Witness to the Revolution

by Clara Bingham

  JANE FONDA

  For me, the activism started in Paris with American soldiers I met who had deserted and fled to Europe. It’s so ironic, given what people feel about me, vis-à-vis soldiers, like I’m against soldiers. It started with soldiers, and it was military bases that led me across country.

  I remember going to Fort Lewis in Seattle and passing out copies of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. We were arrested and taken to the provost’s office, and then released and barred from coming back on the base. By the time I had traveled across the country, I’d been arrested about a dozen times.

  I organized my cross-country trip so that I arrived at Denver during the big national MOBE [Mobilization to End the War] demonstration in April 1970. This was my first public act against the war, a two-day fast in United Nations Square in the center of downtown Denver. About a thousand people fasted and spent the night. It was very beautiful. I’d been with Indians, I’d been with Panthers, I’d been with GIs. I hadn’t spent much time with mothers and others. You know, the white, middle-class peace movement, and it felt good.

  Credit 15.1

  Actor Jane Fonda’s first act of public peace activism was to drive across country in the spring of 1970, visiting military bases and meeting with members of the GI antiwar movement. Here she is photographed in Denver, Colorado, on April 24 participating in a two-day fast to protest the “war tax.”

  The next day, I went from there to Fort Carson, near Colorado Springs, which is a very conservative city. Mark Lane and Donald Duncan suggested that whenever I went to a base or a GI coffeehouse, that I bring as much literature as I could, including The Village of Ben Suc, the Jonathan Schell book. I smuggled boxes and boxes of books and GI coffeehouse newspapers onto the base in the trunk of my car. Leaflets were passed out that there was going to be a meeting in this place, on base. The books did get distributed, but the meeting didn’t happen.

  Later, the commander of the base offered to give me a tour of the base. Recently, a hundred soldiers had lined up in front of the medical dispensary flashing peace signs and saying they were sick—sick of the war. As a result, all of them had been put into the stockade. We hoped that my meeting with the commander would lead to the release of the soldier-protesters, and surprisingly, the general took us on a tour of the stockade and let us talk to prisoners. His tour backfired because we saw prisoners who seemed catatonic. Some, who identified themselves as Black Panthers, said they had been beaten, and it appeared to be so. The visit was abruptly called to an end and we were ushered out before I could determine which prisoners were protesters.*6 It was a very heavy experience.

  I began to notice, during the drive across country, if I went over the speed limit at all I would be stopped. I was obviously being followed. Sometimes I would have to take an airplane someplace, to speak at a campus, and there would be men standing at the gate when I got off, in suits, with black glasses. It was very clear that they were agents. It was an attempt to intimidate me.

  According to my FBI documents, Nixon was more obsessed with me than with the president of Russia. He was obsessed with this movie star that was working with the GIs. That I was going to be letting people know what the soldiers were saying really disturbed Nixon.*7

  WAYNE SMITH (Vietnam vet)

  I was in Vietnam for just over seventeen months, and then I extended for an extra six months. Remember, I volunteered and I hated the military. I was a good medic, but I was a terrible soldier, in many ways. Anyway, I extended. And it was a big, big mistake. It was the winter of 1970 and they gave me thirty days’ leave. I came home, and I was totally emotionally numb. It was like I was going through the motions, but I really wasn’t at home. It sounds strange, but it’s true. And when I was with my family, my mom was so very proud. I had gotten a couple of medals, and she wanted me to go to my family church, the Church of God and Saints of Christ, in my uniform. And there was just no fucking way because I felt so ashamed.

  Before I went to Vietnam, I went to the church and let them fawn over me and say prayers for my safety. But when I came home, it was like, “Fuck them.” You know, “Fuck you, Mom,” in effect. I’m not doing that. I couldn’t talk to my friends. I would speak pidgin Vietnamese. There was a girl that I had a little thing for—we weren’t in a relationship, fortunately, because I was going to ’Nam. I still had feelings for her but I couldn’t relate to her. She grabbed me at one point and said, “Wayne, when are you going to stop destroying yourself?” I didn’t even know what she was talking about. My mom said, “Where’s your smile? You used to smile all the time.”

