The Early Sixties
In 1960, when I joined KPFA, the seemingly random seeds of revolt in the late Fifties coalesced into something that would soon be called “The Movement.” It was the civil rights movement that brought it all together. Elsa had spent the war years in Great Britain where African American troops easily integrated into English society, attending churches, and eating in restaurants with the white English. It was something that Southern Blacks could not do in their ow country. 130,000 US African American soldiers went through Great Britain during the war. Returning to the old South became simply unacceptable. Elsa saw the struggle coming.
In 1959, Elsa interviewed Myles Horton, founder in 1932 of the Highlander Folk School outside of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Highlander was set up to help poor people organize. Horton’s basic idea was that oppressed people are lost as individuals but together can find solutions. The way to do that is through storytelling, performance and music. Horton once said that if he could get deadly enemies to sit down together in a circle and listen to each other’s personal stories, there would never be another war.
In the early Fifties, Highlander turned its attention to desegregation, training Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, James Farmer, Ralph Abernathy … that entire generation of activists came through Highlander. The desegregation workshops were biracial, in violation of Tennessee law. On October 31, 1959, twenty sheriff’s deputies arrested a biracial group attending the Highlander Citizenship School. The Tennessee Supreme Court revoked Highlander’s charter and padlocked the buildings. A few days later Highlander’s buildings burned to the ground. The land was sold at public auction.
Elsa talked to Horton shortly after he transferred the Schools to Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1960. “You can padlock a building,” he said. “You can’t padlock an idea. Highlander is an idea. You can’t kill it and you can’t close it in. This workshop is part of the idea. It will grow wherever people take it.” The corporate media wasn’t much interested in civil rights at the time. Almost no one else had heard of Highlander and most news media missed entirely the formation of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in the summer of 1960, both covered on KPFA.
Not only had I discovered my calling, but I was also in the right place to observe the most exciting stories of my time. It seemed well worth the privation in our personal lives. We lived cheaply, had only a few clothes, our only appliances a refrigerator, a toaster, a stove, a record player, and an FM radio. For recreation we went camping or to ad-hoc parties a few times a week. We’d drag our kids over to Fred Haines house. He had his own children, a big enough place, a few guitars, and drums, and he was a skilled guitarist. We’d bring cheap beer and red wine and sing American folk ballads, labor songs from the 1930’s, anti-fascist songs from the war years, and songs of resistance to McCarthyism. We also made up our own lyrics, like The Ballad of Archie Brown, dedicated to our labor hero from the anti HUAC demonstrations.
Kennedy
Most of the news staff was working on November 8th, 1960, when Richard Nixon and Jack Kennedy faced off in the first televised presidential debate. We planned to do a special when it was over. To many Americans, Kennedy was an appealing young man with a vision of public service. He seemed to represent the idealism of the young. But to those of us on the left, he also represented the belligerent policies of the cold war. Kennedy was a strident anti-communist, committed to building up our military, expanding our nuclear weapons, testing them above ground and he seemed to favor an adventurist foreign policy.
We listened to the debate on radio with a plague-on-both-your-houses mentality. By the end, we all agreed that Nixon had creamed the young Massachusetts upstart. We were shocked the next day to learn that most people watched the debate on television, and they thought it was all over for Nixon. The bright lights that television required in those days and Nixon’s indifference to makeup (he hadn’t bothered to shave just before the show, and he refused makeup) ruined him. When we finally watched the TV clips, we saw Nixon slumped in his chair, unshaven, sweating under the lights while Kennedy was cool, collected, and eloquent. The visual was more important than the content. This debate would change the future of American politics, requiring candidates to be telegenic and campaigns to raise huge amounts of money to buy television time.
We were not surprised that Kennedy was elected, although the margin was a very close 120,000 votes. Much was made of the fact that he would be the first President born in the Twentieth Century, and how much he appealed to the young people. Those of us on the left greeted his inauguration with trepidation. Three days earlier Eisenhower had issued a warning to the American people in his farewell address to Congress: “In the ouncils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."
We did not believe Kennedy understood the seriousness of Eisenhower’s warning. After only a few months in office, Kennedy authorized CIA pilots flying B-26 bombers to attack Cuban war planes. Elsa put us all on alert.
