7
1968
1968, one year which seems the length of ten. 1968, year of hope, year of blood, year of upheaval, year of historic inflection, year of firestorms, year of surprises, year of lost opportunities.
1968, a year in which history hinged, a year that rocked the foundations of societies around the world, from Paris to Prague, from Berlin to Mexico to Washington. We live it; we experience it. We think we are driving historic change when we are bobbing like small corks on the surface, driven furiously by the maelstrom.
The new year commenced with indictments. Dr. Benjamin Spock, the person so many of our mothers turned to for guidance; the reverend William Sloan Coffin, chaplain at Yale; Mitch Goodman, a writer; Marcus Raskin, one-time disarmament expert in the John F. Kennedy administration; and Michael Ferber, a friend from Boston draft resistance work, the “Boston Five,” were indicted by a grand jury in Boston for urging young men to resist the draft, as many of us were doing every day.1 Prison seemed increasingly possible for many of us.
On the twenty-first day of the new year, the nightly news started with coverage of the fighting at the encircled American air base at Khe Sanh. Lyndon B. Johnson, haunted by the catastrophic French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, told his generals, “I don’t want any damn Dinbinfoo [sic].”2
On the thirtieth, Amy and I celebrated my twenty-first birthday.
At half past midnight on the last day of January, in Vietnam the Tet Offensive was launched; by 2:45 a.m. the US embassy in Saigon had been invaded and held for seven hours. There was fierce fighting, devastating fighting, door to door, in city after city. We all watched on television as the Vietcong, whom our military leaders had said were close to defeat, fought vicious battles. It went on and on, savage, bloody, remarkable, for days and then weeks. Cities devastated. Blood flowed in the streets, flowing into American living rooms on the nightly news.
Writing of the battle for Ben Tre, Peter Arnett of the Associated Press quoted an American officer’s iconic lines that summed up so very much of the war: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”3
Less attention was paid to Czechoslovakia, where reformer Alexander Dubček was elected as the first secretary of the Communist Party.
Day after day, the entire globe increasingly seemed caught up in a struggle between the old and the young, between a tired, bloody present and a vastly different future. In Prague, the reformists challenged Soviet domination and orthodoxy. In New Hampshire, the antiwar senator Eugene McCarthy and a legion of young doorknockers challenged Johnson and suddenly, Vietnam was the most important issue in the Democratic primaries. On the right, Alabama’s governor George Wallace, he of “Segregation now. Segregation tomorrow. And segregation forever,” campaigned as an independent drawing large and very angry and very white crowds. The people turning out to cheer him were experiencing profound change and did not like it.
The first signs of spring arrived in Cambridge. The bulbs pushed up through the soil. We, too, experienced small shoots of hope, slender and tentative. Still, we could not shake the iron smell of blood. We kept replaying in our minds the Tet Offensive and the gruesome battle for Hue City that had gone on and on, the casualties horrific on all sides.
Undeniably though, spring was coming. LBJ’s challenger, McCarthy, surged, along with antiwar sentiment, and almost won the New Hampshire primary. Robert F. Kennedy finally took the plunge and announced he would run for president. He campaigned against the war and for a vision of economic justice that appealed to both Black and white, working and poor families. Still, he and McCarthy were not radical enough for us.
Shockingly, President Johnson announced: “I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office—the presidency of your country … Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”4
We could hardly believe it. Johnson announced a unilateral reduction in the bombing of North Vietnam and called for peace negotiations. Perhaps the war would actually end. Hope flared, brief, a match struck in the dark.
Ramparts wanted me to write a book on the vast network of CIA funding. I assembled a small research team, including Jon Weiner in Cambridge and Danny Schechter, in London. When they proposed sending me to Europe to conduct research, I jumped at the chance, especially since it would allow me to connect with student leaders over there—and because Amy and I still needed the money.
I was done with Harvard. Even though my formal graduation ceremony would be with the rest of the class at the end of spring, I had completed all my course requirements.
My first time traveling to Europe was a whirlwind twenty-one days over March and early April. I did Ramparts research in the day and in the evenings met with student groups to explore how better to coordinate our activities. In those three weeks I hit London, Geneva, Bonn, Frankfurt, both East and West Berlin, Copenhagen, Oslo, and Helsinki. From there a quick stop in Paris, then back to London, and home. I visited no museums; I did no sightseeing. I spent each of the twenty-one days with Danny Schechter. Danny was insecure, boisterous, a consummate schmoozer, a complete charmer. His pudgy round face lit up when he was with people. He was completely self-centered but in such a fast-talking, humorous, charming manner that one could not help but forgive and enjoy him. We dashed from city to city. Decades later we would discover that James Angleton, the chief of the CIA’s counterintelligence efforts, was receiving daily reports on our travels.
