“You afraid?” I asked a kid from California. He filled his palm with a wad of Vaseline, then smeared it across his face to protect himself from Mace. “I dunno,” he said. “My toes feel cold, but my ears are burning hot.”
We were standing in Lincoln Park, not long after a curfew declared by the Chicago police. The cops had gathered on the rise above us, in formation. The festival I’d fussed and fretted over never took place, though there were a few impromptu concerts. The only event of note was a ceremony nominating the Yippie candidate for president, a hog named Pigasus. Pig was what we called the police. “Pigs eat shit!” had replaced “We shall overcome” as our chant of choice. As the police line tightened I saw kids holding Spalding balls studded with nails and tacks. My new friend from California pulled a canister from his pocket. It was pepper spray.
Following his lead, I wrapped a towel doused with water around my face. “Better take off those credentials,” my comrade advised. “They’re going after the press.” And they were. Even Hugh Hefner had sustained a minor injury. But most journalists were safe inside the convention hall, which had been cordoned off from the demonstrations. I didn’t see any other reporters in the crowd of kids, and I felt the tremble of elation that comes when you realize that you’ve got a scoop. But this wasn’t just a professional high. The moment when I removed my press pass was also the instant when I crossed over from the regretful life of the insulated to the thrilling zone of risk. Everyone here had seen, if not shed, blood. They were the hardcore, and I was finally among them.
The police advanced a bit after midnight, behind two massive trucks. You could sense the fear in their bodies, the same foreboding that was gripping the whole nation. Though they were very well armed, with steel-tipped riot batons, shotguns, an assortment of pistols and ominous canisters in their belts, when you got close to them you could see terror in their tight lips, and you knew that nothing in their training had prepared them for this. They’d handled riots, but not with TV cameras following their every move; they’d shot at people in the ghettos, but not at the children of middle-class whites. These men were as alarmed and as pumped with adrenaline as we were. When you sense that in a cop, you know that what follows will be out of control.
It remained only for the signal to be given, and when it was, the police advanced down the slope. Floodlights mounted on their trucks shone bright orange. Then tear-gas canisters exploded—putt, putt, putt—and you could see that the police were wearing masks, which made their vision even more imprecise. Soon the kids were engulfed in an orange cloud, and we ran in every direction, looking for rocks to throw and windows to smash and something to feel besides fear. Because one thing about tear gas: if it doesn’t knock you out, it makes you crazy.
That was the first night. The following day was the main event, which began with a demo in the park that bordered Michigan Avenue, just across from the Hilton, where many of the delegates and much of the press corps was staying. Tear gas was useless here, because the wind would send fumes into the hotel. Already reporters were throwing things out of the windows—rolls of toilet paper and even typewriters. Some demostrators threw balloons filled with cow blood from the stockyards. These missiles burst on the cops, along with bags of animal shit, smearing their uniforms like works of abstract art. That was when they really waded into the crowd. Cameras were snapping; TV trucks were gathering. And meanwhile, in the convention hall, Hubert Humphrey’s name was placed in nomination. When one speaker excoriated the city for the violence in the streets, the mayor of Chicago, an old-school boss named Richard Daley, could be seen in TV close-up, shouting what seemed like “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch.”
I don’t remember when the National Guard arrived, but we knew that they’d be more disciplined than the police, and we cheered as they positioned themselves between us and the pigs. It was clear from their eyes where their sympathies lay. Kids started putting flowers in the barrels of their rifles. A few soldiers mustered peace signs. The folksinger Phil Ochs, who had been performing through it all, yelled into a mike, “If any of you are human beings, take off your clothes.” To my astonishment, a number of soldiers removed their helmets. It was one of the most moving moments I experienced in the sixties, proof that my hunch had been right—they were young, and the young were one.
I stood in a knot of journalists, the few who dared to cover the demo from its midst. To my right was an editor from Esquire whose job was to protect the star writer from Paris whom the magazine had imported to cover this event. He was none other than Jean Genet, the sacred monster of modern French letters. Genet was transfixed by the beefy flab of the Chicago police. “Those bellies!” I heard him exclaim in French. The police were clubbing people within earshot of our group, and the editor from Esquire was worried that his charge might submit to a steel-tipped embrace. He ushered Genet along like a parent dragging an unwilling child across the street.
Suddenly I realized that someone had his arm over my shoulder. It was Ed Sanders, the poet I’d met in 1962, when he ran the Peace Eye Bookstore. By now his beatnik band, the Fugs, had had an unlikely hit and he was something of a celebrity. “Stay with me,” he said. I still remember the protective look in his eye. It always came as a shock when someone who didn’t want something from me showed concern for my body or my soul. But I didn’t stay with Ed. I had my escape route mapped out in advance—I always did at demos—and I crossed a bridge a few blocks away. Whatever the danger, I had to witness the action.
