The collection consists of hundreds of hours of Arnold Michaelis' audio, film, and video interviews with the world's leading political and cultural personalities recorded since 1958. Martin Luther King, Jr., Adlai Stevenson, Dean Rusk, Ronald Reagan, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Indira Gandhi are just a few of the men and women interviewed by Mr. Michaelis in their own homes. Arnold Michaelis sought "to record for today and posterity, the flavor of the thinking and the essence of the ideas of the men and women whose lives will be studied by future generations." The bulk of the collection is made up of films, television programs, and radio programs that Michaelis produced, and elements used in those productions. The majority of the audiotapes in the collection consist of interviews, edited and unedited, with celebrities and political figures.
