Witness to the Revolution
Page 29
Oh, a storm is threat’ning
My very life today
I went back to my car, where I found my radio had been stolen. People believed they were moral and high-minded. People believed that they had somehow escaped the endemic moral, political, and economic corruption of American society, and they found out that day that that wasn’t true.
JOHN HARTMANN
(music agent, manager)
It was sort of like the funeral where they buried King Hippie. Altamont was a big damaging blow to the hippie peace and love ethic. This wasn’t peace and love, this was violence and death. The Stones’ image was as bad boys, not good boys like the Beatles. The Beatles, who started out dirty, became clean in the minds of the public. With the Stones, the whole thing was about the devil, and cross-dressing, and everything that was taboo, you could see manifested in various songs like “Sympathy for the Devil.” So they were the bad boys; they made a huge mistake, because they got the Hells Angels to be the security for Altamont.
GREIL MARCUS
It was probably the worst day of my life in a lot of ways. When it was over, we had a meeting at Rolling Stone among those of us who had been there, and we thought, this was so awful, that we shouldn’t even dignify it by covering it. Jann [Wenner] said, “No, we’re going to cover this from top to bottom. We’re going to use every resource we have and we’re going to lay the blame.” The whole issue was devoted to Altamont as this day of calamity, horror, and bad faith on the part of all different kinds of people.
MID-DECEMBER, NEW YORK, CHICAGO: SDS
MARK RUDD
I was one of the people who implemented the closing of the SDS New York regional office and the closing of the national office. That decision was made in conjunction with the decision to go underground. Now I consider the closing down of those SDS national and regional offices to be the largest single political error that I’ve ever made.
CATHY WILKERSON
I remember being at the SDS national office in Chicago when the cops were lined up outside. We called the University of Wisconsin, who kept an archive on SDS, and said, “Do you want the remaining papers?” And they came down at the drop of a hat with a van and literally shoveled the papers off the floor into the van, because the [SDS] office had been trashed by the cops.
MARK RUDD
I had a Volkswagen van, and I remember picking up the mailing addresses for the whole New York region; they were in a couple of big boxes. We had a loft on 131 Prince Street that somebody had given us, and Ornette Coleman was practicing the saxophone above us. I remember around the end of December picking up these mailing stencils and taking them with Ted Gold to the West Street Pier, at the end of Fourteenth Street, and dumping them into the garbage barge that was parked there. That was the end of SDS. If I had been an FBI agent, I couldn’t have done it better.
BERNARDINE DOHRN
We felt a lot of despair, and that’s always unhealthy—it’s a human feeling, obviously, but it’s also politically very unhealthy. We felt the holidays taking over—Christmas lights by Thanksgiving, and people going about their lives as if bombs weren’t raining on the Vietnamese—was unspeakable. And everything that captured the public mind—Nixon’s stupid stuff and ultimately the Charles Manson*11 murders—things that obsessed people were just sideshows and circuses. We had to find a way to bring people’s attention back to the crisis of our time, which in our mind was the Vietnamese struggle and the black freedom movement.
By the time of Flint, a lot had happened. The Days of Rage had happened. We had had lots of arrests, and lots of charges against us. The [Chicago Seven] conspiracy trial was ending, and SDS as such didn’t exist. There was still a campus movement around the country, and a huge antiwar movement, but there was also a growing military assault against Vietnam, and against Laos and Cambodia, and Fred Hampton had been assassinated. All of that was right before Flint.
DECEMBER 27, FLINT, MICHIGAN:
NATIONAL WAR COUNCIL
MARK RUDD
The War Council meeting in Flint, Michigan, December 27–31, was kind of a strange hybrid, because on the one hand it was the continuation of an SDS tradition, which was bringing people together a few times a year for conferences and conventions. SDS typically had three of them. And this was the same kind of thing. But we called it the National War Council meeting and sent out pamphlets calling it a “wargasm.” And it was more like a rally. It also was crazy because it was obviously infiltrated by many, many undercover cops.
Flint was insanity. The venue was a dilapidated dance hall in the black neighborhood. There was a giant cardboard machine gun, and pictures of Che [Guevara] and Fred Hampton all over the walls, and orgiastic dancing to Sly and the Family Stone, but we made up our lyrics. “Che vive, viva Che! Che vive, viva Che.” Sly and the Family Stone were very cool.*12
Stand
In the end you’ll still be you
One that’s done all the things you set out to do
Stand
There’s a cross for you to bear
Things to go through if you’re going anywhere
Stand
For the things you know are right
It’s the truth that the truth makes them so uptight
Stand
All the things you want are real
You have you to complete and there is no deal
Stand, stand, stand
Stand, stand, stand
TOM HAYDEN (founder, SDS)
The meeting in Flint was in late December, just a month and a half before the [Chicago Seven] trial ended. I went there and taught a karate class. But frankly, I thought it was spooky. I think people might’ve been on speed—it could be that simple. They were already in another world. The inner group had made a decision to go underground; they weren’t sharing it.
