What I didn’t realize was the depths of resentment that the police felt toward reporters. Anyone wearing press credentials was a target for the guardians in blue. There are many pictures of journalists being beaten at demonstrations in 1968. (My favorite shows a Times photographer dragged down by cops who are choking him with his camera straps.) It had become apparent to me that I was safer without an identifier. I could easily pass as an ordinary protester, and when you’re looking for someone to club, the taller target is the tempting one. I credit my survival to my shortness.
The demo that Don covered, billed as a Yip-In, had happened in March, just a month before King was killed. It was already clear that the police were ready to bust heads, especially when the protesters showed up in the main hall of Grand Central Station, with its celebrated vaulted ceiling featuring signs of the zodiac. The chaos must have been glorious to behold, chants ricocheting off the marble floor and walls. I wasn’t there, so I wouldn’t know, but I do remember what happened to Don. At some point, the police lifted him up and shoved him headfirst through a plate-glass window. His wound required stitches. Our staff photographer took a picture of him that ran, I believe, on the front page. Don is looking directly at the camera, blood dripping down his face and onto his press card.
After that incident we were told to buy helmets. (For years afterward I never went to a demo without one.) And Don became even more precious to me. I blamed myself for his baptism by billy club. Finally I forced myself to ask how he was coping with his injury. “Everything’s cool,” he replied. He was going to his place upstate to mellow out. I knew he needed a break. We’d already decided to cover the next big demo together, perhaps under a joint byline. This protest was being organized by antiwar groups determined to disrupt the Democratic convention in Chicago, where Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, would be anointed as the party’s nominee. I would write about the chaos that ensued, but Don wasn’t there with me. The conversation I’ve described was the last time I saw him alive.
Sometime during that time-out in the country he walked into a lake and drowned. He was twenty-three. The Voice obituary concluded that his death was accidental, but a guest at his house told me a more complicated version. According to him, they were tripping, and at some point he and Don had a sexual encounter. Apparently it was Don’s first gay experience, and afterward he wandered off by himself—end of story. I know it’s difficult to keep track of someone while you’re in an altered state, but I was furious at this guy. Couldn’t he tell how troubled Don was? Why hadn’t he stayed with him? Unreasonable as my feelings may have been, this behavior struck me as the epitome of what lay beneath the mellow veneer many people cultivated in the late sixties. It wasn’t indifference but something even worse: a casual faith in letting people in distress do their thing.
The trauma of Don’s death remains so painful that my hands are trembling as I recall it. Everyone at the Voice was devastated. His memorial service was the only time I saw my colleagues cry. The editor seemed steeped in grief, and in the weeks that followed he withdrew into his office. A few years later the paper was sold to the first of many owners, each of them less connected to its original mission. But for a while I kept a picture of Don in my desk drawer. It was the one that had run after he was injured by the police. While pacing out a paragraph, I would stare at his face, blood dripping from his forehead and a look of stunned confusion in his eyes. Like so many images from my youth, that picture is now online. When I see it today the Neil Young song about childhood and memory fills my raw and raging mind: I was helpless. Helpless. Helpless.
The Whole World Is Watching
Youth fare was our best ally. If you were under twenty-five, you could fly anywhere in the country at half price. That made it easy to move thousands of demonstrators to Chicago in August of 1968—the cost from New York was only fifty dollars. The Voice sent several reporters to cover the Democratic convention and the protests in the streets. I had made a prior trip, tagging along with the radical leadership, a coalition of Panthers, Yippies, and the first major New Left organization, Students for a Democratic Society. They were scheduled to meet with the police department and the mayor’s office. Only the activists knew that a journalist was present.
There, at opposite ends of a long wooden table polished to a sheen, sat Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, and other members of the boisterous crew that would come to be known as the Chicago Seven. They were in no mood to be judicious. Permits or not, they were going to occupy the city’s parks for the three days of the convention, and their agenda included a musical marathon called the Festival of Life. When asked how many people could be expected, they blithely estimated one hundred thousand. (The actual crowd was twenty-five thousand at most.) One of the leaders—I’m not sure who, but it was probably Abbie—told the officials that his followers were planning to drop LSD into the city’s reservoirs. I remember questioning him about whether that was really possible. Of course not, he replied. Everyone knows you can’t lace an entire water supply with acid, and besides, fluoride would neutralize the drug. But the bureaucrats at the meeting weren’t aware of that. They looked pie-eyed. Afterward they spread a rumor that the police were going to open unused sewer tunnels as mass jails. Hyperbole was the standard mode of address on both sides. It added to the sense of unreality.
I thought about sitting this demo out. I already knew what a police riot, as we called these encounters with the law, looked like. And I had vivid memories of the racial backlash, Chicago-style. In 1966 I’d covered a housing march led by Martin Luther King in a suburb called Gage Park. Five thousand white residents attacked us in a frenzy. I watched as King fell to the ground, hit on the head by a rock. He later told reporters he had never seen such violence. The march ended abruptly, and we were herded into buses under a hail of abuse. (I remember shouts of “Kill coon King!”) The organizers told us to lie under the seats. As the bus careened through the streets, rocks crashed through the windows. I looked up long enough to see a nun throwing a stone. This left a vivid impression, and it recurred as I pondered returning to Chicago. But I decided to go. It was too good a story to miss, and by then I was hooked on the spectacle of violence, the greatest show on earth.
