ALTAMONT: THE DAY THE MUSIC DIED
The Woodstock Festival of August 1969 was supposed to have been a beginning, the green shoots of the cooperative commonwealth in which everyone would be nice to one another and leaders would conform to the popular will. In fact it was the end—or, rather, a false dawn. Reality was revealed in gory Technicolor four months later at a dusty racetrack called Altamont.
The runes were already there for anyone inclined to read them. In the month before Woodstock, the Rolling Stones gave a free concert in Hyde Park, London, with the Hell’s Angels providing unofficial security. Sixties peddlers of peace and love were smitten with the black-leathered brutes, a gang so bad they were good. They guarded the fenced-off area near the stage, where VIPs gathered and sipped champagne. That should have been a clue to something amiss, since the communal paradise of Hippie Nation was not supposed to have Very Important People. Far from the radiant center, the peasants could hardly see the stage or hear the music. Their enjoyment was ruined by the early appearance of a Seventies phenomenon: blue-overalled skinheads, or bovverboys, with swastikas tattooed on their foreheads. They lurked in the trees and pissed on the peaceful hippies below.
If Hyde Park was mildly unsettling, the Isle of Wight later in the summer was undiluted nightmare. Far from being a love-in, it was a cash-in. Greedy entrepreneurs capitalized on the hippies’ failure to bring food by selling disgusting hot dogs at exorbitant prices. Immense symbolism was packed into each slimy sausage. “The festivals destroyed the underground: everyone trying to make a buck out of it,” Jeff Dexter complained. “After Woodstock the music industry said, ‘Hey, there’s a mass audience out there’—it was still wide open and everyone wanted a piece.” Richard Neville, who somehow endured the whole thing, remembered: “The nights were freezing, all the blankets sold, the food ran out and the latrines stank. For the last hot dogs, the queue was three hundred yards long. . . . Huddled around huge bonfires of rubbish . . . 200,000 fans tried not to feel anticlimactic.” “This was when my first wave of disillusionment with hippies set in,” Charles Shaar Murray confessed. “People would be standing up to get a better view, then go down because a full can of Coke caught them in the back of the head. . . . For me, that was the beginning of the end of hippie. . . . I’d been to the Woodstock movie, read all the stupid books and I thought life could be an endless free rock festival. At the Isle of Wight I realised that it couldn’t be and that it was dishonest to carry on claiming that it was feasible. I had bought the whole package, as much as I could swallow.” The final indignity came when demoralized fans found no direction home. British Rail had neglected to realize that if hordes of people went to the Isle of Wight, they might eventually want to get back.1
Given the portents of doom, it is perhaps surprising that so many people thought Altamont was going to be like Woodstock, even though Woodstock was not really like Woodstock. As the rock journalist Michael Lydon found, the festival momentum was driven by the hippies’ irrepressible ability to hope: “[Altamont] was the biggest gathering in California since the Human Be-In three years before, not only in numbers but in expectation. . . . It would, all believed, advance the trip, reveal some important lesson intrinsic to and yet beyond its physical fact. The 300,000, all in unspoken social contract, came not only to hear music, but to bear living testimony to their own lives.” Altamont came at the end of a long and highly profitable Rolling Stones tour of America. It was, in essence, their way of saying thank you. In line with that sentiment, it was supposed to be a free concert and, as such, homage to a golden idea.2
Agents representing the Stones met informally in San Francisco with some people from the Grateful Dead. The latter were experts at staging big, free outdoor events—or at least they claimed to be. Ambition, fueled by drugs, went unrestrained. The manager of the Sears Point raceway, in a generous mood, offered his grounds for free. Everything seemed to be going smoothly, but leaving organization to the Dead was like entrusting nutrition to Cap’n Crunch.
“An essential element of free concerts is simplicity,” Lydon wrote. Unfortunately, nothing about the Stones could ever be simple. “Everybody wanted a piece of the action. Hustlers of every stripe swarmed to the new scene like piranhas to the scent of blood.” After sleeping on it, that nice man at Sears Point started getting greedy. He asked for $6,000, plus another $5,000 deposit to cover possible damage. That was a hitch, but not an obstacle. In order to cover the steadily mounting costs, the Stones sold the film rights. It then turned out that the Filmways Corporation was the actual owner of Sears Point, and when their people got wind of a concert movie, they demanded distribution rights. The Stones told them to get lost, at which point the rent was raised to $100,000. This was on Thursday. The concert was scheduled for Saturday. Crowds were already gathering, and the stage was being built.3
Enter the lawyers. In San Francisco, no lawyer was bigger than Melvin Belli. A lover of things huge and sordid, he offered to help the Stones in their tussle with Filmways. The Dead were elbowed aside as Belli’s office became Concert Central. The hippies, who had originally seen the concert as a celebration of their culture, got sick at the sight of so many men in suits.
Out of the blue came Altamont, a stock-car track fifty miles east of Berkeley, whose manager, Dick Carter, could hardly contain his delight at the prospect of hosting the Stones. The stage was dismantled and moved, volunteers migrated eastward, and radio stations frantically advised listeners about the new venue. From all directions, the faithful converged. “At 7 A.M. the gates are opened. Over the hill and down into the hollow by the stage comes a whooping, running, raggle-taggle mob. . . . In minutes the meadow is a crush of bodies pressed so close that it takes ten minutes to walk fifty yards. Only the bravest blades of grass still peep up through the floor of wadded bedding. On and on comes the crowd; by 10 A.M. it spreads a quarter-mile back from the stage, fanning out like lichen clinging to a rock.” Astrologers warned that it was not a good day for a concert. Something indeed seemed amiss. The crowd, encouraged after Woodstock to expect something truly magnificent, grew impatient when paradise failed to materialize. Everyone was supposed to feel love for one another, but it was hard to muster affection with someone’s elbow poking into your ribs, when drunken hippies stepped on your toes, and when it rained rubbish. The air was thick with the stench of cheap wine, sweaty bodies, pot, shit, and vomit. Instead of paradise, Altamont seemed more like a dream of Hieronymus Bosch. Lydon saw not the usual concert crowd, but “weirdos, . . . speed freaks with hollow eyes and missing teeth, dead-faced acid heads burned out by countless flashes, old beatniks clutching gallons of red wine.” The music might have distracted attention from the squalor, but not many could hear the music. Todd Gidin left in the afternoon, long before the Stones started to play. “Altamont already felt like death. . . . Behind the stage, hordes of Aquarians were interfering with doctors trying to help people climb down from bad acid trips. On the remote hillside where I sat, stoned fans were crawling over one another to get a bit closer to the groovy music.” A friend told him that, after dropping acid, he’d had a vision that “everyone was dead.” Gidin was not usually tuned to mystical visions, but this one seemed painfully portentous.4
The presence of the Hell’s Angels didn’t help—they brought an air of menace to a gathering supposedly founded on love. The Stones had hired the Angels to provide unofficial security. The idea might have come from the Hyde Park experience, when the bikers looked menacing but generally behaved better than the crowd itself. Unfortunately, British Angels came from a more pacific branch of the family tree than their Californian cousins. They were promised free beer, but the real attraction seems to have been the opportunity to run riot on such a large stage.
That opportunity did not go wasted. While Jefferson Airplane was in the middle of a furiously exuberant version of “Three-Fifths of a Mile in Ten Seconds,” a fight broke out below the stage. Marty Balin, the lead singer, intervened, whereupon a Hell’s Angel started beating him with a pool cue. The crowd, paralyzed in confusion and terror, could not decide whether this was a bad trip or, worse, reality. The band stopped playing; the stage now filled with menacing bikers looking like sentries at the gates of Hell. The crowd called for peace and love, but the pleas were about as effective as an umbrella in a tsunami. Everyone wanted the Angels to leave the scene, but they refused to surrender territory conquered. “In the awesome presence of the Angels we gleaned something of that deep, silent terror we had of brutes when we were kids on the playground,” wrote the rock critic J. Marks. “And in the scuffles and glares of anger we began to recognize the sheer helplessness of our great pop superstars and prick-deities who could not turn back the sea with a single command so that we might safely stride uninterrupted toward the magic milieu of their music as we had at Woodstock and Monterey.”5
Worse was to follow. In the middle of the Stones’ set, carnage erupted. Four Angels jumped from behind the amps. One, Alan Passaro, leaped down and, brandishing a knife, charged into the frightened crowd. The music faltered, recovered, then stopped completely. More Angels appeared from nowhere, jostling the band members, who were not about to yield. Jagger, taking seriously his role as leader, politely asked the Angels to clear the stage. No one was quite sure what was going on below. The music started again, then stopped.