The KPFA newsroom was a small room off the central hallway cluttered with desks, filing cabinets and tables strewn with papers. Two wire service machines chattered in a closet through a closed door with a glass window. These relics of the news media’s past are long gone, draining newsrooms of an adrenaline sound bed that underlay all our work. There is simply nothing like an old-fashioned wire machine ringing, one, two or three urgent bells and then beginning to type as a second machine lurches into action with its own bells and its own type pattern. As the second of the three bells rang, we had the door open and were pulling the first lead. Cuban exiles had landed on Playa Giron in Cuba.
The wire service news reports and radio and television news told a narrative of instant success. The invaders were moving inland, the population was rising to support them, and so on. We had done several programs on Cuba, interviews with American visitors. Castro still seemed to have wide support among most Cubans. We were suspicious and started to search for sources at the invasion site that we could trust.
Most radio and television stations got the AP Radio wire, which was a severely truncated version designed for short radio and TV announcements. We got both the AP “A Wire” and Reuters, a European news service, a rare luxury for a poor station, but one insisted on by Elsa. AP was carrying the success story, taken (it turned out later) from a State Department press releases written before the invasion began. On Reuters we noticed a small item filed from Cuba by a reporter working for the Yugoslavian news service, Tanjug.
Elsa tried to trace him down in Cuba without success, but we were able to get translated reports through Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Tanjug’s story was the opposite of the Associate Press. The invading force never got off the beaches. KPFA was the only radio or television station in the United States that got it right. American media is never more gullible than when it comes to war. Consistently, each new war gets enthusiastic support from all media outlets.
Pacifica Radio
As I entered Elsa’s inner circle, I became aware of a titanic struggle going on for the control of Pacifica, with Elsa and her followers on one side and management and the Board of Directors on the other. Elsa could never have worked harmoniously in any institution that did not give her uncensored access to the air. For Elsa, getting the truth on the air, always meant “forcing it through the wheels of the machinery.” The drift of any institution was toward the safe and complacent.
KPFA had been under a sustained attack from a small group of conservatives since 1958. The attack intensified as Pacifica began to gain more listeners from its coverage of HUAC, Civil Rights and the student movements. Neo-conservatives Russell Kirk and William Rusher refused to appear on WBAI in New York City if any “known communists” were allowed to be broadcast. At KPFA, sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, a regular KPFA broadcaster, Eugene Burdick, author of Failsafe and The Ugly American and Paul Jacobs, a local anti-communist liberal
circulated a February, 1960 issue of Counterattack: Facts About Communism and Those Who Aid Its Cause. It contained an article, Radio Station Promotes Communists, and listed communists, leftists and liberals who had appeared on the station.
The board wanted to take Herbert Aptheker, a Marxist historian, off the air. Winkler wrote to Aptheker, “We have decided to give you a rest for a while and use your spot for other commentators on the left.” Elsa was furious. Joined by the music director Alan Rich and three other staff members, she asked for a clarification of Pacifica’s policy. Elsa saw it as an attack on Freedom of Speech. We spent hours in whispered conversations in Eddy’s coffee shop, or late into the evening in our messy offices, among used coffee cups and the stale smell of too many cigarettes, plotting against the bosses.
Eleanor McKinney had been with Pacifica since its very first days and was frequently in the middle of disputes between Elsa and Harold Winkler. Eleanor knew I was an ardent supporter of Elsa, but she also felt I was reasonable. Eleanor sympathized with Winkler’s position, the man in the middle between the neocons and the radicals. She said he’d been enthusiastic and optimistic about the growth and potential of the Foundation when he first took over. In 1958 KPFA had won a George Foster Peabody Award for Public Service, radio's highest award. The Peabody praised KPFA for demonstrating that "mature entertainment plus ideas constitute public service broadcasting at its best.”
Pacifica was expanding. In July of 1959 Terry Drinkwatter, son of the founder of Western Airlines, had launched KPFK in Los Angeles. In 1960, Louis Schweitzer offered Pacifica his New York City FM station, WBAI. Pacifica was now broadcasting to three metropolitan centers with a potential audience of sixty million people.
By the Spring of 1961 I was producing my first radio programs, including a long and pretentiously titled documentary: Cuba, the United States, and the Coming Crisis in Latin America.
