1968

by Mark Kurlansky

  Only a few weeks before the Democratic convention, it was alleged that North Vietnamese gun boats had fired on U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. Johnson retaliated by attacking North Vietnam and got Congress to pass the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which empowered the president to take “any means necessary” to protect South Vietnam. There has been much evidence, including a cable from one of the destroyers, that the attack may never have taken place. In 1968 the Senate held hearings on the subject but never resolved it conclusively. The suspicion has endured that the Tonkin incident, whether it occurred or not, was seized by Johnson as a pretext to pursue the war. Tom Hayden said, “When the Democratic Party was agreeing to the Tonkin Gulf Resolution at the same time they were refusing to seat the Mississippi Freedom Party, that was a turning point for me.”

  The following year Stokely Carmichael went to Mississippi intending to form a local black political party in one of the counties there. He chose Lowndes County because it was 80 percent black. The all-white Mississippi State Democratic Party had a white rooster for a symbol. Searching for a predator that would devour a rooster, Carmichael called his party the Black Panthers. More than a year later two Californians, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, talked to Carmichael about starting their own California party for which they borrowed the name Black Panther. Not seating the Mississippi Freedom Party at the 1964 convention had radicalized the civil rights movement and profoundly changed the history of the 1960s in America.

  One year after the Freedom Summer, the southern civil rights struggle was no longer center stage. Black Power was shifting attention to northern cities. Stokely Carmichael, Bob Moses, and all the diverse elements of the civil rights movement could agree on the importance of stopping the war and on little else.

  Hoffman appeared not to have noticed this shift. In the spring of 1965, he opened the Snick Shop in his native Worcester, selling crafts made by poor blacks in the South while his fellow SNCC workers, H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichel, Julius Lester, and others were selling books and pamphlets on Black Power. Stokely Carmichael admired him for his physical courage. It was somewhat more than physical courage—an irresistible pull toward the vortex. When demonstrators were attacked, he stepped to the front and did everything he could to be the most visible. But when SDS organized its first antiwar rally in Washington, Hoffman did not even go. His most publicized comment about opposing the war at the time was that everyone should protest by going to Jones Beach on Long Island on a summer day wearing only bathing suits.

  In 1968 Julius Lester published his seminal work, Look Out, Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama! Lester wrote about how it had been fine for SNCC to have “white and black together” in the words of the Pete Seeger anthem, when they were fighting southern racism, but once they went north it became clear that white people, not southerners, were the problem. “The mask,” he said, “began to slip from the North’s face.” He noted the media value of Black Power—it was provocative.

  The cry for black power has done more to generate black consciousness than anything else. The term is not new, having been used by black people like Richard Wright and James Boggs, as well as whites like Charles Silberman. It achieved world wide notice, though, on the highways of Mississippi during the Mere-dith March, when SNCC organizer Willie Ricks condensed what everybody had been saying, “Power for black people!” and said, “Black Power!” (Ricks is not one to mince words.)

  What had been a dull march turned into a major news event. Everybody wanted to know what this Black Power was. If SNCC had said Negro Power or Colored Power, white folks would have continued sleeping easy every night. But BLACK POWER! Black. That word. BLACK! And the visions came of alligator infested swamps arched by primordial trees and moss dripping from the limbs and out of the depths of the swamp, the mire oozing from his skin, came the black monster and fathers told their daughters to be in by nine instead of nine-thirty. . . . BLACK POWER! My God, the niggers were gon’ start paying white folk back, . . . The nation was hysterical. Hubert Humphrey screamed, “. . . there is no room in America for racism of any color.” He must have been lying because black people know of 48 states at least that have so much room for racism there’s hardly room for anything else.

  SNCC had never been more than 20 percent white, but in December 1966, seven months after Carmichael became head of SNCC, the organization narrowly passed—19 to 18, with 24 abstentions—a measure barring white people. It was Bob Moses, the man who had brought a thousand volunteers south two summers before, who ordered the expulsion. Hoffman was furious and struck back in an article in that month’s Village Voice, where he originated his hip first-person colloquial style—a style that New York publications have been imitating ever since. He attacked SNCC’s Achilles’ heel: the fact that, as in many of the sixties movements, SNCC organizers had been doing a great deal of sleeping with one another. These were young people working closely together, often in great danger. As SNCC worker Casey Hayden said, “If you were lucky enough to have a bed, you might feel bad if you didn’t share it.” SNCC had tried to keep this information within the organization, because people were not only having sex, they were having interracial sex, black men with white women, and there was absolutely nothing that so provoked white racists as this. Abbie Hoffman wrote that white women had been lured into the organization and seduced and were now being thrown out: “I feel for the other whites in SNCC, especially the white females. I identify with all those Bronx chippies that are getting conned out of their bodies and bread by some dark skinned sharpie.”