The focus of the Angels’ violence was Meredith Hunter, an eighteen-year-old from Oakland. The exact sequence of events remains a matter of dispute. Some claim that the Angels attacked first, perhaps because Hunter, a black man, had a white girlfriend. Others contend that, without provocation, Hunter pointed a gun at Jagger. No one disputes that he did brandish a gun, though whether he or the Angels were acting in self-defense remains unclear. Once that gun appeared, the result was inevitable. A witness later described an execution:
They hit him . . . I couldn’t tell whether it was a knife or not . . . but on the side of the head. And then . . . he came running towards me, and then fell down on his knees and the Hell’s Angel . . . grabbed onto both of his shoulders and started kicking him in the face about five times or so, and then he fell down on his face . . . and then one of them kicked him off the side and rolled over and he muttered some words. He said, “I wasn’t going to shoot you.”
We rubbed his back up and down to get the blood off so we could see, and there was this big hole on his spine and a big hole on the side and there was a big hole on his temple. A big open slice. You could see all the way in. You could see inside. You could see at least an inch down and stuff, you know.
The audience seemed ready to stampede. Those more than fifty feet away (which included 99 percent of the crowd) had no idea what was going on or why the music had stopped. Boos were heard as impatience grew.6
Rather bizarrely, given the circumstances, the Stones eventually resumed their set. By this stage, however, the spirit had evaporated. Most people wanted to go home. The Grateful Dead never did play. “Looking back, I don’t think it was a good idea to have Hell’s Angels there,” Keith Richards admitted. “It was a complete mess and we were partly to blame,” Jagger confessed in 1989. “You expected everyone in San Francisco—because they were so mellow, nice, and organized—that it was going to be all those things. But of course, it wasn’t.”7
According to subsequent reports, there were three births and four deaths at Altamont. The former might be a myth; the latter, sadly, is not. Two friends, Mark Feiger and Richard Savlov, were killed by an out-of-control car during the stampede from the concert. Another man, his faculties impaired by drugs, wandered into an irrigation canal and drowned. Finally, there was Meredith Hunter, beyond hope even before a doctor reached him. In May 2005 Alameda County sheriffs closed the case on Altamont, concluding that “Passaro acted [alone] to stop . . . Hunter from shooting.”8
“We knew it was all over,” wrote J. Marks. “We were dying. . . . Dying of our own massive appetite for humanity: the act of faith which had directed us not only to imbibe mysterious potions which changed our heads, but also directed us to engulf and absorb huge, fatal doses of derelict humanity.” He saw a direct line from the Haight, to the murder of Linda and Groovy, to Altamont, and ultimately to Charles Manson and his “Family.” “The huge ranks of alienated, anti-social psychopaths were being naively absorbed into the generation’s main flank, where they were then turning into mad dogs and destroying those who had welcomed them.”9
The Stones, apparently, were brilliant, as brilliant as the crowd had dared hope. So was the play at Ford’s Theatre on a certain night in 1865. Brilliance was irrelevant amid the deaths—of concertgoers and of a dream.
CHAPPAQUIDDICK: A CAREER DROWNED
Martha’s Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts, had long been the playground of the Kennedy family. Everyone in the extended clan was familiar with its little roads and bridges. All that knowledge went for naught on the night of July 17, 1969, when Ted Kennedy inexplicably lost his way. A wrong turn, excessive speed, and impaired reactions resulted in his car plunging off a small wooden bridge on the Vineyard’s companion island, Chappaquiddick, and landing upside down in eight feet of water. He escaped, but his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, did not.
The Sixties began with one Kennedy, and ended with another. Ted, the youngest of the brothers, seemed destined to take up the mantle left by Jack and Bobby and thus satisfy those who still believed that only a Kennedy could save America. Fans of the clan (and they were many) wanted Ted, senator from Massachusetts since 1962, to run for president in 1972. Those hopes, however, died with Kopechne in Poucha Pond. When considering the end of the Sixties, it is difficult to resist the metaphoric possibilities of a car upside down and underwater, an innocent young woman dead inside, and a wealthy middle-aged man swimming away.
Kopechne was one of the guests of honor at a small party at Lawrence Cottage after the Edgartown Regatta. The party was a gesture of thanks to six “Boiler Room Girls” who had worked on RFK’s 1968 presidential campaign. All the young women were single. All the men attending—Kennedy and five cronies—were married. All their wives were absent.
Kopechne left the party at 11:15 P.M. Kennedy offered to drive her back to her hotel in Edgartown. Though she had her own car and supposedly did not drink, she accepted Kennedy’s offer. The senator might have asked his driver, John Crimmins, to take them to Edgartown, but for some reason he insisted on driving himself. They left in time to catch the last ferry, due to depart at midnight. On the way, Kennedy inexplicably took a sharp right turn onto Dike Road—a dirt track—instead of bearing left onto Main Street, the more natural route. After about a half mile, he descended a hill going far too fast and overshot a small wooden bridge set at an oblique angle to the road. According to the accident report, the car “somersaulted through the air for about 10 meters . . . and landed upside down.”10
“I attempted to open the door and window of the car but have no recollection of how I got out of the car,” Kennedy later stated. “I came to the surface and then repeatedly dove down to the car in an attempt to see if the passenger was still in the car. I was unsuccessful in the attempt. I was exhausted and in a state of shock.” He then lay on the bank for a short time, catching his breath. Even though houses were nearby, he did not call for help, choosing instead to walk back to the party. Though he passed a pay phone on the way, he did not call the police.11
On reaching the party, Kennedy summoned Paul Markham and Joseph Gargan; the latter was his cousin. They decided not to call the police but instead raced back to the scene, supposedly to see if Kopechne could still be rescued. Efforts to reach the car failed. According to Gargan, who kept quiet about the incident for twenty years, Kennedy immediately started constructing a scenario which would absolve him of blame. He allegedly suggested he would claim that Mary Jo had been driving, that she had dropped him off, driven to the ferry herself, and taken a wrong turn. Gargan vigorously rejected the idea. “You told me you were driving!” he shouted. Apparently intent on going ahead with that plan, Kennedy returned to his hotel in Edgartown, without contacting police. Finding that the last ferry had already left, he chose to swim the narrow channel. He slipped into his hotel unseen, put on dry clothes and then established his presence by asking a hotel employee the time. His actions suggest that he was trying to construct an alibi, but the idea was abandoned when Markham and Gargan arrived the next morning and refused to follow the script. The three men then reported the accident to police, by which time a passing fisherman had already alerted authorities to the car in the water.12
John Farrar, the police diver who recovered the body, believed that Kopechne did not drown, but rather died of asphyxiation. He thinks she found an air pocket in the car, from which she breathed until the oxygen ran out. If so, she could have lived up to two hours after the accident, in other words, more than enough time to save her, had Kennedy summoned police immediately. George Killen, the detective who conducted the investigation, came to the conclusion that Kennedy “killed that girl the same as if he put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger.”13
A week later, Kennedy attempted to explain. By this time, the air was thick with rumor. In a formal statement, he steadfastly maintained his innocence. “There is no truth, no truth whatsoever, to the widely circulated suspicions of immoral conduct that have been leveled at my behavior and hers regarding that evening. There has never been a private relationship between us of any kind. I know of nothing in Mary Jo’s conduct on that or any other occasion . . . that would lend any substance to such ugly speculation about [her] character. Nor was I driving under the influence of liquor.” Since Kennedy could not blame his behavior on drink, he had to blame it on a lapse of judgment. “My conduct and conversations . . . make no sense to me at all.” He suggested that he might have been suffering the effects of concussion, or that he might have been in shock. Nevertheless, “I regard it as indefensible the fact that I did not report the accident to the police immediately.” He claimed that he had turned down Dike Road in error, yet he was intimately familiar with the area, having driven that route on two previous occasions that same day.14
The police handled Kennedy like the crown prince of an absolute monarchy, charging him only with leaving the scene of an accident. For that, he received a suspended two-month jail sentence and a one-year driving ban. On no occasion was he pressed to provide credible answers to the hundreds of questions arising from the case.
To this day, questions outnumber facts. Holes in the story have been obligingly filled by eager conspiracy theorists. Some have argued that Kennedy was drunk and was having an affair with Kopechne, or was about to consummate one. Others claim Kopechne was pregnant and that Kennedy murdered her. Still others have asserted that the CIA or other dark forces engineered the entire incident in order to scupper a Kennedy bid for the White House. Perhaps inevitably, there are those who suggest that Chappaquiddick is simply part of one giant conspiracy whose tentacles stretch to the assassinations of Jack and Bobby.
