Witness to the Revolution

by Clara Bingham

  *5 The break-in at Brookings was never attempted.

  *6 The mistrial was called because of both the break-in to Dr. Fielding’s office and the illegal wiretaps of Morton Halperin’s phone. On May 11, 1973, Judge Byrne ruled: “The totality of the circumstances of this case…offend a sense of justice. The bizarre events have incurably infected the prosecution of this case.”

  *7 H. R. Haldeman, Richard Kleindienst, and John Dean were forced to resign after revelations that the White House ordered the burglary of Fielding’s office.

  *8 The unwinding of the war took place in stages in 1973 starting with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in January, in which the United States agreed to withdraw its troops in sixty days in exchange for a cease-fire, the return of American prisoners of war, and a promise by North Vietnam to recognize the legitimacy of South Vietnam’s government. In June 1973 Congress passed the Case-Church Amendment, by a solid majority (325–86 in the House, 73–16 in the Senate), prohibiting funding for U.S. military activity in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. This ended direct U.S. military involvement in the war. The last induction of draftees took place on July 1, 1973, and draft registration ended in March 1975. In April 1975, North Vietnam invaded South Vietnam. Saigon fell April 29, helicopters carried the last employees out of the American Embassy, and U.S. Navy ships secreted thousands of South Vietnamese out of the country.

  *9 On February 19, 1970, a bomb was detonated at the Golden Gate Park branch of the San Francisco Police Department. One officer was killed and several were seriously wounded. No one took responsibility and the case is still open.

  *10 The search for the Weather Underground fugitives was one of the largest manhunts in U.S. history. Bryan Burrough, in his book Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence (New York: Penguin Press, 2015), was the first to publish the name of the Weather Underground’s expert bomb maker, or “bomb guru,” Ron Fliegelman. Fliegelman, who worked closely with Cathy Wilkerson in New York, studied bomb making and designed almost all of the Weathermen’s bombs. Remarkably, Fliegelman’s story and name had been kept a secret, despite the publication of six memoirs and three books about the Weathermen.

  *11 On August 19, 1976, the FBI raided its own headquarters and found Hoover’s black-bag jobs file and discovered a series of burglaries in the New York apartments of relatives and friends of the fugitive members of the Weather Underground. The break-ins had been conducted in 1972 and 1973 by the FBI’s Squad 47, led by John Kearney in New York. In April 1978, a thirty-two-count indictment was brought against three of the FBI’s most senior retired leaders, Ed Miller, Mark Felt, and L. Patrick Gray. Charges were for “conspiracy to injure and oppress citizens” with warrantless searches. Felt and Gray were both convicted in 1980, but neither served jail time. Ronald Reagan pardoned Mark Felt for his actions involving the Weather Underground investigation, not knowing that he had just pardoned Deep Throat, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward’s key source in the Watergate scandal. Felt would reveal himself publicly as “Deep Throat” twenty-five years later, in 2005. See Tim Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI (New York: Random House, 2012), p. 349.

  *12 The 1975 Church Committee hearings unearthed COINTELPRO files that showed that the FBI went so far as to infiltrate the women’s liberation movement in dozens of cities and towns across the country. The committee’s chief counsel, Frederick A. O. Schwarz, Jr., concluded, “The FBI abuses were much more dangerous” than those of the people they were pursuing. “They undermined American democracy, violated the law and subverted the Constitution.” Medsger, The Burglary, p. 344.

  *13 Files retrieved under the Freedom of Information Act showed that Mark Felt told his FBI subordinates that one way they could convince Jennifer Dohrn to reveal her sister’s location would be to kidnap her baby boy. Medsger, The Burglary, p. 493.

  *14 Bernardine Dohrn got three years of probation and a $1,500 fine. She and Ayers settled in Chicago, where Ayers became a professor at the College of Education at the University of Illinois in Chicago, and Dohrn founded the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University School of Law, which she ran for twenty years.

