Barefoot in Babylon

by Bob Spitz

  Both Joel and John contemplated strangling him. Joel didn’t intend to let him get away with the about-face. “Now, hold on a minute, Artie. You were just as pissed off as we were about this whole thing a minute ago. What the fuck is going on?”

  “It’s just that I see what Michael’s saying, man. We’re all in this together, and if we run around worrying about who said what to who every second, we’re just gonna fuck ourselves.”

  “Right on!” Michael yelped. He gathered up the momentum that had somehow been inverted and turned it in his favor. Coolly, he delivered a speech about how they had gotten bogged down in matters unrelated to the festival. According to Lang, by being so petty, they were all responsible for interfering with progress. It was time they put aside such trivialities and, instead, put their noses to the grindstone.

  Artie gave him a resounding cheer of support and promised to get his “publicity program” moving. Michael slapped him encouragingly on the back.

  In a state of disbelief and shock, John and Joel reaffirmed their support and drifted back to their office. Lang had bamboozled them again. They had been prepared to crush his wayward enthusiasm, but their desire had been stronger than their stamina, a blank cartridge. They lacked his killer instinct. And worst of all, they knew the time would come when they would pay for their mistake.

  • • •

  That same afternoon, Lang kept an appointment in the downtown office with a career cop they had flown north from the South who was interested in regulating security for the festival. The former chief of police had recently been under indictment regarding his well-publicized ties with organized crime and had either retired or been eased off the force to save both sides unnecessary embarrassment. His name had been one of those that Stanley Goldstein had been given by the International Association of Police Chiefs, and he wanted Michael to meet him before the next day’s get-together with Wes Pomeroy.

  A half hour before that appointment was to take place, Stanley informed Lang that there was a young lady waiting on the second-floor landing who Stanley considered to be a prime candidate for personal assistant to Michael. The entire office had been assigned the task of finding such a person at Michael’s request. They jumped at the opportunity primarily because they desperately needed a responsible person to stay by Lang’s side, making sure he got to scheduled meetings on time and reminding him about problems requiring his notoriously short attention span. Michael grumbled something about being swamped with work, but told Goldstein to send her in anyway. He’d get it over with quickly and move on to more important matters.

  Ticia Bernuth was a tall young woman as lissome as Tennyson’s hazel wand. When she sat down across from Lang’s desk, her limberness dropped her flush against the curved chair support, misrepresenting her actual height. Michael judged her to be close to six feet tall and around twenty-two years old. Her most striking characteristic, though, was her hair, which was the color of the scarlet halo that surrounds a flame and plummeted to a point below her shoulders without so much as a comma or a wave. The intensity of her hair gave her boyish face an uncommon chalky nakedness; her tight compact figure, small breasts, and long tapering fingers added to her extraordinary appearance, all of which Michael found quite sensual and bewitching.

  Ticia explained to him that she had just returned from spending six years traveling abroad. She romanced Lang with tales about her adventures in Saudi Arabia and Iran, about gallivanting across the desert sand on a camel, about sheiks and kingdoms and splendor he never thought existed in modern times. It was astounding reality carved from the very pages of the Arabian Nights tales, and Michael was sold.

  “You got the job,” he told her, “starting immediately.” Her first assignment was to pick up Wes Pomeroy at LaGuardia Airport the next morning. Stanley was to give her a description of the Washington law enforcement official, and it would be up to her to locate him as he came off the plane. She had been asked to remain in the office that afternoon “to sit in on a meeting that was gonna go down with another cop.”

  That meeting lasted less than a half hour. The cop, a big, burly man with a wrenched nose and a furrowed brow, was shown in by Goldstein and assured them that he had a fail-safe security plan worked out that would not only maintain order but would “keep the little bastards seated in one place for as long as they were on the grounds.” Ticia looked nervously at Lang, who smiled and shook his head. The policeman’s plan had to do with building two barbed-wire fences six feet apart around the perimeter of the site. “The area in between,” he explained, “would be filled with hundreds of snarling Doberman pinschers right out there in the open as a warning for them to sit down and shut up—or else! Any time you want, all you have to do is cut a hole in the fence and let the dogs go charging out. Believe me, there won’t be any trouble at all if you let me handle it this way.”

