10
Days of Rage
I would prefer not to remember those days, weeks, months, the year following the disintegration of SDS. Those were dark days, days of craziness, days of rage. While much of the country had turned against the war, still the killing ground on. We had done everything we thought we knew how to do. We had marched, held teach-ins, debated, won debates, and had even organized mass fasts against the war. We had told ourselves to make the leap from protest to resistance. We had organized sit-ins, occupied buildings, shut down colleges. We had organized draft card burnings and large-scale draft resistance. And still the bombs fell, still the blood flowed, now not just in Asia but also at home.
I would prefer not to recall my role in those days. I, too, experienced some of the craziness that seemed to flood the synapses of so many of us who had worked so hard to end a war that showed no signs of ending.
I lived a split life. On the one hand I was trying to learn to organize beyond the campus, reaching out to young people in Dorchester, working with returning Vietnam veterans, mobilizing large numbers of people to join peaceful marches. On the other hand, I was part of a team that kept up a frenetic pace of demonstrations that were more and more militant, leading to ever more violent clashes with police, to near riots and then actual riots. We and the police were in constant conflict. We hated them. They hated us. The violence in Asia was nonstop. The conflict at home was equally without pause and intensifying every month. We needed thoughtful strategy. All we had was rage.
SDS no longer existed as a functioning national organization, torn apart by sectarian warfare. The faction known as Weatherman (from their major statement quoting Bob Dylan, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”) had embraced violence and formed into collectives to organize “the revolutionary youth.” Weather collectives parading with National Liberation Front (NLF) flags fought with kids on beaches and outside high schools, somehow thinking that showing toughness was a prerequisite to gaining respect. I thought they were simply stupid crazy.
Weatherman announced the “October Days of Rage.” They were going to Chicago to fight the Chicago police. They told everyone to bring helmets and gas masks and boots. I spent a good part of that August and September of 1969 desperately attempting to talk people out of this madness. I continued to feel a sense of personal failure and growing despair as I “lost” friends to Weatherman: Mike Spiegel, Mike Kazin, Bo Burlingham, Mark Dyen. The list grew depressingly long. Bizarrely it seemed to be the gentlest, the most intellectual of my friends who succumbed to the Weatherman cult.
Mark arrived at Harvard in 1966 looking for SDS. There was no need to recruit him. He had grown up in New Haven, the son of Isidore Dyen, a brilliant, rigorous “linguistic scientist” who taught at Yale for forty years. Mark was one of the smartest younger people to join SDS. Once at Harvard he threw himself completely and passionately into “the movement.” Years later, looking back at his trajectory, seeing him jolted out of a natural path that would have led him most likely to become a professor and a public intellectual, I felt occasional guilt.
I was horrified as I watched this decent intellectual, squeezed by the demands of stopping the war, furious at the murder of Black people, ground down by the unrelenting attacks of the Progressive Labor Party (PL) people, turn increasingly angry and violent. Soon Mark was pledging to “renounce his white skin privilege,” join the struggle of Third World people against the United States and loudly committing to use “any means necessary.” Soon he was proudly discussing getting into fistfights with high school students as a strategy for building a revolutionary youth movement. I was baffled. He was so damn smart. And now seemed crazed.
I would try to reason with Mark that violence was a strategic and moral disaster. I was unpersuasive. Increasingly he was drawn into Weatherman, as were other young activists that I had led. Well, I was their leader no longer. I could not talk them out of a path that seemed to me obviously stupid. Contemptuous of my lack of commitment, my unwillingness to take the final steps, Mark soon stopped talking to me. Then he was gone, joining a collective whose secrets I did not want to know. Baffled, I felt I had let him down. I had failed him. I had lost him and too many others. His embrace of craziness seemed to me to be, at least in part, a result of my poor leadership. (Mark would come back to political sanity faster than many others. By the winter of 1973, we would be working together again and would do so for many years, remaining lifelong friends.)
Feeling the need to create an alternative that could keep people out of Weatherman and keep up pressure to end the war, I helped organize the November Action Coalition (NAC) planning a week of actions for that November. The Old Mole office on Brookline Street was the hub for everything we did. Despite the splintering of SDS, the office hummed with constant activity.
