Witness to the Revolution

by Clara Bingham

  Randy said he was the only man left in the San Francisco War Resisters League office, because all the other men had been imprisoned—David Harris and several others. He said, “Pretty soon it’ll be all women when I go to prison.” I think that was the first moment that everybody in the audience had heard that he was going to prison. His trial was just after this, but he knew he would end up going to prison. “But,” he said, “I know that it’ll be all right, because all of you people will still be working against the war.” So it was hitting everybody at once. He was crying slightly at this point. His voice was choking. And one by one, people were standing up, and eventually everybody was standing up and nearly everybody was crying in the audience. Everybody was crying. I was crying.

  I got out of my chair and found the men’s room, and as soon as I got there I began sobbing hysterically. My chest was heaving, and it was hard to breathe. I’d only cried like that one other time in my life, when I learned that Bobby Kennedy was shot. I had seen Bobby just days earlier and I had drafted the policy framework for his last speech, which was in San Francisco. So here for the second time, and only other time in my life, I was crying—but not just crying, really hysterically racked. I thought, Randy Kehler is right. Resisting the draft and going to jail is the best thing he can do at this point. That’s what we’ve come to. The lines of a Leonard Cohen song called “Dress Rehearsal Rag” kept going through my mind. It’s about a guy contemplating suicide. The refrain of the song is

  That’s right, it’s come to this,

  yes it’s come to this,

  and wasn’t it a long way down,

  ah wasn’t it a strange way down?

  I was sitting on the floor of the bathroom, sobbing and thinking, This is what my country has come to, that the best thing a young man can do is go to prison. And that’s when I thought, My son is born for prison. He was fourteen then, and indeed the war was still on when he turned eighteen. Finally I got up, and I washed my face in the basin, and went back still crying.

  I was in there a good hour, and toward the end I was thinking, Okay, now what should I do to help end the war, now that I’m ready to go to prison? I just realized that going to prison could be an effective thing to do. Was I ready to go to prison? Well, sure. Here were these people who were perceiving that it made sense for them to go to prison. So the point was not that I wanted to go to prison—I didn’t, I never did—but that I should be willing to do everything up to and including prison, or being killed, like these other Americans. And that meant, more significantly, risking my clearance, my job, my career, all the other things that you risk short of prison. These risks prevented all my colleagues at RAND, who felt exactly the same way I did about the war, from meeting a Bob Eaton or a Randy Kehler or Janaki Tschannerl.

  RANDY KEHLER

  Some weeks or months after my talk, Dan said, “The question that I never, ever asked myself, that never occurred to me, was what might I do if I, too, were willing to go to prison?” And as soon as he asked himself the question, the answer popped up. “I would release this study, revealing decades of lies by four different administrations, Republican and Democrat, to Congress, to the press, to the American people, about what Vietnam was all about. And what was happening on the ground there, and what our real objectives were.” And that’s what he did.

  DANIEL ELLSBERG

  What Randy had done was put in my mind the willingness to go to prison for life, for the small chance of ending the war.

  * * *

  *1 Mario Savio was a Berkeley student, a gifted orator, and a leader of the Free Speech Movement. In Savio’s often-quoted December 2, 1964, speech about civil disobedience, he references Henry David Thoreau’s “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience”: “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus—and you’ve got to make it stop!”

  *2 Ira Sandperl was a pacifist and a student of Gandhian teaching who worked at the renowned Kepler’s Books in Palo Alto for thirty years and is credited with teaching a generation of men how to resist the draft nonviolently. He became folksinger Joan Baez’s mentor after meeting her in 1959, when she was a high school senior, and traveled with her to Mississippi in 1966 to help with Martin Luther King’s school desegregation campaign. Together, Sandperl and Baez founded the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence.

  *3 Daniel Berrigan was a radical antiwar activist, poet, and Jesuit priest, who along with his brother Philip (also a Catholic priest) and seven other Catholic activists used homemade napalm to burn hundreds of draft files from the Catonsville, Maryland, draft board in May 1968. The group was called the Catonsville Nine. Berrigan was sentenced to three years in prison, but he and others skipped bail and went underground. He was eventually apprehended in 1972.

  *4 The Presidio 27 was one of the largest cases of resistance to the war from within the military. On October 14, 1968, twenty-seven prisoners who were being kept in the stockade at the military base in San Francisco’s Presidio staged a sit-in during morning formation and sang “We Shall Overcome.” They were tried for mutiny, and the first three sentenced were given fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen years of hard labor, which caused a national uproar. Their sentences were eventually reduced on appeal. Three of the GIs escaped to Canada.

  *5 Founded in the Netherlands in 1921, the War Resisters League is an international antiwar organization that has helped war resisters since World War I. The league had a close working relationship with the Gandhian movement.

