Witness to the Revolution

by Clara Bingham

  DAVID FENTON (movement photographer)

  I have some of the very few photos from that SDS convention in Chicago of ’69. I was seventeen and had just dropped out of high school to be a photographer for Liberation News Service, which was a chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. Liberation News Service*18 was the AP, UPI, Reuters of the underground, countercultural, antiwar press. One of the people that had started it, Allen Young, was a former Washington Post reporter who was so fed up with the Post’s bullshit coverage of the Vietnam War that he quit and helped start the Liberation News Service.

  It was small, but influential, because there were several hundred underground antiwar newspapers. There was one in every major city and on every major campus at that time, and LNS was the news service for all of them. We actually printed a packet of photographs and news and mailed it to people. Imagine! We had correspondents traveling with the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong, and with the early precursors of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the guerrilla movements in Latin America and in Cuba. We had correspondents all over the place.

  When I joined Liberation News Service, it was obligatory to go to SDS conventions, so they sent me to Chicago, and I went into this huge hall and saw these people waving the Red Book and chanting. That was the Progressive Labor Party. They were extremely ideological and rigid and incredibly sectarian. Culturally, they were very straight—no sex, drugs, and rock and roll for them. And I think that was part of the nature of the split. It was a cultural split, not just an ideological split. Bernardine Dohrn and Mark Rudd, Terry Robbins, and Bill Ayers stormed the stage, guarded by a bunch of Black Panthers, and took over the convention and expelled the PL people.

  Credit 4.7

  David Fenton dropped out of high school at age seventeen to join the movement as a photographer for the Liberation News Service (LNS), which provided news and photographs to six hundred underground newspapers reaching one million readers.

  PHOTOGRAPH BY STEPHEN SHAMES.

  The Weathermen faction of SDS romanticized that they were going to get high school students from the working class to rebel and storm out of their schools and fight the police and have a revolution. They really thought that. You have to be completely delusional to think something like that. They were fucking out of their minds.

  MARK RUDD

  Part of our Weatherman ideology was the concept of a revolutionary youth movement, and that young people would rise up to support third-world revolution. So we set about trying to prove that by organizing the white youth, and the point of all the organizing was to bring them to Chicago in October ’68 to demonstrate our militancy.

  The theory was if we started armed struggle it would grow into a mass phenomenon, and we would be the vanguard of this large mass movement. It would take on the issue of power. Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun—Mao Zedong had written that, and we believed that. The Vietnamese were engaged in a war for liberation. The Cubans had to engage in a war for liberation. The black struggle had turned from nonviolence to by any means necessary. Malcolm X was our hero, not Martin Luther King. These are all to a large extent intellectual phenomena that were present in our milieu at the time. We had all read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, an absolutely critical book.

  We split into two entities, and I found myself as the national secretary of our faction of SDS, which was now in control of the national office and the regional offices, and in touch with the chapters; we had four hundred chapters, and a national membership of about 120,000 and a national weekly publication called New Left Notes. We decided that a small group of people would take over this major national organization, which had democracy in its name, and would reorient the work of the organization towards struggle in the streets, and eventually armed struggle. We were totally out of touch with our membership. But we knew we were right. Terrible arrogance, you know?

  JULIUS LESTER

  By the time SDS broke up in ’69, I was aware that the movement was falling apart. I was aware that the movement was becoming ideological. And when movements become ideological, they lose sight of people. Ideology becomes more important than people. I’m talking about all movements. I’m talking black movements, white movements. The Panthers were also very ideological.

  MICHAEL KAZIN

  People who study it tell you different things. Some think that the SDS membership was about 120,000 strong. The problem is, I went to the national office and I saw people open up an envelope with membership cards in them, sometimes from a whole chapter, put them on a table, and then somebody would spill cheap wine on it and throw them away. I mean there was no way of knowing how many members there were. People called themselves SDS members who never saw a membership card, because they felt like SDS members. SDS was a name.

  SDS petered away. Some chapters tried to keep going. The irony was that the national office didn’t matter that much, but if there was no national office, there was no newspaper, there was no sense of being part of a national organization, and then you might as well just be an antiwar group rather than SDS. A lot of SDS chapters were not full of revolutionaries. They were full of kids who called themselves pacifists, didn’t like the war, were for civil rights, but they were not revolutionaries, and were not looking to pick up a gun and smash the state.

  TOM HAYDEN (founder, SDS)

  That was the end of SDS. It was really bizarre, because this was before Kent State, Jackson State, before the Moratorium, before Earth Day. There were many student uprisings to come, and the group that had triggered it, and had gotten all the blame and all the credit, was actually dead. Unbelievable. And this was not seven years from the time when SDS was formed.