In London at the very start of the trip, Danny and I joined an anti–Vietnam War march with 25,000 people swelling into the streets heading to the American embassy in Grosvenor Square. Danny maneuvered us close behind Venessa Redgrave, tall, elegant with a symbolic bandage around her head, and British antiwar leader Tariq Ali, who presented a petition to the embassy. We left and only read later of intense fighting between police and protestors.
In Berlin, I found myself in a small apartment, filled with books, talking with a shaggy-haired leader of the German Socialist Student Union (whose German initials were conveniently SDS), Rudi Dutchke. I found him thoughtful, cogent, compelling. The German SDS was the student wing of the SDP, the Social Democratic Party. While from a far richer and different history than our SDS, it was very much a New Left student organization. Late afternoon light filled the apartment, accenting how devoid of color it was, except for the colors of the covers of books everywhere. I felt an instant kinship, a connection with both Rudi and his American-born wife Gretchen Klotz. Gretchen frequently left the discussion to check on their young son. Rudi and I talked about longer term strategy. The challenge to move from a student movement to something more permanent and powerful. We agreed on the overarching need to stop the war in Vietnam. “The American war in Vietnam,” Rudi always called it. We talked about the shah of Iran and how protests of his rule had been important to the German students. We shared our concern that the concentration of power in fewer and fewer hands would only increase unless checked.
Rudi’s face creased with concern, “We are worried especially about the concentration of the media. Here the Springer empire dominates news and has a profound impact on consciousness and politics. They are a powerful force.”
Then he shifted: “Michael, we are only students for a short time. Here in Germany probably longer than you in the States. Our challenge is to see beyond a student movement to something larger.”
He leaned back, looked at me, “We need a long march of our own. A long march through the institutions of society, yes?”
I nodded in agreement.
Rudi rocked forward, “We need to march through all the institutions, especially those that shape consciousness, schools, newspapers, television, but also all the institutions of everyday life.” He went on to outline how our generation needed to transform the institutions that mattered or, if failing to do so, create new ones of our own.
Rudi then turned to more immediate challenges.
“We in SDS here take seriously the slogan: ‘One, two, three Vietnams.’ That means we in Germany must open another front against the war, lead a nonviolent campaign against the terrible power of America. If the Americans are to be stopped in Vietnam, it will be because of a global struggle against imperialism. We in Germany want to play our part.”
“Yes,” I responded, “but the real responsibility is ours, inside the US. We are in the center of it.”
“You are,” he says, “and we need you to be part of a global struggle.”
I agreed and we talked briefly about promoting more communication between the German and American SDSs. I was excited to connect. I felt as if I could have talked with Rudi for a week and not be wasting time. But this trip did not allow for it. We exchanged addresses. Rudi and Gretchen loaded me down with literature, most of which was in German, which I could not read. But I took it. We promised to stay in touch. We hugged and I left.
The next day, I went by subway into East Berlin, under the border rather than through it. I was stopped, my bag searched by the East German police, who were shocked and irate that I carried German SDS literature. They acted as if the New Left was significantly more of a threat than NATO. They confiscated every pamphlet, every poster, every brochure. As an American I was sternly admonished and then set free to go on my way. It was clear that the old men who ruled the communist states and their many guards were part of the past we sought to overthrow.
Danny and I collected some useful research on CIA covert funding, but what I really took away from the trip was that I was part of a worldwide New Left of the young and that we were pitted against an elite of old men in a fight for our future, for decency, for democracy, and against barbarism. I felt confident as to the outcome. I was delighted to be part of the struggle.
On April 4, as I was concluding my dash through Europe, Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot dead on a Memphis motel balcony. He was there to aid the organizing of the garbage workers, to insist that economic rights were necessary for civil rights. The garbage workers were doing essential work but being paid wages they could not live on, treated miserably. They were on strike, and Dr. King, a fierce critic of poverty, of the war, of inequality, traveled to Memphis to support their struggle. Boulevards have been named after him. A holiday created in his honor. How many people remember why he went to Memphis?
