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Jeff Guin:

So tell me where and when you were born.

Greg Baldwin:

I was born November 14th, 1946, which these days sounds to me more like 1846, but there it is. I lived in Lexington, but I was born in Boston. I was brought up in Lexington.

Jeff Guin:

So tell me a little bit about your family.

Greg Baldwin:

Mother, father. Father born 1914, mother, 1915, both from New York, New Jersey area. My father was an airline pilot and based in Boston. Because of that he managed to escape the second World War draft because he was working for commercial airlines in 1941, when Pearl Harbor happened and Congress passed a law that froze certain people in their occupation. They could not enlist for the Army, Navy, or Air Force. There was no Air Force then, but Army or Navy. They could not change jobs. They had to keep their jobs and airline pilots were one of them.

So he flew through the war, troop transports to Iceland and Greenland. Greenland I’m sure of, Iceland I’m not sure of. My mother was basically a housewife most if not all of her life. She did some work towards when she became an empty-nester. She died at the age of 89. My father at 91. And I had one brother who passed away 2018, I think it was towards the end of the year. And two sisters younger than I. My brother was older, so I was the second and I have two younger sisters. One is in Rhode Island and the other is still in Massachusetts.

Jeff Guin:

Can you describe your relationship with your brothers and sisters?

Greg Baldwin:

My relationship with my sisters was always very close. My relationship with my brother was similar to a cat and a dog, both in bad moods for 20 years. It was not a good relationship.

Jeff Guin:

So what’s your ancestry?

Greg Baldwin:

Irish. I used to think that my grandmother on my mother’s side was off the boat, but she was not. I found out, I don’t know about maybe a year ago that my family actually, the Irish side came over in the 1840s, I think probably in the famine. The English side, the Baldwin side came over in, the first one was 1636 I think, and landed in Massachusetts. The father , Samuel Baldwin, died on the ship he was on. But he had two sons who were in their early teens, which in those days meant they were essentially adults. So they went and settled somewhere in Western Massachusetts, I’m not sure where, but one brother went south, one brother stayed north. And so there are two branches of the family now. One was a southern branch, the other’s a northern, but there’s virtually no contact between them that I know of.

Jeff Guin:

So do you consider yourself a family genealogist or are these just stories that you’ve heard?

Greg Baldwin:

Just stories that I’ve heard and put together over the years and stuff like that. One of these days I’ll probably do the genealogy just because I’m interested in history and I’d like to know more about it. But I feel sort of cheated that my Irish side came over so long ago because that deprives me of the opportunity of becoming an Irish citizen.

Jeff Guin:

Did your family names change at all?

Greg Baldwin:

No. The Irish side is Sheehan, the English side of course is Baldwin. And my grandmother on my father’s side was Irish as well. I had a genealogy test done on myself a few years ago and they reported that I’m like 82% Irish, which is about as Irish as an average Irishman born in Ireland. And the rest of me is all Scottish and English.

Jeff Guin:

Are there any traditions that have carried over? Like Irish traditions?

Greg Baldwin:

No. No.

Jeff Guin:

All right. So we’re going to go into a little bit about your school years, growing up where did you go to school? Just start with grammar school and then we’ll get into when you were getting your legal degree.

Greg Baldwin:

Okay, well, it’s almost a miracle I’m still here because I had eight years of nuns, and then eight years of Jesuits. And I got to tell you if you can survive that, you can survive anything at all. But I started with St. Agnes School in Arlington, Massachusetts to the fifth grade. And then the fifth grade I was transferred by my parents to the Rose Hawthorne Catholic School. It was a grammar school and high school in Concord, but the high school was only for girls. I went to Rose Hawthorne because my sister was there and I had to basically take her because she was younger, so I would take her to the bus and get her on the bus and we’d go up to the school and I’d keep an eye on her, that sort of thing.

And then I went to Boston College High School, 1960 to 1964, and I went there because my brother went there, but it was considered the best Jesuit Catholic High School in the Boston area. So I did four years of Jesuits and studied Latin for four years, ancient Greek for three years. And I had two math courses in my entire high school career. Well, which was fine with me. I have nothing to do with math. I’ve never enjoyed it or liked it at all. So, I’m basically sort of a classic education, the Greek and Roman classics and ancient literature and all that. I graduated from BC High in 1964 and then went to Boston College, which was sort of an automatic step. It was hard to go to BC High and not be accepted to BC because both Jesuit schools and both very closely related.

So I went to BC ’64 through ’68. I was in the business school. Actually, when I went there it’s funny how things change. When I went there the only schools that women were allowed in, this was in a college, was the school of nursing and teaching, because that’s what women did. It never occurred to anybody that women might actually be interested in business, let alone be good at it. So there were no women in my class in the entire class. But it was in college that I met my first Jew and my first Black, I had never met a Jew except for one doctor, a pediatrician, in my life. And I had never met a Black person in my life except late in high school I think my mother had a Black woman come in from Roxbury to do the cleaning once a week or something like that.

And there was, in my class, there was one Jew and one Black and that was it. And the Black guy died I think between sophomore and junior year. But it was a very, what would be the right word, closed education. It was white, it was Catholic. I was exposed to virtually nothing, except white Catholic culture, which has its good points, but it also has an awful lot of bad points. But there it is. Anyway, I was in the School of Business in BC. And in my third year I decided I had absolutely zero interest in business, and I was much more interested in history. So I decided I would transfer from the School of Business to the School of Education. And in order to do that and still graduate in 1968, I had to take I think six or seven courses in my junior year in the second semester.

But it was a really heavy course load and it was so unusually heavy that the guidance counselor called me in. The first time I’d ever met the guidance counselor. I didn’t even know I had one. But yeah, he asked me why I was taking all of these extra courses. And I think they were mostly English literature and history courses and things like that so I could catch up on the number of credits to graduate from the School of Education in 1968, the same year I’d graduate if I stayed in the Business School, and get my teaching certificate. And so I said to him, “I don’t want to be in business and it bores me and I don’t like the math or the accounting, and I want to teach.” And he said, “Well, that’s fine.” He says, “You do realize there’s a war going on, right?.” It was sort of a silly question in 1968, because that’s all anybody ever thought about then, it seemed .I said, “Yeah.” And if you stop and think for a moment, trying to stay in the 1968 graduating class instead of just taking an extra year to ’69 or ‘70 was about the stupidest thing you could possibly do, because in ’68, if you didn’t go to grad school, you went into the Army. It was just as simple as that. And everybody’s trying to find ways to get out of going into the Army or the Navy or any of the services. And one of the ways of doing it was going to grad school. But he said to me, and this is why he asked, “Do you realize there’s a war going on?” In those days, they were giving a draft deferment for college and also for graduate school. So if you went on to graduate school, you’d get a deferment. And so you’d have people in college delaying graduation or going to grad school for years just trying to avoid the draft.

He said to me, “All of those guys who can’t afford to stay in college are looking for the job that will give them a deferment.” And that wasing, because teachers were deferred. And they don’t really want to be teachers, he said, so they’re taking the biggest gut course they can, they think that’s history.” He said, “So by the time you graduate, son, you’re going to be in competition with about 15,000 wannabe history teachers. None of whom really want to be history teachers, but you’re going to be in competition with them for a teaching job anyway. You’re not going to get a job and you’re going to wind up getting drafted.” And I said, “Well, I hadn’t thought of it that way,” and obviously I hadn’t.

He suggested what I should do is stay with business, and take a degree in economics. He said economics would open me up for all sorts of different paths, not just business. And he turned out to be right. It was very good advice in the long run. So, I took the degree in economics and I graduated in ’68 cum laude. And prior to graduation, I applied to law school and I applied to five or six law schools I think.

I took the LSATs as they were called. And in those days they were scored on 800. That was the max you could get. And I took the LSATs and I got a 620. And I thought, “Mm, not bad.” I wasn’t impressed, but the guidance counselors were impressed. It is a different guy, a different guidance counselor. But he started talking, “You got a 620?” And I said, “Yeah.” He says… It turned out all the guys who were getting straight A’s got 400, 425, 450, and I got a 620.

How the hell I did it, I don’t know. I didn’t study for it or anything. I just went in and took the exam. So probably God’s way of putting me on the right path without my knowing it and not telling me so I wouldn’t fuck it up. But in any case, I applied to, I got into, I don’t remember what I applied to. I applied to Harvard and Yale, which were total long shots, but their cut off… Harvard was 625, and I had 620. And the guy said, “You got really good marks and it’s close. You might luck out.” Yale. I think their cutoff was 610, 612, something like that. I didn’t get into Harvard, obviously. And Yale, the application was a couple days late, so they didn’t accept it. But I got into Cornell, Georgetown, Columbia, and I think I was wait-listed at Virginia. Don’t hold me to that, it’s just my best recollection now.

And so I’m accepted to law school. I haven’t chosen which one yet. And the President decides that he’s going to withdraw all of the deferments for graduate students. It was an election year and he needed to look tough on these college boys, the rich college boys that were avoiding the draft by staying in school for as long as they could. So he withdrew the grad school deferments. So I wrote to each of the schools I was accepted at and I said, “Thank you for the acceptance. I’m really thrilled. But what happens if I get drafted before I register or if I register and then get drafted while I’m in law school?”

