CHAPTER 8
you say you want a revolution
As 1967 unfolded, the tribes grew further and further apart. Hippies often felt that the antiwar “leaders” were boring and/or too angry. Radicals and liberals accused hippies of being self-indulgent. The old left claimed that the new left had no discipline. Young radicals were not all that impressed with what the old left had accomplished. Within each of these broad categories there were numerous sects, which were frequently at odds with each other.
At the same time, the American government and establishment increasingly harassed the civil rights and antiwar movements. The left pondered numerous conspiracy theories. Was the spread of LSD a plot to undermine left-wing activism? How about the proliferation of other hard drugs? Were there government provocateurs who were manipulating the movement into self-destructive actions? Were any of the deaths of Panthers, rock musicians, and countercultural figures actually murders? As Stephen Stills had written, paranoia strikes deep. Many of these notions were met with skepticism from most hippies and lefties, but there was also a prudent appreciation of the old adage: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.
It is certain that the FBI used wiretaps and informants and other methods, legal and illegal, with an ideological agenda that went far beyond stopping crime. Many details remain shrouded in mystery, but anyone interested in having a sense of the dark pressure that all aspects of the left were under can Google the word “COINTELPRO,” which was the FBI’s code name for the program that aimed to subvert the protest movements.
At a minimum, the antiwar movement deserves a lot of the credit for the “Vietnam Syndrome,” a strong aversion to another war, which the right wing thought was a disease and we knew would help keep the US out of a war in Central America in the eighties (though it did not, admittedly, keep the US out of the region altogether). This would not be the utopian result of “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream,” but it was far from meaningless.
None of this was clear in 1967. For many lefties, the need to feel that their tribe’s strategy was superior to other antiestablishment voices created a toxic myopia that delegitimized those whose antiwar tactics were just as valuable.
One weird example of counterculture infighting took place at the 1967 SDS Convention in Michigan, when Emmett Grogan and Peter Berg disrupted one of the meetings. SDS was among the many groups that Grogan disdained. Berg had called the Port Huron Statement of five years earlier “pallid and elusive.” The 1967 conference was called “Back to the Drawing Boards,” and Tom Hayden gave the keynote speech.
Grogan and Berg burst into the convention uninvited, asking for a lawyer to help another Digger who had supposedly been arrested for swimming nude in the nearby Platte River. Berg ridiculed SDS as all talk and no action, in contrast to the Diggers who were helping individual people with free food, crash pads, and medicine. Grogan read Gary Snyder’s poem “A Curse on the Men in Washington, Pentagon,” and they stayed for more than an hour loudly insulting SDS members.
Todd Gitlin speculated that perhaps the reason SDS permitted the long interruption in their convention was that the Diggers “were our anarchist bad conscience . . . We shared in the antileadership mood.” The pressure to prove just how radical they were led to police being described as “pigs” for the first time in an SDS newsletter in September 1967, and to a resolution condemning Jefferson Airplane for their Levi’s commercials.
A lot of the focus was put on helping draft evaders. Stanford University student body president David Harris (who would marry Joan Baez the following year) had announced the formation of the group The Resistance in April, and at its encouragement more than five thousand men had turned in or burned their draft cards in 1967.
SDS passed a resolution to help military deserters. Its author, Jeff Shero, explained,
First, hide the guy out for a few weeks until his GI haircut grows in. Then give him your draft card and write to the draft board for another copy, telling them that you lost yours. After that, supplied with civilian clothes, he leaves for another city and gets a job . . . I intended it to be an illegal resolution. We should stand for disruption in the armed forces and for soldiers going underground.
This was fine, but many of us felt there was a dissonance between the intensity of anger that was starting to come from some of the radicals and the lack of a coherent long-term strategy to accomplish their goals. Michael Kazin, who became cochair of the SDS chapter at Harvard in 1969, told me, “It bothered me when John Lennon sang in ‘Revolution,’ ‘You better free your mind instead.’” The implication was that activism was less important than inner work. I reminded Kazin that earlier in the song Lennon sang, “You say you got a real solution / Well, you know / We’d all love to see the plan.” Kazin chuckled ruefully and admitted, “Well, there wasn’t one.”
During this same time period, religious antiwar communities also became increasingly radical. A delegation of Quakers went to North Vietnam with medical supplies. Radical Catholic Father Philip Berrigan and his brother Father Daniel Berrigan were involved in numerous nonviolent acts of civil disobedience aimed at ending the war. On October 27, Philip Berrigan and three others (the “Baltimore Four”) poured blood on Baltimore Selective Service records. As they waited for the police to arrive and arrest them, the group passed out Bibles. Berrigan told draft board employees, “This sacrificial and constructive act is meant to protest the pitiful waste of American and Vietnamese blood in Indochina.” He was sentenced to six years in prison.
Jews and Jews
On June 10, 1967, the Six-Day War ended with Israel’s resounding victory over several Arab invaders and with the Jewish state occupying relatively large pieces of land formerly controlled by their enemies.
