9

Strange Days: 1969–70

In the coming years, the weight of that damn war sits heavy on our young shoulders. It ratchets up each day, each week, each long month. Year after year. We carry it with us. We do not experience the savage horrors of those who fight in it. The dark tunnels we fight in are often the tunnels of our mind. The responsibility to end it rests uncomfortably. Images, facts, lies replay in our minds, in our dreams, waking, sleeping. Incessant. Urgent. Over and over. They weigh us down.

A silent monk in flames. American boys dying in tall elephant grass. A naked girl running from inferno towers of napalm, mouth open, arms extended, exposed skin, silently screaming save us, save us … a man being shot in the head … 300 still bodies sprawled in the ditch by the road at My Lai. A war measured in nightly “body counts.” Endless deceit, deceit in the Tonkin Gulf. Deceit in each day’s press conference. Lies. Death. A friend’s first cousin from Ohio, a first lieutenant dead in the Ia Drang Valley. Napalm, jellied flame, jellied death. The incessant lies. Escalation. Always escalation.

Willie Pete—white phosphorus that burns to the bone, burns even in water, burns unchecked when exposed to the very air we all breathe. Christmas bombing, mining of Hanoi and Haiphong harbors. Agent Orange. Deforestation. Pacification. Endless words. Endless fictions. Endless waves of B-52s dropping seven million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—more than twice the bombs dropped altogether on all of Europe and Asia in World War II; endless explosions; endless death. The invasion of Cambodia. Uncounted villages destroyed. Uncounted dead “Gooks” who are in reality mothers, daughters, sons, brothers, fathers, and grandfathers. Bodies deemed unimportant.

One million, two million, three million dead. How to count so many dead? Numbers that sit heavy on us. Wake us up. Torment us. Not numbers. People. People who should have lived, loved, seen the glory of another sunrise. The uncounted dead form mountains in the mind. Weigh upon us. Prey upon us.

Where there should be the exuberant joy of youth, there is a sense of death all around: in Vietnam, in Cambodia, killing fields, staggering numbers of dead that haunt our days and nights. The dead of this decade are not just in distant Asia. Medgar Evers gunned down in his driveway. Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney pulled dead from the mud of a Mississippi dam. Malcolm dead in a Harlem ballroom. Martin Luther King dead on a motel balcony in Memphis. Bobby Kennedy, dying on a California hotel kitchen floor. Fred Hampton dead as he slept, shot by Chicago police in his own bed. Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause, William Schroeder, and Sandra Lee Scheuer shot dead on the campus of Kent State. Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green shot dead at Jackson State.

The weight of the war wraps around us, wraps our every day, warps our minds. Guilt boils under the surface. Guilt at not going; guilt knowing someone else goes; guilt at not stopping them from going; guilt at not being able to stop this abomination, so wrong, so unnecessary.

We are determined to stop it all. We are desperate to stop it all. Until it stops, we cannot stop. We will not stop. We march, we educate, we protest, we sit in, we surround cars, we march again, we will try everything, we will do anything. Desperation and despair battle with hope. Some days we think we will win. Some nights we feel as if we are suffocating in failure. The weight presses down, burns us like Willie Pete; the very air we breathe burns our souls.

Those days and nights of 1969 and 1970 are strange, surreal. Amy and I walk out into the slanting, gold filtered light of an early Cambridge evening, heading to the movies. As usual, Amy walks faster, head down, three feet ahead of me. I am lost looking at her, the stacked heels she wears accentuating the shape of her legs, her A-line skirt drawing me to her slender waist, the setting sun catching reddish tints in her long hair as it falls down her back. Suddenly an unmarked police car cuts us off, its tires squeal; doors fly open, and Detective Dominick Scalese runs up to us, gun in hand, pushes me against a wall, and says, yes, “Up against the wall, motherfucker.” Amy stands silent nearby as he presses the blued barrel against my temple, and growls, “One of these days, maggot, one of these days, I am going to find you in a dark alley, and I will blow out your motherfucking brains.” I say nothing; there is nothing to say. Detective Scalese glares with all the menace he can summon. I remind myself he is not going to do anything, here in public view, not now, not this time, so I smile.

Both Boston and Cambridge police thought it great sport to occasionally throw me up against a wall and put a gun to my head. We sensed the pressure mounting. We felt the threat from the state with its sanctioned monopoly on force and violence. While unaware of it, I had been placed on multiple FBI registries: the Security Index,¹ and the Rabble Rouser Index,² which in 1968 was renamed the Agitator Index.³ These were lists of the people that the FBI considered dangerous and who, if the president invoked the Emergency Detention Program, would be immediately imprisoned.

