Coming empty-handed, going empty-handed—that is human.
—Zen Master Seung Sahn
I don’t know what made me leave my dorm room cave on that gloomy November day in 1962 in Ann Arbor to listen to a man I knew little about, Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. King was not yet that famous, he had not yet given his “I Have a Dream” speech on the Washington Mall, he had not yet won the Nobel Peace Prize, but the Michigan Daily ran a small announcement that he was speaking at Hill Auditorium the next day and I decided to go.
I had been lying in bed, for days or maybe weeks. The pain was in my head—the most important person in my life, my father, was dying and I was just a kid with no idea what I would do without him. Outside, the world teetered. Nuclear madness in Cuba. Federal troops on patrol after violent reactions to the first black student admitted to Ole Miss. Bob Dylan singin’ “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” I hardly noticed.
I locked myself in my room, gorged on candy and comics—Superman, Captain Marvel, Spider-Man—any story of a wonky weakling who could transform into an all-powerful hero. I was seventeen, in my second year of college in Ann Arbor. I was the awkward, nerdy son of the smoothest, strongest man I’d ever known.
When my dad answered the phone, “Mmm . . . yelloh,” it sounded like “mellow,” which he was. Mellow, tall, handsome, with wavy black hair now turning to white—he had been forty-two when I was born, fifteen years older than my mother, who said he looked like Clark Gable. He was thin and athletic, a former boxing champ we were told, with a pencil mustache and a gambler’s easy way. He had gotten good at numbers, not the kind you learn in school, but running numbers, selling illegal punch cards on the streets. He had dropped out of school and by age twelve was working for bookies and mobsters, collecting the money, returning with cash to pay off any winnings.
He had arrived from a place he called Belarussia—White Russia—five years earlier, when he was seven, with his bricklayer father Luis and seamstress mother Bessie, both Orthodox Jews from the shtetels. He became a fighter because he had to, he told me; life for Russian Jewish immigrants was tough on the streets of Detroit. He was skinny and needed to defend himself.
I remember seeing a photo of him in boxing shorts and gloves, pounding a punching bag. He was probably the same age then as I, when hiding in my dorm room—seventeen. The photo hung framed in his office at Brilliant Music Company.
Dad loved the racetrack, and took my younger brother, Barry, and me there and to opening day for the Tigers, Bobby Lane and the Lions, and especially Red Wing hockey games—his favorite bets. He would tip an usher to get us seats near the penalty box so he could get me a broken stick from my idol, Gordie Howe. Cops and mobsters alike would greet my dad like their oldest friend. They would tease him about some boxing match he had won or lost. Sometimes they noted his Masonic ring; other times he would point out a member of the Purple Gang, Detroit’s version of the Jewish Mafia that he had grown up with.
I knew he had been a tough kid, but by the time I was born those days were mostly behind him. Brilliant Music, his company, was on the margins of the legitimate business world. Dad leased nickelodeons, jukeboxes like Rock-Olas and Wurlitzers, to restaurants, bars, and bowling alleys. In the bars and restaurants, customers fed the machines with coins, and Dad’s men came weekly to collect them, left some percentage behind, and brought the rest to the office. It was an all-cash business, the kind the mob loved. No papers, no problems. My dad had the largest jukebox “route” in the Midwest, and the Mafia made it clear that it wanted to take it away from him.
I was woken one night by terrifying cries from my parents’ bedroom. Mom was sobbing. Dad had just left the house, carrying his revolver, to answer a “man-to-man” challenge from a mobster she said was named Buffalino, who told my dad on the phone that if he did not meet him on Hastings Street, “the boys” would kill me and Barry. It was 2 A.M. Buffalino never showed, but the next day Barry and I were taken away from our home. This remains one of my most vivid childhood memories. Mom took Barry to stay with Catherine Miller, our black housekeeper, in the projects. Catherine—Barry and I called her “Cackie”—a big, warm, loving black woman, housekeeper and surrogate mom, was with us for more than ten years. She was perhaps more my mother than my own mom.
