Parentheses

Responsible debate and legitimate political action—these are the ways to change policies in a democratic society. The resisters only retard the cause they seem to advance while threatening the foundation of the freedom they so recklessly exploit.

‘The only good government,’ I said, ‘is a bad one in the hell of a fright; yes, what you want to do with government is to put a bomb under it every ten minutes and blow its whiskers off—I mean its sub-committees. And it doesn’t matter if a few of its legs and arms go too, and it gets blown out of the window. Not that I’ve personally got a bad opinion of governments, as governments. A government is a government, that’s all. You don’t expect it to have the virtues of a gorilla because it doesn’t belong to the same class. It’s not a higher anthropoid. It has too many legs and hands. But if you blow off some of the old limbs, well, imagine. There you have a piece of government lying in the middle of Whitehall, and it says to itself, “This is most unusual. I distinctly heard a bang. I must enquire at once—yes, immediately—I must appoint a commission.” So then it opens its eyes and looks at the crowd and says, “My God, what has happened, what are these creatures?” And the people say, “We’re the people, you’re the government, hurry up and do something for us.” And the government says, “I’ll have a committee on it at once.” And the people say, “You haven’t got any committees—they’re all dead—you’re the government.” And the government says, “Haven’t I got a secretary?” And the people shout, “No, we’ve just chopped her up with a rusty axe.” “Or an office boy?” “No, we’ve pushed him down a drain.” ‘

‘Yes it is,’ the people say. ‘We’ve sent for another bomb. But you’ve got ten minutes still, so you’d better do something.’

Encouraged by my first political successes in Indiana—over 100,000 copies of my New Republic article had been reprinted and distributed by the YSA—I returned to New York in the summer of 1963 ready to become a full-time political activist. During the next four years, three of them in New York, I did, in fact, become involved in dozens of political causes and groups, and in activities which, at times, consumed my energies almost full time.

When I began this book—four months after we arrived in Spéracèdes—I had expected that the bulk of it would be about my political activities during these years. Doctor Spock, Mitch Goodman, and the three others had recently been indicted for conspiracy to violate the selective service law (for giving support to draft resisters)—and this indictment derived indirectly from a campaign I had started at Stanford University the previous spring. I had come to Spéracèdes in order to write a novel, but once there a familiar pattern repeated itself; I found (felt)—again—that things political (my activities of the previous years) threatened to overrun and destroy my fiction. In order to deal with my political activities—to put them to rest—I wrote several long political articles during my first months in Spéracèdes. The articles weren’t enough, though, and once again I found myself launched on a book-length project, one I thought would be political in nature, and one whose ultimate purpose, again, would be to exorcise (to explain) the political emotions I’d been carrying around in me so that—the material made tangible, dealt with in print—I could get on, could feel free to return to fiction, to a new novel.

The beginning point (GM) and the end point (the Spock trial) were there, and I only, I thought, had to describe a few of the events in my life which had led from one to the other—particularly my political involvements during the years 1963–67. By the time, in the fall of 1968, that I came to write about these years, though, I found that they didn’t interest me, that all of the items I’d listed, made notes on, been ready to describe in detail, seemed unimportant.

My political activities—which I’d thought would be the most important part of the book—now seemed only parentheses between General Motors and Spéracèdes.

The narrative I was at work on, as the thoughts I put on paper the week of my thirtieth birthday showed me, was itself becoming less and less political. The more solidly I made my way into the world of politics during the years 1963–67, the more abstract, the more boring (in my memory) all the activities began to seem. Having made the decision to leave America just before major actions which I had helped plan, I had to wonder—especially as I became more and more at home in the daily life of Spéracèdes, as I felt less and less desire to return to America, to become involved politically—how political I had ever been.

Politics was supposed to be that activity which dealt with the possible, with the “real” world—yet, in my memory, my own political activities didn’t seem real. I felt a distaste for them, a revulsion to writing about them. And with this revulsion, with the necessity to write about my involvements, came one possibility: that all my political activities—even what I referred to as my political emotions—had been only one affect of my writing, of my desire to be a writer.

Such a feeling was mixed with (a rationalization for?) my sense of hopelessness about all political activity in America; read-ins, teach-ins, protest marches, draft card burnings, ads in The New York Times or the Palo Alto Times—what, I began to wonder, had these ever had to do with murder and suffering, war and revolution? If I found that the most overtly political part of my journey during the previous ten years was now the most boring, I also found (had to find) that it was the least significant. The more I was able (as in Indiana) to gain control over the rage that had first driven me to become involved politically—the more, that is, I was able to act “realistically” and regularly to achieve concrete objectives—the more, in my memory, all my activities seemed unreal, hopelessly cut off from the conditions which had first inspired them.

In the fall of 1963, however, such thoughts, literally, could not enter my mind. I was working on a new novel, I was working politically (with CORE, with antiwar groups), I was (this to pay for $150 monthly phone bills Betsey and I began to run up between Bloomington and New York) teaching blacks and Puerto Ricans in junior high schools in New York ghetto areas (Williamsburg, the West Side, south Harlem). I was twenty-five years old, I’d had three articles published, I’d written seven unpublished books, and, in my one-room apartment on the fifth floor of a West Side brownstone, I led the life of a New York writer, of a New York intellectual involved in left-wing activities. On the days I didn’t teach, I’d stay home and write, and keep in shape by going up and down the five flights to see if the mail had come, with its daily letter from Betsey, its daily batch of rejections. (There was a balcony under my window and I couldn’t see to the sidewalk below the house; the mail came anywhere from nine to eleven-thirty.)

Above my desk I kept a scoreboard—a list of where each of my books, stories, and articles was, the date each had been sent out, and the odds. (These ranged, depending on my mood, from 10–1 or 15–1 for a story I felt confident about, to 989,989–1 for the film rights to an unsold novel.) At the bottom of the scoreboard I listed a Best Bet, Hopeful, Long Shot, Sleeper, and a Daily Double—and I kept a running count of rejections and acceptances—THEM vs. US. Once a day my friend Jerry Charyn would call, or I’d call him (we’d gone to Columbia together and he’d had his first story taken by Commentary the previous winter)—“How many pages today, Jay?” he’d ask. “Six,” I’d say. “Better get back to work,” he’d reply. “I did seven.”

During the afternoons I’d play basketball in Central Park, and two or three evenings a week I’d be at a political meeting of one kind or another. If, for a while, my silent politics had been irresponsible, mad, and uncompromisingly radical, I found, back in New York, that I had swung to the other extreme: in things political, I now became realistic, responsible, sane. Thus, though I was signing statements that fall, before Kennedy’s death, in which I declared I wouldn’t serve in Vietnam, and in which I urged others not to—I was working, during the following spring and summer for the (re)election of those (the “lesser of two evils”) who were sending men to Vietnam. Though I still believed in immediate equality for all men, in immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam, I was able to speak to groups about the need to write to their congressmen in order to urge de-escalation of the war, or passage of the voting rights bill.

During the spring and summer of 1964 I worked with Lower East Side CORE in voter registration. I still see the looks on the faces of the Puerto Ricans who answered doors—their fear, their shame, eyes lowered, as they said, as if they’d all agreed on a single response: “Spanish don’t vote.”

I remember how quickly I became immune to the rot and odors of their buildings. I remember their politeness (excessive—nobody living in such conditions, I said, should be polite), the times I was invited in for something to eat, to drink—and the thrill when we’d be able to convince a single man or woman to go with us to the local firehouse to register. Most of all, though, I remember that we worked that summer to get them to register so that they could vote for Lyndon Baines Johnson.

My job, as I saw it on my return to New York, on behalf of any cause, became an eminently American one: to win friends and influence people. This could best be accomplished by demonstrating something that was equally American: that what was morally right was also pragmatically profitable. (E.g., it was in America’s “self-interest” to get out of Vietnam.)