  *15 When Mark Rudd surrendered to authorities in 1977, all charges against him were dropped because of FBI illegalities. He taught math for twenty-six years at Central New Mexico Community College in Albuquerque.

  *16 By 1972, the secretive group of hippie drug dealers from Laguna had become America’s largest international hashish smuggling and LSD distribution network, with more than 750 worldwide operatives. The Brotherhood laundered money in foreign bank accounts and forged passports so accurately that the government studied the group’s techniques for its own use. All told, the Brotherhood reportedly moved twenty-four tons of hashish to America in surfboards, VW buses, and Land Rovers from countries as far-flung as Afghanistan, India, and Nepal.

  *17 Leary, whom Richard Nixon called “the most dangerous man in America,” was put in solitary confinement in California’s Folsom Prison, with bail set at $5 million. In return for a shortened sentence, he agreed to cooperate with the FBI’s Weather Underground investigation. Leary would later claim that his attorney Michael Kennedy masterminded his jailbreak, which Kennedy denies, and a federal investigation into Kennedy’s involvement came up empty. Leary’s wife, Rosemary Woodruff, refused to cooperate with the FBI, and to avoid being subpoenaed she lived in hiding for twenty-three years, surfacing in 1994. Leary was released from prison in April 1976 by Governor Jerry Brown.

  *18 On his first full day in office, January 21, 1977, President Carter pardoned hundreds of thousands of men who had evaded the Vietnam War draft, many of whom were living in Canada. But the pardon did not clear civilian war protesters who were convicted of violent acts, nor did it clear an estimated 500,000 to 1,000,000 active-duty personnel who went AWOL (absent without leave) or deserted when they were serving during the war.

  *19 Rick Ayers moved to Oakland and became a professor of education at the University of San Francisco.

  *20 Most of this quote is from my interview with Jane Fonda in New York on June 14, 2014, but in some cases she suggested that I cross-reference her autobiography, My Life So Far, for factual and historical details, which I have done here (pp. 353–54).

  *21 Fonda traveled alone to Hanoi for two weeks in July 1972 at the invitation of the North Vietnamese, who wanted a celebrity to bring attention to the aggressive new U.S. bombing campaign, which had begun in April and would conclude over Christmas of 1972. The Haiphong Harbor was mined, and dikes, bridges, railroads, and the city of Hanoi were bombed by a barrage of B-52s. It was the first time the United States had bombed North Vietnam since 1968. Fonda made several radio broadcasts, delivered letters to POWs from their families (in a visit that would later become very controversial), and brought the POWs’ letters back to their families. On the last day of her trip, her photograph was hastily taken in front of an anti-aircraft gun.

  *22 Quoted from “The Truth About My Trip to Hanoi,” http://www.​janefonda.​com/​the-truth-​about-my-​trip-to-​hanoi/.

  *23 In September 1970, the Scranton Commission report concluded: “Even if the guardsmen faced danger, it was not a danger that called for lethal force. The 61 [to 67] shots by 28 guardsmen certainly cannot be justified. Apparently, no order to fire was given, and there was inadequate fire control discipline on Blanket Hill. The Kent State tragedy must mark the last time that, as a matter of course, loaded rifles are issued to guardsmen confronting student demonstrators.”

  *24 Sovereign immunity is a legal doctrine that protects the state from civil or criminal prosecution.

  EPILOGUE

  TRANSFORMATION

  America is moving out of Vietnam….But Vietnam is not moving out of America….

  There was no cease-fire on this front….[F]ew Americans challenge the proposition that for good or bad, something has happened to American life—something not yet understood or agreed upon,
something that is different, important and probably enduring.

  —JAMES RESTON, New York Times, January 24, 1973

  In the space of just one week in January 1973, Richard Nixon took the oath of office for his second, short-lived presidential term; Lyndon Baines Johnson died at his ranch in Stonewall, Texas; North Vietnam and the United States signed a cease-fire agreement in Paris; and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird announced an end to the draft. That same week, in his second inaugural address, Nixon outlined a new, more cautious American foreign policy: “The time has passed when America will make every other nation’s conflict our own…or presume to tell other nations how to manage their own affairs.”