I ambled onto Michigan Avenue, where the police were still deployed. By now night had fallen, and they were foraging for stray protesters. I needed the safety of a group, and I let myself get swept up in the crowd around the Hilton. A line of cops started pushing everyone back against the plate-glass windows that framed the lobby, flailing away at whomever they could reach. I heard glass break behind me. People were falling through the windows and into the hotel, shrieking with one breath and apologizing for stepping on toes with another. I saw clubs moving in slow motion—the same cartoony experience I’d had at Columbia. I stared at a kid whose arms had been twisted behind him in the crush. I felt the Guernica in his eyes; the same terrified expression that the big horse had in the painting was on his face.
All of a sudden floodlights on TV trucks broke the darkness. The street looked like a studio, and in the glare everyone started shouting, “The whole world is watching.” It was a spontaneous chant, born of the knowledge that we were on the air, live, just as Hubert Humphrey was accepting his party’s nomination—the networks showed a split screen. We had accomplished what we’d come for, spoiled the party for the party of war. Even better, we’d taken our hero Henry David Thoreau’s advice: “You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.” I found something else as well: the joy of knowing that I was risking it all for the Revolution.
Once again, my diminutive height came to my rescue. I managed to scurry under people’s legs, and I slipped out of the crush at the Hilton. I scampered down the street, shaking badly. A few blocks from the hotel, I heard a police car screech to a stop. Three cops got out, ready to arrest me, or worse. I sprinted up the stairs of the Art Institute of Chicago and took refuge in its arched arcade. In the street below I saw people who weren’t even in the demo carrying TV sets. (Black residents would call this “the white riot.”) My eyes burned with gas. My hands shook with fury. “Pigs eat shit!” I screamed. Suddenly I heard a gun go off. For the second time in my life, I felt all the hairs on my body stiffen, as I had at the White Castle riot.
The cop standing behind me must have fired over my head, or maybe his gun had blanks. At any rate, I wasn’t hit. Instead I had a kind of blackout, mentally disappearing from the spot. When I came to, I was three blocks away, with no memory of how I’d gotten there. A police car skidded along the street under a hail of rocks. A kid standing next to me was preparing to heave one. “The first time’s hard,” he said to me, “but after that it’s easy.”
Something similar was happening in Czechoslovakia, where, a year earlier, I’d seen the glimmers of a liberal Communism that was fated to be repressed. Just a week before our marauding through Chicago, Soviet tanks had entered Prague. I’d seen footage of students pleading in vain with Russian troops. It added to my sense that we were fighting a global battle against a tyranny that was much bigger than the U.S. government or even capitalism. Years later I would understand that this was a battle between a patriarchal order and the forces of change, and the streets of Prague and Chicago were bloody with the effects of machismo run amok. But whatever drives people to risk their lives in the name of liberation, whatever the moment contains that makes revolutionary energy decisive—it was missing in Chicago. Something stopped us.
We had glimpsed the precipice, seen the potential for vast violence, felt the viciousness of a threatened state, and sensed the power of the backlash that would surely ensue from its collapse. Call it cowardice and you won’t be entirely wrong. But it was also the product of an unexpected perception. The moment of our victory in the streets was also when we had to confront the consequences of our acts. Did we really want our country to fall apart? That was the question Chicago presented, and for most of us the answer was a definitive, if unarticulated, no. It was like the hatred you feel toward your parents when you’re young. You may want to kill them, but you don’t want them to die. This is the origin of the love that eventually replaces filial rage. It doesn’t usually arrive until the parents are feeble, and that was how the government now seemed to me. Suddenly I felt bound to its fate. I’d left New York determined to smash the state, but I left Chicago an ambivalent patriot. It prevented me, or saved me, from the fate of a warrior. And this, I’ve come to think, is why our revolution fizzled.
To my mind, the same decision was made in the black community, where the ghetto riots never evolved into a true insurrection despite the efforts of a number of radicals to organize a fighting force. It wasn’t just the fear of retaliation. Malcolm X’s famous slogan “By any means necessary” poses an implicit question: What, exactly, is the reason for this necessity? For most black people, including the rioters (some of whom were middle-class), the answer was similar to ours. There was a widespread underlying faith in the possibility of change—even Abbie Hoffman had named his son America. This belief inspired rebellion, but also restraint. And change would come. Fitfully, and not entirely for the better, a new America would be born. From rage, renewal: that’s the lesson of the sixties, dude. But at the time, the only thing that seemed to be approaching was … exhaustion.
I’ve already mentioned the Weather Underground and its futile attempt to end the war by setting off bombs. But they were rationalists compared with the Symbionese Liberation Army. In 1973, this cultish cadre would shoot a school superintendent with cyanide-laced bullets. Later they would achieve fame by kidnapping Patty Hearst. By then I didn’t want to even hear the R-word. This violence was not only useless and immoral, but dour. The pleasure principle was missing. And the man who could have brought creativity to the remnant of the Movement was hors de combat. I would later learn that Abbie Hoffman had been struggling with severe depression. He would kill himself in 1989. The Revolution was a crucial distraction for him, even more than for me. When it was over, he lost his best defense. And so did I.
