The news was filled with misinformation. Prison officials said the hostages were killed by the prisoners: “I saw slit throats” was repeated over and over. What actually happened took a while to get sorted out, which gave the lies time to settle into the popular imagination. By the time autopsies revealed the truth, Attica was fixed in the public imagination—slit throats and all.
The first of many funerals had been held the same day the story broke about the way the guards had really died. There were two. One was for William Quinn, the corrections officer who was injured on the first day of the uprising and—contrary to official reports—the only prison employee actually killed by the inmates. The other funeral was for the first of nine hostages killed when Governor Rockefeller gave Commissioner Oswald the green light to crush the uprising.
On the day of those funerals, the op-ed section of the New York Times published the transcript of a Panglossian speech about prison reform by Commissioner Oswald. It had been recorded and played over the public-address system at Attica a week before the uprising. The decision to play that tape belied the profound disconnect between the prison administration and the prisoners not just in New York State, but around the country.
There was nothing radical about the need for change. About two weeks before Commissioner Oswald’s tape got its chilly reception from the inmates at Attica, George Jackson was shot in San Quentin Prison, and the news spread fast. No ordinary prisoner, Jackson had been a symbol of black resistance. Imprisoned for ten years at California’s Soledad prison for a seventy-dollar gas station robbery, his letters had been published in an acclaimed book, Soledad Brother, the year before. Acquitted of killing a guard, he had been transferred to San Quentin and killed in what the authorities claimed was an escape attempt. Fearing a national movement, prison officials around the country were trying, and failing, to stop the flow of information between prisoner activists. Mail was read, censorship increased, and little if any effort was made to conceal it. The goal was to squelch news about conditions at other prisons. But not all information traveled by mail. Visitors and newly arrived prisoners, like the members of the Auburn Six, brought news too.
Even if the flow of information could have been stopped, prison authorities were working under a false assumption. There was no organized movement, nothing orchestrated in any meaningful way—not by the Black Panthers, YAWF, or anyone else. A limit had been reached. The appalling conditions and human rights abuses that were commonplace around the nation’s prisons didn’t square with two decades of civil rights upheaval. A few prisoners became readers of historical and political works that sought to explain why they and so many who looked like them found themselves imprisoned. As a result some inmates began to see themselves as a by-product of an inherently biased system. Their crimes, in their eyes, were a form of revolt, with the resulting incarceration making them political prisoners. As for me, I straddled the political fence. On the one hand I saw many of their crimes as the inevitable result of the failure of the War on Poverty. On the other I was afraid of violent crime, and wanted those who would attack me on the streets sent to prison.
As for prison reform, prisoner activists had a good ear for pandering and propaganda, but as Bob Dylan put it, you didn’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blew. Playing the Oswald tape and then doing nothing was a bad idea. Worse, Oswald had been the commissioner while the Auburn Six were being tortured at one of his supposedly reform-minded prisons. The inmates at Attica took it for what it was—lip service. Even more insulting, it must have seemed as if prison officials weren’t even trying particularly hard. The Times editorial board called the transcript of Commissioner Oswald’s speech “New Directions,” and with the majority of Attica’s dead still unburied when the transcript was published, the irony was clear. Commissioner Oswald, relatively new to the post he occupied, was definitely premature in touting progress in state correctional facilities when he said: “The main impact of the new direction of the department is the recognition of the individual as a human being and the need for basic fairness throughout our day-to-day relationships with each other.” The sad thing was that compared to his predecessor, Commissioner Oswald actually was a reformer.
But Rockefeller had turned Oswald into a bagman. It was his job to shut down the uprising: The governor had to remain untouchable.
* * *
At around seven thirty in the evening, four days after the uprising was crushed, a bomb ripped through the offices of the New York Department of Corrections in the usually quiet state capital of Albany. The offices were on the outskirts of town; it was a Friday night; they were deserted. The Weather Underground immediately claimed responsibility for the bomb, placed a couple of hundred feet from Commissioner Oswald’s office.
