5

Taking It to a New Level: 1966–67

On the afternoon of November 7, 1966, I stand on the flat hood of a black car, next to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara as he completely loses his composure, jabs his finger in my chest, shouts at me and the 800-student antiwar protestors surrounding us. Our protest will generate headlines at a time when the Johnson administration had sought to show that the war still had support on the campuses.¹ Their effort, sending McNamara to Harvard, boomerangs.

When the Harvard-Radcliffe SDS steering committee heard that the man overseeing the war was coming to our university, there was no question we would organize an appropriate reception. We were determined the university should not lend even tacit support to a criminal war.

We were so very young, earnest, and sincere. We took seriously the issue of freedom of speech. We did not take the position he could not come or could not speak. Instead, we insisted that if Harvard entertained McNamara, his visit must include an open public debate on the war. If we could force a debate, we would win. If McNamara refused the debate, we would stage a dramatic protest that would provoke more discussion of the war.

We circulated a petition demanding that McNamara debate Bob Scheer, the antiwar editor of Ramparts, who would be in Cambridge at the same time. Soon we had 1,600 signatures on the petition. McNamara and his Harvard handlers refused the debate. As part of the visit, McNamara would hold small discussions with selected students in Quincy House. His exit from those was our opportunity. We thought we could turn out enough students to surround the entire block. We would stop McNamara’s car with our bodies, demanding he debate.

The day arrives. About 800 of us form a human chain around Quincy House while McNamara is inside. Prowar students have hung sheets out their windows “Welcome Mr. McNamara,” “Kill for Peace,” “Kill the Cong,” “Back Mac,” and “Napalm SDS” (along with another that reads “Black Day for Gordon Linen,” the company unwittingly providing the sheets). Speakers blare “Mack the Knife” across the courtyard.

My job is overall coordination. I have a system of runners to keep me informed as the action gets underway. We ring the building. Attempting to help the secretary to evade us, decoy cars bolt out onto the street. In the ensuing confusion, we attempt to figure out which car is the right one. On the opposite side of the block, a car carrying the secretary attempts to leave at high speed. SDS members, heedless of risk, throw themselves down in front of the car, hoping it will stop.

As McNamara recounts thirty years later in his book In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, his driver wants to drive on and over the students and McNamara insists he stop before someone is killed.² Soon—according to McNamara’s account—his car is surrounded by a milling, out of control, “mob” that rocks it and kicks it and threatens to overturn it.

I am on the other side of Quincy House from where the car is surrounded; a runner informs me that we have stopped the right car. We all rush to that side. Carrying a bullhorn, the badge of authority, I am passed through the tightly packed crowd, arriving to find that Hal Benenson, the captain of that portion of our line, has changed the plan. Hal had missed the final planning meeting. where we had all agreed that we would insist on a full public debate, peacefully blocking the car until he agreed. Now, Hal has reached an agreement with McNamara that he will take three questions and then we will let him go. The students around the car are sitting quietly in a circle three to four people deep. The rest of the 800 are pushing as close as they can, attempting to see what is happening. No one is kicking the car. No one is threatening McNamara. I am passed up onto the hood beside McNamara. I am totally flustered, not by being up on the car with the secretary of defense but by the sudden change in our plans. Standing on the car, holding the bull horn, looking out over the expectant crowd, I am unsure of what to do.

I decide to go with Hal’s commitment. This seems the only honorable path. So up on the car alongside McNamara, with his trademark hair slicked back, his tie narrow, his suit dark, his glasses large, I announce that we will take three questions and that the secretary of defense has agreed to answer them. He seems to relax a little.

The next part of the event is totally absent from McNamara’s book. I call on SDS members that I know I can count on. The first question is about the origins of the war and the Geneva Accords which promised free elections which the US never allowed. I repeat the question through the bull horn. McNamara responds, “It started in ’54 to ’55 when a million North Vietnamese flooded into South Vietnam.” “Goin’ home!” somebody shouts. He is tense and stiff. Despite the change in plans, I am starting to feel more in charge, and I call on another student whom I know will ask a good question.

He asks, “How many Vietnamese civilians are being killed and injured?”

I use the small bullhorn to repeat the question, so everyone can hear it. I turn to McNamara and ask him to share the statistics of Vietnamese civilian casualties. He answers abruptly that they are not known.

I ad lib, “Come on now, you are known for your command of numbers and statistics. Are you really saying you do not know how many civilians are being killed each day, each week, each month?”

Again, McNamara, the famed numbers wizard, answers, “I don’t know.”

I respond, “You do not know, or you do not care?”

At this point everything changes.

McNamara answers me by yelling to the crowd: “You know when I was at Berkeley, I spent four wonderful years and when I was a student, I did some of the things you are doing… . but there were two differences between you and me.”

Now he turns to me, his hands trembling, and he shouts, “I was more courteous … and I was tougher.”

To emphasize his point, he starts jabbing his forefinger at my chest, shouting, “I was tougher then and I am tougher now. I was tougher then and I am tougher now. I am tougher now!”

His spit flies in every direction, behind the glasses, his face wrinkles in either rage or fear or both. He jabs at my chest repeatedly, screaming, “Tougher then and tougher now!”

I am shocked, speechless in the face of the unexpected sight of one of the most powerful men in the world shrieking at us about how tough he is.

