True Believers

by Kurt Andersen

  “ Exactly,” Buzzy said, “he was like too heavy, you know? For a public meeting? I’ve got a feeling he might be some kind of undercover.”

  “You think they’re really doing that?” I asked. “Planting agents posing as Harvard kids, pretending to be radicals?”

  Buzzy stopped walking for a couple of seconds and looked at me with his mouth open. “Yes, Virginia, and there’s no Santa Claus, either. SDS may be a bunch of fake rich-kid revolutionaries, but the cops and the FBI don’t know that.”

  As we walked past the president’s house, Buzzy shouted into the pine trees and dogwoods, “Up against the wall, Octopusey!”

  “You’re into Bond?” Alex asked.

  “Used to be. The books, not the movies. I think I read every one when I was in Danang.”

  After we all stipulated that James Bond was an imperialist pawn, we had a spontaneous rapid-fire ten-minute colloquy outside Lamont Library—favorite and least favorite Fleming books and villains and girls and deaths, and Buzzy’s suggestion that it might be possible now “to actually disrupt the Pentagon’s missile tests using radio beams, like Doctor No.”

  That Bond conversation, our first extended one in years, was the moment the three of us became the four of us.

  My journal entries petered out in the middle of October, then stopped. I no longer squirreled away every single stray memento. Partly, this was a self-conscious makeover, a decision to stop doing what I’d done as a child and live life instead of collecting its ephemera. Buzzy’s paranoia also had an effect: it seemed unwise to keep a record of what I and everyone around me thought and said and did every day.

  So this 1 percent of my life, the last quarter of 1967 and first third of 1968, is uniquely underdocumented. As a result, it seems less a series of minutes and hours and days that flowed like all the others before and since, as implacable as a river. Instead, it’s more fantastic, like some story I once heard. I know I was not at all alone back then in experiencing life as simultaneously unreal and hyperreal. But even with the clarity of hindsight and the luxury of the long view, I can’t get over the feeling that this chronicle of this particular period feels more like fiction than the nonfiction it is. That Robin Williams joke—”If you remember the sixties, you weren’t there”—has some truth, and not even mainly because of the drugs. At some moment, Karen went through the glass and jumped down into the looking-glass room.

  Harvard was constantly burning that year, and I don’t mean metaphorically. Every month a fire broke out in some dorm or academic building.

  One afternoon in Chuck and Buzzy’s room, we made Magic Marker protest signs for our expedition to Washington. The Mobe—the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam—had provided no signage guidelines. Alex insisted we be succinct, no more than five words per sign. We all agreed that peace symbols and MAKE LOVE NOT WAR were “hippie clichés.” Chuck and I debated the comma between his HELL NO and I WON’T GO. For his sign, Buzzy decided on STOP THE WAR MACHINE rather than US OUT OF VIETNAM.

  We arrived in Washington on a Friday night. It was my first visit, and when I got goose bumps looking out the bus window at the Capitol dome, I told myself the feeling was not standard patriotic instinct but excitement that we were about to Confront the War Makers. We slept on the floor of a common room at an American University dorm, which Alex had persuaded Patti, his ex-girlfriend, to arrange.

  We got to the Lincoln Memorial very early the next morning. Everyone was supposed to organize themselves into groups and gather near the appropriate two-foot letter near the reflecting pool—R for religious protesters, F for flower people, N for Negroes. We milled in the vast unlettered area designated for students.

  The trees on the Mall were turning, the weather was sunny and cool, rock bands played, and my delight at being among so many people like me—a hundred thousand kids in jeans and long hair, high on their shared happy hatred for the war and the government and the status quo—was extreme, incredible, sublime. Most of the signs and chants were about peace now, peace now, peace now. Some people carried Vietcong flags and chanted “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is gonna win!” One kid was dressed like an old-time hangman in a hooded black robe, dragging an effigy of President Johnson in a noose. Another had a sign that said WHERE IS OSWALD WHEN WE NEED HIM?

  Alex panned the crowd with his movie camera and then zoomed in on me. “Why’re you grinning like an idiot?” he asked.

  Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.

