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Chapter Six: "Your Sons and Your Daughters..."

From Bob Avakian's memoir From Ike to Mao and Beyond

This week we are running a famous clip of Mario Savio in 1964, a student leader at that time at the University of California at Berkeley, calling on people to “put your bodies on the gears on the gears of the machinery” of the system and stop it from running. This took place at the height of the Free Speech Movement, one of the first big student struggles of the 1960s. At a time when the Supreme Court is poised to rip away the right to abortion, the spirit and words of Mario Savio have great relevance.

Mario Savio speaking at the Sproul Hall steps at UC Berkeley, December 2, 1964

To give some context for this powerful clip, we’re also running a chapter from Bob Avakian’s (BA’s) memoir recounting his involvement in that movement. This chapter begins as BA is still recovering from a very serious illness but has been able to enroll at Berkeley and resume a normal student life. You get a sense here of how BA began to politically develop, you get a sense of the times and of Mario Savio, and you also get a larger sense of how people in general can begin to go through changes in how they think and what they do as they get involved.

My family and all my friends and I were still holding our breath, because you don’t know twice before I’d been through a situation where things were going well with low dosages of cortisone, and  then the symptoms of kidney disease would reappear. So there was the possibility of a relapse now that I was completely off the cortisone. But  that summer brought a lot of big changes in my life.

I had been nominated by some of my English professors to be part of an undergraduate honors seminar on John Milton, the English poet who wrote Paradise Lost (and Paradise Regained), over the summer. There were about ten of us in the seminar, which was taught by Stanley Fish, a big Milton hotshot who was only a few years older than we were — I think he was 24 at the time. He’s now a big figure in academic and intellectual circles more generally in the U.S., and I’ve written a few things recently commenting on some of his books. At that time, I hadn’t heard of him but I was into English literature, I was still trying to write poetry, and this sounded like an exciting thing to do. So when they asked me, I said sure.

We met for a number of weeks, five days a week for several hours, and it turned out to be a fun seminar. One time Professor Fish brought in this guest lecturer who talked about a certain aspect of Milton’s work, and I was wearing my dark glasses in the classroom. While he was talking he kept pausing and looking at me, and finally he just couldn’t take it any longer — he turned to me and said, “Why is it that you’re wearing shades in this class?” And I don’t know why, but for some reason I had an answer ready, and I responded without even hesitating: “Plato has written that the eyes are the window to the soul, and I don’t want anybody peering into my soul.” Even that guest lecturer couldn’t help cracking up at that point.

Opening Up

I met Liz in this seminar, and she had a big influence on me. I was already anxious to be more involved in political affairs, and she came from a progressive family — her parents had been sympathizers of the old Communist Party. She told stories about how people she knew had to bury their Marxist books during the McCarthy period. She had a radicalizing effect on me, to put it that way — for instance, I was drawn to the Free Speech Movement (FSM) when it broke out that fall, but she had a big influence in getting me more deeply involved in it.

I was going through a lot of changes in a kind of a telescoped way, the way you do when big, world events happen one after the other. There had been the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, and then a couple of years after that the Chinese exploded an atomic bomb. I remember walking with somebody after we’d gone to a civil rights demonstration in the Bay Area against one of these local businesses that wouldn’t hire Black people, and there was this BIG headline in the local newspaper: “Chinese Explode Atomic Bomb.” I turned to the person next to me, who was more radical than me at that time, and I said, “Man, that’s scary, that’s bad.” And he said, “No, I think it’s a good thing.” I said: “Why? That Mao, he’s crazy, it’s not good for him to have the atomic bomb.” And he answered, “No, it’s a good thing, because it could mean the U.S. won’t be able to fuck with China so easily.” I still was not by any means a communist and, as reflected in the comment I made about Mao at that time, I still accepted a lot of the anti-communist propaganda and bullshit. But I was open. The prejudices I had were clashing up against somebody else who had a different understanding and was challenging me that kind of thing was repeatedly happening. So, when he said this, it wasn’t like I just dismissed it. I didn’t say, “Oh I see” and just agree with him, but on the other hand, it became one of those things circulating in your mind.

This was when the U.S. was escalating the war in Vietnam, in the period of 1964 and ’65. I hadn’t yet made up my mind about Vietnam, even at that point. In fact, during the Free Speech Movement there were some people in leadership of that movement, including Mario Savio, who were making statements against the Vietnam War. And I wasn’t sure that I liked that — I was still wrestling with questions about the Vietnam War, and I felt this should not be a dividing line, or a necessary point of unity, in the FSM. But all these things are clashing in your mind in times like that.

Torn by Kennedy and the Democrats

Just to backtrack for a minute, the Kennedy assassination was a perfect example of the contradictoriness of my thinking. I came to class at the university that day and everybody was stunned and saddened that Kennedy had been assassinated — they were all openly grieving. And I remember one of the women in one of my classes got mad at me because I was sort of aloof and not expressing any emotion. But then, as it sunk in, believe it or not, I actually wrote a poem memorializing Kennedy a few weeks after that. I sort of felt like Phil Ochs at that time, who talked about his Marxist friends being unable to understand how he could write a positive song about Kennedy — and about how that’s why he couldn’t be a Marxist. And that kind of speaks to where I was at, at the time.

