I’m not saying there was no great music after the Summer of Love. The encroaching sense of danger was a perfect setting for rock, and I found a lot to get excited about: John Lennon’s wicked ruminations, the wry romanticism of Joni Mitchell (at her best when she wasn’t trying to be anthemic), John Fogerty’s neo-Americana. His song “Bad Moon Rising,” with its nod to horror films, vividly depicts the ominous mood of 1968:
Don’t go ’round tonight
It’s bound to take your life
I still wrote about music, but now it was only part of my beat. The real action in youth culture was in the streets. The hippie riots on Sunset Strip were soon replicated in other cities as nomadic tribes of freaks met the forces of law, order, and real estate development. Even Toronto, that bastion of Canadian sanity, experienced a nasty crackdown. Only the quiet contempt that passes for tolerance in New York kept the local hippies from receiving the same treatment (for the moment). But the greatest threat to their safety came from civilians who were out for pussy or prey. Hippie chicks, as they were already called, became easy pickings, and rape was a major problem for kids living on the street. So were hard drugs like speed and heroin, as well as the sinister presence of the Hell’s Angels. In those days, their lifestyle was less about freedom than authority. For me, biker brutality would be embodied by the infamous Altamont concert of 1969, when the Angels who had been hired to provide security stabbed an acid-addled fan to death. The incident occurred just below the stage as the Rolling Stones performed, and it was captured on film. You can see the look on Mick Jagger’s face as he watches the murder after the fact, on an editing console. There’s a shock of … is that recognition? For a moment he looks like he’s pondering his role in the enveloping madness. Then he recovers his composure—ever the pro.
I wasn’t surprised by this turn of events. The insulation of urban hippies prevented them from seeing their privileged position in neighborhoods where poverty was endemic. Spiritual or not, these kids were targets for the anger that welled up in residents who had no choice about where they lived. The police had a similar attitude, and all that was necessary for them to exercise it was tacit permission from their commanders. Soon everyone I knew had a friend who’d been roughed up by cops or ripped off by thugs. It was as if the blood of hippies was being offered to the entire society as an outlet for its anxieties. The hippies reacted to their new role by refusing to be sacrificed. Though passive resistance was the strategy of choice, it became hard to maintain once the brutality landed on them from all sides. Enlightenment was proving insufficient to resolve the conflict between the hip and straight worlds. Now it was time to put up a fight.
A similar shift went on in the black community, where the pacifist teachings of Martin Luther King had been supplanted by the bark of Black Power. The ideological rift between the old militance and the new was clear, but the difference in sensibility seemed just as interesting to me. This wasn’t only a new attitude toward violence; it was a new style that owed as much to the counterculture as it did to Malcolm X. Afros and dashikis were a corollary to long hair and tie-dyes, with a different meaning, certainly, but serving the same purpose of creating a group identity. Meanwhile, the counterculture borrowed many of its slogans and much of its slang from blacks. These two groups moved in separate spaces, but their consciousness crossed over. As a result, the Aquarian Age, if it ever existed apart from the musical Hair, gave way to a white version of Black Power—the image of a hippie with a Molotov cocktail.
A year earlier, the kids I wrote about were “too busy grooving to put anybody down,” as the Monkees warbled. Now they saw themselves as part of a global struggle. Someone borrowed a page from the Vietcong playbook and called 1968 “the year of the heroic guerrilla.” The term applied not just to Third-World revolutionaries and insurrectionary blacks but also to students resisting the war, and even to hippies. It wasn’t a vanity. People who are subject to the same treatment soon conceive of themselves as a class, and the perception widely held was that everyone who wasn’t white and straight (i.e., normal) faced the same enemy, embodied in the cop with a club. The ability to identify one’s oppression with a much larger situation was as pretentious as anything else in youth culture, but it was also a real expression of the empathy with the underdog that many young people felt. The result was a new political formation that went by an amorphous but inclusive name: the Movement. I was glad to see this fusion take shape, and I wondered what role rock would play in it. The answer was blowing in the tear gas.
I don’t want to give the impression that no one believed in the pacifist hippie vision. One of them was Don McNeill, my best friend at the Voice. We were pretty much the same age, and we formed a kind of triumvirate with another young writer, a disillusioned West Point cadet named Lucian Truscott IV. He’d come to the Voice after writing a series of letters with a distinctly conservative slant. Naturally he was invited to the paper’s Christmas party, and he showed up in a full-dress uniform and sandals. Lucian was the scion of an illustrious military family—the only person I’d ever met with a number in his name—but he soon broke with his legacy (you can find the details online; they’re worth checking out), and he fit right in at the Voice. He was hard-drinking but deeply caring, the perfect foil for Don, with whom he immediately bonded. Both of us saw Don as a model of the alternative-press ideal: he lived what he wrote about.
The hustle didn’t exist for Don, which made him an unlikely New Yorker. In fact, he’d been raised in Alaska, the son of a journalist, and he inherited the itch to report, along with a set of values that drew him to the counterculture. Why he came to the hardest place for such a project to succeed, instead of joining the trek to San Francisco, I’ll never understand. But he was the Voice’s correspondent in the hippie trenches—literally, since he was homeless. Once in a while he took a room at a midtown hotel, but many nights he relied on a bed in an unused upper floor of the office, or he moved among the crash pads of the East Village. One of the most distinctive things about the Voice was its willingness to hire people who were partisans of the subjects they wrote about. I felt that way about rock, at least at the start, and Don was just as dedicated to the hippie scene. Nearly every week he filed a piece about something I hadn’t noticed, radical experiments in communal living and the kind of activism that would never reach the desks of journalists busy covering the more colorful manifestations of the mess.