  I specifically recall the remarks by Benjamin Spock, the celebrity pediatrician whose dog-eared guide to childrearing had been a permanent fixture on my mother’s bedside table. With the giant white marble Abraham Lincoln seated in the shadows behind him, Dr. Spock reminded us that the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese were not bogeymen—the real enemy, rather, “is Lyndon Johnson.”

  As the speeches ended, an older man’s voice came over the loudspeakers, sounding like a high school principal on Bizarro World: “Those who wish to proceed closer, and perhaps more militantly, to the Pentagon, may do so.” A large fraction of the crowd—the cool kids, the radicals, members of the resistance—oozed across the Potomac for hours, puddling at the northern edge of the huge, low stone building.

  To Chuck, it was as he’d imagined the fortress of Isengard in The Lord of the Rings. Alex said it looked like the set for Wagner’s Götterdämmerung that he’d seen in Budapest, “I mean exactly, with the looming wall and thrust stage”—the Pentagon’s deep flight of steps—”and the hundred spear carriers in white helmets all lined up downstage.” The spectacle of menace was perfect. It was a fantasy come to life. Helicopters hovered close enough for us to make out their insignia, their low-frequency high-decibel quarter-second thumps filling our bodies. Uniformed men with binoculars and rifles stood and crouched on top of the building, backlit by the setting sun, watching us watching them. The men on the steps in white helmets were U.S. marshals, each one holding a billy club in front of him. It was The Pentagon.

  I remember hippies chanting “Ommmm,” which embarrassed me.

  I remember watching, amazed, as actual soldiers ran out of the building and down the steps and formed a line just behind the marshals, and saying how odd it was that they were holding rifles and wearing neckties, to which Buzzy replied, “MPs, out of Fort Bragg.”

  I remember people singing “America the Beautiful” and trying to figure out whether it was sincere or ironic—and then, when a couple of kids stepped right up to soldiers and stuck flowers, stems down, into their rifle muzzles, petals against bayonets, I understood it was a completely brilliant new kind of gesture that combined sincerity and irony.

  I remember watching a girl right next to me open a zip-top Coke and guzzle it without stopping and then throw the empty can at the men with guns and clubs, and realizing that I needed a can of pop or something because I was low and had already shared my two candy bars with Buzzy and Chuck for lunch.

  I remember the terrible sour smell that made me think I was at Centennial Pool the summer the chlorine machine went haywire, and I remember Buzzy saying tear gas as people began shouting and pulling their shirts over their faces and trying to run.

  I remember feeling angry and frightened when a second wave of MPs trotted down the steps, and one of them, a dozen feet away, stared at me as though he thought he could read my mind.

  I remember being pushed forward, and seeing the back of Alex’s head way over to my left, and wondering where Chuck and Buzzy were, and saying Hey when somebody shoved me again, and stumbling and falling to my knees, and grabbing somebody’s arm with both hands to try to get up, and being struck and seeing stars and saying Fuck—and then (I think) hearing the marshal who’d clubbed me inhale before he whammed me again on the head.

  The next thing I remember is lying on cement, just apart from the crowd, looking up at Alex with my head on his lap as he carefully dabbed at my face and neck with the sleeve of his beige Brooks Brothers windbreaker, which was not quite drenched but mu
ch more than spattered with my blood. I felt incredibly pissed off and incredibly lucky.

  I licked my lips and touched my fingers to my mouth. “I had chocolate milk?”

  “A nice woman gave me her Thermos of Bosco for you. You were acting a little out of it, so I figured you needed sugar.”

  “Thanks. Out of it how? Did I cry?”

  “Uh-uh, you said, ‘I’m gonna bash that bastard in the balls’ like five times. It was funny.”

  My blood sugar must have dropped really low. “Sorry about your jacket.”

  “My property is your property. Plus, it’s old.” He was still dabbing my head. “This bump is so big. It’s like there’s half a golf ball stuck in there. The bleeding’s stopped, though, mostly.”

  “Have you seen Chuck or Buzzy?”

  “Present and accounted for,” Buzzy said, and when I turned to see him standing behind Alex, my golf-ball bump hurt. “But our boy’s in the brig. Right after you were wounded in action, the same Wyatt Earp asshole who decked you hauled him off.” Buzzy sounded very cheerful.

