Credit 20.2
The Yale campus in New Haven, Connecticut, is flooded with thousands of students and activists for a May Day rally calling for a fair trial for the Black Panther New Haven Nine.
PHOTOGRAPH BY STEPHEN SHAMES.
My daughter was three weeks old or so when I got to New Haven and three months old when I was arrested for conspiracy with the intent to commit murder on May 22, 1969. I did not murder anyone; I did not ask that anybody be murdered; I didn’t conspire to do anything. However, there was an FBI informant [George Sams]—I didn’t know this originally, I just knew he was twisted and sadistic. A man came into the party office bringing another man [Alex Rackley] who he held captive and eventually orchestrated his murder.
Bobby Seale was in town speaking at Yale, and because I was living in New Haven, this man, George Sams, reported back to the FBI that Bobby Seale and I had led that conspiracy. And that is why I was arrested in the middle of the night. Sometimes I wonder why I wasn’t killed that night, but I think that they were trying to keep us alive so that there could be this awful trial—and it was really awful. I think they wanted to make the black community and the movement community hate us. But that isn’t what happened; it was exposed in the trial that the FBI had set up the murder because the guy who they had hired to do so wasn’t psychologically well, so he couldn’t endure on the witness stand.
The judge was relatively kind. The DA was, like many district attorneys, not about human beings but about winning, and my lawyers, Charles Garry and Catherine Roraback, were phenomenal. Bobby Seale and I were on trial together. I didn’t have anything to do with how the trials were separated out. But two men were tried separately from us. One of them was the person to whom George Sams said, “Pull the trigger,” and he did.*2
It took three months to pick the jury for my case, the longest voir dire in the history of the United States to that point, because of fear-based and racist thinking. I spent fourteen months in jail awaiting trial, and six months on trial. It was such a circus. The United States was on trial.*3
TOM HAYDEN
So, just as we were trying to deal with all the tensions at Yale, Cambodia happens. And that adds to the total volatility of everything, the unpredictability of everything. The rally then becomes the launching pad for a call for a nationwide student strike, and in the response that was being generated, Kent State happens. Then Jackson State happens. Then there’s this big, pretty spontaneous and massive demonstration where people are surging around the attorney general’s office, the Justice Department in Washington. And then Kingman Brewster, Jr. [president of Yale], led a delegation of Yale students, a thousand of them, to lobby Congress.
Credit 20.3
Black Panther leader Ericka Huggins (pictured on this banner) was on trial with cofounder Bobby Seale. They were both accused of conspiring to murder fellow Black Panther Alex Rackley. Ultimately, the charges against them would be dismissed.
PHOTOGRAPH BY STEPHEN SHAMES.
Credit 20.4
Student strike graffiti on the Hall of Languages at Syracuse University, May 1970.
So now it’s everything from the most revolutionary to the most mainstream, all temporarily united against Cambodia and Nixon. It was a week of escalating madness. It was one jolt after another. They seemed to just keep on coming. People predicted a breakdown or revolution. The country seemed to be literally out of control, and we were improvising whatever tactics we could in the midst of something that was much larger than any one organization could handle.
HARVARD CRIMSON, MAY 7, 1970
324 UNIVERSITIES STRIKE NATIONALLY; PROTESTS EXPAND
By Marion E. Mccollom
…Yesterday morning, students at N.Y.U. seized three buildings,…demanding $100,000 ransom for the Black Panther Defense Fund before releasing the buildings.
Governor Ronald Reagan of California yesterday afternoon asked all seven state universities to close until Sunday, so that students could consider “the grave sequence of current events.”
MICHAEL KAZIN (Harvard SDS leader)
There were student strikes, there were building takeovers, there were spontaneous demonstrations, there were smoke-ins. Ultimately, the count was seven hundred campuses and 2.5 million students. A lot of high schools, too. It just felt like if the college was not on strike, it must have been a pro-Nixon college. Because anybody who was opposed to Nixon and opposed to the war at that point was going to try to do something, especially after Kent State. Who knows what would have happened without Kent State? And Jackson State, for black students, was just as important. Radicals like me tried to make Jackson State just as important as Kent State, even though the press didn’t play it up. We wanted to show that the Nixon administration and their allies were willing to kill antiwar demonstrators who were peacefully demonstrating, and we couldn’t abide that. That was true for liberals as well as radicals like me.
I went to New Haven first. There was this big pro-Panther demonstration in New Haven. I tried to be everywhere. Wherever the action was, I wanted to be. I went back to Cambridge, and helped organize demonstrations, including the big one with thirty-five thousand students marching from the Boston Common to Soldiers Field in Cambridge, on the Harvard campus. A few of us freelancers decided that we couldn’t have this demonstration be peaceful, and we decided when we got to Harvard Square, we would basically stage a riot. I hope that the statute of limitations has passed on these things.