This created some immediate fault lines in the American left. Certain radicals, including some vocal members of the black community, identified with the Palestinians who were now under Israeli military occupation. Many left-wing Jews looked for a formula to balance their radicalism on other issues with an inclination to support the Jewish state that had been created in the shadow of the Holocaust and which had prevailed against surrounding countries aspiring to destroy it.
The Soviet Union publicly supported the Arab countries during the Six-Day War, as did several American leftist groups who typically stuck to the party line, including the Communist Party USA, the Progressive Labor Party, and the Socialist Workers Party—all of which had few members but nonetheless represented “the left” in the minds of some American Jews.
In an interview with the New York Times on August 15, 1967, SNCC leader Ralph Featherstone said, “SNCC is drawn to the Arab cause because it is working toward a third world alliance of oppressed people all over the world—Africa, Asia, Latin America. The Arabs have been oppressed continually by Israelis and by Europeans as well, in such countries as Algeria.” He denied that SNCC was anti-Semitic, and said that they were only interested in indicting “Jewish oppressors,” a category he applied to Israel, and “to those Jews in the little Jew shops in the ghettos.” The vast majority of Jews, even radical Jews, were offended by that language.
During the first week of September there was a New Politics Convention at Chicago’s Palmer House, which attracted several thousand delegates. I asked Todd Gitlin how one became a delegate and he laughed and said, “That’s a good question.” A committee had been created a year or two earlier, and a sense that there should be a gathering of the left, possibly to nominate a third-party presidential candidate, took hold and drew funding from various labor unions and wealthy individuals, including Harvard instructor Marty Peretz.
The arcane rules of the convention gave weighted voting to representatives of various groups, and a forceful alliance of black delegates succeeded in pushing through a resolution that gave them 50 percent of the total votes. It is not clear whether the rationale for this was that African Americans represented half of the American left or as recognition of past discrimination, but the most vocal black voices were not, according to Gitlin, activists who he had previously seen at SDS or SNCC meetings or any other left-wing gatherings. To this day, he wonders if some of them were provocateurs directed by the government or reactionary private interests to foment dissension within the left.
If so, they were successful. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the opening of the convention, but he came and went quickly and was not a delegate, nor was he present for any of the meetings. He made it clear again that he was unwilling to run for president of the United States, and without the potential of his name, the notion of a third-party challenge to Johnson and to whomever the Republicans would nominate receded. Instead, the convention focused on a series of radical resolutions amid angry infighting.
Renata Adler acidly wrote in the New Yorker of radicals “who seemed to find in ceaseless local organizing—around any issue or tactic demonstrably certain of failure—a kind of personal release, which effective social action might deny them . . . [There were] revolutionaries who discussed riots as though they were folk songs or pieces of local theater.”
The most controversial proclamation condemned the “imperialist Zionist war” that Israel had just won. The anti-Israel resolution was actually removed in the final hours of the conference, but there were lasting wounds that remained from some of the loud anti-Semitic rhetoric expressed by a handful of black delegates. Peretz walked out of the convention and out of the American left. He told a TV crew covering the convention that “the movement is dead.” Peretz later bought the previously left-wing New Republic magazine and shifted its ideology to the right, especially on foreign policy.
According to Adler, Dick Gregory said, “Every Jew in America over thirty years old knows another Jew who hates niggers. Well, it’s even, baby.” It is impossible to know the context of Gregory’s remark fifty years later, but he had long worked with Jews in the entertainment business; he remained close to them, and his subsequent activism was inclusive. It seems likely to me that he was reacting to pressure from some Jews not only to oppose anti-Semitism, but to somehow take responsibility for the remarks of all other African Americans.
Dr. King made a related point in a long letter to Dr. Maurice Eisendrath of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. After explaining that no one from the SCLC was actually a delegate to the New Politics Convention, he pointed out that those SCLC members who attended meetings, such as Hosea Williams, fought against the anti-Israel resolution and helped to get it reversed. King summarized his support of Israel’s right to exist, the legitimate concerns of impoverished and occupied Palestinians, and the unhealthy influence of the oil business in the region. King lamented any effort to divide blacks and Jews and concluded, “It would be a tragic and immoral mistake to identify the mass of Negroes with the very small number that succumb to cheap and dishonest slogans, just as it would be a serious error to identify all Jews with the few who exploit Negroes under their economic sway.”
Nevertheless, the psychic wounds passed on from the dreadful legacy of the Holocaust caused painful reverberations for some Jews. As Eric Alterman wrote,
For the left, the [Six-Day War’s] legacy became a point of painful contention—as many liberals and leftists increasingly viewed Israel as having traded its David status for a new role as an oppressive, occupying Goliath. For many American Jews, however, most of whom previously kept their emotional distance from Israel, the emotional commitment to Israel became so central that it came to define their ethnic, even religious, identities.
