Hayden was already calling the Black Panthers "America's Vietcong," and planning the riot he was going to stage at the Democratic convention in Chicago that August. This pivotal event is described conveniently, but inaccurately, as a "police riot" in Talbot's film, Gitlin's book, and Hayden's own memoir which singularly fails to acknowledge his efforts to produce the eruption that ensued. Civil war in America was not something that was going to be imposed on the SDS revolutionaries from the outside or above, as Hayden disingenuously insinuates. Civil war was something that radicals — Hayden foremost among them — were trying to launch themselves.
Talbot continues his mythologizing of the spring of 1968 and the period just prior to the Chicago Riot by romanticizing the political ambitions of Bobby Kennedy, and mis-remembering how the left reacted to them: "Out of the ashes of the riots in the wake of King's murder, new hope came in the form of Bobby Kennedy, who had undergone a profound transformation from Vietnam hawk and aide to Sen. Joe McCarthy to dove and spokesman for the dispossessed."
It is true, of course, that Bobby Kennedy made a feint in the direction of the anti-war crowd and more than one gesture on behalf of Cesar Chavez. It is also true that Hayden attended Kennedy's funeral and even wept a tear or two. But those tears had little to do with Hayden's political agendas at the time, which were more accurately summed up in Che Guevara's call to create "two, three, many Vietnams" inside America's borders. Hayden's tears for Kennedy were personal, and he paid a huge political price for them among his revolutionary comrades who were not overly impressed by Kennedy's sudden political "transformation." After the funeral, SDS activists wondered out loud, and in print, whether Hayden had "sold out" by mourning a figure whom they saw not as the great white hope of the political struggle that consumed their lives, but as a Trojan horse for the other side.
With King dead in April and Kennedy in June, the stage was set for what Talbot calls "the inevitable showdown" in Chicago in August. And here he allows a glimmer of the truth to enter his narrative: "Both sides, rebels and rulers, were spoiling for a confrontation." But just as quickly he reverts to the mythology that Hayden and his cohorts first created and that leftist historians have since perpetuated: "Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley made it possible. He denied permits for protesters at the Democratic Convention." The denied permits made confrontation inevitable.
In fact, the famous epigram from 1968 — "Demand the Impossible" — which Talbot elsewhere cites, explains far more accurately why it was Hayden, not Daley, who set the agenda for Chicago, and why it was Hayden who was ultimately responsible for the riot that ensued. The police behaved badly, it is true — and they have been justly and roundly condemned for their reactions. But those reactions were entirely predictable. After all, it was Daley who, only months before, had ordered his police to "shoot looters on sight" during the rioting after King's murder. In fact, the predictable reaction of the Chicago police was an essential part of Hayden's choice of Chicago as the site of the demonstration in the first place.
It was also why many of us did not go. In a year when any national "action" would attract one hundred thousand protestors, only about ten thousand (and probably closer to three thousand) actually showed up for the Chicago blood-fest. That was because most of us realized there was going to be bloodshed and did not see the point. Our ideology argued otherwise as well. The two party system was a sham; the revolution was in the streets. Why demonstrate at a political convention? In retrospect, Hayden was more cynical and more shrewd than we were. By destroying the presidential aspirations of Hubert Humphrey, he dealt a fatal blow to the anti-communist liberals in the Democratic Party and paved the way for a takeover of its apparatus by the forces of the political left, a trauma from which the party has yet to recover.
One reason the left has obscured these historical facts is that the nostalgists do not really want to take credit for electing Richard Nixon, which they surely did. As a matter of political discretion, they are also willing to let their greatest coup — the capture of the Democratic Party — go unmemorialized. Instead they prefer to ascribe this remarkable political realignment to impersonal forces that, apparently, had nothing to do with their own agendas and actions. Talbot summarizes: "While 'the whole world (was) watching,' [Daley's] police rioted, clubbing demonstrators, reporters and bystanders indiscriminately. The Democratic Party self-destructed." Well, actually, it was destroyed by the left's riot in Chicago.
When the fires of Watergate consumed the Nixon presidency in 1974, the left's newly won control of the Democratic Party produced the exact result that Hayden and his comrades had worked so hard to achieve. In 1974, a new class of Democrats was elected to Congress, including anti-war activists like Ron Dellums, Pat Schroeder, David Bonior, and Bella Abzug. Their politics were traditionally left as opposed to the anti-communist liberalism of the Daleys and the Humphreys (Abzug had even been a communist).
Their first act was to cut off economic aid and military supplies to the regimes in Cambodia and South Vietnam, precipitating the bloodbath that followed. Though it is conveniently forgotten now, this cut off occurred two years after the United States had signed a truce with Hanoi and American troops had been withdrawn from Vietnam.
"Bring The Troops Home" may have been the slogan of the so called anti-war movement, but it was never its only goal. The slogan was designed by its authors to bring about a "liberated" Vietnam. Within three months of the cut-off of military aid, the anti-communist regimes in Saigon and Phnompenh fell, and the genocide began. The mass slaughter in Cambodia and South Vietnam from 1975 to 1978 was the real achievement of the New Left and could not have been achieved without Hayden's sabotage of anti-communist Democrats like Hubert Humphrey.
