1968

by Mark Kurlansky

  The SDS group was put up in the Havana Libre, the former Havana Hilton, completed just before the revolution. This sterile, modern hotel was one of the first and last true high-rises built in Havana. The young radicals were comfortable there, eating crab and shrimp cocktails with Cuba libres. They visited factories, which admittedly they rarely did in the United States, and training programs, and a farm where field hands actually sang on their way to work. Gitlin tried to stay skeptical but said, “Mostly I saw energy, amazing commitment. Ordinary people seemed both mobilized and relaxed.” It was an extraordinary combination to see a people energized by a young revolution, inspired by a charismatic leader, and yet with the calm, the music, the sensuality, the good humor, and the accessibility of Caribbean culture. Gitlin, Tom Hayden, other SDS leaders, and David Dellinger were there analyzing the revolution in between conversations about what to do in Chicago during the Democratic convention coming up in the summer.

  Gitlin returned to the United States still full of reservations but impressed enough with his experience that he began to arrange other Cuban trips for SDS members. SDS was growing rapidly on college campuses and by 1968 had nearly one hundred thousand members.

  Mark Rudd was in the first group to go on one of Gitlin’s SDS-organized trips to Cuba. They were put up at the Riviera, the not quite high-rise over the footbridge by the bay. But they objected to the luxury and arranged to be moved to student housing in the abandoned mansions of the neighborhood. Everywhere they went in this year of the heroic guerrillero, they saw Che’s portrait—on walls, in stores, in homes. Traveling by bus in the countryside, they looked down into a valley and saw Che’s portrait, several acres large, fashioned in white rock and red earth. Rudd knew the teachings of Che: “The duty of every revolutionary is to make a revolution.” He longed to be a revolutionary, to be “a man like Che.” Soon he would be back on his Ivy League campus. He was eager to get back.

  CHAPTER 11

  APRIL

  MOTHERFUCKERS

  NEVER EXPLAIN WHAT YOU ARE DOING. This wastes a good deal of time and rarely gets through. Show them through your action, if they don’t understand it, fuck ’em, maybe you’ll hook them with the next action.

  —ABBIE HOFFMAN, Revolution for the Hell of It, 1968

  I SENSED IN MARK an embryo of fanaticism that made me feel slightly irrelevant in his presence.” That is what Tom Hayden wrote about meeting Mark Rudd when he was twenty-nine years old and Rudd a twenty-year-old Columbia student.

  In 1968 there was an expression, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” It was a cliché ironically offered as advice by Charlton Heston to young, rebellious chimpanzees in the 1968 Hollywood hit Planet of the Apes. In another 1968 movie, Wild in the Streets, a dictatorship by young people rounds up everyone over thirty-five and imprisons them in concentration camps, where they are kept helplessly high on LSD. The film was made by the over-thirty crowd, the same ones who insisted that youth trust no one over thirty. Twenty-year-olds never expressed such a ridiculous sentiment. In 1968, Abbie Hoffman turned thirty-two, as did Black Panther Bobby Seale. Hoffman’s colleague Jerry Rubin turned thirty that year, and Eldridge Cleaver turned thirty-three.

  But the college students of the late sixties were different from those of earlier in the decade. They were even more rebellious and perhaps less skilled at expressing that rebellion. Tom Hayden described Rudd as “a nice, somewhat inarticulate, suburban New Jersey kid with blue eyes, sandy hair, and an easy-going manner, non-descript in appearance, apparently having no time for changing clothes or engaging in sterile debate.”

  Rudd’s style and manner were certainly different from those of Tom Hayden or Mario Savio, who were conservative dressers, notably articulate, and frequently engaged in long hours of debate with their movements. Hayden, who expressed himself with a brilliant clarity, may have found Rudd inarticulate by contrast, but the true difference was that Rudd, a tough, avid, and thoughtful reader, did not attach the importance that Hayden did to words. The younger rebels did not believe in civility. While Savio, perhaps the best student speaker of the sixties, was famous for the genteel removal of his shoes to avoid marking up a police car, one of Rudd’s famous moments was sitting in the Columbia University vice president’s apartment and pulling off his shoes.

