THE VATICAN: HUMANAE VITAE
Less than three months after his election in 1959, Pope John XXIII announced his intention to convene the Second Vatican Council. “I want to open the windows of the Church,” he declared, “so that we can see out and the people can see in.” Its purpose, he proclaimed, would be aggiornamento, or modernization.
Just how much fresh air would be allowed in through the open windows was unclear. Prior to the council, the pope sent out mixed signals, maintaining that “the present situation in the world makes it all the more urgent for Christianity, if it is not to perish, to proclaim its ancient principles with vigor.” That did not suggest an enthusiasm for reform. But then, in his opening speech to the council on October n, 1962, he seemed to welcome the winds of change. “The Church should never depart from the sacred treasure of truth,” he proclaimed, “but at the same time, she must ever look to the present, to the new conditions and the new forms of life introduced into the modern world.”1
The Second Vatican Council met in four sessions during the years 1962 to 1965. In all, 2,908 men (and no women) were entitled to attend. As many as 2,500 took part in the general sessions, making it the largest ecumenical council in the history of the church. At times, the atmosphere was not unlike a political convention. Debates were sometimes acrimonious, secret cabals abounded, and plots were hatched in the smoky cafes surrounding the Vatican. While the council was technically democratic and votes were frequently taken, final decisions rested with the pope.
The first session ended on December 8,1962, and the next was due to begin the following autumn. During the intervening period, on June 3,1963, Pope John died. Eighteen days later, Pope Paul VI was elected and immediately confirmed that the council would proceed. In the remaining sessions, the council covered much ground and pronounced upon numerous controversial issues concerning church governance. Most of the pronouncements were, however, far too arcane for lay Catholics, who had difficulty perceiving the impact upon their own lives.
The one issue on which Catholics most desired clarification was birth control. Early in the third session (1964), the pope withdrew that issue from the jurisdiction of the council and informed bishops that the topic would be referred to a special commission appointed by him. Frightened by the potential consequences of an entrenched papacy, the Patriarch of Antioch warned his fellow cardinals: “I beg of you my brothers; let us avoid a new Galileo case: one is enough for the church.”2
The pope bluntly disregarded that warning. He seemed to signal his position on October 4,1964, when he addressed the United Nations and suggested that the solution to the problem of overpopulation lay in the reduction of poverty and the expansion of food production, not in limiting the birthrate. As he put it, the aim should be “to multiply the bread on the table, not to diminish the eaters.” On the other hand, he suggested to the journalist Alberto Cavallari of Corriere delta Sera that he had no firm opinions: “The world asks us what we think about [birth control] and we must give an answer. We cannot remain silent. It is difficult to know what to say. For centuries the church has not had to face such problems. And this matter is a little strange for churchmen to be handling, and even embarrassing from the human point of view. . . . Deciding is not as easy as studying. But we have to say something. What can we say? God must enlighten us.” Subsequent events demonstrated just how complicated this issue was for the church. The need for a new doctrine was widely recognized, but the Catholic church is not adept at changing direction.3
The papal commission was two-tiered, consisting, first, of fifteen cardinals and bishops and, second, of sixty-four lay experts. According to Thomas Burch, a professor at Georgetown University and member of the lay committee, the pope suggested that he wanted to find a way to change the church’s position, but was worried that to do so would challenge papal authority. After two years of deliberation, the lay members voted 60 to 4 in favor of a change, while the clergy voted 9 to 6. The majority opinion expressed in both cases was that reform was appropriate even though it would undermine the doctrine of papal infallibility.
Among the minority group, the issue of papal authority was more important than the rights or wrongs of birth control. Dissenters argued: “If it should be declared that contraception is not evil in itself . . .this would mean that the leaders of the church, acting with extreme imprudence, had condemned thousands of innocent human acts, forbidding, under pain of eternal damnation, a practice which would now be sanctioned. The fact can neither be denied nor ignored that these same acts would now be declared licit on the grounds of principles cited by the Protestants, which popes and bishops have either condemned or at least not approved.” The author of that opinion was the Polish archbishop Karol Wojtyla, who would later become Pope John Paul II. His views mirrored precisely those of Pope Paul. As the Roman Catholic historian and theologian August Hasler has concluded, “The core of the problem was not the Pill, but the authority, continuity, and infallibility of the church’s magisterium.”4
Whatever the real rationale behind the church’ subsequent ban on contraception, the pope took steps to root that ban firmly within Christian doctrine. The long-awaited papal encyclical Humanae Vitae, issued on July 25,1968, recognized the problems of overpopulation and gave lip service to the desire of parents to limit family size, but stressed without equivocation that any means of artificial birth control constituted a violation of natural law. A husband and wife “are not free to act as they choose in the service of transmitting of life, as if it were wholly up to them to decide what is the right course to follow. On the contrary, they are bound to ensure that what they do corresponds to the will of God the Creator. The very nature of marriage and its use makes His will clear, while the constant teaching of the Church spells it out.” According to the encyclical, “God has wisely ordered the laws of nature and the incidence of fertility in such a way that successive births are already naturally spaced.” The important point, however, was that the conjugal act could not and should not be separated from the act of procreation. “An act of mutual love which impairs the capacity to transmit life which God the Creator, through specific laws, has built into it, frustrates His design which constitutes the norm of marriage, and contradicts the will of the Author of life. Hence, to use this divine gift while depriving it, even if only partially, of its meaning and purpose, is equally repugnant to the nature of man and of woman, and is consequently in opposition to the plan of God and His holy will.” The encyclical went on to condemn, specifically, abortion (“even for therapeutic reasons”), sterilization, the Pill, the IUD, condoms, and every other method of artificial contraception, whether used by the individual or promoted by the state as a method of population control. The only approved means was the rhythm method.5