My father was part of the Democratic Party. Toward the end of his life, he became more alienated from the whole system and more outraged about the injustices in the U.S. and what the U.S. is doing around the world — but for much of his life he was a real liberal Democrat. In fact, he had been offered a position in the Kennedy administration, but he turned it down because I was in the Bay Area and too sick to move, and he didn’t want to be separated from me while I was sick. My parents, of course, were very upset about the Kennedy assassination, and in fact I think my dad went to a meeting and read this poem that I wrote memorializing Kennedy.

This kind of contradictory thinking that characterized my parents, and myself, at that time, is fairly common among progressive people. You see a lot of the injustices and what we sometimes call the “running sores” of the whole society and the way in which it grinds up people, and you see ways in which the people presiding over the society are responsible for this. But you still carry along the illusion and have the hope that they can be brought to their senses, that they can be made to see that this is wrong, and — since they’re in a position to do something about it — you want to believe that they will do something about it, if they can just somehow be made to see what’s wrong. That’s an illusion that is often difficult to shed; it takes a lot for people to fully cast that off, and that was true for me too.

Into the Student Life

At this point, in 1964, I was finally able to leave home. Since I had been cut off from a lot of social experiences, I wanted to go live in the dorms, even though I was by then in my third year of classes. But there was still a question of whether my health requirements would allow that. Among other things, I had this very strict diet, where literally every day I was calculating how many milligrams of sodium I could eat, and things like that. Finally I had a discussion with my doctor and he said, “You know you’re probably at the point where if you’re just careful about what you eat, if you don’t eat salty foods and don’t add any salt to anything, you’ll probably be all right in the dorms.” That was the big hang-up about living in the dorms at that time: I had enough strength, but there was also the question of diet, because something that threw my system off could give me a severe setback.

This friend of mine from high school named Tom was living in the dorms, and we got it arranged so that he and I could be roommates, which made it easier for me. That was a very important step for me at that time, given how dependent I’d been forced to be. Even though I loved my family, I wanted to be taking steps to be on my own more.

While the dorms, obviously, have their limitations, this was a positive experience for me under the circumstances. Mainly people go in the dorm when they first come into the university, and then move on — but since I hadn’t been able to do that, I actually enjoyed it quite a bit for the short time that I was there. Tom, my roommate, was a progressive guy and also a big sports fanatic like me. This was a time when even life in the dorms was beginning to be affected by the big changes sweeping through society and the world. That kind of ferment was finding expression throughout university life.

At that time I still physically bore the scars of being sick and I was also struggling to overcome them psychologically. My friends used to talk me into going to parties, and my love for singing provided a way for me to sort of break out of my shell socially. I’m not exactly even sure why or how I got the nerve to do this, but when I’d go to the parties — and I didn’t have to get drunk or high to do this, either — often at a break I would just start singing. I would sing R&B songs or Motown or whatever. I even did this in the dorms. We had four dorms together in a group where everyone ate at the same cafeteria, and at the big meal on Sunday they used to have a microphone for people to make announcements. So one Sunday at the urging and daring of my friends, and somewhat on my own initiative as well, I actually got up and just took hold of the mike and started singing this Mary Wells song that I loved, “Bye, Bye Baby” and the whole place just responded. So that became a Sunday institution during the time I was in the dorm.

Dylan and “Beatlemania”

I remember also when the Beatles first came to the U.S. It was a big deal. They were on one of those shows like The Ed Sullivan Show, and everybody in the dorms gathered around the TV to watch the Beatles — except for me and Tom, who really didn’t like or care about the Beatles that much and were also making a statement that we had other kinds of music we were into and we weren’t going to get caught up with the herd. In retrospect, I’ve sometimes said, in explaining how I really didn’t get Jimi Hendrix at the time, that some of the influences I had from high school — the friends I had, and the musical interests — had given me almost a “narrow nationalist” view: “Jimi Hendrix, what’s he doing playing all this psychedelic white hippie stuff?” I’ve since come to understand how narrow that was, how I failed to appreciate something that was new and breaking with some conventions and molds, and I’ve tried to learn from that, not just about music but more generally.

But even recognizing that narrowness, there was something that I still think was valid in how Tom and I were making a statement: “What’s the big deal about these English white boys coming here and singing rhythm-and-blues?” I remember a friend of mine telling a story about a track meet in L.A. that took place during this time, and how Mick Jagger was staying in the same hotel as some of the athletes in the meet. At one point a number of them surrounded Mick Jagger and said, “Oh, you’re supposed to be a big singer,” and they started singing all these different doo-wop and rhythm-and-blues songs, and challenging him: “Let’s hear you sing this one, let’s hear you sing that one.” And I cracked up when I heard that I thought it was a great story. So, in sort of the same spirit, Tom and I were not gonna become part of Beatlemania. Later on, I came to appreciate especially John Lennon a lot, in a different way especially for his political and social views, but even musically. But back then, we were not gonna get swept up in “Beatlemania.”

Bob Dylan was another story altogether. There was this one guy at Cal who used to sing the whole repertoire of Bob Dylan music, and he had the Bob Dylan look as well. I’m sure there was this kind of phenomenon all over the country, and I’m also sure that this kind of “imitation” was exactly the kind of thing Bob Dylan didn’t like, but this guy had the harmonica and the guitar and everything, and that’s actually where I first started hearing some Dylan songs. Then, as I got more political, I really got into Dylan. I remember in particular the album The Times They Are A-Changin’. They were changing, and this brought a lot of generational conflicts.