Chappaquiddick was swept under a rug in a way that, post-Watergate, seems quaint. But though the Kennedy family successfully contained the scandal, they could not suppress the stink it emitted. Though Ted continued to harbor dreams of the White House, Chappaquiddick was in truth the last act of the Kennedy presidential drama. The public did not need all the answers to know that something was amiss. They did not need conspiracy theorists to tell them that the events of July 18 were scandalous. No possible explanation for Kopechne’s death could be imagined which did not reveal Kennedy in a bad light. He was either cynical or foolish or stupid. Any one of those characteristics was enough to disqualify him from the presidency.
Camelot, and all the innocence it implied, was over. In time, Americans would discover that the moral deficiencies Chappaquiddick rudely exposed were not unique to Ted, but were shared by his brothers. They all seemed to possess an errant gene which caused them to misbehave in the presence of beautiful women. The people of Massachusetts remained loyal to Ted, but most Americans considered him a liability. How things had changed in the course of a decade. In 1960, Massachusetts gave the nation a president. After 1969, the voting behavior of that state would seem an anomaly.
THE MOON: MAGNIFICENT DESOLATION
The terrible year 1968 ended with the crew of Apollo 8—Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders—becoming the first human beings to orbit another celestial body. In a live broadcast from the Moon, they read from the Book of Genesis and wished the people of Earth a merry Christmas. Most Americans judged it a sublimely beautiful event even while they agonized over its enormous cost. “Thank you for saving 1968,” one woman wrote to NASA.15
The journey to the Moon seemed long at the time, but was incredibly short in retrospect. In seven years, the Americans had gone from brief, suborbital flights involving chimpanzees to a voyage around the Moon with three astronauts. The journey had been marked by tragedy, but astronaut deaths had not caused Americans to question the need to beat the Russians. Debate about the real worth of space travel was smothered by the need to make a political point.
The drama of the Moon race overshadowed entirely the genuinely important developments in space. In August 1960, the Soviets launched into orbit a large capsule containing two dogs named Strelka and Belka. The American public was plunged into despair, as had happened after every Soviet space feat since Sputnik. What few Americans realized, however, was that their country had so far achieved the genuinely important advances in space. Four months earlier, on April 1, the United States had launched Tiros 1, the world’s first weather satellite, which instantly transformed meteorological forecasting. Twelve days later came Transit 1B, the world’s first navigation satellite, which allowed ships to calculate their position with pinpoint accuracy.
These feats inspired little pride among Americans for the simple reason that the Soviets had defined the terms of the space race. Ever since the launch of Laika, the first space dog, the standard of achievement became the ability to put a living being into space, even though doing so had about as much importance as shooting a scantily clad woman from a circus cannon. The logical extension of this paradigm was the meaningless race to the Moon. Because the United States was behind in that race, it had to endure a long crisis of confidence. Meanwhile, away from the anguish, American satellite engineers laid the foundations of a communications revolution which would rival the invention of the printing press. That, however, was hardly noticed amid all the barking about Strelka and Belka.
Tiros and Transit were appetizers before the main meal. The entrée came on July 10, 1962, when a Delta rocket placed in orbit a satellite called Telstar, belonging to AT&T. A short time later, Telstar was used to relay the first satellite TV pictures—showing an American flag outside a ground station in Andover, Maine. Thirteen days later came the first live broadcasts. The plan had been to relay to Britain and France a presidential press conference, but the satellite went live before Kennedy was ready, so technicians inserted a few plays from a baseball game at Chicago’s Wrigley Field. Later that day, the satellite was used to transmit overseas a phone call and a facsimile transmission—what would later be called a fax.
“The achievement of the communications satellite, while only a prelude, throws open to us the vision of an era of international communications,” said Kennedy with less drama than the event deserved. Kennedy understood that space travel, though enormously exciting, was a rather shallow matter of Cold War prestige which in the long run would have very little effect upon ordinary people. Satellites, on the other hand, had potential beyond the wildest dreams. In the same speech in which he pledged to land a man on the Moon, he asked Congress to approve an additional $50 million for communications satellites. While that sort of money would hardly buy a space toilet for an astronaut, it would make a huge difference in satellite development.16
Aside from the simple and innocent potential of instant communication across vast distances, the satellite had huge political importance, especially in the Cold War, where battles were won with words. Satellites offered the opportunity to beam messages into areas where communication was previously blocked and to places heretofore inaccessible due to their remoteness or technological backwardness. They made it possible to tell the people in “huts and villages” around the world about the beneficence of American capitalism.
Satellites meant that the world was suddenly much smaller; and it was a place in which those who spoke English would increasingly do so with an American accent. In April 1965, Senator John Pastore of Rhode Island described the first Intelsat satellite as “the shop window through which America can and will be seen throughout the world.” Before long, people everywhere—the young in particular—would strive to look and act like Americans. Satellites provided the ability to market American products into every dark corner; modernity would be defined by the consumption of Levis, Cokes, and Big Macs. The entertainment industry, after a decade in which individuality and creativity seemed to blossom, would suddenly be smothered by the homogenizing imperative of a worldwide communications network. American culture, beamed via Intelsat, would achieve far more victories in the Cold War than the US Army ever did. A few countries would grumble (the French, for instance, would set up new ministries dedicated to the preservation of Gallic identity), but most would simply surrender to the tidal wave of American culture. “Space for the benefit of all mankind,” as Kennedy benevolently called it, would benefit America most of all.17
Satellites were, however, bit players in the space drama. American attention was focused almost exclusively on astronauts who might carry Old Glory to the Moon. While the Moon race attracted enormous attention, underneath the surface lurked profound unease. Rather like parents at Disneyland, Americans could not avoid thinking about how much the adventure was costing.
On the eve of the Apollo ii launch, two dominating issues of the 1960s, space and civil rights, collided. Leading a protest at Cape Kennedy, Ralph Abernathy complained about the “bizarre social values” which motivated America to spend $35 billion on an adventure in space, while back on Earth one-fifth of the nation lacked adequate food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. Given such deep poverty, the lunar mission seemed obscene.18
Abernathy was not a lone wolf howling in the wilderness. After the Watts riots in 1965, the McCone Commission had warned: “Of what shall it avail our nation if we can place a man on the moon but cannot cure the sickness in our cities?” Apollo was a great deal less popular than is commonly assumed. The poor, the unemployed, most blacks, and most women were unenthusiastic. On only one occasion during the 1960s did a poll show a clear majority of Americans agreeing that the space program was worth the cost. Difficult as it is to imagine, throughout the 1960s the Vietnam War was more popular than Apollo.19
Virtually every NASA publicist had mentioned “man’s need to discover” when justifying the huge budget. In 1969, the theologian Daniel Migliore questioned this justification. “Americans are accustomed to transcending the old and the oppressive by spatial movement,” he noted. Simply stated, they equated progress with movement. Migliore, like Abernathy, advocated a different conception of moral progress. “We must make up our minds. Is freedom primarily to be found in spatial migration (to outer or inner space)? Or is freedom to be sought first in shaping a new future for men here on the good earth?”20
Neil Armstrong did not agree that a choice had to be made. According to him, man’s first step on the Moon would be a giant leap for mankind. His famous eleven words uttered when he first stepped on the Moon “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” were undoubtedly enormously popular, but few stopped to contemplate their logic. Few paused to consider how walking on the lunar surface would help starving children in Biafra or blacks in Alabama.