From Frankfurt and Paris, I watched, angry, powerless as America’s Black neighborhoods from Oakland to Boston erupted in sadness, in anger, in rage, and in frustration. The National Guard was called out. Washington burned. Detroit burned. Roxbury burned. Smoke and violence filled the air each spring day. I returned to a country on fire.
Back home, I was stunned again as exactly one week later, April 11, Rudi was shot in the head as he went to the drugstore for cold medicine for his child. It was unclear if he would live. (He lived for another decade before drowning in his bathtub from an epileptic fit brought on by the shooting.)5 Around 2,000 students marched through Berlin to the offices of Springer Publishing. For months, the Springer media empire had mounted a savage, nonstop attack on SDS and especially on Rudi, its most charismatic leader. Springer papers repeatedly called on readers to act to “Stop the terror of the young reds now!” and “Eliminate the troublemakers.” A reader had answered their call and shot “Red Rudi.” The students marched. The police mobilized to defend the Springer buildings. The German student movement that had been surging, largely in opposition to the Vietnam War, now broke out into massive demonstrations. Tens of thousands took to the streets. All over Germany the young battled with the police. The country was rocked to its core.6
I was shocked. The Tet Offensive. Dr. King. Rudi. We were living in apocalyptic times. The unimaginable became each new day’s headlines. The tide of blood was rising, rising.
Shortly after Rudi was shot, and student protests swept across West Germany, SDS and the Student Afro Society at Columbia University in New York mobilized over Columbia’s ties to the Institute for Defense Analysis and the construction of a new gym opposed by the African American community surrounding Columbia. The leadership of Columbia SDS (declaring themselves the “Action Faction”) was more militant than any other SDS group had been. They brought a new style and language to the organization that was rapidly taken up by newer SDS leaders across the country.
Hundreds of students occupied first one and then another and then another of the Columbia buildings. These were declared “free zones” producing a heady sense of rebellion and freedom.
Before dawn broke on April 30, the New York Police Department (NYPD) stormed the occupied buildings, liberally spread tear gas, and arrested over 700 students.7 The following days there were more confrontations, and this time some of the students fought back. The protests continued into May with more police attacks and more arrests. The police savagely beat protestors. A massive student strike completely shut down Columbia for the rest of the academic year.
My high school friend Ron Carver had entered Columbia after several years organizing with SNCC in the South. In Mississippi he had been jailed, chased, and hunted, but, in the end, he escaped physically unharmed. He became the press person for the Columbia strike committee. During the second sweep of police, several Columbia deans recognized Ron and told him the police were looking for him in particular. The deans offered him safety in one of the unoccupied buildings. Only they were not offering him safety; they were intentionally sending him into a building where a squad of police waited to administer such a brutal beating with saps and blackjacks, that he was rushed to the hospital—a beating so savage, so thorough, that I literally could not recognize him when I visited him almost a week later. (He would eventually successfully sue the NYPD.)8
Anything, everything, seemed possible—from the worst of possibilities to wild soaring hope. Each week’s news brought the improbable and unbelievable. Events were speeding up. History was all around us. First the massive demonstrations of the German students and then the battles of Columbia. On the heels of Columbia, the French students staged even larger demonstrations. In early May, authorities shut the University at Nanterre. The police occupied the Sorbonne. Twenty thousand students took to the streets of Paris. The police attacked; battles were joined all over the country. The result was a tidal wave of student strikes: college students went out on strike; soon high school students went out on strike; ever larger demonstrations were met by increasing police violence. Soon, unlike in Germany and in the United States, the movement spread beyond the schools and eleven million French workers went out on strike.9 It made us think anything might be possible.
All Europe was ignited in protest and movement. Even in Eastern Europe, in Czechoslovakia, the Prague Spring led to the expulsion of the Soviet military forces and an experiment of “socialism with a human face.” Hope was everywhere. So were tear gas, truncheons, and bullets.
In Mexico, in advance of the Olympic games, students there joined the worldwide explosion of protest. The student marches were met with government violence, which led to a country-wide student strike. Hope soared that decades of one-party rule might be effectively challenged. That hope was snuffed out in a bloody massacre that killed dozens of student protestors.10
To us it seemed as if the whole world was caught up in struggle, protest, violence, and hope. I was riveted by each day’s wild news, as were all my friends. Our moods would swing from hope to horror and back. Students around the world were reaching a new level of militancy and scale. The old men were determined to stop them, stop us, by any means, including naked violence. This was now more than protests. This was now more than a fight over one war. This was now a fight over everything. This was a fight for the future.
