[00:16] Meg: Welcome to Desperately Seeking the '80s. I am Meg.

[00:19] Jessica: And I am Jessica. And Meg and I have been friends since 1982. We got through middle school and high school together here in New York City where we still live.

[00:28] Meg: And where we podcast about New York City in the '80s. I do ripped from the headlines.

[00:33] Jessica: And I do pop culture.

[00:36] Meg: Jessica. Kerry Cheeseboro wrote to us. Oh, hi. In response to the story about the Central Park Five. And I'd posted about Yusef Salaam, and he wrote I just hung out with him a couple of days ago.

[00:52] Jessica: No.

[00:52] Meg: He's now running for City Council, 9th District. Isn't that amazing?

[00:57] Jessica: Amazing. I love that.

[00:58] Meg: And I was like, what? That's so incredible. And so then I looked it up. It turns out he's got this incredible book, Better, Not Bitter: The Power of Hope and Living On Purpose in the pursuit of racial justice. We should get our hands on that.

[01:11] Jessica: Yes. Wow, that's a really good book cover. Who's publishing that?

[01:16] Meg: I don't know. It was a New York Times bestseller. Nice. Very exciting. Okay, do you want to get started? I'm very excited about my story today.

[01:23] Jessica: Yeah, I want to know.

[01:35] Meg: So, Jessica, when we were growing up, did your parents watch the evening news? Was that a regular thing?

[01:43] Jessica: Sure.

[01:44] Meg: Do you remember what station you watched? Who was your anchorman?

[01:48] Jessica: Well, I'll tell you why I remember.

[01:52] Meg: Okay.

[01:53] Jessica: Chuck Scarborough and Sue Simmons.

[01:56] Meg: Oh, that was local news.

[01:57] Jessica: Right?

[01:58] Meg: Oh, I was talking about national news.

[02:00] Jessica: Oh, national news. I have no memory of that at all. I mean, I'm sure they did.

[02:06] Meg: Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, Dan Rather.

[02:10] Jessica: Yeah, right.

[02:11] Meg: And do you remember they always had to have, like, a notable sign off.

[02:16] Jessica: Yeah, yeah. Like Edward R. Murrows was Good night and good luck.

[02:19] Meg: Right. And Walter Cronkite.

[02:21] Jessica: I don't remember. I'm sorry.

[02:23] Meg: And that's the way it is.

[02:24] Jessica: Oh, that's the way it yes, yes.

[02:27] Meg: And Charles Osgood, I'll see you on the radio.

[02:29] Jessica: Very cute.

[02:30] Meg: Oh, well, that wasn't much of an engagement question because you didn't watch the evening news.

[02:38] Jessica: We did. But you know what? It was that I was so well, local news for some reason, captured me. So all the stuff that you talked about.

[02:50] Meg: Ok so you were a local news person

[02:52] Jessica: Like of course my parents did that. Maybe it was the time that local news was on. When I was a little girl. This is during my Fleming days, I had to interview a local person of note, and I interviewed Sue Simmons. Yes.

[03:12] Meg: Oh wow. That's so exciting. Do you have a picture of the two of you together?

[03:16] Jessica: I did it all over the phone, old school, like, with a pad.

[03:20] Meg: Was she a friend of the family or something?

[03:23] Jessica: No. How did you get? I have no memory. I have no memory of how that happened.

[03:28] Meg: No, I can't wait to post about her. Yeah, the second you said that, I was like oh, yeah, she's the bomb.

[03:32] Jessica: Wasn't she the one? Did she say something really? Like she cursed on air.

[03:38] Meg: I don't know. We have to look it up.

[03:39] Jessica: Yeah. You're going to like it anyway. Okay.

[03:42] Meg: All right. You ready?

[03:43] Jessica: Yes.

[03:44] Meg: My sources for today are a whole bunch of articles written in The New York Times over the course of about a decade. On Saturday evening, October 4, 1986, Dan Rather, anchor of the CBS Evening News, left the home of his friend and colleague, David Buxbaum at 1095 Park Avenue at 89th.

[04:08] Jessica: I know what this is. I'm so excited. This is such a good one.

[04:13] Meg: I thought you would enjoy this because.

