{"id":581146,"date":"2026-07-12T00:52:14","date_gmt":"2026-07-12T00:52:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/581146\/"},"modified":"2026-07-12T00:52:14","modified_gmt":"2026-07-12T00:52:14","slug":"pbs-the-open-mind-host-alexander-heffner-on-shows-70th-anniversary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/581146\/","title":{"rendered":"PBS ‘The Open Mind’ Host Alexander Heffner on Show’s 70th Anniversary"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tWhen The Open Mind<\/a> premiered on PBS<\/a> in 1956, host Richard D. Heffner wanted to do something that had never been done on television before: each Sunday for an hour, have a weekly dialogue about ideas, not merely events, scrutinizing not just what we are doing as a country but why we are doing it. Sure, TV hadn\u2019t been around that long \u2014 a decade earlier, only one percent of American homes even had one \u2014 but Heffner\u2019s creation was revolutionary. He broadcast Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s first televised interview in 1957; he discussed \u201cLiving Within Our Means\u201d with Milton Friedman, the \u201cModern Woman\u201d with Helen Gurley Brown, \u201cGood Sex\u201d with Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the Holocaust with Elie Wiesel, and feminism with Gloria Steinem. He had a formal approach, introducing his guests at length before they started their discussions, but his genuinely curious interview style kept viewers in their seats.<\/p>\n

\n\tAfter Heffner\u2019s death in 2013, his grandson, Alexander Heffner, took the reins. \u201cIt\u2019s easy to get lost \u2014 even coming of age in the Eighties and Nineties, in the collage of TV \u2014 [on] why is this the outlier, and why is this a legacy to carry forward,\u201d Heffner tells Rolling Stone. But he\u2019s managed to carve out a new style for himself, and during Covid reimagined the show as something that could exist outside of a studio, traveling to meet his subjects around the globe. After recently completing a seven-part series, Mayors of the World \u2014 where he visited South America, Europe, and multiple cities in the U.S \u2014 he caught up with Rolling Stone to talk about The Open Mind\u2019s 70th anniversary, the future of the Democratic Party, and what we can learn from Trump\u2019s approach to America\u2019s 250th birthday.<\/p>\n

\n\tLet\u2019s start with the Mayors of the World series. Why did you decide to do that for the 70th anniversary?<\/strong>
After doing two years of interviews with U.S. senators and governors, I had exhausted myself in the silly proposition that bridge-building was our destiny in the immediate future, or even the foreseeable future. That was a bit of unreality. I recognized when President Trump was re-elected that if we were going to actually perform this mission in a way that is relevant to people\u2019s lives, that you have to go to the municipal [level] \u2014 to the lifeblood of your city. That, to me, was a person that I think most voters and Americans still regard as accountable to the people.<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\tMayors have to get the job done in ways that presidents and senators just don\u2019t. That was a takeaway from these exchanges, from Athens to Dusseldorf, feeling as though there is a pure connection to the populous life and genuine concerns of people. That was felt in Atlanta with two initiatives of the mayor there: one to build a supermarket in downtown Atlanta \u2014 it was a food desert \u2014 and the other to take shipping containers and convert them into permanent housing. I think the most tangible, like, big picture, was Toronto, with [Mayor Olivia Chow\u2019s] successful implementation of a vacancy tax. [Zohran] Mamdani\u2019s pied-a-terre tax proposal [in New York City] and the billionaire ballot initiative in California are the most evident examples of Americans\u2019 thirst for that type of reform. But Mayor Chow was actually empowered to deliver that.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tHeffner interviewing Toronto Mayer Olivia Chow for part of his Mayors of the World series.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tThe Open Mind<\/p>\n

\n\tOne of the people you interviewed was Henriette Reker, who served two terms as mayor of Cologne, Germany, from 2015 to 2025, and was stabbed in the neck in 2015 because of her pro-immigrant stance.<\/strong>
I\u2019m passionate about Mayor Reker of Cologne. Just to be able to interview someone whose campaign directly resulted in the assassination attempt on her. Americans have the tendency to take for granted the tranquility that we\u2019ve achieved in, not all of the 250 years, but generally, the perseverance of the Constitution.<\/p>\n

