End of the Summer of Love
As the summer dragged on the Haight was overwhelmed by kids, tourists and the media. Frightened parents wanted something done. Police began to aggressively enforce drug laws. The risk to dealers went up, but so did their profits. When the profits increased, the professionals came in. William Thomas, a rare Black man in the Haight Ashbury scene for years had sold drugs under the slogan, “Superspade, faster than a speeding mind.” He never made a huge profit and everybody loved him. He was murdered in August of 1967 by rival drug dealers who wanted to up the price and encourage the use of stronger stuff than LSD.
The scene by the end of the summer was grim. The summer festival had become a tawdry carnival. There were too many people. They couldn’t take care of each other. Kids panhandled for loose change; undercover cops made everybody paranoid. The first topless bar opened. Tourists gawked from their busses, seeing visual proof of the own worst fears.
“Well, let’s see, we’re starting down the world famous Haight Street now, I’m going real slow, folks, and I want you to look to the left and to the right into the 2nd story windows. These are all crash pads. Look, look, look, there’s a naked girl, right there. Look at her; she’s facing you, standing right there in the window. And the people yelling, Charlie, stop the bus, I want to take a picture. I think it’s my neighbor’s kid.”
It wasn’t summer camp. There were no counselors to clean up and keep the linen clean. Groups like the Diggers and the Free Clinic and free legal services were overwhelmed. Kids started taking psychedelic drugs when they were suffering from some kind of hassle, some kind of loss, and had bad trips.
“I feel bad about a lot of stuff that went down in the Sixties. We were really playing with fire. There are people who just started taking it literally. I mean they got strung out on drugs and they killed themselves or other people. VD was rampant because of this great promiscuity riff that everybody run down… free love and make revolution and it really got out of hand. Too many fourteen year olds coming from Iowa, from anyplace, asking, “where’s the scene, man.”
Speed and heroin soon became drugs of choice. A career criminal named Charles Manson, just out of prison after serving his third term, formed a commune, composed mostly of young women, in the Haight.
The original transplants from North Beach, left for rural communes, split the city, went off to live on country farms. On October 6th, 1967, little more than three months after the June 21st Be-In, they declared the death of hippie and held a final gathering in the panhandle, to bury the Psychedelic Shop sign. Lenore Kendal called it “ a very clear response to everything getting sold. And very noble. I think it was very tasteful.”
I watched the Haight Ashbury experiment from the safety of my three-room house outside of Hoosick Falls, New York. I hadn’t used any psychedelic drugs, but I had given up drinking (except for an occasional milk and gin with my neighbor!) and smoking tobacco in favor of marijuana. People reacted to the drug in different ways: the giggling foolishness you see so often portrayed in media; others simply got tired and fell asleep; I found it focused my attention and gave me a lift during long sessions of grading student papers.
Because it was illegal, everyone who smoked had crossed a line and joined the outlaws, even if only on the remotest fringes of crime. This created a sense of community among users, a sub-culture different from the dominant one. A counterculture. Unlike cocaine or heroin, marijuana was usually shared with others. Unlike speed it made people more mellow, less likely become violent. Members of this subgroup let their hair grow longer, wore looser, more colorful clothes, and began to identify more with each other than with the American mainstream, the world divided between hip and square.
Whatever mellow drug reveries we may have and in 1967, they confronted a violent reality when the shit hit the fan in 1968.
The Shit Hits the Fan
On January 31st, 1968, 400,000 Vietcong and North Vietnamese soldiers overran almost every major city and military garrison in South Vietnam. Our embassy in Saigon was attacked. Two days later, we all watched the Saigon police chief as he executed a Vietcong prisoner in cold blood with a pistol shot to the head. Walter Cronkite, in a CBS News special, declared the United State would have to negotiate an exit. President Johnson, who was listening, told his staff it was all over. A few weeks later he announced that he would not run for re-election.
Johnson is a classic tragic figure, a great man brought down by his own misguided judgement. He was an FDR liberal, and our country remained “our country” under his leadership. He used his considerable political skills to strengthen the working and middle classes. His tragic flaw was his inability to admit a mistake in pursuing the ill-advised war in Vietnam that John F. Kennedy had started.
Martin Luther King was murdered on April 4th. He had just begun to move beyond Civil Rights and Vietnam to poverty. He had gone to Memphis to help a garbage workers’ strike. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets across America, some peacefully, many violently. Uprisings broke out in 125 cities nationwide. In many instances the National Guard was deployed. In Washington, DC, Chicago and Baltimore, it took tens of thousands of regular army soldiers and Marines to end the violence. When it was over, 39 people were dead, more than 2,600 injured and 21,000 arrested.
