Rebels in White Gloves

by Miriam Horn

  Though she was invited to go, Alison Campbell had skipped Woodstock. That summer, after graduating from Wellesley, she was working in the brooch department of Tiffany’s, next to Princess Hohenlohe (a member of the German nobility) at the diamond counter, and was “just too straight an arrow” to call in sick. Alison did make it to the infamous Rolling Stones concert at Altamont that December, dressed like a nymph in a gauzy Empire-waist dress and sandals and flowers in her hair, but she remembers little except the fear. “I was glad to get home. It was not nice. When the Hell’s Angels killed that guy, it was like watching barracudas descend on bait.”

  Alison had moved to San Francisco just a few months earlier with her poet boyfriend, Michael, and had found a job at a gallery making kinetic sculpture. For a brief time, she experimented with the freedom she felt, cut loose from her family’s fortune and the expectations and shelter that came with it. She earned only enough to live in a basement apartment for fifty dollars a month. Her father sent her generous checks. She sent them back.

  But things were falling apart with Michael. He continued to be unhappy with Alison’s “hang-ups” over fidelity and keeping the house clean. When she received a job offer at home from one of her father’s patients, she abandoned her self-exile and for a time returned to the fold. For the next six years, Alison would be a kind of court artist for the Paul Mellon family, flying about in their Gulfstream jet—its walls hung with Braques and Van Goghs—to do watercolors of the family’s Virginia and Washington and New York and Antigua homes. “I felt strange painting for wealthy people when I had wanted to make a difference in the world. I had marched after King’s assassination and protested against the war and wanted to go into the Peace Corps; I always identified more with people who were hurting than with those who were not. But when Nixon was reelected, I was so disillusioned. I stopped paying attention to politics, stopped believing we could change the world.”

  A near-member of the family in those years, Alison did Mrs. Mellon’s Christmas shopping every year: buying gifts for John Jr. and Caroline Kennedy or a toothbrush in gray and yellow—his racing colors—for Mr. Mellon. When she married an aspiring medical student, in a wedding as grand as her debutante ball, with eight bridesmaids, six hundred guests, and her father in tails, she wore a dress given her by Mrs. Mellon—a Givenchy gown.

  It was a short-lived marriage. Supporting her husband both financially and emotionally left Alison drained and in search of rejuvenation. She earned a black belt in Tae Kwon Do. Then, one afternoon in Washington in 1976, she went to a New Age fair and met some visitors from Findhorn, a spiritual community on the Scottish North Sea coast with vaguely Celtic beliefs and remarkable gardens. A few days later, Alison was sitting reading a Findhorn garden book when an odd thing occurred. “A butterfly landed on me, several times. I’d been reading about the secret life of plants and why you should talk to them, about how angels direct all things. Oh dear, I’m worried how this will sound—you can’t describe a spiritual experience. But I felt I’d had proof many times of the benign forces in the world, in the flowers and hummingbirds. As a child I had felt it was magic to be alive, that there must be a soul that made your body move. What other people tried to accomplish with drugs, I already felt I had—a heightened sense of color and shapes. I always felt there was consciousness in everything. I thought if there’s a place they believe in angels and try to grow plants the way the plants want to grow, I’ve got to check it out.”

  Alison had found the religion of her upbringing uninspiring. “My parents sent us to an Episcopal church, but they never went. And life didn’t match what I learned in Sunday school. I saw pious ministers who wouldn’t rile their wealthy congregations, weren’t agitating to change corporate behavior. I felt guilty about being confirmed when I didn’t believe.

  “Though I hadn’t managed it yet, I still wanted to live closer to my ideals, and after four and half years, I needed a separation in my marriage. So I gave away almost everything, including the French hand-painted china Mrs. Mellon had given me, and went to Findhorn. They had one place open, in the kitchen—it was slogging work, four of you feeding three hundred people—but I decided I’d do it and asked to stay. I met unbelievable people there: Swami Satchidananda, Pier Vilat Khan, who was the head of the Sufis, Dr. Frederick Leboyer [a French obstetrician who advocated gentle birth, in a darkened room and under water, so as not to traumatize the baby]. After some months, I realized I couldn’t go back to my marriage. Fortunately, we had no children yet, though we had tried. I agonized over not going back. But I knew I had to pull myself back together and make my own happiness instead of propping up somebody else.” A year later, Alison returned to America, having met Bruce Swain, a journalist who shared her interest in the spirit world and with whom she would soon establish a middle-class Middle American home.