There were also American Jews and others on the left who tried to balance support for Israel’s right to exist with opposition to an extended occupation of the newly conquered territory. J.J. Goldberg (no relation) started the first high school chapter of SDS in 1965 at Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington, DC. He went to George Washington University in 1966 and joined the SDS chapter there as well, but quit after a few months because the head of it “was a very nice guy but he was a Maoist and an anti-Zionist.” To Goldberg, Zionism was not only an expression of solidarity with a post-Holocaust Jewish state, but also a connection to democratic socialism. In the sixties, the only government that Israel had ever known was that of the Labor Party. “Pete Seeger used to sing a song in Hebrew at every concert,” Goldberg remembers. “In 1960, when Ghana became the first African country to gain independence from a European colonial power, we were taught their new national anthem at the Jewish summer camp I attended.”
It came as a shock to Goldberg when segments of the American left, such as those at the New Politics Convention, opposed Israel after the Six-Day War. At the same time, many of the establishment Jewish organizations were supporting the Vietnam War, in part because of veiled threats from the Johnson administration that US support for Israel could be compromised if the “Jewish community” opposed him on Vietnam.
Former President Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger Jr. said that it was intellectually inconsistent to oppose the war in Vietnam and support the Six-Day War, but Goldberg disagrees. He sees both as wars of national liberation: “To me, Ho Chi Minh was akin to Ben Gurion.” When he transferred to McGill University in Montreal, Goldberg also supported the Quebecois liberation movement. Yet he debated peace activist David Dellinger, who suggested that Israel should be a nonreligious state: “I felt he was singling out Jews as the only community of its size and set of traditions that didn’t have their own country.”
Among older Jews, no one was under more pressure than Arthur Goldberg (no relation to either J.J. or to me), who had been a leading labor lawyer and was among those who had helped negotiate the merger between the AFL and the CIO in 1955. Goldberg was secretary of labor in Kennedy’s administration until Kennedy appointed him to the United States Supreme Court. When Lyndon Johnson persuaded Arthur Goldberg to leave the Supreme Court and become US ambassador to the United Nations, he was under the impression that the president would allow him to negotiate an end to the war in Vietnam. But Johnson never permitted him to do so.
Barry Goldberg, the blues piano player who was in the Electric Flag, is Arthur Goldberg’s nephew. Barry was immersed in rock and roll and didn’t pay much attention to politics in those days, though he saw his uncle on family occasions and says that Arthur Goldberg forever regretted having been manipulated by Johnson into leaving the Supreme Court.
J.J. Goldberg and other Zionist Jewish lefties were viewed with suspicion both in radical circles and in the mainstream Jewish community. They created new institutions such as the Radical Zionist Alliance, which supported Israel’s right to exist and defend its borders, opposed most of the settlements in the Palestinian territory, opposed the war in Vietnam, and continued to identify with democratic socialism on economic issues. (The notion that all American Jews thought in political unison was almost as untrue in the sixties as it is today. Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Allen Ginsberg, and countless others in the counterculture and radical left had little or no emotional connection to Israel, and at the same time, there was always a cohort of Jewish conservatives who had contempt for the left.)
As the New Politics Convention was winding down, Martin Luther King Jr.’s colleague Andrew Young prophetically shared his feelings about the black radical demands: “These cats don’t know the country has taken a swing to the right. I wish the violence and riots had political significance, but they don’t.” A friend of Young’s chimed in, “They just have political consequences,” to which Young presciently replied, “Yeah, all bad.”
Resistance
By 1968, Tom Hayden would claim that having tried available channels and finding them meaningless, having recognized that the establishment did not listen to public opinion, the new left was moving toward confrontation with the American government. In reality, although the antiwar movement had enormously broadened its constituency, it did not command anything close to majority support in America in 1967. There were ballot initiatives calling for withdrawal from Vietnam in two of the most antiwar cities in America in October 1967. Only 37 percent favored the war in San Francisco and 39 percent in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
This strengthened the argument of older peace movement leaders who wanted to focus on getting an actual majority of Americans to oppose the war. Younger radicals felt that without greater intensity, the dry arguments of peaceniks wouldn’t move the needle. There was some truth on both sides of this divide.
In Todd Gitlin’s book The Sixties, Hayden is quoted as telling the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence that “the turning point, in my opinion, was October 1967, when resistance became the official watchword of the antiwar movement.” A big part of the new thinking was that the cost of disruption would make policy makers recalculate and avoid such costs. Hayden urged the movement to focus on “what cost we can impose on the heartless, cost-calculating decision-makers.” He urged the left not “to become obsessed with finding ways to make the antiwar movement respectable to the editors of the New York Times.”
“Resistance” swept through the cadres of SDS with the swiftness of a hit song, and the government responded in kind. On October 18, 1967, there was a sit-in at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, at the recruiting office of Dow Chemical, the principle manufacturer of napalm, which was causing enormous pain and death in Vietnam. Police clubbed many of the demonstrators and used tear gas on them. About seventy students ended up in the hospital. In response, many student organizations called for a general strike of the university.
Just a couple days before the Madison sit-in, on October 16, there was a march in Oakland in which demonstrators tried to block access to the Oakland Army Induction Center, which resulted in the arrest of Joan Baez, among others.