  The war was over, and however the Nixon administration tried to dress it up, North Vietnam, though crippled, had prevailed. Vietnam, in the words of veteran war correspondent Neil Sheehan, was “a bad war, an unnecessary war, a mistake by American politicians and statesmen.” America was indeed close to looking like what Nixon said he feared most, “a pitiful helpless giant.” While America’s superpower role was diminished in the thaw of post-Cold War global politics, its domestic identity had transformed. The political, cultural, and spiritual fallout from the Vietnam War and the War at Home would profoundly and permanently change the nation.

  ROGER MORRIS

  There is a kind of trauma involved in the moral, emotional implications of what went on in Vietnam. It was a great American tragedy. Nineteen seventy was a climactic moment in American life, and we’re still living with the consequences, and just getting rid of the Vietnam syndrome. Vietnam, as a factor in the mentality of American foreign affairs, the way we see the world, and the lessons that we draw from it, is terribly important. We never really came to grips with the reasons for the mistake to begin with, which was our hubris and our ignorance of another people.

  JOHN PERRY BARLOW

  I think everybody, whether they went to ’Nam or not, everybody had a life that was profoundly altered. There’s no way in the world that I would have gone to college in four years straight if it hadn’t been fear of matriculating to the University of Vietnam. It affected everybody and in ways that people still don’t quite know how to discuss. The people who went to Vietnam and came back with stories that they couldn’t tell because nobody wanted to hear; the people who didn’t go to Vietnam and felt guilty because they hadn’t supported their brethren who did. I think it is a terrible scar.

  TOM HAYDEN (April 27, 2015, speech)

  One can only guess at why many in the elites hope to forget the Vietnam peace movement, why public memories have atrophied, and why there are few if any memorials to peace. The denial of our very impact, the caricatures of who we really were, the questioning of our patriotism, the snide suggestions that we offered no alternative but surrender to the external threat, has cast a pall of illegitimacy over our memory and a chilling effect among many peace dissenters. One reason for this forgetting is that the Vietnam War was lost, a historical fact which representatives of a self-proclaimed superpower can hardly acknowledge. Rather than admit that their war was a failure, it is more convenient to lay blame on the peace movement, the mainstream media, the dovish politicians at home, and the so-called enemies within.

  How the peace movement will be remembered—honored, or reviled—is still a moving target. What will remain indisputable, however, is that the draft played a central role in politicizing a generation. Forced conscription in an unpopular war propelled millions of men and women who were born anywhere near the years 1944 to 1950 to engage in American public policy. Whether they reacted to the draft out of self-interest, or based on moral principles, the draft played a critical role in turning the youth of the late sixties into an acutely politically engaged and awakened generation.

  The activism of the time created, as Ralph Nader called it, “a new form of citizenship.” Rebelling against conformity, promoting American values of self-determination, and owning a sense of responsibility to be agents for change are all hallmarks of the movement. Even though the movement opposed the U.S. government at almost every turn, it did so out of its own flavor of patriotism and drive to hold the government accountable for what it considered unjust conduct at home and abroad. As Time managing editor Henry Grunwald wrote in June 1970 after touring the country, “The radicals—always excepting the most violent fringe—insist that America must be great. That is why, within reason, we must cherish them.”

  Yet, the question remains, who won the war at home? Cultural and political extremism both produced their own lasting backlash, but history’s verdict generally holds that the cultural revolutionaries won and the political revolutionaries lost. Marxist rhetoric never found a broad base in a country founded on democracy and free markets. The political revolutionaries reacted to a brief moment in time, in a political vortex, and ultimately they lost sight of their audience. But in the end, hippies, feminists, and black power, environmental, and gay rights advocates permanently changed the DNA of American freedom.

