Witness to the Revolution

by Clara Bingham

  RALPH METZNER (psychedelic psychiatrist)

  Albert Hofmann recognized right from the beginning, LSD is more than just another drug. When he was a hundred and one years old, he said, “I don’t think we have yet found the best way for these substances to be employed in society for human betterment.”

  That’s the way I feel. I think research needs to continue. Basically for the entire seventies and eighties and nineties, research for LSD’s therapeutic uses came to a standstill. It’s very limited now.

  DAVID FENTON (movement photographer)

  Culturally, it was a revolution. And it was instant. It was as fast as it took a tab of LSD to dissolve. People were never the same again. And that’s part of why, to me, shutting down all the clinical, psycho​pharmacolo​gical research on those drugs was a terrible mistake, and something I blame Tim Leary for. He flaunted it too much. He caused too much of a counterreaction.

  BILL AYERS

  When they captured Tim Leary [in Afghanistan in 1972] he did some time, and he told [the FBI] everything he could remember about us. That’s why we kept him at arm’s length. He never went to any of our houses, and he never really knew the names of anybody except me, Jeff, and Bernardine. But he did rat us out to the authorities, and that was bad.*17

  BRIAN FLANAGAN

  The problem is Tim snitched on a lot of us. When he came back to the United States and stood trial, he named names and told tales after we saved his ass.

  VIETNAM VETERANS

  RICK AYERS (army deserter, Weather Underground member)

  I stayed underground until 1977—seven years. The Weather Underground pretty much broke up around ’76 and I said, “I’m out of here.” I came back to the Bay Area. It was just before the Carter amnesty.*18 I had Dennis Cunningham for my lawyer, and all I had to do was fly into New York and turn myself in.

  They put me on a bus to Fort Dix, and there were probably two hundred deserters who came in that week. In other words, there were thousands coming in. A lot of them were just working-class people who stayed at their uncle’s farm. But the point is, the numbers were so high—that’s why Jimmy Carter did an amnesty. I got a less-than-honorable discharge. But if I’d been arrested in ’72, I would probably have gotten two years for desertion.*19

  MICHAEL UHL (Vietnam veterans organizer)

  The turnabout began with Reagan. The Vietnam debacle, the enormity of the war’s unpopularity and active resistance to it, was a real setback for managers of U.S. military policy and a threat for the militarized sector of the economy. Addressing the alienation of the veterans was an important vehicle to refashion the narrative of the Vietnam War.

  Reagan went against the grain of the conventional wisdom, which had already concluded that the war was a mistake, if not worse, and recast the war as a “noble cause.” This is around the time the “spat-upon vet” urban myth also took hold. I guess Reagan’s message resonated strongly among those who don’t study the background of historical events, and who simply wanted to feel good about themselves again, feel good about America. It could become cool to defend what in a prior state of mind a vet would have viewed as indefensible. So, in my view, Reagan exploited veterans’ ignorance and damaged psyches by promoting the empty gesture of belatedly welcoming us home. I say empty because he didn’t really want to back that up with services and benefits. Keep in mind that this was the same Reagan who vigorously opposed the creation of vet centers because he claimed they would “mollycoddle” the vets. When in fact, given the controversy of the war, and the numbers of postwar problems this generation of vets was facing, the vet centers were critical as a kind of halfway house for reintegrating ’Nam vets into society, and as a buffer to the VA, which was run then by World War II vets who had contempt for us, for “losing” our war.

  Today the campaign to commemorate Vietnam and honor its veterans serves a similar service, to further remove the onus of having participated in a bad war by abstracting the veterans from the bad history of the war, and honoring them for just showing up (thank you for your service), and for which the word valor serves as a convenient euphemism. Thankfully, there are still many of us who refuse to buy into that historical falsification, and who wish to see an honest portrayal of the Vietnam War passed down to future generations.

  JANE FONDA (actor, peace activist)

  My mail was opened, my house was broken into and ransacked by the FBI. I remember when we were filming Steelyard Blues in Berkeley, I put my daughter into a playschool called the Blue Fairyland, which was part of the Red Family collective. They followed my daughter to the Blue Fairyland. Everything was so misunderstood.

  In 1973 I filed a lawsuit against the Nixon administration to compel the various government agencies to admit they had been carrying on a campaign of harassment and intimidation in an attempt to silence and impugn me. When my case was settled in 1979, the FBI admitted that I had been under surveillance from 1970 to 1973 and that they had used counter​intelli​gence techniques, in violation of my constitutional rights, to “neutralize” me and “impair my personal and professional standing.” The CIA admitted that they had read my mail, and the FBI had seized without subpoena my bank records.*20 They tried to get [Armand] “Army” Archerd, the Variety columnist, to plant what they called “black propaganda,” which was rumors they knew weren’t true. Archerd didn’t do it, but he did write about it later, and he told me that they were trying to get him to say that I had threatened Nixon’s life. I also found out that I was on Nixon’s enemies list.