Some highly influential people agreed with Armstrong. In an article in TV Guide prior to the launch, Walter Cronkite remarked: “When Apollo n reaches the moon, when we reach that unreachable star, we will have shown that the possibility of world peace exists . . . if we put our skill, intelligence, and money to it.” Wernher von Braun, the ex-Nazi engineer who sold space to the Americans, called the lunar landing “equal in importance to that moment in evolution when aquatic life came crawling up on the land.” Nixon, eager to get in on the act, called it “the greatest week in history since the beginning of the world, the creation. Nothing has changed the world more than this mission.”21
“It is the spirit of Apollo that America can now help to bring to our relations with other nations,” Nixon remarked with a quiver in his voice. “The spirit of Apollo transcends geographical barriers and political differences. It can bring the people of the world together in peace.” How precisely that would happen was not explained. At the very moment that Armstrong stepped on the lunar surface, Americans and Vietnamese were killing each other with ruthless efficiency. They continued doing so after Armstrong left the lunar surface. Nixon apparently forgot that Cold War mistrust was the single most important motivation for the journey to the Moon.22
The best of American technology and billions of American dollars had been devoted to a project whose real benefit was illusory. One year after his return to earth, even Armstrong had lost hope in the giant leap. Asked whether he still believed that the conquest of space would render war obsolete, he replied: “I certainly had hoped that point of view would be correct . . . [but] I haven’t seen a great deal of interest, or evidence of that being the truth, in the past year.”23
The Moon was not a beginning but an end. NASA suggested as much when, shortly after the landing, they flashed on the big screen at Mission Control Kennedy’s famous words: “Before this decade is out . . .” Below was a simple message: “TASK ACCOMPLISHED, July 1969.” The message was deeply symbolic of NASA’s greatest difficulty—namely, the desire to graft grandiose dreams of limitless space exploration onto the much more finite ambition of the American people to kick lunar dust in Soviet faces.24
Nixon, despite the rhetoric, was eager to wrap up the space adventure, in order to reduce the federal budget. “We must . . . realize that space expenditures must take their proper place within a rigorous system of national priorities,” he told the American people. His budget office had produced a devastating critique of manned space travel. “No defined manned project can compete on a cost-return basis with unmanned space flight systems,” the report argued. “Missions that are designed around man’s unique capabilities appear to have little demonstrable economic or social return to atone for their high cost. Their principal contribution is that each manned flight paves the way for more manned flight.” The memo, written just one month after the Moon landing, constituted an astonishing outbreak of realism after a decade of somnolent lunar fantasy.25
Congress agreed with Nixon. Even before the Apollo ii launch, legislators had been circling like a pack of wolves. Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield announced that he would oppose any further space adventures “until problems here on earth are solved.” Congressman Ed Koch, the future mayor of New York, confessed: “I just can’t for the life of me see voting for monies to find out whether or not there is some microbe on Mars, when in fact I know there are rats in . . . Harlem apartments.”26
The American people agreed. Shortly after the Moon landing, Gallup found that 53 percent of those polled were opposed to a Mars program; only 39 percent were in favor. A Newsweek poll showed 56 percent wanted Nixon to spend less on space, while only i0 percent thought he should spend more. A live broadcast from Apollo i3 was canceled by CBS due to lack of viewer interest. In its place came the Doris Day Show. During the Apollo 17 mission, instead of showing what would be the last steps of man on the Moon, NBC aired a repeat of the Tonight Show.27
Cronkite, who watched the space race at close quarters, from Sputnik to the last lunar journey, felt that the adventure was worth every penny. “The . . . space program . . . in that terrible decade of the 6o’s, played an important part in maintaining a semblance of morale in a country that was very, very depressed in everything else that was happening.” He was a staunch supporter of new space goals, no matter what the cost. “How much is it worth,” he asked in 1974, “to prove in an era of cynicism and gloom that man can do anything he wants to do as long as he has the will to do it and the money to spend.” In the Sixties, that sort of remark sounded uplifting. In the lean 1970s, it sounded insensitive and arrogant.28
Those, like Cronkite, who fondly remember Apollo struggle to provide justification beyond the fact that it made Americans feel good. What was the cost of this happy pill? The combined effect of the Vietnam War and the Moon mission nearly sent the American economy into crisis. At various times during his presidency, Johnson was urged to make drastic cuts in NASA’s budget. But he refused, because he could not betray John Kennedy’s pledge to land on the Moon by the end of the decade. At one point, Americans were urged to forgo foreign holidays due to an escalating balance-of-payments crisis. Americans could go to the Moon, but they should not go to Mexico.
Sputnik had inspired a complete overhaul of American education. Billions were injected into the teaching of science. Yet when Armstrong walked on the Moon, hundreds of scientists with Ph.D.s were driving taxis or collecting unemployment checks. By the end of the decade the United States had thousands of underutilized space engineers, but was short of plumbers and electricians. The lunar module was a beautiful thing to behold, but the Pinto, the pride of Ford Motor Company, had a tendency to explode. While Armstrong rode in a craft made by Americans, an increasing number of Americans rode in cars made by the Japanese.
Armstrong’s first words from the Moon will be remembered forever. Buzz Aldrin’s were instantly forgotten. He looked around the lunar surface and muttered, “Magnificent desolation!”—unwittingly providing the perfect two-word synopsis of the lunar race. The achievement was magnificent, combining the best of American imagination, courage, and technological prowess. Its meaning, however, was desolate—as dry and worthless as lunar dust.
The Moon was a Cold War battlefield, just like Korea and Vietnam. It was the finishing line in a race for supremacy—not because it was important, but because it was there. It didn’t make sense financially, as the voyages of Columbus and Magellan had; but during the Cold War, money didn’t matter. Scoring points against the Russians was priceless. Just after Sputnik, Eisenhower had tried to keep the American people focused on what was really important. He had tried to persuade them that they did not need meaningless space stunts to demonstrate their worth. But he had failed. In 1964, he returned to the theme, reminding Americans of the money they were wasting. One day, Eisenhower feared, historians would judge that “here was where the US, like Rome, went wrong—here at the peak of its power and prosperity . . . it forgot those ideals which made it great.”29
GREENWICH VILLAGE: YOU DON’T NEED A WEATHERMAN
Travel up Fifth Avenue in New York, turn onto 11th Street, and you come to a legendary block. Number 48 is the house where Oscar Wilde rested for several months in 1882 after conquering America, armed only with his genius. A short distance away is the home of actress Cynthia Harris, whose windowboxes are celebrated in the New York Times Magazine. The street has, at various times, been home to Dustin Hoffman, Mel Brooks, Anne Bancroft, and Angela Lansbury. Gerald and Sara Murphy, the real-life inspirations for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Nicole and Dick Diver, once lived at Number 50. The poet James Merrill was born at Number 18, a house bought by his father, Charles, one of the founders of Merrill Lynch. That’s also the house that blew up in 1970.30
The explosion occurred on March 6, when Terry Robbins, busily constructing a nail bomb, wrongly connected a wire. At that time, the house belonged to James Wilkerson, a wealthy ad executive who had no idea that his daughter Cathy had turned it into a bomb factory. Bits of Robbins and his friend Diana Oughton were found by neighbors in unlikely places over the following weeks. Ted Gold, another friend, had just returned from an errand when the house collapsed around him. He was crushed by a heavy beam.
Cathy Wilkerson and Kathy Boudin were also present, but miraculously survived. Near-naked and dazed, they were taken to Dustin Hoffman’s house next door. A neighbor provided clothes. In the confusion that followed, they simply melted away, and didn’t surface again for more than ten years.
Robbins, Wilkerson, Gold, Boudin, and Oughton were members of Weatherman, the terrorist group at war with “Amerika.” At the very moment when Weatherman became famous because of the bombing, the group also began its ignominious decline. That decline was not, however, apparent to diehard members, who existed in a state of deep delusion even when not tripping on LSD. According to the Weather forecast, Oughton, Gold, and Robbins—martyrs of the revolution—would inspire American youths to topple the Establishment.
How does it feel
To be inside
An explosion?
Was there time
To flash upon
The way we came?
