It was actually like, even without Tom Wolff's doing, this was like a major story in newspapers

throughout the country that this famous composer would host a fundraiser for these

revolutionaries.

So it was really that that had consequences for Leonard Bernstein.

I would say more so than him just being kind of

personally skewered and mocked because at the time America was still, you know, it was very

controversial to, I think it was less the like the cringness of it all than the Black Panther

party of it all, right? The fact that he's raising money

for these people who want a revolution, which in his, what they kind of revert back to is they

would say, well, look, this wasn't a party. This was not a party. It was a discussion. We also

do a discussion. And again, we are

believers in civil liberties. And Bernstein kind of went back and forth on this because he

later is quoted as criticizing them. He says they're a bad lot in an interview with United Press International

and they behaved badly. They laid their own graves. They spoiled the deal and they won't be

rational. And then the next day, he says to the New York Times, oh, that's nonsense. I never said

that. But I think it is indicative of, and this is what Wolf does capture, is the limits of liberalism

and the conflict of being rich, living in a white supremacist society, and wanting to do something about that, but not knowing

of whether or not things should be fundamentally upended, which is what your guests want

you to do. It's what the people you're raising money for want you to do. But once you're

confronted with that fundamental question, there's an indecisiveness there. And I do think he

captures that rather well.