I met obstacles—facts which, a year or two before would have returned me to the letter to Kennedy, and the memory of which, in Spéracèdes, helped account for my desire to reject what I’d been part of. I remember, for example, talking with friends in the spring of 1964 about the “stall-in” of automobiles that was being planned for opening day of the New York World’s Fair by militant CORE chapters. My friends—like most liberals, like most civil rights leaders, like the New York Post and Times—opposed the stall-in. This was “going too far.” There were, I was told endlessly, peaceful, orderly ways of registering grievances, working against injustice. Moreover, my friends argued, hadn’t the passage of a civil rights bill, hadn’t the March on Washington, the victories of Martin Luther King—hadn’t these shown that things were changing, progressing? Most important, tying up New York’s highways would only “alienate” those white people whose support Negroes had worked so hard to gain and whose support “they would need” to achieve further gains.

I asked some of my students at a junior high in south Harlem about the stall-in. Most of them didn’t know anything about it—those who did seemed to agree with my friends. A few, however, dissented. One seventh-grade boy wrote: “If a man not going to be my friend cause he gets held up in a traffic jam for some hours one afternoon he must not be a very good friend in the first place.”

I remember also, during my first year back in New York, working with a friend, Gene Glickman, on a mass income tax refusal campaign which (again) was to be national in scope. We drew up a plan, drafted a covering letter, met with a lawyer, and then sent out dozens of letters to friends we thought would be sympathetic to the idea. So as to draw in “moderates,” we stated that the taxes would be placed in escrow until the United States government was involved in negotiations on Vietnam, or had been rebuffed in an honest attempt to get negotiations going. Also, that—so as to minimize personal risk—the tax refusal would not be undertaken or announced until five thousand people had pledged themselves to it.

Not a single response was positive. Though such experiences confirmed some deeply skeptical part of me, at the time they only made me work harder in a “realistic” way, they only made me work to do away with those things whose continuance threatened to make me radical in action as well as belief.

Betsey and I were married in the early summer of 1964 and we moved nine blocks south to a brownstone apartment on West Seventy-sixth Street. By then I had finished the novel I’d begun the previous fall and I’d also had—a few months before we were married—two short stories accepted (one by The Colorado Quarterly, the other by Transatlantic Review), the first fiction of mine that had been taken for publication since I’d begun submitting material seven years before. By this time I’d had, by count, over five hundred rejections—and nothing, not even the impersonality of the acceptances, could dampen my joy (one of the acceptances—for ten dollars—came on a mimeographed form; the other began: “I wonder if we ever told you we’d like to do your story? Would our usual $25 be acceptable?”).

I’d attended no regular classes at Columbia that year, and taken none of the requisite exams along the Ph. D. route. In May, I applied for a part-time teaching job in Columbia College, one supposedly given only to graduate students who had already passed their “orals” and were at work on their dissertations. When the head of the department questioned me about my progress toward the Ph. D., I mumbled something about taking the “orals” the following year. “And if you start another novel—?” he asked. I shrugged, smiled, got the job, and shortly after classes started in September, began work on another novel. It was one I’d been planning, trying to start for over a year and a half.

I taught at Columbia for the next two years (my office during my second year was the one that Mark and Charles Van Doren had shared, across from Richard Chase’s), and found at first that I enjoyed the teaching, enjoyed the fact of being in the position (at twenty-six) of those I’d admired most in the world when I’d been seventeen. The men who had, nine years before, seemed like gods to me—Lionel Trilling, Andrew Chiappe, James Shenton, F. W. Dupee—were now—the word had a wonderfully snobbish sound to it—colleagues.

I found, though, that the life at Columbia, once I could be part of it, held little interest for me—I did my work and got paid for it, and spent as little time on campus as I had to. Though it was supposedly against Columbia’s rules, I continued to do substitute teaching in the city schools, and this teaching was more important to me.

Yet, in Spéracèdes, when I came to write about my teaching of black and Puerto Rican students, I found that I didn’t want to—and again, now, back in America, I find that I resist detailing any experiences, friendships, anecdotes. To do so would, I claim, be only additional exploitation of their lives. If I filled a book with stories, with my students’ compositions, and we read them, we would all, I suppose—even me—be moved; we might even vow to “do something”—but what could we do? The individual success I may have had during those years, the effect I might have had on a few students (and their effect on me)—what does this have to do with the problems of massive numbers of human beings trapped in massive school systems within massive social and economic systems?

GM again. During my days in the city schools the refrain—without revolution, America is doomed—was stronger than it had ever been. Still, I resist trotting out the lives of black and Puerto Rican students I knew, I resist catering to what I feel is nothing more than the moral voyeurism of well-intentioned liberal readers, I resist providing a bit more of what Huck Finn would have called “soul butter.” For what warnings could I preface any extended account of these teaching experiences with that would be powerful enough to counteract the illusion that my account would produce—i.e., that if only there were enough such books (enough such teachers, enough such publicity), all might still be changed, improved.

Nothing I could say, no memories I could conjure up would be more than a footnote to what I felt the first day I entered a ghetto school: that it was sheer madness to believe that what was needed to make things right would ever come from the things, the institutions which had made them wrong; that one could not—that I should not—ever try to argue about this.

As always, one did the best one could—I continued to act “realistically” to try to change particular wrongs, to create options, alternatives—but there was more hope, I felt, not only for the children trapped in the schools, but even more for those of us who were not poor, black, and young—in blowing up the schools (the ghettos) and starting over, than there was in continuing with things as they were, with trying to institute reforms from within, via the means available.

What, I wondered, were children doing in such places? What was miraculous, what mystified, even excited me—was not that the students knew so little, but that, given the world they’d made their way in, they knew anything at all, that they were still alive, still individual, unique, different—one from the other.

But I stop here, before the anecdotes and editorials rush from me. (The picture that has been in my head while writing all of this seems to counter the seriousness with which I want to tell all, with which I want to resist telling all: an eighth-grade class lined up to leave the room at the end of the period, and as I glance at them I notice that one of the boys in the back of the double line has his arm around his girlfriend, his hand resting on her breast, fondling it. He sees that I see him, start to move toward him, and he smiles at me, as if to say—everything’s okay, man. He winks at me, knowingly; I stop, smile, wink back.) For even if I could arouse readers—could make them feel deeply about the children of the ghettos—what point? The liberal’s notion (wish) that understanding and love and goodwill and education will eventually solve all problems becomes, in America, only another version of the conservative’s notion that before we change anything else, as Barry Goldwater was telling me in 1960, “we must first change the hearts of men.” The effect of both is to sustain the status quo.

The political and the personal, if they are ever separate for me, are certainly not separate here: i.e., I stop myself from further description and/or analysis out of the knowledge of how deeply these experiences and impressions went, out of the knowledge that these experiences—more directly than others—found transformation in my fiction (though here, as opposed to my letter to Kennedy, the fact came before the fiction); out of the feeling that the black children I’ve known have in some way been the brother I’d loved, felt guilty toward, wanted to help, to love, and—losing guilt—to be equal to (me to him, him to me).

I taught, I wrote, I played ball, Betsey and I enjoyed living on the West Side (she got a job as a children’s librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library, where I’d first discovered books), I became increasingly active in politics, and in New York’s chief political activity, political discussion. If the way to return to the real world lay in compromising my revolutionary vision, then the way to continue to make my way in this world also lay in compromise. I became a “respectable” activist—trying to persuade those to the right of me to move slightly left and those to the left of me to move slightly right. I was reasonable, realistic—I never appeared in a public demonstration without a jacket, tie, fresh haircut. The way to accomplish all objectives, I was learning, was to gain the goodwill of moderate Americans; and anything which threatened to alienate them became the gravest of political sins. In the antiwar movement, for example, one acted on the assumption that if only we could educate something called “The American People” about the war in Vietnam, they would come to oppose it; if they came to oppose it, they would make their voices heard; and if they made their voices heard, the government would execute their will and end the war. What I’d learned my second time in Indiana took precedence over what I’d felt my first time there.