Don managed to be both accurate and sympathetic to the people he wrote about. His attitude was a striking contrast to my fretful ambivalence. It rekindled the sentiments I’d felt in the Haight and repressed on the pavement of Manhattan. I suppose he signified upward mobility to me—he was so securely middle-class that he could afford to be indigent. In any case, we saw the struggle very differently. He believed in consciousness; I believed in fighting back.
The detachment I was so proud of, the mark of my rationality in the face of mental goo, was beginning to seem like the greatest of all illusions. There was no way to justify remaining outside the battle. The draft was an omnipresent threat, the war a patent danger to everything I stood for. I hated the lies that rationalized it, and the pretense of reason that masked a blind madness. Like millions of people, I was appalled by the photos of naked children fleeing from a wall of burning napalm; the Zippo lighters setting fire to peasant huts; the bodies coming home, which the military hadn’t yet learned to hide. It was enraging and frightening to behold. Worse still for someone with my politics, the war was being prosecuted by the most progressive president since FDR, the man who’d led the drive to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 despite his prediction that the Democrats would lose the South as a result. (They eventually did.) That contradiction stoked my fury. Liberalism, the religion of my youth, was now a nice word for hypocrisy. The president had a crack in his moral center, and we, the young, had a duty—to each other, if not history—to drive a sword through it.
My shift from observer to participant in the uprising that came to be called the Revolution was a long and perilous process. Don McNeill played an important part in it. He was the reporter I most wanted to be. Craft and empathy were conjoined in his work; he witnessed and he empathized. His politics were in his limpid eyes. Though he never sported bell-bottoms and beads, he had a certain style in the only clothing he wore, a leather jacket, dark pullover, and jeans. His long hair brushed against the press card dangling around his neck, and he was skinny the way people who don’t think much about eating are. I didn’t think of him as a sex object. Though he was certainly my type, he didn’t project an erotic aura. But I often found myself offering him a sandwich or a donut. I think it was my way of hovering over him.
Nothing in my experience had dislodged the feeling that it was risky to cherish people. The only way I could handle it was to argue with those I cared for, as I did with Don, incessantly. We had running debates about the fate of hippie culture and the proper strategy of resistance to fascism—that word was on everyone’s lips. He seemed so out of touch with what was really “going down,” yet I longed to believe that he was right. After all, I’d come of age in the civil rights movement. I wanted us to overcome. But the unrest fostered rage where hope should have been—and I was bursting with it.
Some of the fury was righteous, some compensatory. I was pissed at the government for saddling my generation with a wicked war. But I was also angry about being forced to reveal my homosexual feelings in order to avoid the draft, thereby acknowledging, if only to the army doctors, something that still shamed me. One of my greatest satisfactions is that no young person today will experience the ordeal of “queering out” of the military. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, this act of desperation seared itself into my personality. In the project where I grew up, the word faggot had a double meaning, as it does in many working-class communities; it was what you called a queer, but also a weakling—and that’s what I was in the eyes of the army. I wasn’t good enough to be a soldier. At first I felt immense relief. I came home after my draft-board physical and fell into an exhausted sleep. But I had the most unlikely dream. I was in Vietnam, fighting alongside the other guys, dodging bullets and scurrying under barbed wire, having a hell of a time. This was a dream of belonging, not combat, but I woke up horrified.
The dream revealed that I was psyched for warfare. The only problem was finding the right enemy. Like most of my friends I thought Ho Chi Minh was cool, a poet who had once lived in Harlem and worked in a Chinese restaurant. How could I hate someone who looked like my image of an Asian sage? Better to strike out against the system whose might was at the core of this unjust war, of poisonous coups by the CIA, of FBI provocateurs planted in groups that were dedicated to change. This was the nation we had come to call AmeriKKKa.
The same passions that once drew me to rock, the lust for ecstasy and the need to escape from myself, now fed a fascination with the Revolution. I was on my way to becoming what the Rolling Stones called, somewhat derisively, a “street fighting man.” (I didn’t appreciate Mick Jagger’s irony—after all, he wasn’t being drafted.) The new counterculture of resistance was immensely attractive. It summoned me. And what it said was: Don’t hustle, don’t seethe, don’t be-here-now. Act.
By the end of the decade I would be faced with situations that required me to make a choice between reporting what I knew and hiding salient facts. Sometimes I chose to do the latter because telling the truth would have blown the cover of activists accused of crimes, people whose safety I valued more than the rules I’d learned in j-school. It wasn’t an easy decision—I took the ethics of reporting very seriously—but hopefully this chapter will explain why I acted as I did. I witnessed the violent reaction of the authorities firsthand, and it destroyed my confidence in American justice. I saw black defendants mistreated in courtrooms, and it made racism feel concrete and systematic. I watched young people who were in every sense like me—my long-haired peers—clubbed before my eyes, and it made the police seem as irrational as the men conducting the war in Vietnam; in fact, their brutality felt like part of the war, and it unleashed the solider within me.
