Witness to the Revolution

by Clara Bingham

  Stephen Bull (born 1941) was special assistant to the president and appointments secretary under President Nixon. Bull later worked for the Commission on the Review of the National Policy toward Gambling, Philip Morris Company, and the United States Olympic Committee, and was a member of the Salvation Army’s board of advisors.

  Jack Cipperly (born 1927) is emeritus assistant dean in the College of Letters at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he worked from 1967 to 1997. Cipperly served in the Marine Corps and then enrolled at the University of Wisconsin on the GI Bill. He stayed on for his master’s and PhD degrees.

  Peter Coyote (born 1941) (né Robert Peter Cohon) is an award-winning actor, author, film director, screenwriter, and film narrator. Coyote has appeared in more than one hundred films, including E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Patch Adams, and Erin Brockovich, and he has narrated 165 documentaries. He was a prominent member of the San Francisco counterculture community from 1967 to 1975, during which he and others started the Diggers, an anarchist improv group that supplied free food, housing, and medical aid to hippies living in Haight-Ashbury. The Diggers evolved into the “Free Family,” which founded chains of communes around the Pacific Northwest and Southwest. Coyote describes his sixties exploits in his memoir, Sleeping Where I Fall (1998).

  Bernardine Dohrn (born 1942) is a founding member, leader, and chief spokesperson of the radical Weathermen group. Dohrn lived underground as a fugitive from 1970 to 1980, where she raised two sons with her husband, Weather Underground member Bill Ayers. Dohrn and Ayers turned themselves in to authorities in Chicago in 1980. Although she was one of the most wanted fugitives of the sixties, a judge gave Dohrn three years of probation and a $1,500 fine because FBI evidence against her was illegally obtained. Dohrn, who graduated from the University of Chicago Law School in 1967, is a retired clinical associate professor of law at Northwestern University School of Law’s Children and Family Justice Center. The founder and former director of the center, Dohrn worked for twenty years as an advocate for fair sentencing for children, and ending over-incarceration of children of color.

  William “Bill” Dyson, Jr. (born 1941), served as an FBI special agent in the Chicago bureau from 1967 to 1998. Two years after joining the bureau, Dyson was assigned to surveillance of the Students for a Democratic Society. He watched as the student group evolved into the militant Weathermen in June 1969. Dyson became a bomb expert and chief case agent investigating the Weather Underground until the group disbanded in 1976. He was a senior counterterrorism specialist and supervisor of Chicago’s Terrorism Task Force for fourteen years.

  Daniel Ellsberg (born 1931) is an antiwar activist and a former marine, academic, strategic analyst for the RAND Corporation, and consultant to the White House and Defense Department. The Harvard-educated Ellsberg joined the Defense Department in 1964 and worked on plans to escalate the war in Vietnam. While stationed in Saigon from 1965 to 1967, he began to understand that the war was unwinnable. In 1967 Ellsberg contributed to a top-secret study on the United States military’s conduct in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. The study later became known as the Pentagon Papers, which Ellsberg leaked to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and seventeen other newspapers in 1971. Ellsberg was charged with twelve federal felony counts, which could have meant a 115-year prison sentence. The charges were dropped in 1973 because of criminal misconduct by the White House Plumbers against Ellsberg. Ellsberg is now an outspoken activist on the dangers of nuclear war and the importance of whistle-blowers. He is author of three books, including Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (2002).

  Tod Ensign (1940–2014) was an author, veterans’ rights lawyer, and director of Citizen Soldier, a nonprofit GI and veterans rights advocacy organization. Ensign cofounded in 1970 the Citizens’ Commission of Inquiry, which publicized war crimes and other atrocities in Vietnam. In 1970, CCI held Citizens’ Commissions in cities all over the country where Vietnam vets described the atrocities they either witnessed or committed themselves during battle. In later years Ensign worked on a wide range of legal cases, and was the first public advocate for veterans exposed to toxic levels of Agent Orange herbicide.