HARVARD CRIMSON
POLICE DISPERSE CROWDS IN SQUARE
FOLLOWING PEACEFUL DEMONSTRATION
By M. David Landau and Mark H. O’Donoghue, May 9, 1970
An estimated 650 state and city policemen dispersed a crowd of 500 demonstrators who had occupied the Square for almost two hours last night. The crowd—largely high school and non-Harvard students…had marched to Shannon Hall, headquarters of Harvard ROTC….
The group had intended to occupy or burn down Shannon Hall….
TOM HAYDEN
The strike just happened, and it was led, in a lot of cases, by student governments. It was larger than any other student strike. In the spring of ’68, from Columbia to Paris, there were more countries involved with student strikes. But ’70 was so big that I think it was the turning point for the establishment. They knew that if they continued the war, there would be some kind of permanent rupture in American society.
Credit 20.5
Angry protesters flock to the Boston Common after the Kent State shootings, May 5, 1970.
BUD KROGH
In one of the planning sessions at the Justice Department, the idea occurred to me that it would be better to protect the White House if we circled it with buses rather than a SWAT team or riot police. I think that proved to be true. I’ve always felt that if you removed the provocation—I think sometimes a line of police can almost provoke violence—and have something inert like a bus—what can you do to a bus? You can punch the tires out, break the windows, and write graffiti on it, but it’s not going to be a physical interaction. So we did that the night before the May 9 demonstration. We circled the White House with buses, and we had the Eighty-second Airborne military unit guarding the Old Executive Office Building from the inside. They came in army trucks in the middle of the night, and we had an extra police and Secret Service detail. It was a siege environment.
STEPHEN BULL (Nixon personal aide)
There was a movie theater between the residence and the East Wing. It accommodates probably a dozen people, and that’s where Nixon would be watching a movie. You didn’t have videotape back then. You’d bring a projector up there into the White House. I think he saw the movie Patton about three dozen times. Some of the famous lines in the movie are “Americans have never lost a war.” “Americans love a winner, and will not tolerate a loser.” I think Nixon liked the no-nonsense approach that General Patton, or the actor who played Patton, George C. Scott, took. I think that’s the point. He liked no-nonsense guys.*4
BUD KROGH
STEPHEN BULL
I don’t know how many buses there were, but they totally encircled Lafayette Park. They went completely around E Street, the south portion, where you can’t drive anymore, separating the south grounds from the Ellipse. So the buses went all around. The recollection I have is that inside what now was an enclosure, it was quiet and there was no activity. You’d look out onto Pennsylvania Avenue, and there was no one there because it had been cordoned off. But on the exterior, you could hear the noise of what was going on outside. Walking through the Executive Office Building, there were troops sitting down in the hallway prepared in the event that they were needed. That was the environment. Without making a value judgment about who was right or who was wrong, that’s what was going on in this country. You have to have armed troops in the Executive Office Building, potentially to deal with violent demonstrators who might try to attack, and these are Americans. It was quite a time.
If you didn’t experience it back then, you would have no idea how close we were, as a country, to revolution. It was a very violent time, a very divisive time. And I think people on both sides will say that.
BUD KROGH
I got to the Secret Service command post at about four fifteen in the morning and over the loudspeaker came, “Searchlight is on the lawn.” Searchlight was the president’s Secret Service code name. I asked the person there, “What does that mean?” And the Secret Service agent said, “Well, it means the president is out on the lawn.”
I immediately called John Ehrlichman and woke him up, and told him what was going on. He said, “Go over and render assistance as quickly as you can.” So I hung up, and left the Secret Service command post, which was in the basement of the Old Executive Office Building, and rushed across West Executive Drive, and went through the West Wing, and out to the Rose Garden just in time to see the president’s limousine leaving. I immediately commandeered another car and found out from the Secret Service where the president was going, and followed them up to the Lincoln Memorial. I think we got there around four thirty in the morning. It was pretty early; it was still dark when we got there. I followed him up the stairs.
RICHARD REEVES (journalist, Nixon biographer)
We know Nixon had trouble sleeping. He either drank too much, or just didn’t have much of a tolerance for alcohol. I believe the latter. I don’t think the guy was sitting up there downing martinis all night. But he often was up at night, walking around, like any other politician. You have to start from the beginning. Nixon thought he was right, and he thought he would go up to the Lincoln Memorial totally on his own. He didn’t tell anybody—the only aide around was a guy named Bud Krogh, who was a wonderful man. He was only thirty then.
LAUREE MOSS (peace protester from Detroit)
It was early dawn and those of us who were there were people who had driven all night long. People were just milling around and waiting for the march to begin. That’s when we saw a big black limousine pull up. Then we see the president walk up the stairs to the top of the Lincoln monument, and then all of a sudden people mill around him. It was quite shocking, because he looked exhausted, greasy. His face was strained. I’m curious what’s going on so I walk to the top of the steps. I can’t quite get into the circle but I see that people are trying to get him to answer questions. They’re throwing questions at him, and he’s not answering anything; I couldn’t hear anything.