  “Sounds great,” Michael quipped. “I’m sure you and Stanley can continue this discussion later. Right now, I’m already an hour late for a meeting with my financial advisers, so if you don’t mind, we’ll discuss your plan among ourselves and call you with our decision.” He stood up as Goldstein ushered the disgruntled cop from the room.

  “Do you believe that asshole?” Michael asked Ticia. “He’d love to get his hands on the kids at the site. Whew! Was that great. There’s millions of guys like that walking the streets, that’s the scary part. Look,” he said, changing the subject, “head out to LaGuardia tomorrow and make sure Pomeroy gets back here in one piece. It looks like we’re gonna be dependin’ on him more than I thought. Somebody’s got to protect us from these fuckers, and I think he may be just the guy to do it.”

  • • •

  Ticia had no trouble picking Wes Pomeroy out of the crowd that poured off the Eastern Airlines shuttle from Washington the next day. She had been told that he resembled Ward Bond, the star of Wagon Train, and that he “looked like a cop”—nothing more. It was all she needed. She immediately hooked his arm, and within twenty minutes he was back in the Woodstock production office on Sixth Avenue waiting for Michael Lang to arrive.

  Lang showed up an hour late without an apology. There were a few matters that he had to tend to upon walking through the door, but he asked Pomeroy if he would follow him into his office while he got those things quickly out of the way. Pomeroy watched Michael carefully as he returned a few calls to booking agents and managers. He was impressed that, although Lang did not come close to resembling an executive, he was able to make decisions swiftly and see them through with an authoritarian tone of voice. Nobody really gives these kids a chance, Pomeroy thought.

  Stanley Goldstein, barechested and frenzied, came in to say hello and was asked to remain by Lang as he hung up the phone. Ticia, catlike, curled up in a chair in the corner of the room.

  “Stanley tells me that you’re interested in headin’ up our security operation at the festival,” Michael began.

  “Well, I’m interested in hearing more about it first. I may very well not be the right person to handle it. Then again, I may find your whole proposition offensive and objectionable.” Pomeroy smiled politely.

  “Right on.” Lang appreciated his direct approach. No pressure. No commitment. No fucking around. “I guess Stan told you pretty much about what we’re trying to do. I’d like to hear your ideas on it. Then again, I might find your ideas crude and too fuckin’ Establishment-oriented to suit my purposes.” He returned Pomeroy’s smile, and they were even.

  Pomeroy reiterated his concept of a nonviolent security force—“a peace force”—made up of kids and off-duty cops uniformed in T-shirts and jeans. “I don’t want to see anybody hurt like in Chicago,” he stated emphatically. “That was a crime committed by stupid people.”

  “Stan said you were involved in Chicago.”

  “I can’t say I’d go along with being ‘involved,’ but yes, I was there and saw the bloodbath that was going on with my own eyes. It all
could have been avoided, you know, had Daley and the others not been so damned pigheaded.”

  He had captured Lang’s absolute attention; Michael’s eyes danced like a little boy’s awaiting a bedtime story.

  Pomeroy explained to Lang that in 1968, he had been appointed the special assistant to Ramsey Clark, assigned to coordinate “a federal presence” at both the Democratic and Republican national conventions later that year. Pomeroy was left in charge of just about everything including the army, the advance cadres of the remaining branches of the armed services, the state police, liaisons to the National Guard, the Secret Service, and the specially augmented Secret Service that consisted of agents borrowed from all other federal agencies to help in their “mission.” Unfortunately, he only had the services of one other man at his disposal to organize the entire affair, and when Clark asked Pomeroy how many additional peace officers he’d need to get the work done, Wes astutely told him that he wanted to use what was available—to coordinate his two-man team and see if they could handle it on their own. He thought it would be foolish to attempt to set up a peace-keeping system that was entirely different from what everybody was used to.