  I did go to the VA. I was having a lot of nightmares and just couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t even explain it. So I went to—I think she was a psychiatrist, or maybe a psychologist, or a social worker, for all I know—and I couldn’t even explain it to her. But she said, “Because you’re on active duty, we can’t help you.” That just closed an incredible door. I remember drinking more than I ever did, just trying to quiet those voices and echoes. It was just awful. As twisted as it sounds, I wished I’d had a flesh wound. I wished I had had some kind of injury that would manifest my pain, because I had incredible psychic pain. I mean I was the guy who wanted to do good. I wanted to make a difference. Well, in my alone moments, I knew it was just all shit. It was just all for nothing.

  When I came home, America was completely divided over the war. I mean everything was about the war. But my attitude was “I have friends over there dying for you motherfuckers. And you don’t give a shit. And you want to talk rhetoric.” Even those who were supposedly in the antiwar movement—I thought they were either cops, cowards, or people who were just pimping the game. They were not sincere. It didn’t seem genuine. It didn’t seem like pulling the American soldiers out would have been the answer. That would be okay for us. We would be saved. But what about all of the Vietnamese people who were still divided over their allegiance to the South or to the North? We had blood on our hands. We had a responsibility, in some ways, to make it better than it was. And it didn’t seem to me that just ending America’s involvement was the answer. It was too complicated for me, in some ways, to understand. So I sunk deeper into just my own abyss of avoidance and of a lot of self-loathing, contempt for the military, contempt for this country—a vicious cycle.

  * * *

  *1 Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) made its first public appearance in April 1967 when Jan Barry and others carried a banner at a giant antiwar march led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in New York City.

  *2 Published in 1967, The Village of Ben Suc, a classic of Vietnam War literature and journalism, describes in close, chilling detail the American military’s forced removal of Ben Suc’s 3,500 residents into a refugee camp and the physical annihilation of the village. Written by twenty-four-year-old Jonathan Schell, The Village of Ben Suc was first published by The New Yorker on July 15, 1967, taking up the entire magazine.

  *3 Noam Chomsky, a professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and left-wing political activist, is one of America’s most prominent public intellectuals. The author of forty books, Chomsky is a constant critic of American foreign policy and was an early voice of protest against the Vietnam War.

  *4 Quoted from Michael Uhl’s memoir, Vietnam Awakening: My Journey from Combat to the Citizens’ Commission of Inquiry on U.S. War Crimes in Vietnam (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007), p. 132.

  *5 After the CCI hearings, the VVAW convened the Winter Soldier Investigation hearings, for which Jane Fonda helped raise funds, in January 1971. For three days in Detroit, Vietnam veterans gave testimony about war crimes. Graham Nash also helped fund the hearings. Soon after attending the hearings he wrote “Oh! Camil (The Winter Soldier).”

  *6 This paragraph is taken from my interview with Jane Fonda in New York City on June 14, 2014. At her suggestion, I included some details from her autobiography. See Jane Fonda, My Life So Far (New York: Random House, 2005), pp. 237–38.

  *7 Fonda, along with sc
ores of other antiwar activists, was on Nixon’s enemies list. John Dean described the purpose of the list in a 1971 memo: “This memorandum addresses the matter of how we can maximize the fact of our incumbency in dealing with persons known to be active in their opposition to our Administration; stated a bit more bluntly—how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.”

  CHAPTER 16

  TOWNHOUSE

  (January–April 1970)

  The revolutionary mood had been fueled by the blindingly bright illusion that human history was beginning afresh because a graced generation had willed it so. Now there wasn’t enough life left to mobilize against all the death raining down.