I was feeling very bourgeois. I was with my girlfriend, and some other couple, and a kid might’ve been with us. It was no place for couples. They had smashed monogamy, which was a way of giving yourself to the revolution. Monogamy was a form of possessive individualism to be abandoned.
If I had been footloose and not on trial, it might’ve been seen slightly different. If I hadn’t been in a relationship where there was a small child at stake, it might’ve been different. I think it’s more that I was older, and I had this residual foundation of the early sixties in my soul, which the Weathermen were dismissive of. My rock foundation was the early sixties. Theirs was the mid to late sixties. It doesn’t sound chronologically like it’s much distance in time, but it’s an eternity. If you were a college freshman in ’64 as opposed to a freshman in ’57, that’s an eternity. The only thing I can add, now that I look back on it, was that I was becoming out of touch. I mean, these people were having flat-out naked, wild orgies as a political act.
MARK RUDD
I’ve always respected and adored Tom Hayden, and I was really very, very pleased that he came to Flint. You have to understand that from 1962 to 1969, SDS leadership had gone through three generations in seven years. I’d be of the last generation, and Tom being of the first. I think he was the only person there from that first generation.
Tom Hayden has a very clear view of it. He says in one of his essays, as the violence escalated in Vietnam, the violence at home escalated in response. That’s it, that’s a simple way to look at it, and I agree with him.
My FBI files report has me saying at Flint, “We are going to meet and map plans to avenge the deaths of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.” My own madness slipped out of my mouth when I said, “It’s a wonderful feeling to kill a pig or blow up a building.”
BILL AYERS (blog, March 3, 2008)
Bernardine was reported to have said in the middle of a speech at an SDS meeting in Flint, Michigan, “Dig it! First they killed those pigs and then they put a fork in their bellies. Wild!” I didn’t hear that exactly, but words that were close enough I guess. Her speech was focused on the murder just days earlier of our friend Fred Hampton, the Black Panther l
eader, a murder we were certain—although we didn’t know it yet—was part of a larger government plot, the Gestapo-like tactics of an emerging police state. She linked Fred’s murder to the murders of other Panthers around the country, to the assassinations of Malcolm X and Patrice Lumumba, the CIA attempts on Fidel’s life, and then to the ongoing terror in Vietnam. “This is the state of the world,” she cried. “This is what screams out for our attention and our response. And what do we find in our newspapers? A sick fascination with a story that has it all: a racist psycho, a killer cult, and a chorus line of Hollywood bodies. Dig it!…” So I heard it partly as political talk, agitated and inflamed and full of rhetorical overkill, and partly as a joke, stupid perhaps, tasteless, but a joke nonetheless—and Hunter Thompson for one, was making much more excessive, and funnier, jokes about Charles Manson then, and so was Richard Pryor.
ROBIN MORGAN (radical feminist)
When I was noticeably pregnant with Blake, I ran into Bernardine. This was right around the time when she made the pronouncement about Sharon Tate—that the Manson people stuck a fork in her belly after they killed her, adding, “Wasn’t that cool?” I was pregnant and she said, “Is that a pig child?” And I said, “You mean is the father white?” Because if the father was black then the child was acceptable. “As a matter of fact, as it turns out the father is white,” I said. And she said, “So why are you having it?” I said, “What would you have me do, abort a planned, wanted child? Or perhaps I should just stick it in a trash can when it’s born.” She said, “Now, that would be a good idea.” So, frankly, I have never quite forgiven Bernardine, despite her claims of having revised her virulent anti-feminist politics.
BERNARDINE DOHRN
I feel self-critical about those days. I think that that’s the period of time when I feel like the metaphor of bringing the war home took over my language, and the way that I thought about the movement. I can understand that, because I feel like we had this fierce sense that somebody had to stand up and object to the war, and the bullets were flying. People were dying in the thousands every week in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, and were being assassinated at home. So that part I can understand, but obviously I feel now that the language of war, even revolutionary war, made us harsh, made me harsh; and made me speak about war without doing everything to avoid it without recognizing the horror and the harm; and how it turns people, even people who are fighting for freedom, into something else. So I think that period was harsh.
I have vivid memories of that December: the horror of people going shopping, and Christmas bells. You know how in an election cycle like this you can get really cynical about the American people. We can’t talk about the world? We can’t be part of the world? We can’t talk about the environment? That was the feeling times a thousand, because of having the images of war on TV, and having the vets coming home, and knowing from the Vietnamese what the cost was on the ground.
MARK RUDD
The decision was made at Flint that I would step out of the Weather Bureau. I was suffering enormous self-doubt. I didn’t question the rightness of our strategy or of our method, but I questioned my ability to do it. I knew I was posing and it didn’t feel right, and so I experienced this as depression. The other members of the Weather Bureau, which was the leadership of the Weatherman faction of SDS, could see that I was flagging, I was wavering. So, by mutual agreement, we agreed I would demote myself out of the top leadership, down into what you might call a regional leadership position.