  In July 1967, when riots erupted in American cities, Johnson appointed an eleven-member presidential commission headed by Illinois governor Otto Kerner to study and recommend solutions to “civil disorders.” In March 1968, the Kerner Commission released its controversial but much praised study in which racism was said to be the key problem. It accused the news media of exaggerating violence and underreporting on the poverty of inner cities and said, “A new mood has sprung up among Negroes, particularly among the young, in which self esteem and enhanced racial pride are replacing apathy and submission to ‘the system.’ ”

  The report, which sold so widely that by April 1968 it was number two on The New York Times nonfiction bestseller list, called for drastic increases in federal spending. “The vital needs of the nation must be met; hard choices must be made, and, if necessary, new taxes enacted.” Unfortunately, that same day Arkansas Democrat Wilbur Mills, who as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee was the leading figure on taxes, announced that the cost of expanding the war in Vietnam could force a tax increase. That was what the commission meant by hard choices. New York City mayor John Lindsay, a member of the Kerner Commission, was one of an increasing number, including Robert Kennedy, who were complaining that the cost of the war was keeping the country from its social responsibilities.

  But the most quoted and remembered line of the report was “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” And that was exactly what was happening in the militant movements of the Left as well. Mirroring society, black and white activists were increasingly separated.

  By 1967 Abbie Hoffman had become a militant for the privileged whites. He protested capitalism and commercialism by burning money and urging others to do the same. Burning money was not an idea that would resonate with rural southern blacks or urban northern ones. But what was significant to Hoffman was that setting fire to money attracted television cameras, because it was visual. In 1967, when he finally turned his attention to the antiwar movement, his concern was how to get it onto television. In May of that year he formed the Flower Brigade, made up of young antiwar activists with what had become the hippie uniform—long hair, flowered clothing, bell-bottomed blue jeans, headbands, beads—a uniform that seemed to draw cameras. Hoffman, waving an American flag, wore a cape that said “Freedom.”

  Hoffman had learned from the civil rights movement that even creative nonviolence can go unnoticed u
nless the participants are attacked. The Flower Brigade was designed to get attacked. He trained the members in the defensive crouch that he had been taught in the civil rights movement. And they were attacked, young women beaten, American flags torn out of their hands. It made for powerful photographs, and the Flower Brigade was momentarily the talk of the peace movement. Hoffman told the press that they were poorly equipped from “uptown florists” but had plans to “grow our own.” He boasted that “dandelion chains are being wrapped around induction centers,” where draftees were processed into the military.

  Now established as one of the leading “hippies” of New York’s East Village, Hoffman joined a group called the Diggers, founded by a group of actors from San Francisco, the San Francisco Mime Troupe. He explained the difference between a Digger and a hippie in an essay titled “Diggery Is Niggery” for a publication called Win. Diggers, he said, were hippies who had learned to manipulate the media instead of being manipulated by them. “Both are in one sense a huge put-on,” he wrote.

  The Diggers were named after a seventeenth-century English free land movement that preached the end of money and property and inspired the idea of destroying money and giving everything away for free as revolutionary acts. Hoffman staged a “sweep-in” on Third Street in the East Village, usually one of Manhattan’s dirtiest streets. The police did not know how to respond when Hoffman and the Diggers took to the block with brooms and mops. One even walked up to a New York City cop and started polishing his badge. The policeman laughed. Everyone laughed, and the Village Voice reported that the “sweep-in” was “a goof.” Later that year Hoffman staged a “smoke-in” in which people went to Tompkins Square Park and smoked marijuana, which was pretty much what everyone had been doing anyway.

  “A modern revolutionary group,” Hoffman explained, “headed for the television station, not for the factory.”

  Hoffman’s partner and competitor was Jerry Rubin, born in 1938 1968 of Rubin and Hoffman rolling on the floor in drug-induced stupors while founding the Yippie! movement is exactly the opposite of what it appears to be. Instead of being the embarrassing reality leaked to the press by some disloyal insider, it was in fact a planted story. In reality, Rubin and Hoffman had given a great deal of sober thought to the creation of the movement. Hoffman, in his “free” period, wanted to call the group the Freemen. In fact, his first book, Revolution for the Hell of It, was published in 1968 under the nom de plume Free. But after long discussion, the Freemen lost out to Yippie! It wasn’t until later in the year that it occurred to them to say it stood for Youth International Party.

  No one was certain how seriously to take Abbie Hoffman, and that was his great strength. One story tells much about the elusive clown of the sixties. In 1967, Hoffman got married for a second time. The June 8 “wed-in” was also publicized in the Village Voice, which said, “Bring flowers, friends, food, fun, costumes, painted faces.” The couple was to be joined “in holy mind blow”—dressed in white with garlands in their hair. The I Ching, the Chinese Book of Change that was used to interpret the future three thousand years ago and in 1968 reemerged as popular mysticism, was read at the ceremony. The groom was visibly under the influence of marijuana and giggled uncontrollably. Time magazine covered the wed-in for its July 1967 issue on hippies but did not mention the “beflowered couple” by name. Abbie Hoffman was not a widely known name until 1968. But after the wed-in, without any publicity, the bridal couple went off to the decidedly bourgeois Temple Emanu-El on Manhattan’s affluent Upper East Side, where Rabbi Nathan A. Perilman quietly performed a traditional Reform Jewish wedding.

