The growing frustration by protesters began to push many of their leaders toward radical responses—“from protest to resistance.” The thinking was that if the government would not respond to peaceful demonstrations, then they would certainly respond to violence. Most of those who were becoming radicalized were making connections, like the SDS had done, between Vietnam and greater domestic and international policies of the U.S. government. This expansion of their complaints against Vietnam to broader, more general issues allowed many to become “radicalized.”
* * *
REVOLUTION ON THE MIND
And it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for?
Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn
Next stop, VIETNAM!
And it’s five, six, seven, open those pearly gates
Ah, there ain’t no time to wonder why
Whoopee! We’re all goin’ to die!
—“I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,”
Country Joe and the Fish
* * *
By 1968, the Anti-War Movement began to pitch the country into a war with itself, though the majority would not turn against the Vietnam War until President Richard Nixon invaded Cambodia in 1971. A number of events conspired to tear the country apart.
* * *
WHO WERE THE RADICALS?
Most of the extreme radicals came from white middle-class backgrounds. They were honor roll students with liberal arts majors. They were also used to being listened to and having their opinions count. In the mass market, their voice and buying power drove many aspects of the economy, particularly popular culture. To have authority figures not respond to their concerns, when that had become their right, truly seemed outrageous.
Abbie Hoffman
RADICALS ON THE FBI MOST-WANTED LIST
More than two dozen radicals went underground to escape arrest, but these five were notable for making the FBI’s Most-Wanted List:
CAMERON DAVID BISHOP, student activist at Colorado State University, blew up four power transmission line towers in 1969 to cut the supply of power to defense plants.
ANGELA DAVIS (below), a black activist and Communist Party member, arrested in 1970, who was acquitted in a kidnapping, murder, and conspiracy trial for a courthouse shootout.
LAWRENCE ROBERT PLAMONDON, founding member of the White Panther Party. Wanted for bombing a CIA recruiting office in Michigan. Arrested in Michigan but case dismissed because of illegal FBI wiretaps.
BERNARDINE DOHRN, a leader of Weatherman Underground, wanted for rioting, mob action, and conspiracy. Spent a decade living as a fugitive. Surrendered and was fined $1,500 and placed on probation for five years.
LEO BURT, student activist and accused of bombing the Army Mathematics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, killing a researcher. Still on the lam.
* * *
The year began with a disastrous setback in Vietnam. On January 30, at the start of Tet, the lunar New Year, more than 80,000 Vietcong and North Vietnamese soldiers invaded more than 100 South Vietnamese cities and towns and attacked the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. The Communist troops slaughtered thousands of Vietnamese despite the fact that the offensive lasted only one day. The surprise and effectiveness of the attack was a psychological blow to America. For months in military briefings, the government had been saying there was “light at the end of the tunnel.” They led the country to believe that the enemy was incapable of a major offensive and that after some mopping up, the U.S. troops would be home. The Tet Offensive showed that the enemy was clearly not as weak as the government had been portraying it to be; in fact, just the opposite seemed true. The Communists appeared ready to continue fighting for a very long time. The Pentagon had lied to the American people by implying that victory was imminent. The end of the Vietnam War was nowhere near.
* * *
THE VIETNAM WAR BY THE NUMBERS
In 1961, the United States had 3,200 military advisers in Vietnam; in 1963, Kennedy increased that number to 16,300, which was still a small and rather insignificant number. By 1964, Johnson had increased that number by almost half to 23,300 American troops, still supposedly acting only as advisers. As the reality of the strong resistance of the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese Army became clear, Johnson became even more committed to ensuring South Vietnam’s success and inserted 184,000 American troops to assist in fighting the enemy. By now Johnson had committed so many troops to the region and risked America’s prestige with the world to such an extent that it became impossible for him to withdraw. Withdrawing would be a humiliation not only for the country but for Johnson personally. With this in mind, over the next three years the president escalated America’s involvement to more than 550,000 U.S. troops on the ground. By the end of 1968, 30,610 American servicemen had been killed in action. When U.S. troops were finally evacuated from Vietnam in 1973, over two million American fighting men had served in the war. During that time, the war spread from Vietnam into Cambodia and Laos. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian people were killed. Over seven million tons of bombs were dropped, with four million tons falling on South Vietnam, an area smaller than the state of New Jersey. In all of World War II, the United States dropped two million tons of bombs and munitions over all of Europe and the Pacific. Many of the bombs dropped on Vietnam are still there, unexploded, while land mines litter the landscape, still claiming victims to this day.
Poet Gary Snyder captured the sense of horror that many young people felt about the Vietnam War and started to feel about their own country, and even themselves. In this poem, Snyder celebrates all that is not white and middle class, in short, otherness.