The Reckoning
I took the train from Chicago to New York, composing my piece while the heartland streaked by, rusting and resentful. I wrote about crossing the line from reporting to participating, but it took some time for the full feeling of what I’d been through to register. I’d never felt so exhilarated as when I watched kids being clubbed at the Hilton and escaped without a scratch. Now I knew what it was like to exist in a state of pure sensation, to lose myself in the ecstasy of a riot. But the aftermath of that high was sickening. What kind of person did it make me? What had become of the idea, so central to the civil rights movement, that violence was abhorrent because it reduced people to inhuman objects? And what, finally, did we accomplish? We’d destroyed the president who betrayed us, but we had no alternative to offer. And Richard Nixon was lapping up the blood in the streets.
Back in the city I noticed the used needles on the sidewalks, the blathering burnouts, the mood of grim forbearance. It seemed worse than the usual Manhattan response to a summer that lingered too long. There was a pall in the air, as if everyone were breathing the stench of having failed to do what seemed necessary but horrible to behold. We had a stake in the system, hate it as we might, and the prudence it dictated stopped us in our tracks. It felt suspiciously like maturity, and not many of us were ready to accept that gracefully. We had struggled against growing up, but in the crucible of history we did. I certainly did, and it left me feeling prematurely old.
Amid this dejection I interviewed Joe McDonald, of Country Joe and the Fish. They’d been brave and committed enough to play at the Chicago protests, and I wondered what Joe thought of the Revolution now. I wanted him to offer some alternative to my glumness, but instead he affirmed it. “There isn’t going to be any revolution,” he said tartly. “Let’s be realistic.”
Why not? I asked.
“Because you have to control things, and most people I know aren’t ready for that. They want a leaderless society.” Contempt flashed in his eyes. “Three years ago we were hobos singing our hearts out about the virtues of the open road. Last year, we were Indians. Now we’re revolutionaries. Man, if the Revolution ever comes for real, they’ll probably use Andy Warhol munitions. You throw it and this big sign comes on—Pow!”
We heard the sounds of a demo in the street below his hotel. We ran to the window. Kids were carrying Vietcong flags. Joe drew the blinds. “I’m not into that anymore,” he sighed. What was he into? I asked. His wife and kid, he replied—the standard of the mature man, delivered with the venom of a defeated partisan. Like me, he had played a role that proved to be, for all its promise, a stylization, and now it was his life. “I’ve been a poet, a guru, a politico,” he said. “I’ll be anything you want. Tell me what you want me to be.”
I had no answer.
“Well, I’m in the entertainment business. It just so happens that the people I entertain are freaky.”
Joe paid a price for his realism, and it showed in his music, which became almost laconic. “Only the symptoms of energy remain,” I wrote. I could have been talking about myself, but I was still invested in the belief that my mission was more than merely entertaining. I had to find a new subject, something that could inspire the prophetic rhetoric that my readers expected from me. For the better part of a year I thrashed around for a subject. Nothing made my blood beat. Then I heard about the planning for a rock festival on a farm in upstate New York. “Three days of peace, love, and music,” the poster said. I needed that kind of inspiration. If anything could rekindle my ardor it was the lineup at Woodstock, even more definitive than the one I’d seen two years earlier at Monterey Pop. But I wasn’t going to make the same mistake of mixing with the industry elite, so I declined an offer to travel to the festival in a VIP helicopter. I wanted to experience the scene the way I once did—as a fan—and that included getting there. So I joined some friends and we drove up the New York State Thruway. But the road was so jammed that the police
shut it down, and I never reached my destination. The news coverage was all of Woodstock that I got to see. I have to say, I was relieved. Now I wouldn’t have to face the fact that I had no spunk left for this sort of thing. Epiphanies in the mud were no longer my idea of grooving.
Clearly it was time to leave the field of rock criticism to a not-yet-jaded generation, and already the Voice had taken steps in that direction with a new column rotating among a group of writers. It skewered the negativity of “professionals” like me, insisting that the music should be about pleasure, period. I watched from a distance, too melancholy to feel resentful. I understood the need to focus on joy rather than judgment, and I pondered what Joe McDonald had told me during our interview: “Two years ago we believed in music like a god. Well, it’s nothing to believe in. The only emotion I associate with it is pleasure.” The problem was, I couldn’t make that link. My head was hurting, not from the crashing sound of guitars but from Joni Mitchell’s homage to Woodstock, in which she channeled a magic world where bombers turned to butterflies. “We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden,” she warbled. What garden? The one where it was forbidden to eat the fruit of real-world knowledge? Better to be expelled—or perhaps to be the serpent. I fumbled for a way to articulate these feelings, but I couldn’t summon up the language to describe what I felt. The only honest response would have been silence, but I wasn’t ready for that. I am a writer. When all else fails, we write.
Another Little Piece of My Heart Page 23