The Nixon administration was obsessed with the antiwar movement. Vice President Spiro Agnew continued his campaign role of hatchet man attacking antiwar protestors as an “effete corps of impudent snobs.”⁴ More ominously, the attorney general, John N. Mitchell, made sure a grand jury in Chicago indicted Tom Hayden and seven others for the demonstrations at the Chicago Democratic Convention. I knew all the defendants. Beyond Tom and Rennie Davis and the Panthers’ Bobby Seale, they seemed chosen almost randomly, sending the clear message that the government could indict any of us. We understood the message, felt the threat.

The Los Angeles police department with support from Washington formed the nation’s first SWAT team—the Special Weapons and Tactics team—and violently raided the local Panthers.⁵

Though we didn’t know it at the time, Nixon gave J. Edgar Hoover carte blanche to escalate the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) targeting the antiwar movement and Black militants. COINTELPRO was secret and illegal. As usual, the people who paid the steepest price were Black activists, a number of whom would be killed in the coming months.

Along with all my friends, I had a growing sense that the government was increasing its surveillance, its disruption, and making plans to lock some of us up. We debated this from time to time: was it our paranoia or a realistic assessment of the inevitable corollary to a policy of pursuing a war that, like some distant voracious beast, devoured lives without any sign of stopping?

Nixon and his administration did everything they could to paint the antiwar movement as unpatriotic. They developed the trope of the silent majority. When, in May of 1970, 400 construction workers rampaged in New York, beating up antiwar high school and college students,⁶ their leaders were conspicuously honored by Nixon with a reception at the White House.⁷

In May of 1969, Dick Flacks, a founder of SDS, now a professor at the University of Chicago, was attacked in his office, beaten so badly he almost died.⁸ The attack most likely was the work of the “Legion of Justice,” a right-wing group with ties to the Chicago police and possibly the FBI.⁹ Even though we didn’t know who was responsible, the attack seemed part of a growing effort to intimidate and destroy our movements.

We could feel the pressure building. Who would be attacked next? Which people in our meeting were undercover agents? Paranoia was increasing. Who would be indicted next? I could not help but wonder if that dark night might come when the threats of Scalese and other cops became more than words.

One blustery spring day, crossing Harvard Square, I saw the familiar figure of John Maher, tall and lanky, passing out leaflets. I had known and admired John for many years. He was one of the older graduate students who had taken me under their wing when I was still in high school. I had attended John’s wedding. He and Frinde, his wife, had thrown a party for Amy and me after we had gotten married. He had loaned us money to help pay Amy’s tuition. I considered him a good friend even if I had been seeing less of him in recent months. I had heard that he was getting close to the Progressive Labor Party (PL), but I did not take it seriously.

As I walked up to him, I heard him saying in his soft Texas drawl, “Read about how the CIA is destroying the movement. Join the fight against the misleaders of the people.”

He avoided looking at me. I stopped and took a leaflet from another member of the small group passing them out.

I was stunned to read “Ansara, misleader of the people … Ansara, CIA agent.”

I looked at Johnny in disbelief.

Walking up to him, I made a point of looking him directly in the eye. “I can understand you might disagree with me on strategy and what we should be doing,” I said, “but how can you possibly accuse me of being an agent of the CIA? Johnny, you know me. We’ve been friends. You know I am no CIA agent. Come on man, how can you do this?”

John, my friend of six years, never missed a beat. Without any hesitation, he replied, “You may not actually be paid or directed by the CIA, but since you are doing what they would want you to do, objectively you are the same as their agent! And so, the leaflet is right on.”

I stood dumbfounded, dismayed. I felt a pain behind my temples. I was used to attacks by various crazies. But this was John, a good friend. He knew me. I felt a deep chill, sensed a future where many of the most active members of SDS would veer off the rails into a series of bizarre, alternative realities. I shook my head, not wanting to believe it, and walked away without saying another word.

I am in an ornate wood paneled room of the US Senate, facing the chief investigator for the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security. Alongside him, staring off into the distance, is Senator Strom Thurmond, he who famously filibustered against the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Now he says absolutely nothing. Down the length of the table is a stenographer taking notes. Beside me is my friend David Landau and our two lawyers. We are there in response to a subpoena, part of an ongoing investigation into the antiwar movement and New Left.

Jules Sourwine, the chief investigator, turns directly to me, his narrow face almost resolving into one thin line. “Have you brought all the records?” he demands. “Are you prepared to hand them over to us?” Senator Thurmond continues to stare into the distance, uninterested.

“Yes,” I say.

The chief investigator looks around, casting around for the boxes of materials he is expecting.

I produce one plastic check register. He takes it, holding it as if it was potentially toxic and asks, “Where are the rest of the records?”

“You asked for all the records we possess,” I say. “Here they are.”

“We want every document and record in your possession.” He is clearly annoyed.

“I understand. I am responding completely. This checkbook is the only document I have in my possession.”

He looks perplexed and angry.

I have a hard time not laughing.

