WITNESS TO THE REVOLUTION
Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul
Clara Bingham
Random House
611 pages; $30
"So much life, so much death; so much possibility; so much impossibility" - that's the way one activist summed up the end of the 1960s in the documentary "Berkeley in the Sixties." It's the first film on the "Watch List" in Clara Bingham's oral history of America in 1969 and 1970. Ms Bingham - a former Newsweek correspondent and the author of Class Action and Women on the Hill - interviewed over 100 people, many of whom speak eloquently about possibility and impossibility.
Witness to the Revolution starts with David Harris, one of the heroes of the antiwar movement and draft resistance, who explains that "everything ... grew out of the Mississippi taproot": Freedom Summer in 1964, when white college students went south to help with voter registration and saw for the first time "the heroism of the black people in Mississippi." In subsequent chapters, interviewees talk about Woodstock, LSD, the Pentagon Papers and the FBI campaign to destroy the Black Panthers. The book also features an excellent chapter on women's liberation, with comments by, among others, Robin Morgan, the author of the article Goodbye to All That ("Goodbye forever, counterfeit left ... male-dominated cracked-glass mirror reflection of the Amerikan Nightmare").
And of course, overshadowing the entire era, and the entire book, is the seemingly endless war in Vietnam, highlighted by Richard Nixon's invasion of Cambodia in May 1970. It provoked the largest student strike in the nation's history, with 2.5 million students boycotting classes, and 700 colleges shut down. Some months before that, Seymour Hersh's reports on the My Lai massacre came out. Here he recalls talking with the mother of one of the soldiers who participated; she said, "I sent them a good boy and they made him a murderer."
Many of Ms Bingham's interviewees are well known: Daniel Ellsberg, Jane Fonda, Carl Bernstein, Oliver Stone. Some of them have been interviewed a lot: If you Google "Bernardine Dohrn" and "interview," you get more than 20,000 results. And many of them have written their own memoirs or histories of the era. But some of the people here are not so familiar, and their interviews are among the most valuable. Ms Bingham talked to a police officer from Madison, Tom McCarthy, who was part of a street war with the counterculture there; he says, "Everyone on the Madison police force celebrated after we heard about the Kent State shootings." And she interviewed an FBI agent, Bill Dyson, whose job was to listen in on leaders of the antiwar Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). (Disclosure: I was a member.)
The Vietnam War itself gets less attention here than the Weather Underground, the group of onetime SDS leaders that took its name from Bob Dylan's line in Subterranean Homesick Blues, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." As Greil Marcus points out, the group seemed to be saying, "You do need a weatherman to tell you which way the wind is blowing, and we're the Weathermen." Reading these interviews, it's not hard to understand what you might call the Weatherman temptation. SDS had held the first antiwar march on Washington in 1965, but four years later the war was bigger than ever. Over those four years, Bill Ayers says, "we had tried everything that we could think of: organizing, knocking on doors, mass demonstrations, getting arrested, militant nonviolent resistance." None of it worked - and the Weathermen understood why, as one of its leaders, Mark Rudd, explained: Ordinary Americans, especially white workers, were morons - except that's not the word he used.
If America seemed hopeless, though, the rest of the world didn't. As the Weathermen saw it, in Mr Rudd's words, "the non-white people of the world," starting with the Vietnamese and the Cubans, were "going to bring down American imperialism." And inside the heart of the empire, their comrades, a small group of privileged white revolutionaries, could strike powerful blows. So they shut down the SDS national office, and 150 Weathermen went underground. They started a campaign of bombings that were mostly symbolic - targeting, for example, a bathroom in the Capitol building. They aimed to exploit the news media's fascination with violence and reveal the system's vulnerability. The Weather Underground knew they were a tiny group, but they saw themselves acting on the global stage, in solidarity with the great majority of the world's oppressed people.
However, Vietnamese and Cuban leaders "all told us not to do it," Ms Dohrn recalls. Mr Rudd says they wanted "a united antiwar movement" with millions of people, not a violent, clandestine group with a couple of hundred. The Weather Underground knew better. Mr Rudd calls that "our arrogance."
The only flaw in the book is in the title, which refers to 1969-70 as a year of "revolution." Ms Bingham attributes that idea to the Nixon aide Stephen Bull, who told her, "You have no idea how close we were, as a country, to revolution." I don't know any historians who would agree with that; Michael Kazin, who is interviewed here, certainly doesn't. "The war was incredibly unpopular," he says, "but the antiwar movement was also unpopular."
She gives the last word to Robin Morgan: "People who get misty-eyed about that period drive me nuts because then I trot out all the things that were wrong," she says. "But it was also a visionary period in the life of this country, and I'm glad I was part of it."
© 2016 The New York Times News Service
