Blacklisted
A few days before I handed in my resignation at WBAI the CIA interviewed me in my WBAI office. I had agreed to talk to anyone who would listen, and naively believed that I might actually be able to do some good. My resignation was still a secret even froim my staff, but ew I was resigning at that time. I hadn’t even told the staff, but my CIA interrogator, Walter Freund (Walter the Friend), told me he'd heard I was leaving Pacifica. Asked how he found out; Walter would only say it was “in the air.” Then he offered, "a smart, enterprising young man like you" a job with the agency. In my fifteen minutes of stardon I'd now been recruited by both the NKVD and the CIA … both super power security agencies!
Pacifica ran my Vietnam programs incessantly after I left. I was bitter. I went to a WBAI listeners meeting on the upper west side several weeks after resigning. I sat unobserved in the back of the room. Chris Albertson was answering questions. During some comment that I perceived to be particularly egregious, I rose and confronted him. The audience gasped. Albertson ducked behind his chair and escaped out the back in utter confusion. I had the stage to myself, my fans enthusiastically applauding me. Another battle won while the war was lost. Albertson remained manager of WBAI, while I was looking for work.
I sold four pages of photographs to Life Magazine. They showed militia firing rifles at simulated jet fighters and Ho Chi Min raising his fist with other North Vietnam dignitaries as they sang the national anthem. Newsweek ran a three-page spread with my pictures and text. The article ended with the importance that the North Vietnamese placed on the American Peace Movement.
I was invited write and speak across the country. I published three lengthy articles in the Denver Post. I.F. Stone gave me the entire October 11th, 1965 edition of his Weekly. My articles appeared in Diplomat, the War/Peace Report, Viet Report, The National Inquirer and several other small magazines.
I went on a speaking tour. My basic message, in both articles and speeches, was that we were going to lose the war. It was a message not every audience wanted to hear. In one town in upstate New York, I created a near riot during a debate with World War II veterans, and my sponsor led me out a back door as the audience erupted in anger. At an Optimists Club meeting north of Denver, Colorado, I escaped through a back window as the optimists stormed the stage. I was too pessimistic.
Sandy Sokolow of CBS news called in mid-November and asked me to meet him at the Slate, the dark CBS hangout on 11th Avenue. The head of the news department, Gordon Manning, wanted to talk to me about an on-air job covering the Congressional races in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. I met with Manning in his huge CBS office in front of a larger than life-size photograph of his two children. He offered me the job. When I asked about salary, Manning slipped his arm around my shoulder and said, "At the level you're coming into CBS I wouldn't worry about salary.” I was still only thirty; I had carried out the journalistic coup of the decade and I was being offered on an on-air job at the major news organization. I thought I had New York City by the tail.
The conversation with Gordon Manning took place in mid-December. Christmas came and went. New Year’s Eve. I expected to hear something from CBS shortly after the first of the year, but time dragged on with no response. I called Manning’s office. He was unavailable. I called Sandy Sokolow. He was out of town.
In late January, I was speaking at a Synagogue on Long Island. Someone asked me what I planned to do now that I was no longer with Pacifica. I told the story of the aborted job offer by CBS. After my talk a man came up and introduced himself as a lawyer for CBS. He offered to find out what happened. He called the following week. “You were hired.” he told me. “I saw your paperwork. It was sent down from New York to Washington where all CBS hires are reviewed by CBS lawyers. They took one look at your record and said, ‘You can’t hire this kid.’”
You never read about Washington Lawyers in all the media books, but they wield a powerful and final restraint on what gets distributed.
On February 4th, I received word from the State Department that they were lifting my passport. Staunton Lynd, Herbert Aptheker and Tom Hayden had just become the second group of Americans to go to North Vietnam. The state Department had taken their passports. Now they were coming after ours. Leonard Boudin agreed to represent me.
In early March Sandy Sokolow called me unexpectedly and asked to meet again at the Slate bar. Sandy wanted help getting a team of reporters into Hanoi. I offered to produce the segment for him, but Sandy turned me down. I asked him point-blank if he could help me find work at one of the other networks. CBS, after all, had been enthusiastic about my work. Sandy looked even more uncomfortable and replied, without looking at me directly, “Have you ever considered work in another field.”