[04:15] Jessica: It has so much pop culture crossover. It's so good.

[04:19] Meg: Okay, so hold on, because it's going to go all over the place.

[04:20] Jessica: Ok now that I've had my little moment of glee. I will contain myself.

[04:27] Meg: Okay, so, Dan Rather, he's walking home on Park Avenue. His wife, Jean, was at their country house that weekend, and he had gone over to David's place for dinner. After dinner, at 10:43 P.M., he headed home, walking south on Park. He was wearing a striped shirt, blue jeans and glasses. Suddenly, two men dressed in suits approached him. One of the men demanded, quote, "Kenneth, what is the frequency?" Dan Rather responded, you have the wrong guy. Then the man, who was 6' tall, with dark hair and a mustache, punched Dan Rather in the jaw under his left ear, knocking him to the sidewalk. Dan Rather managed to get up and run into the lobby at 1075 Park Avenue at 88th Street. The men followed him into the lobby, repeating the question. "Kenneth, what is the frequency?" And punched Dan Rather again, knocking him to the floor and kicked him repeatedly in the back. The doorman used the intercom to call the super, who chased off the man, chased off the men. Excuse me. Dan Rather was taken to Lenox Hill and was treated and released. He praised the super, the police, and the doctors and nurses who, quote, "acted in the best tradition of helping thy neighbor"

[05:42] Jessica: But not the doorman, who was like, I'm not getting involved with this nonsense.

[05:47] Meg: I kind of thought about that. He did not thank the doorman, on the other hand

[05:51] Jessica: No, the doorman was like, I'm going to ask for someone else to come up here.

[05:56] Meg: Well, when you think about it, his job is it to I don't know. I was like, he can't leave his post. No. Anyway all right.

[06:02] Jessica: It wasn't all happening in the lobby. Yeah, yeah. Come on sorry. He didn't thank the doorman, nor should he have.

[06:10] Meg: Dan Rather's attackers were never caught, and it was assumed that it was a case of mistaken identity, mostly because Dan Rather's name is not Kenneth. That was not the first or the last weird experience for Dan Rather that year. Earlier in 1986, two months before the attack, Dan's ratings slipped. CBS Evening News had finished first in the ratings for 200 straight weeks, ahead of Peter Jennings at ABC and Tom Brokaw at NBC. But that summer, CBS fell behind NBC. On September 1, 1986, Dan Rather, fresh from an August vacation, signed off, quote "and that's the CBS Evening News for this summer ending Labor Day, Dan Rather reporting from New York. Courage. Good night." Everyone thought he'd lost his mind, but he liked the sound of it. Courage. He said courage again on Tuesday. And on Wednesday, following Bill Moyer's report on the Texas Mexico border, he tried Coraje.

[07:24] Jessica: Stop it. Oh, Dan got a little colorful. Dan did get a little like the vacation was too good for Dan.

[07:31] Meg: CBS executives were freaking out. Loyal viewers were mostly concerned for his mental health. But Dan stuck to his guns Thursday and Friday. But Monday's newscast was courage free. He would say it only one more time 19 years later, at the end of his final broadcast, and to each of you, courage.

[08:00] Jessica: He was like, I got that in you, suckers.

[08:04] Meg: But back to 1986, a month after The Week of Courage, Dan Rather

[08:08] Jessica: Did you coin that? Yes. That was awesome. Well done.

[08:16] Meg: Dan Rather was attacked on Park Avenue. And less than a year after that

[08:20] Jessica: And from the floor, did he say, less Courage?

[08:27] Meg: Okay, so less than a year after that, after courage and attack, on September 11, 1987, Pope John Paul II was visiting the United States, and Dan Rather went down to Miami to cover the event. That day was also the semifinals of the US Open for women's singles in tennis. The match between Steffi Graff and Lori McNeil was running long, and CBS was airing it live, which was a huge deal because there's so few stations. So if anybody wants to know what's going on in that tennis match, they have to be watching CBS. At 6:15 CBS Sports called the Miami studio to say they would need to push the Evening News a few minutes. The news was supposed to start at 6:30. Dan Rather called Howard Stringer, the President of CBS News, and said that if his broadcast did not go on at 6:30 as scheduled, he would not be in his anchor chair. CBS News and CBS Sports figured out a compromise. The Evening News would begin at 6:32. Dan Rather wasn't having it. And when CBS Sports didn't yield the network air at 6:30, Dan disconnected his microphone and left the studio. At 6:32 CBS Sports went off the air, but Dan wasn't in his chair, and the network went black. In a desperate move, the CBS Miami station put on a rerun of The New Newlywed Game.