Everything seems to slow down. He pushes his finger again into my chest. He yells, his face contorted. It is as if standing before 800 of us, up on that car in the dull November Cambridge light, he is suddenly revealed as if naked, and we are all stunned at this shocking, intimate vision of a small man gone crazed and exposed. The finger jabs. The shrieking voice cracks. Later that evening, I will think, this is what demystification of the powerful looks like. But at that moment I am simply appalled. It’s unnerving to see the man who commands the most powerful army in the world, a person who can summon bombers or release missiles with nuclear warheads, come so easily undone, completely losing the coolness that was his hallmark.

A wedge of policemen and his protection detail sweep through the crowd, over the crowd, over me. I am knocked to the ground and the trembling secretary of defense is rushed away, into the nearest doorway and down into the warren of underground steam tunnels to “safety.” He will continue his visit to Harvard, recovering his composure and later attending a small dinner organized by the professors Richard Neustadt and Henry Kissinger, where they decided to launch the review and research project that would produce the Pentagon Papers.

The next day more than 2,000 Harvard students sign a letter to McNamara apologizing for his treatment. They excoriate us. On the surface, prowar sentiment seems dominant, and the conventional wisdom is that we had made a huge mistake. We are attacked in editorials across the state and the country as rude Cambridge rabble. The dean of the college, John Monro, sends a short but polite letter to the secretary of defense, apologizing on behalf of Harvard and ruing the lack of civility and rudeness of the protestors. He chooses not to discipline any of us, citing the need to protect freedom of speech and dissent. He and I talk about the demonstration and the logic that drove us. While he does not agree with me, the discussion is reasoned, empathetic, and substantial. Dean Monro, decent and moral, was the only administrator at Harvard during that period with whom we could have a substantive discussion. After this academic year, he will make the decision to leave his prestigious position at Harvard to go south and work at the historically Black Miles College. When he leaves, our last avenue to the Harvard administration leaves with him.

I do not share the common assessment that we have blundered. My more positive assessment is not based on stubbornness but because I see a process at work. The McNamara protest was a key step in organizing students against the war both at Harvard and across the country. Students on other campuses read the headlines and saw the national network TV coverage of what had happened when McNamara came to Harvard and knew they were not alone in their intense opposition to the war. It emboldened student protestors across the nation. Now, whenever any top administration figure attempts to visit a campus, they are met with intense protest.³

At Harvard, our actions provoked heated debate. While it seemed at first that the tide of that debate ran against us, we had an opening to discuss the war and why we opposed it with more students than ever. Again, to build the movement took more than protests. Every protest enabled more education, more engagement, more organizing.

For many students, their first step down an antiwar path started by saying “I do not agree with your actions, they were dead wrong. I wish you would choose different tactics, but I am worried about this war.” That allowed us to explain why we felt we had to do what we had done. We did not yell at people who disagreed with us. We did not write them off when they said that we were wrong. Whenever possible we sought a discussion, confident that the facts were on our side. Even among some of those who most vociferously condemned us, seeds of doubt about the war were planted. Several years later, the facts of the war, the arrogance of the Johnson administration, the agony of so many Vietnamese civilians, the rising death toll of American soldiers, our constant outreach to them—all would drive many of those same students to occupy administration buildings, refuse the draft, and fill the streets with protest.

We had taken a significant step beyond marches into disruptive direct action. We had thrown our bodies in front of that car. We had shown we were willing to take serious risks to stop an immoral war.

Several months later, UN ambassador Arthur Goldberg came to visit Harvard. Once again, we demanded a debate. This time we got qualified support from Dean Monro, who, while deploring “our threats,” decided that our request that the university encourage debate about such a controversial war was indeed right. Goldberg agreed to debate but insisted that it not be televised, nor open to anyone not part of the university community. We finally had our debate. The antiwar position was articulated by Professor Michael Walzer and my roommate and SDS leader David Loud. It was clear to us that we prevailed that night. Losing that debate and countless others across the nation had not the slightest impact on the administration’s willingness to prosecute the war. We realized that our country was committed to a war that was a crime. It fell to us to stop it.

One ironic historical footnote to this whole episode: the graduate student in charge of McNamara’s visit was Barney Frank. His mentors in the Harvard political science department planned for him to use the successful management of the visit as springboard to a job in the Pentagon. We ruined that, and in later years I would remind Congressman Frank that we had saved his career. Despite the validity of that observation, he was never pleased.

The war intensified. Buddhists demonstrated. Political unrest rocked the American-supported South Vietnamese government. American forces increased to more than 385,000 soldiers. By the year’s end, 6,000 Americans had died and another 30,000 had been wounded.⁴ With each passing month, more and more Americans heard of someone who died or was wounded in the tall elephant grass, in the grim perimeter of Tan Son Nhut or other American outposts.

Those of us opposing the war now placed Vietnam in the sweep of recent US interventions where the government had lied to us: Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, the Dominican Republic. We recognized that we were wading upstream in a river of lies.

One evening in the cold months of early 1967, my phone rang. A strange voice obviously from New York asked:

“Is this Michael Ansara?”

“Yes.”

“This is Sol Stern from Ramparts. Bob Scheer says you are our man in Boston.”

Rather surprised by this news, I respond hesitantly, “Well … okay.”

“Listen I need you to do some work for us right away. I cannot tell you what it is about. I am calling you from a phone booth. Will you do it?”

“Well, what kind of work and are you willing to pay me for it?”

“It is research into two Boston based foundations. We will pay you $500.”

That was a lot of money. I had no idea whatsoever how to research foundations, but I thought, what the hell, Amy and I could really use the money.