Eve of Destruction
My career in journalism was at an end. I was not going to be a CBS correspondent. I would not be heralded as the American reporter who caught the Johnson administration in a colossal mistake that required an enormous lie. l was going to be a pariah. The State Department wanted my passport and the IRS was auditing seven years of back taxes.
As summer approached, I found myself speaking on auto pilot in front of audiences, saying familiar words while my mind was thinking about something entirely different. The gigs were beginning to run out anyway. What was I to do with myself? I had a family to support.
I tried to become a rabble rouser, addressing a huge rally in New York City where I screamed, “What do we want … when do we want it…” etc. The crowd shouted back their programmed responses. But even as I worked the crowd, I felt curiously removed from my own rhetoric, as if I were watching myself with bemused detachment. I couldn’t get over being a reporter.
While I was in Vietnam, a little-known singer named Barry McQuire came out with a song called Eve of Destruction that quickly moved to number one on the Billboard charts. It was written by a 19-year-old, P. F. Sloan. It caught the country’s mood and my own.
The eastern world it is exploding
Violence flarin', bullets loadin'
You're old enough to kill but not for votin'
You don't believe in war but whats that gun you're totin'?
And even the Jordan River has bodies floatin’
The young song writer takes us around the world and returns to the United States.
Handful of senators don't pass legislation
And marches alone can't bring integration
When human respect is disintegratin'
This whole crazy world is just too frustratin’
But you tell me
Over and over and over again my friend
Ah, you don't believe
We're on the eve of destruction
The song was banned on ABC radio and widely attacked by conservatives. A group called The Spokesmen released a record called "The Dawn of Correction” and a few months later, Green Beret medic Sgt. Barry Sadler released the patriotic "Ballad of the Green Berets” that also moved to the top of the charts.
The Eve of Destruction compared the violence in southeast Asia to the rising violence in the United State. The civil rights movements had failed to achieve its major goals, and African American uprisings took place that summer in Los Angeles and Cleveland. Although congress had passed Johnson’s Civil Rights bill 1964, individual states had acted quickly to circumvent the law. California passed Proposition 14, which moved to block the fair housing components of the Civil Rights Act.
Los Angeles, with a growing African American population and racial discrimination in housing as severe as anywhere in the country, began to simmer. On August 11, 1965, a routine traffic stop in South Central Los Angeles took the simmer to a boil. The uprising lasted for six days, leaving 34 dead, over a thousand people injured, nearly 4,000 arrested, and hundreds of buildings destroyed.
And yet …
After what the mainstream media called “the Watts riots” many African Americans felt a sense of hope that things finally would change because as part of the coverage, whites had been shown on television how blacks actually lived. A measure of support did follow the uprising. A commission was established to discover the root causes. The report concluded that the violence wasn't the act of thugs, but rather symptomatic of much deeper problems: the high jobless rate in the inner city, poor housing, bad schools. The authorities were worried. The summer before, in 1964, seven northeastern cities had uprisings in African American communities.
The Watts rallying cry of "Burn baby burn” worried white America. Some things began to change. African Americans were not going back to "Yes, sir. No, ma’am.” Non-violent protesting was on the way out. Upheavals were about to spread to cities across the United States.
The anti-war movement remained non-violent. Most Americans still supported the war in 1965. Only 500 American boys had died in Vietnam by then. The war went on for ten more years and killed 58,000 Americans and over a million Vietnamese. We dropped twice the bomb tonnage on Vietnam that we dropped on Europe and Asia in World War II. We poisoned Vietnamese land with agent orange and millions still suffer the consequences.
Today communist Vietnam is an honored trading partner. The war easily could have been avoided. All you had to do was read a few books, talk to a few French journalists, historians and military officers and you’d realize the United States eventually was going to pull out. No one had ever conquered Vietnam, and we were three thousand miles asway with a short attention span.
Retreat to Academia
Somewhere during Freedom Sumer in 1964 I met Frank Millspaugh and we dreamed up the idea of starting a Pacific radio station in Tougaloo, Mississippi, home of a successful African American college since 1869. Frank was the quintessential Midwestern: modest, got things done without a fuss, was average height, average looking, average dressed and had a wicked sense of humor. Although he seemed never to call attention to himself, he always had a drop dead beautiful and brilliant girlfriends.