[10:00] Jessica: That is desperate.

[10:01] Meg: I mean, God, of all things. Who had that on hand?

[10:06] Jessica: Pathetic.

[10:07] Meg: A rerun.

[10:09] Jessica: Oh, my God.

[10:11] Meg: Finally, Dan Rather agreed to return to the set, and the Evening News went on the air at 6:39. Dan's incredibly public snit did little for his reputation. Months later, when interviewing George H. W. Bush about the Iran-Contra affair, Bush blew him off by saying, quote "Dan, how would you like it if I judged your entire career by those seven minutes when you walked off the set?"

[10:41] Jessica: Is that is a harsh flash. That is a burn.

[10:45] Meg: So this odd period in Dan Rather's life and career didn't actually appear to faze him too much. When asked about the attack on Park Avenue, he said, quote "I got mugged. Who understands these things? I didn't make a lot of it at the time and I don't now. I wish I knew who did it and why, but I have no idea." On September 5, 1994, REM released the song

[11:07] Jessica: What's the frequency, Kenneth?

[11:10] Meg: And do you know what the song's about? Have you ever listened to the lyrics besides the title? I didn't either. I just found out.

[11:18] Jessica: Well, what's the frequency? Isn't it about the mental health of the people who attacked him? Or like no. Oh, that's not it.

[11:28] Meg: No, they just used that phrase because they kind of thought it was crazy.

[11:32] Jessica: Isn't Benzedrine in the chorus someplace?

[11:36] Meg: The song is about a boomer trying to understand Gen X.

[11:41] Jessica: Get out of town.

[11:42] Meg: Swear to God. It's like, well, old guy who's like cranky and doesn't understand these young kids. About the song, Michael Stipe said, quote 'I wrote that protagonist as a guy who's desperately trying to understand what motivates the younger generation, who has gone to great lengths to try and figure them out. And at the end of the song, it's completely fucking bogus. He got nowhere." Interesting. You talked about Mike Mills last week.

[12:08] Jessica: Yes, I did. Coincidence?

[12:11] Meg: I don't know.

[12:11] Jessica: I think not.

[12:12] Meg: Listen, Jessica, the story continues. Dan Rather in an unusually light moment, even performed the song with REM on David Letterman's The Late Show. I remember. The whole incident was seen as a weird little pop culture blip with many believing Dan Rather had exaggerated the details of his attack. But it turns out the real story was even weirder and more sinister than anyone knew. Are you ready?

[12:41] Jessica: I was born ready.

[12:44] Meg: At 05:00 p.m., on August 31, 1994, eight years after the attack on Dan Rather, and five days before REM released the single of What's the Frequency, Kenneth? William Tager knocked on the door of the employee entrance to The Today Show at Rockefeller Plaza. Today Show stage hand Campbell, Theron Montgomery spotted William's AK-47 and while trying to alert police, was shot dead. When Tager was arrested, he gave a, quote, "bizarre, seemingly irrational tale of network sophistry and burning revenge in 5 hours of questioning, during which investigators say he rambled, spoke cordially, lashed out at the networks, fell silent and stared into space." That's from the New York Times. The detective in charge said in a news conference, quote, "he says that the networks were watching him for 20 years. He claims that they've been bugging him for 20 years. He claims that they tap his phone, they send rays on top of him, vibrations come out of the television. These are the terms he uses." End quote. He also claimed he had attacked Dan Rather back in 1986, but because the five year statute of limitations had run out on that crime, no one bothered to look into it. William Tager was sentenced to 15 to 25 years and sent to Sing Sing.

[14:13] Jessica: Along with an aluminum foil hat. Sorry. Rays.