It seemed like a lot more than four days had passed. Time had slowed to a crawl. Prison officials kept reporters and lawyers seeking to represent the prisoners outside the walls. News was tough to come by, and I could find out nothing about Tony. The feverish activity of the observers’ committee trying to broker a deal among Governor Nelson Rockefeller, prison officials, and the inmates had been talked to death. I could not get the smell of tear gas and gunpowder as we had been escorted through the heavy steel doors to the outside world out of my mind. During the intervening days I’d thought incessantly about the bloodbath hidden behind Attica’s thirty-foot walls, and the more than eighty men who were wounded and the thirty-three prisoners and nine hostages who were inside, dead or dying. Repeating in my head, over and over, the final death toll, which was forty-three, I felt as if the forward motion of my life had come to a stop. I was paralyzed. Then the Weather Underground bomb shook me out of it.
Before they set off the bomb, the Weather Underground contacted two newspapers and Pacifica Radio’s WBAI in New York City. That was their thing: They made a very public point of being careful not to hurt anyone. Meanwhile the idiocy of setting off bombs remained, and the timbre of the messages attached to these attacks was so overpowered by the Weather Underground’s unique blend of overeager, ill-considered radicalism that they might have done better sending no message at all. At least that’s how I saw it, but then I suppose from a more radical perch that simply meant I favored the tepid sort of advocacy lampooned in Phil Ochs’s 1966 song “Love Me, I’m a Liberal.” Ironically, I loved that song. The communiqué that accompanied this particular bombing cited the “white supremacy” of the corrections system, explaining that it was “how a society run by white racists maintains its control.” The dispatch went on: “We only wish we could do more to show the courageous prisoners at Attica, San Quentin and the other 20th-century slave ships that they are not alone in their fight for the right to live.” It wasn’t news-friendly language, like my outburst on The David Frost Show. That said, there was an ocean separating my position from the overheated radical groups that were operating in the late 1960s and early ’70s. I did not at all identify with the brand of radicalism that marked their communiqués or their bombing attacks. Perhaps it was the way I lived. I had a house in the Hamptons, we had a housekeeper, and I liked to go to the opera. I was not one of them.
Unlike today, when the goal of political bombings here and around the world is to kill and to terrorize the public, the self-described militants of the late ’60s and early ’70s exploded bombs to publicize their message. Like Sam Melville, at least in America, they sent out communiqués warning of the impending action to make sure no one got hurt. Discussions about the war, racism, and other societal wrongs were forced into America’s living rooms after each Weather Underground bomb exploded. Without the spectacle, mainstream media paid little attention to fringe points of view. The Weathermen’s Oswald office bombing, however, achieved nothing, because while the kind of actual and figurative noise produced by the bombing got attention, it was virtually all negative, and the underlying message was lost in the haze of mild hysteria and disapproval.
By contrast, compared with what the Weathermen did, I thought that perhaps my legal work had
some value. The cases I worked on could open doors. I could trudge the more meaningful road of incremental progress. Maybe I could even help stem the Supreme Court’s legal retreat from the promise of equality, something I had written about in “Nine Men in Black Who Think White,” the New York Times Magazine article that got me fired from the NAACP in 1968.
Commissioner Oswald got the Weather Underground’s attention because he was Rockefeller’s front man. The order to attack on September 13, 1971, was given by him, but he didn’t act alone. Governor Rockefeller wanted the situation to be resolved, and he wanted it done at arm’s length. The sort of voter Rockefeller had in mind as he unleashed the force of repression at Attica, or pushed for the infamously anti-black-and-Latino Rockefeller drug laws, was an archetype like Archie Bunker from the sitcom All in the Family—which premiered nine months before the Attica rebellion—actually around the time I was at Auburn. It was all conveying to whites that he would hold the line on their prerogatives and keep blacks at a distance to protect their way of life.
