I had a button on at the top of my army jacket that said, “Crush Nixon.” It had a picture of Nixon’s face and it said, “Crush him.” I felt bad, so I tried to put my hair over it to cover it. I couldn’t believe I did that, but I felt bad that he would see a button that said, “Crush Nixon.” There’s my upbringing.
BUD KROGH
As time passed, the sun began to come up and there was increased concern by the Secret Service. I think we only had four agents when we were there, which was just so far below what you would need in case anything were to go south, and the agents were not happy campers. Dr. [Walter] Tkach, his doctor, was there and Manolo Sanchez, his longtime personal butler. I was the only White House staff person that was at the Lincoln Memorial portion of this morning.
He got in his car, and I had a car right behind his. It was my understanding we were going back to the White House, but he decided he wanted to go up to Capitol Hill. We drove through the city up Constitution Avenue, and by now there were a lot more people that were visible on the Mall. We drove up to the House of Representatives side of the Capitol. This was before we had all kinds of security. It was still early in the morning, maybe five thirty. We walked up the stairs and into the House chamber and the president asked Manolo to give a speech. I had gone into the House side, and was up above in the balcony, observing this. Manolo was very reluctant to speak. “No, please, go on up, give a speech,” the president said. So Manolo did. I forget exactly what he said, but I think it was short.
LAUREE MOSS
After the president drove away, the Secret Service men throw my friend and me and Bob, who has been taking pictures this entire time, into the backseat of a car, and they say, “If you give us the pictures, we will pick one, and we will publicize what happened.” So I thought it was either give them the film or Bob was having his camera taken away from him. We didn’t think of this as being anything important in history, or anything important to the world. We just wanted to go to the demonstration. I think they took us to some basement and took the roll of film from Bob, developed one of the pictures, and gave the roll of film back to Bob. Bob got the camera back, which was most important, and he got the roll of film back, and we went to the demonstration, never thinking twice about what had just happened.
RICHARD REEVES
The president came back to his office, sat in a chair, and wrote a thirteen-page account of what happened. Not all in his favor. He thought it was history.
Credit 20.6
In reaction to the invasion of Cambodia and the killing of four Kent State students, one hundred thousand young activists hold a last-minute rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial on May 9, 1970.
PHOTOGRAPH BY DAYID FENTON.
BUD KROGH
The protest demonstration, with one hundred thousand students, took place that day. It was pretty warm as I recall, and the day went by without any real confrontations. I was, frankly, so relieved that we got him back safely. That was just my overriding emotion. I also had the feeling that he’d [Nixon] really made an effort. I had never seen anything like this. This was a totally nonscripted event. It was a pretty raw experience. But we managed to get through it. Everybody was safe.
TIME, MAY 18, 1970, “A WAR WITH WAR”
Coretta King, David Dellinger, Benjamin Spock and other matriarchs and patriarchs of the movement were there, along with newer personalities like Jane Fonda. Their audience was made up primarily of the instant army of the young, the mobile children who received basic training in the late ’60s, who can travel light and fast for the peace movement and for their own enjoyment. Some 100,000 of them were there on the Ellipse just south of the White House.
JANE FONDA (actor, peace activist)
It was the first national demonstration that I was asked to speak at. Donald Duncan asked me to speak on behalf of the GI movement, and they basically wrote a speech for me. It was scary to stand on that platform. As far as you could see, there were people, all kinds of people, and there were a lot of soldiers in uniform. Of course, there were a lot of guards, military people, that were armed and keeping order. My job was to say, “The soldiers are not our enemy. They are, in growing numbers, understanding that the war is wrong. We cannot treat them as the enemy.” I wish that all these people who accused me of being anti-soldier knew that I’m the one that said, “They’re not the enemy. They didn’t start the war. Let’s be real clear, the enemy are the architects of the war.” So that was my inauguration to that post. I opened my speech with “Greetings, fellow bums!” because Nixon had just called demonstrators bums a few days earlier.*5
BRIAN FLANAGAN (Weathermen member)
The day of the protest in D.C., May 9, we put a bomb in the bathroom of the National Guard Headquarters in Washington, D.C. That’s what we did basically, and that’s what became tiresome to me. We put bombs in bathrooms because that was the easiest place to blow up. After the townhouse, there was no antipersonnel [bombing] done.
LAUREE MOSS
As we were driving back home to Detroit after the rally, we pick up a hitchhiker. We ask him where was he going, and he said, “To Berkeley.” And I said, “Well, we’re going to Detroit.” He said, “I’ll go there.” He and I were kind of attracted to each other. So he and I were in the backseat smoking pot, Bob and my friend are in the front seat, and we drove home. We got home, and this guy Larry ends up living with me for six months.
