In Search of the Lost Chord

by Danny Goldberg

  In an article for the Nation in 2002 about the fortieth anniversary of the Port Huron Statement, Hayden still sounded pissed: “While the draft Port Huron Statement included a strong denunciation of the Soviet Union, it wasn’t enough for LID leaders like Michael Harrington. They wanted absolute clarity, for example, that the United States was blameless for the nuclear arms race . . . In truth, they seemed threatened by the independence of the new wave of student activism . . .”

  During the early part of his career, when he was best known for political protest songs, Bob Dylan seemed to share Hayden’s irritation with the old left. In late 1963, when Dylan was presented with the Tom Paine Award by the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, which had been formed in the early fifties to oppose McCarthyism, he made a contrarian speech that signaled his independence from any political dogma. Shortly thereafter, Dylan briefly visited the SDS National Council meeting and told SDS leader Todd Gitlin that he had been turned off by “these bald-headed potbellied people sitting out there in suits.” (It was around this time that the phrase “generation gap” became a useful part of understanding certain conflicts.)

  The role of the student left increased dramatically after August 7, 1964, shortly before the Democratic National Convention, when President Johnson pressured the US Congress into passing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that set the stage for escalation of the war in Vietnam, without a formal declaration of war. Only two senators, Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska, opposed it. President Johnson had the good fortune of being opposed in the 1964 election by the conservative Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, whose rhetoric was so extreme (including the suggestion that he would use nuclear weapons in Vietnam) that Johnson was able to run as the “peace” candidate. Nonetheless, disappointment by civil rights activists about the Democratic Convention, anxiety about the Cold War, and the SDS critique of American-style capitalism fostered activism to the left of the Democratic Party on many college campuses.

  In October 1964, the Free Speech Movement was launched at the University of California, Berkeley, when a former graduate student named Jack Weinberg was arrested while manning a CORE table, defying university rules against political activism on campus. A series of campus protests ensued and students were supported by numerous activists, including Joan Baez. On November 3, President Johnson defeated Senator Goldwater in a landslide, but this had no effect on the underlying issues at Berkeley. On December 2, 1964, the most prominent of the student leaders, Mario Savio, made a famous speech on the steps of Sproul Hall that concluded, “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop!”

  Almost immediately after Johnson’s reelection, he ordered an escalation of the war. Opposition, led by the peace groups, immediately grew. The antiwar movement initially focused on the academics and other experts who had the background to contradict the rationales advanced by the policy intellectuals of the Johnson administration. SDS organized the first major teach-in at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, on March 24 and 25, 1965. The event was attended by about 3,500, and consisted of debates, lectures, movies, and musical events aimed at protesting the war.

  Not to be outdone, Berkeley radicals created the Vietnam Day Committee (VDC) and produced their own thirty-six-hour teach-in beginning May 21, 1965, which attracted 30,000 participants. The State Department was invited by the VDC to send a representative, but declined. Two UC Berkeley political science professors who had agreed to speak in defense of President Johnson’s handling of the war withdrew at the last minute. An empty chair was set aside on the stage with a sign taped on the back reading, Reserved for the State Department.

  The attendees included several who would emerge as key figures in the antiwar movement over the ensuing decade, including perennial Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas, independent left-wing journalist I.F. Stone, Buddhist scholar Alan Watts, satirist and editor of the Realist Paul Krassner, comedian Dick Gregory, novelist Norman Mailer, Bob Moses from SNCC, Yale professor Staughton Lynd, Stanley Sheinbaum of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, and folk singer Phil Ochs.

  The teach-ins helped frame the antiwar side of the debate for the next several years. Separate and apart from long-running pacifist arguments against the Cold War was a critique of the dubious establishment rationale for this particular conflict. President Eisenhower had concocted the “domino theory” that suggested that if Vietnam fell under Communist control, there would be a chain reaction that could take over the entire Asian continent, including Japan, and then represent a profound threat to the United States. For many young people who were not in thrall to McCarthy-era paranoia, this simply did not pass the smell test. Moreover, the South Vietnamese government that the US was supporting often acted like a tyrannical dictatorship rather than expressing anything resembling the “democratic” values that the US claimed to support. The North Vietnamese president, Ho Chi Minh, was depicted by the Johnson administration as a puppet of the Soviet Union and Communist China, but in reality Ho was a nationalist (as well as an accomplished poet) and not a villain worthy of an American war.