  David Fenton (born 1953) is a public relations executive, political activist, and photojournalist. At age seventeen Fenton dropped out of high school to photograph the antiwar and counterculture movements for Liberation News Service. He photographed most of the major demonstrations, trials, and concerts of the late 1960s and early 1970s. He developed a reputation as one of the movement’s principal and most trusted photographers. In 1972 Fenton published a book of his photographs, Shots: Photographs from the Underground Press. He is the founder and CEO of Fenton Communications, a progressive public relations firm focused on the environment, public health, and human rights.

  John Filo (born 1948) is a photojournalist whose iconic photo of Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling over the body of twenty-year-old student Jeffrey Miller at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, won the Pulitzer Prize. At the time Filo was a photojournalism student at the university. Since then he has worked for an array of news organizations, including the Associated Press, Philadelphia Inquirer, Baltimore Evening Sun, and Newsweek. Filo is currently director of photography at CBS.

  Brian Flanagan (born 1946) is a pool shark, former bar owner, and Jeopardy! champion. As a student at Columbia University he was one of the leaders in the 1968 student revolt and later became a prominent member of the Weathermen. Flanagan was arrested during the Days of Rage protest in October 1965 and accused of breaking the neck of Richard Elrod, a Chicago prosecutor who was paralyzed after a scuffle with Flanagan. Flanagan was acquitted in 1970 and eventually joined the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, the aboveground wing of the Weather Underground. He now runs a wine consulting business in New York City.

  Jane Fonda (born 1937), a celebrated actor, antiwar activist, and feminist, was an early supporter of GIs and Vietnam vets, and worked for the antiwar movement as an organizer, spokeswoman, and fundraiser. She was vilified for allowing herself to be photographed on an anti-aircraft gun while visiting Hanoi in 1972. Fonda was followed and harassed by the FBI for years and her file was twenty-two thousand pages long. Fonda won an Academy Award for best actress in Klute (1971) and Coming Home (1978), and was nominated for five others.

  Robert “Bob” Giles (born 1933) is a journalist, editor, and author. Giles spent more than forty years in the newspaper business. He was managing editor of the Akron Beacon Journal at the time of the Kent State University shootings in 1970. The paper won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the shootings. While he was editor of The Detroit News, Giles directed Pulitzer Prize–winning coverage of a 1994 scandal in the Michigan House Fiscal Agency. He served as curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University from 2000 to 2011.

  Emily Goodman (born 1941) is a retired New York Supreme Court justice. She rose to prominence as an activist feminist lawyer, working for abortion rights and representing only women in divorce cases.

  Peter Greenberg (born 1950) is an author, editor, producer, and a multiple-Emmy-winning broadcast journalist. He is also the travel editor for CBS News. As a student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Greenberg covered campus unrest in 1969 and 1970 for the student newspaper, The Daily Cardinal, and for Newsweek. His most recent book is The Best Places for Everything: The Ultimate Insider’s Guide to the Greatest Experiences Around the World (2012).

  Morton Halperin (born 1938) is an expert on foreign policy and civil liberties. Halperin served as the deputy assistant secretary of defense under President Lyndon B. Johnson, and senior staff member of the National Security Council under President Richard Nixon. He became disillusioned with the war and resigned in September 1969. Halperin’s phone was wiretapped by the FBI from May 1969 to February 1971. He later served in the Clinton administration as director of the Policy Planning Staff at the Department of State (1998–2001), special assistant to the president, and senior director for democracy at the
National Security Council (1994–96). Halperin also served as consultant to the secretary of defense and the undersecretary of defense for policy (1993). He is a senior advisor at the Open Society Foundation.

  David Harris (born 1946) is a journalist and author. As a student at Stanford in the mid-1960s, Harris became involved with the civil rights movement, and later the antiwar movement. In 1967 he founded the Resistance, an organization and widespread movement that promoted draft resistance. Harris was arrested in July 1969 for draft evasion and served fifteen months in prison. At the time, he was married to the folksinger and civil rights and peace activist Joan Baez, who told the story of his arrest during her Woodstock festival performance. He is a former contributing editor at The New York Times Magazine and Rolling Stone as well as the author of ten nonfiction books and one novel.