The Cold War had become tense again. Relations with the Soviet Union deteriorated even more quickly after Kennedy took office. In May, the Berlin Wall started construction. Kennedy met Khrushchev in June in Vienna, Austria. It did not go well. Kennedy later told New York Times reporter James ‘Scotty’ Reston it was the "worst thing in my life. He savaged me”. Observing Kennedy’s morose expression at the end of the summit, Khrushchev believed Kennedy "looked not only anxious, but deeply upset…I hadn’t meant to upset him. I would have liked very much for us to part in a different mood. But there was nothing I could do to help him…Politics is a merciless business.” It sounded as if he thought he could push Kennedy around.
Khrushchev announced the resumption of nuclear testing on August 1st. Kennedy urged Americans to build fallout shelters in a Life magazine spread. In October the Soviet Union detonated a 58-megaton yield hydrogen bomb known as Tsar Bomba. It remains the largest ever man-made explosion. It scared all of us. A true doomsday device, the kind Herman Kahn talked about as he stormed the country in 1959 promoting fallout shelters and the idea that we could survive an all-out nuclear war with losses of only sixty million or so.
On top of all that, by the summer of 1961, reports were coming out of Southeast Asia suggesting that The United States was sending advisers to Laos and Vietnam. In November Kennedy increased the number of U.S. advisers in Vietnam from 1, 000 to 16, 000. A few days later we delivered the first helicopters. Under American guidance, the Vietnamese began the hated Strategic Hamlet program of rural pacification, surrounding villages with barbed wire and guard towers to keep the Vietcong out of schools, community hospitals, and peasant homes.
The Vietnam War was underway.
Blind Ambition
By the end of 1961, a dramatic change had taken place in the United States. Remember Carey McWilliams in 1958 describing my generation as “The Careful Young Men” in The Nation Magazine? Reflecting on the issue much later, McWilliams said that the following year, 1959, “we repeated the same idea--and we had contributions by William Sloane Coffin, of Yale and by Louis Reik, the psychoanalyst in residence at Princeton, and they said they detected some rumblings. By the time we got to the third year, the thing was off and running.” The 1961 issue was entitled "Rebels with a Hundred Causes." “So it had gone completely turned around--from apathy to activism,” McWilliams concluded.
Liberals had mixed reactions to the activism. While they generally supported student causes, the students’ growing militancy and their indifference to ideological disputes of the past troubled most liberals.
The tension was too much for Pacifica president and KPFA manager Harold Winkler who resigned in October of 1961. Quaker activist, Trevor Thomas, succeeded Winkler as President and KPFA Manager. His cautious reaction to the conservative attack was similar to Winkler’s, but he had a Quaker’s patience. Elsa stormed out of one her many meetings with Trevor fuming, “Arguing with a Quaker is like arguing with god. He can’t be wrong because his intentions are good.”
Elsa knew that she would have to work with Liberals. “You are always working with liberals because who else is there to work with in the media?” Her frustration was at their insistence that every issue had two sides. The notion, for example, that a member of a White Citizens Council and a black student trying to exercise his constitutional rights were morally equivalent was abhorrent to Elsa. “They think, they actually believe, that if you can find the middle of anything and sit there that this in itself constitutes virtue. They are never prepared to admit that there is such a thing as right and there is such a thing as wrong and that if it’s wrong you say so and if it’s right you say so. Or at least you give the audience the opportunity to notice this.”
The symbiotic relationship between Liberals and activists was essential, and frustrating in the early Sixties. Liberals generally supported radical goals, but they wanted movement leaders to slow down. They preferred the status quo to the disruption of social change. And yet, without liberals, laws wouldn’t change, and money wouldn’t be available. Without a radical movement, there’d be no reason to enforce the law or write new ones. It was a unique time, when Liberals and radicals, many of the radical young being the children of Liberals, came together to try to change America.
Here’s an example. The Supreme Court ruled that interstate busses had to be integrated. Freedom riders rode the buses into the south where they were beaten, jailed, and their busses burned. The liberal media spread images of the brutality across the world. The liberal Justice Department was forced to act, to uphold the law. As James Farmer, the head of CORE (The Congress of Racial Equality) put it: “Our intention was to provoke the authorities into arresting us, and thereby prod the Justice Department into enforcing the law of the land.”