Frank had worked for the National Student Association. There were rumors even back then, that NSA’s international program was riddled with government agents -- rumors that were confirmed in 1967 when a series of articles appeared in Ramparts Magazine and later filtered into the mainstream press. (see Karen Paget’s terrific book, Patriotic Betrayal for a thorough and heart-breaking account of innocence betrayed). Frank worked for SDS domestically, and in any event his droll sense of humor and thoughtful progressive agenda were far too nuanced for agency operatives. I mention this to recall the sense of paranoia we were still feeling in 1966.
Frank and I put together a proposal with other Freedom Sumer veterans, but despite a nationwide fund-raising campaign we could never attract enough capital to pull it off. Frank went on to become one of WBAI’s most successful stations managers, running the station through much of the 1970s.
An unexpected solution to my employment problem appeared after a lecture to students at Bennington College in Vermont. Bennington was looking for an English professor. Why didn’t I apply? I wrote a letter that emphasized the Reed method of student-engaged teaching. To my surprise, I got a job in the English Department. Critic Stanley Edgar Hyman was my department chairman. Writer Bernard Malamud and poet Howard Nemerov were among Bennington’s distinguished faculty.
Bennington paid beginning faculty less than students spent on tuition, but it was a job. I moved into a tiny two room house across the Vermont line in much less expensive New York State and began the teaching career that I had anticipated when I went to graduate school ten years earlier.
First year teaching was a tremendous amount of work, studying the Oxford English Dictionary and numerous biographies and critical texts into the wee hours of the morning to stay ahead of my students, but it kept my mind off politics and thwarted ambitions. I taught an Introduction to Literature course for freshman, the English novel from Defoe to Conrad, with an emphasis on Wuthering Heights and the Gothic novels of Monk Lewis (The Monk) and Mary Shelly (Frankenstein). The young women loved them. I ended with Conrad’s Nostromo, a wonderful book that bored my Bennington students. In American literature we read Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter and Melville’s Moby Dick.
My next-door neighbor in Vermont was a single man with a few cows and chickens and a small vegetable plot. His favorite drink, which seemed to work for him at almost any time of the day or night, was gin and milk. We frequently drank together in the evenings, in the farm stillness, animals quieting and the bats and night insects coming out as dusk changed to dark and a million stars curved overhead. After the excitement of New York City and the anti-war movement, my life of routine and scholarship moved slowly.
Further
I have been ignoring the bombshell that changed everything in the late Sixties … drugs. Almost no one involved with the movement avoided them entirely and for many people they became a regular part of life. Drugs had a profound effect on a movement that in 1965-66 was barely finding its legs after 1964’s Freedom Summer.
Sometime in the Winter of 1965, out of work and lecturing full time against the war, taking part in teach-ins and rallies, holding off the State Department and the IRS, I saw Timothy Leary interviewed on television. The former Harvard Professor and his colleague Richard Alpert had been giving LSD (it was still legal) to refined college kids in carefully guided trips since 1961. Leary published The Psychedelic Experience in 1964.
I watched with friends at my apartment in New York. After the interview I told them I thought Leary looked “out of it.” I poured myself another martini, lit an unfiltered Camel cigarette, and told my friends that if this LSD and marijuana ever got around, it would end the movement and all hope for progressive change in the United States. Someone laughed, pulled out a joint and offered it around. I had my first puffs of marijuana. Like most first-time users, it seemed to have no effect whatsoever.
Marihuana and acid swept through the youth culture with astounding speed. Ken Kesey and a wild group of followers called the Merry Pranksters toured America in 1964 in a psychedelic painted bus called Further, spreading the acid culture. They even traveled through Mississippi during Freedom Summer, although no one I knew in the movement was aware of them. When they returned to California the Pranksters hosted “acid tests” at La Honda and later in Los Angeles and San Francisco in 1965 and ’66. They filled huge rooms with sensory overload, flashing lights, neon signs, beating drums, and amplified snatches of conversation and handed out high quality, free acid. Gerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead developed a new form of rock and roll with a wide range of sounds, dubbed “acid rock.”
Hundreds of people took LSD for the first time at the acid tests. A Los Angeles acid test held on February 12th, 1966 made the March cover of Life Magazine. Despite the title, the article was more curious than condemning.
A cover of Time Magazine a few weeks later asked, “Is God Dead?”