And all of them wrote back basically saying, “Well, gee, that would really be too bad.” Except for Cornell. Cornell wrote back and said, “If you get drafted even before registration or go into the service before registration, notify us six months before you are released from the service. If you want to come back, we will reactivate your application at no charge to you, taking into account the fact that you have already been accepted once, and the maturity gained in the service of your country.”

So I knew I had my law school, and that was that. And that’s what I did. I went into the Army. I did, what did they call it? Not ROTC, it was Officer Candidate School, OCS. You go into the Army and you serve as an enlisted man through basic training and advanced training. Advanced infantry training for me, because I managed to land in the infantry. That’s another story. But I got through all of that. And then what you did is you would go to Officer Candidate School, this whole process, basic training, advanced infantry training, and OCS took about 10 or 12 months, and at the end of it you would be honorably discharged and then you would immediately re-enlist, or enlist, as an officer, and then do two years from then. So I did roughly three years, which was longer than if I had been drafted, but at least I served as an officer. So that all happened between ’68 and ’71. And in ’70 I went to Vietnam. So I got to stop and let you ask a question because I don’t want to…

Jeff Guin:

No, you don’t have to stop at any point. Your answers are good.

Greg Baldwin:

All right. You want me to keep going with the army then, or?

Jeff Guin:

Well, just a clarification. So you voluntarily went into the Officer Candidate School?

Greg Baldwin:

Yeah, I was going to be drafted. I contacted the Draft Board. My father knew the woman who was in charge of the Draft Board itself. Every district or section had a Draft Board and they would select who would be drafted for that class. I don’t recall how often they drafted per year, but they were in charge of it. So I called her up and I said, “Look, I’ve been admitted to law school and I’ve got what I think is a really great idea here.” This is how naive I was. I said to them, “How about this? If you don’t draft me for three years, I get through law school, I get a degree, and then I’ll enlist in the Army and I’ll go into JAG or something like that. And that way everybody comes out ahead.” She was kind enough not to laugh at me.

And she said, in all seriousness, she said, “Well, I understand Greg, and I sympathize with your position. It’s tough choices.” But she said, “The best that I can do for you is I will let you go for one year, but if the quotas keep as high as they are now,” this was really at almost the height of the war. She said, “If the quotas stay as high as they are now, there’s no way I can let you go for two or three years. So if you want to go to law school, go ahead, but you’re probably going to be drafted in your second year.” So I thought, “Well, it doesn’t make a great deal of sense to go to law school for one year and then get drafted, when I know I’m going to be able to get into the law school for three uninterrupted years after I go into and finish the service.”

So I decided in light of that, what I would do is simply enlist. I couldn’t get into Navy OCS because I flunked the exam. I couldn’t do the math. Math just always comes back to haunt me. But anyway, I flunked that. I went to the Army, and the Army recruiter, of course, they were accepting anything that breathed. You didn’t even have to be able to talk. It was just, it was desperate. It was tough times. And I said, “Well…” I said to him, “I want to enlist, and I want to go to officer school because I went to college.” As if the one entitles you to the other, I learned the hard way that doesn’t work that way. Just because you went to college doesn’t mean you’ll be a good officer. Actually, it probably means exactly the opposite, but that’s another story.

Anyway, I told him, “I want to be an officer, but not in the Infantry.” And he said, “Well, unfortunately, the only officer school that’s available right now is Infantry.” And I thought, “Gee, I don’t want to be an infantry officer.” I mean, that’s a one-way ticket to Vietnam.

So I said to him, “No, I don’t think I want to do Infantry OCS.” And he says, “Well, listen, son,” I’ll never forget, he puts his arm around my shoulder. He goes, “Son, with an educational background like yours, they’ll give you a branch transfer in a heartbeat.” And I bought that one too. I said I was naive, and I was. I was brought up in a white bubble, all the white privilege and all the shit that goes with it, I had. And I had never developed any street smarts or anything like that until I got into the Army. And the Army was the first time in my life that I was ever actually responsible for myself. I mean, they fed and clothed me, but if I screwed up somewhere along the line, I was the one who paid for it. There was no mummy and daddy to take care of things anymore.

So that’s where I did basically my growing up. And it was an ugly process, but I did. And so I got into the Army Infantry Officer Candidate School. I went to Fort Dix in New Jersey for basic. For AIT, the advanced infantry training was Fort Polk in Louisiana. Both of those I think have been renamed now, because Dix I think was a Confederate General, and Polk certainly was a Confederate General. And then Benning, and I think Benning has been renamed as well. So none of them, they’re still there, but not under the same name. So I did Fort Dix, then Fort Polk in Louisiana, then Fort Benning in Georgia, got my commission and was sent to Fort Hood in Texas. And Fort Hood’s been renamed as well because he was a Confederate General.

I spent six, maybe eight months just learning the ropes of being an officer and making all of the basic mistakes that you make as an new officer, as a second lieutenant, brand new, fresh out of college, and thinking that you know everything when you actually know almost nothing. But I didn’t know that. I was stationed at Fort Hood for I think six to eight months. And then instead of sending me directly to Vietnam, for some reason they sent me to Panama to Jungle School Training. And they also sent me to Heavy Mortar Platoon Officer School. Heavy mortar. You know what a mortar is, of course. The average mortar that people think of is maybe this high off the ground. It’s like about three feet long. Somebody has to carry it around with the platoon, but it’s right there with you in the field. Heavy mortar stays behind, it’s much, much bigger and heavier.

I can’t remember the calibers now, but I think there was a 60 millimeter mortar that went into the field with the platoon, but I don’t remember what caliber the heavy mortar was. So I went to Heavy Mortar Platoon Leader School. And then I went to Jungle School in Panama for two weeks, which was just ugly. That was really tough training. And got through that. And then I got my orders and I went to Vietnam, I think, let me think, it was 1970. I went into the Army in July ’68. 1970 was when I went to Vietnam. March, I believe, early March, and was assigned to a unit in Northern I Corps. That’s Northern “EyE’ Corps, it was Roman numeral one. So they just called it I (Eye) Corps. And I went to Northern I Corps and Northern I Corps is where the DMZ was. The DMZ was the demilitarized zone. We used to call it the “Pink Line,” because on the map it was a big pink stripe across the map dividing North and South Viet Nam.

I was stationed in Quang Tri, but not in the city, because they wouldn’t, I don’t know why, but they would not let us mix with the population at all. We were on a base outside the city and we stayed on the base, and that was it. It was called Camp Roberts, and I was there when they held the naming ceremony. During the ceremony my men were snickering and giggling, and when it was over I asked my Platoon Sergeant, why there laughing. And he said, “Well LT, Captain Roberts was fragged by his own men.” Welcome to Viet Nam. Anyway, I never saw Quang Tri city, but that’s where I was stationed. And after about three months, June, some time in June, we got, I won’t go into all the details because it’s not really worth it, but I wound up getting into an ambush. I was in our NDP, our night defensive perimeter. And it was early morning, and I was the lieutenant. I had all the squad leaders gather around me by the radio. The radio was what we called a prick-25. I don’t mean to be vulgar, but it was called that. Officially it was a PRC-25. But it was PRC, those were the military initials.

And the PRC-25 had an expandable antenna. You could collapse it down to about a foot, but it would expand to 20 feet, and you needed to expand it to use it. So we gathered at the radio, and I gave the squad leaders their orders and said to them, we were in no big rush, didn’t expect to find anything. So I said to them, “Go back, get your guys ready. Make sure they get a good breakfast.” This is around maybe half hour after dawn or something like that, because you’re in the field, so there’s no bed to get out of.

And then I sent them off on their way, and I stood there at the radio. I called in to report to the main base. So the antenna goes up. And it never — it should have occurred to me, it didn’t occur to me — that standing at the radio was like standing in the middle of a bull’s eye. Because around us, it wasn’t jungle, it was all open area. It was the northern part of the country. So it wasn’t jungle like down in Saigon or along the, what was the name of that river? The Saigon River? I can’t remember. Mekong River. But it wasn’t like that at all. It was much more open and hilly.

And I’m standing at the radio, and all around us was thick, high grass, maybe about, I vaguely recall, maybe about five feet high or something. And you trample it down so that you have a field of fire. But putting up the antenna for the PRC-25 was sort of putting up a flag saying, “Aim here.” And so I stood in front of the radio after the sergeants all left, the squad leaders. And I thought to myself, “I ought to get my gear ready.” And then I thought, “No, I already got my gear ready.” My gear was probably 10 feet away like from here to Mark, maybe a little bit more.

And I thought, “No, there’s no need to do that.” And then I thought, “Well, I should clean my weapon.” And then I thought, “No, I just cleaned my weapon 20 minutes or half an hour ago. Why do it again?” And then I thought, “Well, those things always jam.” M-16s were sort of a pain. I thought, “It can’t hurt to clean it again.” So I sort of turned slowly from the radio and I sort of very leisurely strolled towards my gear. That’s where my weapon was. And I heard this big, not a big explosion, but a bang. And for some reason, to this day, I still don’t know why. But instead of just dropping. And you can just drop, it’s very easy. You just pull your feet out from under you and you land on your hands, but you sort of wind up in a push-up position and then go the rest of the way down without hurting yourself.