While Talbot forgets this denouement, he does get the significance of the war right: "The war in Vietnam and the draft were absolutely central. I remember a cover of Ramparts magazine that captured how I felt: 'Alienation is when your country is at war and you hope the other side wins."' This is a softened version of what we actually felt. As the author of that cover line, let me correct Talbot's memory and add a detail. The Ramparts cover featured a picture of a Huck Finn-like seven-year-old (it was our art director Dugald Stermer's son) who was holding the Vietcong flag — the flag of America's enemy in Vietnam. The cover line said: "Alienation is when your country is at war and you want the other side to win." This represented what we actually believed — Hayden, Gitlin, Steve Talbot, and myself. What lessons my former comrades draw from our service to the wrong side in the Cold War is not that important to me. I just wish they would have the decency to remember the events the way they happened.
I also wish they would have the good grace not to claim retrospectively sympathies for the struggle against communism, a struggle they opposed and whose true warriors and champions — however distasteful, embarrassing, and uncomfortable this must be for them — were Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and the political right they hate and despise. Go over the fifty years of the Cold War against the Soviet empire and you will find that every political and military program to contain the spread of this cancer and ultimately to destroy it was fiercely resisted by those who now invoke the "spirit of '68" as their own.
"Assassinations, repression and exhaustion extinguished the spirit of '68," Talbot concludes his story. "But like a subterranean fire, it resurfaces at historic moments." Citing the socialist writer Paul Berman, the originator of this ultimate myth, Talbot argues that "the members of '68 . . . helped ignite the revolution of 1989 that brought liberal democracy to Eastern Europe and ended the Cold War." The distortion of this memory is one thing for Berman, who at some point joined a miniscule faction of the left that was indeed anti-communist, while still hating American capitalism almost as much. (How much? In Berman's case, enough to support the Black Panthers — "America's Vietcong" — in the 1970s and to praise the secret police chief of the Sandinista dictatorship in the 1980s as a "quintessential New Leftist.") But this attempt to hijack the anti-communist
cause for a left that abhorred it, is particularly unappetizing in Talbot's case. Talbot, after all, made films into the 1980s celebrating communist insurgents who were busily extending the Soviet sphere in Africa. America, bless its generous heart, has already forgiven Steve Talbot for the indiscretions of the past. So why lie about them now?
Of course, New Leftists were critical of the policies of the Soviet Union (as, at various times were Khrushchev, Castro, and Ho Chi Minh). But their true, undying enemy was always democratic America — their hatred for which was never merely reactive (as is sometimes suggested), never truly innocent, and remains remarkably intact to this day. The worldview of this left was aptly summarized by the adoring biographer of the journalist I. F. Stone, who approvingly described Stone's belief that "in spite of the brutal collectivization campaign, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the latest quashing of the Czech democracy and the Stalinist takeover of Eastern Europe . . . communism was a progressive force, lined up on the correct side of historical events."
Berman, Gitlin, and now Talbot have mounted a preposterous last-ditch effort to save leftists from the embarrassments of their deeds by attempting to appropriate moral credit for helping to end a system that the left aided and abetted throughout its career. It may be, as Berman and Talbot claim, that East European anti-communists drew inspiration from anti-government protests in the West. But this was a reflection of their admiration for a democratic system that embraced dissent and promoted freedom, not the antiwestern agendas of the New Left demonstrators. Even in its best moments, the western left disparaged the threat from the communist enemy as a paranoid fantasy of the Cold War right.
The unseemly attempt to retrieve an honorable past from such dishonorable commitments might be more convincing if any of these memorialists (including Berman) were able to come up with a single demonstration against communist oppression m Vietnam, or the genocide in Cambodia, or the rape of Afghanistan, or the dictatorships in Cuba and Nicaragua. Or, if one veteran leader of the New Left had once publicly called on the Soviets to tear down the Berlin Wall, as Ronald Reagan actually did. Support for the anti-communist freedom fighters in Afghanistan and Africa and Central America during the 1980s came largely from Goldwater and Reagan activists on the right, like Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Grover Norquist, Elliot Abrams, Dana Rohrabacher, and Oliver North, whom progressives — for this very reason — passionately despise.
It would have been nice if the thirtieth anniversary of the events of 1968 had been used to end the cold war over its memories and start restoring a sense of the tragic to both sides. But to do that, the nostalgists of the left would first have to be persuaded to give up their futile attempts to re-write what happened, and start telling it like it was.
19
Two Goodbyes
I. ELDRIDGE CLEAVER's LAST GIFT
ELDRIDGE CLEAVER (1953-I998) was a man who made a a significant imprint on our times, and not for the best. But I mourn his passing nonetheless.
I first met Eldridge when he was Ramparts magazine's most famous and most bloodthirsty ex-con. 'I'm perfectly aware that I'm in prison, that I'm a Negro, that I've been a rapist," he wrote in a notorious epistle that Ramparts published. "My answer to all such thoughts lurking in their split-level heads, crouching behind their squinting bombardier eyes, is that the blood of Vietnamese peasants has paid off all my debts." This nihilism became an iconographic comment for the times, a ready excuse for all the destructive acts radicals like us went on to commit.
