert, network executive,
public affairs adviser. At his core, however, he is one thing.
“I’m a teacher,” he says. “I’m a talker. I’m a speaker. I’m a
preacher. That’s who I am.”
His Subaru station wagon even sports a license plate reading
OPENMIND.
“He is one of the most intelligent, sensitive interviewers I have
ever had in my life,” says Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel,
who has logged nearly 30 Open Mind appearances. “On every
subject that he chooses — war, politics, literature — he manages
to humanize it and bring it up, rather than bring it down. He’s the
Grand Inquisitor in the best sense.”
Heffner likes to tease Abrams — whose 35 appearances on
Open Mind make him his most frequent guest — that he is “a First
Amendment voluptuary” because he is so passionate about free
speech. And Abrams is happy to tease Heffner right back.
“Like Inspector Clouseau and Cato, Dick and I have sparred
so often that we have no tricks left with which to surprise each
other,” he says. “He thinks, I do not know why, that I’m some sort
of knee-jerk First Amendment absolutist. I think — and I know
why — that he’s too prepared to sacrifice core First Amendment
principles to accommodate his social/political predilections.
What I’m sure of is that I can’t imagine anyone I’d rather argue
with, and that we are all in his debt for his extraordinary contributions
to public thoughtfulness.”
Heffner is more modest: “I’m a person of rather limited talents.
I don’t dance, I don’t sing.” He refers wryly to “the 37 people who
are watching the program.” One of them, a cab driver, once deliberately
barreled down on him on Fifth Avenue.
“I thought the end was near — assassination by taxi!” he remembers.
“Instead, a wonderfully smiling youngish driver thrust
a wildly waving arm out his open window, hollering, ‘Open Mind!
Open Mind!’ Was I ever grateful for a viewer.”
It is taping day in the small studio at the CUNY Graduate
Center on Fifth Avenue and East 35th Street. Beneath a blaze
of overhead lights is Open Mind’s intellectual battleground:
a polished, round wooden table and two chairs. In the green
room, amid a plate of cookies and a big-screen TV, Heffner reviews
notes and consults with Daphne Doelger-Dwyer, his associate
producer of more than 30 years. (“I’ve often thought Dick is
the reason they invented Boss Appreciation Day,” she says. “Just
the same, I wish he would stop asking me to try to find articles he
wrote during the Kennedy administration or yet another elusive
piece on the National News Council.”)
Today, Heffner will record four segments. First up is NYU
professor Kim Phillips-Fein ’05 GSAS, discussing her new book
Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal.
Then he will greet Dr. Peter Bach of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering
Cancer Center, whose subject will be caring for the dying. Next
comes Heffner’s youngest guest ever, his grandson, budding
journalist Alexander, a 22-year-old Harvard senior whose topic is
America’s young electorate.
Finally, there is Frances Hesselbein, former president of Girl
Scouts of the USA and president and CEO of the Frances Hesselbein
Leadership Institute (formerly the Leader to Leader Institute).
Attractively accoutered in black jacket and gold and black
Hermès scarf, she also has brought along a jacket with bold tan
and black stripes, which she shows to her host.
“I didn’t know if you wanted something more like this,” she says.
“You look gorgeous,” Heffner replies.
She smiles and says, “I may never go home.”
An hour later, after the taping, Hesselbein will engage in a few
minutes of small talk. “I loved all your questions,” she tells her
host. “There wasn’t one superficial one.”
That’s no accident. “There are comparatively few subjects on
Open Mind that are likely to throw me because I don’t choose subjects
that I know I don’t know enough about,” says Heffner. “I
owe it to my viewers, and I owe it to my guests, not to be dumb.”
Heffner has been playing smart ever since he was a child suffering
from rheumatic fever of the heart. “It was in defense that
I became bookish,” he told The New York Times in 2003. “I was
sickly, so I wasn’t allowed to play sports.” (Perhaps presaging his
role as a moderator in a number of capacities, he was, however,
permitted to umpire baseball games.)
The boy who buried himself in books was the son of a man
who made book: Al Heffner was a prosperous New York City racetrack
tout who lost everything during the Depression. “His very
wealthy customers were big bettors. They would bet $100,000 on
a race. And when they were gone, my father went broke.”
After attending DeWitt Clinton H.S. in the Bronx (“greatest
high school in America”) with Paddy Chayefsky, Richard Avedon
and James Baldwin, Heffner became a devotee of historian
Dwight Miner ’26, ’40 GSAS; literary critic Lionel Trilling ’25, ’38
GSAS; and philosopher Ernest Nagel ’31 GSAS at the College.
Outside of class he was one of the earliest on-air voices for the
fledgling Columbia University Radio Club, delivering a weekly
current events report while future University Professor Fritz
Stern ’46, ’53 GSAS made faces at him through the studio window
(something Stern has consistently denied).
As chairman of the College War Relief Drive, Heffner also successfully
approached University President Nicholas Murray Butler
(Class of 1882) in his Low Library office to ask him to address
a bond rally. Heffner recalls, “He was a large man sitting at a large
desk, raised on a large platform at the end of the room as one approached.
I learned later that that was what Mussolini did.”
Heffner, who majored in history, earned an M.A. in the subject
in 1947 under Richard Hofstadter ’42 GSAS but stopped short of
a Ph.D., considering himself “a teacher, not a scholar.” And teach
he did, at Sarah Lawrence, UC Berkeley, Rutgers, The New School
and his alma mater, where from 1950–52 he taught Contemporary
Civilization. But he craved a larger audience. In 1952, as
Heffner began editing A Documentary History of the United States,
a still-popular paperback collection of vital documents such as
the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address, he
knew he wanted to discuss human events in a broader context.
“I believe history is the synthetic subject,” he reflects. “I think it
is the historian who embraces everything. The story of the past is
the story of the present.”
The chance to explore that link came in 1953, when Heffner decided
to create a radio documentary marking the eighth anniversary
of the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. “I went to every station
in New York and they all said, ‘Who are you? You’re a professor.
You’ve got this book but that doesn’t make you a broadcaster.’”
Finally, WMCA consented. The highlight was an interview with
FDR’s widow, Eleanor, in her stone cottage at Val-Kill. Disaster
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