Joel Goodman and I had arrived in Berkeley several weeks earlier—ostensibly to go to college—and we joined the protest, exuberantly pushing a small Hillman car we’d bought for $100 into an intersection near the induction center along with dozens of others. Our naive notion was that this would actually delay the war machine. In reality, it only took the cops a few hours to tow them all away. Such was the fog of the antiwar movement under siege. The crowd of thousands was more riled up and unruly than I’d seen at East Coast rallies, perhaps because of the “resistance” attitude. When we saw roughly a dozen people run past us with tears coming down their faces from the tear gas, we quickly backed away to avoid getting similarly sprayed.
Mitchell Markus, who would soon become program director of CKGM-FM, the underground radio station in Montreal—and who is now the executive director of the Love Serve Remember Foundation that oversees Ram Dass’s activities—also happened to be in Oakland at that time. “A friend of mine and I were driving nearby and we were so stoned that when we smelled the tear gas we thought it might get us higher. We were against the war, but we had no idea about the details of that protest.”
One of the things I was reminded of when I researched this book is that there were varying accounts of how antiwar kids interacted with Vietnam vets, some of whom were already coming back from their service by 1967. Notwithstanding the fictitious account in Rambo in which Sylvester Stallone’s character claims he was spit on by hippies, no one I knew had anything against the vets. It was obvious to me that they had no control over the war and that the villains were the “best and the brightest” in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. The apartment that Joel and I got in Berkeley was right next door to a couple of vets who shared our enthusiasm for drugs and rock and roll and who became some of my best friends that year.
I don’t claim that our experiences were typical. There is no question that some servicemen back from Vietnam felt disrespected by the changed America they returned to. Many of them needed support that was not forthcoming. However, to the extent that vets were denied the benefits that their counterparts in World War II received, the blame lies not with the counterculture nor with radicals, but with older government officials. Later in the war, many of the most effective voices against it were disenchanted Vietnam vets such as John Kerry and Ron Kovic.
Some on the radical left, black and white, were intrigued by revolutions in third world countries, such as Cuba, that had been catalyzed by small, impassioned cadres. There was a big buzz about Revolution in the Revolution? which was published in 1967 by French academic Régis Debray, who had moved to Bolivia to work with Che Guevara. Debray’s theory was that small groups of committed radicals could be a trigger for mass revolution.
As Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out, however, political conditions in the United States were nothing like those in countries where large majorities had opposed the existing government. As I reflect on the delusional notions of an armed leftist revolution in the United States, I can’t help but be amused that they emanated from some of the same radicals who complained about hippies getting too high!
Gitlin wrote:
There were tensions galore between the radical idea of political strategy—with discipline, organization, commitment to results out there at a distance—and the countercultural idea of living life to the fullest, right here, for oneself, or for the part of the universe embodied in oneself, or for the community of the enlightened who were capable of loving one another—and the rest of the world be damned (which it was already).
Yet many of the counterculture’s most prominent figures, including Allen Ginsberg, Wavy Gravy, and Paul Krassner, were active supporters of the antiwar movement and put their bodies on the line as much as members of SDS did. (Both Wavy and Krassner sustained serious back injuries at the hands of cops at antiwar demonstrations.)
The spirit of the Be-In had not yet entirely dissipated. Stew Albert was a Berkeley radical who, like Rubin, grew closer to heads over time. “You can’t overestimate the effect of acid on the scene,” Albert says. “Political people started taking acid and didn’t think that it was a substitute for politics, but thought that acid had something to say to politics. If you combined politics with the right combination of acid and grass and doing wild stunts and getting involved in the surrealistic edge, it was a marvelous way to live!” He feels that while the acid transformed radicals and appealed to the idealistic youth, the straight civil rights and peace movements often spoke the language of guilt. “We also appealed to fucking off, decadence, taking dope, and getting laid, and doing weird drawings on your body, and the stuff that’s usually identified with the decline of civilization. And yet we somehow got it all packaged into some kind of romantic, idealist, revolutionary mode.”
Tom Hayden had no such romantic notions about LSD or even pot. “Tom was incredibly self-disciplined and he wanted everyone else to be as well,” Gitlin told me. “One day he saw me when I was stoned and he gave me a look as if to say, What’s happened to you?”
One of the political failures of the new left was a lack of connectivity to the labor movement. In part this was a result of a generational smugness among radicals in their twenties who naively thought that the labor battles won by the previous generation were permanent. At the same time, organized labor had grown reactionary about the Cold War because of the purge of Communist-leaning leaders during the McCarthy period and because of the union jobs produced by the military-industrial complex. (Phil Ochs’s song “I Ain’t Marching Anymore” included the lyric, “Now the labor leader’s screamin’ / When they close the missile plants.”) The AFL-CIO, for example, was led by George Meany, who was a fierce anti-Communist and unreservedly supported the war in Vietnam, exhibiting angry contempt toward the antiwar movement. (One notable exception was the United Automobile Workers union, whose president Walter Reuther was a staunch ally of Dr. King.)