  * * *

  *1 Students for a Democratic Society was founded in 1960 and held its first convention in 1962 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where University of Michigan student and civil rights activist Tom Hayden was elected president. Hayden wrote the first draft of the organization’s manifesto, the Port Huron Statement, which became the blueprint for New Left student activism for the rest of the decade. Criticizing U.S. Cold War foreign policy and calling for an end to racial discrimination and economic inequity, the Port Huron Statement advocated nonviolent civil disobedience and participatory democracy.

  *2 The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was a civil rights organization formed in 1960 as a more youthful alternative to Dr. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). One of the largest and more radical civil rights organizations, SNCC conducted Freedom Rides and voter registration drives all over the South.

  *3 The Deacons for Self-Defense and Justice was an armed self-defense organization formed in 1964 in Jonesboro, Louisiana, in defiance of the nonviolent strategies of the mainstream civil rights movement.

  *4 From an article by Jim Hyde in the Daily Californian, May 11, 1967, quoted in Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin, Black Against Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), p. 80.

  *5 Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, by Kwame Turé (Stokely Carmichael) and Charles V. Hamilton, was published in 1967. The book defined black power as a radical way to confront and reform a racist society.

  *6 Huey Newton was in a shoot-out with Oakland police in October 1967. Newton was shot in the stomach and police officer John Frey was killed. Newton was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in September 1968 for killing Frey, which he denied, and the charges were dismissed in May 1970. While Newton was in jail, he became an instant celebrity and darling of the New Left.

  *7 During this period, the Black Panther Party’s size and popularity spread quickly. There are varying estimates of the number of offices (probably sixty-eight to seventy) and the number of members (up to ten thousand).

  *8 The March on the Pentagon, October 21, 1967, was organized by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (MOBE) and included more than 100,000 protesters, a concert on the National Mall, and an attempt to “levitate” the Pentagon. Six hundred and fift
y people were arrested during violent clashes with the military on the Pentagon steps.

  *9 The Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1964 was the first major student protest of the decade. Over a two-month period, almost eight hundred students were arrested in violent clashes with the police. The students demanded that the university lift its ban on on-campus political activities and occupied the main administration building.

  *10 The Tet Offensive was a massive surprise attack launched on January 30, 1968, by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese that humiliated the United States. In one of the largest campaigns of the Vietnam War, 80,000 pro–North Vietnamese soldiers invaded one hundred unsuspecting cities in the South. It took the Americans a month to fight back and regain the cities of Hue and Khe Sanh, for example. Even though the North ultimately suffered more casualties, Tet revealed to the American public that the communist forces were stronger and more capable than the American military had led them to believe. U.S. casualties in the week of February 11–17, 1968, reached an all-time high: 543 soldiers killed and 2,547 wounded.

  *11 The new Columbia University gym encroached on a park in the mostly black residential neighborhood of Morningside Heights and was opposed by local residents.

  *12 Among the files Columbia SDS published was proof of a $125,000-a-year contract between the CIA and Columbia’s School of International Affairs, a contract Columbia’s dean previously denied. Sale, SDS, p. 380.

  *13 COINTELPRO was a secret and illegal FBI project that from 1956 until its public exposure in 1971 targeted left-leaning activists and organizations. The program first pursued groups that Director J. Edgar Hoover considered political enemies, like the Communist Party and civil rights organizations. It was under this program that Martin Luther King, Jr., was harassed and his phone illegally tapped. In response to the student protests at Columbia University, COINTELPRO initiated a new project to target the New Left and worked to discredit, infiltrate, and disrupt black liberation and antiwar groups, as well as veteran, student, GI, feminist, gay, and environmental groups. COINTELPRO also targeted food co-ops, health clinics, underground newspapers, bookstores, street theaters, communes, community centers, and rock groups. Counter​intelli​gence tactics included spreading lies and disinformation, and encouraging violent, self-destructive behavior through the use of infiltrators and provocateurs. See Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers (Boston: South End Press, 2002), p. 177, and Brian Glick, War at Home (Boston: South End Press, 1989), p. 12.

  *14 FBI COINTELPRO operatives were directed to “eradicate” the Panthers’ “serve the people programs.” One of many ways the FBI tried to discredit the breakfast program was by spreading rumors that members of the Black Panther leadership were infected with venereal disease. Churchill and Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers, pp. 145–46.

  *15 Abbie Hoffman was facing several months in jail for a series of charges including resisting arrest, trespassing at Columbia University, and public obscenity for writing “Fuck” in large black letters on his forehead during a protest.

  *16 Huggins and Carter were shot by members of a black nationalist organization called US (United Slaves), at the time when the FBI had intensified its program to undermine the Black Panthers by creating conflict with US and other black liberation groups. The assassin escaped, and later two other US members, George and Larry Stiner, were convicted for conspiring to commit murder. The Panthers considered the Huggins and Carter murder a political assassination ginned up by the FBI. Bloom and Martin, Black Against Empire, p. 220.

  *17 From Vietnamese, Viet Cong (or VC) was short for “Vietnam communist” and was applied to anyone fighting alongside the National Liberation Front (NLF), who were South Vietnamese who opposed the U.S.-Saigon government and wanted unification with Ho Chi Minh’s North Vietnam.

