Devil's Defender

by John Browne

  I was about to have some troubles. The first came courtesy of the US military. I was a student and had a student deferment, which should have kept me out of the draft. And I don’t know if it was because of my involvement with a hippie band or with SDS, SNCC, and CORE, but I lost my deferment. So, incidentally, did my friend and former roommate Steve Rhodes, with whom I’d founded the local chapter of SDS. We got reclassified the same week.

  Home on a holiday break, I reported to the military induction center in Oakland. I had decided before the draft notice that I would not serve in Vietnam and would go to Canada, Mexico, or jail if I had to. Lefty Ramparts magazine and the New Republic were my bibles, and the “teach-ins” I had attended educated me about the war and how wrong it was. The body counts, on both sides, were in the hundreds every week. I could not kill anybody and was not so hot about the idea of getting killed. Two of my high school classmates had already died, both minorities who had volunteered. I became an expert on induction rules and regulations, with the aid of many antiwar organizations, mostly the Quaker Church.

  Maybe my political activism had something to do with my reclassification. Maybe it didn’t. I’ll never know. But when I arrived at my physical, I was put on the infamous Group W bench, immortalized in the Arlo Guthrie song “Alice’s Restaurant.” It was a special bench reserved for those with serious physical or mental health problems, religious objectors, and gay men.

  I came armed with letters from two doctors attesting that I was unfit to kill small people, as I was six foot seven. The draft criteria excluded anyone taller than six foot six. I presented my letters to some beefy officer who called out my name for special attention. Hair down to my shoulders, a thick ’stache spread across my face, I looked like central casting for “antiwar hippie,” and I was smug because I knew the law. The officer read the letters and said, “Come with me. We’ll get you measured.” I imagined some sort of reverse rack that would shrink me to under six six. They made me take off my shoes and socks and tried to press my feet to the floor, pushing my arches down.

  I was still well over six six. The pit bull–looking induction officer led me to an office. He informed me that I could apply for a waiver to circumvent the height restriction. I said, “You mean you want me to get a waiver so I can go to Vietnam and kill little people? In a war I don’t believe in? No thank you.”

  I was reclassified 4-F, a classification that made me untouchable. My pal Steve Rhodes also got a safe reclassification, but I can’t remember why. I confess I had and still have some guilt because my brothers were getting killed in large numbers and I skated through for something silly like my height. Funny thing is, the height limit was changed to six foot eight within a year, but my 4-F kept me safe. I felt blessed and now had the obligation to do all I could to stop the war.

  The other trouble I fell into was with the law. I have Detective Love to thank for that—and for the major life decision that came after. The detective hated us. Me especially. My orange-and-purple ’63 Corvair with California plates was stopped and searched often. Love walked up to me during the concert with the Grateful Dead in Washington Park and said, “I’m not questioning your being here. I’m just questioning your total existence.” And I responded with something like, “Wow, that’s pretty good for a cop.” That pissed him off.

  About six months later the cops showed up at my house and arrested me for a bad twelve-dollar check. (It was a misunderstanding: I had written a check from an account I’d forgotten I’d closed.) And they didn’t just arrest me; they searched the house for drugs. They didn’t find anything. With Love on my back, we were extra careful.

  I was thrown into jail on a Friday night, which is what cops do all the time so that you have to stay behind bars all weekend since the judges aren’t available. The Supreme Court had not established the right to counsel and a speedy trial yet. So in those days you really didn’t know how long you’d be in there.

  I knew Love had to be behind it all. And I knew that if I wanted, I could get out right away. The woman I was dating, Audrey Hillman, came from a wealthy family in Pittsburgh. She and her parents were very involved in politics and were personal friends with a US senator in Colorado. I knew they’d have me out in five minutes. And I knew there’d be a stink about it.

  I’m not sure why, but I didn’t ask for Audrey’s help, even though my band had a show that night. I ended up staying in jail for two or three days. It’s a very powerful experience. The first time you hear a jail door slam, you know: they’re in charge; you’re not. And I smelled for the first time the distinct odor of jails: a combination of sweat, Lysol, strong coffee, and, in those days, cigarettes.