Marijuana was illegal and LSD became illegal in 1966. Police drug busts became more common. As youthful marijuana offenders met movement organizers in the same American jails, their experiences were shared, and the two cultures began to merge.
As the decade spun into its last few years, both drug use and violence escalated. The 1965 Watts uprising had changed everything. Demonstrators were more militant. In June of ’66 Stokely Carmichael announced, “We been saying ‘freedom’ for six years. What we are going to start saying now is ‘Black Power.’” A few months later, H. Rap Brown, then chairman of SNCC, said, “We built the country up and we’ll burn it down in protest. I say violence is necessary. Violence is a part of America’s culture. It is as American as cherry pie.”
Watts changed police behavior as well. Cops now responded to resistance to orders with violence and with mass arrests. In Omaha, Nebraska, on July 4, 1966, on a blistering hot afternoon, African Americans refused a police order to disperse. The cops attacked. People resisted. Protesters demolished police cars and raided the North 24th Street business corridor, throwing firebombs and demolishing storefronts. The uprising lasted three days and cost the city millions of dollars. In what became a regular pattern, it took the National Guard to restore order. Less than a month later, on August 1, 1966, violence broke out again.
On July 18th, Cleveland exploded in an uprising that lasted five days until National Guard troops put it down on the 23rd.
Into the violent mix fell two mass murderers. On July 14th Richard Speck killed 8 Chicago nurses. In August Charles Whitman shot 12 people from the top of the tower at the University of Texas.
Then came the summer of 1967, known in the commercial media as “The Summer of Love,” when uprisings broke out in 159 American cities, leaving 88 people dead and 4,000 wounded. The uprisings in Newark, New Jersey, and Detroit, Michigan were by far the most devastating. Large swaths of the African-American communities in both cities went up in flames. Television showed burning buildings and looted stores, with National Guardsmen and paratroopers patrolling the streets.
Summer of Love
The political movement and the drug culture collided first and most spectacularly during the summer of 1967, dubbed by the mainstream media as The Summer of Love and celebrated with all the hoopla and tawdry spectacle the media brings to everything it touches.
A little background. By 1967 variations of the acid tests were being held in scruffy ballrooms around San Francisco with bands like Big Brother and the Holding Company, Country Joe and the Fish, Moby Grape and the Jefferson Airplane, playing acid rock. It cost only a couple of dollars to get into a performance and with a cheap tab of acid you could get high for twelve hours.
“There was the lights, there was the music, there was the fluorescent chart, and the strobe light ... You would just walk in and start dancing with people. No hellos, no good-byes, no ‘what do you do,’ no names … You’d go and you’d take some acid, and you’d just fly …”
It all began with the Beats. When North Beach got run over by strip joints and tourists in the early Sixties, the Beats fled to the Haight Ashbury on the edge of the Golden Gate panhandle. Rents in old Victorian homes were incredibly cheap. Bohemians tried to live out their values in a mutually sustaining community. They wanted to live the life that movement workers were struggling to bring about in the future. The message of the Beats, “Start living the life you hope to create.”
“Life is and should be ecstasy,” they said. “Being alive should be a joy. And it’s a drag for most people.” Author Michael Rossman, said, “People found themselves huddling together not simply because they were alienated, but also because there was a positive core of not only values but of people who shared those values and a landscape where it might be possible to live those values out in life more fully, not as a private act, but as a communal act.”
Life in the Haight depended both on a rejection of material values and on the availability of cheap material goods. America’s post war consumer machine produced such abundance that it made quantities of perfectly good older stuff, not yet considered antiques, obsolete. People gave it away for practically nothing. Beats in the Haight were living in abandoned Victorian mansions furnished with velvet drapes and over-stuffed sofas in a style called “San Francisco Piss Elegant.”
“People have no idea how cheap it was to get stuff at the thrift stores,” the poet Lenore Kendal told me. “ I mean you could get anything you wanted for a nickel, a penny, nothing. That makes you feel good, you know? Life is easy. So it was possible to exist and give everything away.”
At the heart of the experiment in the Haight were a group of anarchists who took their name from a communal farming group active in England in the 17th Century, the Diggers. The Diggers burst onto the scene after they gave out free food in the panhandle. The food had been stolen, borrowed, ripped off, loaned and cooked in huge ash cans. Free food was understandably popular.