[14:18] Meg: Renowned forensic psychiatrist Park Deitz was too curious to let it go and in 1996, he interviewed Tager and Dan Rather and given the details both provided and Dan Rather IDing him from a photo, Park Dietz determined that William Tager was indeed the what's the frequency Kenneth assailant. He was attempting to discover the frequency that CBS and later NBC, when he went to The Today Show were using to beam signals into his brain. New York District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau said, William Tager's identity as the man who attacked Mr. Rather was established in the course of an investigation by my office. Dan Rather now hosts an online newscast. The News with Dan Rather. He writes a newsletter on Substack called Steady and is popular on Twitter and William Tager walks amongst us. He was paroled in 2010.

[15:18] Jessica: Oh, no. Does Dan know?

[15:22] Meg: I absolutely assume so.

[15:26] Jessica: Wow. I had no idea that they had ever identified the attacker. That is nuts.

[15:35] Meg: Yeah.

[15:36] Jessica: I love it. I love that story. I don't know what my favorite part of the story is. It might be that Dan Rather was trying to be cool and that he just couldn't. He was trying to make fetch happen. He couldn't make fetch happen.

[15:52] Meg: So true.

[15:52] Jessica: He was like courage. It's not working, Gretchen. Let it go.

[15:59] Meg: Well I grew up watching Dan Rather every night, and he is a bit of a stiffy. But I love him.

[16:06] Jessica: He's a stodgy, gruff kind of guy. Yes.

[16:10] Meg: And he's from Texas, so he's got a little bit of that Texas drawl that you know, reminded me of my childhood in Austin.

[16:20] Jessica: Now we have to go back and read the lyrics.

[16:23] Meg: Yeah. Should we?

[16:25] Jessica: Yeah.

[16:26] Meg: Okay, let's pause for a second.

[16:26] Jessica: Okay.

[16:27] Meg: Pause.

[16:28] Jessica: Now that I've read the lyrics, I have to say they're not that illuminating. I find these to be pretty oblique. "What's the frequency, Kenneth?" is your Benzedrine, uh huh. I was brain dead, locked out, numb. Not up to speed. I thought I'd pegged you an idiot's dream. Tunnel vision from the outsider's screen. I never understood the frequency, uh-huh. You wore our expectations like an armored suit, uh-huh.

[16:59] Meg: You would never think that this is actually an incredibly catchy song.

[17:03] Jessica: Yes.

[17:04] Meg: Not from the lyrics.

[17:05] Jessica: No, but it's also the lyrics. Like, A smile like the cartoon, tooth for a tooth. You said that irony was the shackles of youth. You wore a shirt of violent green, uh-huh. I never understood the frequency, uh-huh. Butterfly decal, rearview mirror, dogging the scene. And then there's a reference to Richard Linklater and Slacker in there.

[17:29] Meg: That makes sense.

[17:30] Jessica: But it's so free form. Sure. It's not like you're going to read this or listen to it. Fun. Still difficult to understand, in my opinion, but I love that. Thank you, Meg. Dan Rather. Dan Rather is clearly a guy who deserves a lot more investigation.

[17:53] Meg: Sure.

[17:54] Jessica: He seems to have been dancing on the edge of something, but I'm not entirely sure what just to be able to dismiss What's the frequency, Kenneth, with eh it was a mugging. Like, no, no, not at all Dan. I have a lot of different threads going on today. But it all started when I thought to myself, like, what is a New York institution that we never discuss at all? And I was really racking my brains, and then I found it. Okay, so we're going to have a little discussion about this thing that will be revealed. Engagement question.

[18:48] Meg: Yes.

[18:49] Jessica: We've talked about jobs we had in our youths. Our youths. Did you volunteer?

[18:55] Meg: Yes. Did I? Oh, you know what? Not in New York, though. I volunteered at Aid Atlanta.

[19:01] Jessica: I did some volunteer stuff that in hindsight, I have no idea how I got into it at all. I tutored younger kids in reading at one point. And I also volunteered. I was an intern at the Simon Weisenthal Center. OOH. So that's going to be a little hint about what we're going to talk about today.

[19:25] Meg: Okay.

[19:26] Jessica: So Simon Weisenthal, very, very famous survivor of not one, not two, not three, but four concentration camps.

[19:35] Meg: Good Lord.