  —TODD GITLIN, The Sixties

  From January to March 1970, the Weathermen Purged nonmilitants from their membership, closed down collectives, and established cells or “tribes” in key cities like New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Detroit to wage war on the government and bomb symbols of establishment power like banks, police stations, and government buildings. Meanwhile, the defense in the Panther 21 trial in New York City had begun to unearth evidence of judicial and police crimes aimed at destroying the Panthers. The courtroom revelations only encouraged the Weathermen’s militancy.

  MARK RUDD (Weather Underground leader)

  By early 1970, I wound up in one of two main collectives in New York that were not linked to each other. Mine was the deeper underground collective, and Terry Robbins*1 and J.J.’s [John Jacobs’s] was the regional collective.

  The general idea was that there would be two levels of underground. One in which people would pass from aboveground to underground and back. We were modeling ourselves after the Vietnamese. There were people who lived in villages by day and at night took up arms against the Americans. It was a militia, guerrilla kind of thing. We had a part-time clandestine operation, in which some people would retain their own identities but assume other papers for some operations, and then go back to their old identity, whereas other people would just become fully underground.

  BRIAN FLANAGAN (Weather Underground member)

  Basically, J.J. talked the Weather Bureau into giving Terry Robbins full rein to do his thing at Cathy Wilkerson’s father’s townhouse, at 18 Eleventh Street in Greenwich Village.*2

  MARK RUDD

  Terry was a feisty little guy. Incidentally, his uncle was the choreographer Jerome Robbins. I hate to use the word Napoleonic, but he was sort of a small guy who wanted to be tough, and he wanted to be strong, and there was a lot of anger in him. I wrote at one point about how he beat up his girlfriend and the rest of us didn’t do anything about it. I mean really, if you look at it, you’re not going to put a guy who beats up his girlfriend in charge of anything. At best, you’d help him get some help. At the worst, you might get rid of the guy. But here he was the leader, and he was really angry. I later found out that his father was a traumatized World War II vet who was troubled by anger, too. But he never mentioned that.

  Terry had a view that leadership was kind of like Triumph of the Will. We want it more, and that’s why we’re leadership. In retrospect, it was a fascist view of leadership. And he had convinced himself that the only nonracist thing to do now was to raise the level of armed struggle. We’d have arguments constantly about it, and he’d always win. Any time anyone showed any wavering, he’d hit you with the arguments. “We have to do this, we have to do that. The Panthers are dying. The people in Vietnam are dying, and we’re safe. But we’ve got to take some of the risk.”

  GERALD LEFCOURT (lead lawyer for the Panther 21)

  On every street corner you could see signs that said, “Free the 21.” You’d turn on the radio, a black station in particular, and the deejay would say, “Hey, it’s Tuesday. Let’s free the Twenty-One.” It was everywhere.*3

  We were arguing for the ability to have a fair trial. We were fighting for very typical civil liberties issues. We [the lawyers] couldn’t prepare for trial because the Panther defendants had been separated in seven different jails. They had no opportunity for bail because it was set at $100,000. Their mail was taken from them; many were in solitary with lights in their cells twenty-four hours a day.

  I brought a civil lawsuit to get the [Panther 21 defendants] together. Judge Patterson, a federal judge, took all of our claims and said, “You can’t do this to people. They need access to lawyers, and documents, and discovery.” As a result of that, they were all put together in Queens.

  JOHN MURTAGH, JR. (son of Judge Murtagh)

  My mother told me years later that when my father, New York Supreme Court justice John M. Murtagh, found out that he was the judge handling the Panther 21 trial, the first thing he did was have his law secretary, Tom Hughes, go out and research everything that Julius Hoffman did wrong, because the Chicago Seven trial had become such a circus. He didn’t want to be Julius Hoffman. He wanted to avoid the kind of circus that the Chicago Seven trial became.

  Credit 16.1

  “Free the Panther 21” became a common rallying cry all over the country, including New York City, where Youth Against War and Fascism held a demonstration for the Panthers on December 1, 1970.