Exorcising the Pentagon
Although the labor movement was mostly missing, the antiwar March on Washington on October 21, 1967, was arguably the last time that liberals, political radicals, and countercultural hippies effectively combined energies.
One of my first feelings when I read Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night was a wave of relief that one of the preeminent fifties literary lefties had treated sixties radicals with affection and respect in his highly personal description of the protest. Unlike Tom Wolfe’s relationship with the Merry Pranksters, Mailer was both observer and participant. A large part of the book concerns his day in jail for civil disobedience in protest of the war. He was forty-four years old, a generation and a half older than teenage hippies, but he had always occupied a unique space among post–World War II intellectuals. In 1955, Mailer had been one of the founders of the Village Voice, and that same year he published a long, seminal essay called “The White Negro.” Subtitled “Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” the piece presciently identified many of the sentiments that would form the hippie movement a decade later.
In The Armies of the Night he wrote of himself in the third person, as if “Mailer” was a fictitious character. “Mailer had a diatribe against LSD, hippies, and the generation of love but he was keeping it to himself.” Yet over the course of the rest of the book, he wrote approvingly of the SDS, Jerry Rubin, Owsley, and the Fugs. Of the Fugs’ lead singer, he opined,
[I]t would be delightful to whack a barricade in the company of Ed Sanders with the red-gold beard who had brought grope-freak talk to the Village and always seemed to Mailer a little over-liberated, but now suitable . . . [N]ot for nothing had Lenin pointed out that there were ten years which passed like an uneventful day, but there was also the revolutionary day which was like ten years.
(Mailer’s cultural distance did result in a couple of errors. He thought that the “V” sign flashed by hippies with their second and third fingers stood for “Victory,” because that is what it had meant when Winston Churchill made the same hand signal during World War II. In the Vietnam era, we gave it a very different meaning—it was the peace sign. Mailer also incorrectly refers to A.J. Muste as an anarchist, when in fact the pacifist Muste had been at odds with anarchists since World War I.)
At the other end of the spectrum of protest from the Fugs was the earnest sixty-four-year-old Dr. Benjamin Spock, expressing pacifist indignation in his three-piece suit. Spock occupied a unique space in the movement. In the minds of those who wanted Dr. King to run for president, it was assumed that Spock would be the candidate for vice president. He also had credibility with millions of people who did not usually identify with the left. Spock’s book The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, first published in 1946, was so successful that the New York Times reported that in the fifties and sixties, it was outsold only by the Bible. Spock became concerned about the nuclear arms race, and from 1962 to 1967 he cochaired the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. By the middle of the decade, he was one of the most persistent voices against the war. Cora Weiss, who had been a member of Women Strike for Peace, says, “We all raised our children on Dr. Spock’s book. I had one in every room in the house. He gave a legitimacy to the antiwar movement that no one else except Martin Luther King Jr. did.”
Spock felt that Timothy Leary and others had co-opted the civil rights and peace movements and turned young people away from activism in favor of turning on, tuning in, and dropping out. This needlessly distanced him from many young people who had been raised with the help of his famous book. One could make the opposite argument that the criminalization of LSD and pot had created more suspicion of government and added to, rather than subtracted from, the antiwar movement. Yet there was no denying Spock’s moral authority, nor his commitment to peace. In January 1968, he, William Sloane Coffin, and others were indicted for “counseling, aiding, and abetting draft resistance.”
There were tense negotiations between the more culturally moderate organizers of the 1967 March on Washington and the large number of younger radicals. Cora Weiss and Spock did not want to see Viet Cong flags or leaflets filled with profanity. Even the buttons differentiated some pacifists from their radical counterparts: Stop the War vs. Support the National Liberation Front. Jerry Rubin found wonkish speeches by earnest pacifists like A.J. Muste to be “boring.” His friend Super Joel Tornabene found pacifist David Dellinger’s speech “too slow for us speed freaks.”
At this time, the focus in the underground press that people like me read was on Ed Sanders, who performed an elaborate “exorcism” with the quixotic goal of removing evil spirits from the Pentagon. Thousands of radicals broke away from the main demonstration to march on the gigantic five-sided building at the heart of America’s military defense establishment. Some young people placed flowers in the gun barrels of the soldiers who were “guarding” the massive building from the protesters, resulting in one of the most iconic photos from the sixties. The flowers were provided by Michael Bowen, who in January of that year had been so central to the organization of the Be-In. He had since left the Oracle and moved to Mexico, but he returned to the States to bring two hundred pounds of daisies to the march. (Bowen’s Oracle colleague Allen Cohen later claimed that the idea of exorcising the pentagon was first floated at the Be-In planning meeting at the end of 1966.)