Still, I carried a press card, and that gave me immunity. All I had to do was show my credentials and the cops would let me pass or swing their clubs at someone else. This was a profoundly guilt-inducing privilege, but it also allowed me to observe the mayhem without feeling personally at risk. I could vent my emotions safely, unlike the protesters, and I loved running alongside them as they went wild in the streets. My political commitment was real, but so was the rush I experienced, a surge of adrenaline and a sense of transcendence that I’d only felt from music. I began to transfer my awe from rock stars to radicals.
I admired their stringent thinking, especially after the mushy logic of the hippies. I saw their certainty as sexy in a completely different way. The Movement’s leadership was pretty much a fellowship, and, whatever the limitations of such an arrangement, hanging out with these guys felt like I was finally part of the combat unit that the army had declared me unfit to join. Of course, we warriors were committed to nonviolence—at least at first—but our idea of passive resistance didn’t involve joining hands and singing hymns. Peacefulness was a tactic, not an inviolate principle. We were prepared to be as violent as we had to be, no more, but no less. Our major inspiration was Malcolm X’s admonition “By any means necessary.” I never thought that, when he excoriated white people, he meant me. I saw him as a big brother, and I think that’s how many white activists felt about the black militants who maintained a distant but potent alliance with the antiwar movement. They were a manly example to nerds like us. The counterculture had transformed dorkiness into freakiness, which was a good thing, but adapting the Black Power attitude meant we could also do battle, and that felt very good indeed.
I stopped thinking about hippies and their plan to save the world by expanding consciousness. Only action in the streets could accomplish that. I decided that pacifism was the essence of bourgeois spirituality in soft times. But the times weren’t soft for millions of people in the Third World; nor for U.S. soldiers in peril and the people they killed by the thousands, the ten thousands, the hundred thousands. Not for the wretched of the earth, including Newark and Watts. Yet even as I felt drawn to the earthly delights of insurrection, one thing about the hippie spiel stuck with me. It had to do with giving myself in sex.
That was difficult for a twenty-four-year-old with a narcissistic personality. At first I had to force myself to concentrate on pleasuring women. The need to come pounded within me like Keith Moon’s drums, and it was hard to hold back. But the real difficulty was focusing emotionally on the person beside me. It felt perilous in a way that the particulars of sex didn’t. It wasn’t just a matter of muff diving. I liked the smell and feeling of a clitoris on my tongue, but to really consider a woman’s gratification meant daring to experience the undertones I wanted to deny. Was there a relationship between these feelings and the mild buzz I had when holding my mother’s hand to help her across the street? (She was on the way to becoming lame and blind.) Had she experienced waves of ecstasy while holding me as a baby? I was only wading in the shallows of these emotions, but once I allowed them to register they flowed through me, heightening my pleasure. The bliss of connection rivaled the joy of rock. As a result I had a lot more sex, and not just with my wife. (What else can you do on a waterbed at midnight?). But with Judith it was special. When my delayed climax finally erupted, I would shake wildly in a head-to-toe spasm. I began to think of this as the mother load.
Then I would leap out of bed and race to the fridge, because suddenly I was hungry. I would sit at the table, spooning something sweet and creamy into my mouth, letting it lull me into forgetting the intensity. Something always stopped me from keeping that feeling in mind, which was probably why it was easy to transfer my sexual affections. There was a barrier to intimacy that I couldn’t surmount or even detect. In other words, I had room in my life for the Revolution. And by now it merited a capital R.
Don McNeill was changing, at least in his affect. He often looked grim, and his responses to my arguments seemed less confident. He fretted over the people he wrote about, how easy it was for them to shift from pacifism to respect for righteous violence. His uneasiness deepened my melancholy. It was a poignant reminder of the unraveling I’d observed for the better part of a year, which had swept up even die-hard hippies. Every incident of police brutality, every kid in a tie-dye with a bloody head, was a shot to the heart of love. The communes were ripe for organizing, and a new group arose within the Movement to accommodate that possibility, a cadre of media-savvy freaks who called themselves the Youth International Party, aka the Yippies.
From the start, the New Left distinguished itself from the old one by incorporating rituals of theatrical disruption. We didn’t just march with banners and raised fists; we wiggled and whooped, shouted nonsense slogans, and pulled pranks that revealed the contradictions of power. Play was the key—it was part of the ideology of childishness that had been so important to the hippies and still was to us. But it also reflected the surrealist tradition, which I was familiar with from my time in the cultural underground. I watched the Yippie leader Jerry Rubin create a Dada event by showing up at a congressional hearing in a Revolutionary War uniform. A prior generation of radicals had been hounded by this same committee, and many of them showed great dignity under immense pressure. But Rubin’s antics—at the witness table, he blew bubbles with his gum—completely degraded the proceedings. I have a vivid memory of him running giddily through the corridors outside the hearing room as stunned office workers peered.
The media lapped up these antics, especially when other Yippie leaders wore shirts made from American flags. Today flag neckties are the height of patriotic fashion for right-wing pols, but in those days such displays were considered defacement, and they were a crime. This created a perfect opening for the most creative radical activist of the sixties. He often appeared in a flag shirt; in fact, he was arrested for wearing one. “I only regret,” he said after his trial, “that I have but one shirt to give to my country.” His name was Abbie Hoffman.