I remember, for example, in the fall of 1965, attending the first meeting of the Committee of the Professions to End the War in Vietnam, and earning myself a nomination to the steering committee of one of the subcommittees (The Committee to Organize an International Conference of Intellectuals on the War in Vietnam) by arguing against the participation of Communists (e.g., Yevtushenko) in the International Conference.

We had, I insisted, to keep our principal objective in mind: how would the mass media treat the conference? If there were Communists invited wouldn’t this give the media the opportunity they were looking for to malign us and to ignore the force of our arguments against the war? The reason we professionals (artists, writers, lawyers, doctors, teachers, et al.) had come to that meeting was, I declared, to form a “new” kind of antiwar organization that would be “effective” precisely because it would be immune from the attacks usually leveled against left-wing organizations. Our job, in short, was to make antiwar activity “respectable.”

Although I wanted to feel that my political views were closer to those of more radical organizations, I was at home in the Committee of the Professions. Yes, I agreed with those to my left, it was regrettable that we had to try to make antiwar activity “respectable”; yes, we should probably direct our attention to changing those things which made such compromises, tactics necessary—but first we had to do everything possible to try to end the war in Vietnam, and this meant trying to build a “mass popular movement,” this meant trying to make our cause seem legitimate in the eyes of “The American People.”

I remember sitting around tables in comfortable East and West Side apartments (from my position as co-chairman of the International Conference Committee I had been made a permanent member of the steering committee of the Committee of the Professions), drawing up lists of the most prominent intellectuals in the world, discussing their relative merits, deciding which of them we should invite to the International Conference, figuring out which of us were friends with them, which of us had friends who were friends with them. I drafted the letter that went to them, and we all complimented ourselves when replies (from Mumford, Sartre, Niemoller, Russell, Toynbee, et al.) began coming in.

I also remember getting the Committee to back one of my proposals: for a national advertising and fund-raising campaign on television. If we wanted to reach the American people, I said, then why not do it in an American way, with one-minute spots coast-to-coast by prominent individuals, in prime time. I was guaranteed funds by the Committee, prominent individuals, a sympathetic ad agency to handle things—and I began contacting the major TV networks—only to discover that they would accept no political advertising whatever, except as part of the campaign of a legitimate political candidate during an election year. To work through the courts to force the networks to take antiwar ads, or to try to get the FCC to rule that they had to—everyone we consulted was of the same opinion: forget it.

From time to time I wrote articles about the war, about the antiwar movement, about the civil rights movement—and in the Committee of the Professions I was (more so than at Columbia) thought of as a writer; people discussed my ideas with me, inquired about my fiction and my articles, read my stories. I remember helping to organize the first of the nation’s read-ins, sponsored by the Committee of the Professions—composing letters, ads, making arrangements with Town Hall—and thinking all the time of the day when someone like myself would be doing the secretarial work and I (with Mailer, Malamud, Miller, Kazin, Lowell) would be asked to read from my works. (This was now something less than a grandiose fantasy, I told myself, since the novel—Big Man—I’d completed during my first year of marriage—I’d worked on it for two and a half years—had been accepted for publication.)

I enjoyed—in somewhat the same way I’d done so the last time I’d been in New York—being an anonymous helper in “the movement.” The first job I did for the Committee of the Professions was to pick up and deliver its stationery. And I also enjoyed New York name-dropping games, being “in” on things literary. When, for example, during the Town Hall read-in, one of the speakers chose not to read from her own works, but instead to explain to the audience, as spokesman for all the other writers, poets, and actors, why the read-in was taking place, why she and the others had chosen to protest the war in this particular manner, I could smile, gossip to friends; she had telephoned our office a week before the read-in to ask why she had not been invited. When she’d been told that we already had too many participants, she’d insisted until we’d reluctantly agreed to let her have five minutes of stage time. She took twenty.

I seem always to have been soliciting signatures and money for ads in The New York Times. Generally, faculty members who refused to sign refused because, although they were, they assured me, “against the war,” they did not agree “completely” with the text of our ad. If they could suggest some revisions…if the wording could be changed to represent more accurately their viewpoint… One well-known professor in Columbia’s English Department looked first at a list of signers and, without reading the text, returned the sheet to me; he would not, he said, sign an ad that had already been signed by Allen Ginsberg.

One particular ad contained over six thousand signatures, took up three pages of The News of the Week in Review, and was the largest political ad that had ever, until that time, been bought for the Times. We received wire-service stories, we were able—from contributions that came in because of the ad—to reprint it in a dozen other cities, to spend an evening debating the choice of these cities. For a time I suppose I felt that six thousand signatures in the Sunday Times, or several dozen prominent intellectuals reading from their work at Town Hall somehow related to what was happening in Washington or Saigon.

My writing went well in New York. The more I acted in the world of “real” politics, the more I was willing to compromise my political vision in order to obtain specific objectives, the less, it seemed, I felt a need to compromise the vision that informed my novels and stories. Though I was, I told myself, no less enraged by the world than I’d been before, I was now able to deal with this rage (in both my fiction and my politics) in an efficient, objective way. The process reinforced itself endlessly: the more control I gained over my rage, the more I came to believe in this control and in the power it gave me. The more regularly I put myself into ongoing political activities, the more I came to believe that my ability to have a specific effect on other individuals (and/or a few events) mattered; and the more this happened (as it did in the Committee of the Professions), the more I taught myself that with this power came—the favorite word of the newspapers I’d been brought up with—“responsibility.”

As always in such things I had involved inner theories to justify and explain (to myself) everything I did—this time, however, I found that I had little need to use my own sources of rationalization. What I did and said was approved—and protected—by the world I moved in, by those who agreed with me and worked with me, and by those who did not—but who would have defended to the death, as I saw it, my right to have compromised my more absolute demands and revolutionary desires.

What I remember most when I think of my three years in New York are meetings, and what I remember most about the meetings is that there were so many of them. Not long after I’d begun working with the Committee of the Professions I was selected to be their representative to the nation’s largest antiwar group—the Fifth Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade Committee, and early in 1966 I was made a member of the executive committee of this committee.

Although Parade Committee meetings now seem indistinguishable, one from the other, I do recall the first meeting I attended. It was held in a run-down building near Union Square, and the meeting room was long, narrow, smoke-filled. We sat on wooden chairs, and as the arguments and speeches spun around me (the Committee was composed of representatives from over eighty New York antiwar groups) I felt as if I’d been sent back in a time machine, dropped into a romantic era when words like Working Class and Trotskyite and The Masses still had meaning.

I was surprised that there were so many different groups organized against the war—even more surprised by the fury with which they attacked one another. Delegates spent most of their time denouncing one another—as if, it seemed, rival antiwar groups were more insidious enemies than Dean Rusk or Lyndon Johnson. At the same time, I was astonished by the tolerance and endurance of the representatives: I never—even after months of meetings—could understand how so many people could sit so long, so patiently through endless hours of what seemed to be the same old debates.

At my first meeting there seemed to me to be an infinite number of motions, votes, appeals to Roberts Rules of Order (“Point of Information” was the standard procedure for interrupting in order to make a speech on any subject whatever). One little old woman lectured us for ten minutes on the evils of war; another told us why the war in Vietnam should be ended; a third told us about a tea party she’d held in her apartment in the Bronx, to which she’d invited her neighbors—the response of these neighbors to a discussion on Vietnam “proved,” she said, that “the American people were rising up against the war.”

