And the Wind Began to Howl
Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.
Robert F. Kennedy, quoting the Greek poet Aeschylus, after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
After San Francisco’s Summer of Love in 1967, its hippie subculture became a hub for curious tourists. Middle-aged sightseers came in buses, Kodak cameras around their necks, to gawk at the flower children and take their pictures. The infamous Psychedelic Shop on Haight Street closed in protest; its owners moved back to the Midwest.
A lot of the summer hippies went back to school. Others who stayed found that the bloom was off the rose. The bright idealism of the early days faded to a darker scene: malnutrition, overdoses, cold street corners, junkies, and dirty needles. Free love had been generous: many kids were suffering from ugly sexually transmitted diseases. Some of the flower children went on LSD trips and never came back. Others got hungry and sick.
A well-known neighborhood acid dealer named Shob was found stabbed to death, his right arm severed. Police stopped another drug dealer and found the bloody arm behind the seat of his peace-sign decorated van. Crime was up; maybe the hippie dream had been confiscated. At any rate, utopia’s bright colors had gone gray.
At the end of the summer, George Harrison visited Haight-Ashbury with his wife, the model Pattie Boyd. Wearing granny glasses in the shape of hearts, the Beatle strolled the streets, looking for action. Eventually some of the hippies recognized him and a crowd formed . . . but the San Fran experience wasn’t quite what George had in mind. He said later he thought it would be more upscale. “I expected them to all own their own little shops. I expected them all to be nice and clean and friendly and happy.”1
Sadly for George, San Francisco’s hippies didn’t own cute little shops, and they evidently hadn’t had access to anti-acne products. He said they were “hideous, spotty little teenagers.”
For their part, the pimpled hippies following their Beatle down the magical mystery streets said George was too stoned to even play the guitar someone handed him. His biographer wrote that George ended up being chased back to his limousine by a “wild band of jeering hippies.”2
Not too long after Lonnie Frisbee’s summer of ’67 arrest for public nudity and drug possession, he hit his favorite canyon again, this time without a hundred of his closest friends. His brain was an urgent swirl, full of the beauty around him, questions about the meaning of life, half-remembered threads of everything he’d experienced over his eighteen years, and a nice tab of LSD.
As Lonnie would later explain it, he took off all his clothes, turned his face to the sky, and screamed toward Heaven, “Jesus, if you’re really real, reveal yourself to me!”3
He felt the atmosphere around him begin to tingle, shimmer, and glow. He was terrified. He felt the presence of God. He saw visions. He felt God’s calling on his life.
Lonnie returned to San Francisco, and though there are different versions about what happened next, he evidently met some Jesus People on the street in the fall of 1967. They were part of a small community of former hippies and druggies who had come to know Christ and enthusiastically surrendered everything to Him. They lived in community, modeling a New Testament family of believers, and were loosely headed by a couple named Ted and Liz Wise.
By all accounts, the Wises were strategically used by God to spark the embers of what became the Jesus Movement in Northern and Southern California. They had been enthusiastic drug devotees, “pre-hippies” coming out of a bohemian Beat lifestyle in the early ’60s. They had both come to know Christ, gotten rooted—with a fair amount of cross-cultural confusion—in a “square” local church, and grown in their understanding of the Scriptures.
By mid-1967 they’d started a storefront-type outreach in the Haight, reaching out to the hippies who were flooding the city. A lot of these young people were finding that the hippie life in Haight-Ashbury was not all sweetness and light. Girls were getting raped, kids were strung out, and the hippie experience was short on real health for either body or soul. The Wises would feed them, tell them about Jesus, and give them paperback copies of a new translation of the New Testament called Good News for Modern Man. Many of those lost kids embraced the good news. And some did not: a short hippie named Charlie Manson would come in, eat soup, and jam on a borrowed guitar. He didn’t want to hear about Jesus; he thought he was Jesus.
When Ted Wise encountered Lonnie Frisbee on the street one day, Lonnie was evidently preaching Jesus, UFOs, and Christ consciousness. He told Ted how he’d experienced the reality of God in the canyon a few weeks earlier. Ted discerned that his head had gotten a little messed up with drugs, and his theology was just a little mixed up too. He took him home, fed him, and invited him to come and live with the community. Lonnie studied the Bible with them, and over time embraced a more orthodox understanding of the gospel.4
On October 7, 1967, the Haight’s hardcore flower children proclaimed the official end of San Francisco as hippie mecca. They conducted a mock funeral, solemnly mourning “the death of the hippie, devoted son of mass media.” Organizers said they wanted to let young people know that this was the end of the San Fran movement, and don’t come here; they should stay home and bring the revolution to where they lived. Pallbearers carried a wooden coffin draped in black. It was filled with psychedelic posters, bongs, kazoos, Zen manuals, and beads.
The Summer of Love had passed, and winter was coming.
A few weeks after the symbolic hippie funeral in San Francisco, the biggest antiwar demonstration yet took place on the other side of the country. One hundred thousand protesters gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. Author Norman Mailer was among those who got arrested; Benjamin Spock, the best-known pediatrician in America, denounced President Johnson in his speech as the crowd booed and cheered. Later that evening, around thirty thousand of the protesters marched on the Pentagon, where brutal confrontations with soldiers ended in hundreds of arrests.