  Sometime just before the Democratic convention in Chicago, he continued, Rennie Davis contacted the Attorney General’s office and requested federal assistance in organizing a peaceful demonstration to run concurrent with the convention. “We’re putting together a mobilization committee and we’re going to protest against a number of issues,” he informed Clark, “Vietnam being the most important. We’ve been trying to negotiate with the City of Chicago to get parade routes and specific meeting places allotted for our purposes, but nobody in the administration will deal with us. We’re getting the runaround, and we wish you’d use your office to persuade Daley to at least talk to us because we don’t want any violence there.”

  Clark asked Pomeroy and Roger Wilkens, the Director of Community Relations, to assess the situation and to report back to him so they could avoid an angry confrontation between the hippies and the politicos during the convention. If there was a way around it, he wanted to know so his office could take steps to avert a street war.

  Wilkens and Pomeroy conducted their investigations separately and, in the final analysis, drew the same conclusions. They told Clark that it would be utterly unfortunate if Daley held the hard line and didn’t deal with these people. “The mobilization organization has a diverse number of interests that represents the feelings of a considerable number of the populace,” Pomeroy told Clark. “If Daley communicates with them, I think it would be possible for the leaders of the movement to develop self-regulation and a self-policing responsibility.” In his estimation, there would be no need for extensive policing from the federal reserve in Chicago, nor was there any real possibility that violence would occur. “These are kids with a desire for peace; that’s their whole purpose in demonstrating in the first place. I think it’s our responsibility, and in the best interests of the country, to get Daley to change his mind.”

  Ramsey Clark agreed with him wholeheartedly. The next week, he dispatched Pomeroy and Roger Wilkens to Chicago to confer with the stubborn mayor. Daley reluctantly agreed to see them. Once they were securely inside his office, he told them that if the U.S. Department of Justice really wanted to help him, they would let him know in advance “who the subversives and radicals were when they crossed the town line” so his “local boys can prepare for and deal with them.”

  They tried desperately to get Daley to negotiate with Rennie Davis and several of the other leaders of the movement, to bend in the slightest way so they could achieve the common purpose of a peaceful political convention, but Daley waved them off. “I told you my permit people are already dealing with them,” he said, losing his patience. “Look, we have all kinds of special events planned for people in the neighborhoods of Chicago during the convention. There won’t be any trouble in my city, because I know Chicago and the people wouldn’t dare embarrass me by causing any problems.”

  After the meeting had concluded, Pomeroy and Wilkens shared an elevator to the lobby floor. “You know, it’d be more useful if we had been speaking different languages,” he confided to Wilkens, “because then we’d know we didn’t understand one another. That asshole Daley’s gonna blow things sky high.”

  “You really called Daley an asshole?” Lang asked excitedly.

  “Oh, I might have.” Pomeroy smiled. “I was in an ornery mood and, then, anything is possible.”

  “Don’t stop now,” Michael pleaded. “What happened after that?”

  Pomeroy and Wilkens got professional runarounds from Daley’s people for the two weeks preceding the convention. They would receive printed announcements in their Washington office issued by the Chicago city government advising the public that “we are putting you on notice that there will be no violence in Chicago.” And one was indiscriminately worded to the effect of: “Stay out of Chicago or we’ll take care of you.” It was exactly the opposite of what Wilkens and Pomeroy had advised Daley to do.

  Upon Ramsey Clark’s request, Pomeroy made a second trip to Chicago, this time accompanied by Warren Christopher, the Deputy Attorney General, a very quiet, efficient, principled man. Daley met with them and was more obstinate than he had been with Pomeroy and Wilkens. He wanted names of subversives and he wanted them quickly. Pomeroy and Christopher returned to Washington, D.C., that same evening and impressed the mayor’s attitude upon Clark who, they felt certain, knew what the implications were.

  Lang squeezed out a lazy, high-pitched whistle. “Fucked up, man. Couldn’t’cha lay it all on him, like, let him know the fuzz’d be bringing sticks down on skulls if he didn’t do something?”