  The turn in the early seventies from the political to the personal has been seen by some as a kind of defeat for women. Since the beginning of time, women have sought consolation for their sorrows in the company of other women or the comforts promised in the afterlife; some radical feminists saw consciousness-raising and New Age pieties as merely sustaining those traditions, providing group-therapy sessions or a new opiate of the masses that dissipated anger rather than mobilized it to political ends. In 1969, Anaïs Nin was booed at Smith for being apolitical and self-involved.

  Of course, in Wolfe’s “Me Decade,” everyone was “polishing one’s very self … observing, studying and doting on it.” The human potential movement had barely begun before it was swallowed up by a marketplace increasingly adept at capitalizing on what was hip. Entrepreneurs turned the counterculture into a kind of epicureanism: fern bars, free-range chickens, The Whole Earth Catalog selling gorgeous hand-wrought “tools for intimate personal power” and promising a cybernetic utopia. Self-anointed therapists and gurus saw the moneymaking opportunities in spiritual seekers as well and were soon trafficking in an expensive kind of navel-gazing.

  The co-optation of the sixties would have particular consequences for women. Sexual liberation had been the first movement to be seized upon by the entrepreneurs. Quickly drained of its millennial politics, it became the capitalists’ favorite tool, exploited to arouse appetites for all sorts of curved and aromatic and glistening things. The sex industry came aboveground and flourished; rape and other forms of sexual violence, rarely spoken of until confronted openly by feminists, became the stuff of made-for-TV movies and MTV. The emergent multimillion-dollar recovery movement would also affect mostly women; its market is 85 percent female. The self-help business perfectly reverses feminism’s central insight: Rather than challenging the structural impediments (workplace inflexibility, inadequate public support for parents and children, economic dislocation) to individual success, it turns every problem into a psychological or spiritual illness, a private failure.

  Even feminism, which had assimilated Veblen’s insights and rejected consumerism as a means for confining women, was co-opted by Madison Avenue. Equality became a “lifestyle.” “The ad industry encourages the pseudoemancipation of women,” Christopher Lasch wrote in The Culture of Narcissism, “flattering them with its insinuating reminder ‘you’ve come a long way, baby’ and disguising the freedom to consume as genuine autonomy.”

  Feminism was to a degree complicit in the shift away from social action to self-improvement and advancement. From the beginning, the women’s movement had been split between those like Ti-Grace Atkinson and Kate Millett, who sought a fundamental social and economic revolution, and those like the “bourgeois” Betty Friedan, who were more interested in simply securing for women a piece of the status quo. By 1972, Joan Didion would conclude that the Friedan faction had won and that the original, radically egalitarian and collectivist idea that had animated feminism was lost. “The have-nots, it turned out, aspired mainly to having.… It was a long way from Simone de Beauvoir’s grave and awesome recognition of woman’s role as ‘the Other’ to the notion that the first
step in changing that role was Alix Kates Shulman’s marriage contract (‘wife strips beds, husband remakes them’), but it was toward just such trivialization that the women’s movement seemed to be heading. Of course this litany of trivia was crucial in the beginning, a key technique in politicizing women who had perhaps been conditioned to obscure their resentments even from themselves … but such discoveries could be of no use at all if one … failed to make the leap from the personal to the political.”

  The world of paid work would permit and require most of the women in the class to make that leap. Some would find in work a tremendous liberation from the personal: It would offer a way out of the feminine expectations that were so deeply ingrained at home and the financial dependency that had trapped many of their mothers, and a way in to useful work and citizenship. Others would find the “man’s world” too alien for comfort: These would have to reconsider what it means to be a woman, and have to alter either the workplace or themselves.