  When I came back from Hanoi in 1972,*21 the write-up about my trip was an inch in The New York Times. Nothing. What was going on behind the scenes at the White House was completely different. Nixon was freaking out. He instructed the Justice Department to get me for treason. It’s funny, because the lawyers for the Justice Department who were asked to do this ended up coming back and saying, “She really hasn’t done anything treasonous. There’s nothing here.”

  No big deal was made about my trip to Hanoi until Reagan was elected. Three hundred Americans had already gone [to North Vietnam], including Ramsey Clark [LBJ’s attorney general]. Then, during the Reagan administration, it was decided to use me as a way to discredit the antiwar movement, and to build a case against me as a traitor, even though I wasn’t legally a traitor, and they used state legislators. In Maryland, a state legislator refused to allow me to enter the state to give a speech, and another one refused to have any of my movies shown in his state. The term “Hanoi Jane” was coined and raised to an art form. It was very cleverly orchestrated.

  The photograph was taken in 1972, but it never really surfaced until Reagan. I have explained how the picture was taken and publicly apologized:

  …Here is my best, honest recollection of what happened: someone (I don’t remember who) led me towards the [anti-aircraft] gun, and I sat down….I hardly even thought about where I was sitting. The cameras flashed….It is possible that it was a setup, that the Vietnamese had it all planned. I will never know. But if they did I can’t blame them. The buck stops here. If I was used, I allowed it to happen…a two-minute lapse of sanity that will haunt me forever….But the photo exists, delivering its message regardless of what I was doing or feeling. I carry this heavy in my heart. I have apologized numerous times for any pain I may have caused servicemen and their families because of this photograph. It was never my intention to cause harm.*22

  Credit 26.2

  In a photograph that would haunt her for decades, Jane Fonda is in Hanoi on July 1, 1972, sitting on an anti-aircraft gun that was used to shoot down American planes during the intensive 1972 bombing raids on North Vietnam.

  Between what I actually did and what they said I did, I became a pariah. It was a little hard for me to get work for a while. There were threats of boycotts of my films. I did make movies that were very successful, but there was always this threat hanging in the air. A couple of years ago, I was going to go on the QVC channel to promote my book, and QVC got bombarded with threats
and they canceled me. That became a big story.

  The only thing that I would do differently is that I would have not sat on that anti-aircraft gun. I just didn’t even think what I was doing. I was about to leave. I had been there for two weeks, by myself. I never should have gone for that long and gone alone. Tom Hayden, who I was dating at the time, didn’t come with me. Although I was a grown-up, that was a big mistake, because no matter what reality was, that image says something. I will go to my grave regretting that.

  KENT STATE

  JOE LEWIS (injured Kent State student)

  While I was in the hospital, my sister got some phone calls saying that I deserved what I got, and I should die. I also got some hate mail. I was pretty cowed into keeping a low profile, because it seemed like not only was I shot, but public opinion considered me to be the evildoer. It’s a classic case of blaming the victim. It got even worse that fall, when the Portage County grand jury indicted twenty-five students and professors, including myself. I got charged with a misdemeanor of fourth-degree riot.

  BOB GILES (Akron Beacon Journal managing editor)

  The FBI investigated the shootings and issued a report in July 1970 saying that the National Guard was not in danger, and there was no need to shoot the students. In the months following, President Nixon empaneled the Scranton Commission, which basically said that there was no reason for the guards to shoot.*23 Then there was the Portage County grand jury, which was made up of about fifteen citizens, and they indicted twenty-five people, most of them students, some faculty—and it was critical of everybody but the Guard, and the Guard was totally exonerated. In 1974, a federal grand jury indicted eight guardsmen. Federal judge Frank Battisti dismissed the charges and acquitted the guardsmen.

  JOE LEWIS

  We couldn’t get into the courtroom and prosecute these guys [the national guardsmen], because these people, as agents of the state, were protected by the divine right of kings. They had something called sovereign immunity.*24

  The only legal avenue we had was to pursue a civil lawsuit, and we looked like a greedy bunch of people when we sued for $48 million. But that was our effort to get the truth out. We spent the whole summer of ’75 in the Cleveland courthouse. Across the aisle from us were the men who had shot us, and they were laughing and flirting with the court reporters. The judge was making all these pronouncements, introducing the governor when he came to testify as “Your Excellency,” and not allowing some of the photographic evidence to be seen by the jury, or showing the wounds of the students who were murdered, or shot, because it would be prejudicial. It was just a nightmare. It was a horrible, horrible experience. In some ways, it was worse than being shot.

  DEAN KAHLER (paralyzed Kent State student)

  The jury came back after six, seven days of deliberations, found in favor of the defendants, and against the plaintiffs in the civil trial. Then we had an appeal that worked its way all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, and if you read the Supreme Court’s decision, you’ll see that they were thoroughly disgusted with the way that it was handled in the original court, and remanded it back to trial to start all over again. They threw out that original verdict.