Somehow in the midst of the drama, the pain, the excitement, we failed to think carefully and strategically. Given how much was at stake, what could we actually win? How could we win it?
The tide of blood rolled on in Vietnam. Sustained battles. Tragedy piled on tragedy. I was convinced that we needed to keep the antiwar movement growing and militant. I was also convinced we needed to find a way to bridge the chasm between the movement and the people paying the highest price for the war. I started to focus on community colleges where returned Vietnam veterans were enrolling in large numbers. Many vets supported the war because otherwise their sacrifices, the deaths of their buddies, would have been in vain. But more and more of them in 1968 were already convinced that all that had been lost, all they had endured, was the result of terrible decisions made by feckless leaders. Pain for them was turning to a bright, bitter anger.
That spring, I formally graduated from Harvard. I helped organize and signed a letter that appeared in the Crimson with the names of 98 seniors, 112 juniors, 132 sophomores, and 100 freshmen. It stated simply:
Our war in Vietnam is unjust and immoral. I believe that the United States should immediately withdraw from Vietnam and that no one should be drafted to fight in this war. As long as the United States is involved in this war I will not serve in the armed forces.11
The Harvard class of 1968 had invited Dr. King to be the class day speaker. Now Coretta Scott King filled that role. More than half the class wore armbands to show opposition to the war. Bizarrely, confirming precisely how tone deaf the university was, Harvard’s official choice for an honorary degree and commencement speaker was “His Imperial Majesty, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the Shahanshah of Iran.” The shah, installed by a CIA-backed coup, was a modernizing dictator whose secret police organization (SAVAK) was infamous for throwing student protestors out of the upper-story windows of their towering headquarters. Their record of torture and continuous violation of all basic standards of human rights was well known to anyone who cared to look. We and the Iranian Student Association protested. I was marching in a picket line during my own commencement. The Crimson reported, “Sargent Kennedy, secretary to the Corporation, said the Fellows were not upset by this demonstration. ‘Any distinguished man,’ Kennedy said, ‘is bound to have some opposition.’ ”12 I left Harvard convinced that its self-centered administration had no clue as to the maelstrom all around them. Thinking, mistakenly, that I was totally done with Harvard, I was glad to be gone.
The gulf between the old and the young was unbridgeable. Some of the elites were becoming fearful. They were losing their own children who came to oppose the war and some of whom condemned and denounced their parents as immoral. Even Robert McNamara’s son Craig had turned the American flag on his bedroom wall upside down and stamped his letters with an upside-down flag.13 The elites saw their private colleges riven and shut down. They saw the country seemingly spinning out of control and they feared what was coming. We did not fully sense their fears, missed the fissures opening in elite support for the war. Despite how large our protests had been, often we felt we were not making enough progress. We had made enormous strides. But we did not feel it. The war rolled on. We were desperate. We were hopeful. The future was the prize. We were determined to keep our eyes on the prize, keep on walking, keep on marching. Anything seemed possible.
That spring Amy and I heard that a trip was being organized for radicals to visit Cuba. Amy wanted to go. I had no interest in going myself, but it seemed a great opportunity for her. That summer she headed to Mexico City and then on to Cuba where the group traveled all over the island in a bus. She attended Fidel Castro’s July 26 speech marking the anniversary of the revolution. Upon her return she told me about visiting a lot of artificial insemination facilities, finally earning the scorn of one of the guides when she hinted that they had seen enough cows, to which he replied, “Cows are the revolution.” The group did agricultural work in the fields and met the only three women on the Central Committee. Soon there were regular groups of former SDS members and other activists going to Cuba to cut cane and fall in love with the Cuban Revolution.
That summer of 1968 continued wildly. There was no respite from savage news. Every week it seemed as if the world shook. What happened was beyond our wildest imaginings.
In June, Bobby Kennedy was shot dead on the night he won the California primary. While I was not a supporter of his, I had been impressed with his ability to connect with Black voters, suburban liberals, young people, and white working-class voters, the components that could be a Democratic majority. With his assassination that possibility was lost. Once again, the gun altered America’s future. Moreover, his murder seemed one more example of the spreading violence that was engulfing us.
Also, in June four of the “Boston Five,” including Dr. Spock, were found guilty and the next month sentenced to two years in federal prison. They would appeal and eventually win but that summer the message was clear: the government was coming for us.