Opposition to the war had spread so far that active-duty military marched and signed petitions calling for an end to the war. There was now an antiwar movement within the military.1 Soldiers had begun refusing to fight. The August 1969 New York Daily News front-page headline was: “SIR MY MEN REFUSE TO GO!—Weary Viet GIs Defy Order.”
My friends Ron Carver and Robert Zevin were part of an extensive effort to organize antiwar coffeehouses near military bases and support GI antiwar newspapers and organizing. The antiwar movement was no longer restricted to campuses. It was an inchoate, sprawling social movement that reached into every institution and zip code of the country.
Despite the ongoing growth of opposition to the war, with Richard Nixon in the White House, my mood was not one of hope but of grinding desperation. The forces opposed to us were loud and angry. The power of the state was poised to strike us. The tension constant.
October 15, 1969, brought the biggest demonstrations against the war yet.2 Originally the Vietnam Moratorium was to be a one-day strike—everyone stopping what they were doing to oppose the war. It spread across the country, into every city, onto every campus, and into countless small cities and rural towns. Across America people stood up to be counted as opposed to the war. It would prove to be a powerful brake on Nixon and Henry Kissinger as they considered extreme escalations.
In Cambridge, Amy and I were part of 15,000 people who assembled on Cambridge Common and marched once again into Boston. So different from those first marches. This time no one heckled us. There were no visible opponents. This time the march was led by a contingent of Vietnam veterans. So much had changed in just a few short years. As we marched across the Mass Ave bridge, a great cheer rose up as a sky writing plane created a giant peace sign in the air high above us. On Boston Common 100,000 of us thronged to hear Senator George McGovern remind everyone of what the New York Mets baseball pitcher Tom Seaver had said: “If the Mets can win the world series, we can get out of Vietnam.” My old leader, Reverend Jim Breeden also spoke to the enormous and festive crowd. The entire city seemed overrun with those who opposed the war.3
I worked hard to bring thousands out for the moratorium. I was thrilled at the scale of it. Still, in part as an alternative to Weatherman, and in part, because I had bought into the path of “increasing the cost to continue the war by increasing disruption,” the November Action Coalition offered a much more militant follow up. We targeted MIT, declaring: “MIT isn’t a center for scientific and social research to serve humanity. It’s a part of the US war machine. Into MIT flow over $100 million a year in Pentagon research and development funds, making it the tenth largest Defense Department R&D contractor in the country.”
Michael Albert, the elected MIT student body president, was the coleader of the Coalition. Michael could have been one of the most successful theoretical physicists in the world. Faced with the war, he became the leader of the Rosa Luxemburg SDS chapter at MIT (named for the famed and doomed German revolutionary). The Coalition brought together students from twenty-five colleges, as well as high schools, nursing schools, and new anti–Vietnam War local groups. We promised to shut down the war machine at MIT. For three days in November, Cambridge police and State Police fought to prevent thousands of students from occupying the labs where the defense work was done. MIT went to court to get an injunction prohibiting us from “employing force or violence … damaging or defacing facilities … converting documents to their own use … congregating within buildings to disrupt or interfere with normal functions conducted by M.I.T… . [and] inciting or counseling others to do any of these acts.”4 While our lawyers went to court in an unsuccessful attempt to get the injunction lifted, we simply ignored it.
At the iLabs, snipers, their rifles and scopes visible to us, were placed on top of nearby buildings. Behind the lines of police, with their usual riot control truncheons, walked special police with rifles at the ready. It was obvious that serious violence could break out at any moment. Still thousands of us surged toward the buildings undeterred by the obvious escalation of force being marshaled to defend them. There were running battles in the narrow streets around MIT. The cops always won the day, but for the first time, they were paying a price. It was not just the protestors who were bleeding as night fell.
That October, 150,000 workers at General Electric (GE) walked out in the first national strike in twenty-three years. Their contract had expired, and management was refusing to bargain in good faith. NAC decided to support the striking workers. When GE’s CEO came to Boston University during Thanksgiving break, a group of us, perhaps fifty, showed up to picket. Most students were away. The area on Commonwealth Avenue where we were picketing was empty of its normal swirl of busy students, and now held only street cleaners and a few vendors tending their food carts. There was a chill in the air and an eerie quiet on the street.