One time, when we were together with my parents somewhere, Liz and I put that song on the record player and played it very loudly, sort of right up in their face: “Come mothers and fathers throughout the land, and don’t criticize what you can’t understand...” So, even though I didn’t want to have anything to do with the Beatles, there was a way in which Bob Dylan spoke for the whole social and political upheaval that was occurring, especially for a lot of youth out of the middle class, but not only for them. A lot of his early songs had to do with the civil rights struggle, outrages like the one captured so powerfully in “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” about the killing of a Black maid by this rich young white planter in Baltimore. And the poetry of Dylan also captured me — because I was into poetry, and the poetry of his songs just really drew me. I didn’t see him as a white boy who was just mimicking other people’s music. I looked at him as a poet-musician and somewhat a voice of a generation who was speaking to a lot of things at a point where “The Times They Are A-Changin’.”

New People, New Influences

I only stayed in the dorms for a short time, and then Tom and I and a couple of other people got an apartment. One of my good friends in the dorm, who later moved into an apartment with me and Tom, was from India. His name was Sidhartha Burman, but it got shortened to Sid, and especially some of my Jewish friends liked to joke with him, “Sid Berman, good Jewish boy from India.” But his name was really a classical Indian name, Sidhartha Burman, and he was from a very wealthy bourgeois family. We had a lot of struggle with him. He was a really good-hearted guy, but he used to recount to us, for example, that when he was back in India, he was awakened every morning by being given a massage by servants. Then he would walk from his house to his father’s business in Calcutta, where he lived, and he acknowledged to us that every day he would step over the dead bodies of the poor people who had starved to death on the streets of Calcutta the night before. We struggled with him and struggled with him, and we finally got him for a little while to become kind of a hippie, but that’s as far as we could get with him. On the other hand, he did share with us a lot of experiences and open us up to an understanding, or at least a glimpse, of a whole different part of the world and different cultures and customs.

Politically at that time — in the period before the Free Speech Movement — there was mainly civil rights activity among students. In fact, the right to organize for civil rights activities on the campus was the focal point of what became the Free Speech Movement. It may sound unbelievable now, but in those days, the Cal administration had a rule that you could organize things like student clubs, but you could not carry on political activity on campus for “off-campus political causes,” such as civil rights. You were not allowed to organize on campus for, say, a civil rights protest or demonstration against a company that wouldn’t hire Black people — it was against the rules and you could be expelled for it. That gave the spark to the whole Free Speech Movement (FSM). The FSM not only radically changed the Berkeley campus, but was a major impetus for a wave of changes on campuses all across the country. When the FSM was going on, people, young people in particular, came to Berkeley from all parts of the country.

For example, one day I walked on campus and there was this guy from New York who’d come to Berkeley specifically because he recognized the significance of the gathering Free Speech Movement. He told me stories about having visited Italy, where the Communist Party was looked at very differently than in the U.S. — it was a mainstream political party there. He also told this vivid story about being in a courtroom in New York City when they brought in this prisoner to appear before the judge, and the prisoner had obviously been brutally beaten by the cops. It was so bad that the judge sort of lost control for a moment and blurted out, “god, what happened?!” Then he described how the judge regained his “composure” and went on with the ordinary business of the court as if nothing were wrong. When I put things like that together with things I knew and was learning, from my own personal experience, and especially the experience of many of my friends, it had a kind of cumulative effect.

Malcolm X

As I described earlier, even when I was in high school some of the gathering momentum of the civil rights movement carried over in various ways and found various expressions among the students and within the school, among the Black students in particular. So I knew about Malcolm X by the time I graduated from high school. And I remember a year or so later, when I was in the hospital starting up the cortisone treatments, I saw a Sunday afternoon political discussion/debate program on TV. They had different people talking about Malcolm X and the Black Muslims, with people on different sides of the argument, though they were all white — arguing about whether the Black Muslims were just as bad as the Ku Klux Klan and the white supremacists. I remember one guy making the argument, “No, they’re not, because the Ku Klux Klan and the white supremacists are defending and upholding oppression, whereas whatever you think about the Black Muslims they’re on the side of opposing that oppression.” That immediately struck me as true and important — I agreed with that right away. It was in line with everything I already felt, but it also put something together for me.

I remember listening to Malcolm X’s speeches and seeing him on television, and always being riveted and, increasingly, inspired by him. I agreed with Malcolm X when he said “freedom, by any means necessary.” I had never agreed with the pacifist view. It’s one thing if you want to say there should be pacifist tactics in a particular situation, like a demonstration, but I never agreed with pacifism as a principle — that Black people, for example, should always turn the other cheek. When I heard about the Deacons for Defense in the south, who organized and took up arms to defend the Black community from the KKK and all the racist sheriffs, I thought that was right — it was necessary and important. So when Malcolm X articulated “by any means necessary,” I felt that was right, and I didn’t agree with the idea that you should confine the people to turning the other cheek or just to passively accepting, for whatever supposedly loftier purpose, being brutalized.