But I didn’t do that. I don’t know why. I was trained to do it. I’d done it a hundred times before, but that day I didn’t. I turned around to look what it was, see what it was. And I remember seeing the rocket coming through the grass. It was an RPG. We were in not our usual area. We normally operated where there were no tanks at all. But this was a special mission, so to speak, that we had been called out on. And we were sent to a different area where they – the US, I mean — did have tanks. And so, since we were using tanks in this area, the other guys, the other side was using RPGs, which are rocket propelled grenades. It’s sort of like a bazooka, it’s a shoulder held rocket that shoots off a launcher you’re holding on your shoulder, and goes after a tank. And that’s what they fired at me.

And I saw the damn thing coming through the grass. That’s when I dropped, but it was too late. And so I caught… The damn thing, the thing actually hit where I was standing when I was at the radio. I don’t know if they were aiming at me, or the radio, or the antenna, but that’s where it hit. If I had stayed there, my legs would’ve been blown off and I would’ve been killed. But for some reason, I moved to clean my weapon again, not really wanting to, and not really having to. But I got just far enough away from it where it didn’t kill me, but it wounded me.

Greg Baldwin:

Where it didn’t kill me, but it wounded me. These things have a shaped charge, is what they were called. At least that’s my recollection, which means that when you set off a grenade, it explodes and it’s 180 degrees all the way, a 360 degrees circle. It explodes everywhere, right, on the ground. Right. A shaped charge, all the force of the explosion goes forward. That’s because it’s aimed at armor and it’s supposed to penetrate armor and take out a tank. So all of the explosive power has to go into the tank itself in order to take the tank out. And that’s what saved me really, because the shaped charge meant that instead of being in the full impact like I would’ve been with a hand grenade, I was on the side just at the edge of the cone of the explosion.

So I caught a lot of shrapnel and I got a couple of big pieces in my right knee and I had shrapnel all over my left side. I looked like a comic book character for a couple of years, I guess. They take out the big pieces, but they don’t take the little ones out. The little pieces, the body just rejects them and it pushes them out of your body. You don’t even know it’s happening. You don’t feel it. But the little pieces just break through the skin and fall off.

So anyway, I got what they called a million dollar wound. It was good enough to get you home, but not bad enough to fuck you up for life. And this one, I had two big pieces of shrapnel. One went just between the kneecap and the joint bones, the two bones. I mean, a millimeter in any direction would’ve either shattered my kneecap or hit the joint and shattered both bones. But it didn’t. It just went under my kneecap, and I got another one on my lower thigh, inner thigh.

So they medivaced me out. And I went to, let me see, I went to field hospital first. I was wearing glasses at the time and the glasses shattered of course, and I had a big cut up long here, cross my forehead, cut through the eyebrow, down around, up somewhere in my lip here. The scar on my lip is still there and there’s a little chink in my eyebrow if you really look closely. But nothing else is left. But it actually cut my eyelid and I didn’t lose my eye. I mean, talk about a million dollar wound. I mean, if you got to order a wound in advance, this is the one to get really, because some guy in some tent in Vietnam sewed my eyelid back together and didn’t leave not even a mark. There’s no scar, there’s absolutely nothing. And I wish I knew who it was because I would like to at least say thank you.

(00:31:04)

Jeff Guin:

So can I ask when that happened, what were you thinking? What were you feeling?

Greg Baldwin:

I’m not really sure. The first thing that I thought of, I remember now, I mean, it flipped me over and I wound up flat on my back a couple feet away from where I had been. I don’t know how far. And I was unconscious, but I came out of it. I don’t think I was unconscious for long, maybe 20 seconds or something like that, I think. I’m not sure. But I came out of it and the first thing I did was check to make sure that my arms and legs were there. And as long as I had two arms and two legs, I was fine. If I had lost one of them, I would’ve just stayed there bled to death. I was not going to go back with one leg or one arm. Let me see. And then you just sort of to go into automatic mode because I’m in charge of, platoons are technically, I think around 30 people, but in Vietnam, they were usually 15 to 20, I think.

So I’m in charge of 15 or 20 guys out there, and I don’t have time to think of other stuff. So I called in, I got a hold of the radio. I guess I crawled over to the radio, I don’t know, but it was fortunately still working, and I reported in, let them know that we got hit. And then I called for artillery and gunships and medevac. I should not have called for artillery and gunships at the same time because if you’ve got artillery coming in, you can’t have helicopters there. Obvious danger. You’re going to wind up knocking your own helicopters out either by being hit or the blast or something like that. So I shouldn’t have done that, but I did. And it turned out to be a doubly stupid mistake because this is an area we weren’t familiar with. In our area, if you called in artillery, artillery was there within a couple of minutes.

In this other area, there were a lot of civilians in the area, so in order to fire artillery anywhere around that area, they had to get permission from the mayor of the city as well as all of the military chain. And they couldn’t find the mayor. So it probably took about 20 minutes to get the first artillery rounds out. Well, in the meantime, the gunships arrived and I’ve got the senior squad leader is now with me and on the radio, and he said that the, I can’t remember if it was the medevac first or the gunships, but helicopters arrived first, obviously, because they never take more than a couple minutes.

And I said to him, “Tell them not to come in. They have to wait for the artillery.” Finally, the artillery came in, big explosion, blah, blah, blah, no repeat, because I wanted the gunships to do their thing and get the medevac to land. Me, our Kit Carson Scout, the platoon sergeant, I think we were just the only ones that were hit because they hit the command post, where I was, the platoon was always circled around that.

Had to pull the Kit Carson Scout out of the foxhole. But I didn’t bother to get in the foxhole because I didn’t think I’d be able to get out. And all I remember is the medevac finally came in. The gunships were there. I think they did it at the same time. The bottom line of the thing is you run on adrenaline, you’re not really thinking. So I wasn’t thinking, oh boy, I’m going home or anything. I just wanted to make sure I was physically intact. And then the training sort of kicks in and you start doing things and you do them automatically. The toughest part was waiting for the God damn artillery to come out. And I sure wish I hadn’t ordered that, but once you order it, you can’t take it back. Or at least I don’t think you could. But anyway, I didn’t.

Anyway, they medevaced me out. I remember one of the guys coming, he picks me up by the shoulders and he says, “Come on LT, we got to get to the helicopter.” And my legs wouldn’t work. I couldn’t move them. So he dragged me over to the helicopter and got me in, and the platoon sergeant. A Kit Carson Scout, by the way, is a native Vietnamese assigned to a US unit down at the platoon level. Not everyone got one, but I happen to have one. And you use them to shout out as you’re patrolling to any enemy in the area. Come on, surrender, join us, the food is good, democracy is wonderful, capitalism is the only way to go, all that sort of shit, the standard propaganda crap. Of course it never worked, but you have to go through the motions. I think I only used him once, but anyway, but he was a nice guy.

Buk was his name. And so it’s the three of us. And we get medevaced out. We go to field hospital first, then I think Da Nang. But nobody is telling you where you’re going and you’re really not functioning, or at least I wasn’t. The adrenaline is roaring. And here, I guess I’ve lost consciousness at some point. And the first thing I really remember is being in a hospital, I think in Da Nang. And when you get wounded and you’re sent to the medevac hospital, they don’t undress you. They just take scissors and cut your clothes off. And I was wearing a pair of handmade rosary beads that someone somewhere in the Midwest had just blindly sent, sort of support the troops type of thing. It was some parish or yeah, it must’ve been a Catholic parish because nobody else uses rosaries, that they make them and send them. And I got one in the mail one day, and I put it on, wore it.

Being a Catholic, I guess means being suspicious, but I take that back, it’s not fair. But I was personally suspicious and I wore the rosary, and I remember they were going to cut it off and I asked them not to. So they had to fit it over my head. And it was a tight fit, and my face was a mess. It was all cut up and bloody and all sorts of shit like that. But I still got the rosary beads. And then they operated on me there. And then they sent me to Japan, I don’t know where, some hospital in Japan, military hospital. And they operated on me there. And I wound up with a cast basically from waist to ankle or to my feet. And I was in that thing for months.

Anyway, they sent me from Japan to Fort Devens Massachusetts, because the Army policy, as I understand it, was that if they medevaced you home, they would try and put you in a hospital near where you lived so family could visit and stuff like that. When I went into the service, I was single and my home of record was in Lexington. But after I married, I wanted to be put somewhere near her, and she was living in Plymouth, Mass. So the nearest facility, actually, the nearest facility was an Air Force base on Cape Cod. But they were thinking, we need to put him close to Lexington, his home of record. So I was medevaced to Fort Devens , north of Lexington and Boston. And I was there for, let me see, this was June, maybe four to six months. I don’t really remember. I remember, let me see, this was near the 4th of July. I was in the hospital by the 4th of July in Fort Devens in my cast. I was there for maybe a week and they wanted to give everybody on the post a pass for 4th of July. So they basically, if you were even remotely ambulatory and you weren’t hooked to a machine, basically they gave you a pass and said, get the fuck out of here. We’re closing the hospital for the long weekend.