The person who sat next to me—an intense gray-haired representative wearing thick glasses, who, despite his hair, seemed to be in his late twenties, spoke to no one, didn’t respond to the few attempts at conversation I offered, and sat through three or four hours of the meeting staring fiercely ahead until, at one point, he suddenly rose from his chair and with a sweep of his arm which almost knocked me from mine, his fists beating the air, he proclaimed through the smoke—“What we must all do, comrades, is to educate the working men of America to the fact that their true enemy lives in Washington! We must rip the mask off the bloody tyrant and let the American people see his murderous face!…”

Five minutes later he sat down—and while representatives actually argued for or against what he had said (it was in the form of a proposition, or an amendment to a proposition—I can’t recall which), he returned to his former expressionless pose, staring silently ahead.

What surprised me most afterwards was the fact that some decisions had actually been made at the meeting. Those we thought we were struggling against, I recall thinking, were surely not handicapped by such fierce and insane allegiance to democratic procedures.

Although at the time I kept vowing to quit—kept telling myself how mad the meetings were, how nothing was being gained by all the fights, or even by the marches, I stayed on; and when I think of the Parade Committee now I find that I do so with some affection: I think of the pleasant sensation at seeing my name—on letterheads, handbills, and ads—alphabetically trapped between those of Otto Nathan and Grace Paley. I recall also, at the close of one meeting, being approached by a short, balding man in his sixties or seventies. He shook my hand warmly and thanked me for having supported his group’s position during the meeting. “It seems to me, though, young man,” he went on, “that you have some significant gaps in your education.” He smiled and put his hand on my arm. “I was wondering if you have ever heard of the six hundred families?” I said no. His smile was broader. “Perhaps,” he suggested, “we can get together some evening and I can explain to you just how America’s ruling class works.…”

By the spring of 1966, my confidence built up by my activities on the executive committees of two of the nation’s major antiwar groups—I began advocating direct action against the war. With the growth of both the war and the antiwar movement, some form of mass civil disobedience, I felt, was necessary and possible.

When I brought the subject up at Committee of the Professions meetings, however, nobody was enthusiastic. Less than that: they seemed offended by the suggestion—as if sitting down on Fifth Avenue or at an induction center was something below them, something vulgar. When, somewhat earlier that year, I’d tried to get the Committee of the Professions to join forces with some civil rights groups—this was before people such as Martin Luther King, and organizations such as CORE had joined the antiwar protests—the results had been disastrous. I invited representatives of a Harlem group to a meeting and the discussions took a wrong turn when the Harlem people made some remarks about how they had been double-dealt in the past by white liberals. “What,” members of the committee kept asking me afterwards, “do those people want?”

At the Parade Committee there were groups and individuals who had always been ready to move from protest to action, but in the spring of 1966 even people such as Dave Dellinger, chairman of the Committee (and later chairman of the National Mobilization Committee, one of the first to actually get into the Pentagon in the fall of 1967) were insisting that the time was “not yet ripe” for mass tactics involving civil disobedience: SANE would drop out, the Committee would be split, we would lose the bulk of our middle-class constituency, we would alienate moderates, the uncommitted.

After this, though I still tried to persuade “moderates” (in the manner of Draper, Fulbright, Schlesinger, Lippmann) of the immorality and impracticality of the war, I did so with less enthusiasm. The more I knew about Vietnam, and the more I argued about it—the less I wanted to argue, to know. My political activities began to seem meaningless, distasteful. If those who were most actively opposed to the war were still unwilling to go further than legitimate protest, what hope was there? The reasoning which had sustained my own antiwar involvement until then—that even if we’d had no effect on stopping the war, we (the peace movement) had put brakes on its escalation, we’d provided Lyndon Johnson with breathing space—with more options should he have decided he wanted to get out of Vietnam—the consolation that derived from such thoughts was unsatisfying, unconnected with what was going on in Vietnam. Once again, a plan of mine thwarted, I began to withdraw into myself. Everything I saw or felt (in the newspapers, in the ghetto schools, in the apartments of New York liberals) helped return me to the state of mind that had prevailed during my months in Indianapolis—this time, however, my depression led to no new political campaign. Things seemed, quite simply, hopeless; just as three hundred years of racism and exploitation weren’t going to be changed by civil rights bills and poverty programs, empire was not going to be stopped by advertisements, or genocide by court battles.

Though I continued in the spring and summer of 1966 to work at any task and with any group that was trying to end this particular war, I began to believe that there were some things about which nothing could be done, and that Vietnam was one of them. The activities of the previous year (I was, by then, attending meetings five and six nights a week) bored me now, tired me—I wanted to get away from it all, to be far from meetings and marches. As long as I stayed in America, though, I knew I would continue to work against the war—but the only effect of my work, I felt, would be to drain me. (Although I’d written several stories and articles, since Big Man had been accepted—almost a year before—I’d been unable to begin a new novel.)

The majority of Americans were comfortable, secure, untouched by the war in any direct way. They would, therefore, continue to acquiesce to anything the government did in their name. Those who opposed the war were not, in significant numbers, prepared to undertake the risks involved in escalating their protests. The government, I concluded, knew then that it could continue to do whatever it wanted. More than this, I began to feel that protest against the war was actually welcomed by the government—proof of those American freedoms for which American boys were dying.

Betsey and I talked of leaving the country: I would begin work on another novel, I would be away from New York, I would be far from those political involvements which, though I couldn’t separate myself from them, I felt could destroy my fiction—and, therefore, me.

If, by my actual and sustained involvement in politics I had lost my more extreme desires, I had also lost, by this same involvement, the hopes—the dream—that had first led me to political activity. I was left, I felt, without illusion about my ability to change the world—and without anything to do. I didn’t need, for the conditions of my own life, a revolution; I was no longer able, it seemed, to compensate for my helplessness and despair with dreams and schemes of omnipotence. My losses seemed, at the time, heavy, sad, final.

That my political involvements had come to bore me was not so surprising, though; how, after all, could any political activity in the real world compare with the political campaign I’d created in the months following GM? While events in the real world—in Vietnam or at home or at a south Harlem junior high—could now propel me to “appropriate” action in the real world, they still did so, at least partially, so that my fiction would remain free of these events, would go beyond them—i.e., I still acted politically in order to exorcise things I thought of as being merely political—so that, I told myself, my fiction would not become didactic and journalistic. Since, in the five years since my letter to Kennedy, my politics had become less fictional, other things followed inevitably.

In the summer of 1966 I did no such theorizing. I told Columbia that I wouldn’t be teaching there in the fall and Betsey and I made plans for spending a year in Europe.

In the middle of the summer, Jerry Charyn called from California to ask if I wanted to come to Stanford in the fall as a writer-teacher. I said no, but the offer was tempting (I would be a teacher because I was a writer). When Albert Guérard called a week later and pointed out that Europe would still be in the same place nine months hence (and that I would have more money to enjoy it), we changed our minds and decided he was right: we would see California (something we’d talked of before), we would put away more money, we would have more time to plan our year (or two) in Europe—and, with a light teaching schedule and without New York committees, I was certain that I could get to work again.

Big Man was published that August. When my editor called me on a broiling New York afternoon to say that copies had arrived, I ran to the subway, and arrived at the publisher’s downtown office, dripping sweat, a half hour later. It had been nine years since I’d begun submitting novels; when my editor handed me a copy of my first published book the only thing I could say was, “Gee—it’s so thin.”

A few weeks later, when the first reviews had appeared, I asked a salesman in E. J. Korvette’s book department if he had a novel about basketball which I’d seen reviewed in the previous Sunday’s Times. “Big something—I can’t remember what—was the title,” I told him. “You mean Big Man,” he said, and led me to where the book was. I tried to act nonchalant, interested. We talked. I asked if the book was good, if it was selling, and when his replies were affirmative, I turned the book to the back cover—tried to smile modestly, to apologize for having misled him—and showed him the picture of the author. “That’s me,” I said. “Oh,” he replied. “Your uncle was in this morning—”

Less than a month after publication, in September, 1966, we left New York for California. At Stanford, I was soon at work on a novel (its settings: Williamsburg schools and the West Side of Manhattan)—I was also more relieved than I’d believed possible, simply to be away from the rush of New York meetings, protests, politics. Betsey and I rented a house in Palo Alto—with lemon and orange trees, wisteria, roses, magnolias, morning glories, lots of closets, and a room for me to work in—the first time I’d ever had a separate writing room; the pleasantness of the climate, the people, and the campus life made it easy for me, I found, to believe that there was no urgent need to do anything or try to change anything. My disillusionment with politics, moreover, seemed to reinforce what my political activities during the previous three years had helped stabilize: the trust I put in my fiction. Because nothing I did or wrote could have any significant effect on whatever real world lay beyond my fiction, I might as well, I told myself, do what I wanted and write novels. The guilt which had previously bound my politics to my writing seemed gone.