A Curse on the Men in Washington, Pentagon
As you shoot down the Vietnamese girls and men in their fields
Burning and chopping,
Poisoning and blighting,
So surely I hunt the white man down in my heart.
The crew-cutted Seattle boy
The Portland boy who worked for U.P. that was me.
I won’t let him live. The “American”
I’ll destroy. The “Christian” has long been dead.
They won’t pass on to my children.
I’ll give them Chief Joseph, the Bison herds,
Ishi, sparrowhawk, the fir trees,
The Buddha, their own naked bodies,
Swimming and dancing and singing instead.
As I kill the white man, the “American” in me
And dance out the ghost dance:
To bring back America, the grass and the streams
To trample your throat in your dreams.
This magic I work, this loving I give
That my children may flourish
And yours won’t live.
* * *
“Half a million American soldiers with 700,000 Vietnamese allies, with total command of the air, total command of the sea, backed by huge resources and the most modern weapons,” said an incredulous Bobby Kennedy, younger brother of slain President John F. Kennedy, were being beaten by “an enemy whose total strength is about 250,000.” Kennedy summed up the feelings of many Americans. Already Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy had entered the race for the Democratic nomination in the upcoming presidential election against Lyndon Johnson as a peace candidate. In March, McCarthy would stun Johnson by beating him in the New Hampshire primary. In the meantime, Bobby Kennedy’s thoughts on critical national issues—civil rights, Vietnam, and the moral vacancy of a society of abundance—were leading him to believe that none of this would have happened if there had still been a Kennedy in the White House. In the same month that Kennedy entered the race for the presidency, Johnson withdrew. “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president,” Johnson announced on March 31, 1968.
While Johnson’s failure and his withdrawal from the race were perhaps a triumph for the Anti-War Movement, the tragedies that were to come canceled any sense that go
od would come out of it. The same week as Johnson’s announcement, Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Memphis, Tennessee, to support sanitation workers who were on strike. One week later, King, America’s greatest prophet of nonviolence, was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.
Over the next few days, the despair and sense of futility in the African-American community would erupt into flames across the country. In Washington, D.C., just a few blocks from the White House, and in Baltimore, Harlem, Atlanta, Chicago, and Kansas City, fires burned in the streets and 50,000 national and federal guardsmen rushed in to bring peace. More than one hundred cities were marked with violence, arson, looting, and gunfire. The indescribable grief was felt not only by blacks but by a whole country, that the man who stood for harmony in a divided nation could be taken from us so brutally.
The horror did not end with King’s assassination. Two months later, after winning the California primary, Bobby Kennedy became the victim of an assassin’s bullet. As the brother of a slain president, Bobby Kennedy had captured the imagination of the country. With the California win, he had been gaining momentum and had looked to be heading straight for the White House. Instead, he was brought down by a bullet. The nation seemed to be killing its heroes. Whatever bitterness Boomers were feeling began to seep into the rest of the country. A sense of the absurd began to dominate the culture.
On television, Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In arrived to make fun of the establishment with fast cuts of irreverent humor spliced with a go-go dancer in body paint (Goldie Hawn).
Rockers like Country Joe and the Fish began to sing ironically about Vietnam: “Be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box!”
Simon and Garfunkel sang in a ballad “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?” linking DiMaggio to a lost era where baseball and apple pie still meant something.
The strange, the odd, and the absurd took hold of the nation’s consciousness. One of the oddest manifestations was Tiny Tim, who sang ’20s songs like “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” in a falsetto while playing the ukulele.
Half a million American soldiers with 700,000 Vietnamese allies…were being beaten by “an enemy whose total strength is about 250,000.”
It was like the country had broken free of its moorings. In this anything-goes atmosphere, Boomers felt they had permission to seek their own personal happiness no matter what. In this same spring of ’68, radicals seized five buildings on the campus of Columbia University in New York City. The most notable of these uprisings, however, occurred in August at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The wind seemed to have been knocked out of the Democratic Party. It appeared it would never recover from the death of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. McCarthy did not have the support of party insiders, and no one seemed to have the energy any longer to fight them. Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s vice president and the selection of the party bosses, appeared to have the nomination locked, bringing with him Johnson’s policies and the status quo.
Watching these developments and feeling powerless to do anything about them, the radical youth felt driven over the edge. They reasoned that if the democratic process couldn’t fix the country, then the only logical action was revolution.
Martin Luther King Jr.: assassinated April 4, 1968. Race riots in over 100 cities.
Robert Kennedy: assassinated June 5, 1968.
A protester described the scene:
As soon as we got to Chicago there was a sense that this thing was going to be huge…. You couldn’t help but be caught up in all the violence…. I remember standing in front of the Loop in a big demonstration when the cops came and pushed us through a plate-glass window, and there was glass all over and people were screaming, and their heads were bleeding.