The text of the incantation for the “exorcism” was read by Sanders and accompanied by the banging of cymbals, triangles, and drums. It was in a very different headspace than the reasoned antiwar speeches on the main stage of the demonstration. Here’s an excerpt:
In the name of the amulets of touching, seeing, groping, hearing and loving, we call upon the powers of the cosmos to protect our ceremonies in the name of Zeus, in the name of Anubis, god of the dead, in the name of all those killed because they do not comprehend, in the name of the lives of the soldiers in Vietnam who were killed because of a bad karma, in the name of sea-born Aphrodite, in the name of Magna Mater, in the name of Dionysus, Zagreus, Jesus, Yahweh, the unnameable, the quintessent finality of the Zoroastrian fire, in the name of Hermes, in the name of the Beak of Sok, in the name of scarab, in the name, in the name, in the name of the Tyrone Power Pound Cake Society in the Sky, in the name of Ra, Osiris, Horus, Nepta, Isis, in the name of the flowing living universe, in the name of the mouth of the river, we call upon the spirit . . . to raise the Pentagon from its destiny and preserve it . . .
The war did not end.
Dump Johnson
In recent decades, Lyndon Johnson has correctly been recognized for his political brilliance in actualizing the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act and the surviving elements of the War on Poverty. But in 1967, to millions of Americans, President Johnson was on the wrong side of history, morally culpable for deaths that were not related to American security, and was in thrall to outdated Cold War fundamentalism. His administration’s claims of military success in Vietnam were discredited on such a regular basis that he became known for a “credibility gap.”
Everyone I admired—radical, hippie, liberal, old or young—had contempt for Johnson in those days. The horror of the war gave his political enemies license to make fun of his awkward public persona. After an appendectomy, President Johnson lifted up his shirt to show his scar to the White House photographers. His televised speeches were read from a teleprompter in a singsong cadence that presented a stark contrast to the eloquent, witty, and debonair style of the martyred Kennedy.
A Tom Paxton song lyric went, “Lyndon Johnson told the nation / Have no fear of escalation. / I am trying everyone to please. / Though it isn’t really war / We’re sending fifty thousand more / To help save Vietnam from the Vietnamese.”
In 1967, Woody Allen had enough success as a stand-up comedian that he was given a short-lived talk show of his own before he started directing movies. When William F. Buckley appeared with him, the conservative icon was asked who he wanted to be elected president in 1968. Buckley answered, “Anyone who could beat Johnson.” Allen, an antiwar advocate, sadly chimed in, “That could be anyone including the Boston Strangler.”
The war was not only anathema to hippies and radicals in 1967, but also to some older anti–Cold War Democrats who had been inspired by Eleanor Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson. Foreign Relations Committee chairman William Fulbright of Arkansas, no one’s idea of a lefty, held nationally televised hearings on the war in 1966 that eviscerated the administration’s rationale for the escalation. Wayne Morse of Oregon was one of two senators who had voted against giving President Johnson war authorization after the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, and he regularly reminded Americans that there had never been an actual declaration of war. In New York City, Congressman William Fitts Ryan uncompromisingly articulated the liberal antiwar argument. However, the effort that would eventually persuade President Johnson not to seek reelection was organized outside of Congress.
Allard Lowenstein was thirty-eight years old in 1967. He was the first white board member of Dr. King’s SCLC, and he had unsuccessfully tried to recruit King to run for president against Johnson. Lowenstein was the main writer of Bobby Kennedy’s celebrated 1966 speech in Cape Town, South Africa, during the heart of apartheid, in which the senator said:
It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
By the end of 1966, Lowenstein was adamantly against the war. He had insider political skills that none of the radicals and hippies possessed, and he also understood that his older antiwar peers were out of touch with most young people. He told journalist David Halberstam, “These kids. No one really knows how alienated they really are. Trying to keep them in the system is very, very hard. They’re bitter and they’re angry. They really resent this society. Of course, there are a lot of things in this society that are very resentable.”
In addition to his age, Lowenstein had other baggage with radicals. At a 1966 conference of the National Students Association (NSA), he had debated David Harris. Lowenstein, a former president of the NSA, stressed the need for organization and tactics. Harris cautioned against Americans becoming like “good Germans” during the Nazi era, and called for resistance to the military draft by civil disobedience if necessary. Lowenstein urged students to do everything possible to get a deferment, but if that failed, to serve.
In March 1967, Ramparts published a front-page article that revealed that the CIA had been funneling money through the NSA for a decade, hoping to influence its policies and spokespeople. In August 1967, the NSA cut ties with all groups associated with the CIA.
Nonetheless, Lowenstein was unrelenting in his support for antiwar candidates for public office. Realizing the limits of his personal appeal to young radicals, he focused on organizing elites and intellectuals. He orchestrated a letter from fifty Rhodes scholars questioning Vietnam policy, and shortly thereafter escorted forty-one antiwar student body presidents (including Harris) to a meeting with Secretary of State Dean Rusk. One of the students asked Rusk what would happen if both sides kept escalating to the point of the US dropping a nuclear bomb. Rusk took a drag on his cigarette and said: “Well, somebody’s going to get hurt.” Word of the callous remark spread, and within weeks there were more than two hundred student body presidents signed on to the petition against the war. They thought Rusk had lost it and it seemed like no one from the administration could rationally defend the war. To Lowenstein, this was when the antiwar movement went mainstream.
