If so, they were successful. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the opening of the convention, but he came and went quickly and was not a delegate, nor was he present for any of the meetings. He made it clear again that he was unwilling to run for president of the United States, and without the potential of his name, the notion of a third-party challenge to Johnson and to whomever the Republicans would nominate receded. Instead, the convention focused on a series of radical resolutions amid angry infighting.
Renata Adler acidly wrote in the New Yorker of radicals “who seemed to find in ceaseless local organizing—around any issue or tactic demonstrably certain of failure—a kind of personal release, which effective social action might deny them . . . [There were] revolutionaries who discussed riots as though they were folk songs or pieces of local theater.”
The most controversial proclamation condemned the “imperialist Zionist war” that Israel had just won. The anti-Israel resolution was actually removed in the final hours of the conference, but there were lasting wounds that remained from some of the loud anti-Semitic rhetoric expressed by a handful of black delegates. Peretz walked out of the convention and out of the American left. He told a TV crew covering the convention that “the movement is dead.” Peretz later bought the previously left-wing New Republic magazine and shifted its ideology to the right, especially on foreign policy.
According to Adler, Dick Gregory said, “Every Jew in America over thirty years old knows another Jew who hates niggers. Well, it’s even, baby.” It is impossible to know the context of Gregory’s remark fifty years later, but he had long worked with Jews in the entertainment business; he remained close to them, and his subsequent activism was inclusive. It seems likely to me that he was reacting to pressure from some Jews not only to oppose anti-Semitism, but to somehow take responsibility for the remarks of all other African Americans.
Dr. King made a related point in a long letter to Dr. Maurice Eisendrath of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. After explaining that no one from the SCLC was actually a delegate to the New Politics Convention, he pointed out that those SCLC members who attended meetings, such as Hosea Williams, fought against the anti-Israel resolution and helped to get it reversed. King summarized his support of Israel’s right to exist, the legitimate concerns of impoverished and occupied Palestinians, and the unhealthy influence of the oil business in the region. King lamented any effort to divide blacks and Jews and concluded, “It would be a tragic and immoral mistake to identify the mass of Negroes with the very small number that succumb to cheap and dishonest slogans, just as it would be a serious error to identify all Jews with the few who exploit Negroes under their economic sway.”
Nevertheless, the psychic wounds passed on from the dreadful legacy of the Holocaust caused painful reverberations for some Jews. As Eric Alterman wrote,
For the left, the [Six-Day War’s] legacy became a point of painful contention—as many liberals and leftists increasingly viewed Israel as having traded its David status for a new role as an oppressive, occupying Goliath. For many American Jews, however, most of whom previously kept their emotional distance from Israel, the emotional commitment to Israel became so central that it came to define their ethnic, even religious, identities.
There were also American Jews and others on the left who tried to balance support for Israel’s right to exist with opposition to an extended occupation of the newly conquered territory. J.J. Goldberg (no relation) started the first high school chapter of SDS in 1965 at Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington, DC. He went to George Washington University in 1966 and joined the SDS chapter there as well, but quit after a few months because the head of it “was a very nice guy but he was a Maoist and an anti-Zionist.” To Goldberg, Zionism was not only an expression of solidarity with a post-Holocaust Jewish state, but also a connection to democratic socialism. In the sixties, the only government that Israel had ever known was that of the Labor Party. “Pete Seeger used to sing a song in Hebrew at every concert,” Goldberg remembers. “In 1960, when Ghana became the first African country to gain independence from a European colonial power, we were taught their new national anthem at the Jewish summer camp I attended.”
It came as a shock to Goldberg when segments of the American left, such as those at the New Politics Convention, opposed Israel after the Six-Day War. At the same time, many of the establishment Jewish organizations were supporting the Vietnam War, in part because of veiled threats from the Johnson administration that US support for Israel could be compromised if the “Jewish community” opposed him on Vietnam.
Former President Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger Jr. said that it was intellectually inconsistent to oppose the war in Vietnam and support the Six-Day War, but Goldberg disagrees. He sees both as wars of national liberation: “To me, Ho Chi Minh was akin to Ben Gurion.” When he transferred to McGill University in Montreal, Goldberg also supported the Quebecois liberation movement. Yet he debated peace activist David Dellinger, who suggested that Israel should be a nonreligious state: “I felt he was singling out Jews as the only community of its size and set of traditions that didn’t have their own country.”
Among older Jews, no one was under more pressure than Arthur Goldberg (no relation to either J.J. or to me), who had been a leading labor lawyer and was among those who had helped negotiate the merger between the AFL and the CIO in 1955. Goldberg was secretary of labor in Kennedy’s administration until Kennedy appointed him to the United States Supreme Court. When Lyndon Johnson persuaded Arthur Goldberg to leave the Supreme Court and become US ambassador to the United Nations, he was under the impression that the president would allow him to negotiate an end to the war in Vietnam. But Johnson never permitted him to do so.