I also had a new role to play. I’d volunteered to help organize the free concert in one of the parks, and I started making calls. I had visions of rock stars casting an aura of significance over the event, as if to say, We’re all protesters now. But this was no Monterey Pop. The hip elite weren’t going to show up in their finery, and there wouldn’t be any record executives to sign the best acts. Most of my connections were through press agents, and they were none too eager to see their clients associated with this protest. I contacted a few musicians whose numbers I kept in my Rolodex. They were all sympathetic, but no one was willing to commit. The basic response was: I’d love to overthrow the government, but I’ve got a gig that day. Some expressed concern for the safety of their equipment, which struck me as bogus in an era when guitars and amps were being smashed by performers like insects underfoot. A few said they were worried about getting arrested, though, of course, that was a time-honored tradition in pop. I suppose it was one thing for Jim Morrison to get busted after whipping out his dick onstage, quite another for him to be associated with political disorder (though, in fairness, my inquiry never got past his publicist). I suddenly became aware of how safe even the most radical rock experience was. You blew your mind and went home to groove another day. Pop stars were revolutionaries of representation, unwilling to put their bodies on the line for a Yippie riot.
Only the most political performers showed up in Chicago. One of them, Country Joe McDonald, would come to regret that gig. He got attacked in his hotel by men wearing armbands, probably security guards. I was glad that I’d decided not to reach out to Janis Joplin. I didn’t want to get a regretful rejection from her. By then she had let her manager convince her to leave Big Brother and the Holding Company and take up with a band of seasoned studio mus
icians. I had a nagging suspicion that she’d become a true pro, and I was loath to be proven right.
I shouldn’t be so hard on these musicians. They had every reason to fear what was about to take place in Chicago. Anyone with more sense than I would have picked up the signs. The whole country was inflamed, raw with anxiety and resentment, a land charred by fires of rage. One poster, devised by a British airline, caught the sense that everything was hanging by a thread. AMERICA, it read. SEE IT WHILE IT LASTS.
Nothing expressed this sense of chaotic dread like the scene on campus. Student strikes, following the example of Columbia, shut down hundreds of colleges and universities. To me, this revolt was tangible proof that generational solidarity had power, and, even more remarkably, it could cross borders. All over the West, even in the Soviet satellites, young people were in the streets. Mexico City erupted; Paris was in turmoil, along with London and Berlin. Back home, the expanded FM radio band had made room for new progressive-rock stations, featuring playlists that included a number of antiwar anthems. “Vietnam Rag,” by Country Joe and the Fish, contained the scandalous couplet “Be the first one on your block/To see your boy come home in a box.” Pete Seeger had a hit with his wry evocation of LBJ: “We’re waist deep in the big muddy, and the big fool says to push on.” These were auspicious signs, but by then I wasn’t interested in pop and its artifacts. I rarely opened the records that arrived at their usual pace. I stopped spending long nights at the Fillmore East, and traded in my rock-critic drag for the worn T-shirt and jeans of a heroic guerrilla. On the few occasions when I interviewed musicians my questions were peppered with politics.
“What will you do when the Revolution comes?” I remember asking Neil Young as we sat on the patio of his home in L.A. He looked around him and replied, “I’ll die defending my swimming pool.” Even I got the irony in this zinger, and it almost made me face my rigidity. I greatly admired Young, though his politics were unpredictable. It seemed to me that he had the spirit of Dylan without the paranoia. His art was one of self-exploration, his tool the spare poetics of a Canadian prairie child. He was entitled to his interiority; I wouldn’t have wanted him to face the guillotine for that. But I had seen too many bloody heads to indulge in self-reflection. Where had it ever gotten me, and what use could it be in the current situation? I wanted to put the anxieties of fame behind me and to use whatever suasion I had in the service of the future being born.
I traveled from campus to hippie enclave, covering the action. I learned to tie a wet rag around my face when there was tear gas in the air, and to smear Vaseline on myself to ward off Mace. It felt like I was applying warpaint, which, I suppose, I was. The writing that came out of these experiences was as exhilarating as my first pieces, when I focused on the fans and didn’t have to deal with publicists. There was no need to fret about the compromises of my role. All anyone knew was that this cat was writing down everything they said, and it might end up in the paper. That was how I recaptured the sense of connection and tangibility that I’d lost. There were no celebrities in these uprisings; no dry ice behind the amps to give the illusion of an explosion. Everything happened spontaneously or by laborious consent, and the one thing that seemed inevitable was the deployment of police, whose version of a rave-up was cracking heads. The moment when they struck was primal for them and for us, a theater of cruelty that Antonin Artaud could only have dreamt of, where there was no real safety in the audience. Except, of course, for me. Assuming that I knew how to move fast, which I did, I could keep my skull intact. It was as close as I could get to being a war correspondent, which was the most heroic form of journalism to me.
