Witness to the Revolution

by Clara Bingham

  GERALD LEFCOURT

  After the demonstrations at the ’68 Democratic convention, the FBI put together a case against the leaders of the protest movement and tried to get the Justice Department to indict the Chicago Eight for crossing state lines with the intention of inciting a riot. Ramsey Clark, who was LBJ’s attorney general at the time, refused. This was a demonstration that was determined to be a police riot.*2 But after Nixon was elected promising law and order, his attorney general John Mitchell decided to bring the case. It was political repression, pure and simple.

  TOM HAYDEN (FOUNDER, SDS)

  It was a spectacle from day one: the judge, the Yippies,*3 the mood of the times. It felt like we were on television every day from the day the trial began. So it was not unreasonable for Jerry and Abbie to plan a media strategy. Because the media sort of expected it, otherwise there would be no news.

  They were McLuhanites.*4 They believed that little mattered beyond being on television. If you dressed appropriately, if you had long hair, specifically, that image would reach your base. Words would be useful also, but it was mainly the image, because your image would offend the right people, and attract the right people, as they saw it. Jerry Rubin called it the Academy Award of Protest before the trial began. Jerry and Abbie were partners, but they were also in a rivalry with each other over who was the king.

  I think that Abbie was probably the greater performance artist. He was a natural. From the first day of the trial, they just set forth to create what they called the Yippie myth. It was not an organization, not a political party; it was a media-projected myth that did attract a number of people. It was a platform to act out a myth, which I think was meant to be a generational revolt and also antiracist, and antiwar.

  GERALD LEFCOURT

  Abbie takes the stand and the clerk says, “Name and address.” He says, “Abbie Hoffman, Woodstock Nation.” And the judge says, “What are you talking about?” And Abbie says, “I live in Woodstock Nation. It is a nation of alienated young people. We carry it around with us as a state of mind in the same way as the Sioux Indians carried the Sioux Nation around with them.”

  It was a state of mind—it was a new generation, a new way of being. We talked in terms of “We” instead of “I.” It was people helping people.

  STEVE WASSERMAN

  I remember the courtroom well. It was exactly as Abbie had described it: a “neon cave” of extremely high ceilings with a bullying sterility of architecture that could have been appreciated only by Mussolini. Everything about the courtroom seemed to embody values utterly opposed to everything we thought we stood for. The very architecture announced its mission: to regiment, to confine, to erase individuality, to crush the anarchic and mischievous spirit of joyous rebellion. Our minders and oppressors wore suits and ties; we affected bell-bottoms and tie-dye shirts. They wrapped themselves in the American flag as if to shield themselves from what they were convinced was our assault on all that was holy; Abbie wore the flag as a shirt to advertise our patriotism.

  The prosecution’s intent, it seemed clear, was to intimidate the rest of us, to suppress our opposition, by trying to decapitate our leadership, to make examples of them, to prosecute and persecute them and, by extension, their allies. Not least of the government’s considerations was to distract us by draining the always-meager treasury of opposition of its few dollars by having to pay ever-mounting legal bills.

  GERALD LEFCOURT

  Within days of the opening arguments, Judge Hoffman cited all the lawyers for contempt. Bobby Seale showed up without a lawyer and the government said, “What about these other lawyers who were in the case?” The government tried to force us to represent somebody who we’d met but didn’t know. I was representing the Panthers in New York and Bobby and I were on the same page, but Charles Garry represented the national Black Panther leadership in Oakland. He was their lawyer from the founding of the Panthers on, and Bobby wanted Charles Garry. So we refused the order to represent him, and the judge held us in contempt and he ordered our arrests. Michael Tigar was in Southern California, Dennis Roberts and Michael Kennedy were in San Francisco, and I was in New York. We had a conference call when the arrest orders were announced, and we decided to sue in our own districts to quash the arrest warrants.

  I went to Chicago, where Michael Tigar was already in custody. As soon as I entered the courthouse, I was arrested and brought into the lockup with Tigar, Bobby Seale, and Jerry Rubin. Bobby Seale was in jail because he was awaiting trial on a murder case in New Haven. Jerry was serving a sixty-day demonstration sentence. So the four of us were in a jail holding pen together.

  I remember it was a Friday because what occurred was truly amazing. Bill Kunstler came to the jail to tell us that because it was a Friday at 5 P.M. the appellate court was closed and we had to stay in jail until Monday, when Judge Hoffman would sentence us for contempt. But the U.S. Court of Appeals, hearing the news that lawyers were jailed on this basis, decided on their own to order our release that Friday night. This was a turning point in that trial that got the media all up in arms at how outrageous the government and the trial judge were acting. I mean, to jail lawyers for refusing to represent a defendant they had no relationship with and who had his own lawyer was pretty shocking. Lawyers from around the country demonstrated against our contempt citations, the judge backed down. The contempts were dropped on Monday, September 29, and the four of us held a press conference slamming the government and The New York Times ran a huge front-page story about us. A month later, Bobby Seale was in the chains and gagged while demanding to represent himself. He was finally severed from the trial. By that time the whole country was watching and this became the trial of the century because the movements for change were at war with the government.*5

  The war in Vietnam was raging and the antiwar movement was on trial. In October in Washington, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators [the Moratorium] marched to the Department of Justice screaming, “Stop the trial!” And every night, one or more of the defendants would fly to a rally. Abbie’s effect on this was incredible because he planned what he called TDA, The Day After. He would go to a campus and there’d be five thousand people at a rally, and he would say, “What are you going to do on the day after?” Meaning, the day after they convict us, we need you to go into the streets. You have to respond.