I loved to listen to Malcolm X speeches. At one point, I got a recording of “The Ballot or the Bullet,” and I listened to that over and over. Later, when I started making speeches myself, I drew a lot from Malcolm X, especially the way in which he exposed profound injustices and contradictions of the system so sharply. (I also drew from Richard Pryor, particularly the ways in which he used humor to bring to light things in society that were covered up, or that somehow you weren’t supposed to talk about.)

Straddling Two Worlds

My friend Matthew came back to Cal, and he had a circle of friends who were mainly Black that I also got to know and became friends with. And when I went back to Berkeley High to do tutoring and officiating at track meets and coaching summer league basketball teams and things like that, I maintained contact with my old friends and that milieu, so to speak. While I didn’t think of it that way at the time, looking back on it now, I feel like I was straddling two worlds, but to me they were both part of my life, they were both part of my world. And the same kind of shit that I ran into in high school came up again for example, there were people at Cal who would straight up tell me that they would not be friends with me because I hung out in the Student Union and around campus with Black students. As I said, I was sort of straddling two worlds, but to me this was all part of what I was about. I wasn’t trying to make a “statement” — these were just my friends, these were the people and things I was interested in and cared about, these were just the different parts that made up the whole of my life. I wasn’t saying to myself, “Oh, I’m straddling two worlds,” but objectively I was.

In a lot of ways, culturally, I was drawn more to things that were from my earlier years, especially my high school years, than I was to the university. But then politically, and in terms of intellectual ferment, there were things about the university that were increasingly drawing me. There was the Dylan music, the poetry, even the Milton seminar. I took courses in Shakespeare and Chaucer, and I’m one of the few people that I know of who has actually read the entire “Faerie Queene” by Edmund Spenser! — which is a classical epic poem, hundreds and hundreds of pages long, written at more or less the same time as Shakespeare. I read that — I actually took a course on this poem — mainly because I knew Spenser was a big influence on Keats and I was really into Keats. All that was one part of my life, too.

I also had a goal of learning five or six languages. I took Italian and I took some Spanish, but I didn’t ever fulfill my goal — other things intervened which became more important to me. But by taking Italian I got interested in some of the Italian romantic poets from more or less the same period as Keats and the other English romantic poets. My favorite Italian professor was very progressive, and I used to have talks with him about what was going on in the world — as much as I could, I would talk with him in Italian about all this.

But, once again, I was straddling different worlds. You know, most of the people who were big into athletics — let’s put it this way, they were not among the vanguard of the progressive and radical forces on the campus. There were some friends of mine, like Kayo and my roommate Tom, who were sports fanatics and who also had strong progressive views and radical tendencies, but that was more the exception than the rule. So, in that way you could say there was a certain conflict in terms of things that I was passionate about. But by this time, around 1964, I was finally getting back on my feet physically and feeling like I dared to do some things. So when the summer gave way to the fall and the Free Speech Movement arose, and in addition with the influence of Liz — with whom I was starting to fall in love — I was ready to throw myself into that.

The Free Speech Movement

Despite the administration’s rule that you couldn’t do “on-campus organizing for off-campus issues,” people at Cal were organizing on the campus to protest against local businesses which they identified as practicing racial discrimination in their hiring, such as the Oakland Tribune and this drive-in restaurant called Mel’s Diner. Everybody on campus was aware of this, it was becoming more and more of an issue that people were debating and talking about and getting involved in — or not getting involved in and opposing, because there was polarization. To jump ahead for a second in order to give a sense of this, at a later point in the FSM, during one of the nights when people were sitting in around a police car, 500 fraternity boys came to throw things at the people sitting in and shout insults at them. I’ve often said that in the ’60s even fraternity boys grew brains, but that was later in the ’60s at the time of the FSM they didn’t have them yet.

So the administration sent the campus police to put a stop to this on-campus organizing for “off-campus issues.” A guy named Jack Weinberg was sitting at a table organizing for this and he refused to fold up the table. They arrested him, put him in a police car to drive him off, and then a bunch of students came and surrounded the police car. While this sit-in was going on, I was at a reception that the Chancellor, Chancellor Strong, was having for honor students at the university. At that reception, one of the students asked him what was going on with the sit-in, and the Chancellor basically said: “Well, the area in which they were originally organizing wasn’t the area where the police car incident took place, but where they were originally organizing, we thought that was actually city property, because it was right at the entrance to the campus. But then we looked into it and found out that it was university property, so we decided we should put a stop to it.” And why did they look into it? Well, he went on to tell us, because of pressure from the Oakland Tribune, which was owned by William F. Knowland, who was a well-known reactionary.1The Tribune called up, the Chancellor told us, complaining about the organizing of civil rights demonstrations against the Tribune for discriminatory hiring practices. “So,” Chancellor Strong concluded, “we cracked down on that organizing.”

I was just stunned. I was shocked, first of all, that this was actually how this came about and, second, that he was just saying this so baldly as if everybody would accept it. As I’ve said elsewhere,2 I guess his idea was this: since we had good grades, we must be “grade-grubbers,” in training to become money-grubbers, and we wouldn’t find anything objectionable in what he told us. But a lot of people there did find this very objectionable, including myself. I immediately went over to the sit-in around the police car and got in line to speak the police car had been surrounded by the protesters and transformed into a speaking platform while Jack Weinberg was still sitting inside. It was really great! So when my turn came, I got up on the police car and told this story and explained how it led me to support this whole thing, and I donated my $100 honorarium for being an honor student to the FSM. And that’s how I first got directly involved.

