So it was fitting that he’d host what turned out to be a controversial news special about rock and roll in April of that year. I remember watching that show on the night that it aired. I was thirteen (almost fourteen, as I routinely reminded anyone who would listen). Though it was a school night, my parents let me wheel the cart holding our family’s one television, a black-and-white with electrical tape holding its neurotic and volatile antenna in place, from their bedroom to mine. Thanks to Leonard Bernstein’s patronage, Janis Ian, the fifteen-year-old phenom whose new song, “Society’s Child,”22 was causing a stir, was going to be on.
Until I heard the song, I didn’t know what the fuss was about. But within the first two lines, the answer was electrifyingly obvious.
Come to my door, baby,
Face is clean and shining black as night
Janis Ian was thirteen when she wrote this song and fourteen when she recorded it. But though it had been released in 1966, very few people outside of New York had heard the song by this night in April of 1967. Most radio stations refused to play it, and one in Alabama that dared to was burnt to the ground.
As she stood in a spotlight in the darkened studio, wearing a black mock turtleneck shirt and a jumper that, in fuzzy black-and-white looked just like one of mine, I felt that Janis Ian could have been me. She had unfashionably frizzy hair like mine, which she wore pulled tightly back. She had full lips, which I’d now describe as Semitic but which then, adorning my own face, I thought of as simply fat. She had round, wide-set eyes that looked calmly ahead, never at her small, strumming hands, as she sang.
My mother went to answer
You know that you looked so fine Now I can understand your tears and your shame.
She called you “boy” instead of your name.
When she wouldn’t let you inside
When she turned and said
“But honey, he’s not our kind.”
She said I can’t see you any more, baby
Can’t see you anymore.
The injustice of it! Janis stood in her black stockings and her flats, exposing the adult world.
My teachers all laugh, their smirking stares
cutting deep down in our affairs
Preachers of equality
Think they believe it?
Then why won’t they just let us be?
I thought of my ninth-grade Social Studies teacher, Mr. Berg, spouting all of this grand stuff about intellectual freedom and the importance of having questioning minds. But when I’d questioned his mind earlier that week, rousing myself from my post-American chop suey stupor after lunch long enough to ask why we were studying the history of ancient Greece instead of modern Vietnam, suddenly he wasn’t so interested in inquiry. And though I personally hadn’t experienced or even observed any racist attitudes firsthand, well, that’s because other than Sarah, the Haitian woman who had sometimes babysat and cleaned our house in Montreal, and my parents’ friend Joe, the darker half of what was reputed to be the only interracial couple even in a progressive college town like Ann Arbor, I didn’t yet know any black people. Which, come to think of it, somehow proved just how endemic racism was. But that was all about to change, was already changing. People Janis’s age, my age, were going to do it.
One of these days I’m gonna stop my listening
Gonna raise my head up high
One of these days I’m gonna raise up
my glistening wings and fly
Wait—“one of these days”? Not today?
But that day will have to wait for a while.
Baby, I’m only society’s child.
When we’re older things may change.
But for now this is the way they must remain.
She sang the refrain, this time adding as the final line, No, I don’t wanna see you any more, baby. The plaintive melody ended; the final notes on the acoustic guitar faded into a sigh.
Then, in a completely unexpected coda, like a call to arms, an electric organ responded with one of the most memorable endings in pop music history—a bluesy, two-bar taunt, answering pathos with funk, and surrender with defiance.
If the song represented 1967, the coda announced 1968.
In that wrenching year, finally in high school, I spent my time after class in the Mobilization for Survival office in Ann Arbor, Michigan, attending meetings and producing leaflets for anti-war marches.
