Sixties New York City

I was thrilled with the opportunity I’d been given and never doubted for a moment that we would create something exceptional. We had an incredible staff of hard-working, very smart young idealists. 1962 the senior staff made $12,000 a year, which was less than $1,000 a month when taxes were deducted. I needed housing for $350 a month and in the great rush of that first week in New York, I took a lease on two floors of a charming four-story brownstone on 3rd Street, between Avenue C and D, in the deepest part of the Lower East Side. It was a rare, intact, single family dwelling unit on a street of tenements. Barney and Gret were dubious; the Lower East Side was still a tough neighborhood in the early Sixties. But we had lived with migrants in the Central Valley, and we figured tenement dwellers wouldn’t be much different.

We were wrong. Deep seated racial animosity and the obvious difference in wealth, even with my subsistence salary, targeted us from the moment we moved in. I had a Morris Minor car and returned one night to find the car up on cinder blocks with all the tires gone. I’d talked to some of the kids on the block before, and I looked one of them up. He told me he might be able to get them back for $25.00 each. I gave him $100 and asked him to pass the money along. The wheels were back on the car the next morning.

I was away at work all day, but my wife was stuck in a hostile neighborhood with two little children, blocks from the nearest market. She’d made friends in the Central Valley with other mothers, but not on the Lower Est Side. There was a vacant lot on one side of our brownstone, and when kids started to throw firebombs against the brick side of our house one afternoon my frightened wife called the police. They promised to send an unknown, undercover cop, but of course everyone in the community could smell a cop a mile off, and they knew my wife had called them instead of asking for help from the community. My tenement friend advised me to move as soon as possible, with no hard feelings. He himself was sorry. 

We found a spacious, two-bedroom apartment on 114th between Broadway and Riverside. If you leaned out over the street from its tiny balcony, you could see the Hudson River just beyond Riverside Park. It was a student neighborhood near Columbia University, with good bookstores and bars, but not many young couples with children.

I was working harder than I had ever worked in my life, my days beginning at 7:30 in the morning and running until 10:00 or 11:00 night after night. New York was not like Berkeley, where we all lived near each other. Our New York friends were scattered all over town.  You couldn’t dump the kids in the car drive over for an informal party. The staff socialized after work at bars near the office, excluding our wives and husbands.

It was tough on my wife, and in part to create a community, we tried to get involved with the New York Left. We attended a meeting of a Marxist discussion group led by historian Herbert Aptheker that met in a second story warehouse in Brooklyn. The atmosphere was nothing like the openness of the Bay Area. The biggest enemy was not capitalism but Marxists who held slightly different views. It was depressing. The idea that these people posed any threat to the United States was ludicrous.

In the early Sixties New York’s masses of people were structured into small communities, some reflected in our telephone numbers. Riverside 9-1507, Murray Hill 6-2200, Chelsea 7-0021.  Many of these small communities were ethnically based, like Chinatown, Little Italy, Pleasant Street in East Harlem, and others were polyglot like the Bohemian Village. There were also what a later generation might call virtual communities, such as musicians, filmmakers, progressives, patrons of the 92nd Street Y, people in theater, in ballet, on Wall Street.

These communities were like small towns everywhere where people knew each other, were somewhat bored with the same old crowd and eagerly courted new arrivals who might have any potential for fame and power or at least a good evening’s conversation.  

WBAI Programming

Topics: 192; 1963; WBAI; New York City; anti-communism; neo-conservative; Pacifica; Malcolm X; SDS; the Port Huron Statement; Michael Harrington; Tom Hayden.

WBAI’s station managers and others of the old guard resigned soon after I arrived and I became Acting Station Manager and Program Director of an increasingly well know, controversial radio station. For a while I was invited everywhere, including dinner at an editor’s house in Westchester County with Norman Mailer who my wife challenged as a sexist during an unpleasant dinner table conversation.