No one doubted that Eldridge was the most articulate and colorful tribune of the Panther vanguard. But what he represented most was a limitless, radical rage. Eldridge was indeed a rapist and possibly a murderer as well (he boasted to Timothy Leary, whom he held hostage in his Algerian exile, that he had a private graveyard for his enemies). It was Eldridge who accused Panther leader Huey Newton of betraying the radical cause when Newton reversed his famous summons to "pick up the gun" and begin the revolution. In protest against Newton's "kinder, gentler" Panthers, Eldridge split the party and became spiritual godfather to the Black Liberation Army and other violent revolutionary factions.
But in the 1970s and 1980s Eldridge had a change of heart, or rather many changes of heart. He became a Moonie, and then a Christian, and then a Republican, backsliding to political street hustler in between. Those of us who knew him saw these various incarnations as attempts to secure new support systems for an extraordinary individual who lacked a moral center. Still, it took a certain courage and integrity to tell even a part of the truth, as he did. It meant, for example, detaching himself from the radical gravy train, as others were just beginning to cash in on their criminal pasts. His Panther comrades David Hilliard, Bobby Seale, and Elaine Brown were busily taking advantage of a national false memory syndrome that recalled the Panthers not as the street thugs they were, but as heroes of a civil rights struggle they had openly despised. (To be fair, the public misperception of this past was heavily fostered by former radicals who now occupy editorial positions at ABC, the New York Times, and other institutions of cultural authority.) In their heyday, Panther leaders liked to outrage their white supporters by referring to Martin Luther King as "Martin Luther Coon." But now they were ready to pretend that the civil rights movement had been as much their achievement as his, to join the mainstream, and reap its rewards. On well-paid campus lecture tours, in Hollywood films, and in a series of well-hyped books lauded by reviewers in the New York Times, theLos Angeles Times, the New York Review of Books, and the Washington Post, the Panther survivors rewrote their histories to fit the revisionist legend.
Eldridge, however, chose the lonelier and more honest course of admitting what he had done. His most famous encounter with the law had been a shootout that followed the assassination of
Martin Luther King. In this episode, an eighteen-year-old Panther named Bobby Hutton had been killed. As Panther "Minister of Communications," Eldridge designed the propaganda campaign that portrayed the killing as a classic case of "police brutality." He was abetted in this by a white radical named Robert Scheer, now a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, who edited both of Eldridge's Panther books and saw to it that Eldridge's version of the Hutton incident received wide exposure in the nation's press.
As a result, Hutton's death became a famous martyrdom for the entire New Left, an occasion to expose the "repressive, racist power structure" that victimized black militants like him. But in an interview with reporter Kate Coleman more than a decade after the events, Eldridge revealed that this was not a story of Panther innocence. On hearing the news of King's murder by a lone assassin, he had ordered party members to "assassinate" police in "retaliation" for King's death (but really to launch the war against America that the left was preparing for, but had been unable to carry out).
Eldridge himself had participated in an armed ambush that left two San Francisco police officers wounded. This was the reason that the police were chasing a Panther vehicle containing Eldridge and Hutton that ended in Hutton's death. The courage that Eldridge's revelation took can be measured by the silence of other Panthers who know what happened and New Left radicals like Robert Scheer who have suppressed these facts ever since.
It was during his last televised interview on 60 Minutes that Eldridge won my final respect. Quiet-spoken, as he had never been in his public life, sober, bespectacled and fully grey, he unburdened himself of what appeared at last to be truly felt convictions, not designed for anyone but himself. He said that when you looked at this country as compared to others, it had been remarkably good to people like himself, and to minorities generally, a fact he had not appreciated when he was young. He said, gravely, "If people had listened to Huey Newton and me in the 1960s, there would have been a holocaust in this country."
The interviewer hardly noticed this last remark, and its significance went unexplored. But I noticed. Here was the beginning of any understanding of what the New Left and its Black Panther vanguard were really about in the 1960s. They were atte
mpting to launch a civil war in America that would have resulted in unimaginable bloodshed. At the same time, they had no sensible idea of how to make things better, as they claimed.
For coming to this understanding, and for having the courage to honestly confront what he did, Eldridge paid a profound price. In a world where it is so difficult to get a handle on the truth, and where so many would prefer that it be buried, we should all be thankful to him for providing us with the one he did.
II. ONE WHO WILL NOT BE MISSED
KWAME TURE, a k a Stokely Carmichael, is dead of prostate cancer at the age of fifty-seven. Jesse Jackson, who was with him in Africa at the last, claimed Carmichael for the radical 1960s. "He was one of our generation who was determined to give his life to transforming America and Africa," Jackson eulogized him. "He rang the freedom bell in this century." The truth is otherwise. Kwame Ture was a racist and a lifelong friend of tyrants and oppressors. The world will not miss him. A West Indian immigrant to America, and a child of middle-class privilege, Carmichael hated his adopted country from youth to old age, and never bothered once to acknowledge the immense advantages and personal recognition it undeservedly gave him.
Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes Page 20
