In Search of the Lost Chord

by Danny Goldberg

  At the other end of the spectrum of protest from the Fugs was the earnest sixty-four-year-old Dr. Benjamin Spock, expressing pacifist indignation in his three-piece suit. Spock occupied a unique space in the movement. In the minds of those who wanted Dr. King to run for president, it was assumed that Spock would be the candidate for vice president. He also had credibility with millions of people who did not usually identify with the left. Spock’s book The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, first published in 1946, was so successful that the New York Times reported that in the fifties and sixties, it was outsold only by the Bible. Spock became concerned about the nuclear arms race, and from 1962 to 1967 he cochaired the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. By the middle of the decade, he was one of the most persistent voices against the war. Cora Weiss, who had been a member of Women Strike for Peace, says, “We all raised our children on Dr. Spock’s book. I had one in every room in the house. He gave a legitimacy to the antiwar movement that no one else except Martin Luther King Jr. did.”

  Spock felt that Timothy Leary and others had co-opted the civil rights and peace movements and turned young people away from activism in favor of turning on, tuning in, and dropping out. This needlessly distanced him from many young people who had been raised with the help of his famous book. One could make the opposite argument that the criminalization of LSD and pot had created more suspicion of government and added to, rather than subtracted from, the antiwar movement. Yet there was no denying Spock’s moral authority, nor his commitment to peace. In January 1968, he, William Sloane Coffin, and others were indicted for “counseling, aiding, and abetting draft resistance.”

  There were tense negotiations between the more culturally moderate organizers of the 1967 March on Washington and the large number of younger radicals. Cora Weiss and Spock did not want to see Viet Cong flags or leaflets filled with profanity. Even the buttons differentiated some pacifists from their radical counterparts: Stop the War vs. Support the National Liberation Front. Jerry Rubin found wonkish speeches by earnest pacifists like A.J. Muste to be “boring.” His friend Super Joel Tornabene found pacifist David Dellinger’s speech “too slow for us speed freaks.”

  At this time, the focus in the underground press that people like me read was on Ed Sanders, who performed an elaborate “exorcism” with the quixotic goal of removing evil spirits from the Pentagon. Thousands of radicals broke away from the main demonstration to march on the gigantic five-sided building at the heart of America’s military defense establishment. Some young people placed flowers in the gun barrels of the soldiers who were “guarding” the massive building from the protesters, resulting in one of the most iconic photos from the sixties. The flowers were provided by Michael Bowen, who in January of that year had been so central to the organization of the Be-In. He had since left the Oracle and moved to Mexico, but he returned to the States to bring two hundred pounds of daisies to the march. (Bowen’s Oracle colleague Allen Cohen later claimed that the idea of exorcising the pentagon was first floated at the Be-In planning meeting at the end of 1966.)

  The text of the incantation for the “exorcism” was read by Sanders and accompanied by the banging of cymbals, triangles, and drums. It was in a very different headspace than the reasoned antiwar speeches on the main stage of the demonstration. Here’s an excerpt:

  In the name of the amulets of touching, seeing, groping, hearing and loving, we call upon the powers of the cosmos to protect our ceremonies in the name of Zeus, in the name of Anubis, god of the dead, in the name of all those killed because they do not comprehend, in the name of the lives of the soldiers in Vietnam who were killed because of a bad karma, in the name of sea-born Aphrodite, in the name of Magna Mater, in the name of Dionysus, Zagreus, Jesus, Yahweh, the unnameable, the quintessent finality of the Zoroastrian fire, in the name of Hermes, in the name of the Beak of Sok, in the name of scarab, in the name, in the name, in the name of the Tyrone Power Pound Cake Society in the Sky, in the name of Ra, Osiris, Horus, Nepta, Isis, in the name of the flowing living universe, in the name of the mouth of the river, we call upon the spirit . . . to raise the Pentagon from its destiny and preserve it . . .

  The war did not end.

  Dump Johnson

  In recent decades, Lyndon Johnson has correctly been recognized for his political brilliance in actualizing the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act and the surviving elements of the War on Poverty. But in 1967, to millions of Americans, President Johnson was on the wrong side of history, morally culpable for deaths that were not related to American security, and was in thrall to outdated Cold War fundamentalism. His administration’s claims of military success in Vietnam were discredited on such a regular basis that he became known for a “credibility gap.”

  Everyone I admired—radical, hippie, liberal, old or young—had contempt for Johnson in those days. The horror of the war gave his political enemies license to make fun of his awkward public persona. After an appendectomy, President Johnson lifted up his shirt to show his scar to the White House photographers. His televised speeches were read from a teleprompter in a singsong cadence that presented a stark contrast to the eloquent, witty, and debonair style of the martyred Kennedy.

  A Tom Paxton song lyric went, “Lyndon Johnson told the nation / Have no fear of escalation. / I am trying everyone to please. / Though it isn’t really war / We’re sending fifty thousand more / To help save Vietnam from the Vietnamese.”