  I was placed in a large cell without enough room or beds for the twenty or thirty cellmates. The inmates were, as always, mostly black and Hispanic, and I was one of three or four “fish”—new, white-boy longhairs. After my shaking and sweating stopped I looked around and got really pissed. I was in jail for no reason, and most of my cellmates were in jail because they were poor and minorities. Many of them had been in for days or weeks and didn’t know why. I thought, These people are completely getting taken advantage of by the system. I listened to their stories and learned how to roll a joint with one hand from a friendly Hells Angel.

  I was released on Monday, but the damage was done. I had decided there in my cell: I would fight injustice for the rest of my life. The bounced check charges were dropped, and I quit the band shortly after that and started looking into law schools.

  Audrey and I got closer. We moved in together and got engaged. I truly loved her and her family. And they loved me. The Hillmans had my life planned out: Audrey and I were going to get married and live in a mansion they would buy for us. I would attend the Wharton School for business after law school and work for the Hillmans’ friends, either John Lindsay or Nelson Rockefeller. And then I’d help run the family business and/or be in politics. There was no question: that’s what I was going to do. And they were so nice about it. My dad loved the idea.

  5

  THE SPIRO AGNEW ACID TEST

  The cab driver shot me a look in the rearview mirror. “Are you crazy?” he asked. “I’m not taking you to Fourteenth and U. I don’t drive there.” My new address, according to the cabbie, was in a dodgy neighborhood, a neighborhood recently dubbed the most murderous in the nation. How the hell was I supposed to know? I’d found the one-room basement apartment via the Washington Post classifieds at the Stanford University library and sent a deposit, sight unseen. We pulled out of Dulles International Airport, and despite his protest the driver pointed the taxi toward central DC. We sped through the suburbs of Virginia, crossed a bridge over the Potomac River, and followed a bend in the road to the right. The Washington Monument swung into view on our left. I couldn’t believe I was here.

  Just a month earlier I’d been at a party at the home of Audrey’s uncle Toby Hilliard in California, a big-ass house in Woodside, just above Menlo Park. He was a Texas oilman, a personal friend of George H. W. Bush, and just two years away from cofounding the first pro soccer team in Northern California. I mean, Toby had money. A painting by Jamie Wyeth, son of Andrew Wyeth, sat on the mantle. An original Jamie Wyeth. Toward the end of the party, in Toby’s library, I got into a conversation with a sixty-year-old attorney and law professor. We’d both had a lot to drink. Above us, in the painting, a man wore a headlamp and carefully plucked one of three dozen mushrooms that had burst from the soil; they glowed, bulbous and ambitious in the lamplight. The lawyer asked me, in a voice that sounded like Walter Cronkite gargling gravel, “Where you going to law school?” I told him I’d soon be enrolled at UC Santa Clara. “Ah shit, man, you should go to law school in Washington, DC.” he said. I think he’d gone to Georgetown or something. “You really need to go to law school in DC, because there’s lots going on. And lots of women.” I stared into the headlamp in the painting.

  What can I say? The lawyer had me figured out. Within a couple days I was on the phone with the
admissions offices at Georgetown, George Washington, Antioch, and Howard. They all thought I was nuts. School was starting in a few weeks. There was no way I was getting in for the 1968–69 academic year. But when I called American University, for some reason the director of admissions, Robert Goostree—who’d later do a brief stint as dean of the law school—took my call. I indicated that I was set to go to UC Santa Clara but that I had my doubts. “Oh hell,” he said, “if you got in there, you can get in here, and we could use a real westerner. Come on out.”

  Now here I was, in the back of a cab, the National Mall scrolling to my left. We booked it along I-695, cut over to Pennsylvania Avenue, crossed the Sousa Bridge, and dropped into central DC.