Came from childhood
of horror and hope
To black awakening
petition and protest
Massed in resistance
to their whip and wars
Came youth on fire
fighting for freedom
Naming the enemy
embracing our friends
Learning war through war
in the world revolution.31
Weatherman emerged from the frustration that infected radical politics in 1968. Peaceful protest had not ended the war or liberated blacks or toppled the Establishment. A group of firebrands within SDS argued that violence would shake America and “show young people that we can make a difference . . . and also that life within the radical movement can be liberated, fulfilling, and meaningful.” Violence, by provoking repression, would reveal the true evil of the state. “We felt that doing nothing in a period of repressive violence was itself a form of violence,” Naomi Jaffe later explained.32
Rejecting Marxist class theory, these militants focused instead upon race, lumping American blacks and Third World peasants together as victims of American imperialism. Bernardine Dohrn, a young radical lawyer who had provided legal counsel to Mark Rudd’s Columbia cabal, explained: “The best thing that we can be doing for ourselves, as well as for the Panthers and the revolutionary black liberation struggle, is to build a fucking white revolutionary movement.”33
Whites, because of their skin color, were automatically evil unless they switched sides. “Virtually all of the white working class,” it was argued, “has short-range privileges from imperialism . . . which give them . . . [a] vested interest and tie them . . . to the imperialists.” Differences of opinion about how to politicize the white masses led to fatal splits in SDS in 1969. The showdown came at the SDS national convention in Chicago on June 18. On that day, an article in New Left Notes entitled “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows” outlined a new direction. The title was taken from Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” a tribute that did not please him. The statement was coauthored by Dohrn, Rudd, Billy Ayers, John Jacobs (JJ), Terry Robbins, and Jeff Jones, a group already calling themselves Weatherman.34
Their position clashed fundamentally with the Maoism of Progressive Labor (PL), the dominant faction within SDS. PL opposed all forms of nationalism, including the black nationalism espoused by SNCC. Weatherman, on the other hand, saw nationalist self-determination as the best way to combat American imperialism at home and abroad. They saw blacks in America as a colony and insisted that the black liberation struggle could, by itself, trigger world revolution.35
While delegates were debating the Weatherman statement, a group of Panthers burst into the hall, shouting slogans. They focused their attack on PL, branding them “white supremacists” whose “egocentric policies and revisionist behavior” were “counterrevolutionary.” Those in the SDS mainstream were confronted by an uncomfortable dilemma. While most regretted the disruption, no self-respecting student radical could afford to alienate those at the vanguard of the black liberation struggle.36
With the convention descending into chaos, Dohrn sensed an opportunity. Over the next two days she carefully engineered a coup. On June 21, she called upon the convention to expel PL. “We are not a caucus!” she shouted. “We are SDS!” Without waiting for a vote, she marched her troops out of the hall, fists raised defiantly. The action implied that only those who knew the weather could still consider themselves part of SDS.37
Weatherman claimed to be democratic, but preferred mob rule. In 1969, SDS had around 100,000 members. The number who supported Weatherman never exceeded 1,000; active members could hardly fill a bus. Among the rank and file, profound disappointment was felt at the way SDS had been hijacked by an authoritarian gang. “You don’t need a rectal thermometer to know who the assholes are,” one delegate remarked. The bulk of self-respecting radicals, appalled at the showmanship, immaturity, and violence of Weatherman, took their political commitment elsewhere.38
Weatherman worshiped the NLF revolution in Vietnam, but had neither the patience nor the sensitivity to copy that model. Instead of education and indoctrination of the masses, they had in mind an instantaneous miraculous conversion based on the realization that “imperialism sucks.” Those who did not immediately convert were automatically labeled reactionary. “Either we push on to become soldiers in the world revolutionary war,” a manifesto argued, “or we completely slide back to our respective bourgeois holes and become anti-Communist pigs.” The left-wing journalist I. F. Stone saw this as “a typically American idea that revolution could be ‘instant’ like coffee or iced tea.”39
After their coup, the members of Weatherman went searching for a revolutionary mass. Adroit logical contortions allowed them to identify young whites like themselves as the most promising raw material. As they saw it, they were oppressed by the expectations capitalism imposed upon them, not to mention the shame of their “white-skin privilege.” Youthful alienation would stoke the fires of revolution. In practice, this meant building a revolution from the raw material of the counterculture—in other words, Woodstock Nation. This, however, rested on the assumption that hippies had a political consciousness not already deadened by drugs. In fact, those clear-headed enough to understand their world sensed that Weatherman was just one more group of exploiters. As Tibor Kalman, an underground writer, complained: “Weatherman attempt[ed] to suck off the youth culture in a way that’s not qualitatively different from . . . Woodstock moneyfuckers.”40
Weatherman unashamedly appealed to white youths through the visceral thrill of violence. Instead of “All you need is love,” happiness would thereafter come from a warm gun. Rudd and Robbins wanted “a movement that fights, not just talks about fighting.” Violence would, they predicted, “attract vast numbers of working-class youths.” That was undoubtedly true, but Weatherman ignored the way violence provides its own attraction, regardless of the dialectic in which it is expressed. Before long, bikers and inner-city toughs were joining demonstrations, completely oblivious to the cause they were ostensibly supporting.41
Unlike the Panthers, who saw themselves as a self-defense force, Weatherman took on the role of revolutionary shock troops—the advance guard of a future rebel army. The aim was to create “strategic armed chaos”—a nice name for mayhem. According to the accepted theory, demonstrated in Cuba and Vietnam, violence was supposed to go hand in hand with political indoctrination. With Weatherman, however, violence was like a medicine man’s potion: a cure for every ill. “Armed struggle starts when someone starts it,” one hopelessly simplistic Weatherman paper proclaimed. “International revolutionary war is reality, and to debate about the ‘correct time and conditions’ to begin the fight or about a phase of work necessary to prepare people for the revolution is reactionary.”42
Violent actions became a rite of passage—or what the faithful called a “gut-check.” Violence did not need specific purpose; mindless brutality was useful in creating chaos, building confidence, and sowing fear. “Kill all the rich people,” Billy Ayers told the faithful. “Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents—that’s where it’s really at.” On one occasion, Dohrn and JJ terrorized passengers on a plane for no discernible motive. “They didn’t know we were Weathermen,” she later boasted. “They just knew we were crazy. That’s what we’re about—being crazy motherfuckers and scaring the shit out of honky America.”43
Revolutionary purity meant that enemies were easy to find. In the autumn of 1969, Weatherman raided Mobe offices in Boston and terrorized staff because of their “counterrevolutionary” behavior. Weatherman’s quarrel with Mobe arose in part because suburban parents were joining the antiwar movement, rendering it disgustingly respectable. Likewise, young draftees in Vietnam were condemned for “serving their pig role as counterrevolutionary gendarmes.” They were told: “Turn your gun around, or you are the enemy.”44
Instead of spreading revolution, the Weather egoists spent hours in collective naval gazing, intent upon self-purification. They sought “inner strength,” which would come from “digging ourselves.” To become “self-reliant Communist revolutionaries” meant “smashing the pig inside ourselves, destroying our own honkiness.” Central to this process was the criticism session, an idea loosely borrowed from Che but punctuated with drugs. Because love and affection were deemed destructive of loyalty, relationships were systematically destroyed. The Smash Monogamy campaign started from the premise that monogamy was a form of “dependency . . . in which people held on to each other rather than pushed each other.” A person afflicted by love could not be trusted to take the risks expected of the street fighter. Monogamy was smashed by forcing members to have sex with partners not of their choice. “People literally hid from each other to avoid having sex with comrades for whom they had no sexual desire,” one former member complained. “Could anything be more absurd?”45
The first major battle with “pig Amerika” took place in Chicago. Keen to settle old scores, Weatherman mobilized members for the Days of Rage, to begin on October 8, 1969. “Chicago is the site. It is here that thousands of young people faced the blind terror of the military state; where dreams of grandeur and new life turned into the slaughter of innocence. . . . We are coming back to turn pig city into the people’s city.” The faithful were urged to “Bring the War Home.” “We’re not just saying bring the troops home,” Ayers explained. “We’re saying bring the war home. We’re . . . going to create class war in the streets and institutions of this country.” Drunk on their own enthusiasm, organizers predicted that 10,000 discontented young people would attack the edifice of imperialism.46
The tiny crowd that assembled in Lincoln Park was testimony to the purity of the movement. Estimates differ, but it would be generous to say that four hundred were present, which meant that police outnumbered protesters by about five to one. Despite the low turnout, the leadership refused to call off the action. Instead, its purpose was cleverly changed to reflect its smaller size. Mass confrontation became instead “exemplary action.”47
Into the breach charged the four hundred. “This is it baby, tear the fucker down!” they shouted. “Smash the state!” Wearing padded clothing, goggles, and motorcycle helmets, and armed with makeshift weapons, they made for the Gold Coast, Chicago’s wealthy district. The police, though fully prepared, were nevertheless astonished by the suicidal fanaticism of the mob. By the end of the first night, seventy-five had been arrested, untold numbers were injured, and three rioters had been hospitalized with gunshot wounds.48