With his mane of curly hair (sometimes called a Jewfro), his thick and crooked nose, which had been broken a number of times by the police, and his streetwise Boston accent, he was the face of revolutionary action for my kind. It was Abbie who thought of sneaking onto the balcony of the New York Stock Exchange and tossing a barrage of dollar bills onto the floor. He hadn’t devised such strategies from the Dada playbook, but from a close reading of McLuhan—the old pundit was good for something after all. Abbie was blunt about his intention to use television as a tool of subversion. Though he lacked the cool demeanor that McLuhan regarded as optimal for the new medium, he had a quicksilver tongue and a folksy persona that played great on camera. Watching him on a chat show was like seeing a political version of that Jewish funny-man type known as the tummler. But Abbie had honed his skills as a civil rights activist in the South. He’d been arrested dozens of times and menaced by police dogs. There’s a Richard Avedon photo of him that shows the full impact of these experiences on his face. He was wizened, intrepid, and feisty, even in his writing. Few characters in literature are as true to their author’s lifestyle as the one he created in his memoir Revolution For the Hell of It and its brazenly titled sequel, Steal This Book. The other leaders of the youth movement were either serious militants or jesters like Rubin. Abbie was a guerrilla clown, and he presented a new model for the revolutionary.
I met him on Fire Island, my favorite retreat from the streets. There, I swam nude, ate fish fresh from the sea, and hung out with people who were mellow in a way they couldn’t be in the city. Cars weren’t allowed on Fire Island, so it was easy to forget the tumult. My adrenal glands were on holiday—until I met a firebrand black feminist named Flo Kennedy. I remember her best for introducing me to the phrase “lateral oppression,” which described the practice of minorities attacking each other. She also introduced me to her weekend guest, whom I recognized from the pictures I’d seen of him in action. At the moment I badly needed Abbie’s help.
I had left my dog in the small cabin where I was staying. The dog was large and easily agitated; I’d bought him from a prior owner who had abused him. The vet called him a “fear biter.” (I would often apply this term to cops.) When I returned to the cabin after an afternoon at the beach I realized that I’d forgotten to take my keys. The dog was locked inside. Since I was afraid of heights—a lifelong phobia—I wasn’t about to climb up to the window and lower myself inside. I mentioned this to Abbie, who agreed to do the job. I told him he was crazy, but the look on face said, Don’t tell me about vicious dogs; I’ve seen ’em, smelled ’em, wiped their drool off my pants. He hoisted himself to the window and disappeared. I expected to hear screaming, but instead the door opened and he stood there, holding the docile doggie by the collar. It was a fear biter, but Abbie was unafraid.
The Yippies—not to be confused with yuppies or any cohort of new money that calls itself hip and vibrant—the Yippies were, well, I never really knew what they were, except that they smoked dope, watched a lot of TV, and plotted the overthrow of the government. Over the next year, I got to know Abbie and his wife, Anita, quite well. I would stop by their apartment on St. Mark’s Place from time to time, and through them I got to meet other radical leaders including Jerry Rubin (who later became a stockbroker and marketeer) and Tom Hayden (sexy despite his terminal earnestness; I saw what Jane Fonda would see in him). These activists were among the defendants who came to be known as the Chicago Seven. They were tried on charges of conspiring to start the riot that sullied the Democratic Party convention in 1968. Because I had witnessed several meetings of these alleged plotters—I’d earned their trust as a journalist—I was summoned to testify at their trial. That subpoena is one of the few artifacts from my youth that I held on to, and I still regard it as a mark of pride. To my regret I never got called to the witness stand, but even without my help all the defendants were acquitted of the conspiracy charges. Only Abbie spent time in jail. He’d taunted the bemused judge, a hack named Julius Hoffman, even scolding him for having the same last name. (He called it a shonder fur de goyim, a shame in front of Gentiles.) Finally the judge had enough. As Abbie was carted off for contempt of court, I heard him shout to his wife, “Water the plants!”
One member of the Chicago Seven suffered a special fate. Bobby Seale, a founder of the Black Panthers, was part of the coalition that had led the protest at the convention. Like several of his white codefendants, Seale was verbally disruptive at the trial, but unlike them he was chained to a chair and finally gagged. I would see several black men receive this treatment in court—and worse. I was present at a hearing for George Jackson, a felon who had written an eloquent memoir called Soledad Brother. I won’t go into the contention of prison officials that Jackson was violent toward his guards; such things were often acts of self-defense. But at this hearing he was shackled to a chair. Suddenly the lights went out. Everyone hit the floor, and I heard the sounds of a scuffle. When the lights came on again, Jackson was bloody; he’d been beaten by guards. The official explanation was that he planned to escape, but it would have been impossible in the heavily secured courtroom. Still, there had been several attempts to spring him, including one by his younger brother that turned violent. In the ensuing shootout, a judge who had been taken hostage was killed, along with his abductors. It was very complicated, but not if you were sitting, as I was, near George Jackson’s mother. I saw the look on her face as her son emerged from the darkness, helpless and bleeding.