In early August in Florida, Richard Nixon was nominated by the Republicans. On the night of August 20, 200,000 Soviet soldiers and 2,000 tanks invaded Czechoslovakia, crushing the Prague Spring and with it any chance of reform within the systems of Eastern European satellite countries.14 I cursed the old men of Moscow and the old men of Miami Beach.
The very next week brought the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Antiwar protestors “bringing the war home” took to the streets of Chicago outside of the convention hall. The nation watched on television as the Chicago police force spun out of control, rioted, and beat anyone and everyone that they perceived as possibly the “other.” It didn’t matter—journalists, delegates, family of delegates, younger congressmen, they all were attacked by the rampaging cops, urged on, and unleashed by, the profane mayor, Boss Daley, kingmaker, Democrat. We were disgusted. The Democratic Party was torn apart. Hubert Humphrey became the nominee. I felt simultaneously vindicated in my judgment not to go or bring others to Chicago and guilty that I was not there.
Overall, I did not understand the profound change that was occurring. I knew we had more support than ever to end the war, but I did not grasp what it meant that a majority now opposed it. Perhaps that majority did not like us, but they had turned against the war. And I did not understand what it meant that the elites were deeply split. My friends and I never thought through what was entailed in shifting from a protesting minority to leading a movement with majoritarian aspirations. We certainly never entertained what we might do to swing the election to the woeful Democratic candidate Humphrey who, refusing to break with the war, emerged limping and dazed out of Chicago to mount a joyless campaign.
I had never seriously sat down to figure out exactly how we would end the war. There is a world of difference between demands and strategy. We knew our demands. We often debated tactics. But we rarely discussed exactly how the war could end. Would it be by electing a new president? No, the system was rotten and rigged. Would it be by cutting off funding for the war in Congress? That seemed simultaneously too mild and completely impossible. We would never get the votes. We elevated tactics to the level of strategy. We doubled down on what had worked for us when we were attempting to be a prophetic minority, when we were attempting desperately to carve out space for dissent. Now everything had shifted. But we did not grasp the meaning of that shift. We did not understand what was needed from us.
Working haphazardly on my CIA book for Ramparts paid our bills. The writing was not going all that well. My marriage was also not going that well. Amy was finishing up at Brandeis. While we often marched together, spent our nights together, much of the days we were apart. There were moments of shared joy, dismay, anger, and passion. However, for much of our days we remained separate, two young people thinking we were making a marriage, thinking we were shaping history, while being swept along by fierce currents, external and internal, that we could feel but did not understand.
In 1968, obviously, there was no internet. The cell phone did not yet exist. Fax machines had not been commercialized. Cable television was years in the future. There were three major commercial television networks and a new public broadcasting network, and there were daily newspapers. Most large metropolitan areas had two or more newspapers. In Boston we had the dominant Boston Globe with a morning and evening edition, and the Herald Traveler, as well as the Boston Record American.
In Boston we also had a new “free form” FM station, WBCN, that we increasingly claimed as our own. It was remarkable to have a station playing long sets of our music in a way no other radio station had before. Interspersed with the music, WBCN’s disk jockeys, wild and exuberant, would promote our demonstrations. It was a powerful example of what media could do. I would regularly drop by the station to share our plans and found WBCN an important communication vehicle.
Increasingly we felt we also needed a way of communicating in print that was better and reached farther than our laboriously hand-cranked mimeo leaflets. I thought often of the conversation with Rudi about what to do if we could not seize the leadership of the institutions that shaped consciousness.
Contemplating a “long march through the institutions of America,” we wanted to both transform existing institutions and create new, alternative ones of our own. We often repeated A. J. Liebling’s saying: “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”15
In the early fall of 1968, I was spending more and more time on Brookline Street in Central Square, a rundown area that had once housed small manufacturing plants and wholesaling storefronts but now was in decline. While Harvard Square bustled with four bookstores, student hangouts, restaurants, and hip retailers, Central Square was a throwback to the old blue-collar Cambridge. If Harvard Square was all “gown,” Central Square, only 1.2 miles away, was still an old-school “town.”
Brookline Street was pockmarked with down-and-out, shabby, and often empty storefronts, and I was often in one, long vacant, that we had rented for next to nothing. It was the office for our new venture, our own newspaper. It sat directly across the street from the Brookline Lunch.