  All would face critics on both sides. From the feminist left would come charges of elitism and careerism and selling out. From the traditionalist right would come charges of selfishness. If a man raises a family, performs productive work for society, and engages as a citizen, that is honorable. For a woman to attempt the same would be denounced as a greedy effort to “have it all.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Reinventing Womanhood

  Of all the revolutions made by the members of the class of ’69, none has been more radical than their wholesale entry into the professional world. Though many of the women had experimented with political activity in the sixties movements, work would set them, unlike any previous generation of women, firmly within the public sphere.

  Work promised many freedoms and possibilities: independence, adventure, the chance to pursue passionate curiosities, even perhaps some influence on the world. Most of all, work afforded an escape from their mothers’ small domestic chambers into the larger spaces where they might become “self-made.” But entering the workplace also required of these women their first serious negotiations between the personal and political. Individually and collectively, they had to consider anew what it meant to be a woman, in harmony with or opposition to the expectations of what had long been men’s worlds.

  For some, work would fulfill all their hopes. Entering into worlds where women had not been before, they discovered a liberating absence of the clear expectations laid out for them at home and in relations with men. On this tabula rasa, women could experiment with new ways of being: more competent and controlled, less racked by the complexities of domestic and emotional life. For others, the world of work would prove unexpectedly hostile, alien in its values, and isolating, with neither the community of women they had known at Wellesley nor the solidarities of the sixties movements. Nearly all, having breached the border between men’s and women’s separate spheres, would struggle for a deeper integration of those two worlds: importing into the workplace the gentler habits associated with home, bringing home such “public” values as justice and equality.

  It was 1984, fittingly, when Kris Olson Rogers began to doubt the moral possibility of remaining obedient to the government she served. Working as a federal prosecutor in Portland, Kris was ordered by Oregon U.S. attorney Charles Turner to get an indictment on a former Black Panther then living in town. The evidence against the man was flimsy but adequate for the task: Informants, disguised as housepainters, had ransacked his home and found in an upstairs closet a box containing a disassembled gun, which they had stolen and turned over to the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Kris knew, as did her boss, that in five minutes she could run an ATF agent before the grand jury and indict the defendant on hearsay, no matter the merits of the charges.

  It was no accident that Charles Turner, a conservative Christian and Reagan appointee, had chosen Kris for this task. From the moment of his arrival, Kris had felt Turner’s disdain for her, the “liberal lady prosecutor,” as she puts it, now in his charge. There was no doubt who would win their contest of wills: In an administration recently censured by its own Civil Rights Commission for having reduced by half the numbers of women in the judiciary and the White House, Kris could count few allies. Nor could she easily afford to jeopardize her job, with two small children to support and both parents seriously ill.

  The story of her confrontation with Turner is one Kris has told many times. In the course of those many tellings, she has shaped it into an allegory, a parable on the question that has also plagued Hillary Rodham Clinton: how much to compromise personal principles in order to get and keep power to do things in the world.

  Kris and her husband, Jeff, had gone to Oregon soon after law school, drawn by their love for the great northwestern forests and mountains and sea. They settled first in a country house all overgrown with blackberries, then moved into a big, silent house ringed by hemlock and Douglas fir at the edge of Portland. It was, in the early seventies, a common pilgrimage. Celebrated in the best-selling novel Where the Wasteland Ends as a secessionist “ecotopia,” the shadowy woods of western Oregon offered perfect refuge for dreamy back-to-the-landers and radical environmentalists and marijuana growers in exile from California. More than a few imagined themselves founding the kind of alternative society proposed by Charles Reich and elaborated in the Yale Review of Law and Social Action when Kris and Hillary were contributors: One article called for “the migration of large numbers of people to a single state for the purpose of effecting the peaceful political takeover of that state through the elective process.” These “alienated or ‘deviant’ members of society” would then test the elasticity of such traditional institutions as marriage and democracy, “providing a living laboratory for social experiment through radical federalism.” The radical federalists already in residence—loggers and fishermen, most of them—did not see in the newcomers kindred spirits, and their mutual hostility made for a volatile mix. Even today, the Northwest remains a place of extremes reminiscent of those times. With Earthfirsters and the Oregon Christian Association both committed to principled violations of the law, it is a perfect place for a woman with complex notions about the proper balance between accommodation and dissent.