  Jews in disproportionate numbers were active in student movements in 1968 not only in Poland, but in the United States and France. At Columbia and the University of Michigan, two of SDS’s most active campuses, SDS was more than half Jewish. When Tom Hayden first went to the University of Michigan, he noted that the only political activists were Jewish students from leftist families. Two-thirds of the white Freedom Riders were Jewish. Most of the leaders of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley were Jewish. Mario Savio, the notable exception, said:

  I’m not Jewish, but I saw those pictures. And those pictures were astonishing. Heaps of bodies. Mounds of bodies. Nothing affected my consciousness more than those pictures. And those pictures had on me the following impact, which other people maybe came to in a different way. They meant to me that everything needed to be questioned. Reality itself. Because this was like opening up your father’s drawer and finding pictures of child pornography, with adults molesting children. It’s like a dark, grotesque secret that people had that at some time in the recent past people were being incinerated and piled up in piles. . . . Those pictures had an impact on people’s lives. I know they had an impact on mine, something not as strong but akin to a “never again” feeling which Jews certainly have had. But non-Jews had that feeling, too.

  People born during and directly after World War II grew up in a world transformed by horror, and this made them see the world in a completely different way. The great lesson of Nazi genocide for the postwar generation was that everyone has an obligation to speak up in the face of wrong and that any excuse for silence will, in the merciless hindsight of history, appear as pathetic and culpable as the Germans in the war crimes trials, pleading that they were obeying orders. This was a generation that as children learned of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Children who were told constantly throughout their childhood that at any moment the adults might decide to have a war that would end life on earth.

  While an older generation justified the nuclear bombing of Japan because it had shortened the war, the new generation once again, as children, had seen the pictures and they viewed it very differently. They had also seen the mushroom clouds of nuclear explosions on television because the United States still did aboveground testing. Americans and Europeans, both Eastern and Western, grew up with the knowledge that the United States, which was continuing to build bigger and better bombs, was the only country that had ever actually used one. And it talked about doing it again, all the time—in Korea, in Cuba, in Vietnam. The children born in the 1940s in both superpower blocs grew up practicing covering themselves up in the face of nuclear attack. Savio recalled being ordered under his desk at school: “I ultimately took degrees in physics so even then I asked myself questions like ‘Will this actually do the job?’ ”

  Growing up during the cold war had the same effect on most of the children of the world. It made them fearful of both blocs. This was one of the reasons European, Latin American, African, and Asian youth were so quick and so resolute in their condemnation of U.S. military action in Vietnam. By and large, theirs was not a support of communists, but a distaste for either bloc imposing its power. To American youth, the execution of the Rosenbergs, the lives ruined by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s hearings, taught them to distrust the U.S. government.

  Youth around the globe saw the world being squeezed by two equal and unsavory forces. American youth had learned that it was important to stand up to both the communists and the anticommunists. The Port Huron Statement recognized that communism should be opposed: “The Soviet Union, as a system, rests on the total repression of organized opposition, as well as a vision of the future in the name of which much human life had been sacrificed, and numerous small and large denials of human dignity rationalized.” But according to the Port Huron Statement, anticommunist forces in America were more harmful than helpful. The statement cautions that “an unreasoning anti-Communism has become a major social problem.”

  This first started to be expressed in the 1950s with the film characters portrayed by James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Elvis Presley, and the beat generation writings of Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. But the feeling grew in the 1960s. The young invested hope in John Kennedy, largely because he too was relatively young—the second youngest president in history replacing Eisenhower, who at the time was the oldest. The inauguration of Kennedy in 1961 was the larges
t change of age ever at the White House, with almost thirty years’ difference between the exiting and entering presidents. But even under Kennedy, young Americans experienced the Cuban missile crisis as a terrifying experience and one that taught that people in power play with human life even if they are young and have a good sense of humor.

  Most of the people who arrived at college campuses in the mid-1960s had a deep resentment and distrust of any kind of authority. People in positions of authority anywhere on the political spectrum were not to be trusted. That is why there were no absolute leaders. The moment a Savio or Hayden declared himself leader, he would have lost all credibility.

  There was something else that was different about this generation. They were the first to grow up with television, and they did not have to learn how to use it, it came naturally, the same way children who grew up with computers in the 1990s had an instinct for it that older people could not match with education. In 1960, on the day of Eisenhower’s last news conference, Robert Spivack, a columnist, asked the president if he felt the press had been fair to him during his eight years in the White House. Eisenhower answered, “Well, when you come down to it, I don’t see much what a reporter could do to a president, do you?” Such a sentiment would never again be heard in the White House. Kennedy, born in 1917, was said to have understood television, but it was really his brother Robert, eight years younger, who was the architect of the Kennedy television presidency.