  Being a student in the late sixties was a different experience from being one in the early sixties. For one thing, there was the draft. Neither Abbie Hoffman nor Tom Hayden nor Mario Savio had been subjected to a draft—a draft that threatened to pull students into a war in which Americans were killing and dying by the thousands. Perhaps more important, the war itself, with its cruel and pointless violence, was seen on television every night, and no matter how much they reviled it, these students were powerless to stop it. They could not even vote if they were under twenty-one, though they could be drafted at eighteen.

  Despite all these differences, one thing, unfortunately, had not changed—the university itself. If the American university has in recent years been thought of as a sanctuary for leftist thought and activism, that is a legacy of the late sixties graduates. In 1968, universities were still very conservative institutions. Academia had enthusiastically supported World War II, moved seamlessly to firm support of the cold war, and, though starting to squirm a bit, tended to support the war in Vietnam. This was why the universities imagined their campuses to be suitable and desirable places for such activities as recruitment of executives by Dow Chemical, not to mention recruitment of officers by the military. And while universities were famous for their intellectuals like Herbert Marcuse or C. Wright Mills, a more typical product was Harvard’s Henry Kissinger. The Ivy League in particular was known as a bastion of conservative northeast elitism. Columbia University had Dwight Eisenhower as an emeritus member of its board of directors. Active members included CBS founder William S. Paley; Arthur H. Sulzberger, the septuagenarian publisher of The New York Times; his son Arthur O. Sulzberger, who would take over after his father’s death later in the year; Manhattan district attorney Frank S. Hogan; William A. M. Burden, director of Lockheed, a major Vietnam War weapons contractor; Walter Thayer of the Whitney Corporation, a Republican fund-raiser who worked for Nixon in 1968; and Lawrence A. Wein, film producer, adviser to Lyndon Johnson, and trustee of Consolidated Edison. Later in the year students would produce a paper alleging connections between Columbia trustees and the CIA. Columbia and other Ivy League schools produced leaders in industry, publishing, finance—the people behind politics, the people behind war, the very people C. Wright Mills had identified in his book as “the power elite.”

  At Columbia the dean offered “sherry hours,” in which students dressed in blazers and gray wool pants sipped pale sherry from cut-glass goblets while discussing campus issues. It was this vanishing world that the administration was struggling to preserve in 1968.

  The disappointments felt by the new crop of students were not so different from those felt by the earlier group. Tom Hayden too had been disappointed in the University of Michigan, which he found to be in league with a corporate world. The new students may have just felt the same thing more intensely. Mark Rudd said of Columbia, “I entered the university expecting the Ivy Tower on the Hill—a place where committed scholars would search for truth in a world that desperately needed help. Instead, I found a huge corporation that made money from real estate, government research contracts, and student fees; teachers who cared only for advancement in their narrow areas of study; worst of all, an institution hopelessly mired in the society’s racism and militarism.” The prestigious schools, the ones that attempted to use their status to skim off the brightest, most promising of the generation, were the worst.

  New York, albeit many blocks downtown in the East Village, had become the center of a hip counterculture. Abbie Hoffman and Allen Ginsberg and Ed Sanders—who had a group called the Fugs that was named after a word used by Norman Mailer in his novel The Naked and the Dead because he could not use his F-word of choice—were all in
the East Village. Hoffman frequently appeared at East Village events with his special honey laced with a distillate of hashish. The East Village, a dilapidated section of the Lower East Side, had only recently acquired its name because the once beat Greenwich Village, now the West Village, had become too expensive. The enormously successful Bob Dylan still lived in the West Village. The same thing had happened in San Francisco, where Ferlinghetti remained in the North Beach section that the beats had made too fashionable, while the hippies moved out to the poorer, less central Fillmore and Haight-Ashbury sections.

  The East Village became so famous for its “hippie” lifestyle that tour buses would stop by the busy shops of St. Mark’s Place—or St. Marx Place, as Abbie Hoffman liked to call it—for tourists to view the hippies. In September 1968, East Village denizens rebelled, organizing their own bus tour to a staid section of Queens, where they questioned people mowing lawns and took photos of people taking photos of them.