  Credit 8.2

  The Chicago Eight’s defense lawyers, (from left to right) Dennis Roberts, Michael Tigar, Gerald Lefcourt, and Michael Kennedy, hold a press conference at the Federal Building in Chicago on September 29, 1969, after Judge Julius Hoffman dismisses contempt charges against them for refusing to represent Bobby Seale against his will.

  BERNARDINE DOHRN

  The first time I was arrested was September 26, 1969, the day before the opening of the Chicago Eight conspiracy trial. There are pictures of me being thrown into the police car. I was charged twice in that period with resisting arrest, disorderly conduct, and mob action. Those were the demonstration arrests; if you were at a demonstration and you got arrested, that’s what you were charged with. The conspiracy trial was the epicenter of activity here in Chicago.

  We didn’t know that there was such a thing as COINTELPRO, and yet we knew because we were experiencing it. We knew that we were being followed and harassed, and we knew that people were being hung out of windows by their feet. The Red Squad knew us by sight. There was this organized group of Chicago cops who were all Korean War veterans who were called the Red Squad—they were out to disrupt us, and to jail us. What was to emerge over the next year was many conspiracy trials across the country, against lots of antiwar groups including the Vietnam Vets Against the War, and so on.

  Part of the Justice Department’s strategy was to tie people up in long, costly trials or their own small, petty trial. Once you’re on trial, once you’re charged, and you have to keep making court appearances and you’re in the hands of lawyers, even radical lawyers, you’re in a different posture. You’re off the streets
and you’re worrying about your own defense, and you’re not organizing, and you’re not planning ahead for the next thing, and you’re not thinking about what the opportunities are to grow.

  So we began to plan to have some small groups of us disappear, to protect ourselves from that kind of arrest and constant scrutiny. Our phones were tapped at this time and we were being followed all the time. We did some very funny things: We all learned sign language, and we had whole meetings in sign language. We developed code words—a lot of them were from songs or from drug culture, or from underground culture. We were hardly part of drug culture at that time; if anything, speed was our drug—coffee, speed, and bad food. But we were trying to figure out how to continue to grow and be a force and not be tied up in trials and nonstop arrests.

  DAVID FENTON (movement photographer)

  When the charges came and the trial started, I went to Chicago to photograph activities around the trial for Liberation News Service. Given that I knew Abbie and Jerry, I was hanging out with them every day after the trial. So I became part of the team that would go back to the offices and plot strategy for the next day in the courtroom. We’d watch Walter Cronkite and the other news reports of that day’s trial—it was on every night—and then we’d figure out what antics we were going to do the next day to drive news coverage.

  Abbie and Jerry showed up wearing judge’s robes one day, and Judge Hoffman just flipped out and cited them for contempt. Another day they’d show up wearing Revolutionary War uniforms. All the world’s a stage. I really didn’t see them concerned about the trial at all, until they were cited for contempt of court because of the accumulated actions that the judge just couldn’t bear.*6 They were facing serious jail time at that time on the contempt charges.

  The Yippies were one of the first great myths of the television era. They were basically the Youth International Party. It was Abbie and three guys. That’s it. And the reason I say it was the first great myth of the television era is that the television network news and The New York Times would faithfully report on the pronouncements and actions of the Youth International Party—which were three people. So it was complete and total manipulation. It was hysterical. Nixon thought there were really Yippies, as a result. There weren’t any Yippies. It was Abbie, Jerry, and Paul Krassner. They were master showmen.

  Abbie’s insight into what television was going to do to the political situation in America was amazingly prescient. The only other person in that period who understood it was Roger Ailes, who went to work for Nixon and used his insight to get Nixon elected in ’72. They both saw that TV was going to become everything.

  GERALD LEFCOURT

  The Panther 21 case in New York*7 and the Chicago Eight case were scheduled to go to trial at the same time. Bill Kunstler and I were counsel in both cases, so a decision had to be made. Kunstler basically made the decision that the Panthers needed me. It was a rough thing for me. I was so young to be the lead counsel. The Panthers were facing life in jail. They had no bail—one hundred thousand dollars might as well be no bail. By comparison, Abbie and the other Chicago Seven defendants were released on their own recognizance and were facing five years for a protest demonstration.

  So I worked all summer on the Chicago case until September, when Lenny Weinglass took over Abbie’s representation at trial. Then the Panther 21 case in New York adjourned until February. So I kept coming out to Chicago on weekends to help prepare Abbie’s testimony.