Dad took me out to Willow Run airport and put me on a two-engine propeller flight alone to Cleveland, where my grandparents lived. Before the plane took off, my dad told me he was sending me away “so the gang won’t kidnap you.” I didn’t know what the Mafia was then, but I remember the “unaccompanied minor” stickers and little brass wings that a stewardess pinned on my shirt, marking me as a first-time flyer. Grandma Ida was my favorite, so for me the trip to Cleveland was more a vacation than an escape from harm.
That threat on our lives caused my dad to make a decision. One night in high school my mom and Barry and I sat around our first television set and watched my dad, in Washington, DC, testifying in front of the Senate’s McClellan Committee investigation into the Mafia’s extortion practices in the jukebox industry. The Detroit newspaper ran a photo of my dad on its front page. Journalists called him “courageous.” Bobby Kennedy phoned and even came to our house once, and thanked my dad.
The mob retaliated. They shot and killed my dad’s store manager, a tough looking but kind man named Hugo who I remember because of the way he kept me occupied: he would bring bags of nickels for me to look through. I organized them all by date and kept the rare ones.
Within weeks of my dad’s return from Washington, a teamster truck mysteriously jumped over two streets, a median strip, and an embankment to barrel down the wrong side of the road and slam through the front glass window of Brilliant Music Company. The crash ignited a fire that gutted my dad’s business.
“Well, I knew that they were going to do something,” my dad explained to me. “They went after the store, not us. So you kids are safe now.”
After the office burned down, Dad closed the company. The Mafia had its revenge; Dad was nearly bankrupt. After that he tried to reinvent himself in other small businesses: aluminum fabrication, the then–cutting edge technology of vacuum tube testing, and a new company called Draw-Matic Engineering, which manufactured electrically operated curtains and window dressings.
As strong as he was, he became a broken man. I came home from Ann Arbor for a weekend and found him in our den reading one of those detective books that arrived every month in the mail. Dad was sitting in his green reclining chair. He smiled when he saw me and asked me to sit on the ottoman to talk. He told me his stomach cancer that we thought had been cured by an operation had become a new cancer, or maybe it was a different cancer—it didn’t matter—but he had something called a sarcoma. The doctors told him he would be dead within a year.
I was the eldest son, the firstborn on both sides of our immigrant families. I was no longer a child, but I had never seen death personally. I did not have any experience. Dad and I walked to the front door, where we stood crying and talking. In his weakened state, he stumbled backward into the coat closet. Embarrassed, he quickly got up and said, “I’m not afraid of dying, son. I’m just worried what will happen to you and your brother.”
The next day I woke up to cries of agony. I found my father on the floor of the bathroom, writhing in pain. He had an impacted stool and asked me to remove it. “Do the best you can with what you’ve got,” my father always said. So I did my best. But I had no inner resources to keep from falling into depression as he got sicker and started to slip away. I returned to Ann Arbor and burrowed into my dorm room and waited and cried and hid until I saw the notice about Dr. King.
The small group of students who showed up to hear Dr. King speak didn’t fill even half of Hill Auditorium. The university president was embarrassed. But King wasn’t. He looked out at the sparse audience and laughed and said, “This way there will be more of me to go around. Those of you that want to, come on up here.” Many of us accepted Dr. King’s invitation and moved to the front of the auditorium, some even climbing the steps to the parquet floor of the stage and sitting in a semicircle around him. I wanted to get close, to feel that there was still some warmth in the world when mine was going cold.
King spoke like no one I had ever heard. There was a world of suffering outside my own that I didn’t know about. There were Americans who couldn’t eat at a dime-store lunch counter, who couldn’t walk through town without fearing for their lives. They couldn’t vote, they couldn’t use most public bathrooms, and they couldn’t sit in the front of a bus. They couldn’t get an education like mine, lucked into it as I did by winning a math competition. King transmitted something, an intense feeling of righting such wrongs, of bending the arc of history toward justice using the weapons of love and peaceful civil disobedience. He painted a vivid word picture of a better future, one in which we were all in it together in a land of peace and harmony.