  In 1967, Woody Allen had enough success as a stand-up comedian that he was given a short-lived talk show of his own before he started directing movies. When William F. Buckley appeared with him, the conservative icon was asked who he wanted to be elected president in 1968. Buckley answered, “Anyone who could beat Johnson.” Allen, an antiwar advocate, sadly chimed in, “That could be anyone including the Boston Strangler.”

  The war was not only anathema to hippies and radicals in 1967, but also to some older anti–Cold War Democrats who had been inspired by Eleanor Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson. Foreign Relations Committee chairman William Fulbright of Arkansas, no one’s idea of a lefty, held nationally televised hearings on the war in 1966 that eviscerated the administration’s rationale for the escalation. Wayne Morse of Oregon was one of two senators who had voted against giving President Johnson war authorization after the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, and he regularly reminded Americans that there had never been an actual declaration of war. In New York City, Congressman William Fitts Ryan uncompromisingly articulated the liberal antiwar argument. However, the effort that would eventually persuade President Johnson not to seek reelection was organized outside of Congress.

  Allard Lowenstein was thirty-eight years old in 1967. He was the first white board member of Dr. King’s SCLC, and he had unsuccessfully tried to recruit King to run for president against Johnson. Lowenstein was the main writer of Bobby Kennedy’s celebrated 1966 speech in Cape Town, South Africa, during the heart of apartheid, in which the senator said:

  It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

  By the end of 1966, Lowenstein was adamantly against the war. He had insider political skills that none of the radicals and hippies possessed, and he also understood that his older antiwar peers were out of touch with most young people. He told journalist David Halberstam, “These kids. No one really knows how alienated they really are. Trying to keep them in the system is very, very hard. They’re bitter and they’re angry. They really resent this society. Of course, there are a lot of things in this society that are very resentable.”

  In addition to his age, Lowenstein had other baggage with radicals. At a 1966 conference of the National Students Association (
NSA), he had debated David Harris. Lowenstein, a former president of the NSA, stressed the need for organization and tactics. Harris cautioned against Americans becoming like “good Germans” during the Nazi era, and called for resistance to the military draft by civil disobedience if necessary. Lowenstein urged students to do everything possible to get a deferment, but if that failed, to serve.

  In March 1967, Ramparts published a front-page article that revealed that the CIA had been funneling money through the NSA for a decade, hoping to influence its policies and spokespeople. In August 1967, the NSA cut ties with all groups associated with the CIA.

  Nonetheless, Lowenstein was unrelenting in his support for antiwar candidates for public office. Realizing the limits of his personal appeal to young radicals, he focused on organizing elites and intellectuals. He orchestrated a letter from fifty Rhodes scholars questioning Vietnam policy, and shortly thereafter escorted forty-one antiwar student body presidents (including Harris) to a meeting with Secretary of State Dean Rusk. One of the students asked Rusk what would happen if both sides kept escalating to the point of the US dropping a nuclear bomb. Rusk took a drag on his cigarette and said: “Well, somebody’s going to get hurt.” Word of the callous remark spread, and within weeks there were more than two hundred student body presidents signed on to the petition against the war. They thought Rusk had lost it and it seemed like no one from the administration could rationally defend the war. To Lowenstein, this was when the antiwar movement went mainstream.

  Lowenstein worked with Yale chaplain and prominent antiwar activist William Sloane Coffin to get more than four hundred members of the Yale faculty to urge an end of American bombing of Vietnam. Coffin called Lowenstein “a prophet who stands clearly within the tradition and says, The tradition is being corrupted, let’s restore the tradition.”

  Lowenstein also focused on religious leaders, persuading theologian Reinhold Niebuhr to make an antiwar declaration, and he helped Stanford theologian Robert McAfee Brown write a statement of conscience for more than two thousand religious leaders for a gathering in January 1967. A committee from that conference expressed their concerns to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who was known to be harboring his own doubts about the war.

  Lowenstein privately met with Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Johnson’s national security adviser, Walt Rostow, and found their closed-mindedness deeply depressing. He concluded that President Johnson was not going to end the war, regardless of elite pressures. In the summer of 1967, Lowenstein and writer Curtis Gans formed the “Dump Johnson” movement to recruit an antiwar Democratic nominee. One of their first allies from the liberal establishment was John Kenneth Galbraith, who had been the ambassador to India under President Kennedy and had recently become president of the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). Galbraith said, “This is a year when the people are right and the politicians are wrong.”

  Having failed to get Dr. King to run, Lowenstein and his allies vainly approached Senator Robert Kennedy, followed by Senator George McGovern. In October, just before the March on Washington, Lowenstein finally found a plausible politician willing to oppose a sitting president of his own party—Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy, who announced his campaign on January 3, 1968. McCarthy’s campaign organizers felt that to have the widest possible political reach, volunteers should not look like hippies; men shaved off their mustaches and beards and cut their hair to be “clean for Gene.” But it would not be McCarthy who ultimately had the potential to preside over an antiwar majority.