[19:36] Jessica: Who became the most well known Nazi hunter post war, starting almost immediately after the war, still emaciated from the camps. He started writing down the names of every guard, every officer, every everything, and went through various channels to catch a lot of them and you know, was the source of also these wild international stories about tracking Nazis down in South America and all of that. And I don't know if you're familiar with the show on Prime, Amazon Prime Hunters.

[20:14] Meg: No. Oh, yes.

[20:15] Jessica: Some of those characters are loosely based on actual Nazi hunters who were finding people in the United States in the '70s. You know, what I was thinking is, like, when we were growing up, Nazis were a thing still.

[20:29] Meg: They were still alive. They were walking amongst us.

[20:30] Jessica: They were still alive and they were still around. They weren't like little ancient relic.

[20:38] Meg: No, they were hiding in plain sight.

[20:41] Jessica: Yeah. These were people who were like, in their 50s and 60s. I mean, there are some much older people.

[20:45] Meg: But you mean people who were actually involved in the Holocaust, not just people who like to call themselves Nazis?

[20:51] Jessica: No, I mean people who are involved who are in the German army and/or associated with the camps.

[20:59] Meg: And managed to change their identity and move to the United States and

[21:04] Jessica: Or other countries.

[21:06] Meg: Right and start a new life.

[21:07] Jessica: And that was like a thing. I mean, I don't know if you remember, but it was really part of the fabric of pop culture at the time that like I don't know if you remember this, but when Seinfeld called The Soup Nazi, The Soup Nazi, it was a thing because calling someone a Nazi had a lot of impact. And that was in the early '90s right? And I remember there were all of these in search of's right? Stuff like that.

[21:31] Meg: I was thinking where they compare pictures of a young man and an old man. Is it the same person? How can we know?

[21:40] Jessica: Exactly. It was also the heyday of all of those conspiracy theorists where Hitler was still alive. And speaking of, Bigfoot, Hitler. Wasn't there recently a movie about the man who killed Hitler and Sasquatch with Sam? Yeah, I'm going to look this up during our break, but it's a movie that actually recently came out. I think it was Sam Elliott. So, yeah. Nazi hunters a thing. And so, yeah, I was volunteering at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and I was maybe 15 years old, so I was like, oh, here I am, collating papers again. Pinks in the pink pile, yellows in the yellow pile. But it was actually this seriously intense organization that was still hunting Nazis and disseminating all kinds of information about Anti-Semitism and blah, blah, blah. There I was thinking about that, and then a name popped into my head, and that's how I got to this thing that we never talk about, even though it's a huge deal in New York and we have friends who either work there or are associated with it. What? The United Nations.

[23:01] Meg: Oh, yes.

[23:02] Jessica: We never talk about the UN.

[23:05] Meg: I pass the UN I'm going to say like three times a week because I often take the bus uptown from 23rd street and on First Avenue it passes by the United Nations, which is kind of cool.

[23:18] Jessica: So, okay. The UN was founded in 1945 with the mission of getting nations together to work towards never having World War again. So that's pretty powerful and it's very connected to the Second World War, wouldn't you say?

[23:34] Meg: Yes.

[23:35] Jessica: Well, in 1981, the Secretary General, the head of the United Nations, who had been holding that office since 1971, he had had two full terms. He didn't get his 3rd one. 1981. Goodbye.

[23:52] Meg: Why?

[23:53] Jessica: Well, turns out that he wound up being a bit of a controversial figure. What'd he do? Before I tell you what he did.

[24:00] Meg: What did he do?

[24:01] Jessica: He had a little bit of a murky background. So he was born in and brought up in Austria. He wanted to study medicine, but then it turns out he actually got faint at the sight of blood and wound up studying law and decided to go into the Foreign Service. In order to do that, he volunteered to be in the Army. This was in 1936. And then during his time in the Army Reserve, Germany annexed Austria.

[24:33] Meg: Right.

[24:34] Jessica: He wound up joining the National Socialist German Students; League, which was a division of the Nazi Party. What he did during the war was basically he was a desk jockey, but his actual movements during the war were downplayed. But it came out after Kurt Waldheim was no longer the head of the UN in 1981, that he was actually a full blown Nazi who was head of the UN.