We sat transfixed. Time stopped. Those few hours seem like years of inspiration. None of us was ever the same.
I became infected with the virus of activism, the virus of optimism, the virus of championing human rights. Without being conscious of it, I signed up with an alphabet soup of organizations: NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), and SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). For a moment I forgot about my dad’s sarcoma and my own suffering. I took up the cause of civil rights and the fight against an unjust war in Vietnam. A few hours in the presence of this amazing man and my social isolation and emotional depression had found its antidote—the march for justice and the movement against violence. His power and wisdom were unlike anything I had experienced with professors or rabbis.
Most of my friends joined marches in Alabama and Mississippi over the next two summers. I stayed with my dad but made it to a march in Washington, DC, for freedom, social change, and civil rights. I alternated between being in school, visiting my family in Detroit, and attending sit-ins and teach-ins. I learned nonviolent civil disobedience from African American churchgoers, followers of Dr. King. Four or five of us at a time would pretend we were in Mississippi or Alabama and order a soda at the lunch counter at the Detroit Woolworth’s or Sanders Confectionery. One of the church members would pretend to be a bad guy and smack us on the back, like a Zen master does to wake up a young initiate, without warning. We learned to not react, absorbing blows without hitting back, trying to forgive the assailant or even to love our enemy as the great ones from Jesus to Gandhi had taught. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not so much, but we kept practicing.
A lot of hearts were broken on Valentine’s Day 1965, the day my father died—having lived longer than the original year doctors had predicted. His cancer had been treated with the crude and heavy chemo of the day, and he had gotten pneumonia. After three years of fighting, he lost his strength, his hair, his humor, and his will to live. The doctors summoned me from Ann Arbor, as he mercifully, in their estimation, slipped into a coma. He had a breathing tube and was on life support. They were certain he would never reawaken and asked me to sign the permission forms to stop the drugs that were keeping his heart beating and let him die in peace.
My mother was emotionally unable to make that decision. My brother, Barry, three years younger, was too young by law to have a say. My mother had told the doctors I was in medical school, which was not true, but I had worked a summer at that same hospital as an orderly emptying bedpans for strangers. I sat with my dad. A few weeks earlier he had said, “Larry, I won’t be able to leave you boys much money, but I will leave you something worth much more: a good name, a respected name.” Looking at the face of the man I loved so much I could see he was no longer there. The doctors were right. He was gone. Though he could not hear me, I talked to him anyway and told him how much I loved him and what a great father he had been. I cried and signed the documents.
Five days later, during shiva, the Jewish week of mourning, my mom’s dad, Abraham Sherman, sat me and Barry down to tell us he would now be our father. Grandpa was a kind man, also raised in the shtetels of Russia, and was now leading the Jewish family rituals. He had gotten low chairs for us to sit on and covered all the mirrors in the house with sheets so that the mourners could not groom themselves or display any vanity. No one was permitted to take food out of a house during the mourning period, but they sure could bring food in: the rabbis and members of Temple Israel came to the house with what seemed like hundreds of casseroles. Dad’s Masonic and Shriner brothers were there every day, making sure my dad would be buried in his Masonic apron.
Desperate for a break from the organized grieving, I asked Grandpa Abe to come upstairs to my room so I could show him a rare coin I’d found in the pile of change from Dad’s jukeboxes. He was breathing heavily by the time he reached the landing. It was a buffalo nickel from a 1917 die that had an “8” struck over the “7” such that both numbers showed. Most coins have a mint mark showing the city in which they were struck, and this one was struck in Denver during the Spanish influenza and World War I. That nickel always made me wonder who held it, touched it, and what kind of life they led—poor or rich, soldier or civilian, sick or well. It was rare and valuable.