  John Hartmann (born 1940) is a veteran music agent, manager, and record executive who represented some of the greatest artists and bands of the 1960s and ’70s, including Buffalo Springfield, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, the Eagles, Peter, Paul & Mary, Crosby, Stills & Nash, and Jackson Browne. Hartmann teaches music management at UCLA Extension and a weekly yoga class.

  David Hawk (born 1943) is an international human rights expert. As a Cornell student in the 1960s, he worked on voter registration campaigns, community organizing, and civil rights efforts in Mississippi and Georgia. Hawk worked as an advance man on Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign in 1968, and was a cofounder of the Vietnam Moratorium Committee. Hawk served as executive director of Amnesty International from 1974 to 1978 and director of the Cambodia office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. He has documented the genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda, worked to eradicate land mines in Vietnam, and written about political prison camps in North Korea.

  Tom Hayden (born 1939) was a leading organizer, spokesman, and visionary of the sixties peace movement. While a student at the University of Michigan and civil rights activist, Hayden cofounded Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1960 and wrote the first draft of its manifesto, the Port Huron Statement, in 1962, which became the blueprint for the New Left. During the rest of the decade, he visited North Vietnam, organized teach-ins against the war, and spoke at antiwar protests, including the one at the Chicago Democratic convention in 1968 for which he was later tried with seven others on conspiracy charges and acquitted. In 1982, Hayden was elected to the California state assembly. He represented Santa Monica for eighteen years in the California State Assembly and Senate. A prolific writer, lecturer, blogger, and social justice and peace activist, Hayden has written twenty books, most recently Inspiring Participatory Democracy: Student Movements from Port Huron to Today (2012). Hayden was married to Jane Fonda from 1973 to 1990. His FBI file is twenty thousand pages long.

  Gray Henry (born 1943) is a writer, film producer, and professor of world religions and art history. Henry’s company Fons Vitae publishes the work of Catholic mystic and pacifist Thomas Merton. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1965 and afterward worked as a filmmaker in New York City, where she became friends with Timothy Leary. Henry lives in Louisville, Kentucky, and devotes her life to promoting interfaith peace and fellowship.

  Jeffrey Henson Scales (born 1954) is a photographer and photo editor at The New York Times. Born in San Francisco, Henson Scales at the age of thirteen began taking pictures of the Black Panthers with a 35mm Leica his father had given him. His photographs of Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale, and other activists appeared regularly in The Black Panther newspaper. Scales’s photos can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Museum of the City of New York, and many other institutions.

  Seymour Hersh (born 1937) is considered by many to be the dean of American investigative journalism. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker on military and security issues. In November 1969, as a young freelancer, Hersh broke the My Lai massacre story, which earned him a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. Hersh has also won two National Magazine Awards, five Polk Awards, and a National Book Critics Circle Award, among others. He is author of nine books, most recently Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (2004).

  Ericka Huggins (born 1951) is an African American activist, educator, writer, poet, and former member of the Black Panther Party. In 1969, at age eighteen, Huggins joined the party with her husband, John, in Los Angeles. John was murdered in January 1969 by members of the rival black nationalist organization United Slaves on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles. Ericka Huggins returned east with her three-month-old daughter, where she founded the New Haven, Connecticut, chapter of the Black Panther Party. She was arrested in New Haven in May 1969, along with other party members, and charged with conspiracy to murder Alex Rackley, who was suspected by the Panthers of disloyalty. Huggins went on trial alongside party founder Bobby Seale, and the judge dismissed the charges after the jury deadlocked. Huggins moved back to California, where she worked as the director of the Oakland Community School and became the first woman and African American to serve on the Alameda County board of education. She’s introduced the practice of yoga and meditation to hundreds of prisoners over the years, and currently is a lecturer in women’s studies at California State University, East Bay.

  Dean Kahler (born 1950) was a freshman at Kent State University when he was shot by the Ohio National Guard on May 4, 1970. Of the nine students wounded that day, Kahler sustained the most severe injuries and was permanently paralyzed from the waist down. After the shooting, he returned to Kent State and earned a degree in education in 1977. Kahler has taught history and worked in several government jobs, including for the Ohio secretary of state, where he helped the state conform to the Americans with Disabilities Act. Kahler served two terms as the Athens County commissioner and is a frequent participant in competitive road races.