  San Francisco and New York were the bipolar epicenters of America’s 1968 hip. This was reflected in rock concert producer Bill Graham’s two halls, the Fillmore West in the Fillmore section of San Francisco and the Fillmore East, which he opened in 1968 on Second Avenue and Sixth Street in the East Village. The new rock concerts began in the neighborhood at what had been the Anderson Yiddish Theater. John Morris, who managed the Fillmore East, had been there years before to see the Anderson’s closing show, The Bride Got Farblundjet, starring Menasha Skulnik and Molly Picon. Reopened by Morris, the theater featured such groups as the Fugs and Country Joe and the Fish, who were stars from their grizzly anti–Vietnam War satire, “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag.” They then persuaded Graham to open an East Village Fillmore across the street.

  Graham was not only a dominant force in 1968 rock music, he frequently gave benefit concerts for political causes, including one for the Columbia students when they went on strike in April. Rock music and college campuses had become closely connected. “The college market today accounts for more than 70 percent of the professional concert activities in the United States,” said Fanny Taylor, executive secretary of the Association of College and University Concert Managers in 1968.

  College students also represented a large share of record sales. In 1967, record sales in America had reached an all-time high of $1 billion, having doubled in ten years, and for the first time in history, record albums were outselling singles. These trends continued in 1968.

  The late sixties are often remembered for heavily amplified music full of electronic vibrato, slow fades, and other gimmicks pleasing to drug users, much of it pioneered by the Beatles. Feedback and twelve-track tapes produced a complex and often loud sound from only a few musicians. Researchers at the University of Tennessee exposed guinea pigs to rock music over a period of three months at intervals designed to resemble what “the average discotheque goer” heard and found evidence of cell destruction in the cochlea, the part of the ear that transmits sound waves into nerve impulses. But college students, the important part of the market, were not blowing their ears out in 1968. They could barely forgive Bob Dylan for turning to rock in 1966 and cheered when, starting with “John Wesley Harding,” Dylan returned to acoustic guitar and folk ballad—though never again to the pure folk sound of 1963.

  In 1968 Life called the new rock music “the first music born in the age of instant communication.” In June 1967 the Beatles had performed the first live international concert broadcast by satellite.

  Life called the rock music of 1968 “an eclectic cornucopia.” The year 1968 was a time of ballads with carefully crafted lyrics and a clear melody line. Peace activist and performer Joan Baez, at twenty-seven, was still playing to huge crowds, singing ballad versions of Dylan, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, the poetic Leonard Cohen, and fellow folk protester Phil Ochs. The Cubans imitated her ballad style, and from there the soft and lyrical protest ballad spread through the entire Spanish-speaking world. Even the Basques began singing Baez-type ballads in their outlawed ancient language. Simon & Garfunkel, who had struggled in the early sixties because their style had more to do with Renaissance madrigals than rock and roll, reached new heights of popularity with their April 1968 album, Bookends. With songs such as “America” about the search for the country’s soul, the album is considered by some fans to be their best. Crosby, Stills, & Nash and Neil Young sang ballads with a country sound, as did Creedence Clear-water Revival, though their instrumentals were highly amplified with electric instruments. Joni Mitchell, a twenty-four-year-old Canadian with long blond hair and a crystalline voice, became a star in the United States in 1968 with her ballads. Jerry Jeff Walker sang the sad story of Bojangles, a street performer. Pete Townshend, guitarist and songwriter for the Who, complained that music was getting too serious. Since popular music was being targeted more than ever before to youth, it might have been expected to be more playful. “There’s no bloody youth in music today,” said Townshend.

  There was a surprising mobility among music genres. After sixteen years with a jazz quartet, Dave Brubeck broke up his group and began composing classical music. Three British musicians—Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, and Ginger Baker—strayed from blues and jazz into rock music, calling themselves Cream. The group was greatly admired by the New York Philharmonic’s conductor Leonard Bernstein, who at age fifty gave up full-time conducting at the end of the 1968 season. He was particularly taken with Ginger Baker, saying, “I mean, they’ve got a drummer who can really keep time.”