When an ambulance came for Grandpa Abe in the middle of the night, I was sure it was because I had asked him to climb those stairs to see the nickel. He was dead by the time they got him to the hospital. My mother had lost her husband and her father in less than a week; she watched helplessly as her world crumbled. Grandpa had died because of my selfishness and my stupid nickel.
For years, I carried around guilt about killing my grandfather, making him climb those steps to see my goddamn nickel. The only person I ever confessed that guilt to was Elaine, my first love. She was so classy; she was fifteen and I was sixteen when we met at an AZA high school dance in Detroit in 1960. AZA, “Aleph Zadik Aleph,” was a fraternity for Jewish teenagers. Our theme song was “Izzie, Ike, Jake, and Sam. We are the boys that eat no ham.” Elaine had gorgeous brown hair and a big inviting smile. She lived half a dozen blocks away, and we both went to Mumford High School. On one of our first dates, I stopped the car in the middle of the Ambassador Bridge connecting the United States and Canada; we got out and kissed a long sweet teenage kiss on the international border, to the sounds of honking and hooting from the traffic backing up behind us. Living in Detroit so far from the coasts, I couldn’t think of any other way to manufacture something as sophisticated and romantic as that kiss on the bridge on the border. Elaine and I weren’t seeing each other by the time of Dad’s funeral, but when she walked in the front door during shiva, I fell in love with her all over again. She could understand my loss; her own father had died when she was only a child.
My dad left my mom with a house and a car but no life insurance or income. I would be okay at college; my tuition and expenses were paid by the math scholarship I had won. Following my dad’s example, I developed a side business of coin-operated vending machines that I placed in girls’ dorms, maybe hoping for other kinds of investment returns. Barry was still in high school, so my mom, broken as she was by events, went back to work selling jewelry. Barry and my uncle took over dad’s last company, Draw-Matic Engineering.
As activism took hold of me, I became more of a philosophy nerd, deeply immersed in what philosophers wrote about suffering. The English utilitarian philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill wrote about leading a life in pursuit of the summum bonum, the greatest good. Mill concluded that the greatest good could be computed mathematically by determining the greatest happiness and multiplying it by the greatest number who were made happy by a given act. He called it the greatest happiness for the greatest number. I saw two ways of doing this myself: either by becoming a defense attorney and saving people like Julius and Ethel Rosenberg from the electric chair, or saving lives by becoming a doctor. My father’s cancer might have propelled me toward medicine, but I felt better suited intellectually to being a lawyer. I took the law school admission tests, or LSATs, and did well. I applied to law schools in the East: Harvard, Columbia, and Yale.
“No, absolutely not,” my mom said when I told her I wanted to go to Boston for an interview. “You are not going away and leaving me here alone when I’ve just lost my father and my husband.” I could not imagine any kind of moral code that ignored my newly widowed mother’s pleas. After burying my father and grandfather, it was nearly summer, too late to apply to any of the Michigan law schools. And though I had finished nearly all my coursework for my senior year, I never completed the last class, a thesis on ethics, and so I never did get an undergraduate degree.
A few months after my dad died, in August 1965, I rode my motorcycle to a dentist’s office in downtown Detroit to have my wisdom teeth removed. I hadn’t thought much about riding back home after a round of nitrous oxide, so I waited a bit to let my head clear. An hour later, I started home but was still a little woozy, so I pulled over to get myself together—into the parking lot of Wayne State Medical School. Looking up at the building, it occurred to me: Maybe medical school might actually be a good option after all. Propelled by nitrous and youthful exuberance, I parked my bike and went in.
As luck would have it, the admissions director was in the office that summer day. He was a pathologist way ahead of his time, working on using the body’s immune system to ward off cancer. He was very kind when I told him about my dad, Grandpa, and my desire to do good in the world. The dean did not seem bothered by my lack of an undergraduate degree, maybe because I was such an improbable candidate.