\n\tTo be able to feel and touch the community of Cologne, and this person who suffered that ordeal and overcame it \u2014 and then managed to carry out the courage of her convictions with Ukrainian refugees. A refugee just randomly [came] up to her while we were walking in the town square, to acknowledge her help, her assistance. It\u2019s moving to experience that inflection.<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n

\n\tHow often do you go back to the archives to watch your grandfather\u2019s interviews to prepare for your own?<\/strong>
Whenever there is an episode that I\u2019m doing that has in its DNA some relation to something that was covered in the past. When I was interviewing Bernie Sanders, I would look at the episodes on the New Deal with the historians like Bill Leuchtenburg and try to understand how my grandfather saw it, and how his guests saw the politics of the New Deal, and the counter-revolution we\u2019ve experienced now. But certain interviews there\u2019s almost like a gravitational pull \u2014 it\u2019s like looking at baby pictures or something, like you just have to watch it at least once a year. That\u2019s certainly King, or one from the dozens that he did with Elie Wiesel or Ruth Westheimer.<\/p>\n

\n\tA really interesting one that I\u2019ve watched from time to time more recently is [the 2003 interview] with Al Franken. I\u2019d say that that Franken episode when it comes to understanding the dynamic of right wing-left wing media, and the pressure on liberals to exist in this climate, and to compete in this climate. Of course, Franken himself succumbed to the same type of allegations and insinuations. I think that Democratic Party voters and liberals are recognizing that they\u2019ve been playing two different sports for a long, long time. That Franken episode, like the Bernie episode, explains where we are. But [I also like watching it] from the perspective of just appreciating a probing discourse. So I guess I return frequently to my grandfather in order to keep alive the sensibility that\u2019s grounded in the show.<\/p>\n

\n\tAre there any episodes that you\u2019ve encountered from the archives that you feel haven\u2019t aged well?<\/strong>
That\u2019s a good question. There are episodes that reflect the tendency to lionize the Founders in a way that is incomplete. The [show] was super precocious on civil rights for Black Americans, and one of the things I recognized in the Open Mind archive is the lack of gender equity and representation. I mean, my grandfather would argue that women were not the shapers of policy, and that is a fact when it came to much of the ideas encircling The Open Mind, right? Speaking as if I were his defense attorney, my grandfather, I [would say that] there were successful women in every place of endeavor, but they weren\u2019t actually the shapers of policy outcomes. I think that the archive illuminates the most important voices \u2014 Gloria Steinem [for example] \u2014 but they are in every blue moon, and I wanted to make sure that our show had the most women representation of any of the Sunday [shows], and I think we achieved that.<\/p>\n

\n\tMy grandfather was devoted to Lincoln \u2014 as a scholar, as an admirer. I would say I\u2019m an admirer of [abolitionist] Charles Sumner. And I think that is a bit of a sign of the times, that sort of blind fidelity to these framers. I\u2019m always fascinated by the counterfactuals in American history. If Lincoln hadn\u2019t replaced anti-slavery VP [Hannibal Hamlin] his second campaign with a pro-slavery VP Andrew Johnson, the whole arc of reconstruction in this country may have been different. But that means that studying this in 1956 onward, we don\u2019t leave behind Charles Sumner just because he wasn\u2019t in Lincoln\u2019s cabinet.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat have you been your thoughts watching the America 250<\/a> celebrations roll out?<\/strong>
The UFC fight at the White House is emblematic of what captures the imagination of the people in charge. There are many ways that we could have meaningfully celebrated and assessed our progress, and I think our memory as Americans of 250 will always be animated by the idea that President Trump was in office.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe fact-based scholarly examination of this country \u2014 its achievements and its failures \u2014 that barometer was not taken by the federal government. And maybe it will be in the future, but culturally those kinds of examinations are occurring. We all are celebrating 250 in our own way, and for us on The Open Mind, it was Mayors of the World, in conjunction with the 70th anniversary of the show. And it was taking stock of that history, and doing what my grandfather only asked another journalist to do once before: [He asked] Bill Moyers to interview him for the 50th anniversary, and I asked Judy Woodruff and Lawrence O\u2019Donnell both to do that for me \u2014 to assume a host chair and take stock of our history. And as you can hear from my own appraisal of The Open Mind, like taking ownership of the good, and shall we say, questionable and more questionable, is the right thing to do, and it\u2019s the honest thing to do.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe other side of the coin here is those who only want to question the integrity of the country, or only want to enumerate its deals with the devil, that\u2019s not healthy either. There still can be that intellectually honest middle position.<\/p>\n