Stepping back, I think the FSM expressed the general feeling that students wanted to be treated as adults and citizens, they wanted to have the same rights as other people. Phil Ochs had this song where the refrain went something like, I’ve got something to say, sir, and I’m going to say it now. And as it was in that song, so it was in reality with students and youth at that time. But, beyond that, there were a lot of big things going on in the world. Vietnam was already beginning to heat up in the fall of ’64, and there was the civil rights movement. People wanted to be actively involved in or debating about these things, they wanted to be part of the larger world — they didn’t want to be treated like little children just because they were students. So all this was going on and mixing together: the general resistance against treating college students as if they didn’t have any minds, against the whole bureaucratization of the university and the functioning of the university as machinery to serve the corporate world and the military, and against the depersonalizing effects of all that on the students, on the one hand, as well as the big things going on in society and the world, like the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, that people wanted to be involved in. It was all that together.

The university tried to claim that it was all being fomented by “outside agitators.” There were some people who weren’t students who were involved — and they were welcomed, it was good that they were involved. But it was overwhelmingly students who were involved. This came out, for example, when people were arrested in the big sit-in at the University Administration building. In the aftermath of these arrests, this claim was made: “Oh, these are just ne’er-do-wells, these are just disgruntled students and non-students.” But the records showed that overwhelmingly those arrested were students. Then, since they couldn’t deny that most of those arrested were students, they claimed that they were students who were failing or getting poor grades anyway, so they were just being troublemakers. In response to this, the FSM committee took a survey of the people who’d been arrested, and among other things asked the grade point average of the students who were arrested. This survey revealed and confirmed that the students who were arrested had higher grade point averages than students in the university overall, and were generally not failing or getting poor grades.

At this time Liz was more politically aware and more of an activist and radical than I was. She had a family background of people who’d been involved with the Communist Party, and even though that ultimately meant revisionism — reformism in the name of communism — it still gave her a broader political outlook than I had at that time. And she had a big influence on me. It was partly the political discussions we had and partly, to be honest, the fact that I was interested in her romantically and she wanted to be very active in the Free Speech Movement, that led me to be so consistently involved.

When we went into Sproul Hall for the big sit-in, and as the sit-in went on, I was trying to help keep the morale up. At one point I went from floor to floor organizing singing to keep the spirits up. But, at the same time, this sit-in lasted several days and I was still a serious student, so I was also trying to keep up with my schoolwork during the sit-in — until at one point I just decided, “Oh, the hell with it,” and threw my homework away. I literally took my homework and threw it down the hall. But this also had a larger symbolic meaning, even though I myself wasn’t fully aware of it yet.

Another one of those ironies of “straddling two worlds” happened to me at the end of the sit-in, when people were arrested in almost an assembly line fashion. As they were arrested, a lot of people were thrown down the stairs, and the women in particular were grabbed by the hair and thrown down the stairs. I was on the top floor and saw many people brutalized like that and, of course, this was only a few months after I had finally recovered from being sick. So besides being outraged generally, I was also a little worried about what would happen to me if I got thrown down the stairs or otherwise brutalized, especially if I got hit in the area of my kidneys. And as my turn came to be busted, I recognized the cop who was arresting me as someone who had played basketball for a local college. I saw his nameplate said Gray, so I said, “Aren’t you the ‘Gray’ who played basketball for St. Mary’s?” And I kind of shrugged my shoulders as if to say, “So what you gonna do?” And he replied, “Sorry, can’t do nothin’ for you” and off I went.

Of course, I was very happy to be arrested, to put it that way. I wanted to be part of this, and there was a great camaraderie. When I did this thing with this cop Gray, I wasn’t trying to not get arrested, I just didn’t want to get thrown down the stairs or hit in my kidneys. But I was very happy to be part of this.

At the same time, my whole involvement in the Free Speech Movement came shortly after my dad was appointed as a judge by the same governor, Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, who sent the police in to arrest us in Sproul Hall. So that kind of captures a sharp contradiction. My dad was saying to me and also to my younger sister, “Look, I just got appointed...” In effect, he was saying: “Don’t do anything to screw up my getting established as judge.” My sister and I both had the attitude: “Well, we’re not gonna go out of our way to make trouble for you, but we’re also not gonna hold back from doing the things we think are right or important.”

When I did get arrested, it was another case where both of my parents agreed with the principles of free speech, and even agreed generally with what the students were fighting for, but I think were made very nervous, not only in a personal sense but in a larger sense, by the whole turmoil that was being created — the shutting down of the university, in effect, and people getting busted and all that kind of thing, as well as the personal dimension of how this might affect my dad’s standing as a judge. On the other hand, as soon as they learned that I got arrested, my parents called up my doctor, since I had just gotten over this very serious illness, and I was still in a precarious position. And my doctor, who I later learned was sympathetic to protests like this, told my parents: “This could be very dangerous for him. Even if he spends just one night on a cold floor, it could kick back in his whole kidney disease.” Actually, my doctor felt so strongly about this that he insisted that my dad get me out that night, so that I wouldn’t have to spend the night on a cold floor under jail conditions. So I was surprised to get out a little earlier than some of the other people did, though most everybody was out by the next morning or the next day sometime.