Whatever happened to Sam Melville, the bomb that went off in Albany was a response at least in part to his death. I remember a few things: I was unhappy to hear that the Weather Underground did it; I thought the bombing made no sense, and also that the underground was trying to co-opt something that it had very little (if anything) to do with; I was relieved to hear that no one was hurt, and I thought the action would be easy to dismiss, but I could also hear President Nixon’s silent majority saying that the Attica slaughter was unavoidable with such lunatics taking over the prison. Having fought against deeply ingrained institutional racism as an NAACP lawyer, I had learned that the way you talked mattered a lot, and if you spun something like an argument about racism even slightly askew, like using the phrase “white supremacy” even if that was exactly what you were facing, there was a cost: You risked losing in the court of public opinion. And perhaps that is what I did on The David Frost Show. But what I said was on the mark. If given another chance, I would probably say the same thing again.
If you listen to the Nixon tapes, you will hear Rockefeller’s lack of concern, his contempt for the prisoners, the observers, and even his failure to recognize the sacrifice of the guards’ lives. It’s impossible to miss. It was a class thing as well as a race thing, and I was in a unique position to know. I had deep class roots in my family and plenty of prerogatives, and I know how that shaped me. So there was irony in my attack on Rockefeller’s prerogatives.
The wealth I was born into exposed me to the social reality of racism from the opposite side of the issue. Growing up, we always had servants, they were always black, and at some point that started becoming emotionally freighted for me. Eventually there was a disconnect in my life when it came to race, which I have spent many years trying to piece together. What happened at Attica, however, was clear. It exposed me to more than the social reality of racism: There I saw all of its absolute ugliness.
2
Childhood
My grandfather Jonas Siegel died in 1924 of influenza, leaving behind my father and uncle—both still boys—and my grandmother Bessie. One of my grandfather’s best friends was married to a woman named Bessie, too, who had died not long after my grandfather passed away—also of influenza. It seemed natural that Grandma Bessie and my grandfather’s friend gravitated toward each other as they navigated parallel experiences of loss, and when they got married in 1925 everyone thought it was a good match.
Born Abraham Wonskolaser, or Wonsal, my grandfather’s new anglicized name was Aaron Warner, which became Albert at some point. Most people called him Abe. Among friends and family he was Major, a nickname that had something to do with his rank in the U.S. Army Reserves. He was big on family. In fact my grandfather went into business with his three brothers Harry, Sam, and Jack, who together formed a film studio they called Warner Bros. Major managed the distribution and finances of the company from New York, while the other brothers took care of the production side of things on Sunset Boulevard and later on in the Burbank studios.
When Grandma Bessie and Major got married, the studio was well established and holding its own during a period of nonstop change and innovation, but while the company was doing all right and had solid prospects, it wasn’t until 1927 that Warner Brothers hit it big with The Jazz Singer. Featuring Al Jolson in the blackface makeup that was a symbol of mainstream racism in America, The Jazz Singer held the distinction of making history as the first “talking picture.” Not only did it mark the beginning of the end of the silent era, it made Warner Bros. a lot of money. Overnight the Warner name became synonymous with “Hollywood,” and three of the four founding brothers were industry kingpins. Tragically the fourth brother died on the eve of all that. Sam worked tirelessly to figure out the technical aspects of The Jazz Singer, only to die from an untreated sinus infection the day before the film’s premiere in New York City. The three surviving Warners did not attend that screening. They were burying their brother.
After the wild success of The Jazz Singer, Major and his two brothers were wealthy beyond anything Grandma Bessie—who had been fairly well off before she married him—could have dreamed possible.