“Sure. What exactly do you want me to do?”

“I can’t tell you anything more than that you should find everything you can about the Sidney & Esther Rabb Foundation and the Independence Foundation. They are based in Boston. I will call you in a few days. You cannot call me. You cannot tell anyone what you are doing. You cannot mention the name Ramparts. Can I count on you?”

“I guess so. Sure.”

Ramparts, under the leadership of the flamboyant Warren Hinkle, was the principal popular publication of the New Left. Glossy, well designed, with a staff willing to tackle any subject, its circulation soon outstripped the staid Nation and New Republic. Bob Scheer, the editor, ran for Congress on an antiwar platform. I had met him at national antiwar conferences. He had been our choice to debate McNamara.

I had no idea what they were hoping I might find, nor how to look for it. Since foundations seemed to fall in the realm of professional fundraisers, I reached out to George Sommaripa, a Democratic fundraiser, who I had gotten to know during the Adams campaign. Tall, rail thin, and frail because of childhood polio, George had a burning intensity. He and David Bird had founded Bison Associates, a consulting company. David, short, compact, with a large head and bald dome, had grown up in the forty-room Bird family home in East Walpole. His father, Charles Sumner Bird, Jr., was the scion of Bird & Sons, a roofing and paper company founded in 1795.⁵ Frequently when I went to see George, David would drop in and sing “The International” in five or six different languages, laughing at the end and making fun of me. At various times, David mentioned in a totally offhand fashion that he had worked for the CIA.

If I wanted to find information about foundations, George explained, I should go to the IRS and say I was working for him. I headed off to the IRS in the hideous federal office building next to Boston City Hall. I talked with a nameless clerk who was officious, rude, and adamant that I was entitled to no information.

When I reported my failure to George, he was furious. The regional IRS director was a Democratic appointee and an acquaintance. George immediately called and read him the Riot Act, starting with, “How can you treat one of my guys so poorly!” George sent me back with a letter on his firm’s stationary. Upon arriving at the IRS offices, George’s letter and call changed everything. I was politely ushered into a back room. Soon there was a knock on the door and the same harried clerk, who obviously had been yelled at, entered, and plopped down several large files and without a word, left me alone with them.

George had explained that only the top pages of form 990 were available to the public. Going through the folders, I quickly realized that they had given me the entire tax returns for the last three years for each of the foundations.

If I proceeded to look through the entire files, including the many pages that were not public, I would most likely be breaking federal law. I never hesitated.

The files revealed a clear pattern. Both foundations were vanilla family charities with donations to very local organizations. Amid the many small grants, there were large grants that leapt off the pages, grants to national and international organizations. Most of the income came from the families that created the foundations, yet there were a series of nonfamily contributions that matched exactly the large donations to national and international organizations. A donation of $50,000 would come in from a nonfamily source, and $50,000 would go out to one of the anomalous organizations—a rather obvious pass-through of the funds.

I quickly compiled a list of organizations that had received money and a list of sources for the passed-though amounts. Some of both were based in Massachusetts. I went back to the front desk and asked for information on those. Not aware or not caring that he was giving me the entire files, the IRS clerk silently brought them to me. Again, there was a clear pattern of money being passed through. The list of organizations receiving the money kept growing: the National Student Association, the Asia Society, the International Student Conference, the American Friends of Africa, American Friends of the Middle East, the Congress of Cultural Freedom, the American Fund for Free Jurists, the Independent Research Service, on and on. The money being passed through originated with a series of obscure foundations or funds run out of law offices around the country. The officers and directors for those originating funds were almost all lawyers. I needed to understand who they were.

In the quiet of the Boston Public Library, I pored over the Martindale and Hubbell directory listings for the law firms and the biographies of their many lawyers. I kept searching for something in common, some pattern. The only commonality among the law firms was that a founder or senior partner of each had served with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II. The OSS was the direct predecessor to the CIA.

I realized I was looking at a massive money laundering scheme by the CIA to illegally fund numerous domestic and international organizations. I counted more than a dozen funding sources and one hundred nonprofit organizations receiving the funds. I was stunned—stunned at the scope and shocked that it should be this easy to unravel. I wanted to verify what I had uncovered before talking again to Sol, so I asked to meet with David, the only former CIA officer I knew.

He heard me out as I ran through a summary of what I had found and I asked if that seemed plausible to him. Then without saying anything to me, he picked up the phone, dialed, and proceeded to repeat the essence of what I had told him to someone at the end of the line. Hanging up the phone, David looked at me: “Yup, you have it absolutely right.” I did not need to ask him who he had been talking to. I did not think about the probability that he had just warned the CIA about what I had uncovered.

I could barely wait for Sol’s call. When he finally rang, I rattled on and on and he had to repeatedly ask me to slow down. I never explained exactly how I discovered all the information I was providing.

Sol said that he had been hoping that I would be able to confirm information Ramparts had received that the National Student Association (NSA) had been funded by the CIA for years. The funding started to counter Soviet-funded student groups active internationally. There were vicious ideological fights at international conferences of young leaders from around the world, many of whom would become the rulers of their countries. Soon the CIA was using the NSA’s international programs to gather information on those future leaders and, where possible, recruit some of them. Over the years, the operation at the NSA expanded and became an important covert arm of the CIA. It was clear to me that this was only one part of a much larger pattern of funding, infiltration, and manipulation, all of which was illegal.