Barry Goldberg, the blues piano player who was in the Electric Flag, is Arthur Goldberg’s nephew. Barry was immersed in rock and roll and didn’t pay much attention to politics in those days, though he saw his uncle on family occasions and says that Arthur Goldberg forever regretted having been manipulated by Johnson into leaving the Supreme Court.
J.J. Goldberg and other Zionist Jewish lefties were viewed with suspicion both in radical circles and in the mainstream Jewish community. They created new institutions such as the Radical Zionist Alliance, which supported Israel’s right to exist and defend its borders, opposed most of the settlements in the Palestinian territory, opposed the war in Vietnam, and continued to identify with democratic socialism on economic issues. (The notion that all American Jews thought in political unison was almost as untrue in the sixties as it is today. Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Allen Ginsberg, and countless others in the counterculture and radical left had little or no emotional connection to Israel, and at the same time, there was always a cohort of Jewish conservatives who had contempt for the left.)
As the New Politics Convention was winding down, Martin Luther King Jr.’s colleague Andrew Young prophetically shared his feelings about the black radical demands: “These cats don’t know the country has taken a swing to the right. I wish the violence and riots had political significance, but they don’t.” A friend of Young’s chimed in, “They just have political consequences,” to which Young presciently replied, “Yeah, all bad.”
Resistance
By 1968, Tom Hayden would claim that having tried available channels and finding them meaningless, having recognized that the establishment did not listen to public opinion, the new left was moving toward confrontation with the American government. In reality, although the antiwar movement had enormously broadened its constituency, it did not command anything close to majority support in America in 1967. There were ballot initiatives calling for withdrawal from Vietnam in two of the most antiwar cities in America in October 1967. Only 37 percent favored the war in San Francisco and 39 percent in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
This strengthened the argument of older peace movement leaders who wanted to focus on getting an actual majority of Americans to oppose the war. Younger radicals felt that without greater i
ntensity, the dry arguments of peaceniks wouldn’t move the needle. There was some truth on both sides of this divide.
In Todd Gitlin’s book The Sixties, Hayden is quoted as telling the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence that “the turning point, in my opinion, was October 1967, when resistance became the official watchword of the antiwar movement.” A big part of the new thinking was that the cost of disruption would make policy makers recalculate and avoid such costs. Hayden urged the movement to focus on “what cost we can impose on the heartless, cost-calculating decision-makers.” He urged the left not “to become obsessed with finding ways to make the antiwar movement respectable to the editors of the New York Times.”
“Resistance” swept through the cadres of SDS with the swiftness of a hit song, and the government responded in kind. On October 18, 1967, there was a sit-in at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, at the recruiting office of Dow Chemical, the principle manufacturer of napalm, which was causing enormous pain and death in Vietnam. Police clubbed many of the demonstrators and used tear gas on them. About seventy students ended up in the hospital. In response, many student organizations called for a general strike of the university.
Just a couple days before the Madison sit-in, on October 16, there was a march in Oakland in which demonstrators tried to block access to the Oakland Army Induction Center, which resulted in the arrest of Joan Baez, among others.
Joel Goodman and I had arrived in Berkeley several weeks earlier—ostensibly to go to college—and we joined the protest, exuberantly pushing a small Hillman car we’d bought for $100 into an intersection near the induction center along with dozens of others. Our naive notion was that this would actually delay the war machine. In reality, it only took the cops a few hours to tow them all away. Such was the fog of the antiwar movement under siege. The crowd of thousands was more riled up and unruly than I’d seen at East Coast rallies, perhaps because of the “resistance” attitude. When we saw roughly a dozen people run past us with tears coming down their faces from the tear gas, we quickly backed away to avoid getting similarly sprayed.
Mitchell Markus, who would soon become program director of CKGM-FM, the underground radio station in Montreal—and who is now the executive director of the Love Serve Remember Foundation that oversees Ram Dass’s activities—also happened to be in Oakland at that time. “A friend of mine and I were driving nearby and we were so stoned that when we smelled the tear gas we thought it might get us higher. We were against the war, but we had no idea about the details of that protest.”
One of the things I was reminded of when I researched this book is that there were varying accounts of how antiwar kids interacted with Vietnam vets, some of whom were already coming back from their service by 1967. Notwithstanding the fictitious account in Rambo in which Sylvester Stallone’s character claims he was spit on by hippies, no one I knew had anything against the vets. It was obvious to me that they had no control over the war and that the villains were the “best and the brightest” in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. The apartment that Joel and I got in Berkeley was right next door to a couple of vets who shared our enthusiasm for drugs and rock and roll and who became some of my best friends that year.
I don’t claim that our experiences were typical. There is no question that some servicemen back from Vietnam felt disrespected by the changed America they returned to. Many of them needed support that was not forthcoming. However, to the extent that vets were denied the benefits that their counterparts in World War II received, the blame lies not with the counterculture nor with radicals, but with older government officials. Later in the war, many of the most effective voices against it were disenchanted Vietnam vets such as John Kerry and Ron Kovic.
