Parenthesis

by Jay Neugeboren

  Although I’d helped in the early stages of organizing for the “Call,” I remained unenthusiastic about it. I enlisted signers for it, but I kept urging people—in person, in letters—to choose an action which did more than merely provoke a “legal and moral confrontation” with the government; I urged them to risk more of themselves, to take some action which did not simply support draft resistance by a signature, but which, as Hartman had put it, in some way was “analogous” to draft resistance.

  In mid-August, Vietnam Summer officially separated itself from us. “I have been trying to talk up, organize, etc. around the civil disobedience issue you have started in Palo Alto,” Hartman wrote me, “and although most persons are interested, they seem not to give it high priority… He referred me to Resist, the organization which was working to get signatures for “The Call To Resist Illegitimate Authority,” and to the National Mobilization Committee (under Dave Dellinger), which was, by then, talking about a “direct action component” in the October 16–21 Pentagon demonstration.

  In Palo Alto, we called a meeting of all the local peace groups and decided to organize for direct action against a specific target on the West Coast, and to try, by our example, to get others to organize similar actions in other parts of the country. Our original target date of late-August early-September was by now abandoned; we agreed, instead, to organize around the week of October 16—the date chosen by The Resistance for the sending back of draft cards. Activity—meetings, letters, phone calls—continued, and, on a local level, the possibility for substantial united action seemed good. We had a strong group of committed activists, representing substantial local constituencies—Stanford faculty, local clergy, high school students, the Resistance, Joan Baez’ Institute, Palo Alto Concerned Citizens, East Palo Alto black activists, the West Coast War Resisters League, the local Vietnam Summer people—and we were soon in touch with other Bay Area groups who were also organizing for the week of October 16.

  By this time, however, I was discouraged, depressed. Again, as before, I had been too optimistic, and my disappointment now was as intense as my hopes had been. I felt tired. The turn-in of draft cards would be nationwide—but it would be negligible, it would have little effect on the government’s ability to carry on the war. It could not compare, in scale, to the nationwide campaigns I’d previously envisioned—either in reality, or in my imagination. The local work that was continuing—and increasing—was important, and I continued to be part of it, but without enthusiasm. I felt even more discouraged and disillusioned than I’d felt a year before, when I’d tried (and failed) to get the mass civil disobedience campaign going in New York.

  The effect on the antiwar movement of the Arab-Israeli War, the focus of antiwar activity on “support” for draft resistance, the withdrawal of Vietnam Summer from the plan—everything seemed to confirm my feeling that, though the antiwar movement had grown, once again—at most—it had only grown in proportion to the growth of the war, and to the government’s ability to absorb protest against the war. All things were as they had always been. Plus ça change…

  By this time I had also finished my new novel and it had been accepted for publication. I felt drained, and until I began another novel I would, I knew, live with what was still my most terrible fear—that I had nothing left to say, that I would never write again.

  Stanford offered me a position for the fall, but I said no, and at the end of August Betsey and I followed through on the plans we’d begun a year before and bought ship tickets, sailing date, September 29, 1967. I saw no reason for staying, nothing that I could do that would be crucial, nothing that might happen that I would want to be part of. And I was relieved to know that I’d be gone before the week of October 16—for the actual events, I feared, would have moved me, pulled on me, gotten me caught up in things all over again.

  During the latter part of the summer I went to several meetings in San Francisco, held in the offices of The Movement (a SNCC-affiliated newspaper), at which we organized to try to shut down the Oakland Induction Center. “We have come together,” the call we issued said, “not to engage in a gesture of discontent, not to register symbolic protest, not to influence those in power—but to exercise power.” In San Francisco, things were different than they’d ever been in New York. “We know that one week of activity against the induction centers—even if we close them down across the country—will not stop the draft,” our call stated. “We see this week as a way of involving young people who are facing conscription: black people, high school students, the unemployed and young working people.”

  In Palo Alto we began organizing in small groups of fifteen to twenty people; these groups would meet often between August and October 16, so that demonstrators would learn how to regroup quickly in the midst of an action, among people they knew, in order to decide on strategy, counterstrategy, tactics. That most people seemed to accept the fact that our action did not begin and end (win or lose) with the induction centers (or even with this particular war) seemed right to me, and I remember, during our last weeks in California, speaking with friends about the possibility of building a radical political movement which would be capable of enduring the daily and yearly ups and downs of events, of the government’s actions, of the country’s war and antiwar sentiment, and even of our own half-formed notions of where we were, why, and what had to be done about it.

  I arrived in New York in early September and found that the New York antiwar organizations were in their usual state of frenzied factionalism. I met with people from Resist, the War Resisters League, the Parade Committee, the National Mobilization Committee, and told them about what we’d been doing in California. Although Spock and others were already enlisted on behalf of civil disobedience, nobody yet knew (less than a month before October 16) what the form of the civil disobedience would be—or where it would be.