Soon I was in New York meeting with Hinkle, Sol, and Scheer, amazed to be staying at the famed Algonquin Hotel, uncomfortable that the waiters would not even let me pour my own beer. The Ramparts team drew the erroneous conclusion that they had found a crackerjack investigative reporter. I joined a team of researchers including my old SDS pal Lee Webb and a skilled, young reporter, Judith Colburn, who had been doing parallel research. They had deployed investigative skill, whereas I had relied on blind luck. Together we raced to follow up all the leads.

While I was buried in the details of research, a major drama was unfolding around the release of the information. To control the narrative, the CIA and the NSA thought they might be able to defang Ramparts by beating them to the punch. The NSA would hold a press conference announcing that there had been some funding in the past but that they had ended it. Once Hinkle and Scheer got wind of the possible NSA preemptive strike, they realized that Ramparts could not publish in time to beat the press conference. In those days, it took weeks to design, print, and distribute the magazine. Their way to break the story and get credit for it was to make a deal with the New York Times. Ramparts would get a full-page ad in the Times containing the NSA story, credit for breaking the larger story, and advance publicity about the upcoming issue. In exchange, Ramparts turned over all its research to the Times, including mine.

Following innumerable trails, pursuing ever expanding leads, I was only superficially aware of the “firestorm” that the Ramparts exposé unleashed. The crisis went all the way to the Oval Office, where top national security people and LBJ debated how to deal with the mess. An extensive US covert operation was mounted targeting Ramparts.⁶ Soon there would be attempts to cut off funding, to get the IRS to strike at the magazine; there would be illegal “black bag” break-ins, and every effort made to discredit Ramparts, link it to Soviet espionage efforts, and undermine it in every possible way. One of the CIA agents assigned to destroy Ramparts is quoted decades later by Peter Richardson in his history of the magazine A Bomb in Every Issue, as saying, “I had all sorts of dirty tricks to hurt their circulation and financing. The people running Ramparts were vulnerable to blackmail. We had awful things in mind, some of which we carried off.”⁷ The campaign to end the magazine, or at least severely damage its credibility, however, did not stop Ramparts from continuing to publish.

The Ramparts stories set off a chain of discoveries and revelations. The investigative journalist Seymour (Sy) Hersh, of the My Lai massacre fame, was one of several reporters beginning to pry the cover off the massive web of secret operations that the CIA had been carrying out for years. Then came Watergate and more revelations of a different sort. All these revelations resulted in a Senate investigation led by the iconoclastic young senator Frank Church. The report of that committee still makes for chilling reading. For the first time, the overthrow of the elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, in Iran and of the elected president, Jacobo Árbenz, of Guatemala, attempts to kill Fidel Castro, US involvement in the overthrow of the president of Chile, Salvador Allende, and more, were all officially confirmed as CIA operations. As well they documented years of domestic abuses including those of COINTELPRO, the FBI’s effort to go after Black and antiwar leaders. The FBI and CIA had covertly opened the mail of Americans, illegally broken into homes, lied and smeared activists, and attempted to break up marriages. The agency experimented on Americans, including large numbers of prison inmates and military personnel, in an attempt to discover the key to mind control. One American, part of an experiment testing LSD, jumped out a window to his death. The Church Committee began revealing the national security state and some of its most closely kept secrets.⁸

Some spun the narrative of a rogue agency, an agency out of control. That was fiction. In 1976, a more critical draft congressional report, which was never officially released, stated, “All evidence in hand suggests that the CIA, far from being out of control, has been utterly responsive to the instructions of the President and the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.”⁹

The national security state fought back. Using the assassination of the CIA station chief in Greece, whose name had never been released by the Church Committee, Donald Rumsfeld, then president Gerald Ford’s chief of staff, and Dick Cheney, then deputy chief of staff, supported by the CIA director William Colby and Kissinger, mounted an assault on the committee.¹⁰ They were able to preserve the CIA and its abilities to operate in the dark. Over time Congress returned to the habit of abrogating its responsibilities.

My new part-time position with Ramparts meant that Amy and I, for the first time, had a steady income. For thousands of young people reading it, this story confirmed that the government lied and lied and lied. It broke its own laws. All this provided even more context for understanding and opposing the American effort in Vietnam.

Over the next years ever more young people would realize that our government was lying to them. Soon millions of us would assume that anything our leaders said was a lie. Some would start to make the dangerous assumption that since our leaders were lying so often, they should trust the opposite of whatever they said.

The revelations of the CIA’s covert funding scheme confirmed many young people’s sense of betrayal and disillusionment. It also convinced me that unearthing the secrets of the government and elites was important to our movement building.

We are steadily being enveloped by the war; it is the ever-present fact of our lives. We go to parties. We dance. We make love. We study. We work on other issues. But always, clinging to us, a desperate awareness that bombs are dropping, people are dying. We seem to be the only people determined to stop the senseless violence. We understand now that our government is lying, every day, about what is happening. We understand that it is up to us to force the government to end the killing. Our support on colleges is increasing. So is our determination.

We have created room for dissent. Now we must do more. We call for a shift from protest to resistance. Resistance to us means upping the level of opposition. Seeking ways to throw ourselves onto the gears of the machine and actually stop it from functioning, if only briefly. We see the war machine’s tentacles everywhere, even on our campuses, and we are determined to expose and find ways to stop them. Some of us will defy the draft. Some will focus on our schools. All of us will march and march and march. We are now determined to shatter the unity of the country.