Sourwine icily points out that if they find we have withheld documents from them, they will find us in contempt of Congress, and we will face jail. Again, I assure him we have complied completely and voluntarily.

He tells us we can now leave. Senator Thurmond does not stand as we leave. He continues to stare off into the distance.

The Senate investigators have been focusing on a unique fundraising entity I created the year before.¹⁰ Ralph Hoagland was a cofounder of CVS, the massive drug store chain. Having made incredible amounts of money, he and his wife became immersed in the counterculture zeitgeist. They operated an art theater in Cambridge, the Orson Welles Cinema. Ralph also was very committed to the Civil Rights Movement and then to Black liberation. He met Amy in Roxbury and from their conversation, he asked to meet with me. I was rather surprised when Ralph, thin, awkward, wearing thick, black glasses, without any small talk or preamble, asked me what would happen if he donated significant money to us. Would it be used to purchase guns for the Panthers? While I was unclear what answer Ralph hoped for, I explained no, we were not interested in purchasing guns for anyone. We were interested in raising money for all the organizing efforts and alternative media. We talked about creating a “movement center.”

Ralph pledged $100,000, a shockingly large amount. He had only one condition: his donation must be in the form of an investment in a for-profit company that would make no money so that he could use it as a tax offset. That amount of money with no other strings attached was too enticing for us to turn down.

Sitting in my kitchen a group of us kicked around possible names for the new entity, a for-profit business that would lose money by giving it all to the movement. We wanted something ironic and euphonic. We almost went with names of Cambridge streets, Putnam, Pearl & Kinnaird. That had some music to it but lacked irony. We wanted something with an ironic “heavy industry” connotation. Laughing, we settled on “Cambridge Iron & Steel.”

Receiving the first check for $25,000, we quickly wrote checks to the Old Mole, the Liberation News Service, the Boston Draft Resistance Group, SDS and Sgt. Brown’s Memorial Necktie, an antiwar café. It would be $25,000 in and $25,000 out. Immediately the PL pounced on this the proof, at last, that we were agents of either the government or the ruling class, or both.

Once the PL leaflets came to the attention of the Boston Globe, the story was too good to pass up. On page 2 of the paper for Saturday, July 12, 1969, there was a long piece by Richard Connolly, headlined “Businessman, Dummy Firm Funds Boston SDS.”¹¹ The article, accompanied by a photograph of the small house that Amy and I rented, “The office of Cambridge Iron & Steel,” quotes PL’s bizarre conspiracy theories and our response.

Soon FBI agents visited Ralph Hoagland. Subpoenas were issued by the Senate’s Internal Security Subcommittee. This was all too much for poor Ralph; there would be no additional payments. He was forced off the board of CVS for his donation to us.¹²

In 1969 and 1970 both the House and the Senate mounted full-scale investigations of the New Left. I felt flattered when one government agency produced a poster of the “100 Most Dangerous Radicals in America” with thumbnail photos, and I made the list. I was somewhere down around #80, but still I was there, my picture showing a bearded, scowling face. A two-volume Senate report on the threat from the New Left and antiwar movements in Massachusetts was published complete with extensive undercover surveillance photos of me. Riddled with factual mistakes, we thought the report hilarious. But still there was a chill down the back of my neck realizing all the times the government had been tracking every move, recruiting informants for every meeting, taking photos of us, without my ever having noticed. And logic said they were continuing their efforts to watch us, disrupt us, and possibly indict us.

While some of us were beginning to lose our way, others, the women among us, were finding their voice. The rise of a new feminist movement would empower women and at the same time become a source of new pressure and even pain for many men.

I was sitting in the S & S Deli in Inman Square, Cambridge, having lunch with five SDS women. All of them were women I had worked closely with, all of whom I trusted. They had asked to get together with me for what I thought was a social gathering. After we ordered, one said:

“Michael, we have an important message for you. We need you to listen carefully.”

“Okay,” I replied, not sure what this was about.

“Look,” the next one said, “we need you to change your chauvinist ways. We think you can change but you need to work at it.”

I stopped eating my sandwich. I was not sure what we were talking about, but I felt suddenly uneasy.

“Okay,” I said, “what exactly do I need to change?”

“You need to stop seeing women only as sexual objects, and you must stop sleeping with so many different women. You male leaders are all alike. You profess your support for feminism and yet the only use you have for women is for your sexual pleasure. Michael, you need to stop it.”

I was speechless.

I thought, “These women know me, they know me. We have worked closely together in SDS, in the antiwar movement and at the Old Mole. They know me… . How can they think this … .”

I started to say, “But I don’t—”

Several of them cut me off. “Don’t try to make excuses for yourself. Listen to us. We like you. We want you to change. But you cannot make excuses.”

I could not bring myself to break in and confess that my entire lifetime sexual experience had been limited to two women, one of whom was my wife of the last four years and the other a one-night encounter while traveling in Europe. I tried to suggest I was not the person they thought I was.