“Within a minute or two, right in front of my eyes, I saw and felt the transformation of the mob into a battalion of . . . revolutionary fighters,” Shin’ya Ono wrote. “All of us lost whatever fear and doubts we had before. . . . Each one of us felt the soldier in us.” Violence inspired rebirth. The ritual was repeated over subsequent days, conclusively proving the law of diminishing returns. By the time quiet was restored, nearly three hundred arrests had been made and property damage exceeded $1 million. That alone was reason for Weather pride, but what really pleased the group was that fifty-seven police officers had to be hospitalized. “Offing a pig is more than just hate,” one female member remarked. “It’s love. Love for the revolution, love for the oppressed people.”49
As passions cooled, unease grew. Some foot soldiers complained that they had been used as cannon fodder for the maniacal fantasies of the leadership. The Panther Fred Hampton called the action “anarchistic, opportunistic, adventuristic, and Custeristic.” The leadership ignored these complaints, preferring instead to wallow in righteous martyrdom. The Days of Rage constituted their Tet Offensive—a military defeat but a psychological victory. “Chicago was an unqualified success,” wrote Ono. “We . . . establish[ed] our presence as a fighting force in a dramatic way. . . . As a result, millions of kids are grappling for the first time with the existence of a pro-black, pro-VC, white fighting force that understands that this social order can be, and is going to be, brought down.”50
The Days of Rage widened the gap between the New Left and Weatherman. Even Tom Hayden struggled to understand: “there was something deeply wrong with what happened in Chicago. . . . Trashing Volkswagens was not ‘materially aiding the Vietnamese,’ it was just plain random violence. . . . To ourselves, revolution was like birth: blood is inevitable, but the purpose of the act is to generate life, not to glorify blood. Yet to the Weathermen bloodshed as such was ‘great.’ They were striking terror into Pig Amerika, Volkswagens and all, and their tiny numbers would be unimportant, they claimed, in the vast myth they were creating.” Those who dreamed of a popular front to end the war deeply regretted the antics displayed in Chicago. “Nothing could have served the interests of the ruling class more,” Michael Lerner complained. He and others openly wondered if perhaps Weatherman had been taken over by FBI agents provocateurs “intent on discrediting the whole left.”51
The next manifestation of Weather madness occurred at a war council held in Flint, Michigan, in early December 1969. The hall was decked with huge banners depicting revolutionary heroes—Che, Ho, Castro, Malcolm X, and Eldridge Cleaver. A cardboard cutout of a machine gun hung from the ceiling—a harbinger of violent weather. In an atmosphere reminiscent of a revival meeting, members whipped themselves into a murderous frenzy. Among the items for debate was the question of whether it was acceptable to murder white babies in furtherance of the revolution. “All white babies are pigs,” some members argued. “We’re against everything that’s ‘good and decent’ in honky America,” JJ told the crowd. “We will loot and burn and destroy. We are the incubation of your mothers’ nightmares.”52
Flint brought Bernardine Dohrn to the pinnacle of her power. She was the human embodiment of a Molotov cocktail—a volatile combination of anger, egotism, malice, and raw sexual power. Jumping onstage wearing an obscenely short jumpsuit and thigh-high boots, she used her voice like an acetylene torch, ranting against materialism, racism, love, and beauty. “She was prancing up there like Mick Jagger,” one observer recalled. “Boys and girls both were panting.” Included in her performance was an extended eulogy to Charles Manson, admired for the simple reason that he killed whites and spread fear. “Dig it! Manson killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach.” Before long, the Weather faithful had developed a new salute, which consisted of imitating a fork with four fingers slightly separated and the thumb tucked in.53
“[Dohrn] possessed a splendor all her own,” Susan Stern thought, “like a queen . . . a high priestess, a mythological silhouette.” Within the organization, status was determined by access to her bed. To have sex with her was to be anointed. “She used sex to explore and cement political alliances,” Jim Mellen felt. “Sex was for her a form of ideological activity.” It was also a tool of humiliation, as Steve Tappis recalled: “Bernardine [was] . . . arguing political points at the table with blouse open to the navel, sort of leering at JJ. It wasn’t a moral thing, just sort of disconcerting. I couldn’t concentrate on the arguments. Finally, I said: ‘Bernardine! Would you please button your blouse!’ She just pulled out one of her breasts and, in that cold way of hers, said, ‘You like this tit? Take it.’ Since relationships were useful to her, Dohrn unilaterally ignored strictures against them. Rudd, disgruntled at his inability to play the power game according to Dohrn’s impossible rules, once complained: “Power doesn’t flow out of the barrel of a gun. Power flows out of Bernardine’s cunt.”54
Flint revealed that the elite were intent upon taking Weatherman underground—isolating it in its own dreamworld. The decision was perhaps inevitable for a group drunk on drama. It was also a self-fulfilling prophecy: those who could not abide the masses decided instead to hide from them. Toward this end, the last public office of SDS was closed in February 1970, thus completing Weatherman’s destruction of the organization. In the interests of secrecy, the group purged two-thirds of its members. The remainder broke into tiny cells and kept communication to a minimum. Going underground was like a neverending game of hide-and-seek. Instead of directing their energies to furthering the revolution, members could now devote their imaginations to the challenge of staying hidden.
Due to the decentralized nature of the organization, most members were surprised to hear of the Greenwich Village explosion that killed Gold, Robbins, and Oughton. That cell, which called itself the Fork in homage to Dohrn’s homage to Manson, had earlier firebombed the house of Justice John Murtagh, the presiding judge in a trial of Black Panthers. The nail bomb Robbins was making was intended for a noncommissioned officers’ dance at Fort Dix. The attack was, according to Dohrn, supposed to be the start of a “large-scale, almost random bombing offensive.” In the rubble, police found fifty-seven unexploded sticks of dynamite, thirty blasting caps, and a number of timing devices.55
The Greenwich Village explosion demonstrated that the theory of dying was altogether different from the reality. Ayers calls it a turning point. “It was a terrible tragedy . . . but also a . . . moment to stop and think and pull back from what might have been a . . . really disastrous course.” His sister-in-law Melody agrees: “It had always been a question of who would die first. We didn’t say it aloud, but we all understood it quite well. If we hadn’t killed ourselves, we would have killed others. Deep down, we knew that the townhouse saved us.”56
On May 21, 1970, Dohrn signaled a new direction in a formal declaration of war:
This is the first communication from the Weatherman underground.
All over the world, people fighting Amerikan imperialism look to Amerika’s youth to use our strategic position behind enemy lines to join forces in the destruction of the empire.
. . . Revolution is touching all of our lives. Tens of thousands have learned that protest and marches don’t do it. Revolutionary violence is the only way. . . .
If you want to find us, this is where we are. In every tribe, commune, dormitory, farmhouse, barracks, and townhouse where kids are making love, smoking dope, and loading guns. . . . Within the next fourteen days we attack a symbol or institution of Amerikan injustice.
The choice of words in the last sentence was significant. Despite all the revolutionary bluster, Dohrn had signaled that the Weather Underground would henceforth attack symbols, not people. Bombs would be left in government buildings—courthouses, prisons, and police stations—timed to go off when no one was present.57
Over the next seven years, the Weather Underground became experts at blowing up toilets. Perhaps a dozen bombs were exploded in government buildings. No one was killed, though considerable destruction was caused. A huge outcry followed each bomb, but in truth the American Establishment was unaffected by the flea on its tail. The radical journalist Andrew Kopkind, who had once been impressed with Weatherman, quickly grew disenchanted. “It’s not a revolution,” he argued. “A bomb in Standard Oil’s headquarters in Manhattan does as much material damage to Standard Oil as a tick does to a tiger. Universities have not ground to a halt. Draft boards have not shut down, the war in Indochina hardly has not ended. The resources of the corporations and the government that make public decisions and social policy are complete.”58
In a decade of madness, the Weather Underground topped the lunacy charts. “It sounded like the Children’s Crusade come back to life,” wrote Stone, “a St. Vitus’ dance of hysterical politics.” The members’ ability to influence others was seriously impeded by their obsession with purifying themselves. How does one explain a group so detached from reality and yet so certain of its righteousness? Kirkpatrick Sale, the chronicler of SDS, offered perhaps the best explanation:
They tend to feel guilty about the comfortable, privileged, often very rich homes from which they come, especially when they try to take their message into the mangled, oppressed and very desperate homes of the poor. They feel guilty about what they regard as their own inescapable middle-class racism and that of the society that has showered its benefits on their parents. They feel guilty that they are, at least at the start, frightened of violence, and envy those, like the blacks and the working-class youths, who have confronted violence from infancy. They feel guilty that their brains, money, or pull has kept them safe on university campuses while others are sent to Vietnam. And they feel guilty that the society which has given them and their families so much, and which they have spent the better part of their adolescence trying to change, is obdurate in its basic inequities.
The fires of guilt were kept stoked by the war in Vietnam, which seemed to embody every pig evil. But then, in 1973, the last American troops came home. For the Weather Underground, the effect was like cutting off the supply of oxygen. With the war over, it was difficult to find reason to be angry. Rudd began to wonder at the point of it all. “What are we accomplishing?” he repeatedly asked his friends, who could not provide a credible answer. No longer a revolutionary organization, the group had become a ragtag collection of fugitive celebrities.59
One by one, they surrendered. The Weather Underground underwent an agonizingly slow death, punctuated occasionally by an explosion that made perfect sense to the bombers but seemed meaningless and quaint to everyone else. The Underground’s eventual demise was both predictable and appropriate: the group eventually purified itself to death.