I let myself become involved in whatever campus antiwar protests presented themselves—but these were minimal. I attended meetings of the faculty peace committee held over lunch, outdoors, on the patio of the Student Union, and I was content, generally, to let others do most of the talking, organizing.

The Vietnam war, to judge from these meetings, seemed cause, not for action or outrage, but for academic debate. I remember attending four or five luncheons in a row, where a half-dozen faculty members worked at making a decision about bringing a speaker to the campus to “discuss” the war. The speaker’s chief merit was to be his potential appeal to moderate faculty members. One faculty member vetoed Hans Morgenthau as being too controversial.

I let some people know that I found such activities absurdly inadequate, and some let me know that they agreed with me, that the campus had been more active in previous years (e.g., in a campaign against a nearby Redwood City napalm plant). But discussion that fall continued to be equal to action. The one suggestion I ventured—that the faculty urge draft resistance, that we “aid and abet” our students’ refusal to serve in the military—was transformed, after much discussion, into an announcement I sent out that fifteen faculty members were available for “draft counseling.” Our job, according to most of the faculty I was able to recruit for the counseling, was not to advocate any course of action, or to risk jail—but to try to “educate” our students about the war (a war we’d already been involved in for at least twelve years), to let them know, as one well-known professor put it, that in a nation which allowed dissent there was nothing “un-American” about “considering” Conscientious Objection.

Things went on like this for about half the year, and I didn’t mind. Life was pleasant, untroubled. I taught, I wrote, I signed whatever petitions came to me, I was looked to as a writer. Most afternoons, after writing or teaching, Jerry Charyn and I would retrieve a bit of New York City schoolyard by playing paddle tennis with paddles Jerry had expropriated when he’d been a New York City Department of Parks “parkie.” Vietnam was far away—distant, abstract, always something of an idea. Newspapers, film clips, photos—these could shorten the distance now and then, but the immediacy of the war, if it came at all, came intermittently and always seemed to need some self-starting provocation; one had to work hard to ignite a sense of horror, to remember that abstractions such as murder, suffering, and death had individual instances, and that it was for these individual instances that one had first protested.

The announcement, in January, that Vice President Hubert Humphrey was coming to the campus to speak, changed things, made Vietnam seem suddenly less distant. The campus was quickly in motion. An open meeting was called and the students who attended voted to walk out on Humphrey. The faculty who were present at the meeting pleaded (there, and after) for a more moderate action. A walkout, they said, would violate the Vice President’s right to free speech; it would “alienate” that large body of uncommitted students and faculty we were seeking to educate; it would—the phrase I remember most—be “in bad taste.”

A faculty group called its own meeting and decided on its own form of protest: those who were against the war would come to the auditorium to hear Humphrey, but they would remain silent throughout his speech, they would neither heckle nor applaud, and they would identify themselves as opponents of the war by wearing white armbands.

The faculty group issued a statement, which they ran as an ad in the student paper on the day of Humphrey’s visit: “We, the undersigned members of the faculty, welcome Vice President Humphrey to Stanford, but in so doing we cannot allow our welcome to imply approval of the Administrations’s resumption of the bombing of North Vietnam, extending a policy which Mr. Humphrey has unequivocally endorsed….”

The decorous language of the faculty welcome pushed me over the edge, into action, anger. I began speaking around the campus—at meetings, rallies, at a marathon teach-in—and in my speeches I mocked the faculty armband statement, I said that Humphrey was a murderer, an agent of a murderous policy, and that to call him anything less was euphemism. The week of Humphrey’s visit, I telephoned Charles Stein, a professor of statistics, and one of the faculty members I knew would find the armband welcome as repulsive as I had. We met with one of the student leaders, Barry Greenberg (head of the campus “free university”), and I brought a statement I’d drafted which urged a walkout and which condemned Humphrey and the administration he spoke for as “murderous and criminal.” Within a few hours we had over two-dozen faculty signatures, and we ran our statement as an ad on the day Humphrey arrived. (The white armband ad was signed by 211 faculty.)

Earlier that year, in one of my freshman English classes, we had discussed selections from several autobiographical essays on childhood—by Baldwin, Yeats, Kazin, Stegner, Nabokov, and Howe. My students had remained typically unresponsive. They seemed to understand the essays well enough, but they didn’t react to them. When I pressed them—this was after a discussion of Notes of a Native Son—one girl finally blurted out, with the first gesture of emotion I’d seen to that point: “Childhood wasn’t like that!” The rest of the class nodded in agreement. Weren’t these writers, the girl asked, “exaggerating?” The others echoed her question.

It wasn’t that the students didn’t believe what Baldwin and the others had told them (they did), or that they had nothing in their own lives which could correspond to what Baldwin had told them (they did not)—but something which seemed sadder: that they had nothing within their experience which enabled them to imagine what had been described for them. Stanford students were, generally, intelligent, liberal, good-natured, open, wholesome, rich, and dull—archetypes of the WASP whom Erik Erikson has described as being “emotionally retentive.”

The fact that Humphrey was going to be on this particular campus (a real agent of a real war, was the way I put it in speeches) rekindled in me all the resentment I’d felt earlier at the easy, insulated lives of the students, at the absurdly academic forms of liberal protest—and, most of all, at my own failure to have done much for half a year. The fact, that, before Humphrey’s visit, I would have agreed with most people that if a government official was safe at any major university in America, it would have been at Stanford—a week before his visit, Dow Chemical, maker of napalm, was on the campus and there had been no trouble—only gave me more reason to try to start something.

On February 20, 1967, two years after we had first begun the bombing of North Vietnam, Humphrey chose as the subject for his opening remarks to the faculty and students of the university often called “the Harvard of the West,” Time Magazine’s “now generation” of that year. He said he came to Stanford “to be where the action is,” and, in his most memorable remark of the day, he referred to the late Pope John as one of the “now people.” He did not mention Vietnam in his opening statement, and about seventy-five people walked out when he was done. A while later, when in answer to a question, he stated that “if President John F. Kennedy were alive today he would be doing exactly what the Johnson Administration is doing at this very hour,” several hundred more people walked out.

Humphrey’s remarks (broadcast to those outside on a PA system) and the frustration of many at not having had the chance to walk in in order to walk out (my own predicament)—on good evidence, many of us believed the audience had been “packed”—began to affect those of us outside the hall. We stationed groups at the various exits, and waited for the Vice President’s departure. Bloomington again, only this time I was, I knew, not in a minority.

When the meeting was over and Humphrey used a Secret Service decoy where the largest crowd had gathered at the rear of the auditorium, in order to sneak out a side exit, several hundred of us ran after him, yelling “Shame! Shame! Shame!” continually. He was in the car before we got to him, and he drove away. That night the event seemed important enough (an “attack on the Vice President”) to be carried on nationwide television.

The president of Stanford, J. W. Sterling, immediately issued a public apology to Humphrey in the name of the university, and tried to place the blame for the “attack” on “nonstudents.” We responded one sunny afternoon a few days later by marching on his office bearing signs such as “Give Credit Where Credit is Due,” and “We Are Not Nonstudents.”