They would have none of my fumbling responses. I was not listening to them, and I needed to. They concluded with an ultimatum: I must stop my chauvinist ways and stop sleeping with so many women if I was to stay part of the movement.

This meeting was only one of many, as the wave of women’s liberation swept through the movement, through our lives. It had been a long time building.

Within SDS there were many strong women leaders, but repeatedly they were treated as secondary to men. One illustrative story was told by Barbara Haber, married to Al Haber, both a key part of the small group that founded SDS. They were at an SDS national meeting in the mid-sixties and the group was outside discussing something. As it got colder, Barbara suggested that they all move inside. No response. The intense political discussion continued. Then she made her suggestion again. Again, no response. Her husband Al, leaned over to her and whispered, “Watch this.” Al made the same suggestion to move inside. The group picked up their chairs and moved inside.¹³

Early attempts by women to meet, to discuss their roles in the movement, and the roles of women in the larger society often produced derision and hostility. Defensive and patronizing male leaders in SNCC and SDS could not understand what women were talking about.

Many of the most charismatic male leaders were indeed predatory when it came to sex. They expected that wherever they traveled, after every speech, there would be willing young women ready to sleep with them.

When national SDS leaders came to Boston, I was often tasked with planning the details of their visits. There were many who never asked me to find them women but there were a number who did. At first, I simply did not understand what they were asking of me. Then, when it became clear, I quickly changed the subject and pretended it had not happened. Not once did I call them out. Not once did I confront them. In that way, I was like all the rest of the men in the movement, tolerating the oppressive treatment of women, while waxing eloquently about the need to stand with the oppressed of the world.

SDS was dominated by articulate, arrogant men, men who led by their verbal dexterity, men who felt little need to make space for those less confident or less verbal, men who paid little attention to formal structures of accountability, men who spent no time thinking about how to make sure women were heard—and I was certainly one of them.

Radcliffe admissions were carefully controlled to never exceed 25 percent of the male Harvard class size. Yet, women made up a significantly greater percentage of the SDS activists. However, far fewer were in leadership positions. In fact, the Harvard strike committee in 1969 was initially composed of all men until we made sure to add two women.

It took women organizing themselves to change things. Women active in civil rights and SDS played a pivotal role in creating a new feminism.

As early as 1964, Mary King and Casey Hayden, two white women in SNCC wrote, “The average white person doesn’t realize that he assumes he is superior. So too the average SNCC worker finds it difficult to discuss the woman problem because of the assumption of male superiority. Assumptions of male superiority are as widespread and deep-rooted and as crippling to the woman as the assumptions of white supremacy are to the Negro.”¹⁴

King and Hayden would later write “A Kind of Memo” elaborating on their earlier thoughts and raising a specific critique of movement culture and behavior. Who gets named project director? Who sweeps the office floor? Who takes the minutes? Who speaks to the press?¹⁵ They mailed this to a larger group of women active in the antiwar movement.

At the 1966 national SDS conference in Urbana-Champaign, women in SDS took up the memo and its ideas. Marilyn Salzman, Vivien Rothstein, and Heather Booth, all talented organizers, all women I knew and admired, experienced resistance from the men in SDS. Soon they made the decision to work outside of the organization. Heather and Vivien formed the first women’s liberation organization in Chicago. Marilyn did the same in Washington, DC.¹⁶

Within SDS, feminism faced significant initial resistance either framed in terms of “you are splitting the movement” or “first we need to win our other fights and then we can turn to this issue.” In other words, wait, wait.

Vibrant women’s caucuses formed despite, or perhaps because of, the skepticism and resistance of men. Amy started attending women-only “consciousness raising” groups. She had to navigate the burden of being married to me, one of the most prominent of male leaders. The Old Mole had a strong women’s group. By 1969 there was a full-blown women’s movement in Boston. Amy and most of the women I knew enthusiastically attended a conference of 500 women at Emmanuel College. Bread and Roses, a new organization of New Left women formed and took on the responsibility of confronting male leaders. And I was one. They would hold hundreds of “consciousness raising” sessions for women. They seized a building and created a new women’s center. Another offshoot was the famed publication “Our Bodies, Ourselves.”

The Boston group was part of a much larger women’s movement that would profoundly alter America, changing expectations, roles, and possibilities.

Those first women in SNCC and SDS and the waves of women who came after changed what is possible for women and thus what is possible for men as well. It was not easy.

I, of course, thought I was different from the other male leaders. Many of the women did not think so. If I was different, it was only in degree.

While internal SDS factionalism grew, and women found their voices, I wrestled with a profound exhaustion. Years of leadership, of always being on, of always pretending I knew just what to do, combined with relentless personal attacks, were exacting a toll. All around me, young men were being told to report for their draft physicals. The increasing numbers of young men being fed into the war by the draft ratcheted up the pressure. We had to save them. I had to save them. And I was not good enough.