\n\tDo you think the political center is what most people are looking for?\u00a0<\/strong>
I think that\u2019s just the place that most of us find normalcy, and the place that our neighbors are in. Yes, there\u2019s always going to be hyper-partisans, but I\u2019ve been struck by the feeling that we are in paralysis. We\u2019re waiting for Godot. Yes, I think the conduct towards the anti-ICE protesters got pretty damn despotic. The Republican Party\u2019s obsession with the Save America Act keeps me up at night. There\u2019s so many ways, tangibly, that we could be saving America \u2014 with the state of inflation, which President Trump was correct about \u2014 with the state of housing, with the state of wealth disparity, with the state of medical insurance. It\u2019s the abuse of the Constitution, the exploitation of the partisan vitriol, and then just the feeling that nothing matters, and we can\u2019t get to a happier place.<\/p>\n

\n\tSpeaking of paralysis, and do you think that we\u2019re on the precipice of a shift in the Democratic Party? And is Mayor Mamdani going to be part of that?<\/strong>
A lot of the things that Mayor Mamdani and AOC and Bernie Sanders believe in are things that Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman believed in, and if they express it according to this heritage, then they are making their message far more appealing. The brutal truth is that their whole way of concocting a green new deal \u2014 sure, they used the topic sentence or the chapter of the book, and they modified it, but it didn\u2019t seem genuine in being connected to our history.<\/p>\n

\n\t[As for Mamdani], I think his practical focus on two things that New Yorkers care about, and that have been the primary forces that have pushed them out of the city, is scaffolding and rent. I think he\u2019s laser-focused on those things \u2014 the quality of life. <\/strong>He has his eye on the ball. If it deviates from those two things, then that will be noteworthy, but it hasn\u2019t. And I\u2019m eager to see, as we did in Toronto with Mayor Chow or Mayor Dickens in Atlanta, the proof in that pudding.<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\tI covered the 2016 primary from a perch in New Hampshire, as a fellow at Franklin Pierce University, and I went to some of the rallies, and Sanders was just on point every time. The fundamental thing that he is stating continues to be factual, and that is that [we live in] the most lopsided economy in American history, the most oligarchic that the country has ever seen, and that\u2019s not how we conceived of capitalism. Capitalism always had the Darwinian element, but we lived in a country where the mom and pop store could not just coexist but thrive, and so all this hogwash about policies that are intended to pursue fairness in the economy, how they are a deviation from capitalism, that\u2019s just not true. We lived with a tax code and an ecosystem that was capitalistic and fair at times. As FDR said, he was endeavoring to save capitalism from itself. [When] one person is a trillionaire and controls all the levers of industry, that\u2019s more autocratic than capitalistic, so I think that that is the fundamental point that Sanders made. And it\u2019s the point that would make people who are inspired by him successful, and it\u2019s again the proof in the electoral victories. The question is, can they achieve the policies that they are promising people?<\/p>\n

\n\tThis interview was edited for length and clarity.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When The Open Mind premiered on PBS in 1956, host Richard D. Heffner wanted to do something that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":581147,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[265],"tags":[238465,356,18,117,19,17,34331,128],"class_list":["post-581146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-america-250","tag-donald-trump","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-pbs","tag-tv"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116904274124680298","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=581146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581146\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/581147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=581146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=581146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=581146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}