Mario Savio

Mario Savio, who led the FSM, had a big effect on me, though I didn’t really know him personally. I was active and involved in FSM pretty much all the way through, from the beginning; I went to all the rallies and heard Mario and others speak. Like everyone else who was involved, or who heard his speeches, I was very moved by them and felt they spoke very penetratingly to how we saw things and what was motivating us. But while in general I was very moved by his speeches, I remember one time right before we all got busted in Sproul Hall, Mario gave a speech. I think this was just when we found out that the governor, Pat Brown, was sending the troopers to bust us, and Mario talked about the duplicity and the double-dealing of the university administration and the governor and so on — that they hadn’t negotiated in good faith and that they’d done these back-handed things — but then he said, “And this is just like what our government is doing in Vietnam.” This was in early December of 1964, and I was actively looking into the Vietnam War and trying to figure out what stand to take on it, but I hadn’t made up my mind yet.

As I referred to earlier, I was troubled by Mario’s saying this at that point, because I felt like we had a certain level of unity in the Free Speech Movement, but it didn’t include opposing the Vietnam War. You didn’t have to be opposed to the Vietnam War to be actively and enthusiastically involved in the Free Speech Movement, though probably if you took a survey, the overwhelming majority would have been opposed to the Vietnam War. And, within a short time after this, I myself became convinced that it needed to be very actively and strongly opposed. But at that time I was still in the process of wrangling with this — debating and studying and trying to learn enough to make up my mind about it. So this was a little troubling to me — although, as I’ve said before, as I was trying to make up my mind and come to a decision about Vietnam, the things that were said by people like Mario Savio, for whom I had great respect in general, obviously had a big influence and played a role in convincing me to oppose what the U.S. was doing in Vietnam. So it was that kind of contradictory thing.

The Assassination of Malcolm X

Shortly after this, in February of 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated. This hit me as a devastating loss for Black people, and also for people generally fighting against injustice, not just in the U.S., but throughout the world. I knew Malcolm X was seeking to link up with people in other parts of the world who were fighting against injustices and oppression. And I never believed that it was just Elijah Muhammed and the Nation of Islam who were involved in Malcolm’s assassination. Whether or not they were involved in some way, I knew that the U.S. government was somehow behind this. I knew enough to know that.

So this was another thing further radicalizing me. First, I saw Kennedy blatantly lying, before the whole world with the fate of the world literally hanging in the balance around the Cuban Missile Crisis, then you see something like this, the assassination of Malcolm X, and you know that somehow the U.S. government was involved in this. I hadn’t studied the issue, and a lot of the exposure of how they were involved hadn’t come out yet, obviously. But I just sensed this — I knew they hated Malcolm X and saw him as very dangerous to them — and it made me really sad but very angry too.

I had been aware of the transformations Malcolm was going through. A lot of my friends and I were following this very closely. People were debating about the split between Elijah Muhammed and Malcolm X, and most everybody I knew sided with Malcolm X. We saw him as more radical, more willing to take on the powers that be, more willing to stand up in the face of any threat against Black people and against their oppression. So I was following that very closely, and all that was an important part of what was causing me to undergo a lot of changes in how I was seeing things and what I felt needed to be done.

I don’t remember exactly where I was when I heard the news about Malcolm’s assassination, but I do know how I felt immediately upon hearing this. My friends and I were just devastated by it. There’s that Phil Ochs song that I mentioned before, “Love Me, I’m a Liberal.” It is done in the persona of a liberal — it is a biting exposure of the contradictoriness and hypocrisy in liberals — it starts out with how sad this liberal was when Kennedy got killed, and even what a tragedy it was when the civil rights leader Medgar Evers was murdered, but then this liberal says that Malcolm X got what he had coming. That was a fairly widespread view among a lot of liberals, and Phil Ochs captured that with rather brilliant and biting irony. So there were a lot of very sharp arguments with some people that I knew, because I vehemently disagreed with that view.

Deciding About Vietnam

All these things were influencing me in making up my mind about Vietnam. Obviously Malcolm X was not only against what the U.S. was doing in Vietnam, but was giving these speeches like “The Ballot or the Bullet,” where he sided with the Vietnamese people and talked about how great it was that these poor people who didn’t have a lot of technology were standing up and giving battle and delivering blows to this mighty, powerful, white power in the world, as he saw it — “the great hypocrite America.” So this was having a big influence on me.

Then there were a lot of debates that were sharpening up on the campus and in activist circles. One thing I remember in particular was a lot of argument about who was responsible for violating the Geneva Agreements that had been made in 1954 about Vietnam, which were to provide for the reunification of Vietnam and elections in 1956.3 France was getting out of Vietnam — they’d been forced out by the struggle of the Vietnamese people, having suffered this devastating defeat at Dien Bien Phu. In fact, Malcolm X talked about that — about how the Vietnamese sent the French running. As I looked into these arguments, and when I went to the university library and read the initial Agreement and most of the reports of the commission it set up, I found that their reports overwhelmingly demonstrated that the U.S. was systematically sabotaging this Agreement. I learned that Eisenhower, who was then President of the U.S., recognized that Ho Chi Minh would have been overwhelmingly elected to head any government of a reunified Vietnam. So the U.S. set up a puppet government in the southern part of Vietnam, the Republic of South Vietnam, as a separate state and refused to allow the elections for reunification in 1956. I was reading all the pamphlets and articles about this and listening to the debates, trying to figure out the real truth in all this, just like I’d done at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. And I discovered that it was unmistakably true that the U.S. had sabotaged this Geneva Agreement and prevented the reunification of Vietnam, because they knew that things wouldn’t go their way if this Agreement were implemented.