  *18 An underground wire service, Liberation News Service (LNS) reached one million readers who read six hundred New Left and GI underground newspapers with names like The Guardian, Ramparts, Berkeley Barb, East Village Other, Rag, Paper, Space City, Great Speckled Bird, Ann Arbor Sun, Avatar, and Rat.

  CHAPTER 5

  RESISTERS

  (1967–August 1969)

  “Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam, we’ve all been there.”

  —MICHAEL HERR, Dispatches

  By June 1965, 117,000 U.S. troops were stationed in Vietnam and the ground war escalated swiftly. By the end of 1967, the number of U.S. military personnel in Vietnam had grown to 500,000. Annual American casualty rates peaked in 1968, with 16,899 soldiers killed that year. The average age of the Vietnam soldier was nineteen, compared to twenty-six in World War II, and nearly 76 percent of the American GIs came from working-class backgrounds. With the rising deployment and death toll came a corresponding increase in draft resistance. By 1967, three thousand young men had signed “We Won’t Go” petitions. Five thousand had turned in their draft cards, and anti-draft protests took place on campuses at half of the nation’s public universities. The resistance movement swelled into a grassroots uprising with thousands of participants in most major cities sabotaging draft boards by destroying records, returning and burning draft cards, and counseling others in draft resistance.

  RANDY KEHLER (draft resistance organizer)

  I grew up in Scarsdale, New York, went to Exeter Academy, a private boarding school in New Hampshire, and graduated from Harvard in ’67. In September of ’67, I started at Stanford in the teaching program, and when I first got to campus I met David Harris. I had heard the story about how they had shaved his head one night as a fraternity boy prank. He was organizing this group called the Resistance, which I quickly joined. The Resistance was based on getting young men to turn in their draft cards. He was going up and down the West Coast with this bunch of people; they all lived in a commune in East Palo Alto called the Peace and Liberation Commune.

  So, I immediately thought, I’ve got this draft card that’s burning a hole in my pocket. So, before classes even started, I wrote this letter to the Selective Service System, the national draft board in Washington. General Lewis B. Hershey was the head of it. I essentially said, “I can’t cooperate anymore with any part of this. Here’s my draft card. Don’t call me. I’m not your boy.”

  The law said that you had to carry your draft card. If you were apprehended by an ordinary police patrolman, and they happened to ask to see your draft card, if you didn’t have it somewhere on your body, in theory you could get up to five years in federal prison. No fooling around. I sent it back in September of ’67, full of fear and trepidation. I remember sticking my hand inside the mailbox before I let it go, thinking, All right, think again on this. Is this really what you want to do? The minute I let it go, I thought there was going to be this hand clapping me around the back and hauling me off. Of course I was being ridiculous.

  RICK AYERS (draft deserter and GI organizer)

  The big thing in the fall of ’67, which was my junior year, was resistance against the draft. I turned in my draft card in October. I knew about David Harris and I was in the Resistance. I was also in SDS. But you could be in everything. The Resistance had a lot of Quakers, who were also highly regarded in the movement. They were big in Ann Arbor. So I decided, “Okay, I’m going to do this.”

  I grew up in an affluent suburb of Chicago and went to college in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan, and was very involved in the agitation around Vietnam. My father was the president of Commonwealth Edison in Chicago. He was a big muckety-muck, and a liberal businessman, a friend of labor.

  My choices were: I could still stay in school and be a good boy; protest, but try to not get in trouble. Or, like the Mario Savio*1 line, you could “put your body upon the gears” and say, I’m going to stop this. In other words, instead of avoiding the draft—I got my 2-S [student deferment]—I decided that I would walk into the draft board and say no.

  Credit 5.1

  Demonstrator holding an anti-draft banner at a protest outside the Whitehall Street military induction
center, New York City, July 2, 1968.

  RANDY KEHLER

  I wasn’t happy in the Stanford graduate teaching program and I really wanted to be working full-time against the war. I signed up for a course in what was then a free university. In those days, there were these free universities popping up all over. There was one called the Mid-Peninsula Free University, where anybody could offer a course on anything, and anybody could take a course for a ten-dollar registration fee. There were no grades and people met outside under trees, or in living rooms, or basements. And there was everything from astrophysics to making candles, singing gospel songs, to the history of Vietnam.

  So, I signed up for a course on Gandhi and nonviolence, which was being led principally by Ira Sandperl, Joan Baez, and Roy Kepler. Sandperl*2 was Joan Baez’s mentor, who got her into nonviolent civil disobedience and activism when she was just a Palo Alto High School kid. All three had a big influence on me. Roy Kepler had been a World War II CO, and started and owned the largest bookstore in Northern California at that time, Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park. So I signed up for this course. I knew nothing about nonviolence; the word pacifism wasn’t even really part of my vocabulary.