Images like that were seared into my mind—black men muzzled and chained while a white judge, white guards, and nearly always a white jury proceeded blithely with the proceedings. Perhaps I should have considered whether it was necessary to restrain men who were, in some cases, capable of violence. But no one raised on news photos of lynchings could have assimilated these sights. They convinced me that I was living in a racist state where black men were the objects of fear and loathing. The evidence was manacled before me. And my own freedom to behave as badly as I pleased only added to my rage.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch of New Journalism, I was about to lose the last of my literary heroes. The celebratory tone of Tom Wolfe’s work had turned acidic, and he no longer wrote about the zany individualists who created the style of the sixties. Now his dominant subject was the Manhattan cultural establishment, and he skewered its pretensions in gleeful detail. I relished his exposé of the New Yorker, in which he described the hothouse environment around its editor, William Shawn. My friend Ellen Willis, a pioneering feminist and the first significant woman rock critic, wrote for that magazine, and she had hilarious tales about what couldn’t be said in its decorous pages. She wasn’t allowed to use the word wig or refer to anyone as short. (Shawn was a diminutive man.) Another friend, the pop music critic Jon Pareles, had a similar ordeal at the Times, where the honorific Mr. had to be used before every male name. Pareles fumed about this rule well into the seventies. Would he have to call Iggy Pop of the Stooges “Mr. Pop”? Or Meat Loaf “Mr. Loaf”? No, he wouldn’t, but the problem showed how far mainstream publications were from the spirit and letter of youth culture. Tom Wolfe had an unerring ear for that sort of contradiction, and he used it to devastating effect when he covered a fund-raiser for the Black Panther Party at the home of Leonard Bernstein. Wolfe captured the strange interplay between the militants and the culturati whose patronage they were soliciting. The result was one of his most famous pieces, “Radical Chic.” It was a great read, but Lenny was an easy target, and Wolfe couldn’t—or wouldn’t—grasp the complexity of the situation. It didn’t suit his purpose to imagine that someone like Bernstein might have real feelings of solidarity with the Panthers. I knew otherwise because I, too, admired them.
Today the Black Panthers are part of the retro universe available to anyone with a search engine. For many young people their image is mashed up with the caricatures of blaxploitation films from the seventies. But I got to see the real thing when the cameras weren’t rolling. I often ran into Panthers at Movement meetings, where they were guests of honor. It was a mark of pride for a Panther to attend a demo-planning session. I once spent an afternoon at their office in the Fillmore district of San Francisco, where they ran community programs. There were no media stars in the house, none of their extremely photogenic leaders, just people dropping by to hang out and join the running debate, which was so recondite that I could barely follow it. This was lefty discourse with an internationalist gist. I’d hoped for something more quotably black-and-proud, but I realized that I wasn’t at a James Brown concert. I was watching real-world Marxists discuss ideology, and of course it was boring.
The Commies of my youth—my friends’ parents—would never have talked politics in front of me. It was too risky at the height of McCarthyism. In those days, people like them covered their faces when they were dragged before Congress. That changed in the sixties, when the New Left reinvigorated Marxism as a critical system, even as it turned against the Soviet Union. While covering teach-ins on occupied campuses, I saw undergrads fling dialectics around like fastballs at a game. I watched Spartacists and Trotskyists battle over tiny clods of turf, their numbers swelled by the government agents among them. But these were middle-class people, and I never felt comfortable with their jargon. The Panthers didn’t strike me as middle-class, and so I saw their formality as a marker of upward mobility. I wondered whether they’d trained themselves not to talk ghetto, the way I’d taught myself not to talk Bronx. That would have been a very sixties thing, all of us lifting ourselves through language and being reborn in the Revolution.
Many people reinvented themselves through radical politics in those days, so it didn’t bother me that some of these militants were former criminals. It was what they became that mattered. Unlike black activists who took their cue from Malcolm X, the Panthers pursued alliances with whites, and they welcomed other minorities, including gay people. Though the conflict between blacks and Jews was simmering in the sixties, I never heard a Panther make an anti-Semitic remark. They rejected black nationalism as sectarian, and opposed the Nation of Islam. If I had to place them on the Marxist spectrum I’d call them Mao-oid. They swam in the sea of the people, as the Chairman instructed, but “the people” meant every group that was oppressed, not just a certain class or race. The Revolution would be made by a coalition of the stigmatized, and the Panthers were working to expand its ranks. Best of all, for my purposes, they had an unerring sense of style.
I lavished attention on their long leather coats, black berets, and perfectly coiffed Afros—all part of the Panther mystique, as were their graphics. They created the prime image of the resurgent left, a clenched black fist. It would appear, in many colors, on buttons for all the movements that surfaced in identity politics: fists for students, Chicano and Native American activists, militant feminists, and the Gay Liberation Front. Nearly every form of agitation in the sixties borrowed from the Panthers’ iconography. Their emphasis on community self-defense inspired all sorts of groups, from the Gray Panthers, who advocated for the elderly, to the Pink Panthers, who responded to homophobic assaults. It’s no accident that the Guardian Angels, hardly fans of Black Power, wore red berets. The extent of this influence reflects one of the most salient features of black insurrectionary thinking in the sixties—it motivated all sorts of people who never thought they could stand up for themselves. The Panthers were architects of the future. That was one reason why the government saw them as a threat.