After fifteen minutes, I was surprised to see the man behind the cart selling sausage and onions taking out a blackjack, the street cleaners dropping their brooms and charging toward us. Spilling out of the building came an array of plain-clothed and uniformed officers. The police outnumbered the protestors. Even though that day we were peacefully picketing, the police charged into us, laying about with their clubs and blackjacks.
The next morning the Boston Globe had a dramatic picture on its front page alongside the headline “4 Officers Injured in BU Melee.”5 A policeman has pulled my jacket over my head and is getting ready to whale into me. A slender, young Miles Rapoport along with the curly headed Vietnam veteran Mike O’Connor appear to be punching him squarely in the jaw. Also helping is Ivy Leichman, another of our activist crew. Had it not been for Miles, Mike, and Ivy I would have been beaten and arrested. As it was, thanks to them, I pulled away, and we all scattered as fast as we could. Twenty-four of us were arrested, and we had to concede that the well-planned police ambush was a victory for them. It only increased our anger, hardening our resolve not to be intimidated by the police.
All that fall, the trial of those indicted for the protests at the Democratic Convention, known as the Chicago Eight, proceeded, intensely, grotesquely. Bobby Seale, the lone Black defendant, was ordered chained and gagged by Judge Julius Hoffman, who made no effort to hide his hatred of the defendants. We thought it clear that this trial was meant to intimidate all of us. It was imperative that we respond in a forceful way to make the point that we would not be deterred by this or any other attempts at repression by the state.
Our response in Boston was organized under the banner of “The Day After” (TDA). Since we had no idea when the verdict would come, we organized to bring people out into the streets within twenty-four hours of any verdict that was not total exoneration. It was hard to organize an event with no fixed date. Still, we hoped we could put 5,000 protestors into the streets on such short notice.
While organizing for TDA, I received a worried call from one of our activists. Her relative, a member of the US attorney’s team in Boston, wanted her to know that there had been a secret grand jury convened to investigate us. That grand jury had, he claimed, handed down conspiracy indictments for a small group of us. He did not have the whole list—just the first name on the indictment, mine. He wanted us to know that they were waiting for the next out of control demonstration after which they would announce the indictments and arrest us.
We had no way of knowing whether he was telling the truth. It certainly seemed plausible. All of us agreed that we should do our best to turn out the largest number of people possible for TDA and hope we deterred any move to indict us. We never considered toning down our militancy.
The verdict finding five of the Chicago defendants guilty was issued on February 18, 1970. David Dellinger, Rennie Davis, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, and Jerry Rubin faced maximum sentences of five years in prison. (Seale had been separated for a trial of his own.) Judge Hoffman did not set a date for sentencing. Declaring, “I find the men in this trial too dangerous to be at large,” Hoffman denied bail for the five.6
We immediately announced our march for the next day declaring that the demonstration would be “disciplined and orderly. We will not initiate violence.” However, our press statement went on to say, “We will not let ourselves be attacked and mauled without appropriate defense.”
The news of our planned demonstration brought a strong reaction from the Boston cop Richard G. MacEachern, president of the National Patrolman’s Association, who called on policemen “to meet force with force… . All patrolmen in the United States should take this as an outright challenge and threat to not only themselves but the very basic idea of freedom in America… . If the group that is attempting to coerce the basic concept of law and order—with regard to the trials in Chicago—assumes they will succeed, let them know they will receive as much force as they wish to exert.”7
On February 19 we turned out 10,000 people marching through downtown Boston. After the march, thousands of protestors battled with charging police who eagerly attempted to clear the streets. It was unclear who wanted those clashes more—our folks or the cops. The numbers we turned out on such short notice exceeded our goals. There were no arrests. Officially twelve were injured, including three policemen.
We never found out if the rumored indictments had been real, but none were forthcoming. However, the demonstrations kept coming without a break, each more tension filled than the one before it. In March 1970 we supported the first women’s liberation march on International Women’s Day.
