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The Not-So-Radical Personal Life of a Sixties Radical

I was swimming in the rushing waters of the youth revolt, a revolt challenging every norm and convention. All around me, my friends were experimenting, growing their hair long, inventing new music, experimenting with marijuana and even LSD. I was living through a profound sexual revolution.

I refused to indulge in any of it.

I remained focused on “the work.” There were parties and friends and good times, but I was remarkably conventional in my personal life. I talked with other young people every day about the large issues confronting us, how to live a life of meaning, how not to be submerged in mass culture, how to be authentic, and I always strove to be flexible and understanding. Yet I was personally rigid and uptight when it came to my own choices.

A radical life in the 1960s: demonstrations, drugs, sex, and rock and roll. I certainly experienced the demonstrations. I certainly experienced the music, a constant soundtrack starting with blues, Chicago, Motown, and then finally embracing the Beatles, the Stones, the Doors. My eldest sister Martha went out with the guitarist of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and when they came to town, we partied with them. I loved our music.

But for me there was no adventuresome sex and no drugs. I was as strait laced as any fresh-faced Mormon missionary.

That is not to say that I did not think about women, long after them, silently fall in love with a myriad of fascinating women. But I refused to act on all that yearning. I stubbornly ignored all those baffling moments where afterward I thought, perhaps something had been meant but was never sure, and certainly never took the next step to find out. Ignoring my endless desires, I doggedly and single mindedly pursued Amy, the first and only girl I had ever kissed. I was determined that she and I would marry.

Whenever the combination of SDS, classes, and jobs allowed, I would head down to Providence where Amy attended Pembroke, the women’s college at Brown. I traveled on a small used moped—a bicycle with a tiny gas engine to boost performance that I had purchased for $25. I drove the fifty miles from Cambridge to Providence on the highway on my little sputtering moped, occasionally hitting twenty miles per hour on the downhill but peddling madly up steep hills. Rain or shine, hot or cold, I rode determinedly down the shoulder of the highway, cars whizzing by.

Amy was sometimes glad to see me. We explored Providence, we talked politics, I met her new friends. It was increasingly clear that she was a much more normal eighteen-year-old than me. She explored relationships with other men, dated, acted as most young college women did in those days. I was disappointed. I was surprised. I was hurt. Doggedly I kept on, unrelenting, determined.

I rejected all drugs, rarely consumed more than a beer, ignoring what was happening all around me. After giving a speech or leading a group discussion, I simply could not imagine that the women staying after to talk with me had any other interests than pursuing a discussion of strategy.

The social and sexual norms steadily changed around me. In my first years there, Harvard still had “parietals,” rules that governed the hours and conditions under which women could visit our dorms. The rules were summed up as “an open door and one foot on the floor” at all times. And only during specific hours. These rules were increasingly being flouted.

Early one Sunday morning of my second year, I saw a friend emerging with his girlfriend. It was obvious she had spent the night. As we all walked out into the crisp sunshine, we met the longtime master of Adams House, Professor Reuben Brower. Brower, seeing the student and his girlfriend leaving Adams House, arm in arm, early on that Sunday, raised an eyebrow and said in a loud, arch voice, “On our way to church, are we?” and walked on. At that moment, all three of us understood that the parietals no longer would be enforced, at least at Adams House.

Sadly, there were no women walking out into the early morning sun with me.

Frequently my roommates and other friends wanted me to join them in getting high. I always refused as quietly as I could. I needed to be responsible, and stay focused on the work. I feared what I might discover if I ever let my emotions unbundle and spool out into the light.

My life the first two years at Harvard was dominated by SDS, organizing, paid jobs, and trips to Providence. Still I had room for friends who were not swept up in the heat of the movement. One, notably, was a fellow member of Adams House, Bill Weld, a tall, red-haired WASP, reeking of wealth and diffidence, descended from a signer of the Declaration of Independence, either the nineteenth or twentieth of the Welds to attend Harvard. Bill took nothing seriously. Several years older, he was the most apolitical person I spent any time with. I was drawn by his insouciant manner—such a contrast to my earnest and sincere passions. His natural peer group at Harvard was aghast to see him eating with the scruffy troublemaker they knew me to be. Several times his pals came by and openly upbraided him, ignoring me as if I were not there. “Bill, what are you doing? This guy isn’t one of us. He is SDS and trouble. Why are you spending time with him?”