There was no pause in the violence. The newly installed Nixon administration publicly promised “Peace with Honor” and secretly launched a covert, massive bombing of Cambodia.¹⁷ I knew our work was essential, but I felt I was failing.

The ground war pounded on with an illogic all its own. Over ten days American soldiers were flung again and again in frontal assaults on Hill 937—an insignificant hill that our grunts named Hamburger Hill—where seventy-two of them died and more than 300 were wounded for no strategic reason.¹⁸

US forces in Vietnam peaked at 543,400.¹⁹ The war was a massive, complex, logistical machine, a deadly marvel, a monument to our nation’s unmatched ability to move, supply, equip, feed, and arm hundreds of thousands of soldiers halfway around the world. From 1964 through February of 1973, 2,709,918 Americans served in uniform in Vietnam.²⁰ The Selective Service system was essential to that war effort. During the war, 1,857,304 American men were drafted. In 1969 alone, 283,586 young men received the call from the Selective Service, passed their preinduction physicals and were forced into the armed forces.²¹ An equal number enlisted.

Every young man I knew worried about what to do when ordered to report for their preinduction physical. For me, because of my mysterious joint disease, there was no way I would ever pass the physical. But that knowledge added more guilt, thinking about all those others who would be going, in a sense, in my stead. That guilt lay like a heavy fog, the backdrop to every day, every event. A birthday celebration inevitably led me to think of all those who would never celebrate another birthday.

For others, fear was a more pressing emotion. Should they apply for conscientious objector status? The law specified that only members of formally recognized religions could receive that status. Should they evade the draft by not reporting and hiding for years? Head to Canada? Or by intentionally failing the physical?

One widely shared, perhaps apocryphal, story of an SDS member at his physical comes to mind: when he got to the question “Are you homosexual or have you had sex with another man?” purposefully he checked it, erased, checked it, erased it, repeating that process until the page was visibly almost worn through. When the doctors asked him, “Are you a homosexual?” he paused, looked panicked, and wide-eyed shook his head no. He had not lied. He was rejected.

In the end more than 500,000 young Americans refused to register for the draft or refused to report for their physical.²² About 200,000 were charged with some sort of evasion.²³ Between 30,000 and 40,000 fled to Canada; thousands fled to other countries.²⁴

Who knows how many elite families pulled strings to get their sons out of the war, into safe jobs with the National Guard, or managed to convince doctors to provide false medical conditions? Out of the 1,200 men who graduated from Harvard in the class of 1970, just two went on to serve in Vietnam. Only twelve Harvard men died in Vietnam out of the 12,595 men who graduated from Harvard College between 1962 and 1972. Compare that to the twenty-five South Boston men who died in the war out of a total draft eligible population of only 2,000.²⁵

Thirty of us gathered in the early morning outside the local draft board in Coolidge Corner, near where I had first stepped into that Woolworth’s picket line nine years earlier. No longer a student, I had been called for my preinduction physical. I brought leaflets that opposed the war, informed draftees of their rights, and listed the number for the Boston Draft Resistance Group (BDRG). All of us boarded a bus for the army base, and I began distributing my leaflets. Many of the men sat, slouched and forlorn. There was little talk. As the bus bounced and lurched, I tried to engage guys in discussion. There were terse responses that, sure, the war sucked, the war was wrong. But the general sense, as articulated by a lanky, especially young-looking man in the back, was “We are all so fucked!” A gritty resignation was evident in the slope of everyone’s shoulders, eyes downcast, heads bent, not in prayer but certainly hoping for some unlikely salvation.

Soon enough the bus entered the South Boston army base, the one whose proximity had sparked my resistance to duck and cover what seemed like a lifetime ago. Inside the processing room, reminiscent of a factory floor, vast open spaces were broken up by a few private exam rooms. I could not help feeling I had entered a sausage factory. A flutter of anxiety pulsed through me as I continued to distribute leaflets. A small, neatly creased and pressed sergeant immediately approached. I realized this was Sergeant Brown, so notorious for his drill sergeant attitude that the BDRG named its antidraft café Sgt. Brown’s Necktie. Here he was, in person, confronting me, calling for a team of military police and yelling, “You cannot pass out leaflets here. Who do you think you are? Stop that right now. You are resisting the draft. That is illegal. Stop or I will have you arrested right now.”

Knowing full well that I would fail any physical, I responded very formally, “Sergeant, I am here for my physical, I am prepared to serve my country, but that doesn’t mean I have to stop opposing this war.”

The sergeant, his uniform perfect in every detail, stared at me in surprise. “What do you mean? Aren’t you refusing the physical? Aren’t you refusing to be drafted?”