On the fringes of the Movement, menacing rhetoric was an art form in 1968. An anarchist group called Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers specialized in disrupting orderly demonstrations. Valerie Solanas had a cadre of one called SCUM (the Society for Cutting Up Men). It got more respect than it deserved, even after she shot Andy Warhol. Then there was the Weather Underground, named for a line in a Dylan song—“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” They specialized in bombing federal buildings, and though they made an effort not to kill anyone, they didn’t always succeed. Three people died when one of their devices accidentally exploded, demolishing a Greenwich Village brownstone. These were futile acts with fatal results.
Rational politics wasn’t a strong suit with leftist fringe groups in the late sixties. Yet nearly all their members escaped the fate of the Panthers, whose leadership was hounded and sometimes ambushed by the authorities at all levels of government. Why did these black militants summon up the most primal emotions in their enemies? It wasn’t just because they were armed (that was legal in California), or simply because they were effective (at its height they operated in twenty cities and their newspaper had some 250,000 readers), or merely because they were so good at spectacle. (You can check out the clips of them marching on the Oakland courthouse, chanting, “The Revolution has come! Time to get you a gun.”) They inspired terror because of what they revealed about race—the nightmare and the reality. Race was a fantasy that shaped our identities. It had been central to my coming of age in the early sixties, and now it was at the core of the nation’s destiny.
As a program, the Revolution was never very popular, but as a concept it pervaded the counterculture in 1968. Even the Beatles felt compelled to address it. The official lyric of their song “Revolution” reads, “When you talk about destruction … you can count me out,” but in one recorded version John Lennon sings “count me in” as well. That was pretty much the way I felt. Though I was caught up in the mania, I had my doubts. An uprising of the oppressed was easy to imagine, but how could it possibly succeed? Who would provide the weapons to resist the heavily armed government? And what would happen after the inevitable bloodbath? I was certain that the end result would be a backlash of stunning proportions. There were some very dark forces in the military, and the prospect of a coup seemed credible to me. So I found myself torn between wanting the Revolution and dreading it. This wasn’t just a political dilemma. It was a conflict between warring aspects of my personality, one part learning to love and the other eager for the rush of rioting. Many young people were faced with a similar dichotomy—we wanted to fight, but also to boogie. A quote from the anarchist icon Emma Goldman decorated a lot of dorm walls: “If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution.” And dance we did, all the way to the billy clubs.
As the unraveling accelerated, wild rumors spread, some of them deliberate hoaxes. One of the most notorious appeared in a hip satirical magazine called The Realist, which published “evidence” that Lyndon Johnson had fucked the corpse of JFK in the neck wound. Even a year after that story appeared, when the editor admitted that it had been fabricated, some of my friends believed it, and how could I convince them otherwise when so many unfathomable things were actually happening? Who could have imagined that the CIA would send a harmless gas through the New York subway system in order to experiment with aerosolized LSD as a weapon? It was inconceivable, but apparently true. Our most paranoid fantasies about the government were less extreme than the plans actually hatched. Please consider this when you wonder how people like me could have set out to destroy liberalism and its compromised emblem, Lyndon Johnson. I’m not sure that the foot soldiers of any revolution focus on the future they are ushering in. The urgency of the situation is the only thing that counts. For us, that meant ending the war, and the primary question was the one that inspired my favorite marching chant: “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” The answer: more than we could bear.
I still wrote about rock occasionally, but it was much less central to my life than radical politics had become. My column mostly chronicled the adventures of the New Left. Songs without a political message were like a march without slogans to me, and I was big on slogans—my favorite one was “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” I can only imagine how strange this concept of generational solidarity must seem to young people today, prompted to think that only cliques and networks matter, and bound together by the illusory intimacy of social media, what Susan Sontag, referring to snapshots, called “self-surveillance.” But young people in the sixties were united much more broadly by a war we didn’t believe in, and also by a set of great global expectations. From this perspective it seemed clear that America had to be rescued from its own forms of tyranny. I’m well aware that Tea Party partisans say the same thing, but the point of our movement wasn’t to defend wealth and property. This is the difference between their radical sentiments and ours. They want to preserve their privilege; we wanted to overcome it. Our enemy was the government and the military-industrial complex. Their enemy is the government and … us.
I’d been following the Yippies since their first major demo, in 1967. This was the event that launched Norman Mailer’s career as a New Journalist. The target was the Pentagon. Abbie Hoffman had calculated astutely that the sight of ten thousand kids (and several famous authors) chanting before the building, in an attempt to levitate it, would terrify the authorities. They could easily have coped with a purposeful march, but this was a signal of how cryptic our resistance had become. The open display of irrationality was intended to reveal the true nature of a “rational” war. But it was also an attack on the illusion of coherence. By violating the rules of plausibility, we embodied the disintegration of the order. Abbie called this strategy Groucho Marxism.
I could never decide whether he enjoyed the violence that his tactics unleashed, or whether he regarded it as a necessary evil. Perhaps he felt exhilarated by escaping into reality, as I did. I can’t say, but I do understand the fire that was in his eyes. To commit violence for a just cause is a pleasure—you literally see red. But to present yourself for abuse, to let your head run bloody in the name of a belief, is an even more powerful experience. A violent act propels you to focus entirely on your feelings. You stop thinking. But receiving violence in a demo empties your feelings and replaces them with the purity of a principle. Your thoughts crystallize. This is why many protesters go limp when they are hit. It’s a kind of consummation. I realize that this sounds like masochism, but such terms are useless when it comes to forcing change. Injustice doesn’t relent of its own accord. It demands victims and the witness of the nation, and nothing plays better on TV than the blood of the beautiful being shed.