  It was even worse than the driver had led me to believe. We inched down Fourteenth Street in the late afternoon heat. I gagged on the stench of garbage. Rats zagged down a mountain of curbside refuse. Rusted-out cars with smashed windows flanked us on both sides; some of them had been torched. I later learned that the intersection of Fourteenth and U Street had been the site of some of the greatest unrest during the riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968. Now, five months later, the neighborhood still looked like a revolt had torn through it. It was like a war zone in Beirut. We rolled up to the house where the basement apartment was. The driver let the cab idle.

  I chickened out. “Take me to the Y,” I said. So he drove me to the YMCA, where I spent the night. The next morning I visited the housing office at American University. Bad news. Since school was about to start, all the apartments and dorm rooms were full. Tacked to the community board, though, I found an ad: two women, employees at the French embassy, had a room available in exchange for a student willing to watch their kids from 3:00 PM to 6:00 PM every weekday.

  I called, made an appointment to be interviewed, and we met at a café. The women were in their late thirties with one child each, a seven-year-old girl and an eight-year-old boy. They showed me the house—just across the Maryland state line and within two miles of the law school—and I was offered the job the next day.

  I built a small room for myself in the basement, learned to enjoy the kids, and was spoiled by the single moms. They’d bring me coffee and French pastries in the morning on silver trays with fresh flowers. I did what I could to help out, and they were kind and supportive and even gave me a small salary in addition to room and board.

  Another perk: I got invited to embassy parties. Within weeks I became a regular on the DC party circuit. Sheathed in a secondhand tuxedo, I faked my way deep into the Beltway elite. I was still engaged to Audrey Hillman but would go on more or less platonic dates with Jacqueline Kennedy’s niece Eve Auchincloss and Eldie Acheson, granddaughter of Dean Acheson, the secretary of state under Truman.

  The lines were blurred. At one party a guy sporting a Young Republicans button offered me a joint. Ideology seemed to have very little to do with these events. Which at the time was fine by me. My heroes were dead. When Martin Luther King was assassinated, followed by Robert Kennedy two months later, I withdrew from politics, just as I had after the death of JFK. It was too painful. I put the movement I’d championed in Denver behind me. So much easier to chase the caviar with another flute of champagne and flirt with that admiral’s daughter poised at the other end of the ballroom.

  But slowly, incrementally, as the months ticked by, things began to change again. The more I got to know the people running the country, the more I realized, frankly, that we were all in trouble. You’d always hear “Well, they know better.” Fuck—they were idiots. Complete idiots. And many of them corrupt. I heard someone recently refer to the Nixon White House as organized crime. And it really was. Seeing that firsthand radicalized me anew.

  I lived with the French women for nine months before moving into a small carriage house in Georgetown, right behind the French Market, where senators’ wives bought baguettes, and across from a fire station, the sirens of which blasted at least once a night. To reflect my slow but steady return to radicalism, and with the inspiration of some good weed, I tie-dyed my entire apartment—the curtains, bedspread, sheets, and towels. It was an eyesore, but it was my eyesore.

  Also around this time, in the summer of 1969, I visited the employment board at school and spotted a flyer that announced ABC News was looking for a page to work at its television studio on M Street. I applied and got the job, which involved a six-hour shift on Saturdays showing big shots around the studio, answering phones, and doing “rip and reads” of the national and international news from the teletype, and on Sundays, during another six-hour stint, setting up guests in the greenroom for Issues and Answers, ABC’s version of Meet the Press, which at the moment enjoyed higher ratings than the NBC program.

  The cast of characters who streamed through the doors was like the dramatis personae of the late 1960s Beltway: Ralph Nader, Spiro Agnew, Gerald Ford, George Wallace, Strom Thurmond. In fact I would eventually meet everyone of note in the Nixon White House except Nixon himself.

  And because I sometimes had to pick up photos and other materials from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, I had White House media credentials. Yes, they gave White House credentials to a twenty-three-year-old, pot-smoking, long-haired lefty, a lefty who’d helped Jimi Hendrix score heroin just two years earlier.