And there were real martyrs—several hundred students killed in Mexico City when troops hidden on rooftops opened fire on demonstrators. A few years down the road, four students would be shot dead in Ohio by National Guardsmen who sent a fusillade into a rally. But in 1968 we were still regarded by the authorities as children of the white middle class, and that bought us a degree of mercy. This was not the case in France. There were news photos of Parisian cops swinging leaded capes at student protesters. I clipped these images hungrily. The city of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, the birthplace of existentialism, was reenacting its history of rebellion. I yearned to cover it, in the tradition of Hemingway reporting on the Spanish Civil War. I imagined myself drinking hard (and eating well), sharing the barricades with students whose breath was as bad as their skin, and, as dawn broke over the smoky streets, fucking some shapely enragée in a room with a lingering scent of Gauloise. Nothing is hotter to me than a sexual fantasy combined with true belief. I seriously considered scrounging up the money to fly to Paris, but then I realized that I would have to report this story without credentials. There would be no time to explain to a cop in sporadic French that I was a member of the American press corps. I decided not to try it.
But a local underground paper ran a series of posters from the strike at the Sorbonne, and I put them up in my workroom for inspiration. They were more enigmatic than anything I’d seen here, featuring slogans over sketchy cartoons that perfectly expressed the anarchist roots of this student movement. As in: “All power to the imagination.” “Demand the impossible.” Or my personal favorite: “Under the pavement a beach.” Googling those posters today makes me reach for my blood-pressure collar (LOL). They are the bridge between the anti-Nazi collages of John Heartfield and the street art of Banksy, as influential on the aesthetics of protest as Fillmore posters were on contemporary graffiti art. You can see the line leading from these bold affiches to ACT-UP and Occupy Wall Street.
I was struck by how similar the strategies of the French revolt were to Abbie Hoffman’s sense of revolutionary theater. I mentioned this to him once, and I asked if he’d read anything by the Situationists, a French anarchist group of the time. “Only in the original Yiddish,” he replied. Abbie was a very smart guy, but he didn’t pay a lot of attention to the intellectual currents swirling around him, certainly not to philosophers with a European pedigree. A passing knowledge of McLuhan was as close as he came to theory. But ideas were absorbed by osmosis in those days; someone told someone, who told a friend, who wrote a song that Joan Baez sang at a rally, and soon it was common knowledge. Generational solidarity was a very effective communications tool, and rock was a tom-tom, its beat-borne messages cryptic to the straight world but quite dear to us. When you think about it, this is how Yiddish functioned for Jews, with an alphabet that couldn’t be deciphered by those outside the tribe. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a leader of the student strikes in Paris (back then he was known as Danny the Red; now he’s a prominent Green), has recalled that he synchronized plans with radicals in other countries, without alerting the authorities, by using Yiddish.
What was the driving force behind our unity? The very situation we were born into, the combination of comfort and oppression. For us, I think, chaos and impulse were the alternative to the leaden regularity of an overly regimented system. We had never known an impediment to our desires; we’d come of age with a multi-billion-dollar economy dedicated to meeting our adolescent needs. We harbored a profound belief that change was waiting for the action that would realize it. These qualities—confidence and flight from stasis—are what’s distinctive about anthems of youthful rebellion from the late sixties. A typical example is the repertoire of the MC5, a group of stoner revolutionaries who played during the protests at the Democratic convention (a hot dog vendor supplied the current for their amps). I saw them a year later in their hometown of Ann Arbor. They took to the stage in a clamor of clanging chords, screaming, KICK OUT THE JAMS!!!! I described their sound as “spasm rock.” It was the classic message of rock ’n’ roll but gone political, the adolescent’s urge to resolve tension in an explosion of feeling amped by all the instability, the constant agitation, into a kind of hysteria. It was irresistible to me.
I’d seen the most incredible images on television: the heads of my political heroes blown apart, cities across the nation smolder
ing. Anything was possible—that was how it felt on a daily basis. I walked around in a state of disorientation, as if I were experiencing the aftershocks of an earthquake that hadn’t happened yet. But the strangest thing about this sensation was that it drove me forward. The imminence demanded that I take action, and whatever I might do seemed very important, as if it could make a decisive difference. There’s a joy in that conviction, a delight that overcomes the dread. This desire to know the brink, to leap over the edge and into the Niagara, is my most vivid memory of 1968.
The Democratic Party was about to nominate a man who, for all his progressive leanings, couldn’t bring himself to oppose the war—another good liberal with a cowardly streak. In late August, Hubert Humphrey headed for Chicago to be consecrated, and we headed there too, thousands of us: radicalized hippies, hardcore lefties, adrenalized potheads, students who would soon be susceptible to the draft. Everything was converging. All signs pointed to a showdown. I had a feeling that we were about to kick out the jams, big time. What I didn’t realize was that this moment of release would have enormous consequences. It would be the crucible event in a year when America experienced its gravest domestic unrest since the Civil War.
Another Little Piece of My Heart Page 22