Some on the radical left, black and white, were intrigued by revolutions in third world countries, such as Cuba, that had been catalyzed by small, impassioned cadres. There was a big buzz about Revolution in the Revolution? which was published in 1967 by French academic Régis Debray, who had moved to Bolivia to work with Che Guevara. Debray’s theory was that small groups of committed radicals could be a trigger for mass revolution.
As Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out, however, political conditions in the United States were nothing like those in countries where large majorities had opposed the existing government. As I reflect on the delusional notions of an armed leftist revolution in the United States, I can’t help but be amused that they emanated from some of the same radicals who complained about hippies getting too high!
Gitlin wrote:
There were tensions galore between the radical idea of political strategy—with discipline, organization, commitment to results out there at a distance—and the countercultural idea of living life to the fullest, right here, for oneself, or for the part of the universe embodied in oneself, or for the community of the enlightened who were capable of loving one another—and the rest of the world be damned (which it was already).
Yet many of the counterculture’s most prominent figures, including Allen Ginsberg, Wavy Gravy, and Paul Krassner, were active supporters of the antiwar movement and put their bodies on the line as much as members of SDS did. (Both Wavy and Krassner sustained serious back injuries at the hands of cops at antiwar demonstrations.)
The spirit of the Be-In had not yet entirely dissipated. Stew Albert was a Berkeley radical who, like Rubin, grew closer to heads over time. “You can’t overestimate the effect of acid on the scene,” Albert says. “Political people started taking acid and didn’t think that it was a substitute for politics, but thought that acid had something to say to politics. If you combined politics with the right combination of acid and grass and doing wild stunts and getting involved in the surrealistic edge, it was a marvelous way to live!” He feels that while the acid transformed radicals and appealed to the idealistic youth, the straight civil rights and peace movements often spoke the language of guilt. “We also appealed to fucking off, decadence, taking dope, and getting laid, and doing weird drawings on your body, and the stuff that’s usually identified with the decline of civilization. And yet we somehow got it all packaged into some kind of romantic, idealist, revolutionary mode.”
Tom Hayden had no such romantic notions about LSD or even pot. “Tom was incredibly self-disciplined and he wanted everyone else to be as well,” Gitlin told me. “One day he saw me when I was stoned and he gave me a look as if to say, What’s happened to you?”
One of the political failures of the new left was a lack of connectivity to the labor movement. In part this was a result of a generational smugness among radicals in their twenties who naively thought that the labor battles won by the previous generation were permanent. At the same time, organized labor had grown reactionary about the Cold War because of the purge of Communist-leaning leaders during the McCarthy period and because of the union jobs produced by the military-industrial complex. (Phil Ochs’s song “I Ain’t Marching Anymore” included the lyric, “Now the labor leader’s screamin’ / When they close the missile plants.”) The AFL-CIO, for example, was led by George Meany, who was a fierce anti-Communist and unreservedly supported the war in Vietnam, exhibiting angry contempt toward the antiwar movement. (One notable exception was the United Automobile Workers union, whose president Walter Reuther was a staunch ally of Dr. King.)
Exorcising the Pentagon
Although the labor movement was mostly missing, the antiwar March on Washington on October 21, 1967, was arguably the last time that liberals, political radicals, and countercultural hippies effectively combined energies.
One of my first feelings when I read Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night was a wave of relief that one of the preeminent fifties literary lefties had treated sixties radicals with affection and respect in his highly personal description of the protest. Unlike Tom Wolfe’s relationship with the Merry Pranksters, Mailer was both observer and participant. A large part of the book concerns his day in jail for civil disobedience in protest of the war. He
was forty-four years old, a generation and a half older than teenage hippies, but he had always occupied a unique space among post–World War II intellectuals. In 1955, Mailer had been one of the founders of the Village Voice, and that same year he published a long, seminal essay called “The White Negro.” Subtitled “Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” the piece presciently identified many of the sentiments that would form the hippie movement a decade later.
In The Armies of the Night he wrote of himself in the third person, as if “Mailer” was a fictitious character. “Mailer had a diatribe against LSD, hippies, and the generation of love but he was keeping it to himself.” Yet over the course of the rest of the book, he wrote approvingly of the SDS, Jerry Rubin, Owsley, and the Fugs. Of the Fugs’ lead singer, he opined,
[I]t would be delightful to whack a barricade in the company of Ed Sanders with the red-gold beard who had brought grope-freak talk to the Village and always seemed to Mailer a little over-liberated, but now suitable . . . [N]ot for nothing had Lenin pointed out that there were ten years which passed like an uneventful day, but there was also the revolutionary day which was like ten years.
(Mailer’s cultural distance did result in a couple of errors. He thought that the “V” sign flashed by hippies with their second and third fingers stood for “Victory,” because that is what it had meant when Winston Churchill made the same hand signal during World War II. In the Vietnam era, we gave it a very different meaning—it was the peace sign. Mailer also incorrectly refers to A.J. Muste as an anarchist, when in fact the pacifist Muste had been at odds with anarchists since World War I.)
In Search of the Lost Chord Page 22
