The most helpful hands came from their own ranks. A caravan of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, who had driven all the way from Oregon, doled out a high-protein broth of raisins, oatmeal, and peanuts and set up a hospital tent; a hundred members of the Hog Farm, a Taos, New Mexico, commune, also provided essential services. What really made the event a success, however, was the magnet which had lured so many here: acid rock. The Jefferson Airplane, the Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Family Stone, Jimi Hendrix, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin—these were their folk heroes. They were here in person, and if they could not be seen, they could at least be heard from loudspeakers set atop eighty-foot scaffolds around the stage. And so, despite the rain and constant provocation, the youths in headbands, bell-bottoms, beads, and tie-dyed dungaree shirts made the festival so strong a symbol of generational unity that their future spokesmen would speak of them as the Woodstock Nation.
In an era of rapid change the strengthening of peer group bonds was inevitable. Woodstock was the most spectacular rock festival of 1969, but it was by no means unique. Others that year were held on a ranch near Tenino, Washington, after the state supreme court had overruled objections from the John Birch Society; at Lewisville, Texas (“This crowd is a lot better than Dallas football crowds,” a security officer said, while the Lewisville mayor told reporters that the only problem was created by older Texans who came to stare at naked young swimmers in the Garza—Little Elm Reservoir); and at Prairieville, Louisiana, where the attractions included the Grateful Dead, Canned Heat, Country Joe and the Fish, and the Iron Butterfly.
The festival phenomenon was not confined to the United States. It being an American phenomenon, and this being the age of American dominance, the sounds of rock were echoing in western Europe, and particularly in England. HELP BOB DYLAN SINK THE ISLE OF WIGHT, read banners over that English Channel island. Answering the appeal were 150,000 “oddly dressed people,” as a local policeman put it, “of uncertain sex.” Dylan himself arrived thirty-six hours after the music began; he wore a white suit, yellow shirt, and green boots. A young female admirer ripped off her clothes, danced nude, and screamed, “I just want to be free.” Unlike Woodstock, the Isle of Wight concert wound up heavily in the black.
There was something anomalous here. Fortunes were being made by promoters and entertainers, yet the counterculture which supported them was aggressively antimaterialistic. Unlike swing music, rock was accompanied by an ideological strain. That was one reason many older Americans found it so objectionable. To them, the life-style and the social creed that went with it were unpatriotic, ungodly, immoral, and, if possible, worse. It was possible; their most hideous fears were realized when the ugliest murder of 1969 was committed by a band of hippies run amok. Those offended by the now generation saw it as a vindication of their direst predictions, and the failure of long-haired youth to accept responsibility for it merely deepened their rage.
The victims were actress Sharon Tate, honey blonde and pregnant, and four acquaintances. Their bodies, hideously mutilated and arranged in grotesque positions, were found one August morning in a Los Angeles mansion at 10050 Cielo Drive, overlooking Benedict Canyon. Four months later the killers—who had committed two other murders in the meantime—were found to be members of a commune on the fringe of Death Valley. Their leader was Charles Manson, a thirty-five-year-old ex-convict and, by all accounts, a sexual athlete. The slayers were his protégés: a demented Texas youth and three pretty girls who had been eager to do anything—literally anything—Manson required of them. Their days had been occupied with riding around on dune buggies fashioned from stolen Volkswagens and mounted with machine guns. (Manson had visions of war between the races.) At night they had explored unusual sexual activities—unless, of course, they had been busy stabbing strangers to death.
If Manson and his friends represented the dark side of hippy romanticism, the bright side was youth’s social conscience. The best of young America was profoundly disturbed by man’s abuse of his fellow man and his surroundings. The ecological issue was the least controversial; the need was obvious—pollution had become unconscionable. Gallup found that 70 percent of Americans put the environmental issue first among the country’s domestic problems. Not only the younger generation but organizations on every level of society were awakening to the threat. The United Nations announced plans for a Conference on Human Environment. The President established an Environmental Quality Council. Governors and mayors appointed ecological committees. In Louisville, where a factory with ancient equipment was pouring eleven tons of dirt into the city’s air each day, citizens wearing gas masks marched on City Hall bearing a protest petition with 13,000 signatures; the plant then installed new furnaces which cut the daily yield of soot to one hundred pounds.