The encyclical constituted not simply a ruling against birth control but also an attack on the promiscuity which easy access to the Pill had supposedly inspired. Following more closely the rules of God would, it was hoped, turn back the clock to an age when sex was sacred. “The right and lawful ordering of birth demands, first of all, that spouses fully recognize and value the true blessings of family life and that they acquire complete mastery over themselves and their emotions,” it was proclaimed. “Self-discipline . . . is a shining witness to the chastity of husband and wife and, far from being a hindrance to their love of one another, transforms it by giving it a more truly human character.” Further to this end, the pope addressed the issue of permissiveness in the media. “Everything . . . in the modern means of social communication which arouses men’s baser passions and encourages low moral standards, as well as every obscenity in the written word and every form of indecency on the stage and screen, should be condemned publicly and unanimously.” It was no use, he argued, to “defend this kind of depravity in the name of art or culture,” or to hide behind arguments based on individual liberty.6
The reaction to Humanae Vitae varied from person to person, country to country. In some quarters in Latin America, the encyclical was seen as a bold challenge to American neo-imperialism. Concern had been raised by recent American emphasis upon the need to slow population growth in the developing world. Latin Americans reacted angrily when Lyndon Johnson remarked that “five dollars spent for birth control are rather more profitable than a hundred dollars to favor development.” American-sponsored birth control was condemned as “genocide”; Marxist students in Colombia and Ecuador openly attacked family planning clinics. Catholic clerics, arguing that the “population explosion” was an American invention, maintained that resources were sufficient to feed an additional five or six billion people and that starvation was simply a problem of distribution. “The solution to the demographic problem is not to corrupt mankind in his moral foundations,” the rector of the Roman Catholic University in Santo Domingo argued, “but to educate him so that he may make more rational use of his resources.” At the same time, opinion polls across Latin America consistently showed a majority of women in favor of small families and artificial birth control.7
In the developed world, outrage was mixed with disdain. The British journalist Bernard Hollowood argued that “those who will suffer most from this philosophical nonsense will be the poor and underprivileged, those who lack the strength of mind and body to resist religious enslavement. Many of them will obey out of fear and ignorance, and as they do so they will bring increasing hardship upon themselves, increasing misery and hopelessness. Religion is a terrible and terrifying force when it can be so abused.” The New Scientist argued that “bigotry, pedantry and fanaticism can kill, mutilate and torment their victims just as well as bombs, pogroms and gas chambers.” A group of 2,600 American scientists signed a petition vehemently condemning the encyclical. “Each action to prevent the efforts to stop numerical development of world population sanctions the misery in which millions . . . are living today,” they warned. “The world should be aware as quickly as possible that Paul VI has sanctioned the death of endless numbers of human beings with his wrongly inspired and immoral encyclical.” The biologist Jeffrey Baker pointed out that during the five years from Paul’s accession to the release of the encyclical, the population of the world had increased by 300 million and 20 million had died of malnutrition.8
Individual Catholics were presented with a stark choice: either use birth control and run the risk of damnation, or follow the dictates of the church and surrender to the tyranny of unrestrained procreation. In the industrialized world, the choice commonly made was defiance. Polls consistently showed at least 80 percent of American Catholic women were determined to ignore the ban. That was, nevertheless, not a choice made easily. The encyclical placed a heavy burden on the consciences of Catholics, and drove many from the church. “I stopped going,” one woman confessed. “I have thirteen children, and I can’t really afford to have any more, so I had to make my choice.” The most noticeable effect, however, was observable in the poorer countries, particularly in Latin America. The countries least able to deal with the pressures of overpopulation were also those most reluctant to disobey As the theologian Hans Kung has written, “for the people in many under-developed countries, . . . [Humanae Vitae] constitutes a source of incalculable harm, a crime in which the Church has implicated itself.”9
MAYFAIR: CASUALTIES OF THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION
In early January 1969, Jimi Hendrix entertained the reporter Don Short from the Daily Mirror at his new house in Mayfair, next door to the former home of George Frideric Handel. “To tell you the God’s honest truth, I haven’t heard much of the fella’s stuff,” he confessed. “But I dig a bit of Bach now and again.” In spite of himself, Short was charmed by Hendrix. Like so many others who first encountered the wild man of rock, he was surprised to find a polite, soft-spoken gentleman. Short asked him about his outrageous image. It wasn’t an image, he insisted. “No, I’m just natural all the time. What others think or say doesn’t worry me.”10
Hendrix embodied everything the counterculture held sacred—the exuberance, the excess, the fun, the music, the drugs. Yet those attributes competed with one another; they could not long coexist. Exuberance was difficult to maintain while consuming copious quantities of drugs. Perhaps more fundamentally, style threatened to smother substance. Hendrix made his reputation as a wild man, even though that image did not do justice to his complex sensitivity. Drugs masked his suffering: the more success he achieved, the more exploited he became, and the more he craved escape. His manager, the vile Michael Jeffrey, treated Hendrix like a mother lode to be stripped of ore as quickly as possible, until only a pile of poisonous slag remained. If Hendrix seemed destructive, it was perhaps because he was being destroyed.