The only high point in that terrible night was a remarkable speech by Robert Kennedy, Jr. On the campaign trail in Indianapolis, Indiana, Kennedy went out before a largely African American crowd.
“I'm only going to talk to you just for a minute or so this evening, because I have some -- some very sad news for all of you -- Could you lower those signs, please? -- I have some very sad news for all of you, and, I think, sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world; and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.”
The crowd gasped. Robert Kennedy talked about the assassination of his brother and added: “But we have to make an effort in the United States. We have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond, or go beyond these rather difficult times. My favorite poem, my -- my favorite poet was Aeschylus. And he once wrote:
‘Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.”
Robert Kennedy had served on Senator McCarthy’s witch hunting committee. But his lines from Aeschylus ran true. What impressed me during his campaign for the presidency, was his enormous capacity for growth into someone with compassion whose intelligence and political experience just might end the war and continue Johnson’s progressive legislation.
“What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.
So I ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King -- yeah, it's true -- but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love -- a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.
There was no uprising in Indianapolis.
Two days later, a shootout between Black Panthers and Oakland police left several dead, including 16-year-old Panther Bobby Hutton.
White students became more confrontational. SDS had been organizing at Columbia University for several years, focusing on anti-war issues: an on-campus ROTC recruitment office; sending student class rankings to local draft boards; links to the Defense Department through its Institute for Defense Analyses, a weapons research think-tank that nobody knew about. SDS used teach-ins, occupations and demonstrations, tactics that had been perfected during Berkeley’s 1964 Free Speech Movement.
On April 23rd students held a demonstration at noon at the sundial in the center of campus. Then they moved to a construction site where Columbia was building a new gymnasium, using some land in an existing public park. Harlem residents were opposed to Columbia’s use the land for a university facility and SDS supported them.
A fight broke out between pro-war students, SDS demonstrators and police. SDS leader Mark Rudd suggested demonstrators move to Hamilton Hall, the university’s main building with professors’ offices and classrooms. Hundreds more students joined the occupation there. Some Harlem community organizers and the student Afro-American-Society joined as well. Four other buildings were taken over that night, including Low Library where students had to break a window to gain access. Criminal acts became more common and acceptable.
Both sides made abortive attempts to negotiate, but a week later Columbia officials called the police, who were itching to go. They responded with unusual brutality. Believing they representing the majority of the population (and they probably were!), they wanted to teach the spoiled brats a lesson. Hundreds of citizens, including professors, bystanders and medical personnel were beaten with night sticks. Seven hundred were arrested.
Responding to police brutality, thousands more students and professors joined the demonstrators. In a second round of protests from May 17th to the 22nd, police arrested one hundred and seventy-seven Columbia and Barnard students and sent fifty-one to the hospital.
Columbia closed for the rest of the semester. The gym building was moved to a new location. The university severed its ties to the IDA. The Columbia uprising became a new model for student protests across America.
On June 6th, Bobby Kennedy was gunned down in Los Angeles. The last hope that young people had for high level leadership for progressive change in America had been snuffed out. The remaining Democratic candidates did not have much general support and little or no charisma.
Large numbers of protesters were expected at the Democratic Convention in August. Mayor Daley refused to issue permits for most of them, then ordered his police to suppress any demonstrations that took place. Chicago police attacked hippies, New Leftists, dissident Democrats, Yippies, newsmen, photographers, passers-by and clergymen. They roughed up Winston Churchill's grandson, covering the convention as a journalist. They whacked Playboy's publisher Hugh Hefner. A member of the British Parliament, Mrs. Anne Kerr, a vacationing Labourite was maced outside the Conrad Hilton and hustled off to jail.
The “Battle of Michigan Avenue” ended the protests three days later. Mayor Daley deployed 22,500 police and state troopers. They overwhelmed approximately 10,000 anti-war protesters in what was later called a “police riot.” Extensive media coverage sent pictures of the bloody suppression across the world. “The whole world is watching,” the protesters chanted.
The whole world seemed to be in revolt in 1968. Worker and student uprisings took place everywhere. It began with Prague Spring on January 5th, 1968, when Alexander Dubček became Cechoslovakia’s First Secretary of the Communist Party and thousands of workers and students took to the streets to urge reforms. Dubček believed communism could have “a human face” and instituted many of reforms. (In late August, Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia and put an end to them.)