Back in November 1967, half a million American soldiers were in Vietnam. The draft system was calling forty thousand young men into the service each month. It was the first war with news coverage in real time: television reports were showing, in living color, young men under fire in a jungle far away. More than one hundred thousand troops had been wounded and more than fifteen thousand killed so far. Coffins were coming home to America.
At the end of January 1968, a cease-fire was declared between the People’s Army of North Vietnam and the South Vietnamese and American troops. It was a temporary lull so the Vietnamese people could celebrate their sacred new year, which they called Tet. Thousands of soldiers were on leave. Civilians took to the streets in Saigon and other cities, shooting off firecrackers and fireworks.
In the midst of the week-long festivities, however, thousands of Vietcong soldiers made their way into key cities in the South. Some wore civilian clothes and mingled with the populace, testing their weapons while fireworks exploded. Some wore stolen South Vietnamese army uniforms. And though officials had not noticed the unusual number of funeral processions taking place in previous weeks, now it became apparent that Vietcong had not only infiltrated the South but had also smuggled thousands of weapons in those coffins that had slowly moved through the streets.
The Tet Offensive—one of the most famous and horrific campaigns in modern military history—exploded throughout South Vietnam with massacres, ambushes, assassinations, and thousands of civilian casualties. War correspondents flooded US outlets with terrible reports of carnage.
The communists sustained enormous losses in their surprise attack, but it was a turning point for their cause. For the first time, many who supported US involvement in Vietnam confessed that this was a war America would not win. Wounded American veterans threw away their war medals. Student protesters took over academic buildings on their campuses.
On March 31, 1968, President Lyndon Johnson’s televised speech to the nation ended with a surprise: “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president,” he said.
Polling at the time showed that Johnson would defeat any political rivals. Those closest to him knew the real reason for his decision not to run. Vietnam. Even as early as March 1965, the White House taping system had recorded Johnson’s assessment: “The great trouble I’m under—a man can fight if he can see daylight down the road somewhere. But there ain’t no daylight in Vietnam.”5
The stubborn war had drained the tough Texas politician. Johnson’s father and grandfather had both died at age sixty-four; the president had a premonition he would do the same. Four years after his announcement that he wouldn’t run again for the presidency, Johnson would die of a heart attack at his ranch in Texas—at age sixty-four.
Meanwhile, protests also continued for the domestic focus of the day, civil rights for African Americans. It had been nearly five long years since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s spine-tingling “I Have a Dream” speech to a quarter of a million people at the Lincoln Memorial, in which he called for an absolute end to racism and for civil and economic rights for African Americans.
“I have a dream,” Dr. King had thundered back in 1963.
A dream that this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.6
It was a beautiful dream, full of hope, even in the face of formidable odds back in 1963.
Now it was April 3, 1968. Dr. King was in a church in Memphis, Tennessee, supporting a sanitation workers’ strike. He talked about the daunting trials of the ongoing battle for civil rights, of his disappointment that a nation conceived in liberty for all would still be home to injustice for some. But still, there was hope for all, even if some did not make it to the end of the journey. He ended his speech with reflections full of Old Testament imagery and personal peace, prescient words that have stunned us all ever since.
Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. . . . Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!
And so I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!7
At six o’clock the next evening, Martin Luther King and several of his colleagues stepped out onto the balcony of their Memphis motel. As they talked about their planned rally that evening, Dr. King asked their musician to play the old Negro spiritual, “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.”
“Play it real pretty,” he said with a grin.
There was a single shot. An explosion; 156 decibels. Louder than a jet engine. A .30-caliber bullet ripped through King’s right cheek. It broke his jaw and several vertebrae, severed his jugular vein, and blew off his necktie. He fell to the floor in a pool of blood. His friends rushed him to the hospital. And an hour later, King entered into that Promised Land he had seen so clearly the night before.
Rioting, burning, and looting broke out in more than one hundred cities across the United States. Parts of Washington, DC, erupted in flames. Radicals called for retribution and armed resistance, fueling the growth of the Black Power movement and the Black Panther Party. Hundreds of thousands of people, black and white, mourned the “apostle of nonviolence,” as President Johnson called the slain civil rights leader.
Senator Robert Kennedy, campaigning for the Democratic nomination to run for president of the United States, was in Indianapolis when he heard of Dr. King’s death.
“Oh, God,” he moaned. “When is this violence going to stop?”8
It fell to Kennedy to give the news to the huge crowd that had turned out to hear him that evening. He spoke for less than five minutes from a podium mounted on a flatbed truck. The people screamed and wept and wailed as he spoke of the fallen civil rights leader. Then he did what he’d never done before, and spoke publicly of his own brother’s murder.
For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart that same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort . . . to go beyond these rather difficult times. . . .
The vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings who abide in our land. Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.9
The crowd wept but did not erupt into violence. People quietly went on their way. In spite of rioting in cities like Chicago, New York, Detroit, Oakland, and Pittsburgh—with thirty-five killed and twenty-five hundred injured—Indianapolis was calm that night.
Two months after Dr. King’s murder, on the night of June 4, 1968, Robert Kennedy won the California Democratic presidential primary. Just after midnight on the morning of June 5, he’d addressed his supporters at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He was planning to go to a later meeting in another part of the building, but aides changed the plan and instead escorted him through the hotel kitchen on his way to an impromptu press conference with members of the media.
Surrounded by aides, Kennedy made his way through a narrow passageway. There was a steam table on one side and an ice machine on the other. A seventeen-year-old busboy in a white jacket caught Senator Kennedy’s eye. His name was Juan Romero, and he’d served the senator a meal earlier that day. The senator recognized the teenager and stopped to shake his hand.
Suddenly, a dark-haired man with a gun stepped out from behind the ice machine and lunged toward Kennedy. He shot him three times and sprayed bullets into the crowd until he was tackled by the senator’s aides and friends, five of whom were wounded.
Reporters, photographers, and colleagues rushed the scene. One journalist snapped the photo that became the iconic image of the day: Senator Kennedy is splayed on his back, his legs at odd angles. The young busboy, Juan Romero, in his white service jacket, squats by Kennedy’s side. His face is blurred with fear and confusion as he cradles his hero’s broken head. He’s already ripped his rosary out of his pocket and placed it in Kennedy’s open palm. Kennedy’s eyes are open; he is still alive.
The senator had taken three bullets. One exited from his chest, one lodged in his neck, and another had torn through his brain. In spite of frantic surgeries and efforts to save his life, he died twenty-six hours after the shooting. His assassin, a Palestinian radical named Sirhan Sirhan, would later say that he killed Robert Kennedy because the senator had supported Israel in the Arab-Israeli War of 1967. Sirhan was apprehended, tried, and sentenced to death, though his sentence would later be commuted to life in prison.
RFK was forty-two years old when he died. For many young people, particularly in the wake of Martin Luther King’s death, Kennedy had represented their last hope for social justice, racial tolerance, and an end to the war in Vietnam. Maybe the teenaged busboy, Juan Romero, said it best. His hero’s assassination “made me realize that no matter how much hope you have, it can be taken away in a second.”10
In 1968, Greg Laurie was fifteen years old. He already knew that hope could be taken away in a second. But he hadn’t really placed much confidence in political heroes like Robert Kennedy or Martin Luther King Jr. Like everyone, he was shocked and horrified by their deaths. And like most young people, he hated the war in Vietnam.
But also like that of most teenagers, Greg’s world was pretty small. His lack of hope wasn’t played out on some grand, national stage. It came from his own story. His cynicism wasn’t focused on sticking it to “the Man” or the Establishment. It came from his mom, and from not one man but a whole parade of men in her life. He didn’t trust adults. In his experience, they lied; they did what they wanted and left their mess. He’d clean his mother up when she passed out. He’d walk past her open bedroom door and see her naked on the bed with some guy he didn’t even know. He’d hear her slosh and slur how much she loved him, then yell at him in the next boozy breath. When she was drunk, she couldn’t even say his name right.
Greg was on his own.
He was excited, though, when the Newport Pop Festival came to his area in the beginning of August 1968. It was the first music concert ever to have more than one hundred thousand paid attendees, and it was going to be a phenomenon. He didn’t need to ask permission from his mother to go to the concert. Maybe other fifteen-year-olds’ parents had rules and curfews and concerns for their kids. Not Greg’s mom.
Greg doesn’t remember much about that night. He was excited about Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane. And he was amazed that he somehow ended up only about fifteen feet from the stage.
The band launched into “Somebody to Love” and the crowd went wild. People were screaming and pushing. Love beads were popping off everywhere as it started to get rough. It was hard to breathe. Greg couldn’t see anything except his own feet and a blur of pushing arms and legs all around him.
A random person on the stage pulled him up onto it by his armpits. He bobbed and weaved around the sound equipment and got himself out of there. Much later, he discovered that the mayhem had actually been planned rather than spontaneous. Not very hippie-esque. Singer David Crosby had arranged for a pie fight while Jefferson Airplane was on the stage, and had about three hundred cream pies brought into the venue. While Greg was looking for rescue from the hippie scrum, he hadn’t realized that all those people were in fact storming the stage not for somebody to love but for some pastries to throw.
Today, when pastor and evangelist Greg Laurie is preaching to a huge crowd in a stadium, he sometimes thinks about that crazy night when his determination to see Grace Slick almost ended in Piemaggedon. What if fifteen-year-old Greg Laurie could have somehow known that fifty years later he’d be the one on stage in a huge venue, and that the 161,000 people in the arena for a three-day event were there not to get stoned or to groove in a concert or to throw cream pies . . . but to hear the gospel, and that he’d be the one telling them about Jesus Christ?
That would have been far more bizarre to Greg than the freakiest, weirdest LSD trip he possibly could have taken back in 1968.