“No sir,” I responded, evenly and without rancor. “I am here to serve. I am a good, loyal American. I love my country and our Constitution, which is why I have reported here as ordered and why I am exercising my constitutional rights.” I went on to expound a little on the Constitution and my rights and to point out that I was not yet in the Army.

Sheer bluster on my part. Much to my surprise he backed down, turning to two MPs. “You take this guy and lead him through all the stations. I want him done, through, and out of here as fast as possible. Do it. Now!”

Escorted by two silent MPs, I was led to the head of each line, leapfrogging dozens of young men who had been slowly shuffling forward a step at a time. Soon many of them were yelling at me “Who the hell do you think you are, cutting ahead of us? Get back in line!”

I shrugged, “Hey guys, the MPs are forcing me to cut ahead because of these,” and held up my leaflets. “Want some?”

The immediate response from half a dozen guys: “Hey, gimme some of those leaflets.” Soon a growing number were passing out my leaflets. The two baffled MPs sent for the colonel, who, stern and serious, looked over my leaflets.

“Look,” he said, “you cannot distribute these here.”

“Sir,” I responded, “I respectfully disagree.” Once again, I politely but firmly stated my case, referred to the Constitution, reminded him that he had sworn an oath to uphold it, stated my willingness to serve, and pointed out that I was not yet sworn into the Army. Then I said: “But aren’t you ashamed to oversee this whole thing, sending American men to serve in a war that is a disastrous mistake?”

He reacted as if slapped, his eyes bulging in surprise. I continued: “Look, this is the wrong war. We should never have been fighting it to begin with and now we need to end it.”

“No,” he responds, his voice steadily getting louder. “We have to stop the communists. Come on. We cannot stand by while they overrun one country after another. We need—”

I cut in, “Do you know anything about the history of Vietnam? How they threw out the French? That the Geneva Accords said there were to be free elections, but those elections were canceled because of us? Even President Eisenhower said if those elections had been held, eighty percent of the population would have voted for the communist Ho Chi Minh—and that’s a quote.”

The colonel started to yell: “That’s wrong. You don’t know what you are talking about!”

I remained calm, measured. I had debated this war endlessly for the last five years, with facts and figures, logic, and emotion all at my fingertips. I patiently instructed him as if he was a student who had failed his exam.

After three or four more minutes of back and forth, our voices steadily getting louder, his face red, veins now visible, he screamed:

“You don’t understand! If we don’t stop the reds in Vietnam, soon we will be fighting commies in the Philippines and then in Hawaii and then before you know it, we are gonna be fighting them on Boston Common, for Christ sake, fighting commies on Boston Common! Do you want that? On Boston Common!”

He screamed at me at the top of his lungs. Suddenly there was silence. I looked around. The stations right around us processing young men for the army had come to a complete stop, everyone riveted on our debate. The doctors and nurses and assistants had stopped doing anything and were watching us. The young men in their long lines were staring at us, following the debate with amazement. Along one side of the room there was a line of guys standing bare assed with their pants around their ankles, waiting the inevitable order to bend over and cough. Behind them were a few doctors and nurses, rubber gloved hands stopped in midair, the whole tableau frozen as they listened to us. No one moving. The entire place gone silent.

In the minute of silence, the colonel took this in. He turned back to me.

“Well, you may have your rights, but this is my base, and I decide who is allowed on it and you are not allowed to be here anymore.”

I responded, “Hey I am here prepared to go through my physical. I am here to serve my country.”

He glared at me, still red in the face, his neck seeming to push against the tight knot of his military tie, outrage stamped on his features.

“You are not fit for the Army. Get off my base and do not call us again and do not step foot here ever again.”

Turning to the MPs and Sergeant Brown, he ordered “Get this guy off my base now!”

I was hustled out of the base and walked to South Station. As I walked through South Boston, I was not sure how I felt, how I should feel. I certainly felt relieved that my draft was over. But I thought about all the guys I left behind, being processed. I wanted to laugh at the memory of all the skinny legs and bare asses lined up while the colonel and I debated. I wanted to take some satisfaction in even a tiny momentary disruption of the war machine’s gears and spindles grinding away. But I could not. I walked through South Boston thinking about all those Southie boys either drafted or enlisted, who would continue to die while I was able to take the Red Line home to Cambridge.

Despite remaining 1A, I never heard from the Army again.

There is a pervasive narrative about how badly Vietnam veterans were treated upon their return. Antiwar activists spat upon them, called them “murderer” and “baby killer,” heaping abuse on returning soldiers in airports and on the streets.²⁶ This narrative has been an important conservative characterization of the antiwar movement. While I cannot say it never happened, I never witnessed anything like that, nor would we have supported such behavior.

My friends and I certainly chanted “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” We viewed the top political leadership and the top generals to be criminals and to have blood on their hands. And we certainly grew to hate them. And certainly, we grew to hate the police.