In the first weeks of May, French students occupied universities to protest capitalism and consumerism. Their protest quickly spread to factories with strikes involving 11 million workers. The 1968 French uprising, like the movement in the United States, featured teach-ins, debates, music and singing, stunning graffiti and posters. Students and workers brought the French economy to a standstill. President Charles de Gaulle secretly left France for a few hours, fearful his government would be overthrown.
In October in Mexico, months of student demonstrations ended in a bloodbath at La Plaza de las Tres Culturas just 10 days before the 1968 Summer Olympic games were scheduled to begin in Mexico City. At least 10,000 people were gathered in the plaza when helicopters lite off flares and police snipers opened up in the trapped crowd. Somewhere between 30 and 300 were killed.
Demonstrations broke out throughout the Communist Bloc and in Brazil, Spain, Poland, China, West Berlin, Rome, London, Italy, and Argentina. It seemed for a moment as if a worldwide uprising of students and workers was taking place and Americans were part of it.
The Counter Offensive
Richard Nixon defeated Democratic candidate, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, in November of 1968. He took office in January of 1969. Everybody remembers Nixon as a bad guy, and in a moment you’ll see why. But it also must be remembered that Nixon was the last Republican president to accept FDR’s New Deal. He was far to right of Roosevelt democrats on social issues, but he put through big new initiatives for environmental and consumer protection, argued for a minimum annual income and supported an expansion of Social Security and health care. He even supported unions, because workers were part of what he called “the silent minority.”
“As we renew our commitment to the general well-being of the working man,” Nixon said, “we also reaffirm our faith in sound collective bargaining. In an increasingly complex society, one in which so many elements depend so heavily on one another, the process of collective bargaining must be strong and effective and exercised with self-restraint on all sides.”
The murders and rebellions of 1968 changed the world and I felt out of it in quiet, remote Vermont. I had also committed the most egregious of faculty sins, and fell in love with one of my students. Alexa was the daughter of a prosperous New York City family, a background she completely rejected as phony and wasted. She wqas moving to California and if I wanted to cointinue our relationshiop, I’d have to leave weith her.
In the Fall I left Bennington after two years of teaching and headed to Southern California, which seemed like the epicenter of the future. The success of the Black Panther’s community organizing and its militant stance of self-protection in Oakland, California, had put it in the vanguard of the increasing angry national movement of young people.
The counterculture was also centered in California. The ban on LSD and other hallucinogenics didn’t curb the growth of users. A counterculture whose members increasingly identified themselves by growing long hair and beards and dressing in tie dyed and pioneer clothes, who smoked dope and refused to participate in the war effort. In California some young people were taking Tim Leary’s advice to “Turn on, tune in and drop out” to live in rural communes that were springing up all over California.
I got a job with Pacifica’s Los Angeles station KPFK. It was a good place to cover the last days of the New Left as the movement failed to stop the war in Vietnam or bring genuine relief to African Americans. Nixon’s major campaign promise had been to end the war. In May he started withdrawing troops from Vietnam, but not enough to end draft calls. And he expanded the bombing of North Vietnam.
Violence against the war increased. Between the middle of 1968 and the middle of 1969, one hundred and twenty bombings took place on or around college campuses in connection with the war in Vietnam.
Nixon understood opposition to the war came largely from students. He planned to restore order to college campuses without changing his Vietnam policies. On March 22, 1969, he promised “to reassert in the face of student protest, the first principles of academic freedom.” He only visited one college campus during his first year in office, Beadle College in South Dakota where he said regarding student protests, “We have the power to strike back if need be, and to prevail. The nation has survived other attempts at insurrection. We can survive this.”
Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, had similar ideas. In an off-the-cuff response to a question at a meeting of the Council of California Growers Reagan said, ”If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with. No more appeasement.” He later explained the comment was only a figure of speech and denied that he would welcome a bloodbath “on campus or anywhere else.”
Early in 1969, University of California, Berkeley, students took over a vacant square block near campus, a few blocks down Telegraph Avenue, where the university planned to put up a new building. They planted trees. bushes and some grass, put in a vegetable garden, benches and chairs and held public gatherings. They called it “People’s Park.”