That helped Louisville, but in the national view it hardly counted. There the dimensions of the problem were overwhelming. Combustion in the U.S. was disgorging 140 million tons of grime into the air every year. The automobiles in Los Angeles alone emitted each day 10,000 tons of carbon monoxide, 2,000 tons of hydrocarbons, and 530 tons of nitrogen oxides. Other pollutants rising into the great sewer in the sky over America were oxides of sulphur, sulphuric acid mists, fly ash, soot, and particles of arsenic, beryllium, cadmium, lead, chromium, and manganese. Annually they accounted for eleven billion dollars in property damage alone. Smog disintegrated nylon stockings, stripped paint from houses, turned other buildings a rusty orange, coated sidewalks with green slime, caused rubber to become brittle and crack, discolored clothing, etched windowpanes, attacked the enamel on teeth, induced pulmonary disease, and otherwise eroded, tarnished, soiled, corroded, and abraded man and his works.
All this had been going on for some time, but it was in 1969 that a combination of events forced the ecological issue into the forefront of the national consciousness. Nuclear power plants on the Hudson and Connecticut rivers on the East Coast, and the Columbia River in the West, were found to be killing fish by the ton with thermal pollution. DDT was also taking its toll of seafood and threatening the bald eagle, emblem of the nation, with extinction. Pedestrians in Manhattan were reported to be breathing air whose level of carbon monoxide was twice the danger level as determined by the federal government. And Everglades National Park in Florida and Sequoia National Park in California were threatened by plans for, respectively, a huge airport and an access road to a ski resort.
Construction of the airport was halted by nineteen groups of aroused conservationists who went to court. The Sierra Club also secured a court order stopping the building of the road by Walt Disney Productions, but the order was only temporary, and in other ways 1969 was a poor environmental year for the Golden State. Nature was partly to blame; three storms, dumping 52 inches of rain, hit the slopes of the San Gabriel Mountains in swift succession. Bridges were washed out and hundreds of homes literally slid down the hills—291 houses in Carpenteria alone, with a population of just 7,200. Life was also edgy along the San Andreas fault, which cuts across one corner of San Francisco and runs twenty miles east of Los Angeles. Tension had been building along the fault since the calamity of 1906; another earthquake was overdue. Californians faced the possibility good-humoredly. Bumper stickers declared, “California Deserves a Fair Shake,” and a local best seller in 1969 was The Last Days of the Late, Great State of California, a fictional account of a quake. In reality only one tremor of any substance was recorded, on April 28, and its center was in uninhabited desert country.
That, however, was not the full story of the state’s experience with geological faults that year. The stresses along another of them, combined with man’s folly, provided the nation’s ecological horror story of 1969. Late in January an oil drill which had been boring into a high-pressure pool of petroleum and gas 3,486 feet beneath the bottom of the Pacific Ocean was withdrawn for the replacement of a worn bit. Suddenly the well erupted, sending up oil bubbles 200 feet in diameter around the drillers’ platform. Meanwhile pressure from the runaway well was bein
g relayed along unmapped fissures in the sand and shale of the sea floor. This was catastrophic; drillers capped the original hole in eleven days, but oil continued to boil forth over a wide area.
Six miles east of the platform lay the immaculate beaches of Santa Barbara, where shore-front property had been selling at as much as $2,000 a foot. In the first week of February the white sands cherished by Santa Barbarans—forty miles of superb waterfront—began turning black. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of gummy crude oil coated yachts and fishing craft with a thick scum which could only be removed by live steam. A Sports Illustrated writer reported that petroleum “lay so thick on the water that waves were unformed; they made a squishing sound…. The smell of oil followed me up the canyon to our house, a mile from the sea…. The tideline was a broad black band that looked from the air like something made on a map by a black crayon.”