The demonstration against McNamara produced headlines across the country and lead stories on the nightly TV news. Protests were held regularly now on most American campuses. Despite our increasing protests and revelations, the war machine rumbled on. There were now prisoners of war in North Vietnamese jails as some of our endless waves of bombers were shot down. The bombers kept flying, darkening the Asian sky. The bombs kept dropping. Six weeks after our protest with McNamara, the entire village of Cau Dat near Hanoi was leveled by our bombers.¹¹ The day after Christmas, 1966, McNamara’s Department of Defense was forced to admit that civilians may have been inadvertently killed in our massive bombings of North Vietnam. That announcement was followed by an offensive the next day in the Mekong Delta in southernmost Vietnam, with hundreds of tons of bombs and fiery hurricanes of napalm.¹² The war, the bombing, the burning, the dying went on without end, without a break. The casualties mounted.

In late February, the United States launched the largest military offensive of the war so far. Operation Junction City involved twenty-two US and four South Vietnamese battalions. After almost three months of fighting, the United States announced the end of Junction City and the body count: 2,728 Vietcong killed and thirty-four captured. American losses were 282 killed and 1,576 wounded.¹³ To us those were not numbers—they were once people who woke up with hopes, took showers, made love, made jokes, hoped to make families. Now they were dead. Now they were wounded, maimed. Their lives ended or splintered. Increasingly they inhabited both my waking and dreaming. If we do not do something, more will die. What do we do?

That spring of 1967, opposition to the war was increasing in quantum leaps. Quite different, if overlapping, strategies for opposing the war were emerging. Some were focused on campus organizing and campus demonstrations, others on national mobilization through ever larger national marches. Others were trying to figure out how to take the antiwar movement off campus. And there was the question of the 1968 elections. Could we run candidates? Should they run within the Democratic Party? New organizations were springing up such as one hundred clergy who had spoken out against the war and created a National Emergency Committee of Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. A New Politics organization was formed to look at how to create an electoral expression of the antiwar and civil rights movements.

The Spring Mobilization in New York City on April 15 was by far the largest demonstration so far, as somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 people flooded the streets. We brought thousands down from all the SDS chapters across New England. The snaking, chanting mass of people stretched from Central Park to the UN offices. Nearby seventy-five young men burned their draft cards. Simultaneously another 75,000 people marched in San Francisco.

At the UN, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dr. Benjamin Spock, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s (SCLC) James Bevel addressed the crowds. Bevel took everyone by surprise, even the other leaders of the Mobilization on the stage, when he announced that there would be an even bigger march in the fall in Washington. At that moment, the October 1967 March on the Pentagon was born.

Major changes were taking place in the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. King came out forcefully and eloquently against the war in Vietnam and participated in antiwar marches. He faced harsh criticism from liberals who thought he should restrict his focus to domestic civil rights issues. Instead, King spoke out against the war and also raised the challenge of economic inequality. SNCC’s Stokely Carmichael called for Black Power, echoing Malcolm X by defining it as the coming together of Black people to fight for their liberation “by any means necessary.” SNCC wanted to cast off its dependence on white people. In December of 1966 SNCC asked all white staff and volunteers to leave the organization. A quiet wave of dismay rolled its way up to me in Cambridge.

At a conference in New Haven, I sat outside with a SNCC organizer, Ivanhoe Donaldson whom I considered a friend. I asked him what the decision meant for white people like me who had long loved the organization. The idea that I no longer had a role in the fight alongside him was leaving me disoriented. I expected the usual: go organize white people. Instead, Ivanhoe took his time, looking at me obviously and carefully.

“Michael, have you looked in the mirror recently?” Long pause.

“Look at yourself. Kinky hair. Thick lips. Dark complexion. When are you going to stop hating yourself and accept that you are a brother? When are you going to stop trying to pass? C’mon my brother!”

We both burst out laughing. He gave me a slap on the shoulder. But underneath the jokes, I felt a growing gap, a new sense of loss, unsaid but real nonetheless. It would have been easy for me, raised to think of myself as Syrian Lebanese, to consider myself inextricably linked to the struggles of people of color. It would be nice to slide into thinking that somehow, I was indeed some sort of “brother.” But I knew I had all the advantages of a second-generation American with white skin. My experience as a young teenager in the Civil Rights Movement had shaped me profoundly, enriched me, created a powerful identification with “the movement.” Now the ebullient hope, the dream, of an interracial movement for social change, that had lifted me and so many others, sustained us, nourished us, was deflating.

H. Rap Brown became chairman of SNCC and, declaring “violence was as American as apple pie,” renounced nonviolence. The Black Panthers of Oakland were getting national attention for openly carrying guns as they monitored the Oakland police, a force long known for its racism. Then in the hot summer of 1967, America’s cities exploded into riot and violence.

A Black cab driver is beaten by cops in Newark. Newark’s Black community has had enough; things are supposed to be changing. Newark erupts. In Cairo, Illinois, Robert Hunt, a young Black serviceman home on leave is found dead in a cell. The police say suicide. The Black community in Cairo thinks otherwise. Things are supposed to be changing. Cairo erupts.¹⁴ In Detroit, the police raid a welcome home party for three Black returning Vietnam vets at an illegal after-hours drinking spot known locally as a blind pig. Detroit explodes.¹⁵

In Boston, one hundred members of Mothers for Adequate Welfare, the organization that had grown out of Noel Day’s Dudley Street Action Center, sit in at a state welfare office. The police clear them out and attempt to violently disburse the crowd outside, provoking a sustained riot.