One party stands out in sharp relief, representing another moment of self-definition. The host was a prominent, wealthy liberal supporter of WBAI, but one of those who had great reservations about our focus on nuclear disarmament, poverty in America, civil rights, and the war in Vietnam … all things that communists were talking about. Russel Kirk was there and Irving Howe. Neo conservative professors, intellectuals and their wealthy patrons filled the lavish apartment. The host, a real estate broker, had purchased two adjacent apartment buildings on Amsterdam Ave just off Broadway. He had combined the top floors into a gigantic block long apartment and roof garden.

He gave me a tour of its wood lined study, walls of paintings, windows cascaded with drapery, his wife’s exercise room done in foot square black and white tiles, several living rooms with dozens of little tables surrounded by chairs, the views over Lincoln Center, his own Yoga room, his restaurant kitchen, his wine cellar, and pool room. The performance reminded me of the sherry parties at Columbia University. Was he offering me a brief vision of what could be mine if I played my cards right?

Conversations were constrained. When it came to things that I had experienced directly -- migrant laborers of the Central Valley, young civil rights activists, peace marchers, working class people, even communists -- my empirical evidence bore no relationship to their theoretical wisdom. Anti-communism colored their view of the world. Every situation was evaluated on whether it abetted the Communist cause.

The people at this party, by and large, seemed to me to have huge brains with awesome computing skills but no knowledge of the actual world in which most people lived. Their ignorance was profound and completely unacknowledged. They were, after all, successful, which was all the self-validation they needed. 

I found myself continually defending the station’s programming policies. At this time in my life, I was an aggressive debater with a naïve belief in facts who refused to give up an argument. I was young. I was never invited to another party with anyone from that crowd. It may have been the end of the neo-conservative’s flirtation with Pacifica.

I didn’t know it at the time, but supporters of SDS’s recently drafted Port Huron Statement were having similar struggles with their liberal funders. Tom Hayden, the statement’s main writer, clashed with Michael Harrington over criticism of labor unions, espousal of participatory democracy, a dislike of formal offices, advocacy for direct action and SDS’s anti-anticommunism. SDS even welcomed the participation of a few members (or former high-profile members) of the Communist Party USA.

We aggressively expanding WBAI’s coverage of civil rights and Vietnam. On July 10th Martin Luther King began a prison sentence in Georgia and in September Kennedy sent troops to protect James Meredith, the first African American allowed to enter the University of Mississippi. They stayed for almost year, until Meredith graduated. 

Malcolm X, the militant Harlem leader of the Nation of Islam who was, at least publicly, unwaveringly critical of any whites, was a regular interview subject. I liked Malcolm and from my first interview felt completely comfortable around him. His anti-white remarks were rhetoric. His eyes showed a far more sophisticated understanding. He would look at me and say with a twinkle in his eye that when he was talking about white people, he was talking about a twenty-something, brown haired, blue eyed, glasses wearing radio interviewers, describing me.  It was never personal with Malcolm, and in few years, he would embrace whites in a common struggle.

Invitation to Spy

New York was a great location to cover the early years of the Vietnam War, because it gave me the United Nations and an international perspective.  In US newspapers at the time, there was much written about the war in Vietnam being a surrogate battle waged by the Soviet Union in its Cold War with the United States. That was Kennedy’s justification for going into Vietnam; we were fighting the global menace of communism. 

That analysis was too simple. Vietnamese complained that they were getting little help from their Soviet or Chinese comrades. In fact, in 1962, the Chinese would allow only limited Soviet arms to travel through China if the destination was Vietnam. I decided that a way to get at this story was to confront the Soviet delegation to the United Nations with a counter intuitive question from an American journalist: Why aren’t you doing more to help the Vietnamese?  That’s how I got to know Yuri Permigorof, a military attaché attached to the Soviet delegation.  Yuri was quite defensive about the question and said that many of his comrades wished the Soviet Union was doing more.

After several business meetings, Yuri invited me and my family to his apartment for dinner. My wife and I reciprocated. We were intrigued with getting to know a couple about our own age who represented the dreaded Cold War enemy. Both our families had young daughters and we soon exchanged children’s toys and bottles of vodka or cheap wine when we visited each other.