The most shocking aspect of the disaster was the destruction of marine life. Mussels and rock lobsters died instantly. Porpoises and sea lions disappeared. Pelicans dove straight into the oil and then sank, unable to raise their matted wings, and the beaches were studded with dead sandpipers, cormorants, gulls, grebes, and loons, their eyes horribly swollen and their viscera burned by petroleum. “A very sad-looking mess,” said the Audubon Society; another spectator called it “a sickening sight.” Residents held protest meetings, picketed government offices with placards demanding BAN THE BLOB, and joined a new ecological group called Get Oil Out (GOO). Damage suits totaling a billion dollars were filed; the cost of the cleanup was put at three million.
More than twelve thousand wires and letters went to Washington. At first the government seemed responsive. The Department of the Interior announced that in the future drills would have to be sheathed in pipe below the depth of 239 feet, which had been the previous requirement. Most important, drilling leases in the Santa Barbara Channel were suspended. Then the petroleum industry began applying pressure. Large sums of money were at stake; the leases, granting the right to drill in nearly one thousand square miles of the Pacific, had been signed a year earlier with a dozen firms which were paying 603 million dollars for the privilege. They wanted the privilege back, and in September the Nixon administration gave it to them—in spite of dire warnings from geologists as to other fissures, and in spite of continuing leaks from the original runaway well.
Youthful participants were conspicuous in all the environmental crusades, carrying petitions in Florida, marching on Louisville City Hall in large numbers, and setting up “laundries” to clean and save the California birds. How deep their convictions ran—to what degree they were merely caught up by the excitement of protest—was, however, another question. In some ways they seemed to be flagrantly inconsistent. Although vehemently opposed to pollution of the environment, for example, they enthusiastically supported by their patronage another form of pollution: the junk food industry.
Fast-food stands, peddling empty calories and little nourishment, had been a feature of the American roadside since the 1920s, but not until the 1960s did they impose a sameness on the landscape outside virtually all American cities by becoming the dominant force in the franchising business. Franchising itself—leasing the rights to a commercial name—was a sign of the times; among its creations were the Holiday Inns, Midas Muffler Shops, Citgo stations, and Howard Johnson’s motels. These were conventional and sedate, however, when compared to the quick grill and ice cream shops. The going prices of top franchises in 1969 were $96,000 for a McDonald’s (“Over 5 Billion Served”) hamburger stand, $37,000 for an A & W stand, $24,500 for a Colonel Sanders (“Finger-Lickin’ Good”) Kentucky Fried Chicken stand, and from $7,500 to $30,000, depending on the location, for a Dairy Queen ice cream stand. Other emporia of the fatty snack, all of them drawing teen-agers by the millions, were doing business under the signs of Dunkin’ Donuts, Bonanza, Hardee’s, Burger King, Minnie Pearl’s Chicken, Baskin-Robbins, Roy Rogers Roast Beef, and the International House of Pancakes.
If the young approved of these, they might have been expected to sanction another big financial phenomenon of the time, the conglomerates, of which the best known was ITT—the International Telephone and Telegraph Company—under whose banner hotels, car rental agencies, life insurance firms, bakeries, and manufacturers of communications equipment did business. But conglomerate was a dirty word among committed youths; it was associated with government contracts and therefore with the Vietnam War, which was an even greater enemy than pollution. Here passions ran highest, both for antiwar demonstrators and their critics, and here the rising generation was taking the stand for which it would be best remembered.
The word for protest that year was moratorium. The first M-day was scheduled for May 15. Richard Nixon said in advance, “Under no circumstances will I be affected whatever by it,” thereby guaranteeing large turnouts to ring church bells, wear black armbands, carry signs and candles, and, above all, to march in thousands of American communities as proof of solidarity against the involvement in Indochina. That Wednesday there were 90,000 protesters on Boston Common, 20,000 in New York, and 22,000 in Washington. Some college campuses reported that half their students were gone. At Whittier College, whose most famous alumnus was in the White House, the wife of the acting president lit a flame which was to burn until the war was over.