  Earlier in the sixties there had been tension between the South Vietnamese Buddhist community and the Catholic minority who ruled the government. Some Buddhist monks had burned themselves to death to protest discrimination by the American-backed government. A mirror of this horrible image came home on November 2, 1965, when American Quaker Norman R. Morrison immolated himself in front of the Pentagon.

  By this time, Joel and I were hanging out a lot with Peter Kinoy, a senior whose father was Arthur Kinoy, a brilliant and well-known left-wing attorney who had filed the last appeal for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, two US citizens executed for committing espionage, and later represented Martin Luther King Jr. and many others in the civil rights and peace movements.

  On November 27, 1965, SDS staged a March on Washington to protest the war. Joel, Peter, and I organized a busload of Fieldston kids to attend. The marquee speakers were Coretta Scott King and Dr. Benjamin Spock, but it was the new SDS president, Carl Oglesby, who made the speech that I remembered most clearly on the bus ride back to New York.

  Speaking with mournful disappointment in the agenda of the “liberal” Democratic administration, Oglesby said: “Their aim in Vietnam . . . is to safeguard what they take to be American interests around the world against revolution or revolutionary change, which they always call communism . . . [T]here is simply no such thing, now, for us, as a just revolution . . . [We] have lost that mysterious social desire for human equity that from time to time has given us genuine moral drive. We have become a nation of young, bright-eyed, hard-hearted, slim-wasted, bullet-headed make-out artists. A nation—may I say it?—of beardless liberals . . . Some will make of it that I overdraw the matter . . . [a]nd others will make of it that I sound mighty anti-American. To these I say—don’t blame me for that! Blame those who mouthed my liberal values and broke my American heart.”

  In August of 1966, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which had ruined the lives of many liberals and leftists during and in the aftermath of McCarthyism, held a hearing to investigate antiwar protesters, including Jerry Rubin, who, in defiant contrast to intimidated witnesses in the past, appeared at the hearing in a Revolutionary War costume, complete with a three-cornered hat. The protesters were represented by Arthur Kinoy, who after repeatedly trying to make a point was physically ejected from the hearing room. The next day, there was a photo on the front page of the New York Times of the diminutive Kinoy (my friend’s dad was 5'2") in a choke hold while huge House security men dragged him out of the hearing room. In 1975, when HUAC was finally dismantled by the full House, that image was frequently cited as the beginning of the end of the infamous committee.r />
  Those who objected to the swagger of the new left were not limited to old Communists or anti-Communist Socialists. In 1966, conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. launched the show Firing Line to give conservative views a national television megaphone to counteract the supposed liberal bias of the networks. (In the wake of Goldwater’s defeat, a “new right” was created parallel to, and opposed to, the culture I was inspired by.)

  Also in 1966, the National Organization for Women was founded. Their focus was on a wide variety of areas in which millions of women felt disadvantaged or oppressed, including the way women were often treated in the civil rights and antiwar movements.

  Art and Entertainment

  On February 9, 1964, eleven weeks after the assassination of President Kennedy, the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, demonstrating, among other things, that teenage girls could be sexually attracted to guys with long hair. I was one of millions of teenage males to grow my hair as long as I could get away with while I was still in school, and longer still once there were no authorities to force a haircut. Over the next few years, the trade-off for being attractive to younger women was the hostility of older guys and authority figures who would often mock us with the question, “Are you a boy or are you a girl?”