Sometime in early September, Yuri asked me to meet him at a small Russian restaurant, upstairs off Broadway on 49th Street. It was a long way from WBAI and the United Nations where Yuri worked. Dean Rusk was holding a news conference on Vietnam the next day in Washington.  Yuri asked me if I planned to attend. I did and he asked if I would take notes on the meeting and give them to him.  I said there would be a complete transcript in the New York Times the next day and he could simply read the written record of the press conference. But Yuri insisted that my notes would bring an invaluable interpretation to Dean Rusk’s comments.  I declined. Yuri persisted.  He said he knew that I was strapped for money, and he could help out with regular payments for any intelligence I provided.  I asked Yuri if he was trying to recruit me as a spy, but he didn't like that word. 

The luncheon ended badly, and I didn't see Yuri again socially, although we talked on the phone on one or two occasions.  The next time I saw him was in late October.  He dropped by the office unannounced, and I met him at the receptionist’s front desk.  “Yuri,” I beamed, “We are all being investigated by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee about possible communist infiltration of Pacifica Foundation.” Yuri’s face fell and he put his hand up, as if warding off the devil.  “I think it is better if we do not see each other for a while,” Yuri mumbled as he backed out the door.  I never saw Yuri again and when I inquired about him at his office in the Soviet Mission to the UN, they said he had been reassigned to Switzerland.

We Attack the FBI

The trouble with the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security (SISS) that scared away Yri Permigorof began on October 10, 1962.  Dick Elman called my office and said he wanted me to meet someone.  Dick was a magnificent novelist and acerbic critic of his more pretentious fellow Jews, which brought down a rain of criticism upon his books. He had a broad, open face that was frequently contorted into a grim when he made one of his brilliant and brutal comments on the foibles of the world. Richard had a receding hairline and would soon go almost bald. He was a rare liberal who put his money where his mouth was, passionately devoted to absolute free speech with a gut distrust for anyone in a position of power.  He was a champion of the poor and the helpless, but Richard was no socialist, a point we argued about continuously. Today he’d be called a Libertarian. What united us was an old fashioned belief in the power of truth. 