Hot town. Pigs in the streets, read the text above a black-and-white photo of a scowling, jowly cop in a white helmet and chin strap, leather jacket, and dark, nearly opaque shades. But the streets belong to the people! Below it was a clenched, black-and-white fist, and below that, Dig it? Thanks to the art plastering the walls—photos of Che Guevara, of Benjamin Spock marching with Martin Luther King for civil rights and against the Vietnam war, of three flower-frocked women sitting seductively on a bench, vertically bordered by text saying Girls say YES …To boys who say NO—the otherwise drab office breathed fire. Presiding over the Gestetner ditto machine was Black Panther Huey Newton holding a rifle; next to the coffee-maker, brittle and crusted, was a print of Uncle Sam in a jaunty red, white, and blue stovepipe hat made of an American flag, half his face a black-and-white skull, the other half bearing the invocation to Mobilize Against the War.
Some psychedelic and faux children’s art still adorned the place, entreating us to Make Love, not War or reminding us that War is not good for children or other living things. But by the fall of 1968, such pacifism and idealized innocence were on the wane. Fuck the War in blaring black-and-white was more indicative of the prevailing mood. Fuck the Draft. Fuck the Pigs. And, in an attempt to bridge the two, was another black-and-white poster of a soldier and a policeman, each in profile, with Soldiers out of Vietnam above one, Cops out of the Ghetto above the other.
Those slogans—I could hear them—formed a noisy crowd in my head. I was generally conflict averse, and the confrontational language felt assumed, unnatural to me and to most of us in this office. The rifles frightened me, and I’d debate—mostly with myself—whether violence was ever legitimate in fighting violence. At the Democratic Convention in Chicago in August of that year, police and National Guard had beaten anti-war protestors and the journalists covering their actions. The whole world is watching, the crowd had chanted, but the cry seemed to only incite the cops further. We don’t give a shit, they answered with flailing clubs and jabbing feet. So what choice were they leaving us? (Almost fifty years later, George Zimmerman gets away with murdering Trayvon Martin. Sandra Bland dies in a Texas jail cell in which she didn’t belong. Police kill Eric Garner for the crime of contesting his arrest for unlawfully selling cigarettes. People respond to the outrage with hashtags and Facebook photo filters, with riots and arson, with peaceful, symbolic actions and violent, scary ones, and that quandary haunts me still.)
Watching the 1968 Chicago convention on TV from the safety of my parents’ bedroom, I was not just frightened by their violence. I had never before seen such arrogance, and it enraged me. Martin Luther King had been assassinated. Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated. Two priests, Phillip and Daniel Berrigan, and three others had been imprisoned for destroying draft files at a Baltimore Selective Service Office. Even Dr. Spock had been sentenced to jail for counseling young men to refuse the draft.
The following summer, Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, facing a two-to-five year prison term for allegedly stealing seventy-one Good Humor bars, was drugged by a police informant, then murdered in his bed by police. Unlike some people who used “revolution” as an excuse to dress tough and bear arms, Hampton was a genuine leader, having brokered peace between warring street gangs in Chicago and forged a “rainbow coalition” across numerous black and Chicano and Puerto Rican and predominantly white student groups. For this he was deemed dangerous enough by the FBI to warrant assassination. After shooting him point blank in the head, the
cops pulled his dead body out of bed and dumped it on the floor at the entrance to his bedroom. Then they photographed it, supplying the press with pictures of Hampton, clad in a jacket and polka-dotted boxer shorts, lying face down on the floor in the pool of blood.
But another photo made its way out into the world from that night as well, a picture of Hampton’s bed, illuminated by a floor lamp next to it that shone upward, bathing the peeling walls, tiny desk, sturdy chair, and sheetless, blood-soaked mattress in a fan of warm light. That was the picture that also hung on the walls of the Student Mobilization office in Ann Arbor, the one that, empty of a human form, haunted me the most. I could not reconcile the tenderness of the light with the savagery of Hampton’s murder, and I know now that I was also terrified by what it revealed about death—a palpable and permanent absence.
I was fifteen at a time when the pace of change was fantastically condensed, like the kind of time-lapse movies we were shown in science class. But instead of budding plants or rotating planets, I was seeing leaders and movements roar by, fragile and transient as twigs in a churning river. I went from flower child to anti-Imperialist to ambivalent Maoist a few years later, uncomfortable with the rhetoric, but convinced that I had to rectify what I then saw as my own willful naiveté about political power, how to get it, and how to use it.