As before, I was at work at once on an article concerning the events I’d been involved in, and, again, the article was accepted by The New Republic. In their version it ended with my comment concerning the dramatic rise in antiwar activities on the Stanford campus:

All of this should seem heartening—as it did at first. But then one must remind oneself that although, in individual enclaves, the peace movement may grow, in Vietnam the war grows faster. Within a week of Humphrey’s visit, for the first time, we mined North Vietnamese rivers, we shelled North Vietnam from the Bay of Tonkin and from directly below the demilitarized zone, and we used paratroopers as 50,000 US troops invaded the alleged NLF stronghold in Zone C. As Humphrey had put it at Stanford, Hanoi will know “by the summer” [of 1967] that “the ball game is over.”

The New Republic had, however—and I was furious about it—cut the final four paragraphs of my article; the part the entire article had been building to, the part I’d considered most important. In them I’d reiterated what I’d been saying in speeches on campus before and after Humphrey’s visit—that, for those who meant to be serious about their opposition to the war, the time was long overdue to move from protest to resistance, from dissent to direct action. E.g., ten thousand professors signing ten thousand more ads meant nothing; ten thousand professors refusing to teach, ready to act—that might mean something else.

I had begun my article with a quote from an essay that was much talked about at the time, Noam Chomsky’s “The Responsibility of Intellectuals.” The “responsibility of intellectuals,” Chomsky had said, was “to speak the truth and to expose lies.” But it was also, as he inferred, and as I would write in an article for Commonweal that spring (“Disobedience Now!”), “to act on this truth, to do those things which neither convince the convinced, nor educate a few more citizens, but relate—on a large scale—directly to that horror which goes on every day in Vietnam.” The kind of mass direct action I had proposed in New York the previous year seemed, once again, necessary and possible.

On the campus, some of us began publicly urging those of draft age not to serve in the military, and we made it clear when we did so that this was a violation of the law. My own approach and rhetoric began to change. Whereas in previous years I had advocated draft refusal on moral and altruistic grounds, I now began making statements which, when I read them back in newspapers, or in press releases from the Stanford News Office, continually astonished me. The San Francisco Chronicle dubbed me the “professor-provocateur.” I said things in public—outrageous, uncompromising (e.g., comparisons of U. S. and Nazi actions)—to hundreds of people, that I never would have dared say to a single person. In brief, if like many liberals I had begun by believing in civil disobedience because I loved my country, because I wanted, as those in the civil rights movement had, to demonstrate the depth of my desire to save what was good in it—I now began advocating direct action in order, I said, “to save the world from my country.” Anything, I stated, which gave support to the United States was, in effect, “to give aid and comfort to the enemy.”

At the time of the national mobilization against the war that April, I worked on campus with a “We Accuse” campaign the student radicals had organized concerning Stanford’s complicity in military-industrial projects. The links of the university with the war (primarily through the Stanford Research Institute), with chemical and biological warfare research, and with the strategic hamlet program, were carefully documented.

The faculty reaction to the “We Accuse” campaign was, again, disapproving. The posters—pictures of President Sterling and members of the Board of Trustees such as David Packard, with WE ACCUSE written across the bottom, and collages of wounded Vietnamese children, of burned villages, of dead soldiers behind them—were denounced by most students and faculty, and by the student paper, again, as being “in bad taste.” At a major rally that week, from the entire faculty, the students could get only Mitchell Goodman and me to speak publicly on behalf of the campaign.

I tried to put things in perspective, to put brakes on my activity, my rage: if we couldn’t get more than a handful of faculty and students at a major university to endorse a few posters, what danger, really, did we—or the entire antiwar movement—pose to the work that was actually going on in military-research projects? I was not, in fact, very interested in denouncing President Sterling. He was probably, I pointed out in speeches and discussions, an “honorable man”—as were the stockholders in military-production corporations, the members of the Board of Trustees, the faculty who did the research. Most of these people probably regretted the fact that we were killing people in Vietnam; they probably believed they wanted an end to the war. They were probably all “honorable men.” But Chomsky was right—at the least, we had to speak the truth, and the truth, as I saw it, was that the president of Stanford and his assistants and the members of the Board of Trustees and those who did the research were the men in our immediate community who made the decisions and handled the money and signed the contracts which provided for the research and sustained the factories which made the weapons that went to Vietnam and killed people.

The week-long series of tribunals, exposés, and rallies was not “successful” in terms of winning friends—we could get only fifty students and three faculty to march on the Stanford Research Institute with us the afternoon of the major rally—but they did, I was convinced, influence people. Though our campaigns seemed to make us lose the support of “moderates,” I was convinced that this loss was temporary. I felt optimistic, certain that just as those who had originally been against the walkout had come to approve it, so those who denounced the “We Accuse” campaign would eventually understand it and endorse it. At the least, we started people on their first steps toward recognizing—or even considering—the complicity of the university, by its daily business, in war crimes, and to considering this in a way that might not otherwise have occurred to them. Our irresponsibility seemed quite responsible to me.*

Buoyed—or deluded—by the intensity of my own activity, and by the amount of activity around me, I felt, at the time, that it was almost impossible to be too radical. The further left one moved, the more those in the middle seemed to be drawn leftward.

In New York that week we had gone beyond the dreams any of us had had a year or two before—somewhere between three hundred thousand and a half million people protested (I could remember marches in which we’d been pleased that our numbers had doubled—from five to ten thousand); in San Francisco we more than filled the seventy thousand seats in Kezar Stadium. The fact of such numbers, I felt, made certain things possible, and the argument I began advancing, became a statistical, a pragmatic one: if, I claimed, only 10 percent of those who were in the East and West Coast marches were now ready for direct action, then at least two things were true: 1) there were between thirty and fifty thousand people who would with their bodies, be ready to stop the progress of the war at specific points (the Pentagon, Port Chicago, major induction centers), and 2) there would be enough antiwar personnel left (i.e., the remaining 90 percent) so that all ongoing “traditional” protests could continue at more than full strength.

This meant, moreover, that I no longer had to try to convince the unconvinced about anything concerning the war—my job, instead, was to search out those (the hypothetical 10 percent) who already agreed with me. The difference was crucial, I claimed, for it allowed many of us to abandon certain forms of liberal rhetoric and practice—we no longer had to worry about “alienating” moderates.

From this point on, throughout the spring and summer, I spent all my free time trying to organize a national campaign for mass civil disobedience—and I was able, during those months, to believe that I had a chance of succeeding, that we had a chance of doing something which could actually bring about an end to the war.

Something else: what had been true for my fiction now became true for my politics—I had only to do and say and write what I wanted. I no longer felt that I had to compromise my political vision in order that my fiction remain, in some way, free. I no longer had to try to convince others of what seemed obvious, beyond argument. Those I had to organize, those I would try to convince concerning tactics, already shared basic assumptions with me—about the horror of the war, about the need to do something commensurate with this horror.

I no longer had to do what I’d sometimes felt I had to do—what I’ve feared, even while writing this book, I might feel compelled to do again; i.e., I no longer felt any need to justify my actions, to try to demonstrate why I was opposed to the war and how deeply I was opposed to it. I no longer felt any need to argue against the cynical accusation (one was against the war because it was fashionable to be against the war, because—as a committed [and committeed] member of the Left such a position was mandatory) which had usually been in the air, and against which I was always expected to argue. In previous years, especially among those who would claim, as if this made them the most liberal and open-minded of Americans, that “they had not yet made up their minds” about the war (if there were “two sides” to a story, it seemed to follow logically that neither could ever be right), I’d sometimes felt that I’d been expected to do more than argue, that I’d been expected to perform: to show—with eyes and voice and gesture—just how deeply, how sincerely my commitment to peace was.

In the spring of 1967 things were suddenly different. Immediately following the April 15th march I called a meeting of several members of the faculty antiwar committee at Stanford and found a sympathetic response to the idea of mass civil disobedience. A half-dozen faculty members signed an initial call I’d drawn up, which I then revised, and sent out, along with two covering letters.