Then at a demonstration at Northeastern, we took the offensive. S. I. Hayakawa, the conservative head of San Francisco State University, was locked in a battle with Black students and SDS leading to a protracted student strike. He came to give a major speech at Northeastern. We were determined to protest. We and the police were itching for another fight; both sides felt the time had come. I was totally caught up in an intense spiral: we would protest, the police would respond with unnecessary force, which produced not only more protests but also more militancy, which led to even more vigorous assault by the cops. We called them pigs. They called us maggots. Dehumanization was expansive on both sides.
Outside of Northeastern, a police car, its sirens blaring, its lights flashing, came quickly down the side street where I was part of knots of protestors who had fled after the police had charged the march, billy clubs flailing. The sun was going down; shadows played on the street as I pried a brick loose. The cop car kept coming. I thought of the times I had been thrown up against a wall, a gun pressed to my head. I thought of the times I had been hit by the men in blue, the number of times they had beaten my friends.
Fuck you, I thought, and heaved the brick as hard as I could toward the oncoming police car. It sailed in the evening sky. I watched it fly as if it was moving in slow motion. I followed its arc, seeing it turning over as it flew. I was sure I could never actually reach the police car. But there it was flying, tumbling, true. I saw the windshield shatter, I saw the car swerve suddenly to the left, slow, swerve repeatedly, like a parody of a drunk walking, and finally come to a rest on the sidewalk. I stood transfixed. I wanted to throw up.
“Come on,” urged one of my team. “Come on, run.” I couldn’t move. I felt sick. Physically sick. Sick in the soul.
One of my group shook my shoulder, “Come on, Michael—great shot, run now. God dammit, run!”
I ran.
And as I ran, I kept imagining two policemen, men with families, men who wanted to serve, men whom I probably disagreed with on everything but who were most likely decent people, sitting in that car covered in blood and their families at home, worrying, waiting.
As I ran down the street, I swore to myself that I would never throw another brick in my life.
I never did.
Still, I pushed on organizing ever-escalating demonstrations, our goal to keep maximum pressure to end the war. I had totally bought into the “strategy” of “bringing the war home,” bringing it onto the streets of America.
On the first of April, indicative of how widespread opposition to the war was, the Massachusetts legislature passed the “Shea Act,” challenging the legality of the Vietnam War. The act declared that no one from Massachusetts “shall be required to serve” abroad in an armed hostility that had not been declared a war by Congress.8
Two weeks later we again turned out large numbers for more peaceful massive protests called by the moratorium and the Mobe. After the huge rally on Boston Common, 10,000 people marched back to Cambridge, Amy and I in the lead group. Entering Cambridge, we saw more and more police, including state troopers. Every cop had removed their badge; each was now anonymous, unaccountable for whatever actions they might take as darkness fell. Every cop had a gas mask.
A little after 7 p.m., we rallied on the Cambridge Common. Soon groups of protestors were blocking traffic in Harvard Square. The chants echoed in the spring evening air.
“Free Bobby Seale!”
“One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war!”
“The streets belong to the people!”
Some sat down on the street. Some set fire in trash cans. Some climbed onto the news kiosk in the middle of the square. We chanted, “the streets are ours.” The police thought otherwise.
Suddenly all the streetlights went off. In the darkness, hundreds of state troopers and local police moved forward. We let them. Our strategy, planned and carefully communicated in the weeks leading up to that night, was to break into small groups and stay on the streets for hours, playing cat and mouse, hit and run. Soon plate-glass bank windows came crashing down, and tear gas cannisters started flying. Fires were set but whenever possible our teams ran to put them out. The fighting spread from Harvard Square down Mass Ave into side streets and into Central Square. Cops charged. Kids ran away, gathered again, and heaved taunts and bricks toward the tired police who charged again. The police began beating anyone young, even if they were not part of the protests. Young reporters showed their press credentials to no avail. The fighting took a toll. By early morning more than 300 people were hurt. We thought the action a success as the headlines across the country reinforced the sense that there was an insurrection continuing from coast to coast.