The Brookline Lunch looked unchanged since the year of my birth. Wooden booths down one side, and a long counter down the other, with round, anchored, padded bar stools. And always behind either the counter or the cash register was the owner, Mary. Big hearted, large breasted, her Irish face flushed with the heat of the griddle, framed by lank black hair streaked with gray, every day wearing what seemed like the same floral apron, Mary owned and ruled the Brookline Lunch. The place was, and had been for years, the breakfast and lunch stop for longtime neighborhood residents, cops, and fire fighters. Suddenly as the world swung wildly in that summer of 1968, it was now also the favorite hangout for our posse of radicals.
When we first showed up, there were some glares and quiet muttering. But Mary welcomed us and fed us home cooking at ridiculously low prices. We were her customers; that meant something. Mary had a small receipt pad for those awarded tabs. Once I realized I was among the favored, I ordered my meatloaf, gravy, and mashed potatoes even when I had no money in my pocket. Rarely did Mary let herself get drawn into a political conversation, even as she overheard us continuing our meetings from across the street. But on those few occasions when she did, she made it clear that while she did not agree with us on lots of things, she hated the war, and we were welcome.
On Brookline Street, we created a new underground newspaper, the Old Mole. We had no funds and even less experience. Somehow, we managed to publish forty-seven issues from the fall of 1968 to mid-1970. Sometimes once a month, sometimes more often as money and time allowed, we published a newspaper that covered movement activities, addressed critical issues of the time, and offered people a chance to be involved. Our journalism had no pretense of objectivity. It was raunchy, passionate, and always personal and political. We printed 10,000 copies, in a tabloid format, with a graphic image and bold, provocative, or witty headlines on the front page.
A free-flowing collective wrote the articles, laboriously laid out each issue on poorly constructed light tables, took it to a printer on the North Shore and organized a series of hawkers to sell it on street corners all over the city.
The Brookline Street storefront soon became more than the offices of the newspaper. It was the central spot for planning antiwar demonstrations, the place where new women’s collectives met and got organized, where high school students showed up to ask for help fighting censorship in their schools and producing their own high school newspapers, the home of the Peace and Justice Coalition, and a place that nursing students used to form a “nurses against the war” group. It thrummed with activity eighteen hours a day every day of the week.
We were inspired by the counter cultural papers in California and New York. Whereas they focused more on music, sex, drugs, and culture, we wanted to create a newspaper that would be the paper of the movement. We wanted to be able to expose the lies, biases, and unnoticed ironies of the mainstream press. We wanted to cover what they would not cover. We wanted to write about events in a way that the mainstream reporters never dared to. We wanted a journalism of the committed.
Finding the right name was a challenge. After much debate and many suggestions, a graduate student, Jon Schwartz, suggested “the Old Mole” based on a quote from Karl Marx: “We recognize our old friend, our old mole, who knows so well how to work underground, suddenly to appear: the revolution.”16 We were so tired of searching for a name that we all agreed. It denoted underground, the revolution, and was enigmatic and unexpected—all good. The paper was rowdy, political, provocative, and funny.
The most popular page of the paper was called Zaps, very short ironic stories and quotes such as: “PEACE CORPS EXPELS 13 FOR ANTI-WAR ACTIVITY—A real live headline from the Washington Star.” Another told the story of a court clerk in Kentucky who was supposed to intone at the start of each court session, “God save the Commonwealth and this honorable court.” One day he scrambled his words, uttering what we thought was a hilarious truth: “God save the people from this honorable court.”
Raffish, radical, unpredictable, crazy in a world gone mad. That was our spirit at the Old Mole.
Nixon, the Republican nominee, promised that he had a plan to end the war but would not announce it. He and Henry Kissinger secretly committed treason by interfering with the talks in Paris between America and the Vietnamese, making sure there was no breakthrough for peace. Nixon, even before entering the White House, subverted the law, prolonging the agony of the war.17
In the wake of the civil rights successes, Nixon adopted the first “Southern Strategy,” which reshaped the Republican Party, and over time wiped out the once dominant Southern white Democrats, altering the direction of American politics for decades. His 1968 campaign started the Republican Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln, down its long march to become the party of white grievance and of Donald Trump. Seizing on the riots and continuous protests, Nixon ran “a law-and-order campaign.” He proclaimed: “As we look at America, we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame. We hear sirens in the night … We see Americans hating each other; fighting each other; killing each other at home. And as we see and hear these things, millions of Americans cry out in anguish. Did we come all this way for this? Did American boys die in Normandy, and Korea, and in Valley Forge for this?”18
As America lurched toward election day, it became clear that this would be a remarkably close election. Humphrey had the entire Democratic establishment desperately working as hard as they could. They would not be enough in what turned out to be an election decided by less than one percentage point. Those of us in SDS saw Humphrey as profoundly corrupt, unredeemable, and tainted by his support for the war. We hated Nixon but we had no experience of what a right-wing government might do. We came of age, and to activism, in the years since 1960—so we only knew Kennedy and Johnson as presidents; we had experienced liberal domination of national politics and the policies we had protested were the policies of liberal Democrats.