  STEVE WASSERMAN

  I was a senior at Berkeley High School and had been elected student body president on a radical platform. Several years earlier, in 1965, I began to participate in the Vietnam Day Committee, organized by Jerry Rubin and others to hold teach-ins to educate people about the escalating war. Four years later I attended the Chicago trial as one of Rubin’s many “cousins,” since only members of a defendant’s family were permitted to view the proceedings. I arrived at the apartment of Leonard Weinglass, one of the defense attorneys, which was serving as both de facto legal headquarters and crash pad for the far-flung tribe of radical nomads, unafraid to let their freak flags fly, who sought to muster support for the beleaguered defendants. I walked in and was greeted by a haze of pot smoke. On the turntable, the volume cranked high, was the new Beatles album, Abbey Road,*8 playing George Harrison’s “Here Comes the Sun.” Later, about midnight, Fred Hampton, the legendary and charismatic head of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party, dropped by looking in his black leather coat like a glamorous paladin of the Resistance.

  COUNTRY JOE MCDONALD (musician)

  Judge Hoffman was really an oddball character. He kept asking me questions. I just stalled. They wanted me to testify that Jerry and Abbie and everybody else had conspired to cross state lines to start a riot, and I wasn’t going to do that.*9 Kunstler was cross-examining me. That was their defense strategy, to have people come and talk about the problems of bringing the Yippie thing to Chicago and make a counterculture statement of some kind. I did that, and then I started singing. Well, the judge says, “No, no, you can’t sing. Stop him.” The sergeant-at-arms came over and put his hand over my mouth, and I stopped.*10

  TOM HAYDEN

  On October 29, 1969, Judge Hoffman suspended the Chicago Eight trial proceedings and ordered a defendant to be taken out and dealt with. A few minutes passed, and Bobby Seale was carried back in the courtroom in a chair. They took him through the door, shut the door, chained and gagged him, put him in a chair, and carried him back. It was swift, as I recall. It might have been ten minutes.*11

  When I get stunned, I sort of sink while I’m trying to comprehend what’s going on. Other people were acting out of shock, including some reporters who were gasping. There must have been Panthers in the courtroom. I remember some yelling. But the judge or the FBI had brought in a lot of extra muscle, and there were a lot of armed marshals in the courtroom, maybe twenty-five to thirty. It was not a big courtroom, so we knew who they were.

  WESLEY BROWN

  I think one of the most striking things about the Chicago Eight trial was the perception that Bobby Seale was a far greater threat than Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, Abbie Hoffman, or Jerry Rubin. Seale was just saying you do not have the right to try me or to bring me up on charges. I don’t have to defend myself, because I don’t acknowledge you as a legitimate arbiter of my fate. And he kept saying that until they gagged and tied him up.

  Credit 8.3

  Courtroom drawing of Black Panther Party cofounder Bobby Seale, who, on the order of Judge Julius Hoffman, was carried into the courtroom bound to a chair and gagged.

  TOM HAYDEN

  We went through a couple more rounds where the judge was criticized by our attorneys for the condition that Seale was in, the manacles were too tight, he couldn’t be heard because his mouth was covered, it was barbaric, it was torture, you don’t chain a black man in America. And this all seemed over Judge Hoffman’s head. I’m not sure he was in control of his senses to begin with. He was very old, and his condition was known to the Chicago defense community as either senile or totalitarian. Nobody had a good word to say about him. But in the culture of the federal courts, it meant you never crossed him. You just said, “Yes, sir.”

  WESLEY BROWN

  The image of Bobby being tied and bound had historical continuity with the efforts of blacks who have had the audacity to raise their voices and say, “I’m not recognizing your right to judge me, and so I’m not going to participate.” Eventually they separated his case from the others.

  TOM HAYDEN

  So they take Bobby out and bring him back about two or three times. Defendants would rise and rebuke the judge, and the marshals would push people down, or stare them down. People in the courtroom were so upset, so outraged, that I think the courtroom was cleared, and they took Bobby away and he never came back. Somebody prepared the document, the judge read it, declaring many counts of misconduct, and then he was severed from the case. Mistrial.

  It served the purpose be
cause Bobby was facing a murder conspiracy charge in Connecticut.*12 Chicago was a way station in his journey. And Chicago was trivial compared to anything else. He had made one militant speech for about thirty minutes in the Chicago park during the ’68 Democratic convention, and otherwise, he wasn’t even around. He had nothing to do with Chicago.*13

  I met one night with Bernardine Dohrn, and she was criticizing me for not tearing up and destroying the courtroom when Bobby Seale was chained and gagged. She had the power of provoking guilt when she said things like “Why didn’t you? What would John Brown have done?” And I wondered, Was I just trying to save my white skin? Why didn’t I tear up the courtroom? I didn’t think I had a very good answer, but I didn’t think that her logic went very far, either, because when you tore up the courtroom and were put back in jail, then what would you do next? What’s the day after about? So we would go around and around on this. Turned out, of course, I wasn’t John Brown.*14

  * * *

  *1 David Dellinger was a longtime veteran of the peace movement. Born in 1915, about thirty years before most of the sixties activists, Dellinger was a conscientious objector during World War II and founded the Committee for Nonviolent Revolution in 1946. He was also active in the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.