As we skirmished with police in Cambridge, desperate fighting of a much deadlier nature was taking place in the A Shau Valley of Vietnam. Soon, the Cambodian prince Norodom Sihanouk was deposed by the pro-US general Lon Nol, and Nixon launched the Cambodian bombing and incursions. In response, there were enormous student strikes across the country, the largest wave yet of student protests. Virtually every single college and university in America was shut down. Then came the killings at Kent State and Jackson State. The nation teetered on the edge of coming unhinged.
Amid our ever-escalating battles with police, on March 6 a Greenwich Village townhouse exploded, killing Ted Gold, Diana Oughton, and Terry Robbins, members of Weatherman—all of whom I had known in SDS. I was horrified, saddened, and shocked. People I knew had blown themselves up making a powerful bomb. I had no idea what they had planned to bomb, but whatever plans they had were most likely terrible. While some of the remaining Weatherman leaders would deny it in later years, they had been making bombs to blow up a dance at Fort Dix in New Jersey.9 Fort Dix had become a focal point of antiwar efforts in New York and New Jersey. Had they succeeded, it is probable that scores would have been killed and hundreds injured. My former comrades in Weatherman had totally lost their way.
I had heard about the Weatherman “war council,” where Bernadine Dohrn told the group that now we need to be “crazy motherfuckers and [scare] the shit out of honky America,” and went on to talk about the Manson murders as if they were somehow political. “Dig it! First, they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!”10
Hearing this I thought, How sick! How demented!
As Weatherman planned to go underground and prepare for violent insurrection, they met with the Vietnamese, who were horrified and argued for more peaceful protests against the war. They met with the Black Panthers who also had argued that this path would be disastrous. The leaders of Weatherman simply lied, claimed the blessings of both, and proceeded with their plans.11 The Weather collectives vanished. Over the next years, they would explode a dozen bombs, whose only effect was to damage the movement. They were delusional and morally bankrupt. They believed they were part of a revolutionary movement in a revolutionary moment. Neither was true.
Bizarrely, Nixon and his inner circle were the only other people who believed that the country was on the brink of serious urban guerrilla warfare. Nixon, personally, along with his top law enforcement officials, became convinced that they were in an existential struggle with an incipient urban guerrilla force.12 Indeed, the FBI reported 2,500 domestic bombings over eighteen months in 1971 and 1972.13 However, almost all of these were carried out by isolated, uncoordinated, random radicals—what happens when a movement listens only to itself, feels intense frustration, and has decided that the state no longer possesses any legitimate authority.
Nixon directed the FBI to increase their illegal wiretapping without warrants. He sanctioned scores of illegal “black bag” break-ins. The FBI, at the request of the White House, enthusiastically broke law after law.14 Still the Weatherman collectives eluded them.
One day in June there was knocking on our door. Opening the door, Amy and I saw a man and woman so pale it was as if they had not seen sunlight in months. I was delighted to see that it was Bo Burlingham, who then introduced the young woman as Lisa Meisel.
They said little except that they had left Weatherman and had no place to go. I don’t know why they chose to land on our doorstep, but we were delighted to see them and insisted they stay with us. We asked no questions, the bruised circles under their eyes deep enough to testify to experiences we did not want to hear.
I had felt great affection for Bo. My friend Ron had introduced me to a small group of organizers who mounted the first efforts to reach out to those in active military service and organize them against the war. One of them was Arlo Jacobs. Arlo was everything I was not: slender, blond, Robert Redford handsome, with a sweet innate charm and graciousness.
Sometime later, I met “Arlo” again, except this time he was not Arlo but Bo. For some time, I was not sure which was his real name and which his nom de guerre. Each time I encountered him, by whichever name, I liked him more.
As SDS crumbled, I saw Bo only occasionally, hearing about a trip to Cuba and then about him slipping away into the orbit of Weatherman. I was heartbroken.
I had not met Lisa before, but she had been on the Ohio SDS regional organizing team with Terry Robbins, had been active in the first Kent State demonstrations, and at a very young age began organizing for SDS throughout Ohio and Wisconsin.