  Alex explained, “When Chuck started yelling at the marshal who clubbed you, the guy arrested him.”

  “Bravo Zulu,” Buzzy shouted, which is he what he said when he thought somebody had performed well. “Chuck was very alpha male,” a phrase concerning wolves that Buzzy had just learned in his social relations class. “It’s all good training.”

  After a first-aid stop at the American University clinic, we got back to the dorm. Surprisingly, thrillingly, Chuck was already there, freed, waiting for us. He had a black eye.

  Before we left Washington on Sunday, Alex went off by himself to “visit some family friends in Virginia,” and then we all met up with Sarah Caputo and her NYU friends at Union Station for the ride home.

  When we told her about Chuck’s arrest at the Pentagon, she wondered why he had gotten sprung so quickly.

  Chuck shrugged. “Lucky, I guess.”

  “Really lucky,” Sarah said. “Two people we know from NYU are still in jail, aren’t getting out until tomorrow at the earliest.”

  On the train trip north, Chuck was reading a book of James Thurber’s short stories, including “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.”

  “This is funny,” he said to me. “You’d like it.”

  “Okay.”

  “We’re not Walter Mittys, like Pusey said, because we’re not just fantasizing adventures. We’re having them.”

  We stopped in New York to spend the night on Sarah’s dorm-room floor at NYU. Alex wanted to go to a theater see a new musical he’d heard about, Hair, but Buzzy and Chuck and I didn’t much like the sound of it. “If I want to feel like a far-out hippie,” Buzzy said, “I’d rather spend my two and a half bucks on a hit of acid.” Instead, at Sarah’s urging, we went to see a different political play in the Village. MacBird!, as Alex said at intermission, was a “pastiche and a burlesque” of Macbeth and other Shakespeare plays—the Lyndon Johnson character, MacBird, murders the President Kennedy character. Only because we’d smoked a joint before the play, I think, did we laugh, even at the sad and scary parts.

  “Not to be paranoid,” Buzzy said as we walked back to Sarah’s dorm, “but I wouldn’t bet that Johnson wasn’t involved in Kennedy’s assassination.”

  “I think that’s bullshit,” Sarah said. “I mean, the guy obviously doesn’t even like being president! And covering up a conspiracy like that? I don’t buy it.” The era and our age notwithstanding, Sarah’s reality-check instincts never wavered.

  “In Vietnam,” Buzzy said, “Johnson’s proven he’s a homicidal maniac, right? And J. Edgar Hoover. Who knows?” He’d read that right after JFK’s assassination, Hoover buried evidence of Oswald’s Communist connections so the FBI counterintelligence unit wouldn’t be blamed for letting it happen. “Cover-ups are the Washington MO, man.”

  Buzzy and Sarah did not get along. She was annoyed by his highfalutin New Left bluster, and unlike we Wilmettians, she wasn’t intimidated by his age or his military service. One of her older brothers and a lot of her high school friends were serving in Vietnam.

  We were still a little high. Buzzy proceeded to describe, in the only vivid combat story I ever heard him tell, how he’d watched a napalm bombing run over of a Vietnamese fishing village “way out in the boonies, this mud-mover, an A-6, thunders in at like a hundred feet, maybe less, dropped his canisters, and just fucking smoked the place.”

  “What is napalm?” Alex asked.

  “Jellied gasoline and white phosphorus. Sticks to your skin and burns and burns at fifteen hundred degrees. It is literally hell.”

  I must have continued taking tests and writing papers that fall and winter—I have the report card showing two B-pluses, an A-minus, and an A—but in my memory, the next six months consist of trying to throw monkey wrenches into the war machine and discussing the nature of effective rather than merely symbolic resistance to the ever more demonic national security state. Starting in October 1967, I was thinking about death, violent death, most of the time.

  Our experience in Washington—facing down an armed battallion! beaten! wounded in action! arrested!—made the antiwar rally in Harvard Yard the day after we got back to Cambridge seem timid and useless, a few hundred kids and professors who wanted to demonstrate their concern for an afternoon, “everybody spouting this gentle frowning Quakery bullshit,” as Buzzy said.