Music brought him “some kind of peace of mind or satisfaction,” in direct contrast to politics, which was “really an ego scene—it’s the art of words, which means nothing.” His wild antics were cathartic. “When you bring your girlfriend . . . and watch us play,” he told Dick Cavett, “you can get it out of your system by watching us do it. Make it into theatrics instead of putting it in the streets. So that when you get home . . . youhave all this tension out of the way. It’s nothing but a release, I guess.”11
The contradictions in Hendrix’s life were brutally apparent during a long European tour in the winter of 1968–1969 when he was criticized as “listless and tired.”12 His bass player blamed the poor performances on the scarcity of amphetamines. That said, a concert at the Albert Hall at the end of that tour was ruined because he was too stoned to play. At the Isle of Wight on August 31, 1970, Hendrix played brilliantly, but was too exhausted to provide the outrageous behavior everyone expected. Richard Neville thought the event cruelly foreboding: “Farewell to the joy of Jimi, farewell to the fun at the funfair. . . . Jimi failed because we all failed. . . . We’ve created nothing, nothing.” On this occasion, melodrama was appropriate, since it turned out to be Jimi’s last concert. Eighteen days later he was found dead at the Samarkand Hotel in London. He’d choked on his own vomit.13
“The 60s ended for me in 1970 when they announced on the radio that Jimi Hendrix was dead,” John Marsh recalled. “My first reaction was I knew the 1970s were going to fuck it all. And by God they did.” Marsh’s reaction was not uncommon; quite a few people saw the death of Hendrix as the end of the party. The clues had long been there. “By 1969 it all broke apart and some went to money and others to total insanity,” Spike Hawkins felt. “I saw the end coming with overdoses. It turned very nasty. . . . Deaths came left, right and centre. . . . The energy went.” Hendrix himself told Short that death did not frighten him—a rather short-sighted view for a man supposedly in love and planning a family. “People still mourn when people die,” he said. “That’s self-sympathy. The person who is dead ain’t cryin’. . . . When I die I want people to play my music, go wild and freak out an’ do anything they wanna do.” That sounds like the feelings of a man who expects to live forever. Unfortunately, neither the artist nor his spirit was immortal.14
“Hope I die before I get old,” the Who sang in their iconic “My Generation.” While the band did not perhaps mean that literally, far too many of their generation realized that wish. The ability to stay young and to live in the moment was the greatest strength of baby boomers, but also their greatest weakness. “What are you doing with life?” a reporter asked Janis Joplin in 1969. “Getting stoned, staying happy, and having a good time,” she replied. “I’m doing just what I want with my life, enjoying it. I don’t think you can ask more of life than that. . . . When I get scared and worried, I tell myself, Janis, just have a good time.’ So I juice up real good and that’s just what I have.” Her doctor had warned her that excessive drinking was doing irreparable damage to her liver. “I don’t go back to him anymore. Man, I’d rather have ten years of super-hyper-most than live to be seventy by sitting in some goddamn chair watching TV. Right now is where you are. How can you wait?” Joplin didn’t get her ten years. A few months later she was dead, the victim of a heroin overdose. For a very brief moment, she provided inspiration to young people determined to resist the prudence of their parents. But by living in the moment, she denied herself a future.15
Among those who survived, the drug experience seemed in retrospect fun, colorful, and relatively harmless, something to be remembered nostalgically but (in most cases) to be stored securely in the past. “Sometimes being stoned helped you to perceive the things that were hidden from you by all the advertising,” the actress Julie Christie reflected. “Perhaps getting stoned was the only way to overthrow the sort of mind-fucking that had been going on, this brainwashing. Although there were a lot of casualties, it wasn’t such a bad thing—trying to get on another plane.” Quite a few musicians convinced themselves that LSD improved their creativity, allowing them to discover harmonies otherwise elusive. “When you stop exploring with drugs, now that’s a bad scene,” Steve Winwood of Traffic argued. “I never want to stop exploring.”16
Explorers sometimes got swallowed by the jungle. Among the casualties, history remembers a few famous faces, immensely talented individuals like Hendrix, Joplin, and Jim Morrison, who died far too young. Behind them rank thousands of faceless dead remembered only by their families. And then there are the living dead, those whose minds were ravaged by drugs but whose bodies somehow survived to torment those who knew them when. The producer Joe Boyd recalled seeing guitarist and songwriter Syd Barrett in the spring of 1967. “He was charming, impish and witty.” A couple of months and many tabs of acid later, “he had gone through a dramatic deterioration and he was almost monosyllabic and very blank-faced.” June Bolan was offstage at the last gig Barrett played with Pink Floyd: “He was so . . . gone. I kept saying, ‘Syd, it’s June, it’s me, look at me. . .’ RogerWaters and I . . . got him out to the stage. He had a white Stratocaster and we put it round his neck and he walked on stage and of course the audience went spare because they loved them. The band started to play and Syd stood there. He had his guitar round his neck and his arms just hanging down and . . . he stood there, tripping out of his mind.” Barrett went mad. Susan Lydon, on the other hand, retained her sanity but became a junkie. In the late 1960s Lydon was one of the most promising journalists of her generation. A decade later she was selling her body for a fix. Her mental faculties remained intact, but she could no longer use them productively. Like a ruthless overseer, drugs usurped her mind. For her, heroin started as something beautiful: “Beyond its jazzy status, [it] gave you an incredible high. . . . It made you feel lovingly buffered and protected, like someone peering at the world through a private one-way mirror. Heroin laid down a sensuous sound track under a vision of a world melting into peace. . . . A heroin high came with its own voice. The heroin voice whispered in a way that made your eyes roll back, ‘Everything will be fine.’” Everything was not fine. Like so many talented people, Lydon convinced herself that addiction was a calamity suffered only by the poor or the stupid. Though she eventually kicked her habit, drugs claimed what should have been the best years of her life, and brought immense misery to those who loved her.17
“The competition to ‘de-school’ yourself, to continually transcend limits when you discover them, was an unending strain on the imagination,” thought Peter Coyote. His quest was “fueled by drugs. A lot of speed, a lot of acid, a lot of smack.” Coyote eventually discovered that there were limits to everything. “The problem is, the body is an inviolable limit. And you have to really hurt it before you know that.” Fortunately, he made the discovery before irreparable damage was done:
I didn’t want to die—and I was going to die. And furthermore, I didn’t want to live and be ugly. I was skinny, and yellow, and fetid, and nicotine stained, and burned, and chipped. I wasn’t even a beautiful mammal. You know, I had these two coyote puppies on the porch of my place, and I was looking at them one day, and they were laying in the sun, and their hair shone, and their eyes shone, and their teeth were white, and they were illuminated beings. And I realized that health was beautiful. It’s just physically beautiful. And I thought: “What is it about my friends and me, all these charismatic geniuses, who are all sallow and sickly? We’re smart, but are we healthy? We don’t look healthy and beautiful. We don’t look like vigorous, lusty, energetic mammals.” And that startled me, I thought: “That’s how I want to look. That’s how I want to be.”
The irony, Coyote concluded, was that “many of us were championing the environment and other species and . . .at the same time . . . we were degrading grading our bodies.” By the end of the great drugs experiment, the landscape was littered with casualties. “A lot of my friends are dead,” Coyote admitted. “And some of the carnage was not death—some of it was just dissolution.”18
“People didn’t care about themselves,” observed Sue Miles, who managed to avoid getting sucked into the vortex of madness. “I used to think I wouldn’t do this—I had more regard for myself. I also always thought: I’m going to live beyond my twenties. I am not about to expire here and now, thank you very much. I’d like two lungs, two arms, two legs and a brain.”19
PEOPLE’S PARK: THE FUTURE IN A VACANT LOT
Up until 1967, the San Francisco Bay Area neatly reflected the divisions in Sixties rebellion. On one side of the bay was Haight-Ashbury, the epicenter of the lifestyle revolution. On the other side was Berkeley, a battleground in the political revolution. The two communities shared the paraphernalia of the counterculture but were otherwise distinct and often mutually suspicious. Hippies thought the politicos a bad trip, while the New Left feared that the freaks would tarnish their image.
In 1967, the Human Be-In, billed as a “gathering of the tribes,” attempted a synthesis of the two strands of rebellion. An even more significant blending, however, occurred when hippies began to put down roots in the shabby streets where Berkeley borders Oakland. The Haight had begun to crumble under the combined weight of curious tourists, unscrupulous drug dealers, repressive police, and gouging landlords, causing hippies to flee to the cheap housing and tolerance of Berkeley. The Haight’s sordidness soon followed them. Berkeley’s crime rate soared.
East Bay tolerance had limits. Conservative Republicans, always a force in the area, demanded that the university, which owned the slum housing where many hippies lived, take action. They were supported by William Knowland’s Oakland Tribune, always proficient at firing up public wrath. Under immense pressure, the university decided in late 1967 to demolish an entire block bordering Telegraph Avenue, thus forcing out the undesirables under the guise of urban renewal and university expansion—two good liberal causes.
Berkeley radicals suspected a sinister design—namely, the goal of “eliminating the culture of protest by denying it its turf.” In Ramparts, Robert Scheer argued:
South Campus expansion was based on the presumed need to sanitize and control the University environment. . . . Students would literally be forced to dwell within an ivory tower of concrete and glass dormitories which—along with other official buildings, churches, and a few spanking-new store fronts properly up to code—would be the only structures permitted in the central South Campus area. All others would be pushed out by the University Regents exercising their power of eminent domain. . . . If the [university] was to be a knowledge factory, South Campus Berkeley would be a company town.
In other words, the issue was not simply a matter of what to do with a plot of land. It became instead an argument over rights, a struggle for authority, and a battle for the soul of the Sixties.20
As it turned out, the university had funds for demolishing but none for building. Ronald Reagan, elected governor of California in 1966, had brought to an end the period of relentless expansion. He also used the budget as a stick with which to punish Berkeley for its leftist behavior. As a result, a year after the housing had been demolished, the six-acre site was nothing more than a makeshift parking lot.
