• May 10: In response to the Kent State shootings, the Weather Underground bombs the National Guard headquarters in Washington, D.C.
• May 10: The Boston Bruins win the Stanley Cup, defeating the St. Louis Blues. Bobby Orr scores the winning goal and is named most valuable player.
• May 11: Jimi Hendrix plays at a benefit to raise money for Timothy Leary’s defense fund at the Village Gate in Greenwich Village.
• May 12: Six black men are shot dead by police in Augusta, Georgia, during a protest over the killing of a mentally handicapped black teenage prisoner.
• May 13: Columbia Pictures debuts the film Getting Straight, with Elliott Gould and Candice Bergen.
• May 14: Police shoot and kill two black students and injure twelve during a demonstration at Jackson State College in Mississippi.
• May 21: The Weather Underground issues its first communiqué, announcing a “Declaration of a State of War” against the U.S. government and expressing allegiance with the counterculture.
JUNE 1970
• June: John Kerry joins Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The organization expands rapidly as tens of thousands of soldiers return home in 1969 and 1970.
• June 9: The Weather Underground bombs the New York City police headquarters in response to “police repression.”
• June 27: The Festival Express: Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, the Band, and other performers travel across Canada on a train for five days giving concerts.
• June 28: Gay pride marches take place on the first anniversary of the Stonewall riots, in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
JULY 1970
• July 1: New York becomes the first state in America to legalize abortion.
• July 26: The Weather Underground bombs the Presidio army base in San Francisco on the eleventh anniversary of the Cuban Revolution.
AUGUST 1970
• August 2: Fugitive and former Cornell University chaplain Daniel Berrigan gives a surprise sermon at a Methodist church in Germantown, Pennsylvania: “I come in the name of all those who have said no to this war—from prison, from the underground, from exile, from death itself.”
• August 5: Black Panther Huey Newton is released from jail and five thousand celebrate him outside the Alameda County Courthouse in Oakland, California.
• August 7: Armed seventeen-year-old Jonathan Jackson holds a judge, a prosecutor, and three jurors hostage in San Rafael, California, hoping to force the release of his imprisoned brother, revolutionary George Jackson. Four die in the ensuing gunfire, including the judge and Jackson.
• August 12: Fugitive Daniel Berrigan is seized by undercover FBI agents posing as bird watchers on Block Island, Rhode Island.
• August 18: J. Edgar Hoover puts fugitive and former UCLA assistant professor Angela Davis on the FBI’s Most Wanted Fugitive list.
• August 24: The Madison, Wisconsin, bombing of Sterling Hall math center kills thirty-three-year-old physics graduate student Robert Fassnacht.
• August 26: Women’s Strike for Equality (fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment). Twenty-five thousand people in New York City march down Fifth Avenue, demanding equal pay for equal work and free abortion on demand.
SEPTEMBER 1970
• September 1: The Senate rejects, by a vote of 55–39, the McGovern-Hatfield Amendment to set a December 31, 1971, date for U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam.
• September 4–7: Operation “Rapid American Withdrawal” takes place and 200 Vietnam veterans march from Morristown, New Jersey, to Valley Forge State Park in Pennsylvania.
• September 12: Timothy Leary escapes from jail in San Luis Obispo, California, with the help of the Weather Underground, and becomes a fugitive in Algeria.
• September 18: Jimi Hendrix dies from a drug overdose in London.
• September 26: The New Yorker publishes “The Greening of America” by Charles A. Reich. The nearly seventy-page article describes the revolution of a new generation and the coming change of consciousness.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Witness to the Revolution is an oral history. The core of this book comes from one hundred interviews I conducted between 2012 and 2015 with members of the Vietnam antiwar movement of the late sixties. I began the process of writing Witness by editing tens of thousands of pages of transcripts and shaping them into a tightly woven chronological narrative. Occasionally, I used secondary sources when they fit among the first-person voices in the book—usually from memoirs or diaries of witnesses to that historical time. To provide context, I relied on the substantial body of published sixties scholarship in writing chapter introductions, footnotes, and biographical sketches of each “voice” in the book.
INTRODUCTION
THE AWAKENED GENERATION
We were a whole generation that, for the first time, said No to a war that the country had found itself mired in, and then began saying No to other things, and did so awkwardly at times and with bombast and rhetoric and prick waving but at least was questioning the death grip of the 1950s, which was a stultification of passion and sanity and the genius of the human spirit….And this burst through all of that with Day-Glo colors like in The Wizard of Oz when it goes from black-and-white to color. Everything suddenly was Technicolor and there was hope.
—ROBIN MORGAN
In August 1969, half a million stoned and scruffy pilgrims descended on Max Yasgur’s farm near Bethel, New York, and Woodstock Nation was born. One week later, a RAND Corporation defense analyst had an epiphany. Daniel Ellsberg vowed to do everything within his power to stop the Vietnam War, even if it meant going to jail for treason. Two months later, Ellsberg began photocopying seven thousand pages of top-secret Vietnam War documents that he planned to leak to the press. That October a record two million people participated in the nationwide Moratorium protest to end the war—a figure so high that the antiwar movement could no longer be written off as radical fringe. A month later journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story of the massacre of hundreds of civilian women and children by American soldiers in the Vietnamese village of My Lai.