So that was the first time I went home. My sister-in-law picked me up because my wife is a nurse and she was working, and drove me down to Plymouth, which is when my first son was conceived, cast and all. And actually that is true, that’s when my oldest son was conceived. Ultimately, they didn’t give me a medical discharge from the Army. And I don’t know why, because my leg was all fucked up and I was in a cast and then on crutches for I think about six months. But instead of discharging me, they sent me to Fort Hood again. And so I stayed in Fort Hood until April 1971, when I was discharged. I was supposed to stay in the Army, the end of my two years would’ve been I think the following June, something like that. But they let me out in April. It was called an “Early Out” because the war was starting to wind down and guys were being let out early. So I was honorably discharged and went back and stayed in Plymouth, worked for a couple of months, and then went on to law school.

I was a really terrible officer. No, I really was in retrospect. I was sort of like Cicero, you know the Roman, Cicero? Cicero’s a great politician, great speaker, great lawyer. What nobody knows about him, he was actually in the Roman military for some emergency situation. He didn’t enlist because when you enlisted, you enlisted for 20 years. But he was in and he was an absolutely terrible soldier. He wrote about it once, I forget what it’s called, and I was sort of like that. Yeah, good lawyer, terrible fucking soldier. Absolutely awful. I just made every mistake you could make. It’s like my first trial. My first trial, I fucked up everything you could conceivably fuck up in a trial. I mean, it was like a textbook. If they had made a movie of it, it would’ve been a comedy. But I learned from it. And all those mistakes I made, I never made again. And I think the mistakes that I made as an officer I wouldn’t make again. But they were the product of hubris and immaturity. Believe me I,-

Jeff Guin:

You’re a little hard on yourself. I mean, no one is just, or very few people I would imagine would be ideal officers just starting out.

Greg Baldwin:

Oh, well, I’m not talking about being an ideal officer, just being a decent officer. I mean, it was just, yeah. I wasn’t cut out for it. That’s all there is to it. It was just I was, I can’t think of an expression to get it across. I was just in the wrong place. I should never have been an officer.

Jeff Guin:

You knew that though, right?

Greg Baldwin:

Well, I didn’t know it at the time. At the time I thought I was just doing fine. It’s in retrospect where I realized, I mean, all of the mistakes I made and all the things that I did that I ought not to have done. I pushed my platoon sergeant in Viet Nam, my first platoon sergeant, and my men, too hard, but it’s water under the bridge now.

Jeff Guin:

Well, it’s not exactly like that was something you were going to go to school for or you intended to ever pursue as a profession, so.

Greg Baldwin:

No, that’s true. But other people were in the same boat. They came from college and they were much better at it than I was. But it’s done now. I can’t take it back or can’t change it. So there it is. I wouldn’t give it up. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. If I had to live my life over again, I’d do exactly the same. I’d just like to be able to, if I do it over again, I’d like to be able to remember the mistakes I made the first time around so I didn’t make them again, but.

Jeff Guin:

So were they mistakes that got people hurt or just mistakes that,-

Greg Baldwin:

Oh, no. No. No, no. It was just stupid things.

Jeff Guin:

Okay.

Greg Baldwin:

Too formal with the men. In combat, you can’t do that. You need to be on a first-name basis. And I wasn’t, I was too stuck up is probably the right word. I was too conscious of the fact that I was an officer and they were not, which is really a fatal error for any officer. You can’t think of your men that way. You can’t treat them like some lower-class things that are there just to follow your orders. You have to earn their respect. And I did not. And they were right not to give it, but yeah. It is what it is and it’s over now. So yeah.

Jeff Guin:

We’ll get back to your education at Cornell in a minute, but I wanted to go back to your earlier growing up and just thinking about from the perspective of becoming an emerging gay man, what was that like, especially in the bubble that you described?

Greg Baldwin:

Inside that bubble it was bitter hell. I knew absolutely nothing about sex. I was never taught anything about sex. They didn’t do that in Catholic schools, they didn’t do that in Catholic families, al least not in mine, they taught it in public school, but they did not in Catholic schools because it was just dirty. So I was brought up basically thinking that virtually everything sexual was a sin unless it was done in a married state. And even then, some of the things that you did, you couldn’t do without committing a sin. I mean, it was just a jumble of suspicion and repression and puritanism and stuff like that. So I was just a hopeless case. I really was. And it was complicated by the fact that I wasn’t interested in girls. And all of my friends who were going through puberty and they’re all going crazy over Playboy Magazine because their fathers would get it and their sons would read it, all that.

And I’d look at the pictures and think, what’s the big deal? But I knew how to play the part. So I’d go, oh wow, look at her. But it meant absolutely nothing to me. I had absolutely no reaction and I couldn’t figure out why. Oh, first of all, I couldn’t figure out why they were excited and then I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t like them. And I had no words for it. The word gay didn’t exist to me. The word homosexual didn’t exist to me. I had absolutely no clue. Everything that was happening to my body was, I was the only one because there was nobody there who ever told me, these are the things that just happen as you grow up and this is how you do this and this is how you do that and I just never had any of that.

And it’s the real serious downside of being a white Anglo-Saxon Catholic wrapped in that bubble. It’s great protection. And you get all sorts of privileges with it. You learn basically, if you’re a white boy, especially male, and you play by the rules, everything will come to you. Nothing really bad will happen.

And even Vietnam didn’t seem bad to me within that context because it was part of playing by the rules. You live in the country, there is a draft. You’re expected to defend your country. This is what you do and you do it. My father at one point actually said to me that he could get me into the National Guard, which was what everybody wanted to do. When you get out of college with no deferments, you had to get into the National Guard, otherwise you’d get drafted. And it turned out, I found out he had to bribe some guy in the National Guard to put me up on the list to get in. And I told him no, because you play by the rules. That’s just the way I was. And I was brought up to do that. So when you’re playing by the rules and you’re brought up that way, you really don’t know squat about sex. And I didn’t.

I learned sort of a hard way, but I didn’t have any words. Sexual orientation meant nothing to me. I didn’t have the words. I thought I was the only person who looked at Playboy pictures of girls and didn’t react. And sometimes I wondered if they were all faking, all the guys, until I went to a trip to California. It was the first solo trip I ever took in my life. Went out to visit a girl that I had met on Cape Cod the year before. I think this was, when was this? It must’ve been early in college, maybe my second year But it was that age, like 19. And I went out to California. Visited this girl who lived in Santa Ana, just outside of Los Angeles in Orange County, then visited some relatives who lived there.

And then I wanted to take the train, the train through the Big Sur, the one that goes along the coast to San Francisco, unbelievably scenic. I still remember it to this day. It was fabulous. But I took it from Santa Santa and or Los Angeles or somewhere around there. But I got on the train down there and went to San Francisco. Now why San Francisco? Well, I think it was all subliminal. I never would’ve admitted this in a million years, but sometime before this trip, The Saturday Evening Post, I don’t know, have you ever heard of that? Life Magazine, Look Magazine, Saturday Evening Post. They’re large size picture magazines with stories. Saturday Evening Post was the one that my parents subscribed to and they had an issue once, no idea when it was, but it was before my trip to California where the front cover was the skyline of San Francisco.

And the logo for the story inside was “San Francisco: Queer Capital of the World.” Which is probably why I wanted to go to San Francisco, although I did want the train ride too. But I think that’s why I went to San Francisco. And that was the first time, I’ll never forget this. I can even take you to the store where this happened. There’s a store, sort of a triangular shape, very strange layout. But at the end of it, it was almost all glass. And they had a magazine rack and there was gay magazines there, soft-core porn. And I just saw the cover of one of them. Almost fell over. And it was then that I understood what the guys, my friends were seeing, thinking and feeling when they looked at women. And I got the same thing looking at guys in this magazine. It was no full nudity or anything like that, but finally I saw the light.

I went into the store. I don’t know how the hell I ever got the balls to do this, probably only because nobody knew me in San Francisco, so I felt safer. But I went to the store and I bought the magazine, and that was when I started, I don’t know where I got the words, but started to understand the concept of queer because I connected my feelings with the queer capital of the world. So I knew I was queer, but I knew I wasn’t supposed to be queer. I’m not supposed to be that way. So I can’t be that way. I mean, that’s not part of the rules. That’s not the territory here. I’m not supposed like to guys. I knew that. I knew that just simply because I mean in this society, if you got called queer, it was instant death. Even I knew that much.

You just never recover from it socially, in a sense. I knew all that stuff. So I knew I wasn’t supposed to be this way, but I was beginning to understand I was this way, and I entered into what might have become, but fortunately was not, a never-ending quest to not be “that way.” So I learned to play the game, the straight game. I don’t think I played it very well because it turns out that most of my friends knew I was gay, but they were too polite or too embarrassed to say anything. And in those days, you wouldn’t ask a person that. And if they had asked me, I would’ve denied it to my dying day. I would’ve pulled out 20 Bibles and swore I wasn’t, knowing full well that I was. But if I swore I wasn’t, what it meant was I don’t want to be. Right. I am, but I don’t want to be. I know this is not right. I know I’m not supposed to be queer.

Jeff Guin:

So why do you think that they thought that or knew it?

Greg Baldwin:

I don’t know. I guess I didn’t play the game as well as I thought I played it. Maybe I was just not good with girls. Maybe they could see that I really wasn’t interested in girls. I don’t know. I mean, I dated and stuff like that, but I was certainly no Romeo and I mean, I’d say look at me, dating girls, but I’m talking about me 65 years ago and I’m not sure how they knew.