  After a year in Palo Alto, everything in New York seemed brutal, difficult—even the subways, which I’d loved passionately, tired me. The fact that, when meetings were over, people dispersed to invisible corners of the five boroughs, to apartment houses where they didn’t speak to or know their neighbors; the fact that the simple matter of trying to meet with friends, or with people in antiwar groups, became, always, a major logistical problem; the fact that hair-splitting on texts and arguing over objectives seemed to be a more highly developed art form than it had been a year before; the fact that talk still seemed to be equivalent to action, that people seemed to feel they’d done something concrete against the war in Vietnam when they’d spent an hour or an evening in New York arguing with someone about it—all of this seemed absurd, hopeless, painful; all of it made me ache to get away.

  At the beginning of the summer, Mitchell Goodman had gone East, and had printed a brochure (“TO THE CLERGY, THE MEN and WOMEN of the PROFESSIONS, THE TEACHERS: A CALL FOR CONSCIENTIOUS RESISTANCE TO THE WAR AND TO THE THREAT OF MILITARISM”) in which the Stanford Statement, along with quotes from Hartman and endorsements already secured from prominent individuals had been reprinted (“HOW IT BEGAN: THE STANFORD PLEDGE”). With this material he’d been working to organize what eventually became the Justice Department confrontation leading to the case of the United States vs. Spock, Coffin, Goodman, Ferber, and Raskin.

  Mitch and I spoke often, and he tried to get me to stay. One letter from him, with an allusion to the old Black Sox scandals (“…we need you… I’ve told many people here in the east how much you did out there…you can’t start a thing like this, encourage people to civil disobedience—and then not be there. Say it isn’t so.”) touched me where I was weak, aroused some guilt, made me consider changing my plans, but only for a day or two. On September 29, we left America.

  _______________

  * In the epilogue to The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Alex Haley tells the following anecdote: “At the church where he would speak, Malcolm X was seated on the platform next to Mrs. Martin Luther King, to whom he leaned and whispered that he was ‘trying to help,
’ she told Jet. ‘He said he wanted to present an alternative; that it might be easier for whites to accept Martin’s proposals after hearing him [Malcolm X]. I didn’t understand him at first, said Mrs. King. ‘He seemed rather anxious to let Martin know he was not causing trouble or making it difficult, but that he was trying to make it easier….’”

  SEVEN. Home

  We are reverting to the civilization of luggage, and historians of the future will note how the middle classes accreted possessions without taking root in the earth, and may find in this the secret of their imaginative poverty.

  —E. M. Forster. Howard’s End.

  I left America, retreated into a more private world than any I’d been living in, and I found that even the need to justify this retreat diminished with time, then disappeared.

  My desire (need) to persuade others of the validity of my views—or even to attempt to explain to myself the meaning of my actions, my choices, of my more obscure and/or apocalyptic statements (without revolution, America is doomed)—this desire passed also. When I first arrived in Europe, I remember, I hungered for news of America—I couldn’t begin a day until I’d bought and read the International Herald Tribune. This stopped also: in Spéracèdes weeks would go by when I wouldn’t see a newspaper. From time to time, an article in a paper I did see, a letter from a friend, a specific memory, an encounter with an American abroad, news of the war, of the cities—these could arouse me, arouse my desire to return, to do something—but only temporarily. The longer I stayed away from America, the easier—up to a point—it became to stay away. Major events—the assassinations of King and Kennedy; the Spock Trial; ghetto riots; student rebellions; the Democratic and Republican conventions in the summer of 1968; the New York City teachers strike—these only reinforced my desire to stay away.

  One exception: during the week of October 16, 1967—just after we’d arrived in Europe—when news of the demonstrations at the Pentagon and the Oakland Induction Center reached London, I craved to go back. The size and scale of the actions stunned me—in Washington, demonstrators had actually penetrated the Pentagon, and in Oakland, the plans we’d made seemed to be working: demonstrators working in teams, the induction center shut down temporarily, the Oakland police (this was most astonishing) having to call to other cities for reinforcements. I got all the reports I could, I talked nonstop about what was happening with another Stanford teacher, a doctor from the medical school who was working at the National Health Institute in London, and who had been involved in organizing the Oakland Induction Center action—we talked of flying back to America. In Oakland, we told ourselves, something new was happening—something that might even be the beginning of actual revolutionary activity in which white and black radicals would be allies.

  In the end, after releasing energy, frustration in a fight to storm the American Embassy in London, after securing bruises which I could carry proudly for several weeks (cherishing them as I’d cherished football injuries when I was younger)—I was glad I hadn’t followed the impulse to go back. Nothing would have been served, the actions—again—were largely symbolic. The war continued, continued to escalate.

  Something else, of course—something that seemed, at the time, too selfish, self-centered, to tolerate in myself. My vanity was hurt; I’d misjudged the course events would take, and now that events which I’d played a role in planning were at the center of the world’s attention, I wanted some of the credit. It was difficult, for a few days, to resign myself to my fate: I would not be there to reap the kinds of public dividends that the letter to Kennedy had once promised, and which might now have been mine.