Within a day we had sixteen endorsements, including several from faculty who had, only two months before, condemned the walkout on Humphrey. I remember, for example, going in to see one of the organizers of the white armband protest, and showing him the civil disobedience pledge. He read it and nodded. “Of course I’ll sign,” he said. “But I was wondering,” he added at once, “—have you ever considered sabotage?”

The tone of the pledge to civil disobedience was indicative of my hopefulness: “We do not want to protest the war any longer,” it said at one point, “we want to stop it. We are prepared, through mass civil disobedience to say NO to our government….” Using the English Department mimeograph machine, I ran off the pledge, a list of its sixteen signers, and a covering letter. I sent these to the entire faculty and staff—and additional endorsements beçan coming in at once.

Encouraged by this response, I called a meeting of antiwar faculty groups from other bay area colleges (Berkeley, San Francisco State, San José State). The professors from these colleges, though surprised at the number of civil disobedience pledges we’d already received at Stanford, were unenthusiastic. Several hours, as I recall the evening, were spent in tearing apart our pledge, sentence by sentence. The vagueness of our objectives aroused fierce denunciations, wild arguments—civil disobedience against what? How could a Stanford faculty group organize a nationwide campaign? Shutting down the Pentagon, major induction centers—? This was dangerous talk, wishful thinking. To my repeated explanation—the targets could only be specified exactly when we knew our numbers—the obvious response was flung back: until we know the targets, how can we pledge to act?

One “uncommitted” member of the Stanford faculty interrupted the arguments regularly every half hour by suddenly jumping up and declaring: “All right, I’ll sign—!” He would then give all the reasons for his decision to sign, only to interrupt at the next half hour to tell us that he had changed his mind, that he could not sign such a document, and why. Several times Mitch Goodman interrupted by shouting (to middle-aged professors he didn’t know)—“I’m disgusted with all of you!”

Our initial objective had been to get about twenty faculty to pledge themselves to break the law—i.e., to enlist about 10 percent of those who had previously shown some form of opposition to the war; if the 10 percent ratio held at an enclave as conservative as Stanford, we would, I claimed, have no trouble in getting the movement going nationwide.

Within a month of the April 15 march, we had about fifty pledges, many from the most prominent faculty at the university. We held a press conference and we received excellent coverage—good spots on radio and television, and page one stories in newspapers throughout the West (e.g., a San José Mercury headline: AT STANFORD: GOVERNMENT OBSTRUCTION PLOT HATCHED). On the Campus students told me that the news had “blown people’s minds.” Fifty Stanford faculty members committing civil disobedience and going to jail—? If this were true, anything was possible.

I was more confident than I’d ever been before, though I do remember, when a TV reporter asked me at the press conference why we thought we would “succeed” where others had failed, replying with what seemed to me, then, to be the truth: that we didn’t, of course, know whether or not we would “succeed”—we hoped we would succeed, but what we were doing was more an “act of faith” than anything else—we would act as if we thought that what we did could end the war. What else could we do?

By this time we had also, I thought, replied to one of the major objections the faculty from the other colleges had put to us—how were we going to get the campaign going nationwide? When we had shown the results of our month’s work to Chester Hartman, the acting director of Vietnam Summer, he’d been enthusiastic and had encouraged us. Vietnam Summer, a coalition which was to be the antiwar equivalent of Mississippi Summer, had just been organized, and it had the money and prestige (Mar tin Luther King was behind it, the Kennedys and Rockefellers were supposedly giving it secret support) to put the kind of national campaign we talked about into action. We could state at our press conference, then, as the news media reported, that we had “conferred with the head of a major antiwar group with facilities and contacts sufficient to support the movement,” and we could quote from a memo Hartman had sent us:

…The “We Won’t Go” movement among draft-age youth represents an extreme, potentially effective, and apparently infectious development in the society…. There is a great need for an analogous activity on the part of those who are past draft age…. The response that people at Stanford have had among that faculty to the notion of civil disobedience against the war suggests that it is an idea whose time has come…

Hartman’s memo also outlined a plan of action: We would send out mass mailings stating the case for civil disobedience in June, we would analyze the responses, we would then select the most appropriate actions and targets, recruit the key leaders, and, in late August, issue the call to mass action.

As soon as my teaching ended, my schedule became set: I worked on my novel in the mornings, I ate lunch, and I spent my afternoons and evenings working on the national campaign—mimeographing material, writing letters, answering inquiries, telephoning, sending out copies of the Stanford Statement, the press release, press clippings, and Hartman’s memo to every prominent individual and peace organization I could think of. I was, in short, doing what I had dreamed of doing six years before—and this time I was doing it publicly, I was enjoying it, and I was getting results.

The oppressiveness that had come to define New York politics for me was gone in the spring and summer of 1967. Nearly all the campus radicals were good three-man basketball players, and in the schoolyard a block from my house we’d play several afternoons a week, joking about jump shots and jail. On Sunday mornings we played softball. We went to meetings by foot and by car, not by subway; we met in backyards, in gardens; we demonstrated under the sun; we had picnics in Dave Harris’ backyard; most of those who had committed themselves to resistance were also working with black activists in the East Palo Alto ghetto—working in the day-school program that members of that community had put in place of an Upward Bound program they’d thrown out. Things could, I felt at the time, be accomplished in the Bay Area of California that could never have been started amidst the political entrenchments of the Parade Committee, the geography of Manhattan Island.

We had come a long way from white armbands: Stanford now had more students pledged to draft resistance, over four hundred, than any college in the country—and Stanford only had about six thousand male students, graduate and undergraduate; through its former student body president, Dave Harris, it had become the organizing base for The Resistance, and for the October 16th turn-in of draft cards; and through its faculty, it was becoming the base for the first mass nationwide attempt at direct action by those beyond draft age.

There was something else, something more intangible—something I’d experienced before only when I’d been a boy and something I would experience again only after I’d arrived in Spéracèdes—a sense of community, of things held in common, of a world that was—if marginally, partially—shared. Betsey and I felt it slightly, and we liked it; those of draft age, we knew, probably felt it more than we did. A month or two after we’d arrived in Spéracèdes, Bill Wiser passed along a copy of The Village Voice to me, and I found the following in it, from an interview with Emmett Schaeffer, a New York member of The Resistance. It articulated what I’d been feeling that summer about New York and California, and I clipped it out:

The New York Resistance is almost wholly uncommunitarian. Very few draft resisters know each other, and even workers in the Resistance office conduct their extra-office lives in private. The California Resistance, on the other hand, is familial; many workers and organizers live together doing Movement work while one member holds an outside job to support the rest.

There are a lot of advantages in that… People in California have each other’s support. When you join the Resistance there you really join a community. And I think people there feel that they’re building a continuing radical movement, not just an antiwar movement…

…Resistance leaders talk a great deal about resistance as a process, a process of taking control of your life, of freeing yourself from the system which aims at channeling you toward its own approved goals, a process, in the end, of continuing radicalization.…

The initial response to our first mailings concerning the mass civil disobedience campaign was encouraging. We received endorsements from nationally known individuals, and from major peace organizations; we were assured privately that some of the nation’s most prominent religious leaders (e.g., the Reverend Dr. King, Reinhold Niebuhr, Rabbi Herzberg) could “be delivered” if we could demonstrate that the numbers were there for mass civil disobedience; and we received good coverage in the periodicals which were most likely to reach our projected constituency.

At the same time, due in large part to the six-day Arab-Israeli War that June, there were signs that things in the middle-class middle of the peace movement were beginning to move in reverse. I received a letter, for example, from Noam Chomsky, who was working to organize some form of civil disobedience on the East Coast, in which he said that he had “received letters from a number of people saying, to my great surprise, that they now think perhaps the U.S. should be the policeman of the world (to save Israel, etc.). I think we will have to wait until things simmer down, and there is a return to rationality.”