Jeff Guin:

I think you seem like a military man.

Greg Baldwin:

I was a fucking dork. I had glasses, I was skinny. I was about as attractive as a banana peel, I think.

Jeff Guin:

There’s lots of dorks out there today. That doesn’t make them gay.

Greg Baldwin:

No, no. I’m not saying that looking like a dork makes you gay, but I was just not good with girls. I was tongue-tied and all the rest of that stuff. I’d brag with the best of them and make up stories and all the rest of that. But a couple of the guys, not all of them, but one in particular basically knew I was gay. Semi-confronted me on it once, but I just sort of ignored it.

Greg Baldwin:

Semi-confronted me on it once, but I just sort of ignored it and it went away. Then I got married, so they figured, “Oh, I must’ve been wrong.” I mean, the way out of the problem of being gay was to get married. I went to San Francisco and I did have an experience there that I won’t go into. But I came back from San Francisco, and being a good Catholic boy, following all the rules, I went to confession. You know, you’re supposed to do it once a month. I confessed this, I confessed it to some sort of … What’s the, I can’t think of the word.

I didn’t say, “I slept with a guy,” or something like that. I had a euphemism for it, that’s the word. “I was impure in action with others,” some silliness like that. So I confessed this. No, I actually, no, no. It was after San Francisco, I realized I was a homosexual, and I almost coped with it. What threw me back, I wasn’t out by any means except to myself, and that very little. But I was there, I was beginning to understand it and accept it, and recognize that’s what I am. I went to confession and I confessed to homosexuality, and the priest didn’t say a word. Got no lecture, got no shit, got no screaming or yelling. Holy cow. I mean, “Go say five of our fathers, five Hail Marys. Make a good Act of Contrition.” I got out of that confession and I thought, “Fucking A, man, I’m home. I can mess around all week, come to confession on Saturday, all I have to do is hold out from Saturday afternoon to Sunday morning Mass, go to communion, then fuck around all week, go to confession again on Saturday.

I thought, “I’ve got the answer to this whole problem. I’m home free.” So that’s what I did for the first week. I think maybe the second week, same thing happened. But the third week, no. The priest said to me, “Son …” He didn’t know me, he was a new priest in the parish. I went to him because he didn’t know me. So anyway, he says, “Son, about this homosexual thing, have you seen a doctor?” No, no. He said, “Have you gotten any help for this?” I just thought, “Help? Help? What help? And why would I need help?” Then I thought, “Oh, I’m a good Catholic boy, I’m supposed to have a regular confessor.” That was a key thing, a regular confessor. He was new in the perish. So I said to him, “Well, my regular confessor just left the parish, Father.”

He says, “No, no, I’m not talking about a regular confessor. Have you seen a doctor?” I remember kneeling there thinking, “Doctor? Why the fuck would I want to see a doctor?” Of course, I didn’t think, “Why the fuck.” “Why would I want to see a doctor?” I forget what I said to him, I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I don’t think I ever went to confession again until I was in the hospital after Vietnam. I was in Fort Devens and I was lying in the bed and some goddamn priest came up with the stole on and said, “I’ll hear you Confession now.” So that’s the last time I ever went to confession, and that was only because I was ambushed.

But me and the church sort of parted company around that time. The real thing that killed me with the Catholic church really wasn’t the sexual orientation, though, it was the hypocrisy of it. Because I remember in Vietnam when we were in the field, as opposed in the rear area, you never really knew what day of the week it was. It was totally irrelevant to your life anyway. Whether it was Monday or Tuesday, it meant nothing. You’re just out there and you’re trying to fight. You find the bad guy and kill them, or they find you and kill you. But it doesn’t matter what day it is.

So every once in a while they’d send out a Protestant or Catholic, I don’t remember any Jew, any Rabbi coming out. But I remember the Protestant minister and the Catholic priest. The Catholic priest came out one time. We’re in this night defense of perimeter. He sets up an altar, and he built the altar out of mortar crates. Mortar crates are, I can’t give you the dimensions, maybe four feet long, three feet wide, something like that, heavy as lead, solid wood and about maybe this high. So you pile them up, you pile six or seven of them up and you’ve got a decent altar.

I’m thinking of the irony of an altar to Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, made out of objects designed expressly to kill other people. I thought, “Well, that’s not so hot, but what else can he do?” So I brushed it off. But then he gave a sermon, they never gave sermons in the field, but this idiot did, probably about 5 minutes. But in his sermon, and basically what he said, it’s almost a quote, he said that, “Any man who dies for his country, the church says will go straight to heaven. And if you’re here in Vietnam, you are fighting for your country, so if you are killed, you will go straight to heaven.” I thought, “What kind of bullshit is this?”

I mean, that just threw out all of the teachings that had ever been drilled into me right out the window. It was then that I realized that this is just a bunch of shit. This is a bunch of crap. I got no use for this. When I came home, with my parents, I’d go to Mass and stuff like that. But I was over it at that point. So now I don’t have the church on my back, but I’m married. I got married, and I think in retrospect that it was because … The church’s cure for homosexuality was the love of a good woman and I remember that being said. “The love of a good woman will straighten you out.” I loved my wife. I think I still do love my ex-wife. We did have physical relations, of course, I have two kids. But it was never fun for me, it was more of a duty than anything else. It was difficult, but that’s what it was … I’m losing the point of where we were going with this. You were asking me how I came out?

(01:02:04)

Jeff Guin:

Well, no, just the progression of you dealing with these things. Kind of looking at the pathway for your emergence. So you described your childhood. So you were basically, by the time you went to the … You had the San Francisco visit, there was no contact-

Greg Baldwin:

No-

Jeff Guin:

With another man. Were you a virgin at that point?

Greg Baldwin:

No, I was just doing the average adolescent kind of stuff. That was about all.

Jeff Guin:

So from the trip to San Francisco to the time that you got married was how long?

Greg Baldwin:

Let me see, San Francisco was probably maybe 18 and I got married at 22 or 23. So it was basically college. That was the period of time.

Jeff Guin:

Were there any experiences in college that you connected with-

Greg Baldwin:

No, I don’t recall any sexual experiences in college. Some close calls, but never anything that happened. But like I said, I was not God’s gift to anybody. I mean, you looked at me, you saw a complete dork. Could only be attractive to somebody who was desperate, I think. But anyway, I was attractive enough to get a beautiful wife. God what a woman she was, she is. I am very attracted to smart, independent women. I don’t like the professional housewives. I don’t like the women who build their lives around men. I like women who think for themselves, who speak for themselves, and she was, she is. I did love her. If I had been straight, if I had been straight, I think we’d still be married today. Because I absolutely adored her. I really did love her.

Jeff Guin:

How did you meet?

Greg Baldwin:

We met in college at some house party in Scituate. Scituate is a shore community south of Boston, halfway to Cape Cod. We had a friend who had a house there immediately on the ocean. You’d never build it there today. But this thing at high tide, the front door was maybe five feet from the water. It had no insulation, had electricity, had running water, but no insulation, no heating, just a bare bones cottage. I met her there. My brother was in the Air Force at the time and I was driving his MGTD Roadster, ’53 MGTD Roadster. If you’ve ever seen one, you’d know. It had sweeping Rolls Royce fenders, and it was a beautiful sports car. Even I could attract women in that car, and I attracted her. We started dating. We dated through college. Not exclusively, we broke up at one point, then went back to together. All the standard boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl routine, all that stuff.

We got married just after she got out of college, in September 1969 So she was three months out of college. I was a year and three months out of college. I was in the Army. So I came home on leave and we got married in Plymouth. Then we drove from Boston down to Fort Hood, Texas, and we wound up living in Fort Hood. Basically, she had wanted to get married after graduation, and I said, “I know I’m going to Vietnam. I don’t want to leave you as a 20 year-old or 21 year-old widow.” She said to me quite sensibly, she said, “I think that’s my decision, isn’t it? Because if I’m a widow, you won’t be here. So it’s nothing to you.”

She was right. So we get married. And I loved her family. I think I loved her mother more than I loved my own. We were just like soulmates. God I miss that woman. But anyway, so we got married in ’69. I got out of the army in ‘71, a year and a half later, and went to law school and of course with her. We had an apartment in Ithaca, New York, which was where Cornell was. We did the three years in law school. I think I had maybe one gay sexual experience during law school. So I mean, I was not a virgin, but about as close to it as you can get without being one. Very few sexual experiences, but enough to know this is what I wanted.

I got a job after law school with the Justice Department. Actually, they were the only ones who would have me, but that’s another story. I got the job interview with them … Have you ever heard of the Saturday Night Massacre? It’s part of the Watergate story.The original special prosecutor of Nixon wanted his tapes, I think that’s what it was. That was the problem. But Nixon wanted the special prosecutor fired, and Nixon’s attorney general refused to fire the guy and resigned. The Assistant Attorney General I remember was Eliot Richardson, and he became the Attorney General, and he refused to fire the guy, too.