October 10th was a particularly hectic afternoon, and I was half distracted as Richard introduced me to a tall, clean-cut young man, "Special Agent Jack Levine, Federal Bureau of Investigation." Before I could wince, Levine smiled and said in a hesitant, sincere and high-pitched voice, "No, no.  Former Special Agent." 
Jack Levine had a story to tell.  He had joined the FBI and found to his shock that the agency was racist, obsessive, and almost dysfunctional.  For most Americans in 1962, the FBI was almost sacrosanct. Before the Freedom of Information Act revealed its darker secrets, almost no one criticized the FBI. 
Levine had quit and taken his story to the New York Times, The Washington Post, Time Magazine, Look, Newsweek … you name it.  No one would touch it.  Finally, Carey MacWilliams, edtor of the Nation Magazine, agreed to publish Levine’s assertion that one out of every seven members of the United States Communist Party was FB agent or informant.  McWilliams suggested he come to us to tell the rest of his story. 
Dick and I did a three-hour interview with Levine and edited it down to an hour and half.  We called Pacifica’s new executive director, Jerry Shore, and warned him what we had.  Jerry had been with the foundation for only six months, but he was already a hero to the staff. Shore was not a KPFA regular. I don’t know where the foundation found him, but the need for an executive officer with proven management and organizing skills was recognized by all sides in our constant disputes with management. With three Pacifica stations now operating there was enough money to hire one.   
Shore was good looking, very smart, and had a way of charming people, a quiet charisma.  Trevor respected him and those of us on staff welcomed the buffer between us and management.  We looked forward to concentrating on programming instead of internal politics, and Jerry brought a reassuring air of calm and optimism. He loved and supported our programming, brought fund raising skills to our attempts to raise money and began to coordinate the three stations the maximize our efficiency. He was the main reason I was being sent to New York.  Jerry believed the foundation was poised for rapid growth in all three cities. He excited us with his vision of the future. Pacifica would play a major role in an America that was rapidly changing. 
Jerry reminded me a lot of Clint Jencks but seemed much less ideological and I did not immediately peg him as part of the old left. Elsa knew better. She got hold of his resume and saw that he’d worked in the left wing of the labor movement and been a state organizer for the Progressive Party. If Jerry wasn’t a communist himself, he’d certainly known and worked with them.  It could mean trouble in the future, Elsa predicted, but for the time being we enjoyed the sense of calm stability Jerry brought to Pacifica.  
Jerry, of course, must have shared Elsa concerns about his own possible liability in a head-to-head fight with conservatives. He responded to my excited announcement our interview with Jack Levine, "We need this program like a hole in the head." But neither Jerry nor anyone else at Pacifica ever doubted for a moment that an interview with Jack Levine attacking Hoover and the FBI should not be aired. 
We played the tape for Ephraim London, a New York civil liberties lawyer who advised us that it was in no way libelous or slanderous. In his opinion Levine made a more credible witness than 90 per cent of the people he had seen testify under oath. We prepared transcripts of the tape and mailed them to the FBI and Justice Department for comment. They refused to make any public statement for broadcast, but in a series of telephone conversations that followed they did everything possible to cast aspersions on Levine's character and integrity. None of their charges, however, could be substantiated. 
Pressure mounted during the week before broadcast. The Justice Department continued to advise us that the broadcast would not be in the public interest. Dick and I were taken out for drinks by reporters we had never met from the Associated Press and other networks who urged us to cancel the program because "they'll close you down." Our Folio editor received a call from a labor leader in Washington, D.C., who had "inside information" that everyone at the station would be arrested within minutes of air-time. We received bomb threats. Even I.F. Stone, who first called to congratulate me on the broadcast, called back an hour before air-time to "disassociate" himself from the broadcast and inform me that a better case against the FBI could be made by a careful reading of the congressional record. 

Richard Elman: would you say in general that most of the investigations that you were aware of were taken against or were being made against what might be described as liberal or left wing organizations rather than right wing or conservative organizations?
Jack Levine: Yeah well this is my impression that most of the investigations being conducted by the bureau were into the so called liberal or left wing groups.
Richard Elman: you mentioned NAACP, you mentioned CORE, of course the communist party.
Jack Levine: yes.
Richard Elman; would you mention any others.
Jack Levine: yeah the, the American civil liberties union, individuals there have been, have been investigated for suspected communist affiliations.
Richard Elman: this is public knowledge or is
Jack Levine: oh no, no I wouldn’t’ say this was public knowledge.

This was the first defector from the FBI. It was at a time when no journalist in America criticized J. Edgar Hoover.  The FBI. was above reproach.  Levine was the first person to crack the façade.

Richard Elman: What I’d like to know though is how would the FBI define questions such as loyalty or communist sympathy.  What would be considered communist sympathies.
Jack Levine: Some of these standards that are used.  Through their informants in the communist party they, they know who these active communist party members are.  But in addition to these there is a number of things which people do.
Richard Elman: They get mail for example, they use the telephone and so the FBI attach telephones and make mail covers for example on people who they are investigating.
Jack Levine; Yes, they, they do, if they suspected a person as a communist or has some connection with a communist front group they would certainly tap their telephone and watch their mail.  To develop further information 

Elsa did her part by tracking down another former agent, William Turner, later an editor of Ramparts Magazine.  Turner confirmed Levine's charges. We also scheduled a panel discussion with well-known lawyers to discuss the implications of Levine's charges. And once we broke the story, it was carried in newspapers throughout the country.  The New York Times editorialized about it.  Fred Cook opened his study of the FBI with lengthy excerpts from the program.  
But that was later.  First, we had to pay.