As our rebellion spread and we approached the brink of confrontation with the state, I could sense the shift on all sides, from protest to mayhem. An explosion seemed inevitable. I thought of America as a swollen boil. Over the fateful spring and summer of ’68 it burst, and so did what little remained of my equilibrium. Jolt after jolt shattered my sense of order. Holding back became impossible.
In April, as the trees budded, I covered a bloody student uprising at Columbia University. It was sparked by newly discovered evidence that my alma mater had been doing research for the defense department, with a direct bearing on the war. Moral considerations aside, this meant that the university was supporting a military operation that could place its own students at risk once they graduated. But the protest also had a local agenda. One of the issues was Columbia’s decision to build a gym in the park used by Harlem residents. The community would be granted limited access to the facility through a separate entrance. This was an outrage to an already seething neighborhood. Prominent militants joined black students in occupying a dorm, renaming it Malcolm X University. White students seized other buildings, with much of the faculty declaring its support. Soon the whole place was shut down.
When I arrived to cover the protest, it looked like a cross between a strike and a Living Theatre performance. I remember one student climbing a tree and shouting for all to hear, “This is a liberated tree, and I won’t come down until my demands are met.” Inside the dorms there was a festive air, with pizzas donated by sympathetic merchants, and guitars everywhere. I spent a fine afternoon flirting with students and shilling for quotes. This had the makings of yet another piece about the heroic struggle of the young. But then the administration made a deal with the black occupiers, who marched out of their occupied building with raised fists. That left an opening for the police to move in.
As they entered the campus, in the dead of night, all telephone connections were severed. Then the clubbing began. It had the look and feel of a baby seal hunt. Students were kicked, pummeled, and dragged by the hair down flights of stairs. Their screams echoed across the quad, along with the ululating rebel cry of Arab women that everyone knew from the revolutionary film The Battle of Algiers. It rang from every dorm. By the time the raid was over, seven hundred people had been arrested and a hundred fifty hospitalized. I toured the university chapel, now a makeshift infirmary where dozens of students lay bleeding. But the image that stays with me is the plaza before Columbia’s library. It had been full of people when the raid began, and at some point the police charged the crowd. After the space was cleared I saw dozens of sandals littering the sidewalk. Students had jumped out of their shoes to get away.
How did I remain immune from the clubs, even though I looked just like the protesters? The answer lay in the magic credentials that dangled from my neck. As usual, I was protected by my press card, and it allowed me to witness the bloodletting up close and untouched. At some point that night I stumbled into the dorm next to the building where I’d once studied journalism. About a hundred students cowered in the lobby, and soon after I joined them they locked the doors. But the police used battering rams, and the doors came off the hinges and collapsed. As the cops barged in, I flashed on an old silent-movie cartoon with antique officers swinging their clubs in a cloud of smoke. I raced up the stairs to the mezzanine, and from there I saw the cops beating people in the lobby. The whole thing was in slo-mo—that’s the kind of thing adrenaline will do. The shrieks of the students became a hissing in my ears. The police began climbing the stairs. I calmly opened a window and jumped, falling two stories and hitting the ground on my feet.
I picked myself up and walked to the subway, my mind a block of ice. I took a train to the Voice office and spent the next few hours writing my piece. Then I handed it in and headed home, still in an uncanny state of calm. When I closed the door behind me a cramp gripped my belly, and I dropped to the floor in a spasming ball. I had met my deadline; only then could I feel pain.
By that point I had come to regard political violence as part of my daily life. Only three weeks before the skull bashings at Columbia, Martin Luther King was assassinated. I was not so well insulated when I heard the news. I felt as if the top of my own head had exploded. As city after city erupted in flames, and Lyndon Johnson appeared on the White House lawn to plead for restraint—I remember him saying, “For God’s sake, live within the law”—I noticed how shriveled he seemed. The president’s impotence was nearly as devastating to me as the murder of King. I wandered through streets full of people in a daze, the traffic moving slowly, almost somberly. There are moments in the film Taxi Driver that remind me of the eerie ambience that night.
I saw a car parked, with its radio playing. A group of Black Muslims in suits and bow ties were sitting inside. One of them opened the door so I could hear more clearly. We listened together, not looking at each other but sharing wordless grief. It was a moment I will never forget, that recognition of what it means to lose an idea of what is possible. King’s concept of America as the “beloved community” was powerful even to these separatists, despite their dogma. One of them reached across me to turn up the volume. I was prepared for the cold courtesy that Black Muslims typically extended to whites. One of them had rung my bell erroneously a few years earlier. “Pardon me, white devil,” he’d said politely. This time there was no etiquette to express our feelings. I saw their silence as a vision of the future. But their willingness to share the radio with me was more mysterious. I think it showed a sense of how fragile we all are when a leader is killed. This is the purpose of assassinations, even when they are committed by a lone, crazed gunman. They produce a profound feeling of vulnerability.