  *6 Daniel Ellsberg had spent most of his career as a Cold War hawk. A former marine with a PhD from Harvard in economics, he worked as a strategic analyst specializing in nuclear weapons at the RAND Corporation starting in 1959. In 1964 Ellsberg moved to Washington, D.C., and worked as a special assistant to Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton, in which post he became a proponent of escalating the war in Vietnam. But in 1965 Ellsberg went to Vietnam for two years, with the State Department, to see for himself what was happening on the ground. He spent months in the jungle witnessing the horrors of the war firsthand and came back home a changed man. He spent the next two years at RAND writing part of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s top-secret study of U.S. decision-making in Vietnam from 1945 to 1968 [later known as the Pentagon Papers] and trying to convince the powers that be that America needed to withdraw from what he believed was a criminal and unwinnable war.

  CHAPTER 6

  WOODSTOCK

  (August 1969)

  It was a phenomenal burst of human energy and spirit that came and went like a tidal wave up there in White Lake, Bethel, Woodstock, Aquarian Exposition, Music Festival, Happening, Monster, or whatever you called the fucking thing. I took a trip to our future.

  —ABBIE HOFFMAN, Woodstock Nation

  Posters advertised “an Aquarian exposition: three days of Peace and Music,” and on August 15–17, 1969, half a million people descended on a six-hundred-acre dairy farm in the Catskill Mountains, ninety miles north of New York City. Another million tried but were kept away by massive traffic jams. Thirty-two musical acts played, including Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Joe Cocker, Richie Havens, Santana, and Ravi Shankar. Joan Baez sang “We Shall Overcome” in a thunderstorm. A New Mexico commune called the Hog Farm, led by the charismatic Wavy Gravy, provided security and catering. Young people camped out and were sleeping, eating, making love, singing, and swimming in the nude together. It was not just a musical festival. “We used to think of ourselves as little clumps of weirdoes,” said Janis Joplin. “But now we’re a whole new minority group.” The size and success of the event convinced millions of young Americans who didn’t attend but had already embraced the counterculture that they were part of a larger community. “It was as much of a fair as the French Revol
ution or the San Francisco earthquake,” wrote journalist Andrew Kopkind.

  RICHARD REEVES (New York Times reporter)

  I was chief political reporter for The New York Times and was driving up to the Catskills to cover Mayor John Lindsay, who had just decided that he was going to become a Democrat, and suddenly the roads were totally blocked. There were cars parked in the fields everywhere. I go up to a state trooper and I say, “What the hell is going on?” He says, “Ten miles up that way, there’s a music festival called Woodstock, and people are coming from all over. They’re leaving their cars and walking.” And I said, “How can you get up there?” And he says, “The only way you can get there is by helicopter.” And I said, “Whose helicopter is that?” I was pointing across the field, and he said, “That’s Canned Heat,” which was a group at the time. And so I run over to Canned Heat. I’m just a thirty-three-year-old New York Times reporter wearing a jacket and a tie. So I get on the helicopter and I go up to Woodstock. Woodstock was an extraordinary story.

  GERALD LEFCOURT (Abbie Hoffman’s lawyer)

  The Chicago Eight were indicted in April,*1 and then these rock promoters announce a concert at Woodstock in August. The trial was scheduled for September. Abbie is enraged that they were going to rip off all these young people while “our movement is going on trial for our lives,” as he would say.*2

  So he stormed into the offices of the people putting on the concert and said, “We’re going to protest the concert, unless you put performers on the program who are antiwar.” The promoters folded and gave ten thousand dollars to Abbie to bring whomever he wanted. Abbie picked Phil Ochs, Country Joe, and some others.

  COUNTRY JOE MCDONALD (rock musician)

  They were putting on a festival to make money. That was their idea. But everything that the counterculture did was political because none of it was traditional. So it was political, and you couldn’t really separate the two. It was shocking to the status quo and to the old-line, World War II generation. I’ve talked to some people who went to Woodstock, and they were just hippies in a small community, and didn’t realize that there was this bigger national community of hippies until they got to Woodstock and realized, Wow, I’m not alone!

  STEPHEN STILLS (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)

  Everyone was fist-pounding, and angry about the war, and our music gave them something to do besides just be mad at everything. Woodstock, of course, everyone thinks it was a conspiracy—it’s so simple. There’s Bethel, New York. There are three hundred colleges within one hundred miles. Everybody came, and nobody realized how many hippies there were. They all decided to just gut it out, because all their favorite bands were going to be there. And then the promoters, and Michael Lang, happened to handle several things rather adroitly on the spot. It was a complete accident that it did not turn into hell.

  RICHARD REEVES

  I called up the paper [The New York Times] and I said, “Look, there’s something going on up here, there are hundreds of thousands of people in a field, and I’m going up there.” I didn’t ask. I said, “I’m going.” The news desk didn’t even know the concert existed. Then I got another break. The Daily News called for bringing in the National Guard and cleaning out Woodstock because it was a health hazard; arrest all of the people and move them out. And that might have happened. They were calling for bringing in the army. “This is a danger to national security” because of drugs, and sex, and mud.

  So I set myself up on the stage for three days, and I wrote a story saying, “Except for the fact that they’re dirty,” because there was mud, it was raining, “these people are no danger to anybody.” And I think that the guys who organized it, and some of the stars, realized that the Times was keeping them alive.