SISS Hearings

On December 17, 1962, Harry Plotkin, our loyal and affable Washington attorney who was personally appalled by some of what he heard on Pacifica, received a subpoena to appear before one of Congress' most notorious anti-communist committees, the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security, chaired by Mississippi's equally notorious Jim Eastland.  SISS was apparently unaware that as the Foundation's attorney, Harry Plotkin was immune from testimony. 
One day later, two members of Pacifica's board of Directors living in Berkeley received telegrams announcing that subpoenas (which they had never received) were being postponed. A couple of weeks later Dr. Peter Odegard, another member of the board (and formerly an Assistant Treasurer of the United States and a President of Reed College) and Mrs. Dorothy Healy, Chairman of the Southern California Communist Party, also received subpoenas.   
Trevor Thomas, who was the Foundation's acting President, called SISS’s chief counsel, Jay Sourwine, and asked him the purpose of the hearings. Sourwine replied that the committee wanted to find out how it was possible for a member of the Communist Party to broadcast on an American radio station. Thomas explained that Mrs. Healy was one of about twenty different commentators who, between them, covered the political spectrum from the extreme right to the extreme left. Trevor added that in line with Pacifica's policies and FCC rulings - Mrs. Healy was identified as a communist. The next day, Trevor received a subpoena. 
By the time the hearings convened on January 10, 1963, subpoenas had also been served on Jerry Shore, our new executive director, Joseph Binns, Station Manager of WBAI in New York City for just two weeks, and Mrs. Pauline Shindler, a subscriber to the Los Angeles station. 
Before the hearings convened, the Foundation notified SISS and the press that as a public institution its records were open for examination; its programs could be heard by anyone, and most were scheduled in a program guide. Thomas objected to the coercive subpoenas and once again asked for some kind of explanation. None was forthcoming from Washington. 
Pacifica then requested that the hearings be held in public and even contemplated broadcasting them live, in the belief that all relevant information ought to be made public. Despite the support of both California senators, Clair Engle and Thomas Kuchel, SISS replied that its rules forbade an open hearing. 
When the hearings began, Senator Dodd issued a seven-page statement that each witness was required to read before testifying. The statement dealt with possible communist infiltration of American communications media and referred to previous studies. It then continued: "Recently, there have come to the attention of the committee reports of possible communist infiltration or penetration of an important radio chain, the stations of the Pacifica Foundation. We are here today to seek information, from witnesses whom we believe to be in a position to supply it, respecting facts which may shed light on the question of how much substance there may have been to these reports.  This is our major objective." 
Pacifica had become a fairly secure part of the American scene. Its three stations, in three major population centers (the San Francisco Bay area, Los Angeles, and New York City), had a base of thirty thousand subscribers and an income of close to three-quarters of a million dollars. We had a prime-time audience of one to two million people. 
The purpose of congressional anti-communist investigating committees like SISS had been made clear during the 1950s.  The power of domestic communism had never posed a serious threat to the United States. The anti-communist crusade discredited progressives of all kinds. Legally speaking, congressional committees are authorized to hold hearings to gather information necessary to enact legislation. But as the records of SISS, HUAC (The House Committee on Un-American Activities) and their various local equivalents make clear, they never served any serious legislative function.  Instead, they subpoenaed witnesses, forced them to testify about their beliefs and then publicized their testimony in a context that made the witnesses appear to be subversive.   
By the time the Pacifica hearings were held in 1963, most informed Americans recognized this, and neither SISS nor HUAC could hold public hearings outside of Washington without encountering massive counter demonstrations. The last time HUAC had come to San Francisco, the counter demonstrations had been so effective that the city government announced it would no longer make its facilities available to them.  Pacifica had played a key role in publicizing the real intent of SISS and HUAC by broadcasting its hearings and making its airwaves available to their opponents. 
By 1963 it also was clear that few self-respecting Americans could co-operate with SISS or HUAC, because they precluded the possibility of witnesses testifying fully about themselves and their beliefs. They were forbidden from reading statements, being cross-examined by their own attorneys or having access to testimony made against them. And when their testimony was finally released, it often appeared in a distorted form, modified to meet the committee's own requirements.