BUD KROGH
When we got there, there were not a lot of people around. It was dark, but you could see clusters of young people. There were people that had come from all over the eastern part of the country to join in this demonstration. You could see them along the Mall. The president was up at the top of the stairs of the Lincoln Memorial, right inside the first set of columns. I walked up and stood close so I could hear what he was saying. It was quite a long time, I think thirty or forty minutes. It wasn’t so much a conversation, but more of a monologue in which he talked about lots of different issues that were surprising to me. I think he was making a really genuine effort to reach out to these young people, to explain what he was thinking and feeling. He started by saying that he understood how they felt about their opposition to the war. He went back to his own history before World War II, where he actually sympathized with [Neville] Chamberlain’s view of trying to avoid World War II because he felt that war was very bad for the U.S. But he came to change his mind after a while, and concluded that Churchill was correct, and that Chamberlain was wrong, and he was trying to show the protesters that, while he understood their clear interest in trying to stop the war, he felt that the way that it was done was very important, and he was aligning himself with the Churchill view, that you had to continue to fight even when it looked like getting out of the war was better. But I believe he was also trying to empathize with the young people that were there.
I don’t remember, specifically, what he said about his Quaker background, but he was explaining that he had come out of a pacifist tradition. One young person said, “You know, we’re prepared to die for what we believe in.” And he said he understood that, and what he was trying to do was to make the kind of decisions so that no one would have to die for their country. He was trying to reach out, and I could tell that they could not believe that he was there. It was almost like a stunned silence. I observed a lot of young people that looked like they’d been up for a very long time, and had driven long distances. I think you saw some peace symbols, and some military-style jackets. It was just a bunch of people that really looked like they had dropped everything to come to the city to demonstrate. They looked tired and just a little bit awestruck.
RICHARD REEVES
I think that Nixon thought he had a message to tell these kids. In his own odd way, whether he had Asperger’s or whatever, he thought he could connect with them. He tried, and it was a brave thing to do, too.
BUD KROGH
Listening very closely to what the president was saying, I was amazed at the scope of the things that he talked about. He talked about how important it was to see the world, and get out and understand it, and travel. He touted the importance of traveling around the world, and then he mentioned something that I thought was quite interesting. He talked about the environmental programs he had initiated. I don’t know which bills he had passed at the time, but he said we can clean up the environment and take care of all of that, but it’s really the matters of the spirit that are most important. He said there’s a spiritual hunger in man, which is one of the most important things that we have to respond to. And I’m not sure how most of these young people responded to that, but he was speaking from his heart. He mentioned that he was a strong supporter of the American Indian, and he really wanted to help restore their self-determination. He said that our country took these proud people and just decimated them in so many ways. You could just feel the pain that caused him. He spoke very specifically about that.
To me, what was almost stunning was that he talked about China and how it was his hope that during his administration he would be able to visit China. I think what he was articulating was a policy initiative that he had been thinking about for a long time. I think I’m hearing something here that is probably a pretty deep secret in the administration, and here he is, sharing it with this group of people that I’m not quite sure would pick up on the significance of what he was saying. I did, because I figured that if he’s talking about visiting it during his term, at least something must be under way. I was really stunned by that. I was not on the national security staff. I was on the domestic
policy staff. But, you know enough when you’re in that place to realize that something like that being said is not just a throwaway line.
When the kids were killed at Kent State, that was devastating to so many of us because it was so unnecessary. I think that the president had to have felt some grief about that, realizing that his decision to go into Cambodia had triggered these demonstrations at the universities, and that that decision did lead to these direct confrontations. When he was out there talking to these kids—you had a sense of just needing to reach out and let them know what he was feeling.
LAUREE MOSS
I went back down to the bottom of the memorial steps and told my friend, Nothing’s going on up there, it’s ridiculous. We’re talking, and all of a sudden, we see our friend Bob Moustakas, who has been taking pictures with his Leica the whole time, talking to the president. Nixon asked Bob, “What are you doing here?” Bob said, “Oh, we came for the demonstration.” Then he asked Bob, “Well, who are you with?” And Bob points to us. So then they both walked down to us, and the president is now approaching me, introducing himself to me and my friend, and Bob is taking pictures of us. The president asked, “How old are you?” I said twenty-two. “Oh, you’re the same age as my daughter, Patricia. Oh, how great is that? Are you in college?” I told him that I graduated from Michigan undergrad and went to graduate school at Wayne State in Detroit and that I’m a social worker. Then I said, “What happened? How come you invaded Cambodia? How come you allowed those kids to be killed?” And he goes, “I’m not here to talk politics. I’m here to be with you in sympathy.” He was trying to avoid conversation of anything political. He said he was just joining us in our grief at what happened to the students at Kent State. I smelled alcohol on his breath. I’m very sensitive to that.
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