The next guy in line was Robert Bork. Bork is the same guy who was the first Supreme Court nominee to be totally trashed in the Senate hearings, that’s the same guy. Bork agreed to fire the special counsel. So they lost the special counsel, the Attorney General and the next in line Attorney General in one Saturday night, it was all in one weekend, Saturday night, this happened. It was the Saturday Night Massacre. Well, my law school interview to get a job with the Justice Department was the following Monday. I was in my active, extremely liberal phase. I was a McGovern supporter, big time. It was all in reaction to Vietnam, the Army, the upbringing, the Catholic church. I wasn’t going to become a communist, but I was far left. I went to Professor Blakey, Robert Blakey, G. Robert Blakey, a good man. He wrote the RICO Act, the Racketeering Act.

He was my professor in a seminar I was taking on criminal law. The interview was at 10 or 11 o’clock, I went to him at like nine. I said, “I don’t want anything to do with these people. They’re all a bunch of goddamn fascists.” He says, “Greg, look …” He says, “Two things you need to understand. First of all, you’re not going to become the attorney general. You’re going to become a prosecutor. You’re so far down on the totem pole that nobody will even know you’re there. The stuff that happens at the top just doesn’t filter down that way. What happened to Saturday Night Massacre had absolutely no impact,” he said, “on any prosecutor in the Justice Department. So don’t worry about that stuff. Nixon isn’t going to call you up and tell you to do something bad. It’s not going to happen, I promise you.”

He said, “And the second thing is,” and this was probably a little more persuasive, he said, “You’re the first interview. If you cancel, you’re going to piss them off and they’re going to be pissed off for every other person that they interview at this school all day long.” He said, “And that’s not fair to your classmates being interviewed.” So I said, “Okay, I’ll take the interview.” But I didn’t want it. I didn’t want the job. That’s probably why I got it. I went in there not giving a shit about what I said or what answers I gave or anything like that. But lo and behold, a few months later I get the call, they want to hire me. So that’s how I got into the Justice Department.

Jeff Guin:

Let’s step back a minute. Because you were mentioning that you’re very liberal at this point, and I don’t know if you’ve always felt that way?

Greg Baldwin:

I was a lifelong Democrat, but I was Democrat because daddy was a Democrat. My father was a depression Democrat. He was very conservative. But he was a Democrat by God and he voted Democrat, and that’s the way we were.

Jeff Guin:

So you’re very liberal at this time, it’s also like this is the height of this sexual revolution and probably the first time that gay people have a presence on a national scale. So you’re kind of out, but you’re not out-

Greg Baldwin:

Well, I’m out to myself reluctantly and I know it’s something I have to hide. But I was not out in the sense of anybody else knowing.

Jeff Guin:

So your identification with liberal politics is in no way you making that transition-

Greg Baldwin:

Oh no, my becoming a liberal had its limits. It’s like I said, I wasn’t going to become a communist. Because I just had too much training and indoctrination. I didn’t think for myself. I didn’t know that at the time, but I’d probably never had an original thought in my life except for one or two things I did in college by accident, because I was following the rules, the track that was laid out for me. When you’re in the white man category, I want to say the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, but I’m not Protestant, or I wasn’t. But white Anglo-Saxon male, that’s the place to be. That was the premium in the ’50s and ’60s and well into the ’70s and ’80s and I think even the ’90s. That was the place to be. It still is. I mean, people who say there’s no white privilege, they don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.

I learned about white privilege, I learned what it was because they took it away from me. When I finally did come out, I lost all my privilege. And it hurts. And it’s scary. So I can tell you there is white privilege. But I’m digressing now away from where you wanted to go. You wanted to go to … Where was I in my head at this time? In my head, I was playing a part. I was acting, literally. I was a gay person, I knew I wasn’t supposed to be a gay person, so I was not going to be a gay person, period. That’s the end of it.

That lasted a good 10 years. I was married, we married … Let me see, when did we split up? I think we split up around the 11th year. Let me see. Married in ’69, and I left in, I think it was in 80.. But in any case …

Jeff Guin:

You said you left?

Greg Baldwin:

Yeah, I left. I came out to her. Because I realized, I’m not sure many men understand this, but wives talk to each other and they are extremely graphic. She talked to the other wives, she knew that I was not, I hate to use the word normal, maybe average is better, the average husband. We’d have sex once every three or four weeks and all of her friends are getting it three or four times a week. She didn’t say anything, she didn’t complain. She never complained. She didn’t confront me or anything like that. But I knew it wasn’t good for her. Now at the same time, I had a friend in the Justice Department that I knew was gay, and we had tricked once. No relationship, but we were friends.

From time to time I would have to go … I was stationed in Rochester, New York in the organized crime and racketeering section. So it was called the Rochester Field Office of the Buffalo Strike Force. But it was a one-man office, and I was the one. From time to time, I would have to go to Washington to report or discuss something, some investigation or something like that. I would hook up with my gay friend who was in the Justice Department, he was in the environmental section, I think. I think that’s what they called it, I’m not sure. But he was basically an environmental trial lawyer.

He and I got along very well. We used to talk about my situation. One time we were sitting there probably drinking beer, middle of the night and he says, “Greg, I can understand you destroying your own life, because it’s your life. If you want to destroy it, go ahead.” He said, “What I don’t understand is why you’re willing to destroy the lives of your wife and your two sons.” That was like getting hit upside the head with a baseball bat because it had never occurred to me there was anybody else involved in this. I thought it was all about me, and it was never about me, it was really about them. Those two sentences stuck with me all my life.

What’s that old saying, “No man is an island.” I thought I was, and I wasn’t. That’s what made me realize, and I’ll love this guy for the rest of his life if he’s still alive, and then the rest of my life, for telling me that. It was just probably almost a throwaway line with him, but it made me think and I started thinking, “This can’t go on. It just doesn’t … I’m really missing …” But I didn’t know what to do. So anyway, back in Rochester, I used to have to try cases in surrounding cities. It’ll sound Podunk, but they were major cities in those days. I had to try cases in Syracuse and in Albany, and sometimes in Binghamton, which really was Podunk.

But I had a case that was scheduled in Albany, and it was just before Thanksgiving. It was the night before I was supposed to leave … When you do a trial, you just don’t walk into a courtroom, you prepare, and it’ll take one to two weeks to really get it prepared. You have to interview the witnesses, get all the documents, get the exhibits marked, get all the motions done, and all the rest. It’s very, very intense. Well, this case was in Albany, so I had to go to Albany for about two weeks to get this case ready, and then another week to try the case.

The night before I leave I’m home in bed, and my wife was a nurse and she was working, my ex-wife, she was working. She worked the 3-11 shift. So I would come home and I’d feed the boys, wash them and brush their teeth and all that stuff, put them to bed. Then I’d go to bed and she’d come in around 11:30. She came in and I think she rolled over, she put her arm around me and I rolled away or something like that because I just wasn’t interested in having sex. That’s the way it was. I wasn’t good enough to pretend well.

So after a few minutes she got up and she went downstairs into the living room and I could hear her crying. I remember thinking to myself, “You son of a bitch, how the fuck can you do this?” That’s exactly what I thought. Those are the words that I used. I said, “You cannot do this.” So I got up out of bed, put on my bathrobe, went downstairs, sat down in the living room, she’s in chair here, there’s a round sidetable between us, I’m at a chair here. So we’re sort of side by side, but not physically, side by side. I said to her … I didn’t know how to do this, I hadn’t practiced. I just had to do it, and I had to do it then because I knew I was hurting her. I was killing her. I knew I was doing it. I couldn’t have said that at that time, I couldn’t have put it together for you that way. But in retrospect, that’s exactly what was going on. So I sat down and I said, “Look, the problem is not you. The problem is me. I’m gay.”

There was this kind of silence, and I really don’t remember what she said. But I do remember that she seemed relieved because she thought the problem was I had another women on the side and she either couldn’t or didn’t want to compete with that. But when I was gay, it wasn’t something she could compete with, and it made all the difference in the world. It’s hard to explain. But we talked about it, we discussed it. I don’t remember any of the discussions really, or what we said to one another. But we decided we wanted to stay together. I definitely did. I mean, I really did not want to come out, publicly anyway. And I loved her, and I loved my sons. But I couldn’t go on this way with her, or with them. So it was a baby step, but it was a step.

It wasn’t a baby step to me. In retrospect it was a baby step. But I mean, it was a major step to me at the time. I don’t know where the hell I got the balls to do it. Maybe it was just because I really did love her and I understood what I was doing to her. But in any case, we didn’t tell the boys. It was just between the two of us. I had to go off, maybe it wasn’t the night before I left … It doesn’t matter. But I had to go off to do the trial and I did. I drove off to Albany to try that case. Lost the thing too, which still pisses me off.