Lowenstein worked with Yale chaplain and prominent antiwar activist William Sloane Coffin to get more than four hundred members of the Yale faculty to urge an end of American bombing of Vietnam. Coffin called Lowenstein “a prophet who stands clearly within the tradition and says, The tradition is being corrupted, let’s restore the tradition.”
Lowenstein also focused on religious leaders, persuading theologian Reinhold Niebuhr to make an antiwar declaration, and he helped Stanford theologian Robert McAfee Brown write a statement of conscience for more than two thousand religious leaders for a gathering in January 1967. A committee from that conference expressed their concerns to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who was known to be harboring his own doubts about the war.
Lowenstein privately met with Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Johnson’s national security adviser, Walt Rostow, and found their closed-mindedness deeply depressing. He concluded that President Johnson was not going to end the war, regardless of elite pressures. In the summer of 1967, Lowenstein and writer Curtis Gans formed the “Dump Johnson” movement to recruit an antiwar Democratic nominee. One of their first allies from the liberal establishment was John Kenneth Galbraith, who had been the ambassador to India under President Kennedy and had recently become president of the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). Galbraith said, “This is a year when the people are right and the politicians are wrong.”
Having failed to get Dr. King to run, Lowenstein and his allies vainly approached Senator Robert Kennedy, followed by Senator George McGovern. In October, just before the March on Washington, Lowenstein finally found a plausible politician willing to oppose a sitting president of his own party—Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy, who announced his campaign on January 3, 1968. McCarthy’s campaign organizers felt that to have the widest possible political reach, volunteers should not look like hippies; men shaved off their mustaches and beards and cut their hair to be “clean for Gene.” But it would not be McCarthy who ultimately had the potential to preside over an antiwar majority.
Robert Kennedy
Like Dr. King, Robert Kennedy was peripheral to the hippie world, yet a presence. Many of us wrongly took them both for granted and assumed that they represented the center against which the left and counterculture could rebel, rather than a bulwark against reactionary political forces which would arrive when Richard Nixon assumed the presidency in 1969.
Tom Hayden and Staughton Lynd, an antiwar Yale history professor who was a fixture at rallies, met with Kennedy in February 1967 to urge him to support withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam. At that time Kennedy expressed worry about a “bloodbath.” (Not long thereafter, Hayden and Lynd visited North Vietnam and Lynd was fired from Yale as a result.)
Kennedy met with other radicals, including Phil Ochs, who he was introduced to by Village Voice writer Jack Newfield. Ochs played him the song “Crucifixion,” and when Kennedy realized that it was about his slain brother, he silently wept. In February 1968, Kennedy asked Jefferson Airplane to play at the Junior Village Telethon for a family charity that aided differently abled young people. Airplane manager Bill Thompson recalled going to a touch football game the next day at Kennedy’s house, which was also attended by Tommy Smothers. There was a jukebox in the house and Thompson noticed that it included “White Rabbit.” “We knew they were using our image to get credibility with young voters,” Grace Slick told me, “but we were happy to be used in that way.”
Lowenstein and Jack Newfield were asked by Senator Kennedy to debate with Arthur Schlesinger, who had been a trusted adviser to President Kennedy. Schlesinger suggested that instead of RFK opposing a sitting president, he and the antiwar students could focus on a “peace plank” in the 1968 Democratic Party platform. Kennedy sarcastically asked, “When was the last time millions of people rallied behind a plank?”
Kennedy was even “straighter” than Lowenstein and had no appetite for civil disobedience. Many in the antiwar movement initially had mixed feelings about him. He had briefly worked for Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Committee on Government Operations in the 1950s. As attorney general, Kennedy had been a steely advocate for his brother’s interests but came up against serious issues from the left. In May 1963, he’d met with a group of black intellectuals, including James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, and it had not gone well. However, in the years following his brother’s assassination, Robert Kennedy had expanded his circle of friends and advisers to include many in the movement. Kennedy visited the Mississippi Delta in 1967; after witnessing the extreme poverty, he returned home and lectured his children on their obligation to help alleviate the plight of the poor.
A speech RFK made at the University of Kansas in early 1968 suggests that some of the values of the counterculture had gotten into his head. In fact, the speech seemed to imply a philosophy of life that was remarkably consistent with the values of Haight-Ashbury:
[E]ven if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task; it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction—purpose and dignity—that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product—if we judge the United States by that—that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts . . . television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
A well-written speech is not the same as action. Politicians are adept at making one group feel respected while serving the interests of others. RFK had a complicated past, but there is a lot of evidence to suggest he had grown, and he came to have a spectral presence in corners of the counterculture where “politicians” were usually either ignored or reviled.
In early 1968, as Johnson looked more vulnerable, Kennedy reversed course and ran for president, greatly irritating McCarthy and his supporters, but broadening the antiwar campaign as no one else could. His assassination in June was a devastating blow, even to a radical like Hayden, who spoke of the loss for years. At the request of the Kennedy family, Hayden served as a member of the honor guard that accompanied the slain senator’s body on the train from Los Angeles to Washington. When the Airplane’s Crown of Creation album was released in the fall of 1968, a few months after Kennedy’s assassination, it included an insert with an image of Robert Kennedy’s dog Brumus.