  Robert Kennedy

  Like Dr. King, Robert Kennedy was peripheral to the hippie world, yet a presence. Many of us wrongly took them both for granted and assumed that they represented the center against which the left and counterculture could rebel, rather than a bulwark against reactionary political forces which would arrive when Richard Nixon assumed the presidency in 1969.

  Tom Hayden and Staughton Lynd, an antiwar Yale history professor who was a fixture at rallies, met with Kennedy in February 1967 to urge him to support withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam. At that time Kennedy expressed worry about a “bloodbath.” (Not long thereafter, Hayden and Lynd visited North Vietnam and Lynd was fired from Yale as a result.)

  Kennedy met with other radicals, including Phil Ochs, who he was introduced to by Village Voice writer Jack Newfield. Ochs played him the song “Crucifixion,” and when Kennedy realized that it was about his slain brother, he silently wept. In February 1968, Kennedy asked Jefferson Airplane to play at the Junior Village Telethon for a family charity that aided differently abled young people. Airplane manager Bill Thompson recalled going to a touch football game the next day at Kennedy’s house, which was also attended by Tommy Smothers. There was a jukebox in the house and Thompson noticed that it included “White Rabbit.” “We knew they were using our image to get credibility with young voters,” Grace Slick told me, “but we were happy to be used in that way.”

  Lowenstein and Jack Newfield were asked by Senator Kennedy to debate with Arthur Schlesinger, who had been a trusted adviser to President Kennedy. Schlesinger suggested that instead of RFK opposing a sitting president, he and the antiwar students could focus on a “peace plank” in the 1968 Democratic Party platform. Kennedy sarcastically asked, “When was the last time millions of people rallied behind a plank?”

  Kennedy was even “straighter” than Lowenstein and had no appetite for civil disobedience. Many in the antiwar movement initially had mixed feelings about him. He had briefly worked for Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Committee on Government Operations in the 1950s. As attorney general, Kennedy had been a steely advocate for his brother’s interests but came up against serious issues from the left. In May 1963, he’d met with a group of black intellectuals, including James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, and it had not gone well. However, in the years following his brother’s assassination, Robert Kennedy had expanded his circle of friends and advisers to include many in the movement. Kennedy visited the Mississippi Delta in 1967; after witnessing the extreme poverty, he returned home and lectured his children on their obligation to help alleviate the plight of the poor.

  A speech RFK made at the University of Kansas in early 1968 suggests that some of the values of the counterculture had gotten into his head. In fact, the speech seemed to imply a philosophy of life that was remarkably consistent with the values of Haight-Ashbury:

  [E]ven if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task; it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction—purpose and dignity—that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product—if we judge the United States by that—that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts . . . television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

  A well-written speech is not the same as action. Politicians are adept at making one group feel respected while serving the interests of others. RFK had a complicated past, but there is a lot of evidence to sugg
est he had grown, and he came to have a spectral presence in corners of the counterculture where “politicians” were usually either ignored or reviled.

  In early 1968, as Johnson looked more vulnerable, Kennedy reversed course and ran for president, greatly irritating McCarthy and his supporters, but broadening the antiwar campaign as no one else could. His assassination in June was a devastating blow, even to a radical like Hayden, who spoke of the loss for years. At the request of the Kennedy family, Hayden served as a member of the honor guard that accompanied the slain senator’s body on the train from Los Angeles to Washington. When the Airplane’s Crown of Creation album was released in the fall of 1968, a few months after Kennedy’s assassination, it included an insert with an image of Robert Kennedy’s dog Brumus.

  Feminism Rising

  The Democratic Party, the left, and the counterculture were not much more respectful to women than the rest of American society in 1967. Out of a total of 435 members of the 90th Congress in 1967, only twelve were women. An Emmett Grogan piece for the Diggers’ newsletter, “The Post-Competitive, Comparative Game of a Free Society,” referred to free stores for “chicks to sew dresses, make pants to order, recut garments to fit.” Abbie Hoffman suggested that “revolutionaries” metaphorically “kill your mothers,” and one of Timothy Leary’s favorite put-downs was “menopausal mind.” Rock and roll and the business around it were overwhelmingly male.

  Even so, it was in the realm of political activism where the hypocrisy of left-wing sexism was most directly confronted. In 1965, two civil rights veterans, Mary King and Casey Hayden, presented a paper called “Sex and Caste” at an SDS convention in Illinois. They said that women at SDS were often treated as secondary citizens and were rarely permitted to speak publicly. To some men on the left, women’s roles were limited to child-rearing and sex. This cluster of issues was referred to as the “women question.”