Every now and then, Leonard Bernstein would briefly appear in my peripheral vision, giving speeches at anti-war marches and rallies for Eugene McCarthy. He flared back into the news in June of 1970, when up-and-coming essayist and exemplar of The New Journalism, Tom Wolfe, wrote a lengthy article in New York magazine. “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” which documented a fundraiser that Leonard’s wife, Felicia, had organized and held in their penthouse apartment for the Black Panther 21s’ Legal Defense Fund.23
Wolfe’s snarky phrase, “radical chic,” has since become a permanent part of the American vocabulary, at least among the intelligentsia. It’s the identical twin to “political correctness,” a weirdly superior sort of insult that’s hurled from the left rather than the right. It bugs me, so tonight, after watching the Our World clip of Bernstein and Van Cliburn, I seek out that Tom Wolfe article from 1970. Midway through the first page, I’m already sickened by its venom, its smugness, its pandering to racial stereotypes under the guise of skewering white privilege. I find it appalling.
Lenny was not new to progressive causes, I argue with the page. In the years preceding World War II and in its immediate aftermath, when fighting Fascism was as American as a Thank you for your Service bumper sticker is today, there were unlimited opportunities to take a well-intentioned stand. With his dollars and with his words, Bernstein had supported numerous anti-Fascist organizations, raised funds for victims of Stalingrad, begun work on an opera about Sacco and Vanzetti. Composing, conducting, and jetting around the world, he was more of a signer and endorser than a leader. But his actions were not without consequences. In 1950, he was blacklisted by CBS, suddenly unable to continue the radio and television broadcasts that had fueled his career. Harry Truman banned his music (along with that of Gershwin, Copland, and other progressive American composers) from State Department premises and functions overseas.
In 1953, Eisenhower’s State Department revoked his passport on the grounds that Bernstein was a security risk, preventing him from conducting overseas at a time when the blacklist was making it increasingly difficult for him to perform at home. To regain his passport, Bernstein wrote and signed a self-excoriating affidavit that, while not naming names, essentially disowned his own leftist activities in the 1940s. He was not a Communist, he swore, and had only ever voted for Democrats or Republicans. His association with anti-Franco Spanish political forces had been “nominal,” and his involvement with other anti-Fascist organizations was driven by naiveté, youthful foolishness, ignorance, and a fevered desire to see his own name in print. He was a Jew and an ardent supporter of Israel, he argued, which automatically qualified him as an opponent of the Soviet Union. He realized that in 1949, after Red Channels and Life had published their accounts of his political activities, he should have immediately “‘made a public disavowal’ of his unpatriotic organizational associations. He said that he did so now, and he reaffirmed his loyalty to the United States.”24
Though he described it to his brother as “a ghastly and humiliating experience,” the affidavit served its purpose. Bernstein got back his passport, and doors at the Boston Symphony and New York Philharmonic that had been slammed shut and remained closed for five years now reopened. Lenny was back on his way to becoming a star. By the 1960s, perhaps more secure in his status and feeling less vulnerable, he had again begun speaking out, for civil rights and against the Vietnam war, campaigning for a McCarthy victory to “restore some rational humanism” to this “psychotic, power-obsessed world.”
Sure, I concede, Tom Wolfe is right—Bernstein did practice celebrity politics. Hell, he practically invented the genre, showing up on the last day of the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 to walk the final four miles of the trek arm-in-arm with Martin Luther King and address the crowd of 25,000 participants. But even that required courage—there had been numerous death threats levied against the marchers, and one of them, Viola Liuzzo, would be murdered by the Ku Klux Klan later that day.
And yes, it’s hard not to cringe when Wolfe exposes the exquisite dilemmas that these Upper East Side liberals face in planning their parties for the Panthers (no black domestics) or the Young Lords (no Hispanic ones). But I’m impressed when Bernstein asks Don Cox, a Black Panther leader from Oakland, if it infuriates him to be surrounded by such affluence, if he’s embittered by the fact of such wealth. It is, Lenny observes, “a very paradoxical situation.”