Michael Delacour, boutique owner and hippie impresario, decided to seize the lot for “the people.” The Berkeley left, always game to confront authority, rallied behind him. On April 20, 1969, hundreds of activists invaded the lot armed with picks and shovels. A tractor materialized from nowhere. Those who were not helplessly stoned worked hard to create something. A radical newspaper celebrated the seizure: “The Telegraph Avenue community which has long been in the forefront of the nation’s youth revolt, built a park, People’s Park, on land the University said it owned because it had a piece of paper. Land in this society is owned by men rich enough to afford such pieces of paper. Either the land belongs to the University or the land belongs to the people.” Over subsequent weeks, a park of sorts took shape, but its inspiration was also its weakness: it grew out of innocent anarchism, lacking plan, purpose, or future.21
For radicals, the park symbolized the best of Sixties values: people power and ecological harmony. It was, argued Michael Lerner, an important lesson for the revolution. “The great significance of People’s Park”was that “everyone could see a vision of the new society being realized through the collective work of the people, and they could also see that [that] new society would come only by rejecting the capitalist principle of private property.”The park became an important point of conflict with the ruling class. Hayden, overcome with revolutionary ambition, had recently called for “two, three, many Columbias.” People’s Park fit the bill, given that it seemed another case of a university using its authoritarian power to ride roughshod over the poor and defenseless. The possibility of meaningful confrontation also seemed all the more likely given Reagan’ penchant for dramatic demonstrations of power.22
The left saw the park as Shangri-La; the right, as Sodom and Gomorrah. Caught between these two views was the university chancellor, Roger Heyns, a thoroughly decent man despised by both sides because he kowtowed to neither. While the left rallied and the right fumed, Heyns desperately sought compromise, without success. On May 15,1969, at the request of the Republican mayor, 250 police officers from various forces took over the park, evicted the squatters, and erected a fence. Word spread through the radical community, and within hours 4,000 demonstrators had mobilized. Neither side was in the mood for restraint. Demonstrators tossed bricks and rocks from the rooftops. The police, increasingly frustrated, used tear gas, then birdshot, then buckshot. As time passed, their aim grew more random, their range shorter. By the end of the day, more than a hundred demonstrators had been injured, thirteen of them requiring hospital treatment. A rioter named James Rector was killed when buckshot ripped open his stomach; another was blinded after being hit with birdshot. The police later claimed they had fired in self-defense, yet not a single police officer was seriously injured. “The indiscriminate use of shotguns [was] sheer insanity,” Dr. Harry Brean, chief radiologist at Berkeley’s Herrick Hospital later remarked.23
That night, Reagan sent in the National Guard. For the next seventeen days, Berkeley was a war zone. On one occasion, guardsmen threw tear gas canisters into a lecture hall for no apparent reason. On May 20, a National Guard helicopter sprayed tear gas on a bewildered crowd of staff and students. The outcry was tremendous, but Reagan remained unrepentant: “There was no alternative. Whether that was a tactical mistake or not, once the dogs of war are unleashed, you must expect that things will happen and that people, being human, will make mistakes on both sides.”24
Reagan’s brutality caused Lerner to qualify his praise. “It is useless to say we need more People’s Parks,” he wrote, “for that struggle showed that the ruling class is willing to use its entire army, if necessary, to prevent us from building the new society.” He nevertheless insisted, “People’s Park did show that putting forward positive visions gives us the greatest chance of building a large revolutionary youth movement.” Others were not so sure. Jerry Rosenfeld, a veteran Berkeley radical, sensed manipulation: “The Park Struggle was used for ulterior motives, of both the personal, subconscious kind, and the consciously political kind. . . . If the unknown policeman who killed James Rector was only a pawn, . . . by the same token . . . the blood of James Rector lies also on the hands of my brothers Frank Bardacke, Mike Delacour, Stew Albert, and numerous others. I believe that the death of the next James Rector will be a murder, and whoever writes the leaflet that helps send him to his death will be an accomplice to that murder.” Stephen Smale, a stalwart of the Vietnam Day Committee four years earlier, was bewildered by People’s Park and saw no reason to join the protests. His colleague Morris Hirsch wondered if the entire university had gone mad. Classes had been canceled and the campus had been turned into a war zone, all for the sake of a place for hippies to smoke pot. Hirsch felt that real political issues had been removed from the debate and that the conflict between right and left had been transformed into ritualized combat.25
The battle for the park produced, ironically, two winners. Governor Reagan won his war with the hippies, but they won the park. The university subsequently decided that the wisest course was to leave the site alone—a decision fiscally suited to the lean 1970s. Official policy was to pretend that the park did not exist. The city mowed the pitiful patches of grass, but landscaping was otherwise left to the free spirits who congregated on Telegraph Avenue and called the park their own. A makeshift children’s play area was built, along with a speakers’ platform and a recycled clothing bin. Hippies grew vegetables and little clumps of flowers as and where they pleased. The vegetables were stolen before they ripened and the flowers were never very pretty, but none of that mattered, since both had been made into important symbols of the people’s power.
SAN DIEGO: A BURNING DESIRE TO END THE WAR
On a warm spring day in May 1970, on the campus of the University of California, San Diego, George Winne walked to the center of Revelle Plaza and sat down, cross-legged. He paused, drew a breath, and looked as if he planned to meditate. Since meditating on campus was hardly unusual back then, few students paid any notice. Then, in a movement so swift it seemed choreographed, he produced a bottle of gasoline, twisted the cap, and poured it over himself. A match was lit. Before anyone could react, an ordinary student was transformed into an inferno.
Few people remember Winne’s name. His face does not spring to mind when the casualties of those strange times are recalled. He is, at best, a statistic: one of eight sad souls in the United States who set themselves on fire to protest the Vietnam War. His anonymity makes him an appropriate symbol for the wretched end to the heavenly decade.