It was too late to sit for the Medical College Admission Tests, or MCATs, “But,” the dean was quick to add, “we have some old versions of the test here. If you are willing to take them right now in the office, it would give us an idea if you should ever think of a medical career under any circumstances now or later.” I sat in an empty lab room filled with faucets and sinks, glass jars and the pungent smell of formaldehyde. A student helper timed the test, collected my answer sheet, and told me to wait while administrators scored it. “Well, I guess there really is a first time for everything,” the dean said, looking over my test, tapping his fingers on my motorcycle helmet, which I had left on his desk. “We’ve had a last-minute cancellation, so I guess it’s not impossible to have a last-minute admission.” I was accepted to Wayne Medical School and could stay in Detroit. And I would sell that damn nickel to pay for it.
Medical school was easier than I expected. I was blessed with a good memory, and memorization was what the classes mostly required. After a while, however, I found I was much more interested in the politics in the streets than the bodies in the morgue; the “Movement”—civil rights, human rights, equal rights—seemed more urgent. I still did well in my classes, but I could not ignore the seismic changes in the world happening around me.
I threw myself into organizing, working with many socially conscious groups. I founded the Detroit chapter of a radical group called the Student Health Organization, a kind of marriage between SDS and the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR). I became the editor of their magazine, The Body Politic. I was so engrossed in these activities that my friends at medical school nicknamed me “the Phantom.” I attended board meetings of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). I set up a free clinic in the Detroit housing projects and raised money—and got food—from rich Detroiters, lots of them Republicans and churchgoers, as well as from Movement lawyers and restaurants. Lines of doctors volunteered their time. It is true that the movements for civil rights and against the Vietnam war split the country in half, but unlike today, when the split is between classes and ideologies, in the 1960s this divide was more generational. Parents and their children were divided by the war. But there were always plenty of kindhearted, high-minded people eager to work on projects for the poor, regardless of political affiliation.
I ran a lunchtime discussion group at Wayne State that we called LICE—Lunchtime in Cultural Euphoria—to which I brought an array of speakers to standing-room-only crowds: the singer Odetta; the political comedian Dick Gregory; the union organizer Cesar Chavez, who slept on my couch because we couldn’t afford a hotel room for him; the actor Theodore Bikel; and Dr. Benjamin Spock, the author of the book that raised my generation, Baby and Child Care. Ben Spock had become a hero for me—a famous doctor who put his life and reputation on the line to protest the war and was willing to go to jail for his beliefs. I called and asked to interview him for a student magazine, the New Physician. I wanted to catch him when he came to deliver a talk at Michigan State. When he said he had no time before leaving for Chicago, I asked whether I could drive him from Lansing and talk on the way. During that four-hour drive, we began a long friendship that only ended thirty years later when I attended his New Orleans–style funeral in La Jolla, California. After that first meeting, though, I never made a move without checking in with him. He was my role model for what a great doctor, committed to peace and social justice, should be.
The 1960s were a time when we knew that individuals could make a difference. Through our whispers and shouts, our sitting and marching, risking our jobs and education, the fights with our parents, it was all worth it. We had skin in the game. Our brothers, uncles, cousins, and neighbors were caught in a foreign war not of their own choosing, drafted into killing or being killed, or succumbing to drugs and madness. I took every opportunity to do my part, wishing it had not taken so many deaths to get us to act. For me, protesting was punctuated by medical school, rather than the other way around.
When the Chicago chapter of MCHR put out a request for doctors and medical students in 1966 to join a march there, I put on my white coat, grabbed my stethoscope, and drove the three or four hours down to the Windy City. Doctors and medical students—all with white coats and dangling stethoscopes—joined Martin Luther King and thousands of other protesters in a peaceful march through the pro-war and police-lined streets of Chicago. Several hundred of us were arrested. It seems in retrospect, we were too many to be thrown into the Cook County jail. We were corralled into a large park, a few were handcuffed, some of us were fingerprinted, but none were booked. Dr. King just kept on preaching, teaching all of the protestors about nonviolence while we were detained in the park. It seemed surreal and more like church than jail. Every once in a while a chorus of protestors from outside the barriers around the pretend jail would sing “We Shall Overcome,” and Dr. King joined in as well.