The next morning, I straightened my hair and went to work. I was a social worker working in a psychiatric clinic for emotionally disturbed children and the director called me into his office, and he said, “Is this you?” I replied, “What do you mean, is this me?” He shows me the Detroit Free Press, and about six other newspapers, and on the front page is a picture of Nixon and me. The caption said, “The picture of President Nixon on a dawn visit to the Lincoln Memorial was made by Robert Moustakas, a student from Detroit, Michigan, here for the antiwar demonstration.” It didn’t have my name on it. But it was next to impossible not to identify me. So my director said, “What are you going to tell the parents of the children that you work with?” I looked like a hippie radical in the picture, but at work I didn’t.
Credit 20.7
Just before dawn on May 9, 1970, President Nixon made a surprise visit to talk to antiwar protesters at the Lincoln Memorial. Nixon said that he told the stunned protesters, “I know that probably most of you think I’m an SOB, but I want you to know that I understand just how you feel.” Detroit social worker Lauree Moss is facing the camera on Nixon’s right, and her friend Bob Moustakas took this photograph.
I said, “I quit.” And he said, “What do you mean, you quit?” I said, “I’ll terminate with the children, and I’ll stay another month, but I’m going to quit.” He asked, “Where are you going to go?” I said, “I’m going to move to Berkeley.” Never in my life have I done anything like that. My life was mostly very straight and narrow, except for, of course, smoking pot, and helping street people, and believing in civil rights and the rights of other people.
The very next day, Rolling Stone calls me. How they found out who I am, I have no idea. They call me, and they want to know all the wonderful political things I said to President Nixon. When I said it didn’t happen, he wouldn’t talk politics with me, they were very mean. “How could you miss this opportunity? What a fool. I bet you were high, and you went to D.C. just to have a good time.” It was pretty bad. I hung up. Then I began to feel more and more like, “Oh God, I hope this will be over soon.” The very next day, the picture of the president and me was on the cover of Time, Life, and Newsweek.
Nixon changed my life. It was a turning point for me. I moved to Berkeley with Larry to become part of the movement called “Radical Psychiatry.” My whole world was turned upside down. I lived in a commune. I never wanted to get married, but at that time in my life, I wanted to get my parents off my back. Larry had dropped out of rabbinical school because of the war, so he and I wrote our own marriage ceremony, and we drove back
to Detroit and had a wedding in the rabbi’s chamber. We got a lot of money, about fifteen thousand dollars, which we kept in the bank, and when we divorced a year later we split it. Larry bought a bread van, which he turned into a house. I started going to consciousness-raising groups and came out as a lesbian.
ALISON TEAL (New York City mayoral staffer)
I was twenty-four years old and working for John Lindsay, New York City’s liberal Republican mayor. In honor of the Kent State students who had been killed, Lindsay ordered that all of the city’s flags be flown at half-mast. I don’t remember if the police and fire departments followed it at that time. But they probably didn’t. I remember that all the police cars had on their headlights in the middle of the day to protest the lowering of the flags.*6
On May eighth about one thousand students gathered at noon to hold a memorial service and protest the killing of the students at Kent State. They started on Wall Street and moved up to Federal Hall. It was lunchtime and there were a bunch of Wall Street people out, the streets were very crowded. About two hundred construction workers wearing hard hats and carrying American flags started chasing the protesters through the streets and beating them up with lead pipes and crowbars. The police were essentially going along with it, and they stood by while the hippies were being attacked. About seventy people were injured, twenty were hospitalized, and they set up a sort of hospital for all of the injured people at Trinity Church. I remember even the Episcopal flag was torn down in front of the church by the rioters. A mob pushed through security at City Hall, went up to the roof, and changed the flag back from half to full mast. I think there were only six arrests. Lindsay spoke the next day about being very disappointed in the police force and saying that they were responsible for allowing the hard-hat riot to go on.
CARL BERNSTEIN (Washington Post reporter)
The Nixon people wanted to make the movement look worse than it was—I don’t think Nixon was sitting there saying, “Let’s beat the shit out of these people.” I don’t think that was his thing at all, but that’s certainly where some of his people went with it. But they did want to show not just the Silent Majority, but that muscular forces, meaning those perceived as male, macho, hard-hat, truck-driving men, were out there on their side, and portray the demonstrators as elite, effete, and to the extent that they could, radical.
STEPHEN BULL
In Manhattan, there was some sort of a demonstration going on after Kent State and these guys were burning American flags and the like. These construction workers, the so-called hard hats, had had enough. They went down, and I guess they reprimanded the demonstrators rather severely.
I think it was Chuck Colson who thought, Let’s get these guys down here, give them a pat on the head. So they trotted them in to see the president and meet with him in the Roosevelt Room. Peter Brennan was head of the building and construction trades union then, and after Nixon’s reelection, he became secretary of labor. I think what endeared him to the White House was his people decided they were not going to brook such conduct from the protesters.