All this was percolating within me, and I still remember very clearly when I got up one morning in early 1965 and got the newspaper, and there were big banner headlines about the brutal attack in Selma, Alabama on civil rights marchers. I said to myself: “How in the world could the U.S. government be over there in Vietnam fighting for the freedom of the Vietnamese people, as they claim to be, when this is happening to Black people right here in the U.S. and the U.S. government is doing nothing about the freedom of Black people right in this country, and in fact it is allowing freedom fighters here in this country to be savagely attacked by these KKK and the racist sheriffs and the authorities in the south?” So that was the final straw for me. I knew they could not be fighting for freedom in Vietnam. That was the thing that led me to be firmly convinced that I had to become actively involved in opposing the Vietnam War too.

There was still a lot of division, even in the city of Berkeley itself, on these issues, however. As I’ve described several times, I grew up in a pretty well-off middle class family. And among people coming from that part of society, there were very strong generational divisions developing. And there were also political divisions in line with larger economic and social divisions in society as a whole. Many Black people I knew in Berkeley and Oakland were much more inclined to oppose the Vietnam War because of the basic understanding that I’d come to by reading about Selma — they kind of knew, “Look these people are not up to any good, I don’t care what they say, whether it’s Vietnam or here.” I don’t mean to say that they necessarily had a developed understanding of all the “ins and outs” of the issue, or had read all the Geneva Convention reports, and things like that, but they had a basic understanding of the truth: “these people are up to no good in Vietnam.” They had a lot of experience to draw on that told them that. So there were those kinds of divisions as well.

The ’60s were a time when the universities were opened up to broader sections of society. Previously, they were much more restricted to the elite strata. But it was still largely the middle class whose kids went to college, and largely white students who came to a university like Cal at that time. Among the students, there was tremendous conflict developing with their parents over a whole host of issues, including Vietnam. That was a big phenomenon of the time. For example, my parents were troubled by the Vietnam War, but they were still supporting it.

I used to argue all the time with my parents about this, and one time in particular I had this pamphlet written by Bob Scheer, who now works for the L.A. Times and is more or less a liberal, but at that time was more radical. He’d written this pamphlet making very strong and cogent, very well-documented arguments about the Vietnam War and what the U.S. had done and why it was wrong, and I was using this pamphlet to argue with my parents. And my dad started making what I regarded as nitpicking arguments. Some people might refer to this kind of nitpicking as being “lawyerly,” but I had a lot of respect for the way my dad used logic in his legal arguments — and I’d learned a lot from the dinner table training that he’d given our whole family when he’d sit down and say, “Okay gang, here’s a case, here’s what happened, what do you think?” I respected that and enjoyed it. But I didn’t appreciate this sort of nitpicking way in which he was approaching the question of Vietnam — a way in which things would be argued to actually get away from the truth. I got very frustrated with this, and I took this Bob Scheer pamphlet and threw it across the hall and stomped out of my parents’ house.

There was that kind of very sharp conflict, and I remember at one point my parents said, “Okay, look, if you feel this strongly, write our congressman” our congressman was Jeffrey Cohalen, my parents were friends of his and worked on his campaigns — “and give him your arguments.” So I wrote a several-page letter laying out my arguments about what the U.S. was doing in Vietnam and why it was wrong. He sent me back what was pretty much a form letter — and I probably only got that because he knew my parents and didn’t want to insult them. He just ran out the standard government propaganda about what the U.S. is doing and why it’s good for the Vietnamese people, and he quoted something from this professor, Robert Scalapino, at Berkeley, whom I, and many others, simply regarded as a State Department professor. That just infuriated me more and convinced me even more deeply that (a) what the U.S. government was doing in Vietnam was wrong; and (b) they weren’t going to listen to people who had real arguments about why it was wrong.

Getting In Deeper

At the time there were students who were aggressively supporting the war, like the Young Republicans. But other students, even kind of liberal students, were still not really sure or maybe wanted to cling to the belief that the U.S. was doing something good in Vietnam, perhaps because it was Democratic administrations first under Kennedy and then Lyndon Johnson which were carrying out the war at that time. So there would be debates with these liberal students as well. And then there were people who would come from off campus and seek us out to debate. The anti-war organization on the Berkeley campus was called the Vietnam Day Committee, because they’d organized a big teach-in called “Vietnam Day” in the spring of 1965. People from off-campus would seek out the Vietnam Day Committee table and this included many soldiers who would do a one-year tour of duty in Vietnam and, if they didn’t volunteer to be sent back again, would then come back and do the rest of their time in the military somewhere in the U.S. Or they’d come on leave, on their way back from Vietnam before going to somewhere like Germany. They would often seek us out to argue sometimes they’d be in their uniforms, sometimes in “civilian clothes,” but they would identify themselves as soldiers and talk about how they’d been in Vietnam and how we didn’t know what we were talking about.