  The Beatles’ massive popularity opened the door for numerous other English pop and rock bands to capture the hearts of those girls, the so-called British invasion. In July, the Beatles’ witty film A Hard Day’s Night was released. The film revealed the band’s feisty antiestablishment attitude, and broadened the audience of rock and roll overnight to include older teenagers, college kids, and alienated guys. Young folkies and future rock stars such as David Crosby, Jerry Garcia, and Jorma Kaukonen hastily got electric guitars and formed rock bands. A year later, on July 25, 1965, Bob Dylan “went electric” at the Newport Folk Festival, outraging some folkie purists while inspiring countless others. Among the albums released in 1965 were the Rolling Stones’ Out of Our Heads, Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, Phil Ochs’s I Ain’t Marching Anymore, the Lovin’ Spoonful’s Do You Believe in Magic, and the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, which had a slightly distorted, trippy photo of the band on the cover. It included the song “Norwegian Wood,” which introduced Beatles fans to an Indian instrument called a sitar. Albums released in 1966 included the Beatles’ Revolver, the Byrds’ Fifth Dimension, and Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde.

  In the early sixties, cosmopolitan and campus cultures were impacted by European films by directors such as Sweden’s Ingmar Bergman, France’s Jean-Luc Godard, and Italy’s Federico Fellini, who brought more psychology, impressionism, and mysticism to movies than Hollywood typically produced. British filmmakers presented the subversive comedy of Pete Sellers and Alec Guinness, as well as the angst of angry young men in films written by playwright John Osborne and others.

  In America in 1966, the TV series Star Trek debuted and Lenny Bruce died.

  LSD

  From the midfifties through the midsixties there was increasing experimentation and research into mind-expanding drugs. Awareness of such herbs or chemical substances in Western civilization had been restricted to a few therapists and anthropologists until 1954, when Aldous Huxley published a description of his experiences with mescaline in the book The Doors of Perception. (A dozen years later the book’s title would inspire the name of rock band the Doors.)

  Huxley was a native of England, where he achieved fame as a writer, most notably with his visionary novel Brave New World. He was also a pacifist who had been close to Bertrand Russell as a young man. In the 1930s, Huxley moved to Los Angeles, where he became deeply involved with Eastern religions, in particular the Vedanta form of Hinduism. Huxley’s spiritual teacher, Swami Prabhavananda, was dubious about the spiritual validity of mescaline, but Huxley, while remaining involved with the Vedanta Society, insisted that some of the experiences he got from psychedelics (a word that his friend Humphry Osmond coined in 1956) were consistent with those achieved through meditation and other spiritual practices.

  Huxley befriended Los Angeles psychotherapist Oscar Janiger, who was then conducting research with another psychedelic known as LSD. The formal scientific name for the chemical was lysergic acid diethylamide and it had been accidentally discovered in Switzerland in 1943 by a chemist named Albert Hoffman. (In the sixties, we started calling it “acid.”) Separate from his larger study, Janiger launched a project with artists because he believed they could contribute language and depth to an understanding of LSD that were inaccessible to traditional scientific observation. In addition to Huxley, Janiger gave LSD to actors Cary Grant, Jack Nicholson, and Rita Moreno, classical music conductor André Previn, and author Anaïs Nin, as well as several visual artists who created paintings under the influence.

  Janiger concluded that he could not understand his research without some personal experience, and over the course of his lifetime he took LSD thirteen times. His preference was to stay as invisible as possible and to avoid controversy. Janiger would not publish or otherwise publicly reveal any of his research for several decades.

  Huxley, although shy of conventional publicity, was nonetheless one of the Western world’s most prominent public intellectuals and he believed that transmission to others was part of his purpose in life. In The Doors of Perception he pointed out that what made William Blake so influential was not merely the grandeur of his inner visions but his talent for rendering them through his art and poetry.

  Huxley wrote of the expanded appreciation he had for music while taking mescaline. His rhapsodic perceptions about Bach’s music, reproductions of famous paintings he observed on a walk to a local store in Hollywood, and the pulsing inner life of flowers were remarkably similar to the kinds of experiences that acidheads like me would rave about in the late sixties.