OLD BAILEY: ANOTHER OBSCENITY TRIAL
In Britain, the Sixties began with one obscenity trial and ended with another. In 1960, the jury at the Old Bailey had to decide whether Lady Chatterley’s Lover was obscene. In 1971, the question was not so much whether Oz magazine was obscene, but whether it mattered.
Richard Neville started Oz in Australia in 1963, along with Richard Walsh and Martin Sharp. Exhausted by the persistent attention of censorious Australian authorities, he escaped to Britain in 1967. At first, he had no intention of starting a new magazine, but eventually he found himself pulled by an irresistible tide of nonconformity.
What distinguished Oz from the dozens of other underground magazines was its dazzling visual display, best enjoyed while tripping. Oz was not exclusively about sex, though sex played a huge part. It was instead a manual for life, offering advice about how to live unconventionally. It was, according to Neville, “the sounding board for people with new things to say and nowhere else to say them.” Like the shark that has to keep swimming to stay alive, it had to shock repeatedly—a task that became ever more challenging. As Neville later reflected, much of what was in the magazine was simply ritualized conflict in the generational war: “What did Oz celebrate? . . . we knew what we were against, but what were we for? Being reared in the thrall of the stale, . . . [we] liked to think of ourselves as lovers of the new, but we defined the new only by tearing into the old.”60
In the Sixties, obscenity was an expression of freedom. At issue was not the image but its intent; underground editors considered it perfectly acceptable to publish an utterly vile photo of a naked woman, as long as the purpose was to attack the Establishment rather than to arouse. The novelist Sara Maitland later reasoned: “Germaine Greer did not go around without her knickers on for hedonistic delight alone, nor did the Oz editorial people publish pictures of Rupert Bear with his cock out for pornographic motives. Libertarianism was of course fun . . . but part of the fun was the conviction that it was brave, important and socially useful, liberating at a global level.” In the freedom war, Oz was well armed. The magazine was full of naked women (and very few naked men) in lewd poses. “People regarded us as pornographic but we were very serious about what we were doing and didn’t regard ourselves as pornographic,” Jim Anderson, one of the editors, remarked. “We were into sexual freedom . . . and if we wanted to publish a picture with sexual content, it would also have a point to make.” Unfortunately, those who did not believe in the cause were immune to the message. Instead of political statements, they saw naked women.61
Despite the occasional police harassment, Neville and his colleagues managed to stay out of the courts until Issue 28 of May 1970, the “Schoolkids’ Issue.” According to Felix Dennis, the venture arose from the need to be revolutionary. “It was totally innocent.” “Some of us are feeling old and boring,” an ad in Oz 26 announced. “We invite our readers who are under eighteen to come and edit the April issue.” The schoolkids who responded were allowed to speak out on issues that concerned them, like pop music, drugs, sexual freedom, parental hypocrisy, schoolteachers, and exams. In truth, this meant an opportunity to put into print every puerile fantasy. The cover consisted of a montage of a nude woman, armed with a whip and dildo. While the same woman figures throughout, the repetition of images makes it look like a lesbian orgy. The image which caused the most controversy, however, was a comic strip by fifteen-year-old Vivian Berger. He took the head of Rupert Bear and inserted it in a strip drawn by Robert Crumb, an underground artist renowned for sexually explicit subjects. In this case, Rupert, with a disproportionately large erection, was shown raping an unconscious Honey Bunch K, a character in Crumb’s Big Ass Comics.62
In July, police raided the magazine’s offices. Three separate charges were brought. The first was that of obscenity, as outlined in the 1959 Obscene Publications Act, the same act tested in the Chatterley case. The second was a catch-all charge of sending indecent material through the post. Had this been the extent, the trial would have been relatively simple. Oz would probably have been found guilty and the editors slapped with a small fine. But Neville, Dennis, and Anderson were also charged with “conspir[ing] with certain other young persons to produce a magazine” which would “corrupt the morals of children and other young persons” and furthermore was intended to “arouse and implant in the minds of those young people lustful and perverted desires.”63
In the Chatterley trial the jury was asked to judge the merits of a work of literature. Since no one accused Oz of being literature, the issue in 1971 was more complex. The prosecution saw it as a simple matter of obscenity. The defendants, on the other hand, saw a civil rights case. Neville told the jury: “Because this ‘underground’ or ‘alternative’ press is a worldwide phenomenon and because it represents a voice of progress and change in our society, then it is not really only us who are on trial today . . . but all of you . . . and the right of all of you to freely discuss the issues which concern you.”64
Just as the 1960 trial had focused on Constance Chatterley, the Oz court became fixated with Rupert Bear. For the British, the cartoon constituted a desecration of a national icon—equivalent to watching Snow White perform fellatio on Superman. Vivian Berger, who proved a formidable witness, insisted that his cartoon was not obscene, but was instead simply portraying obscenity—a distinction the jury did not understand. Explaining his motives to the defense counsel, John Mortimer, he confessed: “I subconsciously wanted to shock your generation, to portray us as a group of people who were different from you in moralistic attitudes.” Shock, he suggested, had been achieved through irony. Rupert, the innocent, naive, asexual bear, had been portrayed “doing what every normal human being does.” Berger also insisted that the images were no different from those circulated by schoolboys at break time every day—a justification that shocked the presiding judge, Michael Argyll.65
The trial hinged on the issue of importance. The Oz editors insisted that not just the magazine but also its mission was important—that it served a useful social purpose. “So far from debauching and corrupting the morals of children and young persons,” Neville told the jury, “Oz is part of a communications network which intends the very opposite. It sets out to enlighten and to elevate public morals.” In his closing statement, he argued: “We felt it was of social value to find out what adolescents were complaining about, in the hope that when their complaints were published, someone might do something about them. . . . Even if some of the criticisms expressed in Oz 28 are crude and silly, we believe it was of sociological and educational value that they should have been openly expressed.” Trying to make a magazine which was, for the most part, anarchic fun into something ethically important took its toll. “I felt . . . trapped by my own vocalisation of the polarisation,” Neville later wrote. “Polarised by the judge, exaggerating one’s position, justifying every act as being of the most altruistic motives, when a lot of what happens in life is kind of accidental, random, selfish, a mixture of good and evil.” In his own personal way, Neville was forced to make sense of the Sixties before a jury at the Old Bailey. It was not an easy task. “Being placed in the dock and forced to justify everything you ever did on high moral grounds made me feel a little uneasy by the time it was over.”66
By highlighting importance, Neville walked into a trap. If the jury agreed that the magazine was important but also judged it obscene, he and his codefendants were in deep trouble. Taking up the issue, the prosecuting counsel, Brian Leary, offered a more elevated standard of judgment than that of mere obscenity. Oz, he argued, was not simply corrupting individual morals; it was corrupting society. He asked:
What good ever came out of Oz 28? What lesson is there for us to learn? Members of the jury, there is none, is there? Save that sex is a God to be worshipped for its own sake, culminating in fucking in the streets, even with minors. That doing one’s own thing is an ideal to be looked up to—by young and old alike—no matter how selfish that ideal might be. That a police officer can be called a pig, that cannabis is harmless and that law against it is silly.
. . . We’ve been through the magazine from cover to cover a hundred times, and . . . within its pages there is not one word of tenderness. That’s because Oz does not deal with love. It deals with sex—sex with a capital S.”