On May 15th, 1969, Reagan, over the advice of the UC Chancellor, ordered troops to clear the park.The police raid was savage. When it was over, authorities bulldozed the park to the ground and put up a fence. “People Park ended the movement, really,” student leader Stew Alpert said, “The repression was so brutal.”
In a later demonstration protesting the destruction of People’s Park student James Rector was killed by police. They fired heavy gauge buckshot, each pellet the size of a 38 caliber bullet, directly into a crowd of students. Reagan was unapologetic. "It's very naive to assume that you should send anyone into that kind of conflict with a flyswatter.”
In New York City, despite new legislation that made Gay bars legal in 1969, police raided a bar on Sheridan Square called the Stonewall that catered to African American and Hispanic Gay men. This time, the men resisted. More than 2000 protesters took on 200 cops with stones and bottles, shouting “Gay Power.” Several of the men were beaten when they were taken into police custody. Stonewall was the beginning of the modern LGTB movement in America.
Black Panther chapters opened across the country, two dozen of them by the end of 1969. J. Edgar Hoover announced that the Black Panther Party was “the greatest threat to [the] internal security of the country,” and he assigned two thousand full-time FBI agents to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and otherwise neutralize” the Panthers and other New Left organizations under a program called COINTELPRO. By the end of the year police had killed 27 Panthers and arrested or jailed 749.
The COINTELPRO program was revealed when a group of radicals called the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into FBI offices in Media, Pennsylvania, in 1971. They stole hundreds of secret files, including details about COINTRELPRO.
Politics of Paranoia
Pacifica was not the same institution I had left two and half years earlier. The hot ticket to success was personality radio at the edge. Elsa Knight Thompson’s old-fashioned journalism was out. Few and fewer people seemed to be talking to each other anyway.
I carved out a live three-hour mid-day show that ran from 11:00 AM to 2:00 pm in the afternoon called Free Lunch. The name was a reference to the famous journalist A.J. Leibling’s characterization of the news as the free lunch that newspapers gave out to sell advertising, just as bars in the old days used free snacks to entice customers to buy beer. Most of my guests were musicians, writers and other artists, but I occasionally got pulled into doing political stories.
One was an interview with Ron Karenga, the man who invented Kwanza. In 1969 Karenga was battling with the Black Panthers for leadership. Everyone knew the FBI and local police were trying to destroy the Panthers by turning other black groups against them. I suspected Karenga was an FBI plant.
My station manager suffered from a severe case of radical chic and wanted his own black revolutionary friend. Karenga was the lucky one. Or more likely, Karenga picked my station manager. However, I had no real evidence that Karenga was an agent. I pointed out that he was a cult leader with an unstable personality who advocated confrontation and violence. My station manager didn’t care, and it was worth talking to Karenga to keep the peace.
I interviewed him at his Compton headquarters, set up like a Hollywood movie studio-set with heavily armed, unsmiling bodyguards and absurdly dramatic clothing. Karenga sat in a grander version or perhaps a parody of Huey Newton’s grass throne chair. The African American movement had come a long way from the modesty of James Farmer and Bob Moses in Freedom Summer 1964. It turned out later that the guns, the stage set and Karenga himself were all supported by the FBI.
The distrust between different member of the movement that began in 1965 became full scale paranoia. We knew the FBI and CIA collected and dispersed inflammatory information to local authorities and planted informants and agents in movement organization to encourage violence and thereby discredit protesters. People found it hard to trust anyone they didn’t know.
I covered the trial of several members of the Progressive Labor Party in L.A. They had been turned in by one of their comrades, a young man who had joined them as an insecure, overweight, pimply, depressed teenager. Over several years in the party, his comrades had helped him lose weight, clear up his skin, gain self-respect and find a girlfriend.
I was in the courtroom when the young man was brought out as the surprise chief prosecution witness. His comrades gasped as he accused them of plotting to violently overthrow the United States government. After the trial was over and the Socialist Workers Party members convicted, I went to interview the young man who sent them away.“It was my job,” he explained. “I was getting paid for it. It wasn’t personal. What else could I do?” The FBI payment covered tuition for a year at junior college.
Money was more important than loyalty … probably more important than anything. That still seemed shocking in 1969.
We Blew It
I took my first hallucinogenic drug in David Osman’s back yard. Ossman was KPFK’s Drama and Literature Director, a bright spot on a staff of underpaid, handicapped workers that my manager favored. David was part of the Firesign Theater, a comic group that took Lenny Bruce’s acerbic wit into the psychedelic age.