In city after city across America, African Americans are fed up with the endemic unemployment, constant police brutality, unfulfilled promises, and dreams deferred too long. Refusing the heritage of thousands of lynchings, unafraid in their rage, tens of thousands take to the streets to vent their anger. The newspapers scream headlines about 159 “race riots.” We see them as insurrections. While there is looting and arson, we see the explosions as uprisings, efforts to throw off white supremacy and the long heritage of slavery. The press and white politicians want to paint them as wanton, directionless and self-destructive. We want to see them as a rebellion. The National Guard and the Airborne occupy America’s cities.

Like most white activists I feel relegated to the sidelines. There is no role for us. There is a sense that something profound is being lost. The bonds of hope that united us, Black and white, in the Civil Rights Movement are fraying. The beloved community is no longer the dream. Anger has replaced redemptive love.

At the same time the war in Vietnam dragged on. The war that Hunt in Cairo was on leave from. The war that three Black soldiers in Detroit had come home from, celebrating their safe return in that blind pig. The war that was killing Black soldiers more than white. The war that increasingly haunted us.

That spring, I was completing my senior year and thus, despite devoting all my time to stopping the war and occasional research for Ramparts, I had to write a thesis. I chose to write about the peasant revolt in England in 1381. I explored the role of culture and consciousness in shaping popular revolt. Why did the revolt break out when it did, since many of the conditions that underlay it had existed for years? I was sharply critical of traditional Marxist interpretations that I saw as overly deterministic. Distracted, I left the actual writing to the last minute. Although I knew it was not great, I thought I had produced a decent thesis. The new conservative head of the History and Literature Department was delighted to inform me that my effort had received the lowest grade in the history of Harvard College. I don’t know if that was true, but it was clear that my grade was due as much to his and the two readers’ dislike of my politics as to the quality of the thesis.

No matter—I was not bound for any career that Professor John L. Clive could take pleasure in ruining. I was to be a full-time organizer for the rest of my life. After two more perfunctory classes in the fall, I would graduate cum laude in general studies. I was eager to leave Harvard behind.

For weeks that spring, I had been participating in discussions with a small group of younger faculty members about where the antiwar movement should go next. I argued strenuously that just as we had organized students through education, leaflets, meeting in the dorms, and then campus-wide meetings leading to actions, now we needed to do the hard work of reaching out to communities. I knew the divide that I had experienced firsthand in the foray in the meat-packing plants was as strong as ever. However, in college communities and in the more educated suburbs, there were signs of growing disenchantment with the war. Perhaps we could organize in those neighborhoods now.

Gar Alperovitz, a former congressional staffer now at Harvard, was the moving force behind these discussions. He had started meeting with Marty Peretz, Michael Walzer, and Chester Hartman, all young faculty, around the idea of something he was calling a “teach-out,” similar to a campus “teach-in” but for the public instead of students. They asked me to join their discussions, usually in Marty’s small office.

I asked David and Hal to join the discussions with me. Finding the “teach-out” idea nebulous, we argued instead for a summer project modeled after the Mississippi Freedom Summer. We should set a goal to knock on a million doors that coming summer. After weeks of discussion, everyone agreed. We would try to recruit and train as many local organizers as possible and have them recruit as many local volunteers as possible. It would be left up to the local groups to decide exactly what their activities would be. They could do draft counseling, launch local referenda against the war, educate, circulate petitions, and organize. They could prepare for the elections. At the end of the summer, the project would end. We reasoned it would get the support of various organizations, including SDS, if it were not seen as a permanent and competing organization.

We persuaded National SDS to participate in what we now called “Vietnam Summer.” SDS provided many, perhaps most, of the organizers and volunteers. Marty and Gar raised the funds. Rapidly other groups joined in: the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), SNCC, the American Friends Service Committee, and Clergy & Laymen. I recruited Lee Webb, the former SDS leader, to be the codirector.

Vietnam Summer was officially launched on April 23 with a press conference with Dr. King, Scheer, and Dr. Spock. After the press conference, King and his aide Andy Young met with us and there was discussion of a possible presidential run by King, although he and Young were highly skeptical. The next evening Dr. King spoke to an overflow crowd in Jordan Hall calling for an end to the war and urging volunteers to sign up for Vietnam Summer.

The fundraising efforts flourished. There were posters by significant artists. Benefit concerts. Vietnam Summer raised far more money than I had thought remotely possible.

The summer-long effort embodied the antiwar movement of that year: large, divided, diffuse, confused but determined and increasingly angry. Nevertheless, thousands of antiwar activists and students were trained how to knock on doors. Less than a year later, many of those staff and volunteers would be in New Hampshire knocking on doors for Gene McCarthy.

Vietnam Summer ended up with 700 paid staff members and over 20,000 volunteers working in hundreds of local projects across the country.¹⁶ There were referenda campaigns, local rallies, community meetings, and hundreds of thousands of doors were knocked on. At the end of September, as agreed upon, Vietnam Summer shut its doors.

However, I missed all of it. I had decided to spend that summer taking up an invitation to join the Ramparts team in San Francisco. Neither Amy nor I had ever been to California. Ramparts, inaccurately believing I was a crackerjack researcher, offered me a good-paying job as associate editor. We desperately needed the money. I had borrowed from friends to pay for Amy’s tuition at Brandeis and I needed to pay them back. Both of us were attracted to a break from the nonstop organizing and a change of location.