  DANIEL ELLSBERG

  I think what neither the antiwar movement nor scholars nor journalists have come to understand after all these years about the Vietnam War is that the war could’ve been very much bigger than it ever got. The antiwar movement always assumed that the war was being fought ferociously at the highest possible level. But right from the beginning, the Joint Chiefs had been urging strongly that it be much bigger. They had a litany—it was like a catechism—of escalations that they wanted to be done simultaneously and it involved moving toward at least 500,000 troops in Vietnam, and possibly up to a million. A million was mentioned to the president by the chairman as early as 1965. We eventually got to 550,000.

  The antiwar movement, which was extremely admirable, and conscientious, and dedicated, and right, was doing what they should have been doing, except for the violence of the Weathermen, which helped Nixon. But I would say their efforts didn’t change Nixon’s plans and didn’t shorten the war, but it did something that they weren’t even focused on: It put a ceiling on the war, not just at one point but at many points along the way. They kept that war from getting enormously larger and more lethal than it would’ve been—as many as three to four million Vietnamese may have died during the war. Horrible. But it could easily have been ten million. When I say easily, it wasn’t just a future possibility; it’s what the Joint Chiefs were asking for.

  ROGER MORRIS

  I think the antiwar movement was very real for a time, but it didn’t take long to dissipate. There was real fatigue. My own view of the antiwar movement was that it was largely a draft protest, beyond the few principal people who knew what they were talking about, and the people who really did have a moral objection. Don’t forget what happened—as the troops come home and casualty lists begin to go down in 1971 and ’72, and we begin to savage the Vietnamese people from thirty thousand feet with computers [from B-52 bombers], the opposition became less and less vocal. The war ends not because of the people in the streets. The war ends because the North Vietnamese finally relent on some of the negotiation points, and the Congress of the United States finally pulls the plug.

  JULIUS LESTER

  One of the legacies of the antiwar movement was to end the draft. That was a huge mistake, because now we have a mercenary army. Therefore, if your son or brother is not in the army, then you’re not affected by what the United States does abroad. Whereas with Vietnam, everybody was liable to the draft. That was democracy. And so getting rid of the draft was a huge, huge mistake. I don’t consider that a political victory.

  MARK RUDD

  The draft forced people to pay attention, and that’s why they eliminated the draft. But the cultural revolution was critical, too, because the cultural revolution brought people in. It was like an entry drug. For so many years you had a fixed system that had no breaks in it. In the Eisenhower fifties it was seamless. The only thing happening then was the labor movement, and the growing civil rights movement, that was mostly confined to the black population in the
South and a handful of white liberals. But the sixties showed the major shake-up of the culture, which then led people into looking at the whole thing.

  PETER COYOTE

  I think it’s fair to say that we lost all our political struggles in the sixties. We didn’t end capitalism, we didn’t end imperialism, we didn’t end racism, we didn’t actually end the war in Vietnam. However, we did win all the cultural battles. There’s no place in the United States you can go today where there’s not a women’s movement, an environmental movement, alternative health movements, alternative spiritual practices, yoga, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, organic food, alternative ways of eating and nutrition, gay rights. These things are locked in the culture and these things are exerting long-term pressures that are deeply and subtly transformative, and it is the Diggers’ assertion that they were more powerful than politics, and I still hold to that.

  When I returned to Olema in 1992, it was a little mournful. The place had been leveled, the park service had taken over the land. There was nothing there. I thought, How could such a people so visible in the present, so colorful, so inventive, so imaginative, how could they have disappeared without a trace? But I decided that they didn’t disappear without a trace. It’s kind of like seasoning a stew; you can’t see the salt and the pepper anymore once you’ve put it in the stew. You can’t distinguish the turnips from the potatoes, but they’re all in the stew. But the stew tastes differently because of those ingredients. We’re not so recognizable as individuals, but we all have contributed to making these cultural changes.