Then, in June, Bobby Kennedy was murdered. Like some white lefties and quite a few black people, I’d regarded him as the great hope of electoral politics. Most of my friends preferred Eugene McCarthy, who was running a more cerebral antiwar campaign. He didn’t appeal to me, for the same reason that the peace movement never seemed as urgent as the struggle for civil rights. I didn’t believe in peace; I believed in justice, and that didn’t seem like the same thing. I’m not saying I was right about Bobby, only young and subject to the charisma that he had in abundance. He was visceral in a way that invited not just optimism but ecstasy. Crowds surged to touch him, tearing at his clothes. Watching him campaign, as I did once, was an almost mystical experience. After Johnson declined to run for reelection it seemed likely that Kennedy would be the Democratic nominee. The announcement had just been made that he’d won the California primary. It was after midnight, and I turned off the TV. Then Robert Christgau called and told me to turn it back on. That’s when I saw the ballroom erupt in screams.
I watched for several hours and finally fell asleep in front of the set. When I woke up they were announcing Bobby’s death. The networks showed pictures of him lying on the floor of the kitchen where he’d been shot, his face pale and distant, the tie around his neck askew. His helplessness was terrifying to behold, and the feeling persisted long after that night. It was something I wouldn’t experience again until I saw the column of black smoke rising over the Manhattan skyline on 9/11. But this was far more personal. The sense that all the heroes of my political life were being killed made me feel emasculated, literally. My balls shriveled up against my belly for protection, and for several weeks I was unable to get an erection, no matter how I enlisted my fantasies.
By July I was ready for a Mayan death star to strike the White House (as one of my friends predicted). Everyone around me seemed hooked on apocalyptic expectations. Hysteria had become a habit; I was living on what might be called, in today’s elaborate diagnostic terms, adrenal bulimia. But I focused my feelings on Don McNeill. He represented every hopeful and delicate impulse that was being crushed. And now he slunk around the office, his shoulders sagging. I felt more protective toward him than ever, but I was too frantic to offer him the support he needed—also too overcome with guilt. A few months earlier I had pushed him to write about the Yippies. I argued that he couldn’t understand how the hippies he reported on were evolving unless he hung out with Abbie Hoffman. I tried to convince him that antiwar demos were now part of his beat. I suppose he came to agree, because he decided to cover a Yippie protest at Grand Central Station. I offered to go with him, mainly because I didn’t think he knew how to handle himself around flailing clubs. But there was only one press card. In those days the police thought they could decide what constituted the media, and we were issued just a few credentials, which meant that most of our reporters had to share them. Since Don would be writing the piece, he got the card.
What I didn’t realize was the depths of resentment that the police felt toward reporters. Anyone wearing press credentials was a target for the guardians in blue. There are many pictures of journalists being beaten at demonstrations in 1968. (My favorite shows a Times photographer dragged down by cops who are choking him with his camera straps.) It had become apparent to me that I was safer without an identifier. I could easily pass as an ordinary protester, and when you’re looking for someone to club, the taller target is the tempting one. I credit my survival to my shortness.
The demo that Don covered, billed as a Yip-In, had happened in March, just a month before King was killed. It was already clear that the police were ready to bust heads, especially when the protesters showed up in the main hall of Grand Central Station, with its celebrated vaulted ceiling featuring signs of the zodiac. The chaos must have been glorious to behold, chants ricocheting off the marble floor and walls. I wasn’t there, so I wouldn’t know, but I do remember what happened to Don. At some point, the police lifted him up and shoved him headfirst through a plate-glass window. His wound required stitches. Our staff photographer took a picture of him that ran, I believe, on the front page. Don is looking directly at the camera, blood dripping down his face and onto his press card.
After that incident we were told to buy helmets. (For years afterward I never went to a demo without one.) And Don became even more precious to me. I blamed myself for his baptism by billy club. Finally I forced myself to ask how he was coping with his injury. “Everything’s cool,” he replied. He was going to his place upstate to mellow out. I knew he needed a break. We’d already decided to cover the next big demo together, perhaps under a joint byline. This protest was being organized by antiwar groups determined to disrupt the Democratic convention in Chicago, where Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, would be anointed as the party’s nominee. I would write about the chaos that ensued, but Don wasn’t there with me. The conversation I’ve described was the last time I saw him alive.
Sometime during that time-out in the country he walked into a lake and drowned. He was twenty-three. The Voice obituary concluded that his death was accidental, but a guest at his house told me a more complicated version. According to him, they were tripping, and at some point he and Don had a sexual encounter. Apparently it was Don’s first gay experience, and afterward he wandered off by himself—end of story. I know it’s difficult to keep track of someone while you’re in an altered state, but I was furious at this guy. Couldn’t he tell how troubled Don was? Why hadn’t he stayed with him? Unreasonable as my feelings may have been, this behavior struck me as the epitome of what lay beneath the mellow veneer many people cultivated in the late sixties. It wasn’t indifference but something even worse: a casual faith in letting people in distress do their thing.
The trauma of Don’s death remains so painful that my hands are trembling as I recall it. Everyone at the Voice was devastated. His memorial service was the only time I saw my colleagues cry. The editor seemed steeped in grief, and in the weeks that followed he withdrew into his office. A few years later the paper was sold to the first of many owners, each of them less connected to its original mission. But for a while I kept a picture of Don in my desk drawer. It was the one that had run after he was injured by the police. While pacing out a paragraph, I would stare at his face, blood dripping from his forehead and a look of stunned confusion in his eyes. Like so many images from my youth, that picture is now online. When I see it today the Neil Young song about childhood and memory fills my raw and raging mind: I was helpless. Helpless. Helpless.