A child of an immigrant family that fled the pogroms of Middle Europe, Major was known publicly as a person of few airs. That said, by the time Major died in 1967 he had in fact picked up some of the habits associated with great wealth, prime among them, by the time I was old enough to see his routines, that he never seemed to work. Horseracing, “the sport of kings,” was his passion. Mostly I remember him quietly reading the racing forms. Family lore had it that he once turned down a chance to buy the Yankees because it would have distracted him too much from the ponies. I don’t know if that story is true, but Major certainly spent a lot of time at racetracks in New York and Miami Beach, riding back and forth in the front seat of his chauffeured car. Maybe he had retired or conducted business only between post times. I never asked. Something that did interest me as I grew older, however, was a particular man among Major’s racetrack acquaintances. He was famous for many reasons, prime among them being his job as the first director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
J. Edgar Hoover and Major saw the world though a similar lens. They shared a deep hatred of communism and the Soviet Union. Certainly Stalin’s anti-Semitism fed into Major’s antipathy. The Warners veered hard to the right after World War II. I remember Major buying cases of Hoover’s Masters of Deceit. He would inscribe copies of his distinguished friend’s book to friends and family. The inscription in my copy says: “Fight for USA. A great country. To Lewis Steel. Fondly, A Warner”
When I was ten our family took a trip to see the sights in Washington, DC, and Hoover assigned a special agent to take us around. In the FBI Building my brother and I were brought down to the basement firing range, where we were allowed the rare treat of firing Thompson submachine guns at paper humans—not in evidence then was even a glimmer of the allegedly radical lawyer who would help rebellious inmates striking out at centuries of racism through uprisings like the one at Attica. Filled with wonder, I was trotted around the FBI headquarters, and it would have been a stretch to guess that I would one day number among the enemies described in Hoover’s book, with special agents prowling around my apartment building, going through my garbage, looking for dirt because I represented the Weathermen who were willing to blow things up. That I would spend the majority of my life trying to translate into case law the language of moral outrage directed against nationwide school, housing, and employment segregation, the Vietnam War, and a jurisprudence system stanchioned in the status quo racism of America even after the historic Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision—none of that would have been easy to spot in me that day my family spent roaming around the nation’s capital as the wide-eyed guests of J. Edgar Hoover.
* * *
Growing up, I knew nothing of radical politics. I lived in the cool green shade of Major’s wealth. A conservative worldview was the onl
y one available to me. But I don’t really remember much about that. The main thing I recall about Major was how much he loved my grandmother. He would do anything for her. The full realization that my father and my mother and my uncle (and subsequently my brother and I) were part of a package deal dawned on me only later in life, but even early on there was a sense that while we got to do fun things from time to time through Major’s connections, we were still and always the Siegels-turned-Steels (my father changed our last name when I was five), connected to the Warner name by the gossamer of marriage.
With Grandma Bessie as the conduit, Major’s money got spread around. She became the matriarch and fairy godmother of her own extended family, the Levys. There was jockeying for position—favored family and outliers. For those within the fold, Bessie’s marriage was a very fortuitous bit of good timing, because the Levys were at the beginning of a downward slide from a position of prominence in New York City’s garment industry. Bessie’s father, Moe, had created a chain of men’s stores that pioneered two-pants suits, or what people used to call “Moe Levys.” Sadly for the family, Moe’s flagship store was located near Canal Street, or maybe on it—I don’t remember—which ceased to be a destination for those who wanted to dress like the moneyed classes. Clothing stores were moving operations up to Fifth Avenue. The Levys’ fortune suffered because Great-Grandpa Moe and his two sons must have missed the memo.
When he married my mother, my father was a shy, skinny graduate of the University of Pennsylvania with a rich and famous stepfather. Arthur, or “Artie,” as his friends called him, must have seemed like a very good catch. He was completely protected from the Depression, and had a managerial job waiting for him in the Warner Bros. movie theater empire. The job was in Milwaukee. After a few years my parents came back to New York. My father left the Warner Brothers office to enter into a partnership to run some Forty-Second Street movie theaters. When that deal didn’t work out, he opened two theaters in nearby New Jersey. Again failure. But from what I could tell, the good life went on unabated. My father was a mama’s boy, and Grandma Bessie had married about as well as a woman could. Ruthie, as everyone called my mother, quickly attached herself to Bessie, and all was well in a world that was otherwise falling apart right outside their door. My mother liked fine clothes, jewelry, and furs and, although she said otherwise, the parade of Hollywood stars seemed to thrill her. She was always ready to display her insider knowledge: “Clark Gable has bad teeth,” she loved to say.
The Butler's Child Page 3