  Credit 6.1

  Organizers of the Woodstock festival were caught by surprise when hundreds of thousands more people attended than they expected. The traffic on the way to Bethel, New York, stretched for miles, and eventually people abandoned their cars and started walking.

  THELMA SCHOONMAKER (documentary filmmaker)

  I was an assistant director with Martin Scorsese on Michael Wadleigh’s production of the Woodstock documentary, but little did we know what the concert was going to be. We had no idea it was going to be that many people, or that it would get to be a little bit of a nightmare in terms of the blocked highways and people not being able to use their cars and not being able to get things in, and us not being able to get to our motel to sleep or eat anything for three days.

  Half a million people, and that was absolutely terrifying. Some of them were flying over the fence, because they were just so excited. The great gift of Woodstock was that the security was handled really beautifully. People talked to the kids, calmed them down, took them to the medical tent. There were no police hitting kids over the head. Everybody had the same feeling of love and the same political commitments and values, and it was just a wonderful feeling, even though for me it was quite a personal strain. I was terrified. I had no idea if we were getting the footage, if it was being damaged. So many of our magazines would jam, because it was very humid and raining a lot, and the cameramen would throw off the magazine, and I would try and get them another one from under the stage where we had eighty people loading magazines. It was insane! I remember the first time I looked up and saw half a million people out there. I’ll never forget it. It was absolutely stunning. I mean none of us expected it.

  GREIL MARCUS (music critic)

  I went to cover Woodstock for Rolling Stone magazine and I went for a simple reason, which was that there were lots of bands there I’d never seen and it seemed like a good way to see them. I went with a Rolling Stone photographer and another Rolling Stone writer. We even had tickets and a motel room. The first day I was there I completely hated it. I thought it was just awful. It was hot. There were a lot of people in distress. There were a lot of people without anything to eat, without water. It was a mess. It was this just enormous rural slum, and a lot of people were miserable. It was distressing. And it was raining all the time.

  What was most surprising to me were the number of performances that were just magnificent. Playing for this enormous crowd, people really seemed to come out of themselves and they made music that was bigger, that had more of a reach and an ambition, and I thought, God, crowds like this make for better music. Which probably isn’t remotely true—but that was the feeling I had then.

  Credit 6.2

  A pregnant Joan Baez plays at Woodstock and tells the audience about her husband, David Harris, who is in jail for resisting the draft.

  JOAN BAEZ (political activist, folksinger)

  August 15, 1969, Bethel, New York

  I’d like to sing you a song that is one of my husband David’s favorite songs. And let me tell you that he’s fine….[Pause and applause.] And we’re fine, too. [Pats her pregnant belly.] David was just shipped from the county jail, which is very much of a drag, to federal prison, which is kind of like a summer camp after you’ve been in county jail long enough.

  Anyway, this is an organizing song, and I was happy to find out that after David had been in jail for two and a half weeks he already had a very, very good hunger strike going with forty-two prisoners, none of whom were draft people.

  Credit 6.3

  From August 15 to August 17, 1969, half a million hippies camped out on a six-hundred-acre dairy farm in the Catskills for the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair.

  I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night

  Alive as you and me.

  Says I, “But Joe you’re ten years dead.”

  “I never died,” said he.

  “I never died,” said he.

  COUNTRY JOE MCDONALD

  The size was surprising. It was the biggest stage I had ever seen before—the biggest sound towers, and the biggest audience—I mean, half a million people, you know?

  Then I was on the stage at Woodstock, the band was breaking up, but we got booked two weeks before. We’re not on the poster. I
went early because I didn’t like to travel with the band. I liked festivals because you could see all kinds of acts. Saturday, I was just hanging around the stage, and Santana couldn’t get through the traffic on the road and the organizers said, “How about starting your solo career?” I said, “What the fuck?” And they said, “Just go do something, because Santana can’t get in here. We want to keep something happening onstage.”

  It was Saturday afternoon. I said, “I don’t have a guitar.” They went and they got me a guitar. I said, “I don’t have a guitar strap.” They got a piece of rope and tied it onto the guitar. Then they said, “Okay, go out there and do something.” I hadn’t performed solo for three or four years, and I sang some country-western songs and nobody was paying any attention to me, because nobody knew who I was. Most people knew Country Joe and the Fish.

  I walked offstage to ask the tour manager for Country Joe and the Fish, Bill Belmont, “Should I sing ‘Fixin’-to-Die Rag’ and the cheer? Because I’m saving it for when the band plays later tonight.” He said, “Nobody’s paying any attention to you. What the hell difference does it make what you do?” I thought, Okay. All right. So I went out there and yelled, “Give me an F!” I mean, they all responded and stood up and started singing along. They stopped talking, and they started yelling, and they paid more and more attention to me, and I realized, Whoa, what the hell is going on here? Then I got pretty brave in the middle and started yelling, “How can you expect to stop the war if you can’t sing louder than that?”