  On the one hand, he came from a very traditional immigrant, American, law-and-order, “America-is-a-great-country” mindset, but at the same time—informed by his Catholicism and Christianity—he had a dedication to social justice that was somewhat ahead of its time. I think my father was completely sympathetic, and then some, to the plight of the poor, to suffering; and at the same time would be equally offended by anyone who was disrespectful to the legal system, disrespectful to those traditional institutions. It’s an interesting combination.

  GERALD LEFCOURT

  The Panthers were part of the movement for social change, and they had supporters, some of whom were famous people. On January 14, Felicia and Leonard Bernstein hosted a fundraiser for us. We were just about to start pretrial hearings. Martin Kenner and I had set up a Panthers defense fund to help us fund the trial and support the families of the defendants who were in jail. It was really Felicia’s party. She and Gail Lumet were friendly, and Gail had thrown us a party earlier. I would guess Leonard didn’t have much to do with it at all. He came in late.

  There were about ninety people at their Park Avenue apartment, including Barbara Walters, Otto Preminger, Sidney and Gail Lumet, and Julie Belafonte. I came with three Black Panther members, Donald Cox, Robert Bay, and Henry Miller, and several wives of the defendants.*4

  The New York Times, as a result of that party, wrote an editorial calling it “elegant slumming.” The editorial was disgusting.

  FALSE NOTE ON BLACK PANTHERS

  (New York Times editorial, January 16, 1970)

  Emergence of the Black Panthers as the romanticized darlings of the politico-cultural jet set is an affront to the majority of black Americans….The group therapy plus fund-raising soiree at the home of Leonard Bernstein…represents the sort of elegant slumming that degrades patrons and patronized alike.*5

  GERALD LEFCOURT

  We attacked the government and our defense was that the charges [against the Panther 21] were untrue, and that this was an attempt to destroy the Black Panther Party because they were fighting for the freedom of their people. This is a racist society: The government is racist, the FBI is racist, the police are racist, and that’s what our defense was about.

  CATHY WILKERSON (Flying Close to the Sun)*6

  Judge Murtagh seemed to be following in the belligerent steps of Chicago’s Judge Hoffman….In the New York Panther 21 Case, Murtagh seemed to take pleasure in summarily dismissing the normal rules of evidence to allow the police to introduce anything they wanted, while repeatedly denying defense motions. He had set up the courtroom with armed police, implying to the jury that he expected an armed attack at any moment. It was, Terry [Robbins] said, a way to prejudice jurors and make them frightened of the defendants, none of whom had ever engaged in armed political action.

  JOHN MURTAGH, JR.


  I was nine years old in February 1970, so I clearly didn’t appreciate the significance of any of this. My father was a judge, he went off to work every day, and I guess I dimly understood what a judge did. We lived on 217th Street, between Park Terrace East and Park Terrace West in Manhattan, and I have this very distinct memory of dreaming that my bed was being lifted and dropped, lifted and dropped. “Boom! Boom! Boom!” The next thing I remember is my mother coming into my room in the dark.

  It was February 21, Washington’s Birthday weekend. It was a neighborhood of probably 90 percent either prewar or immediately postwar eight-, nine-story apartment buildings—sort of a traditional Washington Heights–y kind of neighborhood. Except the north side of 219th Street, which runs east–west, and is only one block long, had a dozen semidetached brownstones, which we lived in.

  I remember my mother grabbing me out of bed. It was about two in the morning. The next thing I remember is standing in our kitchen in the dark—my parents were smart enough to not turn on any lights. There were very big windows in the back of our kitchen with translucent white sheer curtains. I can remember standing in the kitchen and seeing an orange glow. What they had done is they had set off three of these things that ultimately turned out to be nothing more than big Molotov cocktails. They were basically glass Tropicana orange juice bottles full of gasoline and rags; these guys were not sophisticated, at least not at that point.