While 20,000 volunteers were knocking on doors across America, that summer of 1967 would come not to be known for their remarkable antiwar work. It would primarily be known as America’s Long Hot Summer of riots. Also, that summer of ‘67 was the summer the “counterculture” burst into prominence and its epicenter was San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury. Quite unintentionally Amy and I joined the thousands of young people making the trip to San Francisco for the “Summer of Love.”

Soon after 100,000 young people descended on New York City for the “Mobilization,” another 100,000 headed for San Francisco.¹⁷ There was some overlap between the two groups; however, the counterculture explorers tended to eschew politics and organizing in favor of music, drugs, and sex. They were more drawn to “be-ins” than marches. In the media, all of us were conflated: the youth of America was in revolt and for many older Americans we were all rather revolting.

I loved being in San Francisco for that summer. Each morning, I would walk through Chinatown, down Jackson Street, often stopping for dim sum, food I had never previously encountered. Continuing to walk while eating a small pearl of a dumpling or a soft bun, I would pass by City Lights bookstore, where on my return trip I would stop and soak up being in the place where Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Rexroth, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti often stood.

Near City Lights was an astonishing Chinese restaurant that Amy and I frequented. It was our introduction to Peking duck and moo shu pork. At twenty, we felt grown up, so sophisticated. That feeling only increased when we went to Sunday brunch at Sam’s of Tiburon, sitting on a long pier jutting out into the bay, a slight breeze riffing the water, the bright sun forcing us to wear sunglasses, drinking gin fizzes and having steak and eggs, people-watching, delighting when the tiny actress Julie Christie and her entourage sat only a few tables away. Early on, Amy’s sister Catherine brought us to a concert on Mt. Tamalpais with Janis Joplin, barefoot, big voiced, wearing a large, floppy hat, singing on the small outdoor stage, the scent of pot wafting through sun splashed mountain fields.

We were young and feeling full of ourselves. We enjoyed the newness of everything that summer, the relief from the pressure of organizing, the chance to explore a strange city and each other, the smell of eucalyptus, the riot of color in the Berkeley rose garden, the foggy coast, the endless soundtrack of new music, the swirling political and journalistic scene centered on Ramparts. Each day, while Amy worked in a “head shop,” I worked with Scheer and Hinkle in the Rampart’s office. Felt the menacing presence of Eldridge Cleaver. Talked with the young Jan Wenner about his dream of a magazine devoted to rock and roll.

Amy and I would head to Bill Graham’s crowded Fillmore for sets by Eric Clapton and Cream, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver, or the Steve Miller band. We were amused at the antics of the hippies and intrigued by the anarchist collective of street theater actors and activists calling themselves the Diggers. We would wander wide-eyed through the crowds of stoned and tripping young people in the “be-ins” at Golden Gate Park, the ubiquitous bongo drumming cluster, the kite flyers, past couples furiously having sex under a ragged blanket, the smell of incense and pot mixing on the summer air. We would take in the street theater of the Mime Troupe with their intense political performances and radical sensibilities. We were surrounded by the sounds of countless musicians playing in the park, playing on street corners. Music, incense, young people everywhere. It was all a spectacle for us. We were not hippies. We were political activists, determined to change the country. While we felt a certain raw tribal kinship with those rebelling through dropping out, the countercultural path was not for us. But for that summer, instead of the constant medley of late-night meetings and endless organizing, we attended parties. One in Oakland was particularly memorable as we found ourselves dancing to recordings of Aretha Franklin singing “Respect” alongside the top leadership of the Black Panther Party.

The summer came to an end all too soon. The editors at Ramparts assumed I would stay. “No one leaves California,” they would say. “No one leaves Ramparts, man—we are the most exciting magazine in the country, and you have a great future with us.” But journalism was not my calling. Amy needed to get back to school and I needed to get back to opposing the war.

Throughout 1967, one hundred American soldiers a week were dying in Vietnam and more Vietnamese civilians than could be counted were being wounded, displaced, or killed. The United States kept pouring in more troops. That July as I was enjoying San Francisco, the US general William Westmoreland requested another 200,000 American boys in addition to the 475,000 already scheduled to be sent to Vietnam.¹⁸

I had helped conceive and plan Vietnam Summer and then I had skipped out to make money and have fun in San Francisco. My summer of love had been different from those of the thousands of flower children who had poured into that city, but it was no less self-indulgent.

I reached an agreement with Ramparts that I would continue to work part-time for them for what seemed to me an astronomical amount of money. That money would support us. I was eager to continue to organize against the war—a job that paid nothing.

While Vietnam Summer carried out its grassroots work, the attempts to create an insurgent politics, a “New Politics,” moved forward haltingly. The exact nature of such a “New Politics” was vague and ill-defined.

While many of the new generation of SDS activists were not interested in electoral politics, I did not think that participating in elections needed to be at odds with local organizing or direct action. I saw them all as different aspects of our struggle. Lacking a coherent strategy, I was for anything that might work.

I doubted that the time was right for running a national presidential campaign, however. I thought it was a given in that summer of 1967 that the next year LBJ would be the incumbent nominee of the Democratic Party. I assumed he would be unassailable in the primaries. If we wanted a national antiwar ticket on the November ballot, it would have to be through a new third party, which struck me as an unrealistic prospect. Working in the Ramparts offices, staying in touch with Vietnam Summer and SDS leaders, I was in constant discussions about the possibility of a King/Spock ticket. I thought it would be more effective to select congressional districts where we could run insurgent candidates who had a chance of winning.