Finally, the stifling conformity and self censorship of the Fifties were over. James Baldwin expressed the new mood in an interview with Elsa Knight Thompson on KPFA, “What we are really living through is nothing less than a revolution. The people who hold the power never give it away. The power that one is trying to get, and I think from the same point of view this may be happening for the first time in the history of the world, one is trying to achieve a bloodless revolution, a moral revolution and in our situation, we have no choice.”
My two years at KPFA remain among the most engaging and productive of my life. My colleagues were exceptionally smart, dedicated and talented. KPFA gave us access to the most interesting minds of our time. Our tiny staff and a host of volunteers produced historical programs — Ernest Lowe on the Belgium Congo, Fred Haines on the Spanish Civil War and the Seattle General Strike. Using portable tape recorders, Dale Minor, Gene Marine and I covered community fallout shelters, peace marches, student activism. John Leonard created a late night program, a montage of music and voices called Nightsounds, that foreshadowed the late night radio shows of the 1970’s. (Much of what Pacifica did in those days has been lost forever, because in our poverty we erased used tapes to record new shows.)
My life was grounded in a supportive community, something that I took for granted. We had our colleagues at KPFA and our close friends, Clint and Virginia Jencks. My parents lived a few blocks away. My sister and her family were in San Francisco. I was twenty-seven, three years short of my thirtieth birthday, the time by which I had to have achieved some great goal … written a book, produced a movie, been crucified.
Then Trevor Thomas asked me if I wanted to go to New York City and take over Programming at WBAI. I didn’t hesitate. Leaving my parents, my sister and brother-in-law and their children, Clint and Virginia and my political friends, my colleagues at KPFA … I honestly can’t remember a moment of regret. The only emotion I remember is blind ambition.
WBAI New York
I took a window seat on the plane from San Francisco to New York and watched the vast country slip by below me. Glints of silver were cars on intercontinental highways. I thought back to my own drive west with my tail between my legs three years earlier. Now I was going back to New York as program director of an exciting new radio station.
Berkeley had been a warm and nurturing home, but its most exciting cafe was still the newly opened Il Piccolo’s, a combination coffee shop and bookstore with a real Italian barista who didn’t speak English. San Francisco, across the bay, was cosmopolitan, but the Beats were old hat and the hippies hadn’t yet arrived. San Francisco seemed to be treading water in 1962. In New York, on the other hand, there was talk of a folk music revival in Greenwich Village, and a young folk musician who had released his first LP in March of 1962, named Bob Dylan. New York was the big time, and I had a job there that I loved at a radio station that was bound to make waves.
I stepped off the plane at La Guardia, dressed in a jacket and tie, a trench coat over my arm and a battered suitcase with enough clothes for a week. It was late in the afternoon, but I took a cab directly to the corner of Madison and 39th Street. WBAI was in a brownstone on 39th halfway between Madison and Lexington. Louis Schweitzer’s Vera Foundation was on the ground floor. WBAI was on the second and third floors. I took a creaky elevator at the end of the hallway up to the second floor. Acting station manager Gene Bruck, who programmed the classical music for the station, was surprised to see me so late in the day, but he called an impromptu staff meeting.
I knew the programmers from their work and others on the staff from telephone conversations, so I was on familiar ground. It was with som awkwardness, therefore, that I lied and told them I wanted to volunteer “for a week or two.” Trevor wanted me to check WBAI out and then make a report before confirming the decision to send me there, so he suggested I tell the staff that I was visiting New York on vacation and had decided to volunteer. You can imagine how that went down with cynical New Yorkers. Glances were exchanged and Richard Elman welcomed me warmly and suggested everybody get back to work.
Elman was a big man, well over six feet, with a slouch, as if he didn’t want to intimidate others. He had a deep voice and a classic New York Jewish accent and large, brown eyes that had the capacity to look right through you. He grabbed my arm, told me to leave my bag in his office, and took me to a bar on Madison where he ordered two Martinis.
“What are really doing here,” Dick wanted to know.
I explained that Trevor and the board wanted to make WBAI more like KPFA, with a greater emphasis on public affairs programming. They wanted me to be program director. Dick was delighted. He said the WBAI staff was eager for support and I would be welcome. Dick and I became lifelong friends.