In the fall of 1968, we experienced a great failure of political imagination.
We thought it would not matter if Nixon or Humphrey won. We thought the war would continue, exactly in the same deadly way, no matter who won. We could not imagine that the war would be expanded, that there would be a simultaneous policy of “Vietnamization,” so that the American body count decreased, and escalation that would claim another million more Asian lives. We could not imagine the disaster that would befall Cambodia because of Nixon and Kissinger. We did not imagine the Christmas bombings of Hanoi and Haiphong. We did not see what was coming—at home, as well as internationally. We did not understand that soon Nixon would invite to the White House and celebrate the leaders of building trades unions who led violent attacks on antiwar protestors in New York. We thought the well of Black sadness could not get any deeper. We were wrong. We could not imagine what would be unleashed against Black leaders and the Black community.
We had no idea of the damage that would be done.
We could not conceive of the manipulative use of a “war on drugs” to go after Black communities and the antiwar movement. As cynical and as sophisticated as we thought ourselves to be, we could not conceive of policies that, years later, Nixon’s top aide, John Ehrlichman would bluntly describe to Dan Baum of Harper’s Magazine.
The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people … You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities… . We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did.19
Despite our growing dread, we did not imagine that protesting students would be gunned down at Kent State and Jackson State. That J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI would get the green light to go after Nixon’s “enemies” and unleash the full force of the FBI on Black organizations and the antiwar movement.
We, in SDS and the antiwar movement, had legions of young people with us. While the voting age was twenty-one and thus many of us could not have voted, there were enough of us over twenty-one that we could have played a pivotal role in the election. Most of us who built the antiwar movement, demonstration by demonstration, dorm meeting after dorm meeting, were so sickened by the corruption of American politics that we refused to participate. Real change, we thought, could only come from “outside” the system. The rules of the election game were rigged to favor the corporate elites. We were so habituated to being a prophetic minority that with a majority of the country turning against the war, we remained locked into the mindset of a minority. What strategy we possessed was simplistic and ill thought through: our job was to create so much disruption that the elites would somehow be forced to end the war. We completely failed to grasp that the war and our movement had already shattered the unity of the nation and that now our task was to reassemble a new majority. Instead, we were determined to keep shattering a status quo that was already splintered.
We boycotted the election. We organized street protests. Our slogan was “Vote with your feet, vote in the street.” On election day we marched. We mocked. We did not organize young people twenty-one and older to vote in one of the closest elections in American history. We, in our anger and righteousness, said, “a plague on both your houses” and walked away. We said “ the lessor of two evils is still evil. Don’t vote.” I had turned twenty-one in January. The following November, I did not bother to cast a vote.
Nixon won. There is no guarantee that we could have pressured Humphrey to end the war, but undoubtedly, we stood a much better chance of doing so with him in the White House than with Nixon. Humphrey certainly didn’t help, as he refused to break from the war. We found it impossible to hold in our minds two possibly competing imperatives: stopping the war and stopping Nixon. And as always, the people of Indochina and Black people in America paid the price.
We started to dream of revolution at the very moment when we might have led a significant portion of the country. The young around the world were shaking the order of the old. SDS led hundreds of thousands of students. Our meetings that only a few years before had drawn a handful, now angrily fill the largest halls on hundreds of campuses. Given what had happened already in 1968, anything did seem possible.
Holding fast to our fantasies and nightmares, we could not imagine that in another twelve months SDS would be no more, blown apart by factions as foolish and dangerous as any of the old left we once despised.
Nineteen sixty-eight was the year of blood. The year of hope. A year in which history hinged. A year in which we thought we were winning and were in fact failing. We were not wrong in our assessments of Humphrey; we were wrong in our assessment of whether it matters if a corporate centrist liberal is elected over an insecure, unstable right-wing candidate who does not respect the Constitution. We failed to understand Nixon and what was at stake. We allowed him to start a right-wing counterreformation that would hold power and warp American politics for much of the next four decades. We allowed our embrace of militancy to replace strategy.