It is almost impossible to imagine the apocalyptic atmosphere of America in those months. From the start of the academic year in 1969 until the beginning of classes in September 1970, a youth rebellion shook the nation in ways we may never see again. It was the crescendo of the sixties, when years of civil disobedience and mass resistance erupted into anarchic violence. Hundreds of thousands of young Americans took to the streets in 1969 and 1970. They were fueled by marijuana, LSD, and rock and roll; inspired by the third-world freedom revolutions of Che Guevara in Cuba and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam; disillusioned by the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy; battered by the police at Berkeley, Chicago, and Columbia; and appalled by mounting U.S. casualties and images of napalm-disfigured Vietnamese civilians.
And yet, the school year of 1969–70 has gone largely overlooked. In popular memory the sixties crested in 1968, with the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Dr. King, with the Tet Offensive and Nixon’s victory in November. The usual mental jump from ’68 to Watergate obscures a crucial historical moment—1969–70—when the sixties went wide and the nation arguably came close to civil war. This book is the story of twelve months that changed the nation forever. In early-twenty-first-century America, when political debate is often confined to shouting on cable television or posting on Twitter, it’s even more valuable to revisit an era when arguments over politics and culture were palpable, urgent, even revolutionary.
I use that word advisedly, for the United States was then veering awfully close to just that: a rebellion that threatened the very order of society. Witness to the Revolution offers eyewitness accounts from people who were on the front lines of a dazzling period of change and challenge. This book explores what it felt like to be alive and active in this extraordinary moment. My hope is to help readers understand, through dozens of firsthand accounts, the ci
rcumstances that made such a large segment of the population become outlaws. Together the stories of the participants of what was known as the “awakened generation” create a portrait of a movement that deserves credit for having the courage to try—even if it failed in many ways—to make the nation live up to its ideals.
For three years, I traveled the country talking to the leaders and foot soldiers of the sixties peace movement. Most of the one hundred people I interviewed were early baby boomers born in the mid-1940s, and all of them played an important role in bucking the system. White, black, male, female, they were almost to a person traumatized and transformed by their experiences during that time. “I’m certainly a victim of post-traumatic stress syndrome,” Tom Hayden told me. “I think everybody, whether they went to ’Nam or not, everybody had a life that was profoundly altered,” said John Perry Barlow.
Grown men and women wept in many of my interviews, their wounds still fresh, their anger and frustration from that time still hot. Daniel Ellsberg, at age eighty-three, broke down when he recalled listening to draft resister Randy Kehler give a speech about going to jail. So did photographer John Filo when he described taking a Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph of a dying student at Kent State. Many were still anguished by their mistakes. Mark Rudd apologized for the Weather Underground’s violent, destructive tactics; Jane Fonda wished she could rewind the fateful moment when her picture was taken in front of an anti-aircraft gun in Hanoi.
—
THE WAR OVERSHADOWED EVERYTHING. A Gallup poll of students conducted in the spring of 1967 revealed that 35 percent considered themselves “doves” and 49 percent “hawks.” Yet the numbers had moved dramatically by 1969, with 69 percent identifying as “doves” and only 20 percent as “hawks.” By January 1970, the bloodshed in Vietnam had become increasingly intolerable, and for the first time a majority of Americans believed the United States had made a mistake sending troops to fight there.
In 1969 discharged Vietnam soldiers organized in large numbers, creating a powerful new force in the antiwar movement: Vietnam Veterans Against the War. More and more GIs resisted the military from inside the military, and thousands deserted, creating a near mutiny. It was the year that Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), founded in 1960, splintered, and a group of militant radicals calling themselves the Weathermen became a media sensation and began to dominate the New Left’s political landscape. That year the Chicago Eight conspiracy trial put the generation gap—the yawning disconnect between those under thirty and their parents—on the stand in Judge Julius Hoffman’s courtroom. The FBI launched a covert campaign to disrupt and destroy the Black Panther Party, which in many ways was the vanguard of the revolution. In December 1969 Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark became movement martyrs after they were gunned down in their sleep by the Chicago police.
A thousand antiwar protesters christened Richard Nixon’s new presidency on January 20, 1969, by pelting his inaugural parade motorcade with rocks and bottles. In his first week in office, Nixon ordered the ramping up of secret FBI intelligence on all left-wing radicals. He never delivered on his campaign pledge to end the war but instead escalated it with massive secret bombing campaigns. In the first two years of his administration, Nixon so heightened the air war that by the end of the conflict the United States had dropped more bombs on Southeast Asia than it did worldwide during all of World War II.
By mid-1969 it was clear that four years of the peace movement’s efforts to end the war were lost on the Nixon administration, and an increasing number of what Nixon called “America’s youth” descended into deep despair and mounting rage. Meanwhile, the draft displaced the lives of 27 million young men as they reached the age of eighteen between 1965 and 1973, politicizing an entire generation. Author Kirkpatrick Sale, who chronicled the student movement in the sixties, called this acutely politically engaged cohort “the awakened generation.”
