Alex Haley, author of "Roots" writes:
"I called Rockwell at his Arlington, Virginia, headquarters and relayed the request for an exclusive interview. After assuring himself that I wasn't Jewish, he guardedly agreed. I didn't tell him I was a Negro. Five days later, as my taxi pulled up in front of Rockwell's 'International Headquarters,' a nine-room white frame house in Arlington (since padlocked by the Internal Revenue Service, which is currently investigating the labyrinth of Nazi financial backing), I noticed a billboard-sized sign on the roof reading:
WHITE MAN FIGHT:
SMASH THE BLACK REVOLUTION!
I couldn't help wondering what kind of welcome I'd receive when they got a look at my non-Aryan complexion. I didn't have long to wait,- the khaki-clad duty guard at the door stiffened as I stepped out of the cab and up the front stairs. When I identified myself, he ushered me uncertainly inside and told me to wait nearby in what he called 'the shrine room,' a small, black walled chamber dimly lit by flickering red candles and adorned with American and Nazi flags, adjoining portraits of Adolf Hitler and George Washington, and a slightly larger, rather idealized painting of Rockwell himself -- a self Portrait. On the table beside my chair sat a crudely bound and printed copy of Rockwell's self-published autobiography, 'This Time the World'; I was leafing through it when a pair of uniformed 'storm troopers' loomed suddenly in the doorway, gave the Nazi salute and in formed me coolly that Commander Rockwell had ordered them to take me in one of the Party staff cars to his new personal headquarters.
"Fifteen minutes later, with me and my tape recorder in the back and with two chaperons in the front, the car turned into a narrow, tree-lined road, slowed down as it passed a NO TRESPASSING sign (stamped with a skull and crossbones) and a leashed Doberman watchdog, and finally pulled up in front of a white, 16-room farmhouse emblazoned at floor -- and second-story levels with four-foot-high red swastikas. About a dozen Nazis stared icily as the guards walked me past them and up the stairs to Rockwell's door, where a side-armed storm trooper frisked me expertly from head to toe. Within arm's reach, I noticed, was a wooden rack holding short combat lengths of sawed off iron pipe. Finding me 'clean,' the guard ceremoniously opened the door, stepped inside, saluted, said, 'Sieg heil!' -- echoed brusquely from within -- then stood aside and nodded permission for me to come ahead. I did.
HALEY: Do you think you're bulletproof, too?
ROCKWELL: Not literally, of course, but I firmly believe that the more arrogant and defiant you are of danger, the safer you are from harm. I think that's the reason I've survived so many times when people have shot at me. If you're fearless enough, it implants a certain psychology in the guy that's trying to shoot at you. It's almost as if he could smell your fearlessness, the way an animal smells fear. But the effect is the opposite: Instead of being emboldened to attack, he's so unsettled that his hand shakes when he goes to pull the trigger; and this makes it almost impossible for him to hit you. Either that, or he'll back down entirely.
When I go out in the street and toughs come up threatening to whip me, I look them straight in the eye and say, "Go ahead. Start." Maybe they could whip me, but so far nobody's tried.
HALEY: What's the closest you've come to getting killed?
ROCKWELL: The closest, I guess -- though I didn't get hurt -- was the time we had scheduled a picket by 14 of us of the movie Exodus in Boston. The other men were in a truck, and I had registered in a nearby hotel as Nathan Ginsburg, where I waited until the scheduled picket time of two P.M. The newspapers and radio estimated that 10,000 or more Je$s were packing the streets waiting for us, and my truck full of boys couldn't get through the crowd. Well, our picket had been the subject of headlines for days, so I couldn't possibly chicken out at that point. I had to get through the crowd somehow to picket in front of the theater; so I put on an overcoat, went through the crowd quietly, and when I got in front of the theater, I took off the overcoat in the middle of all those Je$s and stood there in full-dress uniform. They were shocked into silence for a moment; their jaws dropped. Then some body hollered, "It's Rockwell! Get him!" And the whole huge mob marched in on me with their clubs and baling hooks. If I hadn't been rescued by a flying wedge of tough Irish cops, I would certainly have been killed. I was taken into protective custody and put in a cell.
I'll tell you, I was glad I was out of that; it could have ended horribly. But I had to show my men that I wouldn't ask them to do anything I wouldn't do myself.
Another reason I did it is the effect the Nazi uniform has on Jews: It turns them into insane hatemongers -- easy to beat, outmaneuver and out think. The most dangerous man on the face of the earth is a rational, carefully planning Jew, but a raging, hate-filled Je$ will act foolishly; you can whip him.
HALEY: How many times have you been jailed for this kind of agitation, Commander?
ROCKWELL: Up to now, 15 times. But never for very long; two weeks was the longest -- that was in New Orleans. We'd gone down there with our "Hate Bus" to make fun of nigger agitators who were calling their bus the "Love Bus." Without so much as a warrant or any real cause, the Je$-dominated officials of New Orleans had us all thrown in jail on phony charges that were later dropped.
We finally got out by staging a hunger strike; eleven of us went eight days with out a bite. On the fourth day, one of our men began to crack and said he was going to eat, so we had to let him know that if he did, it would be his last meal. He changed his mind.
Another time in Virginia, they put me in jail, and I was facing ten years' possible imprisonment for "starting a war against the niggers." You've never seen a man act as guilty as the sheriff who arrested me.