Also one of the craziest things that happened was after Flint, I went to Ann Arbor and shacked up with a girlfriend of mine, and we both did acid for the first time. You can imagine what that was like—total paranoia, plus the feelings of exhilaration around psychedelics. I took my first acid trip on December 31, 1969, and took my last acid trip on December 31, 1970, and in between I became a fugitive.
I spent the month of January traveling around the country, trying to recruit people in the organization to go underground. By the time that I got to New York in February, I was still aboveground, and I was still using my own ID. I still had contact with my parents and old friends, and was using regular telephones. But we set up a series of houses in Manhattan that were completely clandestine. We rented apartments under clandestine names and we began living there and operating. And that included an armed robbery to finance the operation.
There were circles of support. And it involved some people being willing and able to go underground and other people wanting to help. It’s not as if there was a clear line between those in the organization and those outside the organization. There were sort of circles of agreement and of support. And I suspect that lawyers felt maybe that they should have been on the front lines but their skill kept them doing legal stuff. We were getting money from wherever we could get money. It wouldn’t matter. We’d get it from our parents; we’d get it from anybody who had money.
TOM HAYDEN
As my day job, I was working inside the system, which the Weathermen considered wrong, and they thought I should go underground with them. I wouldn’t do that because I didn’t feel that I fit in with them. However, I didn’t know if they were right or wrong. This is what was so existential about it. Maybe a police state was coming. Certainly towards the Panthers it seemed to be coming. The Berrigan brothers had gone underground. There were different undergrounds. There was a Catholic underground against the draft. There were Panther undergrounds. There were draft resistance undergrounds. Drug dealer undergrounds, marijuana undergrounds. All across America, a lot of people were breaking one law or another. So it wasn’t a completely strange idea.
So in that sense, I took seriously the Weathermen analysis of repression and I thought it was legitimate, but I wasn’t going to do it. I knew all sides of the debate but I wasn’t leaving my legal defense work in the court [at the Chicago Seven trial]. And I wasn’t giving up on the idea of persuading public opinion, or persuading an appellate judge. It could be that I was trained all my life to use words, and to abandon words for guns just didn’t seem the best use of my talents.
BRIAN FLANAGAN
In December of ’69 we started dumping the collectives, and starting other collectives that were doing violent stuff. The mass collectives that were living openly in apartments we dumped and started going into safe houses and doing arson and various low-level bombings. All of the big names went underground.
DECEMBER 27, MADISON, WISCONSIN: CHRISTMAS BOMBINGS
KARL ARMSTRONG
It was winter break, so there was no one on campus. I felt like I was out there in the emotional wilderness. I had reached an emotional low point, where I said, “I really have to act.” The armory was half a block away from where I was living, and half of the building was devoted to ROTC. There had been lots of demonstrations at the armory. First of all, I thought it was a beautiful building. I played basketball there. But I realized what it meant symbolically. I was of very mixed mind about it. It went against my grain to destroy property, but I knew that the symbolism was really important.
On December 27, 1969, at two o’clock in the morning, I walked up to the building, threw a jar of gasoline in, and burned the building. Basically it was my declaration of war. I was now at war with the United States. To me it was laughable: It felt like puny acts against the war machine. But it was important, because this was a way of committing myself. After the first act I said, “There’s no turning back.” It was just a matter of marshaling resources, picking the right targets, and trying to be smart. I truly felt out there, and yet, in another sense, I felt really comfortable because I was finally active.
WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL, DECEMBER 29, 1969 (front page)
FIREBOMBS DAMAGE UW
ROTC BUILDING
Firebombs were thrown through three windows of the ROTC building at Linden and Babcock Dr. on the University of Wisconsin campus early Sunday, damaging several desks and scorching the ceiling of a lecture hall.
No one was injured.
; KARL ARMSTRONG
After the firebombing of the armory, I talked to my brother Dwight and I said, “I’d like to do an aerial bombing of the Badger ordnance plant.”*13 And he said, “Are you crazy? What are you talking about?” And I said, “Well, remember the firebombing of the ROTC building a couple of nights ago? That was me.” I said I thought a bombing of the Badger ordnance plant on New Year’s Eve would be the perfect symbolic bombing against the war. The Badger ordnance plant was producing the bulk of the rocket powder used in Vietnam. It was a huge plant. I picked New Year’s Eve for the symbolic starting the New Year. I thought that symbolically it was the time to do it.
My brother had been a gas jockey at the airport, so he did the flying. We went to Morey Airport and we pulled an ROTC training plane out of the hangar. Dwight wasn’t a certified pilot, and he had never flown at night before. Lynn, my girlfriend, Dwight, and I loaded up a big metal ashtray from the fraternity house and a couple of mayonnaise bottles filled with ammonium nitrate. I knew about bombs from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. But we didn’t have a detonator. So I knew they probably wouldn’t go off. The symbolic act seemed more important than the actual damage, because if the bombs did go off, we’d probably have been blown out of the air. We followed the road up to the Badger ordnance plant, and we could see Lynn from the air as she was going in to make the phone call to warn them at the plant that we were going to bomb it in protest of the Vietnam War. I didn’t think anyone would be working there because it was New Year’s Eve.