In 1965, when American combat troops were first sent to Vietnam, the preferred method of protest was the teach-in, as seen at Michigan and Berkeley. The concept was wonderfully idealistic: students weren’t just complaining about the war—they were also, in theory, learning. In truth, however, teach-ins were simply platforms for proselytizing radicals. Students were exposed to the stalwarts of the American intellectual left—the “corpse evangelists” for whom the events offered a temporary ladder out of obscurity (see Dylan, “My Back Pages”). Beyond the ivory tower, however, teach-ins were nothing more than a nuisance—living proof of the marginality of the student peace movement. The Johnson administration simply ignored them.
Even though most students were protected from the draft, they felt the war personally. It seemed close and, as it escalated, it drew closer. Male students realized that, but for the accident of intelligence, they might be facing the horrors of a jungle patrol. In other words, the war provided the perfect Sixties cause: personal and political. It was individually threatening and, in a wider sense, seemed to embody everything wrong with America. Student radicals wanted not just an end to the war, but also an end to the mentality that produced it.
Student opposition arose from the belief “that the war is immoral at its root, that it is fought alongside a regime with no claim to represent its people, and that it is foreclosing the hope of making America a decent and truly democratic society.” That argument might have seemed logical to those in Political Science 101 at Berkeley or Columbia, but was never likely to strike a chord with the American people, who did not appreciate accusations of immorality. “It was a time of intense certainty,” the student activist Sam Brown recalled. “We were young, smart, intellectual (so we thought), and committed to a moral cause. We believed ourselves patriots defending America’s ideals. They (and by that time ‘they’ were almost always older) were, as far as we were concerned, narrow-minded, intolerant, and unwilling to accept our patriotism. . . . The ideas espoused by either group were almost automatically opposed by the other. Each side held to its half-thoughts and unfounded assumptions. Each side hurt the other.” Out of incomprehension grew contempt, which inhibited a united effort to end the war. In working-class bars across America, the peacenik and the Communist guerrilla were reviled equally. Workers applauded when Spiro Agnew called student protesters “an effete corps of impudent snobs who consider themselves intellectuals.”26
Protesting the war was hugely enjoyable. “It was a social thing,” Mark Rudd admitted. “People hang out. And the subculture is fun. There were drugs and girls.” Campus protesters like Jerry Rubin derived enormous fun from being “psychic terrorists” who sought to jolt Americans out of conformist apathy. Demonstrations were devised not for the message they conveyed but for the controversy they created. Robert Nisbet, a Berkeley professor of sociology who opposed the war, felt that “the actions of the student rebels . . . resembled nothing so much as the jack-boot authoritarianism of Hitler Youth in the 1920s: complete with shouted obscenities, humiliation of teachers and scholars, desecration of buildings, and instigation of various forms of terror.” Even though opposition to the war steadily grew, so too did disgust with students. “I was thoughtless, arrogant, horrible, hysterical, and unbelievably selfish,” one former protester confessed. “I still will not forgive myself for the pain and agony I caused.”27
In time, the unpopularity of the Vietnam War was translated into love for the Viet Cong. As early as 1965, Berkeley students donated blood and collected money for the Viet Cong, though whether the revolution ever benefited is doubtful. While this sort of behavior was more prevalent in Europe, where admiring Ho Chi Minh became a popular way to express hatred for America, it was sufficiently prevalent in the United States to cause damage to the image of the peace movement. The Progressive Labor faction of SDS, for instance, judged the Viet Cong a perfect example of the righteousness of Maoist revolution. In some circles, kind Uncle Ho and his band of virtuous guerrillas became chic heroes. They were the ultimate romantic warriors: peasants who fought the Yankee imperialist on a bowl of rice per day.
An entirely separate movement arose among ordinary people in towns and cities across America. It grew gradually, each agonizing month adding to the chorus of discontent. Middle American unease was rooted not in the immorality of the war, but in its futility. As casualty lists lengthened, doubts grew. Student protesters never quite understood that most Americans were concerned only about the fate of their sons and the significance of their sacrifice. Quite typical was Clem Labine, former star pitcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers, whose son Jay lost a leg in Vietnam: “First I guess I was a hawk. Then I was a dove. Then Jay went over and I went superhawk. Atom-bomb those Northern bastards for my kid. Now that he’s back . . . what do you think? I’m superdove.”28
Eugene McCarthy, during his presidential campaign, tried to establish a common ground between the campus and the heartland. Central to this effort was the “Clean for Gene” campaign, which attempted to persuade young radicals to jettison hedonism for the greater good. “I fought hard against associating lifestyle issues—drugs, rock music, sex—with the peace movement,” Stephen Cohen, a young McCarthy activist, recalled. He did not succeed. “[The behavior of students] so alienated and turned off people who would have been genuinely against the war. Students generally made a fundamental strategic error.” SDS activist Todd Gitlin recalls how his friends, certain of their moral virtue, had no time for McCarthy’s good sense. “Strategy-minded antiwar liberals rudely reminded us that we were forfeiting the respect of Americans who were turning against the war. . . . But to hell with them! Which side were they on, anyway?”29
The National Mobilization Committee to End the War (known as Mobe) was, as its name suggests, an effort to knit together the disparate anxiety. Students were present, but not dominant. Mobe was instead a coalition of the Old Left and New Left, liberal pacifists, young men worried about the draft, parents, and students. Unity was preserved because of a single-minded focus on the war. Talk of overturning the government was discouraged. Organizers tried desperately to create a movement that would seem antiwar, not pro–Viet Cong.