Enraged by Nixon and Kissinger’s escalation of the war and frustrated to the point of madness by the impotence of their efforts to end it, some reacted with violence while others found solace in “making the personal political.” In March 1970, three Weathermen accidentally killed themselves while building a bomb in a West Village townhouse. This was also the year when women brought the revolution home, split from their male comrades in the antiwar left, and launched the “second wave” women’s liberation movement.
By 1970 at least two million Americans had tried LSD, and up to three million lived in communes. Thousands of fugitives were on the run from the draft, bombing and disturbance charges, and draconian drug laws. Federal prisons held 3,250 draft resisters, and the Department of Defense reported that more than 400,000 men had deserted the armed forces, with about 100,000 fleeing to foreign countries, including Canada and Sweden. An entire generation seemed to be living outside the law. The counterculture set up shop in Haight-Ashbury, Big Sur, Laurel Canyon, Cambridge, the East Village, and Madison. These “free zones” became safe havens for draft resisters, dodgers, and military deserters. The cross-pollination of left-wing activists with hippie drifters and dropouts, who were all part of the same Great Refusal to conform, created a new brand of rebel.
Credit itr.1
An anti-Vietnam War protester in San Francisco on November 16, 1969, holds a sign that sums up the point of view of millions of youth in the late sixties.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT ALTMAN.
Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia May 1, 1970, and days later the National Guard, in response to student protests, killed four white students at Kent State and two African American students at Jackson State. Soon after, the largest student strike in American history erupted, and two and a half million students boycotted classes, shutting down seven hundred colleges. During that academic calendar year, nine thousand protests and eighty-four acts of arson and bombings plagued schools.
The Scranton Commission, appointed by Nixon after Kent State, warned that the student strikes had imposed a “crisis as deep as the Civil War [and] if this crisis of understanding endures, the very survival of the nation will be threatened.” FBI director J. Edgar Hoover compared student unrest to the violent coal and steel strikes of 1919–22. Life magazine concurred when it declared, “Never in the history of this country has a small group, standing outside the pale of conventional power, made such an impact or created such havoc.”*
In late August 1970, radicals at the University of Wisconsin detonated a truck bomb that destroyed an entire university building, accidentally killing a thirty-three-year-old graduate student. Two weeks later, Timothy Leary, imprisoned for marijuana possession, escaped from jail with the help of the Weather Underground, high jinks that publicly sealed the alliance between the counterculture and the political left. As Leary’s lawyer Michael Kennedy said in a September 1970 press conference, “This is the year of dope and dynamite, flowers and flames.”
The country was coming unhinged. By the end of 1970, American deaths in Vietnam had reached 53,849, and 52 percent of Americans reported knowing someone who had been injured or killed in Vietnam. In 1969 and 1970 alone, 13,600 American soldiers came home to Delaware’s Dover Air Force Base in flag-draped coffins, their mournful ceremonies televised nationally. This was more than twice the number of casualties that would occur decades later in ten years of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. In total, the grueling ground war and relentless U.S. bombing attacks would take the lives of three million Vietnamese.
—
AS OF THIS WRITING, six people I interviewed for this book (Tod Ensign, Stanley Karnow, Albert Maysles, Richard Moose, Haskell Wexler, and Michael Kennedy) have died. Most of the people I talked to were in their late sixties and early seventies, ready to reflect and analyze the impact history made on their lives and the impact their lives made on history. It felt like the right time to ask this generation to talk about an era that was so vivid, so violent, so infuriating, and, at times, so much fun.
Witness is a narrative oral history that recounts s
ome of the events between August 1969 and September 1970 in chronological order, and also dips back in time to reveal what shaped the lives of the book’s main actors. For example, the students at Kent State did not take to the streets to protest the invasion of Cambodia in a vacuum. Each person I interviewed, whether they were journalists or students shot by the National Guard, had been personally and politically shaped by the events of previous years. As much as I tried to tame the scope of this book by limiting its timeline to one year, its footprint is much larger. The movement was by definition leaderless and divided into so many, often quarreling, factions defined by race, gender, violence or nonviolence, civilian or military, communist radicals or party-line Democrats. I describe this wide scope and complex weave of movements and events through the emblematic experiences of some of its most engaged players.
—
THE TERM YOUTHQUAKE BARELY captures the destructive vibrations of this anti-establishment explosion. “If you didn’t experience it back then,” Nixon aide Stephen Bull told me, “you have no idea how close we were, as a country, to revolution.” No matter which side of the White House fence you were on, the future looked perilous. “America was on the verge of a civil war every day,” Daniel Ellsberg told me. Bill Ayers concurred: “I was convinced that we were on the verge of a revolution. I’d never been in one. I had only read about it. But I was convinced that the contradiction between the American people and its government was so great, and so profound, that it was unresolvable, and we were zooming towards some kind of cataclysmic explosion between us and them.”
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