  “He knew,” Wes continued. “I heard that a day or two before the convention, Ramsey had a meeting about it with Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey. Ramsey supposedly told Johnson: ‘You’re the only one who can stop it by getting Daley to back off. If he doesn’t, we’re going to have ourselves one hell of a disturbance here in Chicago.’ But it was no use. They needed Daley’s support to carry the state of Illinois and didn’t want to make waves. In the end, they came back to him and told him that they would not interfere with Daley. It was his city and he could ably handle the situation.”

  “Couldn’t you see what was happenin’, man?” Lang asked.

  “Oh, I could see it all right. Anyone who wasn’t blind could see what was about to occur. It was frustrating as hell.”

  “Well, whaddija do?”

  “Nothing,” Pomeroy said. “We just sat back and watched as the local cops turned into thugs. You can’t imagine how that feels being a cop all your life and watching them embarrass a time-honored tradition of law enforcement. And, you know, the whole demonstration was the biggest goddamned put-on in the world, and these idiots in Chicago took it seriously. You take a guy like Abbie Hoffman; he’s only a street theatre guy with a lot of humor in him who tries to put a lot of people on whenever he can. I remember watching Abbie doing a snake dance in the park outside the convention hall; it was hilarious. And the next day, the Chicago papers billed it as a diversionary tactic to propel a riot. Bullshit. I know it wasn’t. I was there.”

  Wes told Lang and Goldstein that the police department had gotten all of its ill feelings and direction from Daley. “In effect, Daley had emasculated the top command of his police department. Even if they wanted to have aided in pulling off a peaceful demonstration and maintaining civil order, they couldn’t have done much about it. The whole thing was preventable. It was just a crying shame.”

  Lang knew now, more than ever, that they had their man for the security detail at the festival and there was no way he was going to allow him to walk out of the office before agreeing to take the job. Attitude was the key. Without it, one could bring in any form of crowd-controlling device and not get desired results. But Pomeroy’s attitude was enough to instill a feeling that everything was going to go d
own in a peaceful manner. He was compassionate, and he had a true understanding of the people’s right to carry on without fearing police intervention. Moreover, Pomeroy lacked the fear of the generation that other cops had.

  Pomeroy sensed Lang shared his concern for the audience’s safety and was somewhat convinced that, despite their unmatched appearances, they both had the same interests at heart.

  “You know, Michael,” he explained, “in almost all cases you can assume that groups of people don’t want violence. If you can persuade them that you’re not going to oppress them and will help them express their own points of view, the potential for violence is almost nil. You’d better get one thing straight, too: you do have that power. The Establishment always has the power. And anyone running this rock festival with all that money behind them is going to wind up being the Establishment, whether you like it or not.”

  Michael made the first move. “We really want you on our side at the festival. I think you could help bring about some kind of unity between the kids and the cops.”

  “And use some of my pull to land you guys local respect.”

  “Right,” Michael acquiesced.

  “Well, the more I talk to you, the better a chance I feel there is of actually accomplishing what you’ve set out to do. I’ve worked out a situation with my personal affairs that’ll let me out of Washington two days a week until the middle of this month. If that’s all right with you, I can make a few calls and have someone else I trust set the preliminary security system into motion up in Wallkill before I arrive.”

  “Who do you have in mind?”

  “There’s any number of people who could do it. I’ve got a friend in New Orleans who’s pretty competent and who I’ll be seeing next week. There’s also John Fabbri.” Fabbri was the chief of the roughneck South San Francisco police department, a precinct constantly at odds with the rebellious working-class kids who, each Friday, converted their factory wages into alcohol and went on a tear. Fabbri had kept the peace there; he understood the kids and had developed personal relationships with many of them. Fabbri and Pomeroy had become friendly when Wes was the San Mateo County under sherrif, and they had published a book together on police personnel selection. “Fabbri would be a godsend in a situation such as this. If we can get him away from the force for a few months, you fellas’ll be very lucky indeed.”