In October 1967 came Mobe’s first great March on Washington, with some 100,000 protesters taking part. The demonstration lacked cohesion, but that hardly seemed important, given the weight of numbers. That said, the weakness of the coalition was painfully evident. The veteran pacifist David Dellinger called it a mix of “Gandhi and guerrilla”—the former admirable, the latter not. Hippies, perhaps unfortunately, had decided to join in. As they freely admitted, participation of this sort was unusual, given that they seldom had time for anything so serious as politics. Some decided it would be fun to levitate the Pentagon. “There are seven million laws in this country,” Abbie Hoffman proclaimed, “and we aim to break every single one of them, including the law of gravity.” Quite a few hippies were sufficiently stoned to convince themselves that America’s biggest building actually did rise. Rubin convinced himself that theatrics of this sort could end a war. “It made me see that we could build a movement by knocking off American symbols. We had symbolically destroyed the Pentagon, the symbol of the war machine, by throwing blood on it, pissing on it, dancing on it, painting ‘Che lives’ on it. It was a total cultural attack on the Pentagon. The media had communicated this all over the country, and lots of people identified with us, the besiegers.” In truth, self-indulgence undermined otherwise impressive commitment.30
Three months later came the Tet Offensive. The slow erosion in support for the war turned into avalanche. After Tet, a peace movement of substance, rooted in the anxieties of ordinary Americans, gained dominion. Egocentric campus activists could not bring themselves to merge with this deluge of popular protest, which eventually overwhelmed them. Polls showed that, while support for the war fell, so too did support for student protesters. In 1968, a poll rated them 28.4 on a scale from zero (very unfavorable) to 100 (very favorable).31
In the presidential election of 1968, Americans turned not to avowed peace candidates like McCarthy or McGovern, but to Nixon, who promised that he could end the war and salvage American credibility Nixon’s victory is probably the best indication of how little the campus peace movement had achieved in three turbulent years. The American people wanted the war over, but they did not buy the fundamental reconstruction of their society that students espoused. After his election, Nixon arranged for troops to trickle home, thus suggesting that an end was near. For most Americans, that was enough; they were still sufficiently patient to allow Nixon the time he needed to deliver peace with honor.
The peace movement’s finest hour was also its grand goodbye. Vietnam Moratorium Day, October 15,1969, was marked by rallies in 500 towns and cities across America. Then, on November 15, came a huge demonstration that brought 250,000 protesters to Washington. The crowd was peaceful, orderly, and fundamentally ordinary. Student radicals drowned in a sea of conformity. Reacting to the spectacle of protesting stockbrokers, lawyers, and tennis-shoed moms, Rubin sneered: “Peace has become respectable!”32
The demonstration was impressive, but Nixon cleverly manipulated it to his advantage. In his famous “silent majority” speech nine days later, he warned that “the more divided we are at home, the less likely the enemy is to negotiate in Paris.” He continued: “And so . . . to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support. . . . Let us be united for peace. Let us also be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.” The gambit worked. After the speech, Gallup found that 75 percent of those polled thought that the term “silent majority” referred to those people who believed that “protesters have gone too far.”33
“One of the reasons the president can get away with such nonsense is that many of us in the peace movement failed to dissociate ourselves strongly enough from violence on the left,” wrote a dejected Sam Brown, one of the moratorium’s organizers. Nixon’s subsequent policy epitomized Middle-American sentiment: a gradual withdrawal of troops was combined with virulent attacks upon campus dissenters. Students were the new enemy—a handy distraction from the disappointment of Southeast Asia. Despite the popularity of the November demonstration, Gallup found a 6 percent rise in public approval “of the way President Nixon is handling the situation in Vietnam.”34
In the spring of 1970, Mobe shut its offices in Washington. Nixon had silenced dissent, even if he had not ended the war. But then came Cambodia. The war that was supposed to be ending was instead widened. The invasion launched on May 1,1970, sparked a torrential resurgence of campus unrest. Within four days, more than a hundred campuses erupted. “The overflow of emotion seemed barely containable,” wrote the Washington Post. “The nation was witnessing what amounted to a virtual general strike by its college youth.” The new protests lacked the radical bombast of earlier campus activism, when students wanted to end the war and change the world.35
Kent State University was typical of the post-Cambodia protests and atypical of Sixties activism. A second-tier university, it catered mostly to students who were intent on earning a degree, getting a job, and buying a house in the suburbs. Since 1965 the campus had been comparatively quiet, with small bands of SDS activists trying desperately to drum up alienation. But even the mild-mannered Kent State students would not tolerate war in Cambodia. As tension rose, Ohio governor James Rhodes warned that he would “employ every weapon possible” in confronting protesters. “No one is safe in Portage County,” he added for dramatic effect. Faced with a tough battle to win the Republican nomination for the Senate, he was trying to duplicate what Reagan had achieved in California—namely, a populist campaign fired by hatred of students. Campus demonstrators, he argued, were the “worst type of people we harbor in America,” and he promised that “we are going to eradicate this problem in Ohio.”36
On May 4, students came out en masse. Rhodes had mobilized the Ohio National Guard, made up of kids not all that different from the protesters. The guard carried live ammunition, even though none of the students were armed or particularly bellicose. Someone panicked and pulled a trigger. Others followed. Thirteen seconds later, four students were dead and nine others lay wounded. Sandy Scheuer was walking to class, 300 feet from the line of soldiers, when she was cut down. “She was everything we lived for, and now our lives are an empty shell,” her father later wrote. “Sandy represented everything good in this world. She was a gentle girl blessed with a fine sense of humor, a love for life tempered with compassionate concern for the misfortunes of others—qualities which made her warm personality so appealing to all who knew her. What greater anguish is there than the thought that Sandy’s devotion to her studies, her desire to help people, . . . should lead her into the path of a bullet, shot through her lovely neck.” A spokesman later claimed that the National Guard had responded to a “grave threat.” Yet at the time weapons were fired, no student was closer than sixty feet from the line of soldiers.37