At the time, Neville vehemently disagreed, as he was obliged to do. He argued that “Oz was trying to redefine love, to broaden it, extend it and revitalize it, so it could be a force of release and not one of entrapment.” In retrospect, however, he decided that Leary was probably right: “[He] had made several telling points. One that struck home was the absence of tenderness in Oz 28. It was true. And strangely so, given that we once claimed that love was all you need.”67
The case lasted six weeks—the longest obscenity trial in British history. Since the jury could not, in the end, distinguish between obscenity and freedom, the Oz editors were found guilty. The conspiracy charge was rejected, but majority verdicts were reached on the charges of obscenity and of sending indecent material by post. Britain’s liberal establishment was outraged. Writing in the Times, Bernard Levin called it a national disgrace. “It served notice on the young that we will listen to them, but not hear; look at them, but not see; let them ask, but not answer.” Eloquent as that assessment seems, it is unfair. While the trial started out as a callous assertion of authority by the old against the new, after six weeks it became something more. In retrospect, it seems more like a genuine attempt to come to terms with a decade of baffling change. After years of wandering in a surreal landscape of shifting standards, the British were desperately trying to put down stakes, consult their compass, and figure out their location. Part of that attempt was trying to define standards of decency, a much more complicated issue than obscenity. This was perhaps a futile quest, but an understandable one.68
That said, the sentences were undoubtedly vindictive. Argyll focused his hatred of nonconformity on three rather insignificant individuals for the simple reason that they happened to be in his courtroom. During the seven days he took to pass sentence, the defendants were refused bail and ordered to undergo “medical, social and psychiatric reports”—measures clearly designed to humiliate. On arrival at the prison, they had their long hair shorn, perhaps in the misguided belief that, like Samson, their strength would drain away. Virtually all of Britain assumed that Argyll would impose stiff fines, but no jail sentences. Instead, on August 5, 1971, he sentenced Neville to fifteen months, followed by deportation to Australia. Anderson got one year. Turning to Dennis, Argyll said: “Since you are the least intelligent of the three, I shall only sentence you to nine months.” The Daily Mirror, no friend of the counterculture, was horrified. “OZ: OBSCENE! BUT WHY THE FEROCIOUS SENTENCES?” the headline shouted. Those who had not felt inclined to support Neville, Anderson, and Dennis on the obscenity issue now rallied to their side.69
The obscenity charge was quashed on appeal, but the charge of sending indecent material through the post was upheld. Small fines were levied. According to Geoffrey Robertson, the defense barrister, the obscenity convictions were reversed only after the lord chief justice, Lord Widgery, sent his clerk to Soho with £20 to buy the coarsest porn on the market. Widgery had no trouble deciding that Oz was tame in comparison.
Was Oz obscene? Clearly, Oz was a lot less depraved than scores of magazines and films freely available. But the jury had been asked to make an absolute decision, not a relative one. Because Oz did not claim to be pornography, it was judged according to higher standards of decency than would be applied to those magazines that clearly were. As Charles Shaar Murray wrote in retrospect: “This was a cultural war disguised as an obscenity trial: ordinary porn, which knows its place and reinforces rather than challenges the social order, rarely receives this kind of attention from the authorities. On the other hand, overtly radical work concerned with ideas becomes instantly vulnerable . . . to mass outbreaks of orchestrated indignation.” In their defense, Neville, Anderson, and Dennis had repeatedly insisted that their magazine had a higher purpose than mere porn. In that argument, they were perhaps too convincing.70
Oz benefited enormously from the publicity gained at the trial, but as a result became what Neville never wanted. The pretense of social reform was dropped and the magazine became just another vehicle for advertisement. Increased profits fundamentally altered the obscenity issue. Stated simply, if two magazines both contain lewd pictures, the one that makes money is more likely to seem pornographic. Marsha Rowe, one of the office drudges, tried to make that point to Dennis when a post-trial issue contained a photo of a naked female straddling the US eagle. “It has no redeeming aesthetic nor any political allegorical point,” she argued. “It is lewd, pornographic.” Dennis either did not accept the logic or, more likely, no longer cared. He understood more than anyone that a watershed had been passed. For him, Oz had always been a business, not a barricade in the revolution. From the platform it provided, he eventually built a publishing empire worth £150 million, a rather effective rejoinder to Argyll’s contempt.71
Because the Oz trial seemed to express the Old versus the New so perfectly, lines were easily drawn and nuances ignored. Strip away the libertarian rhetoric and one discovers a filthy, puerile magazine. At the time, it was difficult for liberals to ignore this apparently worthy cause: Oz became a shibboleth; something symbolic of a generational struggle that seemed crucially important. Nevertheless, some liberals felt uneasy about the cause they were expected to support. One potential defense witness explained her refusal to come to the aid of Oz “I think in many ways that my character was partly shaped by Rupert Bear! My memories were being violated. The arrogant, male, aggressive style of drawing that appeared in the name of revolution worried me. It brought into symbolic shape areas of male antagonism to women that were completely covered up in the old socialist style of the movement. It awakened our antagonism to the way men had the arrogance to portray sexuality in their terms.” A similar complaint was made by Marsha Rowe, whose experience with Oz inspired her to found the feminist magazine Spare Rib. “The underground press used sex-objectifying images which had developed from being fairly romantic to stridently sadistic,” she declared. By 1971, she found it increasingly difficult to defend a magazine that regularly demeaned women. The issue was not obscenity but degradation. “I . . . was beginning to feel contradictions exploding inside my head.”72
Oz was prosecuted at a time when it was already in terminal decline. “The ‘alternative’ society had . . . ended and this was its dying flourish,” argued Geoffrey Robertson. “The 60s were over . . . and then suddenly this failing, fading magazine was put on centre stage, charged with corrupting a generation which was no longer bothering to read it.” After a brief surge in popularity, the magazine went into liquidation in 1973. For the Oz staff the demise was symbolically appropriate. The age of rebellion, when emotion mattered more than content, was drawing to a close. Readers had grown tired of magazines whose only purpose was to pillory the Establishment. Editors and writers, likewise, had exhausted themselves working within the strict confines of that genre. Rebellion for rebellion’s sake had become boring. “Then it was goodbye, thank you very much,” Sue Miles said of the final chapter in the Oz drama. “It was the end, and I wanted it to be the end.” As for Richard Neville, he had no difficulty letting go. “I’d had enough of Oz, I was ready for it to go. I felt it had lost its innocence and daring. And all that anger generated by the trial fundamentally isn’t my style. I was losing my sense of humour and the magazine was losing its sense of humour.”73
The counterculture had changed, but so too had Neville. Rebellion by itself no longer appealed. The worship of excess had become facile or, worse, destructive. Years later, he recalled the whirl of emotions felt while writing one of his final editorials in Oz:
With . . . heresy swirling in my head, I sat down with a joint on a Saturday night and wrote a state-of-the-nation address for Oz, state of the Woodstock nation: “The flower child that Oz urged readers to plant back in ’67 has grown up into a Weatherwoman; for Timothy Leary, happiness has become a warm gun. Charles Manson soars to the top of the pops and everyone hip is making war and loving it.”
On and on it went; a litany of all my doubts. . . . How my best friends, sickened by the festering malaise of the Underground scene, were cutting their hair, changing their paisley patterns, losing themselves in the front stalls of Noel Coward revivals. While Leary might say that “World War III was being waged by short-haired robots,” those who burnt you with bad dope, bounced their cheques, jumped your sureties, wrecked your crashpad . . . were not short-haired. On I raved: how the offices of Rolling Stone (visited on the way home from Sydney) were as icily functional as IBM and how its editor, Jann Wenner, was moved more by mammon than music; how Abbie Hoffman, briefly met at a recent soiree in Paris, tended to converse through his lawyer and was animated primarily by talk of book advances . . .; how the legitimate new freedoms were being corrupted by selfishness, especially as the gonococcus germ hadn’t heard of Women’s Lib. In short, how we blithely declared World War III on our parents, while forgetting to look after our friends.
Rocking the Establishment had given way to making money. Those like Felix Dennis and Richard Branson who rode the counterculture like a bucking bronco eventually grew very rich. Those who vainly struggled to maintain hippie principles found only ignominy and poverty. As Neville reflected: “There have been times later in my life when I’ve been completely broke, standing in some dreadful bus shed in Melbourne, and said to myself, ‘I should have kept it going and become Richard Branson.’”74
Germaine Greer, who often wrote for Oz, felt particularly well-placed to pronounce upon its flaws. “Instead of developing a political analysis of the state we live in, instead of undertaking the patient and unsparing job of education which must precede even a pre-revolutionary situation, Oz behaved as though the revolution had already happened.” However apropos that criticism might be, it seems discordant coming from Greer, given her close involvement with the magazine. She has made a career of having her cake and eating it too, usually in front of admiring British television viewers. Her experience reveals rather starkly one lesson about the demise of Oz. Those who tried to use the media to further the countercultural revolution eventually found themselves used by the media. In time, the value of the counterculture was measured by its marketability. Somewhere along the road to revolution, Neville and his friends lost their way. Their ability to shock, when combined with their obvious intelligence, good looks, articulate manner, and engaging personalities, made them revolutionary celebrities. The liberal intelligentsia, headquartered at the BBC and the Guardian, was only too willing to give these obviously talented people a voice, since any program or features page that included them was bound to attract attention. To this day, Greer continues to milk that cow. But her experience, more than that of anyone else, raises a troubling question: How could the counterculture survive if it relied on the established culture to give it voice? Writing in the New Statesman, Neville’s friend Angelo Quattrochi, remarked: “Poor misguided children of Marx and Coca Cola, you started making fun of society, but now you’re making fun for it.”75