It was a short DMT trip of about 30 minutes. The garden became ecstatically beautiful. Drops of rain glistened like diamonds on every branch and leaf bud. The air was a balm and everything seemed perfect for about thirty minutes. Transcient euphoria.
L.A. was a party town in the late Sixties. There were other DMT trips and parties at celebrity houses where we snorted coke off mirrors and swam in dark pools above lawns stretching to tennis courts and servants quarters. I got hopelessly lost while incredibly stoned, somewhere in the suburbs on the way to a party where Hunter Thompson showed up with pocket full of amyl nitrates that he popped all night.
Out on the West Coast, we were all intrigued by the 400,000 young people who gathered on a dairy farm near Woodstock, New York, from August 15th to the 18th, to listen to 32 musical performances. Despite almost constant rain, a few births and deaths, the media called it a milestone in rock and roll and the counterculture. The dawning of the age of Aquarius. Good vibes all around.
That was the spin the rock musical Hair put on the counterculture. It opened off-Broadway in New York in 1967 and came to Los Angeles in 1969. I was ripped on hash brownies and my most vivid memory is of the audience, rows of polyester women with blue hair teased into enormous buns. At the time, Hair seemed to be marketing a vapid parody of the counterculture, as artificial and out-date as the hairdos in the theater.
Thirty years later, when I saw an off-Sunset version with two teen-aged daughters, I found it truer to my memories of the hippie phase than I imagined. What struck me most, I explained to my daughters, was how innocent the drugs, nudity and protests all seemed. “Innocent?” They asked in shock. But there was a huge amount of trust in the first psychedelic way-stations on the counterculture highway.
A grimmer side of the drug culture emerged that summer in Los Angeles. The Charles Manson commune had moved from the Haight Ashbury to an abandoned mining camp in the desert. The charismatic leader and a bunch of attractive young women were racing around on dune buggies. Later that summer, they murdered Sharon Tate, (who was 8 months pregnant), and several friends of hers at Roman Polanski's home in Beverly Hills, inflicting more than 100 stab wounds on their victims.
The romance with the decade’s counterculture came crashing to an end at the Altamont Speedway on December 6th. A free rock concert was supposed to be Woodstock West, but it ended in chaos and violence instead of peace and love. Hells Angeles provided what little security there was (instead of the Diggers who had handled the crowd at Woodstock) and the choice of drugs seemed to be uppers and alcohol rather than acid and marijuana.
Three hundred thousand people showed up, many including the Hells Angels drank heavily. The crowd became increasingly aggressive as the day went on, storming the stage and fighting with each other. Santana, Jefferson Airplane, The Flying Burrito Brothers, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young played, but one performer was knocked out by a thrown bottle and drunken speed freaks kept storming the stage. The Grateful Dead refused to play and left the concert. The Rolling Stones were the last set. Shortly after Jagger screamed his hit song, Sympathy for the Devil, a Hells Angeles biker killed Meredith Hunter when the eighteen year old pulled a .22 caliber pistol from his pocket and stormed toward the stage. By the end, many people were injured, numerous cars were stolen and then abandoned and there was extensive property damage.
The Rolling Stones put out the Let It Bleed album at about the same time. Many people believe the album was an ode to the end of the Sixties; “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” as the ultimate anti-sixties thing to say. Music critic Greil Marcus wrote, “That song and ‘Gimme Shelter’ were about the moral collapse of the counterculture.”
The story arc of serious drug use is well known. An extensive literature, from Thomas De Quincey’s 1821 autobiographical account of his opium addiction, “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater,” serious drug use begins with revelation and ends with misery. If you’re lucky, redemption may be a coda. People entered the drug culture of the Sixties at different times, but many of those who got deeply involved went on similar journeys of discovery and despair. Tom Wolf’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” ends at the Pranksters’ last acid test, a bitter failure at The Barn in Scotts Valley, not far from Santa Cruz, where a voice (is it Babbs?), whispers over and over again on the loud speakers, “We blew it.”
“Easy Rider,” the iconic film that came out in 1969, ends with the same words, “We blew it.” Critics still debate what those words mean in the film, but it was clear by 1969 that the counterculture was changing from its first innocent blossoming into something much more complex, disruptive and dangerous. In the early Seventies, in a six-month period, Alan Wilson of Canned Heat died on September 3rd, 1970, then Jimi Hendrix on September 18th, then Janis Joplin on October 4th and Jim Morrison on July 3, 1971.