The protesters’ bitterness and anger was emblematic and fueled the rage of 10,000 other protesters who descended on the Windy City. However, they were met with an even greater and heavily armed force—23,000 police and National Guardsmen. As anyone would expect, violence erupted almost immediately on the streets.
Inside the convention hall, politician after politician took the podium and droned on about American greatness, while outside the police were wreaking havoc on the protesters. The insane disconnect between what party bosses were orchestrating inside and the utter anarchy occurring outside was captured by television cameras and photographers. They documented both the boring speeches and the brutal violence that the police and the National Guard were committing on protesters. As the convention progressed each day, the horror grew. From outside Chicago, America appeared to be burning.
Jane Adams, born in 1943 and a member of SDS in 1968, described the experience on the streets:
When Humphrey was nominated, I was in the YMCA watching it on TV. I ran out in the streets, and armored personnel carriers with barbed wires on the front of them moved into position. The young people chanted, “The whole world is watching,” which really meant that the whole world is watching this massive injustice that’s going on here, the ripping-off of our democracy from us.
Protesters began referring to Chicago during the Democratic National Convention as “Czechcago,” making a comparison of the city’s police to the brutal put-down of protesters in Prague that spring by 650,000 Soviet troops.
The Chicago Seven and their lawyers at a press conference
THE CHICAGO SEVEN: A COURT CIRCUS
In an attempt to justify their extreme actions, the government indicted eight radical leaders for conspiring to incite riots. The eight leaders included David Dellinger, a pacifist and the chairman of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam; Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis, leaders of SDS; Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, leaders of the Youth International Party (YIP); John Froines and Lee Weiner, local Chicago organizers; and Bobby Seale, cofounder of the Black Panther Party.
Beginning in September, the trial was a circus. The prosecutors stressed the group’s provocative rhetoric and subversive intentions. William Kunstler, the lawyer for all defendants—the Chicago Seven—except Seale, attributed the violence to overreaction by officials rather than a conspiracy. He paraded singers, artists, and activists to testify in court about what the demonstrators were protesting. During the trial, Weatherman (an SDS splinter group) proclaimed “Days of Rage” on the streets of Chicago.
Seale, however, refused to participate in the proceeding since his organization had not joined in the protests at the convention. When he became disruptive and hostile, the judge ended up binding and gagging Seale for three days before declaring a mistrial and sentencing him to four years for contempt of court. The trial for the other seven lasted five months. They were found guilty in February 1970. Two years later, however, their convictions were overturned by an appeals court, which cited the judge’s procedural errors and overt hostility toward the defendants. Sadly, Bobby Seale, the only African-American defendant who did not participate in the riots for which the eight were charged, was the only one who spent time in jail.
To add to the strangeness of the year, the Republicans nominated a man everyone thought was politically dead: Richard Milhous Nixon. Nixon had lost the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy. His famous bitter words on that loss were: “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.” Now Nixon was head of the Republican ticket, a man of proven experience, having been vice president for eight years during the Eisenhower Administration and a U.S. senator before that. Many had forgotten Nixon’s nefarious past as one of the key supporters of the anti-Communist witch hunts of the early fifties. By 1968, he had been rehabilitated simply by the passing of time and the country’s emotional reaction to the violence at the Democratic convention. As a symbol for calm and status quo, Nixon campaigned by talking about America’s “silent majority,” which he said still believed in the flag and the family, in the need to have a strong nation ready to fight Communism. In what seemed a spectacular failure of the youth movement, Nixon won the election and was sworn in as president
in January 1969.
Nixon’s presidency would drive many in the left even further into radical politics. The left had not forgotten Nixon’s unethical behavior during McCarthyism and did not believe that he had changed. Instead they felt that they were being marginalized and that their freedom to express their beliefs was being threatened. Many imagined a return to the McCarthy hearings and the blacklisting of left-leaning citizens again. Though the country was in a much different place than in 1950 and the likelihood of something like that occurring again was remote, the radical left had reason to worry.
With Nixon’s win, it was clear the radical left did not have broad support across the country. Leftists also would face an illegal and unethical attack from parts of the government, which helped to undermine what little support they did have. A secret task force called COINTELPRO (counterintelligence program) was formed by the FBI to carry out a plan to disrupt and destroy these radicals. By bugging offices, planting agents, and recruiting informers, the FBI manipulated public perception of these groups.
By 1969, many of the campus protest groups were becoming paranoid about information being leaked and were disintegrating into squabbling factions. The most notable radicalization was SDS, which splintered into the Progressive Labor Party and the Weatherman. Weather-man were notorious for their promotion of violence against the system. The group was literally blown apart on March 6, 1970, when a faulty pipe bomb destroyed a Manhattan town house, killing three members. The Progressive Labor sect simply disappeared with a whimper.
America Dreaming Page 8