Ten days later, a repeat performance took place at Jackson State University in Mississippi, where two students were killed. The outcry on campuses across the country dwarfed any previous period of activism. More than four million students came out in protest. Over 1,300 colleges and universities were affected, with 536 temporarily closed, 51 for the rest of the academic year. For most students, this was their first (and last) taste of activism. Kent State inspired what had previously proved elusive—namely, a unified student movement of monumental power. But solidarity born of anger could not be sustained; fissures quickly developed between true pacifists, anarchists, hippie pranksters, proto-revolutionaries, and the habitually apathetic. Nixon found it easy to manipulate these divisions. His promise of a withdrawal from Cambodia by June 30 (not, strictly speaking, a departure from his original plans) cooled tempers. Most students returned to their books, while a few psychopaths indulged in destruction. Almost two years later, the last combat troops left Vietnam.38
Shortly after the killings, one Kent State student—frightened, bewildered, and dismayed—went home to seek solace with his parents. “My mother said, ‘It would have been a good thing if all those students had been shot.’ I cried, ‘Hey, Mom! That’s me you’re talking about,’ and she said, ‘It would have been better for the country if you all had been mowed down.’” A similar sentiment was expressed by Dr. Paul Williamson, a physician living in McComb, Mississippi. When his son entered Tulane University in the autumn of 1970, Williamson warned him not to confront authority. “If you choose . . . revolution, expect to get shot. Mother and I will grieve but we will gladly buy dinner for the National Guardsman who shot you.” He urged his son to use his energies for more practical purposes. “Have you ever considered how many coeds there are to be kissed?”39
These incidents were not perhaps typical, but they are revelatory. A deep gulf had always existed between the baby boomers who went to university and their “Greatest Generation” parents who put them there. That gulf was widened by the war, but especially by the inclination of students to doubt the honesty and morality of their country. “I am tired of being blamed, maimed, and contrite,” wrote K. Ross Toole, a forty-nine-year-old professor of history at the University of Montana, and father of seven.
My generation has made America the most affluent country on earth; it has tackled, head-on, a racial problem which no nation on earth in the history of mankind had dared to do. It has publicly declared war on poverty and it has gone to the moon; it has desegregated schools and abolished polio; it has presided over the beginning of what is probably the greatest social and economic revolution in man’s history. . . . It has declared itself, and committed itself, and damn near run itself into the ground in the cause of social justice and reform.
By attacking America, the protesters attacked their parents. No wonder, then, that when parents felt torn between family and nation, many sided with the latter. The escalation of violent protest at the end of the decade caused the older generation to become distinctly less liberal. Support for the right of students to protest (even peacefully) steadily declined, to less than 40 percent in 1969. A Gallup poll in March 1969 found 82 percent of respondents in favor of expelling militant students and 84 percent in favor of withdrawing their federal student loans.40
Neither the campus protests of the mid-1960s nor the massive reaction to the Kent State killings had any measurable effect upon the way Middle America ended its war. Sixties romantics often view the antiwar movement as a continuum which began on the campuses of Berkeley and Michigan, gained strength from Walter Cronkite’s post-Tet commentary, coalesced in the March on Washington, and triumphed when the troops came home. If such a scenario were accurate, the student protesters would emerge as heroes—true martyrs who endured scorn in order to right a wrong. But it is difficult to assign credit to student activists for shaping the opinions of Middle America, since each regarded the other with deep contempt. In any case, courage seems a prerequisite for martyrdom. Civil rights protesters in the South went into the lion’s den, risking severe injury and death. In contrast, student antiwar protesters operated within the closed, protected, and tolerant world of academia. They protested to one another more than to their enemies. In November 1965, the civil rights activist Bayard Rustin challenged a Berkeley crowd to “go out into the community instead of spending so much time talking to yourselves. . . . Then when people read in the newspapers that you’ve been arrested, they’ll know why.” That challenge went unheeded.41
“However much they rewrite that war and whatever else the United States does,” the novelist Angela Carter has remarked, “it was the first war in the history of the world where the boys were brought back from the front due to popular demand from their own side.” While that might be true, it is not true in the way Carter imagines. The various antiwar movements did affect the outcome of the war. Johnson and Nixon, two paranoid presidents, formulated military strategy with the public’s reaction in mind. Protest convinced Hanoi that it could win a protracted war and Washington that it could not. But two points deserve emphasis. First, Americans would have supported a war which was being won; therefore, defeat had to become apparent before dissension could turn critical. Had American forces really been winning, as Westmoreland and Johnson repeatedly insisted, the protesters would never have been more than a noisy nuisance. Second, no one group should claim credit for mobilizing Americans against the war—certainly not the students. Success came because diverse and antagonistic groups eventually attained critical mass. In fact, with a bit less egotism on the part of some protesters, and a bit more political finesse, success might have come sooner.42