I spent the summer of 1966 as a volunteer clearing out discarded junk piles in the South Bronx and Spanish Harlem and turning them into “vest pocket” playgrounds. In the summer of 1967 I became a federal employee of the new Office of Equal Health Opportunity, looking for civil rights violations in hospitals in Alabama and Mississippi. One of the other medical student teams was shot at after they did a stealth night inspection of a hospital with multiple violations in Mississippi. After that, our employer, the federal government, shipped me off to San Francisco to inspect hospitals for discrimination.
San Francisco! It was 1967 and ground zero for the Summer of Love, the Age of Aquarius, a nonviolent revolution of good over evil. There was something in the air—in addition to the smell of patchouli and pot smoke. It was impossible to believe that goodness and mercy would not inherit the earth, at any second. Allen Ginsberg had been on Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park chanting Om. There were concerts, parties, and so many girls. Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters were driving a bus of riotous colors through Haight-Ashbury. You could order home delivery of erotically shaped “Montana Banana” sundaes from a restaurant in the Haight called “Magnolia Thunderpussy.” The temptations of sex, drugs, and rock and roll were too much for a young kid who had hardly been out of Detroit, Michigan. I took Oscar Wilde’s advice: “The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.” I inhaled. Everything, deeply.
The intoxication continued that fall when I hopped the bus caravan to Washington, DC, to join more than one hundred thousand people marching on the Pentagon. Feeling part of a movement so enormous, and feeling so grateful to be in one of the few countries that allowed such a march, was overwhelming. I was not far from where the iconic “Flower Power” photo was snapped of a protestor putting a flower in the barrel of a soldier’s rifle.*
The next summer, 1968, exposed me to a darker turn being taken in Europe. I was spending the first semester of my senior year of medical school doing an externship in pediatrics and global health at Guy’s Hospital in London with poet and pediatrician Martin Bax. I ended up at a conference in Oxford sponsored by the Medical Association for Prevention of War. My professor of psychiatry from Wayne State, Paul Lowinger, was also there. Paul had been invited to join playwright Arthur Miller, who was in Paris protesting the stalled peace talks there. When he suggested I join him, I couldn’t resist.
We stayed at the Hôtel du Quai-Voltaire on the Left Bank, a home away from home for American activists. On the first night, I took my first psilocybin. Over the next few hours, the already magical streets of Paris became painted over by a soft purple hue. A door opened in my mind to something bigger; a vague, undeniable sense that we humans were more than we seemed to be, and that we were a bigger part of and more important to the shape of history than we knew. The war in Vietnam, the city where the peace talks were taking place, the idea of peace, God’s most precious gift, all merged in my psychedelic trip, fluid, neither real nor dream.
Arthur Miller invited Paul to join him the next night at a celebration of the anniversary of the signing of the French accords with Vietnam at some embassy. I tagged along, still seeing a bit of purple from the psilocybin. After cocktails, the group moved into a large auditorium to hear speakers and watch films. At first the films were all about peace—the peace treaty that France and Vietnam had negotiated, and the desire for peace with the United States. The audience was a potpourri of Third World activists, African nationals, and European diplomats. Someone came through the audience and handed each of the Americans a gift-wrapped box. Inside was a four-inch metal sculpture of a Vietnamese peasant plowing a field with a plow that was shaped like a U.S. fighter jet; the wings of the plane were the plow’s handles, and the nose of the plane was the blade. Underneath the plow was a slogan in English, something like: “We will beat their war planes into plowshares.” It was a welcome gift, until I found out that the sculpture was crafted out of the metal fuselage of a U.S. plane that had been shot down in Vietnam. An American pilot might have been killed to make this little gift. The film that followed showed Vietnamese artillery shooting down a U.S. plane. The crowd burst into applause as our plane burst into flames and the pilot parachuted to an uncertain fate.