  The SDS action the following day against the Dow Chemical recruiter was much more our bag. Although the chapter leaders had decided against staging a sit-in—”Told you they were wankers,” Alex said—on Wednesday morning in the chemistry building, we four were among the mob who spontaneously turned it from a nice picket-line protest to an act of militant resistance. We decided then and there that tolerance had its limits, and we would suspend the bourgeois civil liberties of the manufacturer of napalm.

  During the discussion, Buzzy took out his underlined paperback copy of Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance” and read aloud, telling the hopped-up, wide-eyed multitude that we’d been brainwashed to “ ‘protect false words and wrong deeds … Different opinions can no longer compete peacefully for persuasion on rational grounds.’ People, it’s time for the Great Refusal!” People applauded.

  I agreed, but I got goose bumps when Chuck pointed out that Dow’s product was technically called Napalm B, and then asked, “If this were Munich in 1938, and the manufacturer of Zyklon B showed up, wouldn’t stopping him be the right thing to do?”

  By noon in the hallway outside the room where Dow’s research director was supposed to be interviewing chemistry students for jobs, there were hundreds of us sitting knee to knee and standing arm in arm, physically preventing him from leaving and interviewees from entering.

  More protesters continued to arrive. “ ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,’” I said softly to Chuck, “ ‘but to be young was very heaven.’”

  “What?”

  “Wordsworth. The poet? Writing about the French Revolution. He was our age when it happened.”

  Chuck kissed my bruised forehead quickly, almost furtively. Bliss was it, indeed. Very heaven.

  “Exactly how do we think this show is going to end?” Alex asked quietly as the lunch hour passed.

  “I don’t know,” I whispered back, “but that’s what so great about it—it’s real instead of everyone politely following a script.”

  “Improvisation,” Chuck murmured.

  “Like war,” Buzzy said in his big twangy voice.

  Amazingly, several professors showed up to urge us on.

  When the new dean of Harvard College appeared, it all became even more remarkably real. The boys sat up a little straighter, opened their eyes wider, quieted down. I watched the muscles in Chuck’s neck and jaw tighten. The dean seemed to recognize most of them, and they definitely knew him—the year before, he’d been the college admissions director, the very man who had turned each of these boys into a Harvard man. He said it was wrong to restrain th
e freedom of expression of people with whom we disagreed, that we were running the risk of being kicked out of school because the university could not countenance threats.

  Buzzy piped up. “Is that a threat?”

  Everybody laughed, the dean included. “Touché,” he said.

  Sometime that afternoon the mob somehow decided we would let the man from Dow go—if he would sign a pledge that he’d leave and never return. He refused. At sunset the group decided to let him go anyway.

  That same week FBI agents appeared on campus, visiting the dorm rooms of boys who’d ceremonially turned in their draft cards at the Justice Department during the protests in Washington. The Johnson administration reaffirmed its determination to bomb and kill in Vietnam.

  “Not to be paranoid,” Buzzy said, “but the crackdown has started. The masks of consent are coming off, boys and girls.”

  So the four of us began our fall offensive.

  Buzzy knew how to make M-80s—big firecrackers he called “small charges”—using purple swimming-pool cleaner and the aluminum powder from cracked-open Etch A Sketches. A friend in California sent him ten yards of green fuse. Twice we set them off just outside Shannon Hall, where ROTC had its headquarters, and once inside the building, right by the ROTC office. Each time we left Xeroxed photographs of napalmed and machine-gunned Vietnamese children with the Magic-Markered legend YOUR ENEMIES.

  Chuck managed to acquire a palm-size canister of Mace. We took turns attending the classes of Harvard government professors who advised the Johnson administration on Vietnam—Samuel Huntington and Henry Kissinger are the two I remember—and with a couple of surreptitious squirts of pepper mist, people started coughing and the lecture halls cleared.

  Quiet protest was ineffectual. Militance worked, the newspaper taught us daily. The secretary of defense had resigned, we read one morning. “Of course he’s going to go run the World Bank,” I said. “War by other means. Making sure the rich countries and the corporations keep the third-world countries poor and powerless.”