Richard D. Heffner started interviewing major opinion makers when Dwight Eisenhower was president. Since 1956 as host of The Open Mind, the longest-running television interview program in public television, Professor Heffner has been interviewing many of the influential figures who have shaped our national history, or just inhabited the consciousness of modern America. Here are the candid, often surprising and provocative, and always revelatory voices of the men and women who have dissected national politics, clarified the law, molded the media, shaped race relations, set the agenda for women's rights, explored medicine, and chronicled or created the American scene and pop culture. Here, too, is Mr. Heffner's own cogent perspective on the events and people that defined America over the past fifty years. The Open Mind has recorded the intellectual passage of a nation through a half-century of hopes and disappointments, of revolutions in thought and fashion, of constitutional challenges, recession, war and the ongoing battle for freedom and justice.

Through the unguarded immediacy of a video recorded conversation and text transcripts, this site offers the benefit of historical hindsight and insight into America's near-term past.

These conversations with some of the most creative thinkers of the last half-century are a primary resource for students, teachers, researchers, archivists, librarians, historians, journalists, and all who are interested in history, biography, media, communications, news, and public affairs.