Credit 20.8
On May 8, 1970, two hundred construction workers waving American flags confronted one thousand students who were holding a memorial service on Wall Street for the four students killed at Kent State. Police stood back and watched as the construction workers beat up the kids in what would be called “the hard-hat riot.” About twenty people were hospitalized and seventy injured.
ALISON TEAL
Lindsay was so far from working class. They called him the “Mayor from Hanoi” and “the red mayor.”
MICHAEL KAZIN
As most historians of the sixties will tell you, and me included, the war was incredibly unpopular. But the antiwar movement was also unpopular, because it was perceived as being primarily privileged white kids. We did stupid things like waving Viet Cong flags and burning American flags and saying this country sucks. Most Americans were not ready to hear that, in whatever variation. And they were right not to want to hear it, because as I’ve realized since, there are a lot of good things about the country, and the problem was not the country. The problem was the people who ran it.
* * *
*1 The New Haven Nine was among the highest-profile Black Panther trials. Nine Panthers, including their leaders, Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins, were tried for the murder of fellow Panther Alex Rackley (age nineteen), who was suspected of being an FBI informant. A huge, peaceful pro-Panther rally gathered at Yale on May 1, the weekend before jury selection for the trial began, and protesters were fed and housed by the sympathetic Yale administration and students. Ultimately, three of the Panthers were convicted for the murder and Bobby Seale, Ericka Huggins, and the other four were acquitted.
*2 George Sams, a Panther field marshal with a violent history, claimed that Bobby Seale had ordered him to kill nineteen-year-old Alex Rackley, whom Sams accused of being an FBI informant. In the end, Sams pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, and two other Panthers whom Sams ordered to shoot Rackley were also convicted. Many members of the Black Panther Party (including Huggins) believe that Sams was an FBI agent provocateur, but this has not been definitively proven. Sams and the prosecution did not have solid evidence against Seale, who, with Huggins was seen by many outside the courtroom as a target of government repression. Ericka Huggins had a harder defense than Seale because her voice could be heard on an audiotape ordering Rackley’s torture, which, she testified, she did under threat from Sams. The Seale-Huggins trial began in October 1970 and ended May 25, 1971, with a hung jury, and the judge dismissing all charges.
*3 “Free Bobby, Free Ericka” became the rallying cry by members of the left who believed the Panthers had been set up by the police and the FBI and could not get a fair trial. Even the president of Yale, Kingman Brewster, stated: “…I am skeptical of the ability of Black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the U.S.”
*4 Patton, the epic biopic about General George S. Patton during World War II, won the Academy Award for best motion picture in 1970.
*5 On May 1, 1970, Nixon called student protesters “bums…blowing up the campuses” in a conversation with Pentagon employees. On May 8, Nixon was asked about his “bums” comment at a press conference. This was his answer: “On university campuses the rule of reason is supposed to prevail over the rule of force. And when students on university campuses burn buildings, when they engage in violence, when they break up furniture, when they terrorize their fellow students and terrorize the faculty, then I think ‘bums’ is perhaps too kind a word to apply to that kind of person. Those are the kind I was referring to.”
*6 Mayor John Lindsay was the target of blue-collar anger because of his patrician style and liberal policies toward blacks. One sign protesting the lowering of the flags to half-mast read, “Lindsay drops the flag more times than a whore drops her pants.” Time, May 25, 1970, p. 21.
CHAPTER 21
UNDERGROUND
(May–July 1970)
If you happen to accidentally recognize a fugitive at a movie theater or rock festival, don’t freak out. Stay calm. Quietly go up to the person and empty out all of your pockets and give all your belongings to him or her, especially money, food, vitamin C, credit cards, identification, checkbooks, pot, driver’s license, social security card.
Give the fugitive your beads, headband, the shirt off your back and then a big hug and a kiss. Helping and hiding a fugitive is one of the best acts of a human being.
—JERRY RUBIN, We Are Everywhere
One hundred and fifty weathermen shed their identities in the spring of 1970 and waded into the alternate universe of Vietnam War deserters, resisters, Black Panthers, Catholic radicals, drug dealers, and hippies who made up “the underground.” The FBI began its hunt to find the Weathermen, and J. Edgar Hoover declared that their leader, Bernardine Dohrn, was “the most dangerous woman in America.” Soon to rename themselves the Weather Underground, the Weathermen’s numbers were small in comparison to th
e thousands of others in hiding. The Pentagon reported 73,000 deserters in 1969 and another 89,000 in 1970. Seventy percent headed to Canada and other countries but thousands remained in America, hiding in plain sight, wearing disguises and using false names.
BERNARDINE DOHRN (Weather Underground leader)
That spring of ’70, when we were newly underground, the invasion of Laos and Cambodia was followed by the biggest student strike in the history of the United States. Even though SDS had been lost, suddenly there was a vibrant, national student movement. The killings at Kent State and Jackson State propelled both the black and white student movements to accelerate in their organization, strategies, and tactics.
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