The Stanford statement and the number of people who signed it, are very impressive. I doubt that we could even come close to those numbers here, among tenure faculty, at least, in all the Boston area universities put together.

My 10 percent-90 percent theory began to fall apart. In the jargon of the press, doves (on Vietnam) were becoming hawks (on Israel). Many who had, at first, been sympathetic to our proposals now began to question closing down the Pentagon, immobilizing induction centers. Might we not, as the argument went once more, “alienate” those moderates whose support we needed and had been (for so many years) trying to enlist?

Most of those who remained responsive to the idea of civil disobedience now began to shy away from actual confrontation and sought (again) for symbolic confrontation—for acts which had as much (or more) to do with establishing the right to protest the war as they did with protesting the war. I received letters from people urging that we put our major efforts into “The Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority”—a statement which had been drawn up earlier that summer and which gave technically “illegal” support to draft resisters.

Although I’d helped in the early stages of organizing for the “Call,” I remained unenthusiastic about it. I enlisted signers for it, but I kept urging people—in person, in letters—to choose an action which did more than merely provoke a “legal and moral confrontation” with the government; I urged them to risk more of themselves, to take some action which did not simply support draft resistance by a signature, but which, as Hartman had put it, in some way was “analogous” to draft resistance.

In mid-August, Vietnam Summer officially separated itself from us. “I have been trying to talk up, organize, etc. around the civil disobedience issue you have started in Palo Alto,” Hartman wrote me, “and although most persons are interested, they seem not to give it high priority… He referred me to Resist, the organization which was working to get signatures for “The Call To Resist Illegitimate Authority,” and to the National Mobilization Committee (under Dave Dellinger), which was, by then, talking about a “direct action component” in the October 16–21 Pentagon demonstration.

In Palo Alto, we called a meeting of all the local peace groups and decided to organize for direct action against a specific target on the West Coast, and to try, by our example, to get others to organize similar actions in other parts of the country. Our original target date of late-August early-September was by now abandoned; we agreed, instead, to organize around the week of October 16—the date chosen by The Resistance for the sending back of draft cards. Activity—meetings, letters, phone calls—continued, and, on a local level, the possibility for substantial united action seemed good. We had a strong group of committed activists, representing substantial local constituencies—Stanford faculty, local clergy, high school students, the Resistance, Joan Baez’ Institute, Palo Alto Concerned Citizens, East Palo Alto black activists, the West Coast War Resisters League, the local Vietnam Summer people—and we were soon in touch with other Bay Area groups who were also organizing for the week of October 16.

By this time, however, I was discouraged, depressed. Again, as before, I had been too optimistic, and my disappointment now was as intense as my hopes had been. I felt tired. The turn-in of draft cards would be nationwide—but it would be negligible, it would have little effect on the government’s ability to carry on the war. It could not compare, in scale, to the nationwide campaigns I’d previously envisioned—either in reality, or in my imagination. The local work that was continuing—and increasing—was important, and I continued to be part of it, but without enthusiasm. I felt even more discouraged and disillusioned than I’d felt a year before, when I’d tried (and failed) to get the mass civil disobedience campaign going in New York.

The effect on the antiwar movement of the Arab-Israeli War, the focus of antiwar activity on “support” for draft resistance, the withdrawal of Vietnam Summer from the plan—everything seemed to confirm my feeling that, though the antiwar movement had grown, once again—at most—it had only grown in proportion to the growth of the war, and to the government’s ability to absorb protest against the war. All things were as they had always been. Plus ça change…

By this time I had also finished my new novel and it had been accepted for publication. I felt drained, and until I began another novel I would, I knew, live with what was still my most terrible fear—that I had nothing left to say, that I would never write again.

Stanford offered me a position for the fall, but I said no, and at the end of August Betsey and I followed through on the plans we’d begun a year before and bought ship tickets, sailing date, September 29, 1967. I saw no reason for staying, nothing that I could do that would be crucial, nothing that might happen that I would want to be part of. And I was relieved to know that I’d be gone before the week of October 16—for the actual events, I feared, would have moved me, pulled on me, gotten me caught up in things all over again.

During the latter part of the summer I went to several meetings in San Francisco, held in the offices of The Movement (a SNCC-affiliated newspaper), at which we organized to try to shut down the Oakland Induction Center. “We have come together,” the call we issued said, “not to engage in a gesture of discontent, not to register symbolic protest, not to influence those in power—but to exercise power.” In San Francisco, things were different than they’d ever been in New York. “We know that one week of activity against the induction centers—even if we close them down across the country—will not stop the draft,” our call stated. “We see this week as a way of involving young people who are facing conscription: black people, high school students, the unemployed and young working people.”

In Palo Alto we began organizing in small groups of fifteen to twenty people; these groups would meet often between August and October 16, so that demonstrators would learn how to regroup quickly in the midst of an action, among people they knew, in order to decide on strategy, counterstrategy, tactics. That most people seemed to accept the fact that our action did not begin and end (win or lose) with the induction centers (or even with this particular war) seemed right to me, and I remember, during our last weeks in California, speaking with friends about the possibility of building a radical political movement which would be capable of enduring the daily and yearly ups and downs of events, of the government’s actions, of the country’s war and antiwar sentiment, and even of our own half-formed notions of where we were, why, and what had to be done about it.

I arrived in New York in early September and found that the New York antiwar organizations were in their usual state of frenzied factionalism. I met with people from Resist, the War Resisters League, the Parade Committee, the National Mobilization Committee, and told them about what we’d been doing in California. Although Spock and others were already enlisted on behalf of civil disobedience, nobody yet knew (less than a month before October 16) what the form of the civil disobedience would be—or where it would be.

After a year in Palo Alto, everything in New York seemed brutal, difficult—even the subways, which I’d loved passionately, tired me. The fact that, when meetings were over, people dispersed to invisible corners of the five boroughs, to apartment houses where they didn’t speak to or know their neighbors; the fact that the simple matter of trying to meet with friends, or with people in antiwar groups, became, always, a major logistical problem; the fact that hair-splitting on texts and arguing over objectives seemed to be a more highly developed art form than it had been a year before; the fact that talk still seemed to be equivalent to action, that people seemed to feel they’d done something concrete against the war in Vietnam when they’d spent an hour or an evening in New York arguing with someone about it—all of this seemed absurd, hopeless, painful; all of it made me ache to get away.

At the beginning of the summer, Mitchell Goodman had gone East, and had printed a brochure (“TO THE CLERGY, THE MEN and WOMEN of the PROFESSIONS, THE TEACHERS: A CALL FOR CONSCIENTIOUS RESISTANCE TO THE WAR AND TO THE THREAT OF MILITARISM”) in which the Stanford Statement, along with quotes from Hartman and endorsements already secured from prominent individuals had been reprinted (“HOW IT BEGAN: THE STANFORD PLEDGE”). With this material he’d been working to organize what eventually became the Justice Department confrontation leading to the case of the United States vs. Spock, Coffin, Goodman, Ferber, and Raskin.

Mitch and I spoke often, and he tried to get me to stay. One letter from him, with an allusion to the old Black Sox scandals (“…we need you… I’ve told many people here in the east how much you did out there…you can’t start a thing like this, encourage people to civil disobedience—and then not be there. Say it isn’t so.”) touched me where I was weak, aroused some guilt, made me consider changing my plans, but only for a day or two. On September 29, we left America.

* In the epilogue to The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Alex Haley tells the following anecdote: “At the church where he would speak, Malcolm X was seated on the platform next to Mrs. Martin Luther King, to whom he leaned and whispered that he was ‘trying to help,’ she told Jet. ‘He said he wanted to present an alternative; that it might be easier for whites to accept Martin’s proposals after hearing him [Malcolm X]. I didn’t understand him at first, said Mrs. King. ‘He seemed rather anxious to let Martin know he was not causing trouble or making it difficult, but that he was trying to make it easier….’”