At the end of August, I flew with Scheer to attend the National Conference for a New Politics (NCNP). This was an ambitious effort to bring together Black organizations, the predominately white antiwar movement, the New Left, and liberal Democrats to create a new political expression that would encompass all of us. The steering committee included Paul Booth of SDS, Julian Bond of SNCC, SANE’s Dr. Spock, and Simon Casady, the president of the powerful California Democratic Council.

Skeptical but intrigued, I joined the more than 2,000 delegates representing more than 200 different organizations in Chicago.¹⁹ We met against a backdrop of insurrections in the urban heart of America. Cities were burning. SNCC leaders embraced Black Power. The Panthers had burst onto the national consciousness. White people who had supported the Civil Rights Movement were confused and hurt as they were asked to leave the organizations they had supported for so long. Still, in advance of the conference, Black leaders, including Bond, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Floyd McKissick had written an open letter calling for continued cooperation and political alliance between Black activists and white progressives.

The antiwar movement at this point was already an amorphous sprawling effort going in many different directions, from draft resistance to marches to local referenda to a very few insurgent candidates. There had only been a handful of attempts by the antiwar movement to enter the electoral arena. The robust but ultimately unsuccessful primary campaign of Scheer in the Bay Area in 1966 was one of the exceptions.

All the dysfunction of the movements of 1967 was on naked display as the conference rapidly splintered along racial lines. There was no agreement on direction, strategy, or tactics. Dr. King gave a rather disappointing keynote address. Bond appeared briefly and then vanished.

Early on, Black nationalist delegates walked out of the conference. Another group of remaining Black delegates formed an angry and aggrieved Black caucus and met separately. They framed the key issue of the moment as whether white people would finally accept Black leadership. They promulgated a thirteen-point list of “nonnegotiable demands” that had to be accepted before they would return to the conference. They demanded 50 percent of the votes at the conference, support for reparations, and condemnation of the “imperialist Zionist” Six Day War and Israel. They sent speakers into the main hall to denounce white liberals. There was a nasty undercurrent of criticism of the “Jewish” nature of so many of the white leaders. Jewish leaders who supported Israel—and even those who were critical of Israel—felt uncomfortable with what they saw as a growing anti-Semitism. Many Jews had been the very first to march with the Civil Rights Movement. Now they felt a stinging and very personal rejection.

Peretz played a major role in convening and funding the conference. He was furious with the Black caucus. This would be the start of a long journey that would leave Marty viciously opposed to those on the left and a fanatical defender of Israel. Peretz and Scheer hauled me aside. I was the perfect go-between. My mother came from a Jewish family and my father was Syrian Lebanese. I knew many of the leaders of the Black caucus. Yes, they told me, I was perfect. Scheer and Peretz charged me with negotiating with the Black caucus to find better language that could keep the conference from totally splintering.

I had absolutely no idea what to say or do. I told them so. They insisted. Soon I found myself shuttling back and forth between the Black caucus and the white leadership.

That sweltering summer in Chicago, I could no more bridge the gap at that dysfunctional conference than all the mediators over the years have done in the Middle East. I went back and forth. There were tweaks and modifications to this sentence and that paragraph. Many Jewish delegates felt pain and anger; Black leaders were confident of their perspective of internationalism, anti-imperialism, and Black Power. The breach could not be healed. Liberal and radical Jews now felt they were being cast aside after years of dedication to civil rights. Black leaders were not interested in being subordinated to the wishes of white people, even those who had marched with them.

In the end, amid chaos and confusion, the white delegates accepted the demands of the Black caucus. The conference led nowhere. Many Black delegates left convinced that the white left was attempting to use them. Many white delegates left angry, hurt, or determined to shed their “white skin privilege” and look to Black leaders for direction. I left confused but clear that no new national political formulation could emerge from this dysfunctional effort.

The NCNP conference would be seen over time as a farce. The failure it symbolized was a tragedy. The movements of the 1960s were unable to create an effective and lasting electoral political expression; that failure would cripple American politics for years. In a few short months, the presidential campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy would build on the antiwar movement and directly on Vietnam Summer. It would not, however, draw the support of the Civil Rights Movement and of Black activists. Nor would it have the whole-hearted support of SDS and the bulk of the New Left.

The failure of the antiwar movement to be sophisticated enough to both embrace protest outside the electoral arena and at the same time insurgent candidates within it, would be a costly mistake.

Many of the most experienced antiwar and New Left organizers disdained the electoral arena. That would carry down the years as many of us became community organizers and stayed outside of elections. In those same years, many elections would be decided by such small margins that field organizing could have made the difference. Right-wing forces entrenched themselves in the National Rifle Association, evangelical and Catholic churches, right-to-life groups, small business associations, and conservative women’s groups. They would use locally rooted organizations and cause-based groups to power their electoral efforts. On the left there would be nothing comparable. With the unions under constant attack and steadily declining, the right would often out organize the center left, winning close elections that could have been swung the other way, starting with the election of Richard Nixon in 1968.

The divisions between white progressives and Black radicals would hurt the efforts of both. That summer’s conference could never have succeeded but the fault lines it revealed were tragic and long lasting. The nation was about to enter a period of unimaginable crisis and upheaval. And we were not preparing our movements to lead.