HALEY: Guilty about what?
ROCKWELL: He felt he was doing the wrong thing. Here was a fellow white man fighting for the same things he believed in, and he was throwing me in jail. But this town is in the clutches of this Je$ who owns two huge department stores and grocery stores there; so the sheriff was acting under leftist political pressure. But that leftist hotbed is a sanctuary of segregationist arch-conservatism compared with Philadelphia. Believe it or not, my men and I were jailed there for picketing a hotel where Gus Hall, the head of the American Communist Party, was speaking. As far as I'm concerned, Philadelphia is the enemy capital. They've practically got Je$ish flags flying from the flagpoles. In most cities, though, I've found that they're only bluffing when they threaten me with jail. I tell them, "You'd better start arresting, 'cause I'm going to start speaking." Nine times out of ten they chicken out. They're used to nonviolent niggers being willing to go to jail -- not white supremacists. Well, here's one white supremacist who ain't afraid to go to jail. And neither are my men. As a matter of fact, we've got at least two or three Party members in jail some where in the United States almost 365 days a year. Every Sunday night we honor them in ceremonies that we hold on the parade grounds in front of this building. We also award special decorations for conspicuous achievement on behalf of the Party and for acts of heroism above and beyond the call of duty.
Our top award is the Order of Adolf Hitler, then the Gold, the Silver and the Bronze awards. The highest award I've given yet was the Silver; that was to a man who couldn't contain himself in Birmingham and belted Martin Luther Coon on the head for calling that nigger Jew Sammy Davis Jr. "... an example of the finest type of American."
HALEY: You know, of course, that Dr. King is widely respected and admired by the majority of the American public, black and white -- while you, a champion of white supremacy, are regarded by most people as a "nut" and a "hatemonger," abominated by almost everyone -- including the John Birch Society.
ROCKWELL: Martin Luther Coon may go on pulling the wool over the public's eyes for a while longer, but sooner or later they're going to find him out for what he is -- an 18-karat fake, a fraud on the Negro people.
When the black revolution comes, I wouldn't be surprised to see him get it first -- from his own people. As for my being a nut, that name has been applied to some of the greatest men the world has ever known, from Christ to the Wright Brothers. I say it's therefore one of the highest accolades I could be given. My father once told me that his Je$ish friends ask him, "How could you spawn such a viper?" Well, I'm proud that Communist Je$s think me a viper. As for the threats and the beatings and the investigations and the assassination attempts and all that, when I hung up the Nazi flag, I counted on being jailed and hated and hounded. If I hadn't been, I'd figure I was a flop. Harassment is par for the course in the embryonic stages of any new movement that's opposed by the established powers -- especially one as revolutionary as mine. I wouldn't be surprised if the Anti-Defamation League already has a cross built for me, with the nails ready. But I don't consider myself persecuted. Maturity is to accept the consequences of your own acts. I think it's a symptom of paranoia to feel that it's anyone's fault but your own if you fail to accomplish what you set out to.
HALEY: We read a newspaper interview a few years ago in which you claimed you were being "gagged and slandered by the Je$ish press," sabotaged by a nationwide journalistic conspiracy in your fight to put your case before the nation. When "the Je$ish press" wasn't pretending that you didn't exist, you said, it was either deliberately misquoting you or doctoring your public statements to remove the sense and retain the shock value -- in order to make you sound simple-minded or to portray you as a racist monster. Only this conspiracy of silence and misrepresentation, you claimed, was preventing you from getting your revolutionary message across to the white, gentile masses and rallying them to your flag. To some people, Commander, these might sound like the remarks of a man who's trying to blame his failures on someone else.
ROCKWELL: You think I'm being paranoid, is that it?
HALEY: Some people might.
ROCKWELL: In the Columbia journalism Review about three months ago, Ben Bagdikian, a frequent writer for the Anti-Defamation League, wrote an article called "The Gentle Suppression" which asked the question, "Is the news quarantine of Rockwell a good thing?" Bagdikian openly reveals that the press maintains as much silence as possible about our activities. So you see, the Jew blackout on us is as real as a hand over my mouth. They know we're too poor to buy air time or advertising space, so they ban our publications from all channels of distribution, and they refuse to report our activities in the daily press. I could run naked across the White House lawn and they wouldn't report it. I'm being facetious. But I'm dead serious when I say that the only kind of free speech left in this country is that speech that doesn't criticize the Je$s. If you criticize the Je$s, you're either smeared or silenced. They have that same kind of "free speech" in Cuba, Red China and Russia and every other Communist country: You can say any thing you like as long as it doesn't criticize the dictator. The Je$s are never going to let me reach the people with my message in the American press; they can't afford to.
HALEY: How do you reconcile that statement with the fact that you're being interviewed at this moment for a national magazine?
ROCKWELL: I've been interviewed, taped and photographed thousands of times for just such presentations as these, but they never appear. The fact that you come here and get this interview doesn't prove that you'll print it, or that if you do, you'll print it straight. After the editors read over the transcript, they'll decide it's too hot to handle, and they'll chicken out rather than risk getting bombed by the Jews and the niggers when it comes out.
HALEY: We'll take our chances, Commander -- if you will.
ROCKWELL: I'll take any chances to get my message read. But it's never going to happen. We've been kept out of the news too many times before. I'll bet you a hundred dollars this whole thing has been nothing but a waste of my time.