  Huxley contextualized his mescaline experience as compatible with the Hindu notions of dharma and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. “[T]his purely aesthetic Cubist’s-eye view gave place to what I can only describe as the sacramental vision of reality. I was . . . back in a world where everything shone with the Inner Light, and was infinite in its significance.”

  Yet Huxley was carefully calibrated in his spiritual claims. “I am not so foolish as to equate what happens under the influence of mescaline or of any other drug, prepared or in the future preparable, with the realization of the end and ultimate purpose of human life: Enlightenment, the Beatific Vision. All I am suggesting is that the mescaline experience is what Catholic theologians call a ‘gratuitous grace,’ not necessary to salvation but potentially helpful and to be accepted thankfully, if made available.”

  Huxley viewed psychedelics with a sense of discretion that would not be shared by the more flamboyant Dr. Timothy Leary—a brilliant Harvard psychology professor with a restless mind who was intrigued by the use of psilocybin mushrooms in religious rites by the indigenous Mazatec Indians of Mexico.

  In 1960, Leary took psilocybin in Mexico, and immediately developed an evangelistic enthusiasm about psychedelics. Leary belatedly read The Doors of Perception; finding great commonality in their experiences, he befriended Huxley.

  Leary soon launched a research project at Harvard centered around LSD. Although there was no scientific way of determining the exact effect of psychedelics on the brain, he speculated that the chemical temporarily removed habits of thinking created in early childhood, causing users to experience the world through the uninhibited senses of a baby. “We think that LSD temporarily suspends your imprint—instead of seeing everything like a tired old snapshot.” He also believed that the chemical (or “sacrament,” as he was soon to call it) permitted access to parts of the brain that were not consciously available to most people. Yet Leary also echoed Huxley’s sense of proportion on the spiritual value of psychedelics: “You don’t worship a sacrament, you use it as a key.”

  Like Janiger, Leary felt that artists were essential to a deeper understanding of LSD. He reached out to Janiger’s younger cousin, Allen Ginsberg.
After his first LSD trip, Ginsberg shared Leary’s experience of “agape.” The poet had been exploring Eastern religion in the years since he’d become a beat celebrity and the acid experience conformed to many of his spiritual concepts. He was so inspired by that first acid trip that he called the White House from Leary’s home to see if he could persuade recently elected President Kennedy to take LSD with the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev. (The poet was not put through to the president.)

  Ginsberg agreed to help turn on other artists to LSD and soon thereafter he hosted Leary in New York. In a harbinger of the various reactions that would play out on a mass stage later in the decade, not everyone had the same experience. They gave some to jazz legends Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk. A week later Ginsberg saw Dizzy at the Five Spot (a popular club for downtown jazz fans) and asked him how he liked the drug. The trumpeter replied, “Whatever gets you high, man.” Not long afterward Ginsberg encountered Monk at the same club and the pianist pointedly asked if he had anything stronger.

  Poet Robert Lowell and novelist Jack Kerouac took LSD in Ginsberg’s East Village apartment. Ginsberg recalled that Lowell liked Leary, but couldn’t shake off his habitual gloom. At one point Leary exuberantly said, “Love conquers all,” and Lowell pensively responded, “I’m not so sure about that.” Kerouac was similarly ambivalent. Once the acid kicked in, he was silent for over an hour, and then, while looking out the window of Ginsberg’s apartment on 2nd Street between avenues A and B, the author of On the Road mused, “Walking on water wasn’t built in a day.”

  A couple of years later, Leary and his colleague Richard Alpert, who had been a precocious academic star, were fired by Harvard for doing research into LSD that included studies with undergraduates. Before his first LSD trip in 1961, Alpert considered himself “an adult in a world that was defined by the intellect. The high priests of America were scientists and intellectuals. What was valued is what you knew you knew. Introspection was rejected. What was respected was what could be measured from outside, not from inner experiences. Anything you couldn’t measure was treated as irrelevant.”