His response was direct: “But he is interesting and fun, way more interesting than you. So, who gives a damn!”

Bill and I had the same size feet even though he was much taller. He possessed numerous pairs of handcrafted shoes with fine-grained leather, English made. Tired of seeing me wearing the same cheap pair every day, offended by the hole visible in the sole and slowly enlarging, Bill handed me a pair of his shoes, saying simply, “Keep them. I have plenty and can buy as many as I want.” (I would be shocked when years later Bill became the Republican governor of Massachusetts.)

Adams House and all of Cambridge was alive with creative energy. The poet Allen Ginsberg and his lover Peter Orlovsky spent a week in residence. The poet Denise Levertov became a passionate member of the antiwar effort. Bands were sprouting. Music ricocheted from every open window.

Political and social turmoil produced complex plays, attempts at creating new art, a new culture. I loved attending performances with young actors such as Stockard Channing, Maeve Kinkead, John Lithgow, and Tommy Lee Jones, all of whom went on after Harvard to have successful acting careers.

I was especially enamored of Kinkead. The first time I heard her name I was struck by its music. Then I met the slender young woman, her long hair cascading down her back, every gesture graceful and elegant. I could only stare and hope my hungry heart was not too obvious.

Tim Mayer, despite affecting a sybaritic diffidence accompanied by a constant cutting sarcasm, remarkable for both its verbal dexterity and casual cruelty, became a good friend. A senior, he decided to stage The Threepenny Opera. His research for the production, he thought, required studying contemporary radicals and that quickly took him to me.

Politics and culture were inseparably intertwined. I loved debating what John Ford’s movie, The Searchers, said about the American character or if The 400 Blows was indeed ushering in a new cinema. I argued over Mother Courage and Her Children. I repeatedly went to see The Threepenny Opera, debating its staging with Tim. I silently longed for Kinkead. Played pinball at Tommy’s Lunch late into the night with members of the J. Geils Band. Everywhere around me was a world of poets, actors, writers, musicians, and artists. I wanted to be one of them. But the war and politics always pulled me back to organizing.

I had a fierce need to be married and to be married to Amy. I felt a great, idealized, and idealistic love for her. Profoundly unaware of what drove me, I exerted every ounce of will into convincing Amy to marry me.

And in that spring of 1966, she agreed. We were both nineteen.

I had grown up with parents who preached the importance, the necessity, for tight-knit families. Yet I had felt a constant, inchoate ache, a sense that there was a hole in my family, a profound gap between what was said and what was real. Now I would finally have a family of my own, a chance for everything to be right. Amy succeeded in transferring to Brandeis for the fall semester

Other than the blur of the Adams campaign, I remember remarkably little from that summer. Amy and I lived with my parents in a house they had rented ten blocks from Harvard Square. For the fall we sublet a basement apartment at 1010 Mass Ave, opposite the Orson Welles Cinema.

I frequently took my nine-year-old brother Jim with me to the Adams campaign office. He loved to help in any way he could. Over the years he would attend a constant stream of demonstrations. Other than Amy, I felt most attached to and felt the most love for Jim.

Every few weeks that summer, Amy and I would meet with her parents in vain attempts to discuss our plans. Both her parents were frantically opposed to our getting married and simply refused to discuss it. As the summer ended, Amy and I informed them that we were going to get married in two weeks; it could either be in their house or at City Hall. They reluctantly agreed that we could get married at their house but insisted the guest list be kept very small. Her father then awkwardly informed me there would be no money from them—no money to pay for Amy’s college tuition, no money for us to live on, not one dollar of support of any kind. I scoffed indignantly at the idea that we cared about his money. Our wedding took place in the Merrill home on the first block of Commonwealth Avenue. Beforehand, I went out to Jacob Wirth’s restaurant with my six roommates and my two best friends from Commonwealth. We chose Jake Wirth’s because the waiters were proud union members. We pooled all our money, piled it in the center of the round table, asked the waiter to bring as much of their wurst, red cabbage, warm potato salad, and beer as the small heap would cover. We paid no attention to time until someone pointed out that we were now late for the ceremony. Off we sprinted, running across the Common and the Public Gardens, arriving sweaty and late. The bride’s mother wept throughout the ceremony; hers were not tears of joy. I did not care. I was married to Amy at last. I had a chance to form a family of my own. Despite having to borrow money for her tuition, and feeling an all too familiar financial pressure, I was delighted.