  When the second trial started, they heard a couple of witnesses, and Judge [William K.] Thomas, who was the new judge, a real judge, in Cleveland in 1979, looked over all the evidence. In the seventh week, we said we won’t settle unless we get an apology from the Guard. The judge said, “Well, how about if they take responsibility, and say that they shouldn’t have shot you?” None of us were happy with that, but everybody kept saying maybe we should accept it. We’ll get them on record saying they were wrong for shooting us, and taking responsibility for shooting us. We decided to settle at that point in time.

  LAUREL KRAUSE

  (sister of slain Kent State student Allison Krause)

  In the 1979 Kent State civil settlement, all we got was a statement of regret, and fifteen thousand dollars that we received for Allison.

  DEAN KAHLER

  The grand total for everything was $675,000. It was the era prior to large jury settlements. I didn’t particularly care for this, but all the people who weren’t as injured as I was said that they were only going to take a certain amount of money, and they wanted the most of it to go to me. So I ended up with $350,000. It helped me with medical bills. It’s still helping with medical bills.

  My view is we don’t have truth and justice yet on Kent State. But we got as much as we’re going to get for quite a while, because I don’t see the government wanting to open up an old wound.

  JOHN FILO (Kent State student photojournalist)

  I was a student that not only survived being shot at, but I was now a famous student over the death of other students. It was very hard for me. Back then you never went to a psychiatrist. You never went and sought help, because that meant you were crazy. You learned how to deal with it. And it screwed me up for a very, very long time.

  JOE LEWIS

  I think I had post-traumatic stress disorder, but about fifteen years after I was shot, I found that speaking about it was healing. Prior to that, I just cried. Then I realized that by speaking to students in colleges and high schools about the Kent State shootings, I was sharing the burden of sadness and truth with students, and I realized that it was a healing experience to talk about it. I’ve actually tried to share what I consider to be the truth about what happened, which is a government conspiracy and cover-up.

  I ask students to seek the truth of this case, because some of the testimony was locked away for seventy-five years. In 2050 that testimony should become available, and I encourage students who I’m speaking to now, that in 2050, to please pay attention and think of me.

  MADISON

  PAUL SOGLIN (mayor of Madison, Wisconsin)

  There was a spontaneous reunion of the left in the summer of 1989. On the last night, there was a dinner at a restaurant called the Second Story. Karl Armstrong got up and said, “I’ve apologized to the Fassnacht family. I’ve apologized to the university. I’ve apologized to the people of the state of Wisconsin. I want to apologize to you. We did something very wrong and you paid the consequences. We had no right to act on your behalf.” He was absolutely correct in saying that.

  PETER GREENBERG (student, Daily Cardinal reporter)

  One day, about thirty years ago, a letter came, addressed to me at Newsweek, with no return address. It was a single-spaced, typewritten diatribe against me. It said that because I worked at Newsweek, I had sold out. The postmark on it was Jackson, Mississippi. The handwriting reminded me of Leo’s [Burt], and I just figured that he was probably hiding in plain sight in the most unpredictable place you’d ever imagine: Jackson, Mississippi. He’s probably married, a Little League coach. I have no idea. That was as close as I got to thinking I might know where he was. The interesting thing about all of that is, I think if you ask anybody from the Cardinal who knew where Leo was, “Would you tell anybody?,” to this day they’d say, “No.”

  BILL DYSON

  Leo Burt is a fugitive, and they would prosecute him, because a person died. Last heard, he was in Canada, allegedly crossed over the Niagara Falls. But for forty-four years Burt has remained at large, the last phantom of the 1960s.

  * * *

  *1 Eight antiwar activists calling themselves the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into a small FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, on March 8, 1971, and stole more than one thousand classified documents. They leaked the documents to the press and publicly exposed for the first time the existence of the FBI’s secret counter​intelli​gence operation (COINTELPRO) and its illegal efforts to repress, harass, and disrupt hundreds of liberal and left individuals and political groups. The Media files showed that the FBI was investigating two hundred different left-leaning political groups. The discovery led to a congressional investigation into the FBI’s actions chaired by Senator Frank Church (Democrat of Idaho) in 1975. The FBI never caught the eight burglars, and some of the
Citizens’ Commission group went public for the first time in 2014 with the publication of Betty Medsger’s book The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI (New York: Knopf, 2014).

  *2 Through the use of fake letters, rumors spread to the press, informants, and agents provocateurs, the FBI incited a rivalry between Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver. The ensuing internal conflict led to a rash of brutal murders in the early seventies of Panthers by Panthers.

  *3 Panther party chairman Huey Newton became increasingly violent, his mental health deteriorated, and his drug problem escalated. In August 1974 he was charged with murdering eighteen-year-old Kathleen Smith. Newton fled to Havana and Elaine Brown took over the party chairmanship position. Newton was shot and killed in Oakland in 1989 by a drug dealer.

  *4 The New York Times published the first excerpt of what became known as the Pentagon Papers on June 13, 1971. Attorney General John Mitchell forced the Times to stop publication with a court injunction after the paper published three articles containing classified information from the study, but The Washington Post followed on June 18, 1971, and published a series of articles based on the documents Daniel Ellsberg had given the newspaper. The Supreme Court lifted the administration’s newspaper censorship order on June 30, and Ellsberg was eventually indicted.