It was hot and stuffy; the walls of the theater closed in on me. The cheering was deafening. I stumbled through the crowd, running out in the middle of the movie. I felt like I was going to vomit. There was no good side to be on during that war, but I could not ever be on the side that cheered for death.
I walked back to the hotel though the streets of Paris, not knowing what to do with the sculpture made from an American plane. Forty years later I am not quite sure why I still have it other than to honor the verses from Isaiah, “They shall beat their swords to plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nations shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”
I did not serve in the army during the Vietnam war; I had been exempted from the draft because of a bony tumor on my knee and because I was enrolled in medical school. I hated the war, but I was not sophisticated enough to realize that those who were drafted did not have the advantages of choice that I had. Like so many in my generation, I made the disastrous mistake of conflating the soldiers who did not have a bony tumor or were not in medical school, who were drafted and had no other choice, with killers. So many of those draftees, those warriors, came back from the war disheartened and confused, only to be abused by people like me and my generation. We were right to fight against our country going to war, and we were right to fight Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson or any president who pushed America into a dubious war. But we were so wrong to victimize the kids who were drafted to fight in a war they had no power to start or stop. We should have thanked them. Perhaps keeping the sculpture has been a small reminder of a sin I have tried to make up for over the years.
My childhood pal and med school roommate Jerry Eichner joined me in Paris. We bought a shiny new VW microbus, which we drove to Stockholm to visit John Takman, a doctor who was part of the Medical Association for Prevention of War. He was helping to organize Bertrand Russell’s war tribunal, which was in the process of investigating American actions in Vietnam as war crimes. All of northern Europe was unanimous in its opinion of America’s actions. We wanted to hear firsthand how they had come to these conclusions. The American government ignored the proceedings, terrified instead of dominoes falling, of the Soviet sphere of influence overtaking theirs.
From there we went to Helsinki and entered the Soviet Union through the Finnish border. The U.S. Embassy advised us not to drive into Russia, as there was war brewing with Czechoslovakia. We ignored their warnings.
An “Intourist guide,” a Communist Party minder, traveled with us to Leningrad (St. Petersburg) and Moscow—and then southwest toward where I thought was the village where my father was born. We did a pilgrimage to communist hero memorials, but didn’t find the heroes. I wanted to know about three people, Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky, and how their philosophies were addressing social inequalities in Russia. Instead of answering the question, every Russian we met wanted to know if we had three things that they could buy from us and resell: copies of Playboy, Beatles albums, and, most of all, blue jeans. I remember trading a pair for a huge cardboard box of Russian goodies: two bottles of vodka, many Russian dolls, and, though I couldn’t play them, four or five balalaikas. Our trip was cut short when our guide forced us into Bulgaria and off the road the Soviet military was using to mobilize its forces into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring. Disillusioned with Mother Russia, we made haste to Istanbul and back to London.
My generation set out to change history, prove that right was greater than might, that America was indeed different, that we were outside the normal stream of history, but not like those who boast of “American exceptionalism” as a cudgel for nationalism. We were a new kind of patriot, believing the actual words of the Declaration of Independence, that America was founded on the principle that all people—with the emphasis on the word all—have the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We believed deeply that human and civil rights had found their home in America, and that all—again the emphasis is on all—people are created equal. Although we were frequently labeled anti-American, we were motivated by the deepest patriotism, by the idea that a nation “of, by, and for the people” would only endure if we corrected the social wrongs of discrimination and disenfranchisement, especially redressing the pain caused by slavery. It was not a class struggle; it was a generational belief system. Detroit could easily have divided along class lines. But my memory of those days was that though people disagreed about the war and civil rights, everyone still wanted to be part of the same national vision regardless of where they came from.
Whatever had been in the air in San Francisco, the smell of freedom was spreading, and something new was pervading the world.