That summer Bo and Lisa stayed with us, and we could see their true gentle and decent natures revive. Quickly Bo and Lisa married. Bo asked for assistance finding a job. I was eager to help and grilled him on what jobs he had held so far. As an undergraduate he had hosted a popular blues radio program on Princeton’s student radio station. That made me think of approaching WBCN. In recent years, as I regularly stopped into the station to let them know about plans for upcoming demonstrations, DJ Charles Laquidara, an especially enthusiastic supporter, kept talking to me about helping the station start a news program. “Come on man, why don’t you become our first director of news?” But I was an organizer, not a radio newscaster. Now I thought Bo might be the right choice for the job. Charles took to Bo immediately, and he was hired to be the director of news for WBCN. I helped him assemble a small team of volunteer researchers to support him.
Bo’s natural charm quickly won over everyone at the station. Then on his fourth day, July 23, as Bo was rushing to prepare the noon news, he saw a story come clickety clacking over the AP teletype machine: 12 radicals indicted by federal grand jury in Detroit. Bo ripped off the story, in a rush to start the newscast. As he read it, he was stunned to see that one of the last names on the list of those indicted was his.
In a panic that the FBI would immediately arrest him, Bo first called Lisa and then me. I had a stable of lawyers who regularly defended us, almost always pro bono, and one, who had good relations with the US Marshals, said Bo should go somewhere where he would be inconspicuous, while the lawyer figured out what was going on.
I took Bo to the movies and we watched the newly released Cotton Comes to Harlem; two tense white boys in a three-fourths–empty downtown movie theater in the middle of the afternoon, trying not to talk or think about a massive dragnet combing the nation for Bo and the other fugitives, talking instead about Chester Himes and Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed, and calling the lawyers from pay phones every so often.
Finally, the lawyers arranged that Bo could surrender without punitive bail. It turned out that the FBI had absolutely no clue where he had been or that he was even living in Massachusetts. With a trial likely a year or two away, Bo and I attempted to save his job at WBCN.
We met with the owner, Ray Riepen, who, while remarkably patient and sympathetic, kept coming back to the problem of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). He feared that keeping an indicted Weatherman on the air would be the tipping point given all the other controversial things the WBCN team was constantly doing. I argued passionately, “Ray, you can’t throw Bo out onto the street; he just got married, he just started here, he has no money, now he has legal bills. I know you are not heartless. You won’t throw him to the wolves. You must have a job for him somewhere, somehow.”
Remarkably, Ray proposed a solution. His weekly newspaper, Boston after Dark, would hire Bo with the same salary, same benefits, no break in income. Ray was pleased; he had managed to do the right thing and avoid the wrath of the FCC. Bo was pleased; he had a job and an income. Quickly Danny Schechter, one of the volunteers we had organized to support Bo, stepped in and became “the news dissector” to modest fame in Greater Boston.15
Bo began a career in journalism that would carry over the decades. It would be a journey from Boston after Dark to editor at Ramparts and then into a long and distinguished career in business writing that led to Inc. Magazine and numerous acclaimed books including, Small Giant, Finish Big, Street Smarts (with Norm Brodsky), and The Great Game of Business (with Jack Stack).
Eventually, the indictment in Detroit would be dismissed because it was revealed that the government had illegally wiretapped phones and broken into people’s homes.16 In the end, it was the FBI officials and agents who would be indicted.17
Like Bo and Lisa, most of those who as young people participated in Weatherman, or PL, or other forms of late-sixties sectarian militancy and weirdness, have gone on to live full lives complete with many contributions to civic life, education, and the arts. Most have become sweet and loving parents and grandparents.
Still, I would prefer not to remember those dismal days when so many friends edged into craziness at the very moment when our leadership was so urgently needed. I would prefer not to think of my own lack of strategy. I was searching for a way forward. I wanted to keep the pressure on to end the war. I wanted to “increase the cost” of continuing the war through ever more disruption. At the same time, I wanted to find a way to organize blue-collar communities. I wanted to reach out to returning veterans. And I still harbored the dream of a long march through the institutions of America, a long march that could produce a new democratic consciousness. Anxious and often miserable, still I thought I was leading. More often than not, I was floundering.