  Michael Kazin (born 1948) is a professor of history at Georgetown University and co-editor of Dissent magazine. He is an expert in nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. politics and social movements. As a student at Harvard University in the late 1960s Kazin was a prominent antiwar activist and became cochair of the campus chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. He and others led an occupation of University Hall, nonviolently expelling university administrators on April 9, 1969. Kazin was briefly a member of the radical antiwar group the Weathermen. He is author of five books, most recently American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (2011).

  Randy Kehler (born 1944) is a social justice, peace, and environmental advocate. During the Vietnam War he served a twenty-two-month prison sentence for resisting the draft. As a member of the Resistance and an outspoken advocate against the war, Kehler inspired Daniel Ellsberg to leak the Pentagon Papers to the press. Kehler was coordinator of the successful Safe & Green Campaign to shut down the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant.

  Michael Kennedy (1938–2016) was one of a handful of “radical” criminal defense lawyers who roamed the country representing their clients in court, trying to keep them out of jail, and serving as the behind-the-scenes backbone of the movement. Kennedy represented Timothy Leary, members of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, members of the Weather Underground, Huey Newton and other Black Panthers, many draft dodgers and resisters, and a slew of other sixties activists who ran into trouble with the law. For the rest of his life, Kennedy remained a prominent New York trial lawyer with a colorful and often famous list of clients. He also served as general counsel and co-owner of High Times magazine for forty-one years and was an outspoken advocate for marijuana legalization.

  Laurel Krause (born 1955) is a writer, environmental activist, and cofounder of the Kent State Truth Tribunal. She is currently forming the Allison Center for Peace. Her sister, Allison Krause, age nineteen, was killed in the May 4, 1970, shootings at Kent State University.

  Egil “Bud” Krogh (born 1939) is a lawyer, a former Nixon administration official, and one of the mos
t prominent defendants in the Watergate scandal. From 1970 to 1972, Krogh was White House deputy for domestic affairs, and his duties included codirecting the Special Investigations Unit, eventually known as the “Plumbers.” Krogh approved a covert operation to burglarize Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. He later pleaded guilty to conspiracy and served four and a half months in prison. Krogh is currently a senior fellow on Ethics and Leadership at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress, and counselor to the director at the School for Ethics and Global Leadership.

  Anthony “Tony” Lake (born 1939) is a foreign policy expert who served as a Foreign Service officer in the U.S. State Department from 1962 to 1970. Lake resigned from his position as special assistant to National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger in May 1970 because of his opposition to the invasion of Cambodia. He served as national security advisor for President Clinton from 1993 to 1997 and is currently the executive director of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). Lake has written and edited eight books, including Legacy of Vietnam: The War, American Society, and the Future of U.S. Foreign Policy (1976, contributing editor).

  Gerald Lefcourt (born 1941) is a prominent New York–based criminal defense lawyer with a long history of representing activists. Soon after graduating from Brooklyn Law School, Lefcourt represented Mark Rudd, the Black Panthers’ New York chapter, and Abbie Hoffman. He was lead defense lawyer for the Panther 21 during their 1969 conspiracy trial. Hoffman, who remained a lifelong client, inscribed his 1971 manual for revolutionary living, Steal This Book, to Lefcourt, with these words: “Dedicated to Jerry Lefcourt Lawyer and Brother.”

  Julius Lester (born 1939) is a professor, writer of fiction and nonfiction, poet, political commentator, musician, folklorist, photographer, and former civil rights activist. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he taught for thirty-three years. Lester joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the mid-1960s as the head of the committee’s photography department. In 1968 he published his first book, Look Out, Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama!, which was followed in 1969 by Revolutionary Notes and Search for the New Land: History as Subjective Experience. All three books chronicle the events, emotions, and hopes of the 1960s with grace and rage. Lester went on to write more than forty books, many for children, and win dozens of awards, including the Newbery Medal.