Feminism Rising
The Democratic Party, the left, and the counterculture were not much more respectful to women than the rest of American society in 1967. Out of a total of 435 members of the 90th Congress in 1967, only twelve were women. An Emmett Grogan piece for the Diggers’ newsletter, “The Post-Competitive, Comparative Game of a Free Society,” referred to free stores for “chicks to sew dresses, make pants to order, recut garments to fit.” Abbie Hoffman suggested that “revolutionaries” metaphorically “kill your mothers,” and one of Timothy Leary’s favorite put-downs was “menopausal mind.” Rock and roll and the business around it were overwhelmingly male.
Even so, it was in the realm of political activism where the hypocrisy of left-wing sexism was most directly confronted. In 1965, two civil rights veterans, Mary King and Casey Hayden, presented a paper called “Sex and Caste” at an SDS convention in Illinois. They said that women at SDS were often treated as secondary citizens and were rarely permitted to speak publicly. To some men on the left, women’s roles were limited to child-rearing and sex. This cluster of issues was referred to as the “women question.”
Margery Tabankin, who had helped lead the University of Wisconsin protests and who became the first female president of the National Students Association, explained the complicated psychology: “Part of being a woman was this psychology of proving I was such a good radical, ‘better than the men.’ We felt we were motivated by something higher because we didn’t have to go to war ourselves. Most guys didn’t take women seriously, however. They were things to fuck.”
Heather Booth had grown up in the New York area and became an activist in her teens, inspired by the American Friends Service Committee’s work against the death penalty. She later participated in SNCC’s actions against segregation at Woolworth’s in 1960. In 1964, by then nineteen years old, she was part of SNCC’s “Mississippi Summer” that focused on voting rights. Booth laughingly recalls the SDS discussions: “A woman would say, I’m not listened to, and a man would answer, Yes you are. Someone else complained that women were only people asked to make coffee or take notes, and a guy would say, That’s not the only thing you do.”
In June 1967, a resolution for “liberation of women” was brought to the SDS convention in Ann Arbor. It protested women’s “colonial relation to men,” and called for communal childcare centers, distribution of birth control information and devices, legalized abortion, defense against rape and domestic violence, gay rights, women’s health care, and equal pay for equal work, all no-brainers in retrospect, but apparently too edgy for SDS at the time.
The leftist paper the National Guardian reported that some men objected to the phrase “help relieve our brothers of the burden of male chauvinism.” A watered-down resolution to “study the problem” passed and was published in SDS’s New Left Notes, but it appeared alongside a cartoon of a woman wearing earrings, a polka-dot minidress, and matching visible panties, holding a sign that said, We want our rights and we want them now. For many women on the left, this was the final straw. Booth recalls that at the SDS convention, “Jimmy Garrett, who was with SNCC, walked out and said to a group of us, You’re not going to get your act together unless you decide to meet by yourselves. At first I thought he was wrong and that we should all stay together, but after an hour I realized he was right, and afterward, several of us talked among ourselves.”
Booth also notes, “In the women’s movement, women’s liberation was the vehicle for students.” By 1967, she was attending the University of Chicago, and was helping women get safe abortions (still illegal in 1967; the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized it nationally would not come until 1973). She was also a cofounder of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union in 1969.
The Democratic Party was not completely oblivious to the women’s movement. President Johnson signed an executive order that broadened affirmative action to include discrimination based on gender, which resulted in federal agencies and contractors taking proactive measures to increase the number of women employed on federal projects.
Although I supported the policy goals, I was never a part of the women’s movement. Speaking to women who were involved in the sixties, it is clear that one of the movement’s many virtues was providing a euphoric sense of community, similar to the feeling many of us had about hippie culture. I got a flash of this when I spoke to Booth in 2016 while she was immersed in get-out-the-vote work to help Hillary Clinton in Florida, a few weeks before the US presidential election. The sixties were fresh in her mind half a century later and she conflated an explosion in the arts, dancing, rock and roll, and poetry, along with consciousness movements, with the hard-core activism she embraced.
Many histories of the period cite Stokely Carmichael’s statement, “The position of women in the movement is prone,” as the prime example of leftist male chauvinism. Booth emotionally defends him: “We all knew he meant it as a joke, as a sarcastic depiction about the way some of the less enlightened males in the movement felt. Stokely was personally always respectful of women.”
When I ask if she had bitterness about the way SDS had acted, Booth responds, “In a way, there was a continuum and SDS was not all bad. It allowed us to find our voice. It allowed us to convene a meeting on the women’s question.” She continues, “There always have been people working in particular areas like women’s rights, gay rights, the environment, the peace movement, and civil rights, but in my heart, I always felt like it was one movement and I still do.”
In hippie circles there were also those who felt a metaphysical unity among the many subcultures that emerged in the sixties, though it was becoming increasingly obvious that after 1967 this unity would have to occur without relying on most of the symbols that had served to connect the tribes.