  The new record albums came with increasingly elaborate covers, many double flapped, their curiously costumed and staged photos set in swirling, throbbing graphics. The album covers were in fact designed for young people smoking marijuana or “dropping acid” to seemingly spend hours examining. Under the influence of drugs, everything appeared to be a double entendre with deep hidden meanings. A fairly straightforward film such as 1967’s The Graduate, about a young man uncertain of his future in a world of shallow values, seemed laden with far deeper messages. Beatles songs were examined like Tennyson’s poems. Who was Eleanor Rigby? The Man with the Balloons, Marco Ferreri’s Italian film starring Marcello Mastroianni, tells the story of a disillusioned man with a bunch of balloons. He decides to find the breaking point of the balloons and discovers that each balloon is different. End of movie. Do you get it? The meaning of it all? It was this insistence that everything had a hidden deeper meaning that led to the unexpected success of the low-budget 1968 thriller, Night of the Living Dead, which was seen not as a zombie horror film, a type of cheap thriller that had been done repeatedly since the 1930s, but as a cogent satire on American society.

  Singer Janis Joplin, who in 1968 was screeching out her voice with a California group called Big Brother and the Holding Company, said that she was not a hippie, because hippies believed in trying to make the world better. Instead she said she was a beatnik: “Beatniks believe things aren’t going to get better and say, ‘The hell with it,’ stay stoned, and have a good time.”

  But while trying to make the world better, the hippie spent a great deal of time stoned and having a good time. Smoking marijuana was probably more commonplace among American college students in 1968 than smoking tobacco is today. It was commonly believed, and still is by many, that the government’s drug enforcement apparatus was an instrument of repression and that a truly democratic society would legalize drugs.

  It seemed America was divided into two kinds of people: those who lived the new way and those who were desperate to understand it. The secret of the surprise theatrical success Hair, “the American tribal love-rock musical,” was that although virtually nothing happens in the course of it, it claimed to offer the audience a glimpse of hippie life, furthering the stereotype that hippies do absolutely nothing and do it with an inexplicable—surely drug-induced—enthusiasm. Newspapers and magazines often ran exposés on campus life. Why was Abbie Hoffman’s wed-in covered in Time magazine? Because the news media and the rest of society’s establishme
nt were trying to understand “the younger generation.” It was one of the “big stories of the year,” along with the war they were refusing to fight. Magazines and newspapers regularly ran articles on “the new generation.” Most of these articles had an undertone of frustration because the reporters could not understand whose side these people were on. To the establishment, they seemed to be against everything. An April 27, 1968, editorial in Paris Match said, “They condemn Soviet society just like bourgeois society: industrial organization, social discipline, the aspiration for material wealth, bathrooms, and, in the extreme, work. In other words, they reject Western society.”

  In 1968, a book was published in the United States called The Gap, by an uncle and his longhaired, pot-smoking nephew trying to understand each other. The nephew introduces the uncle to marijuana, which the uncle queerly refers to as “a stick of tea.” But after he smoked it he said, “It expanded my consciousness. No kidding! Now I know what Richie means. I listened to music and heard it as never before.”

  Ronald Reagan defined a hippie as someone who “dresses like Tarzan, has hair like Jane, and smells like Cheetah.” The lack of intellectual depth in Ronald Reagan’s analysis surprised no one, but most of these analyses had little more to them. Society had not progressed beyond the 1950s, when the entire so-called beat generation, a phrase invented by novelist Jack Kerouac, was reduced on television to a character named Maynard G. Krebs, who seldom washed and would croak, “Work!?” in a horrified tone any time gainful employment was suggested. Norman Podhoretz had written an article in the Partisan Review on the beat generation titled “The Know-Nothing Bohemians.” A rejection of materialism and a distaste for corporate culture were dismissed as not wanting to work. A persistent claim of a lack of hygiene was used to dismiss a different way of dressing, whereas neither beatniks nor hippies were particularly dirty. True, the occasional Mark Rudd was known for slovenliness, but many others were neat, even fastidious—obsessed with hair products for their new flowing locks and preening in embroidered bell-bottoms.