November 15 fell on a weekend, and the New Mobe, as it was called, lasted for three days. This time the focus was Washington. Police put the crowd at 250,000; the New Mobe committee said 800,000 participated; there was really no way of reaching an accurate estimate, but certainly nothing like it had ever happened in America before. While the White House was announcing that President Nixon would stay inside, watching a football game on television, the first of 40,000 marchers passed by outside, each bearing a card with the name of an American who had died in Vietnam or the name of a Vietnamese community destroyed by the war. The marchers walked four miles, from Arlington to the Capitol, where the names were placed in huge, flag-draped coffins.
It was orderly. The Army had 9,000 troops in reserve to control unruly demonstrators, but they were not used, and praisers of the crowd’s restraint included presidential aide Herbert G. Klein and Republican senators Hugh Scott and John Sherman Cooper. A minority view was expressed by Attorney General John N. Mitchell. Two minor episodes of violence had marred the weekend: an SDS band had attacked the South Vietnamese embassy, and a mob of Yippies had tried to rush the Justice Department building. Both had been turned back by tear gas. Taking note of them, Mitchell said that while “the great majority of participants” in the New Mobe had “obeyed the law,” the march had been accompanied “by such extensive physical injury, property damage, and street confrontations that I do not believe that—overall—the gatherings here can be characterized as peaceful.”
Spiro Agnew agreed. Washington was not surprised. By now it was clear that whatever other members of the administration might say, the attorney general and the Vice President would be pitiless with Americans who broke the law.
***
My Lai, which was to become the American Lidice, was a Vietnamese hamlet, too small to be known outside Quang Ngai province on the South China Sea until the hot, humid morning of Saturday, March 16, 1968, when it became an open grave for some 567 old men, women, and children. Even then the name was unfamiliar to most of its attackers, all members of Lieutenant William L. Calley Jr.’s Americal Division platoon. They called it Pinkville because the area was colored pink on the military maps issued the night before at the platoon leader’s briefing.
Calley and his men were members of Task Force Barker, named for Lieutenant Colonel Frank A. Barker Jr., who would die in a helicopter crash three months later, leaving his role in the events of March 16 forever obscure. The question of provocation was also nebulous; it was to be raised at Calley’s court-martial. Charlie Company of the division’s 11th Infantry Brigade, to which his unit belonged, had been in Vietnam three and a half months. During that time the company had los
t almost half of its 190 men to booby traps and sniper fire. At the briefing the lieutenant was told that My Lai was held by the 48th Battalion of the Viet Cong. Captain Ernest Medina, the company commander, later said that he did not know any women and children were there. He told Lieutenant Calley to clean the village out, and Calley passed the word among his men. At daybreak they were helicoptered in, their M-16 automatic rifles loaded and ready.
On landing they found no Viet Cong. Instead there were only defenseless civilians, who, according to Private Paul David Meadlo, were herded by the American soldiers into the center of the hamlet “like a little island.” There, where two trails crossed, the lieutenant ordered his men to shoot the inhabitants. Meadlo was one who obeyed—“I poured about four clips”—68 shots—“into them,” he said afterward; “I might have killed ten or fifteen of them.” Calley stood beside him, pumping automatic fire into the captives at point-blank range. Next the soldiers shoved seven or eight Vietnamese into one of the huts, or “hootches” as the grunts called them, and tossed a hand grenade in after them.
The third phase occurred in an L-shaped drainage ditch, which was to become infamous during the Fort Benning, Georgia, court-martial. There the mass murder took on aspects of an assembly line operation. “There was a variety of people there—men, women, and children,” a rifleman testified at Fort Benning. “…There was being brought up small groups of people and they were being placed in the ditch and Lieutenant Calley was firing into it.” Another witness told how the platoon leader had dealt with a Buddhist priest and a baby. The priest, who was wearing the flowing white robe of his office, held out supplicating hands as though in prayer. He kept repeating, “No Viet, no Viet.” Calley, according to the testimony, smashed in the man’s mouth with the butt of his M-16, reversed the rifle, “and pulled the trigger in the priest’s face. Half his head was blown off.” As for the infant, “Lieutenant Calley grabbed it by the arm and threw it into the ditch and fired.”
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 176