It was not a bad case either, but I can see the holes in it now. But we got through the trial, and this was Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving was the following week. My wife and I, ex-wife, had planned she would pick me up in Albany because we always spent Thanksgiving with her family in Plymouth. It was the drive from hell. It was probably about a 12 hour drive. But we did it, we really loved her family and being with them, they were a lot of fun. So we were supposed to meet in Albany in front of the courthouse, I would be standing there waiting and she would come pick me up and we’d drive on to Boston. I remember standing there with my suitcase out in front of the courthouse, in bleak, nasty weather, late November, Albany, it’s fucking cold-

November, fucking freezing cold, cloudy. And I thinking, “Will she come? Will she show up? Or will she just go right past Albany and go on home to Plymouth?” And then she showed up. Boys were in the car, everybody, hello, kissing, hugging, all the rest of that stuff. We drive on, the boys fall asleep. I can’t remember if I said to her or she said to me, but the conversation was basically, I think she said, “I didn’t know if you were going to be there.” And I said to her, “I didn’t know if you’d come.” And we stayed in the marriage, this was, trying to think of the years, late seventies, probably ’78, ’79, ’78, I think. And we stayed married. We didn’t tell anybody about my being gay. And I was transferred voluntarily, transferred from Rochester to Philadelphia. There was a federal law under which the federal government could lend employees to local law enforcement. It included the Justice Department. I don’t know if it was only the Justice Department or every department, but you could loan employees to cities and municipalities and counties to help them do things.

And Pennsylvania had just passed a law allowing for sitting grand juries. Prior to that, they had to be specially called and it was a big thing. In the federal system, there’s grand juries sitting all the time, constantly. Not 24 hours a day, but they’re almost always available. But they didn’t in Pennsylvania. So having grand juries at your beck and call and always in session was a very new thing to them. And they didn’t know how to do it. They also, at the same time, passed an Electronic Surveillance Act. Electronic Surveillance was basically tapping phones and bugging rooms. But it was a very complicated law, it was a very difficult thing to do and do it legally. It could be easily suppressed, it was hard to do correctly. And nobody knew how to do it In Pennsylvania, well, some people did, of course. But what I’m focusing on is the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, suddenly has the grand juries, but they have no idea how to run them or how to regulate who goes through it and when and how to schedule things.And suddenly they could do electronic surveillance legally, but they had no experience with it. And a friend of mine who had worked with me in the Buffalo Strike Force when we were both in Rochester, but he would drive over from Buffalo and get me oriented for the first year or so that I was there, he had taken a job at the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office. His name was Lloyd George Parry. Very good man, very good prosecutor, fair and totally honest. He’s the guy who tried the cops in the MOVE scandal. You don’t remember MOVE, I’m sure. MOVE was a Black movement in Philadelphia. I don’t remember what it stands for, but it was called MOVE, and they took over a building in Philadelphia, it’s just a tenement that was abandoned. But the cops decided they had to get them out, because they didn’t own it, they didn’t belong there, and it was a white neighborhood, “So why are you here? You’re Black.” And the neighbors didn’t like it. And you get all the standard stories of garbage and sex and loud music and all the horseshit, and it all was horseshit, but it surrounded these poor people.

And the cops decided to get them out. So what they ultimately did is they did a raid on the thing and they burned the entire building down. I think they burned the entire block down doing it, but it was a big scandal because the police had overreacted so badly. And my friend who had been transferred to Philadelphia was in charge of trying the police, which was an impossible task in Philadelphia. It couldn’t be done. Rizzo was the mayor at the time, and he was the former police chief. And there was just no way those guys were going to get convicted. But that’s again, a different story. But he said to the DA, who was Ed Rendell, who later became the governor. He said to Rendell, “I know a guy in Rochester that knows all of his stuff.” And I had done grand juries, I mean I used grand juries to do routine indictments. I used grand juries to do difficult, complicated investigations where the grand jury is investigating.

And I had done, oh Christ, a dozen electronic surveillances, bugging cars and rooms and houses and phones, and none of them were ever suppressed. So I knew how to do that. And the way this worked is the government would continue to pay my salary and the local law enforcement would offer something on top. So I wound up with a 25% raise, it was just too good to pass up. But we were ready to leave Rochester. None of us wanted to. The boys loved Rochester, she loved Rochester, I loved Rochester. Great place to live, really. And I can’t say anything bad about that place at all except for the weather. But we needed a change, not badly, but we needed a change. New friends and stuff like that, I’m not quite sure why. Running away from myself, maybe. But anyway, we did it. I was the driving force, I was the one who did it. I think she would’ve stayed if she could have. But we went down to Philadelphia, we moved there. I was in the DA’s office for a year, I would say, wow, what was my title? Head of the… Christ, I want to say the Intelligence Unit, I think that’s what it was called.

I don’t know what they call it now, they probably don’t even have it anymore. But I had to write the grand jury manual and the manual for how to do electronic surveillance, which I did. And the year was up and I didn’t like being there, and they didn’t like me being there. So we mutually parted ways at the end of the year. And coincidentally, at the end of the year, I got a call from the guy who had been my former boss in the Strike Force in Buffalo, Marty Steinberg. He took over the Buffalo Strike Force, his name was Marty Steinberg, and he’s still here, he’s still practicing law here in Miami. A very, very incredibly good lawyer, one of the best trial lawyers I’ve ever seen, and great investigator. And he ran the Buffalo Strike Force. And technically he was my boss, even though I was in Rochester. And he had taken a job, he left the Strike Force, I don’t remember when, but he had left it, and he had taken the position of chief counsel for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

And to put that into context, that committee is the old Senate Un-American Activities Committee. It was Joe McCarthy’s committee. And the officers were still in the same place. I actually had Bobby Kennedy’s desk, because I went to work there ultimately. But Marty was the guy who… No, I’m getting ahead of myself now. George Perry was the guy who got me the job in Philadelphia, and Marty was the guy at the end of the Philadelphia thing, just as it’s winding down, I’m in about my 10th or 11th month of the 12-month commitment. And Marty calls me and says, “Look, I’ve got a position open as assistant counsel, if you are interested, if you want to come down.” And I thought, this is the time, because in terms of living with my wife, the lie was getting unbearable.

I remember going to cocktail parties and having to laugh at queer jokes, and I had to tell queer jokes, because you have to keep your credentials. You have to play the game, and you have to play, it’s not an easy game to play. It is fucking tough, because you have to watch everything you do, how you walk, how you talk, how you react to a joke, how you react to a good-looking woman coming down the street. You can’t go over the top, because if you do, it’s the lady doth protest too much, they begin to suspect, but you can’t under-react, because then they’ll think, “There’s something wrong with him, he didn’t react or he didn’t react like us.” So you have to match yourself to all the nuances of all of the straight guys around you, and it is fucking murder.

And it got me to the point I think, maybe of a nervous breakdown, because I remember thinking, if I go on this way, I am going to be the guy in the headline that says, “Man kills wife, two kids, then self.” I could not live that way and survive, and I probably would’ve taken them with me. I certainly could not have gone on. And so when Marty called and said, “This job is available, it’s in Washington DC,” I jumped at it, because I knew we could not afford to move again. We had just moved from Rochester to Philadelphia and we couldn’t afford to buy a new house in Washington or a home or apartment or anything. So I told her I was getting this job and I’m going down there, I’ll come back on the weekends, but I’m going. And basically, it was we’re separating and she understood that, and I understood that, we both knew it, and we decided we weren’t going to tell anybody.

We would just play the game and say that we were for career purposes, for my career, I was taking this job in Washington, but we couldn’t afford to move, so I would commute. And I did commute. I would go down there Sunday evening, spend the week, and come back either Friday night or Saturday morning on the train between Washington and Philly. It’s only a couple three hours. And it was a reliable way of doing it, and it was a hell of a lot easier than driving. And I couldn’t afford a car anyway, I didn’t have a car. I walked to work when I was in DC. So let me see now. What was the point of all of this?

(01:33:04)

Jeff Guin:

So you’ve been out to your wife for a while now.

Greg Baldwin:

Oh, yeah. And really, I didn’t come out to anybody, but I basically said to her, “I can’t live like this anymore.” And I took Marty’s job. She was pissed, she was really angry. She would’ve stayed married to me for the rest of her life, we’d still be married if she had her choice. And I think her mentality was sort of the American contract, just as I get privileges being a white male, she had automatic white privileges being a white female. And one of those privileges is your father takes care of you for all of your life, then your husband takes care of you for all of your life. And I broke that contract. So she was not happy. But I felt like, I can’t describe it, like the weight of the world was off my shoulders. Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, I’m free at last, that was the feeling. It was a new world and I didn’t have to hide and I could pick friends. I didn’t have to pick suburban couples. I could pick gay guys, straight guys, women, I could have all those friends.

And I was starting fresh. I was starting all over again. It was like I was just starting college. That moment when you suddenly become your own person, only I was doing it 10 fucking years later than everybody else, but I was doing it finally. And it was absolutely glorious, I loved it. I work all week, go out to the bars, go to the gym, date, have a good time. Saturday morning, got on the train, go up to Philadelphia, go to the house, see the kids, do all the laundry, clean the place. She was terrible at laundry and absolutely awful at cleaning. She couldn’t vacuum to save her life, God bless her. She tried, she just wasn’t good at it. She was good in the kitchen, but she hated doing dishes. So I’d come home, I’d do the dishes, I’d do the laundry, I’d have a week’s worth of laundry from the three of them, and so it’d take me all weekend to do the laundry. But it worked for a while.

Jeff Guin:

So the boys have any inkling as of what was going on?