[25:07] Meg: How did they do that? Well, had he changed his name?

[25:12] Jessica: No, he hadn't.

[25:13] Meg: They just didn't check his references.

[25:16] Jessica: Well, he wasn't a war criminal, and he had been an interpreter. He had not been accused of any wrongdoing.

[25:24] Meg: And he became an American citizen.

[25:26] Jessica: No, he's an Austrian. Okay. Secretary General of the United Nations is always someone from because it's about a League of nations. Right.

[25:34] Meg: But it seems odd that they would keep one person from one country the whole time.

[25:39] Jessica: No, not the whole time. Just for two terms.

[25:41] Meg: Ten years.

[25:41] Jessica: Right. From 1971 to 1981. Yeah. Right.

[25:45] Meg: A long time.

[25:45] Jessica: It's a long time after the war. He has this diplomatic career. He tried to become the President in Austria and didn't make it. So I guess as his second runner up prize, he was like, maybe I'll try to be the head of the UN. And he was supported pretty roundly, except for China. China never liked him. They were like, nah, not interesting. Not interested, rather. And according to a Finnish diplomat at the time who voted against him, that Waldheim's Nazi connections were already known to them. So he'd created some kind of a murky smokescreeny thing so that, yes, he was in the war, but it was that or be killed, and that he stayed off the front lines and he didn't have any real involvement and he knew nothing.

[26:33] Meg: Okay.

[26:33] Jessica: Right. He had no exposure to anything, and he knew nothing. After being the head of the UN. He runs to be President in Austria and he wins. Wow. Then he tries again a second time, and he does not win in 1986.

[26:50] Meg: So the Austrians didn't care about the whole Nazi thing?

[26:53] Jessica: Are you seriously asking me that question right now? But here's what was part of his doom in his campaign is that in 1985, an international incident known as the Waldheim Affair began. A journalist named Alfred Worm revealed that in Waldheim's biography, there were all of these missing pieces about his time during the war. In his investigative journalism, he found out that, in fact, Waldheim knew a hell of a lot and that his desk was right next to a place where prisoners in a concentration camp were shot.

[27:39] Meg: Oh, my God.

[27:40] Jessica: Pretty consistently. Like 200ft from where he was.

[27:44] Meg: Oh, my God.

[27:45] Jessica: And that he had lied about his service in the Mounted Corps of the SA and that he had concealed that he had reached a really high rank of the highest Lieutenant that you could possibly be. In 1986, the World Jewish Congress concluded from their investigations that he was, in fact, implicated in many Nazi mass murders.

[28:09] Meg: Oh, my God.

[28:10] Jessica: So he said, that's not true. This now became a you did, no I didn't. And then finally he said, look, this is a classic. I love this. What could I do? It was do what I did or be executed. And it's like, wow, you really belong in what is it? The Wall of the Righteous or whatever is in the Holocaust Museum. I forgot what it's called, but he is a shit. Basically one of the reasons that this was such a big deal at that time, and still to some degree, Austria has been very reticent about owning its part in the Holocaust and sort of hiding behind well we were annexed. It's like and Hitler was Austrian anyway, so Waldheim was a very controversial figure and was never imprisoned. He was never put on trial. None of this ever happened. He just sort of went into his private life, and that was it. But to me now, going back to my Simon Wiesenthal time, so this was all happening when I was working at the Simon Wiesenthal Center. My take on it and what I thought was what stays with me to this day and why I think that show, just Hunters, whatever it's called, is so interesting, is that the notion that there are Nazis in the United States seems crazy, but it's not at all. And this notion of the United States as an impregnable society. You know that we are this virtuous, world police nation is nonsense, and that there have been in fact, forget Hunters, there have been movies and other pop culture about this for a really long time. May I draw your attention to a very famous movie called The House on 92nd street?

[29:58] Meg: I grew up on 92nd street.