The Diggers created a free store that blew people’s minds. It was well stocked and you could swing from one side of the room to the other on a big swing with red velvet ropes. Diggers organized regular street cleaning happenings, with musicians and picnics to create a sense of community and social responsibility among the Haight residents.
Lenore Kendal told me, “I think there was tremendous honesty in the first Haight Ashbury days, it was honestly open and honestly loving. That was what made everybody so happy. That’s what attracted people’s attention.”
Word of the extraordinary scene in the Haight Ashbury with its open drug use fascinated the media, and word quickly got around. Straight people came to look and were outraged.The kids had a different take. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, with the thinly disguised “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant, where you could get anything you wanted, and the Jefferson Airplane’s hit White Rabbit, all glamorized drug use.
A dreadful song by Scott McKenzie was played more than any of them. It advised American kids to wear flowers in their hair if they were going to San Francisco. During the Spring of 1967, newspaper and magazine writers, television and movie crews, sociologists and celebrities, all came and carried word about the Haight to every corner of the world. In an international poll taken in 1967, more people had heard of the Haight Ashbury than had heard of San Francisco. Some reporters predicted that 200,000 high school and college kids from all over the United States would pour into San Francisco for a Summer of Love. This, of course, caught the attention of entrepreneurs.
“I picked up the paper in the Spring and it said 200,000 people, hippies, whatever, are expected to be in the Haight Ashbury, and I thought, oh boy, if I could get a dollar out of each of them.”
Hippie culture started being marketed.
“There’s a new record store in the Haight called the New Geology Rock Shop. Zanadu has a lot of new things going on … they’re on a campaign to cover their ceiling, floor and all their walls with threads. They’ve got purple, green and orange paisley outfits for sale and shirts of things like purple satin and gigantic paisley velveteen pillows and a full selection of bell bottom slacks … hey, we’re an hour past the full moon, Katie…” Those are actual excerpt from a San Francisco commercial radio station in 1967.
Radicals who still soldiered on in the Movement distrusted the drug culture, but they couldn’t ignore 200,000 young people either. Dope smoking, acid dropping hippies disdained politics, but were more than happy to draw movement organizers into their new world. Both sides of the cultural divide decided to kick off the summer with a huge gathering in Golden Gate Park. It was a precursor of the future for the political left. The event would not be a demonstration nor a rally but a Human Be-In.
Planning the event was frustrating for movement organizers.
“We kept saying, ‘Who’s going to speak at the event.” And they would look at us smile and say, “No speakers. No words. Just communication... One of us was in a suite and tie. He demanded that the Be-In have a list of demands that go to the government, because it’s a waste of time to bring 20,000 people together and to make no demands on the government. So we agreed to demand the end of the war.”
It was the Hippies only concession. The event was scheduled to take place on the day the new California law banning LSD went into effect … the summer solstice, June 21st, 1967.
Just after dawn, bright eyed kids met in Golden Gate Park, dressed in loose clothes covered with beads, moving in a haze of marijuana, sandalwood and patchouli oil, trying to explain to straight reporters what it was all about.
“I live in the strawberry fields, and it’s a communa, and every morning is beautiful, because nobody has any of these materialistic values.”
“You know, I really think the goal in life is to be happy. And you can gain happiness from a lot of sources, and hopefully you can gain it from within your own self. But this is just a gathering of people who like to be happy. Who like to ‘BE’.”
“That’s why I’m here. To love and be loved. To get away from all the fakeness. You don’t have to be someone you aren’t. You can just be yourself.”
Allen Ginzberg, Neal Cassidy, other surviving Beats, Berkeley politicos, Ken Kesey in disguise (on the run from two drug charges) and Tim Leary who repeated his advice, “The message is very simple. It can said in six words. Turn on. Tune in. Drop out.”
Within a few weeks tour busses started working their way down Haight Street.
“My boss used to say, ‘Don’t take the people to the Haight Ashbury,’ and the people would come on the buses with Haight Ashbury on Time Magazine, on Newsweek, and all these national magazines and they’d say, ‘Hey driver, are we going to Haight Ashbury? And the people were amazed, they were awed, they just couldn’t believe in their wildest expectations, that this was actually coming off.”