  The studio issued me a blue blazer—the ABC logo covered the left breast pocket—into which I tucked my midback-length ponytail. I’d walk the politicians through the studio hallways and to the greenroom, where, at 10:00 AM, I’d make them a cocktail.

  One of my first guests was George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama and four-time presidential candidate. He always showed up with this strange handler, whom he called the Major or something like that. The governor was often drunk before I even mixed his morning highball. I remember one Sunday, leading him and the Major through the studio, when the governor stopped at a picture window that framed M Street. A nice-looking interracial couple strolled by, hand in hand. Governor Wallace: “Look at those two niggers!” I think he was the most disgusting person I’ve ever met.

  On the other hand, I really hit it off with the producer of Issues and Answers, Peggy Wheaton. She was dynamic and smart, and she encouraged me to participate in the show, even when it pissed off guests like Strom Thurmond, the pro-segregation senator from South Carolina. At an ABC-sponsored party at a hotel one night, Thurmond had wandered off, so I was dispatched to find him. I tracked him down and lightly tapped his shoulder. He was drunk and he lost it, started screaming something about me assaulting him. It didn’t help that my ponytail had slipped out from my blazer. Peggy came along, and he snarled, “That long-haired fucking freak!” That’s how he talked.

  “Ah, Strom,” Peggy said, “calm down. John will make you another drink.” And he quieted down.

  John Mitchell, Nixon’s attorney general, three years away from serving prison time for his involvement in Watergate, hated me too. Same with Spiro Agnew, the vice president. The feeling was mutual.

  See, my dive back into radicalism corresponded with the last death rattles of Americans’ acceptance of the war in Vietnam. It’s hard to believe in these days of apathy that there were two massive demonstrations in DC that hastened the end of the war. I was involved in the planning of both. In October 1969 there was the Moratorium, believed to be the largest protest event in history—more than two million people demonstrated nationally and in Europe. There were at least five hundred thousand in DC alone. My law school friends and I formed legal teams and security groups to keep order, and it worked: thousands were arrested, but no one was detained long. (I felt a personal triumph when Leo Seligson, one of my dad’s best friends, who was rich, conservative, and generally disgusted with my long hair and antiwar attitudes, materialized at the protest and yelled at the police to stop hitting a protestor. Leo then joined us and later crowded into the office of Idaho senator Frank Church to express opposition to the war. Thereafter Leo became active in the antiwar movement and
, an emotional guy, would cry at hearing the weekly body counts.)

  The next month saw the Mobilization in DC, with three to four hundred thousand demonstrators. Again, my friends and I were heavily involved, securing permits and planning logistics alongside students from New York University and Columbia (they didn’t know DC, but we did). Six students from Kent State, still stunned at the murder of kids on their campus at the hands of the National Guard, crashed at my Georgetown apartment; one of them wore a helmet on which she’d painted KILL THE PIGS.

  A classmate of mine, interning for John Mitchell at the Justice Department, told me that Mitchell, tobacco pipe in hand, had looked down at the thousands surrounding the building, turned to his staff, and said, “Arrest them all.”

  Somehow my friend and future law partner Allen Ressler and I escaped capture. We zoomed through the back alleys on his 50cc motor scooter, dodging the police and National Guard, and made it to the courthouse. Armed with intern certificates from the DC Bar Association, we ran down to the holding cells in the basement and brought five to ten people up at a time to stand before the friendly judges who would release them. We did this for more than twenty-four hours. One guy, stuffed with thirty or forty other people in a holding cell designed for five, stood holding an umbrella and sported a bowler and a three-piece suit. He looked like a banker—because he was. His name was Chester, and he was outraged. He told me the police had no regard for who they were arresting and had scooped him up. Now he wanted to be the “last person” released and take the matter to the Supreme Court. He said he was a lifelong Republican, but no more. He argued with the judge not to be released and to speak with some high-ranking Justice Department official he knew. The judge released him anyway. But this was a true transformation. Chester would never be the same.