[30:00] Jessica: The House on 92nd street was a movie that came out in 1945. And it was about a bunch of Nazis who were part of, at the time, acknowledged floods of Nazis who came into the United States between 1939 and 1941. That it's this viper's nest and they try to recruit this young man who becomes a double agent for the FBI, and he tries to expose the ring before they kill him or something like that. It takes place in New York? On 92nd street. Crazy. Filmed on 92nd street? Part of it. That's so nuts. So worth looking at, where both you grew up and where we went to school. Anyway, so Kurt Waldheim was someone who really cast a pall over the, you know, the UN and the office of the Secretary General and a bizarre example of living in plain sight and people still not really doing anything.

[30:59] Meg: Not paying attention or something. Or if you can just sort of spin it differently then and change your whole identity, that's crazy.

[31:08] Jessica: Also during his tenure, it was also when the Israeli athletes were killed at the Olympics, when Waldheim was the Secretary General soon after that happened, Idi Amin sent him a telegram. It's like he sent him a note saying, good thing that those Jews were killed and supporting Palestine, and anything anti Israel is basically you go, Kurt Waldheim. Waldheim rejected having any connection to this or anything to do with it. And he was know, we don't acknowledge or read out or receive any direct communications from leaders of any countries, like that's not shared. And then soon after that was the raid on Entebbe, where Idi Amin held hostage all of these Israelis and the Israeli forces had to come in and basically kill everybody to get them out. This is not the most politically astute reporting I've ever done, but what I think I'm sort of obsessed with and focused on is that this is something that has gotten so far away from our consciousness and our culture that what we call Nazis in the United States now, right? And like all of the wannabe Nazis. The wannabe Nazis. And as we're looking at the January 6 activities and, you know, Trump now facing his criminal indictment and all of this stuff going on, that the notion of what was done then has become diminished. I don't know, diluted, I guess, and warped and the enormity of what went on and how sinister it was to have Kurt Waldheim as the head of a peace organization that's just not even part of the public consciousness at all kind of amazes me. You know, when we started doing this podcast, we talked about what did we see then and what do we see now? And I remember at the time, because of where I was working, that it felt like, well, it's just another part of the news cycle because it wasn't weird for people to be hunting Nazis, right? And that now it's become a show on Prime and that the idea of white supremacy has changed and morphed and taken on a different identity here in the United States, and it's no less insidious and it's overtaken the really scary history that came before it. So that's how I see it from then and now, that it's like, how could this thing that was so huge in my consciousness is now not even a notion? Like, no one's aware?

[34:00] Meg: That's wild.

[34:01] Jessica: Yeah.

[34:01] Meg: And I'm caught on the whole idea of, like, if you wanted to prove who somebody was then you could kind of just spin it differently. And there wasn't DNA. I know that he didn't try to pretend to be someone different, and it was just about how he talked about it, that he just lied about it. But now there's so much more evidence that we can prove that, people are who they are.

[34:23] Jessica: Right. Back then, it was like, well, I wrote my biography, my autobiography. It's like, so what?

[34:28] Meg: Right? That's proof?

[34:29] Jessica: You know, that's proof? That's nothing, we're all sleuths now. We are all sleuths and conspiracy theorists to boot. But yeah. Anyway, that's my Kurt Waldheim. What the hell, people? So another little tidbit. Ues. About why I think this is relevant and a New York story other than the UN is that it's a very relevant to New York story as 18% of the New York City population is Jewish compared to guess what the number is for world population? 1? .2%.

[35:15] Meg: That's crazy. I wouldn't have thought that. I wonder what it is for the United States.

[35:22] Jessica: Less than 18%, I can tell you that much. Probably. Call Montana, ask them. The sensitivity and the awareness and the activism and all of that in New York City is particularly skewed to that sort of thing. And so having been the head of the United Nations, you know, located in New York City makes it all the more scandalous.

[35:54] Meg: Completely. What's our tie in today? Dan Rather, Evening News?

[35:58] Jessica: Well, they covered the Waldheim affair on the Evening News.

[36:02] Meg: Our tie ins are getting

[36:05] Jessica: They're getting tenuous right? Wait. Let me think for a second. So we have cryptic statement.

[36:11] Meg: I think it's something.

[36:12] Jessica: So it's hidden statements. So "What's the frequency Kenneth" is a hidden meaning, hidden statement and Kurt Waldheim's entire past is a hidden statement.

[36:24] Meg: Now we know the truth. The truth has been revealed.

[36:27] Jessica: And then it was revealed.