  When she accepted a job as a federal prosecutor in Oregon, Kris told herself that it would be a brief, strategic sojourn: She would go inside as “a fifth columnist” only to become a better defense attorney by “learning the enemy’s ways.” As it turned out, she remained through three administrations, persuaded over time by the justification offered by her first boss and mentor, U.S. attorney Sid Lezak—that, as a prosecutor, she “could do more.” While a defense attorney could react only to other people’s legal initiatives, Kris could initiate her own: against white-collar and environmental crimes, for civil and tribal rights. The last would become a principal focus of her work. Having first fallen in love with Oregon on a visit with Lezak to the Warm Springs Reservation to watch ritual dances and feast on buffalo stroganoff—the same year that the American Indian Movement seized Wounded Knee and brought native rights to the foreground of left consciousness—Kris became one of the nation’s experts in tribal courts and the protection of cultural traditions and religious freedom. She was also the first woman in Oregon to prosecute high-profile criminal cases: kidnappings, bank robberies, and drugs.

  Kris did not get an indictment on the former Panther. Sabotaging Turner’s goal, she brought the phony housepainters in as witnesses, encouraged the grand jury to fulfill its role as a “shield” for the individual from the state, and ultimately persuaded the jurors not to indict. Turner was furious. “He spluttered that I had embarrassed him with the local police chief, to whom he had made a promise that the Panther ‘thorn’ would be removed.” He complained to Washington that Kris was insubordinate, a complaint he repeated a few months later, when she chaired a committee for an organization of local business and civic leaders on how to deal with growing street prostitution in Portland. She recommended decriminalization to limi
t pimping and public health dangers, and the provision of alternative programs for those who wanted to leave the life. When she then spoke out against Attorney General Ed Meese’s antipornography campaign, she incurred the wrath of some feminists and, again, of Turner, who attacked her on the front page of the Portland Oregonian as “unfit to represent the United States” and demanded that she resign. Kris felt she had no choice but to do so, and was sure her government career was at an end.

  Nine years later, in 1993, when Bill Clinton asked Kris to leave her job as professor and dean at Lewis and Clark Law School and become the first woman U.S. attorney in Oregon, her appointment roused her local enemies anew. Turner led a campaign to defeat her nomination, persuading the state’s leading newspaper to reprint his letter of a decade earlier denouncing her to Washington and to editorialize against her appointment, branding her “soft on crime.” At her swearing-in, Kris retaliated with a bit of political theater reminiscent of her commune days. While Turner’s conservative Christian fellows were gaining legislative victories against gay rights around the state, Kris invited members of the Warm Springs tribe to say the invocation prayer and the Gay Men’s Chorus to sing a song by the Grateful Dead.

  As the chief federal law enforcement officer in Oregon, Kris has watched her life take several ironic turns. Having once been known in her commune for baking delicious hashish brownies to serve with English tea, she has become, in America’s prime marijuana-growing region, a frontline soldier in the war on drugs. She is an outspoken critic of efforts to expand government surveillance of citizens, including the antiterrorism bill supported by Clinton, but it is frequently her signature that authorizes wiretaps and search warrants. And though a lifelong champion of civil disobedience, she has come down hard on what is at present the nation’s most active antiestablishment movement, prosecuting a string of antigovernment militants. Among her targets have been the “Posse Comitatus,” radical advocates of property rights who refuse to pay taxes and menace federal employees; operators of a Corvallis, Oregon, methamphetamine lab, who stockpiled diesel fuel and ammonium nitrate in quantities sufficient for a bomb like the one used to blow up the federal building in Oklahoma City; and a survivalist in the Columbia Gorge, who nearly burned down a small town when his booby-trapped arsenal of 1,400 pounds of plastic explosives blew up.