Greg Baldwin:

No, no. I told the boys the standard story, my job is taking me there, “But we’re still married and I’m still your father, blah, blah, blah, blah,” that sort of thing. I think they understood what was going on. They didn’t know the words for it, but I think they knew that we were splitting up, but we did not tell them we were splitting up. We didn’t tell anybody we were splitting it. And that didn’t come until later. But I wanted to tell the boys and after three or four months of being in Washington, I said to her, “I think we should tell the boys.” But she had a pediatrician who’s this old German, a super conservative, probably a former Nazi or something. And he said to her, “Oh, if you tell your boys about him , they would be destroyed. You’ll ruin their lives,” all the death, damnation, Sodom and Gomorrah, sulfur and fire and brimstone, “don’t tell the boys whatever you do.”

So I’m not looking to pick a fight and I’m not going to give her any more trouble than she’s already got from me. She’s now a single woman and suburban American. Do you know what that means? There isn’t a fate worse than death than that. Really, it’s that terrible. I didn’t realize this, I don’t think she did either. But when I left, she became the neighborhood pariah, because she was a single or a lone woman in a neighborhood of men. Now the men already had women, but the women saw her as a predator after their husbands. And so suddenly she was cut off from every friend she had up there. None of them except for one friend, Janice Campolongo, a wonderful person, and one neighbor, Paul and Margarite DeSantis. No one else stuck with her. All the invitations stopped, the shopping trips stopped, the afternoon teas, all that stopped. And she wound up with no friends, which I mean, I was shocked, I just couldn’t believe it, but that’s the downside.

Jeff Guin:

Did she tell you this?

Greg Baldwin:

Yeah. Yeah, she did. And she was really angry with me and she badmouthed me to all of her friends. She made new friends at my kids’ schools.

Jeff Guin:

Did she say why?

Greg Baldwin:

Yeah, I think she told them. I’m not sure when she told the neighborhood in Philadelphia or the ex-neighbors in Rochester. They all found out, but I mean, it’d be sort of hard to miss, because eventually I was in the fucking news all the time for a while as a “gay activist” and stuff like that. Well, I’m not sure if she ever told anybody I was gay, I think she did, but all of her friends hated me, because we didn’t have enough money for two households. It was a problem. And she bore the brunt of it. She was the one who was stuck. Now she went through every fucking credit card I ever had and maxed every last one of them out. And finally, the financial got so bad that I said to her… Let me see, no, she hadn’t met Pete yet. So I think I said to her, “We need to get a legal agreement here, we need to legally separate.” And at some point my mother was on me almost daily, “Go back to your wife, go back to your wife, go back to your wife.”

And I hadn’t come out to her or my father or my brother and sisters, but it was constant pressure. And finally, I just had it with my mother and I decided this has just got to stop. So I called Claire, that was my ex-wife’s name. I called her up and I said, maybe I wrote to her, I’m not sure, I think I might’ve written. But basically, the message was that, “This just can’t go on, we’ve got to tell people. And if you don’t tell your family by such and such a time,” and I gave her a month or two, I think, “then I’ll tell them. But one way or the other, this is going to stop and we’re going to tell people the truth about what’s going on. And if you want to tell them that it’s because I’m gay, that’s fine with me. I don’t mind at all. And if I tell them, I will tell them it’s because I’m gay.”

The chips were down at that point. And so she agreed and she told her parents, her father never talked to me again, which really hurt. Her mother has passed away at that point. But anyway, that’s how we sort of cut that Gordian knot, by my demanding that it be cut. But we still didn’t tell the boys. And we didn’t tell the boys, because the doctor was still saying, “Ach du lieber, they’ll all die terrible fates.” So we didn’t tell them, although I wanted to, and they would come down and visit me on weekends, and I introduced him to my gay friends, I introduced him to the guy I was dating. They knew what was going on. Kids are not stupid. We think they are, but they’re not. They understand things. They might not have the words for it, and they might not have the courage to question you about it, but they understand these things.

And I found out later that they did know exactly what was going on. They didn’t know the mechanics of it or the details, they just knew I was with Yates, who’s a guy I was dating there that they knew, they really liked Yates. I think they liked Yates better than me. But Yates was a real character, wonderful guy too. But we didn’t tell them until substantially later. And that gets into my job with the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, because that ultimately was the trigger that fired the shot. What happened in a nutshell is I came out to the senator who was my boss in the Senate Subcommittee. He asked me to leave, because being gay meant I was a security risk. I came down here to Miami as an assistant U.S. attorney, and they did a background check. They discovered I was gay and everybody went fucking nuts in the Justice Department.

And ultimately, them going nuts is what led to me coming out to, I think, to the boys at that time, but my mother and my father, my brother, and my two sisters as well, because the FBI wanted to interview them all, but I’m getting way ahead now. But that was sort of the first step.

Jeff Guin:

We’re going to go into detail about that tomorrow. I think that’s where we’ll start tomorrow. But in terms of the boys, where were they in that? You said they understood already, but did you ever have a formal conversation with them?

Greg Baldwin:

I did in the end, yes, I did. I got permission from her, because finally the German doctor died, she got another pediatrician, she told the pediatrician the whole story, pediatrician says, “You haven’t told the boys yet? What’s wrong with you? What are you thinking? For God’s sake, tell them.” So then she calls me after she says, “They’re coming down this weekend, tell them then.” It was a crazy thing. Anyway, they came down, let me see, I was here in Miami and they came down for a week or something, one of the holidays, and I was with my current husband Jose at that point. We were living together in the Grove, Coconut Grove. And I told my wife, “Yes, I’ll tell them when they come down.” So I sent him off somewhere. He knew I was going to do this, and I sent him off, “Just get out of here so I can do this in case there’s all sorts of fireworks or emotion or something.” I didn’t know what to expect.

So they’re outside playing football, they’re throwing a Nerf ball back and forth in the street, and I call them in, I sit them down. Now, when I had told them that I was leaving to go to Washington, I had told them, “I can’t give you all the reasons now, you’re too young, but when you’re older, I will tell you exactly what’s going on.” And so I called them and I sat them down and I said, “You remember when I left Philadelphia, I told you, I’d explain someday why I was leaving?” And they said, “Yeah.” And I said, “Well, I’ve been given it a lot of thought and I’ve been watching you guys, and I think you’re ready to know.” They go, “Oh yeah, okay, tell us.” And I don’t know what they expected to hear, but I said, “The reason that your mother and weIsplit up is because I’m gay.” And they go, “Oh.” hat was it, “Oh.”

I said, “Well, do you have any questions?” “No.” I said, “Do you know what gay is?” “Yeah.” “What is it?” “Well, it’s when two guys are together. They like each other instead of girls.” I said, “Okay, do you have any other questions?” They said, “Yeah.” I said, “What?” “Can we go out and play football now?” That was it, because they had figured it all out. They had seen me in Washington, they had seen my friends there in Washington, and they put two and two together. I mean, they’re not dumbbells. So it was sort of like a non-event.

Jeff Guin:

Did you have any conversations in subsequent years or as they got older, did they express any sort of distress in that process or have questions for you?

Greg Baldwin:

I think the distress was more centered around the divorce than anything else, the separation and ultimately the divorce. The divorce, I don’t think bothered them, but the separation, my leaving Claire, as with any kid that impacted them, and there was anger there and there was residual anger that we all got over, because we talked about it.

Jeff Guin:

Mama ain’t happy. Nobody’s happy.

Greg Baldwin:

Well, it was really rough for her, because before she met her current husband, she was alone, so a single parent with two boys, trying to get them educated, but having to work full time, and she put herself through graduate school, so she got a Master’s in Nursing. An absolutely awesome person. She wound up basically running the hospital up in Philadelphia that she was working at. It was really rough on her until she finally met, I think she dated a few guys, I don’t really know the details, but she finally met Pete Lindley and Pete, who is to the right of Attila the Hun, and she married, and I always liked Pete, we never talk politics, but I had no expectations of demands of Pete except that she make her happy, and he did make her happy.

And we’ve always gotten along with Pete and the four of us are all good friends and see each other and talk to each other frequently, or holidays and stuff like that. So she got through it, but it was not easy. It was very, very difficult for her from the first original ostracizing by all of her so-called friends to finding a place, she couldn’t afford to keep the house we were in. She finally sold it. She sold it at a profit, but she lied to me about that, and I knew she was lying, but I wasn’t going to say, “I’m entitled to 50%, give me a check right now.” Fuck, I’m the one who caused all the problems, so I wasn’t entitled to split any equity with her, and I didn’t. So she kept all the equity, but then she bought a place or rented, I forget which. But anyway, she kept the money. She got a new place and she was there for quite a while, and she was there, I think when Pete was with her. They were both together then.

Jeff Guin:

Did you know Pete prior to-

Greg Baldwin:

Oh no.

Jeff Guin:

There was no-

Greg Baldwin:

No.

Jeff Guin:

He wasn’t one of the neighbors.

Greg Baldwin:

No, no, no. I don’t know of any connection with neighbors and Pete at the time, it was just somebody she met and they fell in love. He was in the middle of a divorce too, and his was a very bitter, hotly contested divorce on his ex-wife’s side, and so they had to pretend they weren’t living together while they were living together. It was awkward, because if Pete’s ex-wife had found out that he was living with somebody else, she would’ve used it in the divorce, much to his disadvantage. But ultimately, it all worked out. They got married and I got married and the rest is history.