That hatred, however, was never directed at the men who were forced to fight the war. They were every bit as much victims as the Vietnamese. Increasingly I met Vietnam veterans on the campuses and on street corners and in taverns. I felt empathy and respect for them whether they were against the war or not. I met veteran after veteran who had re-upped for a second tour in Nam, not because they supported the war but because they had lost a best friend, the buddy beside them. When I talked with them, they were not waving the flag and denouncing us.

Most of the vets I encountered, especially those who had experienced hard combat, were looking for a way of putting it all behind them, attempting to reconstruct their lives. Many had deep wellsprings of anger. Many felt that the war had to be supported if they were to honor those who died beside them. However, an increasing number—small but growing—felt that the best way to honor those sacrifices was to join us in opposing the war.

We reached out very delicately to Gold Star families—the families who had lost a son in the war. Overwhelmingly the Gold Star families supported the war. It was simply too painful to think they had lost a child to a war that should never have been fought. However, a small group of parents did oppose that war, and worked to stop it before it took the lives of any more sons. Ruth and Harry Gottschalk were the first Gold Star parents I knew who took a stand after their son Billy, a marine lieutenant and helicopter pilot, was killed in Vietnam. I met Ruth when she joined Gold Star Mothers for Peace and worked with us against the war. Ruth and Harry were determined to oppose the war and later became supporters of our community organizing efforts.²⁷

I was occasionally invited to visit American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars posts to talk about the war. Usually, I was invited by a younger veteran who had returned from Vietnam. Usually, the older vets disagreed with what I said—but almost always politely and respectfully. That would not have been the case even two years earlier. But now the great majority of Americans either opposed the war or had profound misgivings about it.²⁸

That summer of 1969, the war raged on. Nixon announced the withdrawal of 25,000 troops and escalated the bombing.²⁹ Muhammad Ali went on trial for refusing to fight in Vietnam.³⁰ That summer of 1969 the factionalism that had been poisoning our ranks burst forward into a spectacular display of surreal lunacy.

On June 18, 1969, I joined 2,000 young people packed into the dirty, ratty Chicago Coliseum for what became the last SDS convention. For four days I wandered the vast hall, feeling lost, repulsed as two factions waged a bizarre war against each other. I had only contempt for the crazed sectarian PL group with their warmed over old left Marxism-Leninism. But I found myself appalled at the behavior of the current SDS national officers and leaders from around the country who had formed what they called the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM).

Sitting high up in the stands I watched with disbelief as hundreds of RYM people waved the little red books of Mao Zedong, waved them in unison, chanting slogans from China, one upping the would-be Maoists of PL.³¹

The national SDS leadership brought in leaders from the Black Panthers and the Hispanic Young Lords to denounce “white skin privilege”—and to attack PL, which put class above race. During a diatribe attacking PL as armchair Marxists and racists who refused to follow Black leadership, Chaka Walls, the Panther speaker, veered off into an attack on feminism as “pussy power.”³² I felt physically ill.

All four days, I felt trapped in a nightmare with no way out. What had happened to the organization I had loved? What had become of our audacious vision of a New Left? This was a sick parody of everything I despised in the old left.

There were occasional fistfights. The convention site was fittingly gray and ugly. The debate was ugly and bizarre. There was nothing inspirational, only a vicious desperation. Everyone except the PL group walked out and held a separate convention. I could not find a place within either faction.

SDS was no longer my home.

When I joined SDS, the organization sought a new left rooted in American realities. We were contemptuous of the bankrupt old left. Now SDS was dominated by factions, each one bizarre, worshiping at the altar of cartoon Marxism.

I was totally perplexed how so many of my friends in SDS could spin off into weird cults. The Maoists of the PL and their “Student Worker Alliance,” which never had any workers in it, had a certain appeal for the sons and daughters of the elite. I, for one, never took them seriously. My mistake.

At Harvard, the PL’s chief organizer, Jared Israel was an unhappy, paranoid person. Arrogantly, I was confident that people would see the ridiculousness of his positions. Decades later, Jared’s paranoid politics led him to become cochairman of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milošević, the former Serbian leader war criminal,³³ and to claim that the September 11 attacks were the product of a conspiracy involving the CIA.³⁴ In 1969, his politics were no less paranoid and fantastic. Yet, with all the turmoil, dismay and confusion abounding, the reductionist certainty of PL, for all its ludicrousness, attracted otherwise smart and decent young people.

Grouplets and cults abounded. Some young people fled into faux religion, shaved their heads, and chanted Hare Krishna in the airports and on street corners. Others became Trotskyites, Leninists, Maoists. Others were drawn like the proverbial moth to the flame of violence. The overwhelming majority of the student movement remained young and confused and as decently passionate as ever. However, among the most committed, the most active, there was a growing inability to differentiate fears and dreams from reality. The most committed and the most passionate were driving themselves into delusion in a world seemingly gone mad.