It’s no big deal, Cox says at first. But then he keeps talking, describing how he used to have a job and wear a suit and keep his nose clean and be a “respectable Negro … But then one day it dawned on me that I was only kidding myself, because that wasn’t where it was at. In a society like ours I might as well have had my hair-guard on and my purple pants, because when I walked down the street I was just another nigger…see…just another nigger…”
Bernstein responds. “Most of the people in this room have had a problem about being unwanted.”
Wolfe finds this response to be narcissist, psychoanalytic, and absurd, and veers off into another rhapsody of ridicule. I don’t find it at all funny. Of course I get his point—how could the insecurities of some Harvard-educated doyens of Society compare to the daily, random harassment faced by black men? But I also think about Bernstein as the still-closeted gay man; as the Jew trying to make it in a world in which the great composers had, until then, denied their Judaism or converted; as the blacklisted idealist forced to choose between his passion or what would become his shame, choosing shame. I think this gathering, however bizarre, would not have happened in a room where none of the fashionable hosts had ever had the experience of being unwanted. And I think that those who make it from the margins to the glittering center of success make a choice about whether to close ranks and assert their entitlement, and for all of his vacillation, his attempts to take a stand without incurring the cost, Bernstein chose not to.
So even if Lenny was wearing “a black turtleneck, navy blazer, Black Watch plain trousers and a necklace with a pendant hanging down to his sternum,” even if the conversation was happening in “a big, wide room with Chinese yellow walls and white moldings, sconces, pier-glass mirrors,” at least the conversation was happening. Dialogues like that, however mismatched the players, echo over the years.
Still, why am I getting so worked up about a forty-two-year-old magazine article, written by a fedora-wearing, white-suited white man who is now very old, about a hatless, turtle-neck or tuxedo-wearing white man who has been dead for years? Perhaps I’m seeking justification for having become the kind of checkbook liberal that I once so deplored. Perhaps I’m atoning for mocking m
y poor Uncle Herbie’s banjo lessons, which were, after all, the harmless pursuit of an aging, good man seeking expression for some need that couldn’t and wouldn’t be satisfied by selling record players. Maybe I’m grateful to Leonard Bernstein for taking a fifteen-year-old girl with big thoughts and bigger feelings seriously at just the moment when I was grasping for the same respect.
Now I am sixty-one years old. I still carry Leonard Bernstein’s songs with me. I carry all the songs I listened to over and over again when I was young; the vapid ones with the yellow plastic disc at their core right alongside my beloved West Side Story.
From this great remove, I can’t chronicle all the turns on that journey, nor can I summon the arguments that steered them. What I now think is that change is driven by snatches of songs and slogans and indelible images on posters and record covers and memes like #BlackLivesMatter and the common sensibility of all who embraced them. What I can plot is a jagged emotional arc from the mid-60s to the early 80s, from excitement to confidence, even ecstasy, to bafflement, rage, determination, and despair. What I remember is Lenny, Che, Huey, and Abbie. Drums, flowers, fists, guns—icons on the walls, the beat of running feet, the scent of the purple Gestetner ink, tangy and bracing and yet somehow sweet.
Nixon’s Farewell (1974)
When I got to work that August morning in 1974, I was tired and a little hung over. Richard Nixon, with his scowling face and sour but sanctimonious rhetoric about the justness of our government’s murderous ways in Southeast Asia, had announced his resignation the night before. I’d celebrated with my friends and co-workers under a gorgeous starry sky, and only when dawn was approaching did we drop off into the drunken, righteous, and all-too-brief sleep of the vindicated.
Checking in at the nursing station, I learned that a new patient, Duane P., had been admitted. He’d had a small piece of his brain cut out in an experimental procedure a few years earlier, but according to the brief history in his chart, it didn’t seem to make much difference. He was still unpredictable, uncontrollable, and undesirable.
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