We would continue to march. Hundreds of thousands of us continued to protest the war. We shut down campuses. We organized sit-ins. We organized returning veterans to join the fight against the war. Millions would still participate in 1969 and 1970. The moratorium in the next year would be a massive outpouring of opposition to the war reaching into cities and towns across the huge expanse that is America. The antiwar movement would put a brake on some of Nixon’s worst schemes for the war. Many long-term, enduring changes in the country have their roots, at least partially, in our efforts. None of that alters the fact that in 1968 we made serious mistakes and failed to meet the moment.
The record player blares Motown. Most of us are dancing. The day has been spent turning out young people to protest the war and the election. The night is for letting it all out. Dancers pack the room, most in pairs but some alone and seemingly oblivious. Inside a circle of men and women pressed as tight as possible, a small group of women dances with other women, shyly at first and then the exuberance of the room ripples through them as well. Women, and for some reason it is only the women, sing the words of the songs as loud as they can; they shake their heads, they shimmy. They are young, they are strong, they are exuberant. The men in the room feel their presence acutely, the gravitational pull strong for all the men, all that is except for the small, scattered group somehow not at ease, even among their friends, seemingly impervious to the waves of sexual desire radiating around the room. Or are they covertly responding to a very different set of desires?
Another small group is smoking dope on the back porch, discreetly, as it is illegal. Over in the front hall, by a keg of beer, a very few serious ones are didactically debating what they think is political strategy; they too, but for different reasons, are impervious to the raw animalism of the room. They live in their heads. Out on the dance floor a pudgy young man with a wispy beard and sweat-stained curls breaks out into some surprising moves, with a special grace of movement for one whose middle is so significant. Behind him two women start to dance within the circle of other women. The men draw near and one suddenly ducks in to dance with both women, head back, eyes wide, energy pumping up, palpable, and felt.
We are proud, we are young, and we are so certain. We will never be so certain again. We are swimming in the river of history, and we know it. For these few hours we are shrugging off the weight of the war. We are diving into the exuberance of our age. Just for these few hours we don’t think about napalm, the war, the dead, King, Kennedy, the election. We are feeling so alive. We have no idea of the future and for these few hours we really don’t give a good god damn. For this evening, we just want to be young. Slowly there is some filtering and pairs form and begin to hope for connection. Over in a shadow one couple cannot resist kissing. For everyone, the pull is there, yearning comes in waves and in its own way is delicious. The beat picks up. A line forms, and soon most people are dancing one behind the other.
And now suddenly the years open up. I am looking back. I am there in the dance line. I can see myself, dark haired, awkward; Amy, slender, is swaying in front of me. I feel a sudden wave of immense sadness not just for the loss of youth and all that inevitably brings, but for the loss of so many people I once loved and for the hopes we had. I see Sara singing, head tilted back, curls shaking, and no idea that within five years she will be dead of breast cancer. Right behind her is Hal who will end up twenty-five years later throwing himself out of a forty-story window. Pat is dancing with no concept that in the very next year he will be killed in a tractor accident doing community service in Africa. There, in the dark corner, I imagine one of the gentlest intellectuals I knew. He is shy and sweet. He will end up in the Weather Underground, will participate in a robbery that goes terribly bad, people will die, and he will spend decades, the rest of his life, most of his life, in prison.
Students will die in Mexico. Tanks roll across Prague. Students will die at Kent State and Jackson State. More Black leaders will be shot dead. The tectonic plates of our politics will shift but not as we are imagining. Then the old men seemed destined to fail and fall. They will eventually die but be replaced often by those conservative students we despised and thought irrelevant, those right-wing students who were such an embittered minority, the awkward and mean-spirited, close-cropped students who hated our protests, hated our politics, hated our rebellious spirit, hated our excesses and our values—those students will grow up to rule America causing endless pain and damage. They will become the old men of today.
We didn’t think enough about the 65 percent of our peers who were not in college. Many of them will leave the inchoate rebellion of youth to embrace a raw conservatism as they age.
The long ripples of our movements will change how America understands itself. Those ripples will crest again in waves of feminism, environmentalism, and gay rights. The young old men of the right will battle against them, perplexed that even as they seem to have won politically, the country continues to change.
Some of us will stay in the fight for a lifetime. Others drop away. That is all in the future. This night we are dancing; this night we think we are winning; this night we think anything is possible. We dance into the night.