Unknown to us, the FBI had 120 undercover informants working inside SDS. Many of them were in Chicago stoking the fires of conflict and craziness. Hoover ordered them to support the national office because he was frightened of the disciplined and familiar Leninist approach of PL. Ironically, that meant FBI agents worked hard to support the weirdness that became Weatherman.³⁵

For the next year I felt I was fighting for souls—and all too often losing—as one after another, decent young activists entered the dark world of end-of-SDS weirdness.

I had always thought that the “movement” made people better. For the first time I thought that people who struggled in the raw caldron of political passions and fought injustice could emerge changed, but maybe not for the better. I read and reread a poem by Bertolt Brecht, “To Posterity” that ends:³⁶

For we knew only too well:

Even the hatred of squalor

Makes the brow grow stern.

Even anger against injustice

Makes the voice grow harsh. Alas, we

Who wished to lay the foundations of kindness

Could not ourselves be kind.

But you, when at last it comes to pass

That man can help his fellow man,

Do not judge us

Too harshly.

I now had nagging doubts, not about the justice of our cause, not about the goals we fought for but about who we were becoming as we fought for them.

My abstemious nature continued to drive my closest friends wild. My refusal to get high was most infuriating to them. David, my old roommate from Adams House, insisted on the two of us making a special trip to the abandoned granite quarry in Milford just over the border of New Hampshire, which had become a place of episodic sanctuary. To get to it, we had to sneak through private property adding a smidge of outlaw quality to the adventure. On hot summer evenings when we wanted to escape, we gathered a small crowd, piled into several cars, drove to sleepy Milford, careful not to attract any undue attention from the local police, parked at the end of a dirt road, and made our way quietly past several homes, down an abandoned dirt track to the quarry. The solitude, the cool waters, the star filled clear night sky, the ripple of the moon reflected in the strokes of a naked body swimming through the dark water became our favorite respite from the war, from organizing, from the news, from the pressure.

Once in the water, we were muted and hushed, enveloped by a sense of the sacred we felt lying back in that coolness and looking up at the inverted bowl of brilliant stars.

On this night, it was just the two of us. David brought pot-laced sugar cookies. We were hushed and reverent as we stared up at the summer night sky. The cookies were almost inedible, burnt, gritty, terrible tasting. We choked some down and afterward, every fifteen minutes or so, we asked each other “Feel anything?” or “You buzzed yet?” shaking our heads, no, nothing happening.

David brought out his saxophone. Later, I realized that I had played it for over an hour. I had never picked up a sax before. Not only had I played it, but David and I also agreed that I had played it beautifully, gorgeous tones rising into the night air above the quarry, lingering in small echoes perched in the steep clean cuts of the sheer granite walls.

It was a brief disconnected moment of beauty and grace. And then it was gone. I would not experiment further in this time of epic experimentation. I told myself that I had work to do, wars to stop, cops to face down, racism to confront, a nation to change.

The morning of December 4, 1969, dawned clear and cold. The cold had settled down on us and every day, even a clear day, seemed gray and unrelenting. The phone rang early. The caller on the other end of the line sounded frantic, almost incoherent.

“The pigs killed Fred Hampton last night. Shot him dead while he slept. Fucking pigs! Happened early this morning. He is dead. This is fucking war.”

I was speechless. The spiral of death and violence was spinning ever faster. Fred Hampton had seemed special, a powerful, young Black leader who was militant and spoke articulately of the need to rebuild a multiracial movement. Hampton was the young leader of the Black Panthers in Chicago. He was particularly close with SDS. Just twenty-one, he was a year younger than me.

Slowly over the next days, we learned some of what happened. As Fred slept in his bed, before dawn, the Chicago police and the FBI raided the apartment that also served as the headquarters for the Panthers in Chicago. There was no warning, no request for surrender. The police fired more than eighty rounds into the apartment, through the walls of his bedroom, killing Fred while he slept and also murdering Mark Clark, another Panther. The police described what happened as a shootout, but they could offer no proof that the Panthers in the apartment had actually fired at them. We were clear: the government had murdered one of the most promising young Black leaders in the land. Indeed, years later documents would establish that Fred’s personal bodyguard was an FBI informant who provided detailed plans of the apartment and had slipped Fred a sleeping potion. His killing was a cold-blooded, state-sponsored assassination.³⁷

The murders of Fred and other prominent Black Panthers confirmed for us that the state was willing to sanction extrajudicial execution, at least for Black leaders. The trial of the Chicago Eight confirmed that the state was willing to use the force of the legal machine to jail antiwar activists. Local police were more than eager to bash heads. All contributed to the sense that we had entered a stage of conflict more violent, more potentially deadly than before. It felt as if the war had indeed come home.

And thus, the year ended as it had begun—bleak, violent, and bloodstained.