  This was not the worst blow my vanity suffered that week. During the battle to break into the Embassy, Betsey and I had been in the front lines, pushing and shoving against the London police. Betsey, in fact, after having argued with me during the walk across London against my infatuation with techniques, as in Oakland, which were not nonviolent—had been the only one of thousands to break through the police lines. She did so three times, and then—caught in no-man’s-land between the police and the Embassy—she’d called to thousands of us to follow her. At which point, each time, she was gingerly lifted up by a policeman and placed back in the crowd. At one point, sweating and groaning, I’d looked up to find myself staring into a beautiful red beard, trimmed beefeater fashion, like that of the guard at the Tower of London. The owner of the beard, a young London policeman, his arms linked with those of his co-workers to right and left, was groaning and sweating also. “With a beard like that,” I muttered, “you should be on our side.” As we continued to shove against one another, three to four thousand people behind me, five hundred to a thousand police behind him, mounted horses now beginning to help, without even seeming to notice me, with only the slightest glance my way, he replied at once, “I’ve got taste.”

  During the next eighteen months I was involved in only one other incident which was in any way political. In the fall of 1968—a year after we’d left America, and just after Betsey and I had returned from the camping trip which had taken us across 9,000 miles of Europe, from the arctic circle in Norway to the inner regions of Yugoslavia—I received a notice from my draft board stating that the FBI and the Attorney General had informed them that I had “surrendered” my draft card, and that they would, therefore “be forced to take action” against me—unless, of course, I now promised to carry the card with me and to obey all parts of the selective service law. Two weeks after the first notice, I was directed “to report” to my local board. What had seemed, only four months before—when I wrote the reflections with which this book begins—a “remote” possibility, was no longer remote.

  Betsey and I had gone on the long trip that summer—away from Spéracèdes—for several reasons. In her third month, five weeks after we’d received the news that she was pregnant, she’d suffered a miscarriage, and we’d been more let down, more shaken by this than we’d expected to be. Also, I’d come to the point in this narrative where I’d begun chronicling my New York and California antiwar and civil rights activities, and having to do so had filled me with distaste for the entire project. I had absolutely no desire to write about meetings and marches, wars and ghettos—and, realizing that I didn’t want to write, in a supposedly political book, about the years when I had, finally, become political, I had to doubt the book itself, my reasons for doing it, whether or not I should continue. My second novel had been published a few months before, and, for me, this meant that I should have been working on the third. Instead—again—politics (in the form of a book) was in the way.

  The trip helped. When I returned to Spéracèdes in the fall, I was able to dig in at once on the final chapters of this book, and though everything I’d written on my thirtieth birthday, and everything I’d said in the final chapter of the original draft of this book should have made me react, when I heard from my draft board, in whatever “realistic” way would have most easily solved the immediate problem—I reacted, inevitably, in an opposite way. I refused to reply to my draft board, I refused to promise them anything, and I swore that I would not. My moral juices were as active as they’d ever been: I wrote long letters to friends and antiwar organizations telling them of my predicament, and explaining why I would not, of course, ask for my draft card back—even though I was thirty years old, even though I still had a 2A deferment (leave of absence from teaching), even though this meant that being declared delinquent I would be called for induction in the next month’s pool, and, when I didn’t report, would be faced with the usual penalties: five years in jail and/or $10,000 fine.

  I would, I said, probably get to stay on in Spéracèdes indefinitely. For, I argued, if the government could, by threatening jail, get me to say: “Okay, I’ll ask you to send me back my draft card”—then what had all my protests ever meant? Although the draft card was only a piece of paper sent out by people who had no “legitimate” authority to conscript men and send them to kill and be killed, that piece of paper was im
portant: for it represented the government’s actual ability to have killed all the people it had already killed in Vietnam. Although I admitted to those who suggested that I simply ask for the card back, that nothing would be served by my exile, that I myself had—since at least a year before—been of the opinion that draft card turn-ins were morally noble acts, but politically useless ones, I now stood firm.

  Then too, though I was, by turns, enraged, obsessed, made giddy by what was happening—did the American government, or its bureaucracy, actually want to put me in jail?—the fact that I might have to go to jail or face not returning to America for many years didn’t, during a Spéracèdes autumn, seem very real.

  The day I’d received my first note from my draft board, I’d written to Resist, the major organization for aiding resisters, asking for advice on how to keep out of jail. By the time I received—exactly one month later—a notice from my local board declaring me “delinquent,” I had not yet received a reply from Resist, or from any of the other antiwar organizations I’d written to. But I was far from America, I was over thirty years old, I was married, my writing was going well, I would be able to survive—what, I wondered, would have happened to an eighteen-year-old in my position who needed to rely on the efficiency and machinery of the American peace movement?

  After not hearing from Resist, I’d also written to a friend of mine, Marty Cramer. He was a lawyer and I’d asked for his advice; I now received it. “My advice to you,” he wrote, “is to swallow your PRIDE and to write the Draft Board that you were away when the letters came and could not answer them. Tell them to return your draft card, period.” He pointed out some consequences of my action I hadn’t thought of (e.g., the problems I might have getting my passport renewed if I stayed abroad to avoid prosecution, the problems I might have putting up with the laws of whatever other country I chose to live in), and said a few other things which part of me had already been whispering.