Many of these soldiers would try to hold sway by acting as if they knew all about Vietnam, because they’d gone there to conquer it and occupy the country and oppress the people. They would give us the standard military line. This was before massive rebellion hit in the military. A few years later, there would be many, many soldiers and veterans of the Vietnam War with a very different viewpoint, but this was earlier, in 1965 and ’66, and the soldiers were still mainly defending what they were doing. A lot of times it would go from the level of all this bullshit about fighting for freedom to talking about their buddies. That was the last line with which the government and the military brass could keep the grunts fighting: “Look what happened to your buddy, your buddy got killed by these ‘gooks’ ”— as they would call them, along with other racist terms “so therefore, you have to hate them and fight against them all the harder.” A lot of times the arguments would break down pretty quickly to that what happened to “my buddies.” But first they would try to give us more lofty-sounding arguments about freedom, in terms of what was happening in Vietnam the same kind of bullshit the U.S. uses about Iraq now. At that time, it was “we’re there to liberate the people from the communist tyrants.”

And so we’d get in these big arguments and, after a while, when people would challenge them and show that what they were saying about the history of things and so on wasn’t true, they’d fall back on, “Well, I was there and I know.” They’d demand: “Have you ever been to Vietnam?” I’d say, “No,” and they thought that was the end of the argument. But then I would ask them, “Well, look, you’ve been saying all this stuff about communism and the Soviet Union and China and all that, have you ever been to the Soviet Union or China?” “Well, no.” “Then what do you have to say about all that, if you’re gonna put the argument on that level? According to your logic, you can’t say anything about the Soviet Union, or China, or communism, because you’ve never been to those places, you’ve never been to a ‘communist country.’ ” Then they’d sort of hem and haw and we’d get back to the substance of the issues, once we got rid of that ridiculous line of argument. Besides being actively involved in demonstrations, what I loved most was being in all these vibrant discussions and arguments. Knots of people would form around the table and then they’d break up and another knot would form, and more people would come to the table and new discussions and debates would break out, over these tremendously important issues.

Sometimes the arguments got pretty heated, even with people that you would expect would be on your side. The hippie thing was generally cool, as far as I was concerned, even though that wasn’t really what I was “into,” as we used to say. But I didn’t have any patience for some of the “hippie/dippy” stuff about “everybody do your own thing,” without regard to what “your thing” was. One time I was at the office of the Berkeley Barb newspaper, which was kind of an alternative newspaper that was pretty radical at the time. And there was this kind of hippie-biker type in there. I was talking to some other people in the Barb office about the Vietnam War, denouncing it and exposing different things that were going on. And I was really ripping into Lyndon Johnson, what a mass murderer he was — everybody hated Lyndon Johnson, because he was both the symbol of continuing and escalating the war and the president who was actually doing it. This hippie-biker type was listening for a while, and finally he pipes up and says, “Hey man, you know, like, maybe the Vietnam War is just like Johnson’s thing, maybe he’s just doing his thing.” I got really angry and turned to him and said: “Well, what if my thing is just punching you in the mouth right now?” And he went, “Oh, okay, man, okay I get it man.”

During this period, Liz and I had continued to become closer, and then to become lovers. In 1965 we got married. For some reason I had decided that I wanted to become a doctor. I’d switched my major from English to pre-med. I was an activist and wanted to remain an activist, but I was thinking about what I wanted to do as my life’s work, so to speak. I didn’t want to become a doctor so I could go to the golf course. I wanted to become a doctor so I could give people medical care who didn’t have medical care. But my pre-med studies lasted less than a semester. I remember having to go to chemistry lab several afternoons a week, and every time about two o’clock or so I’d think: why am I not at the Vietnam Day Committee table, or why am I not helping to organize a demonstration? So that didn’t last very long. I went to the university administration and asked if I could withdraw from school that semester. Because I had a good standing as a student, they allowed me to withdraw that semester “without prejudice,” and I became much more of a full-time activist.

Liz’s parents had an interesting reaction to that. Remember, they had a whole history of being political activists and communists perhaps, or at least radical people who were communist sympathizers. They weren’t so upset when we became active in the Free Speech Movement or even opposing the Vietnam War. But when I took this step of withdrawing from school to become involved full-time in anti-war activity, as well as civil rights and things like that, they got very upset. They lived back in New York, and I remember one time her father was talking to me on the phone, and he said, “Look, this is very serious what you’re doing. I know what you’re doing — you’re becoming a full-time revolutionist, and pretty soon you’ll be meeting together with other people who are revolutionists and making plans for a revolution.” I argued vigorously with him that this wasn’t true, because at the time I didn’t think that was where I was headed. But ironically he, who had had some experience with things like this, could see it more clearly than I could — and of course, in retrospect, he was right. I mean, it wasn’t bound to turn out that way, but he recognized the trajectory that I was heading off on.

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FOOTNOTES:

1. William F. Knowland was nicknamed William “Formosa” Knowland because of his big-time support for Chiang Kai-shek, who had ruled China with the backing of the U.S. and other imperialist powers but had been driven from power in 1949 by the Chinese revolution, led by Mao Tsetung, and forced to retreat to the island of Taiwan, which was formerly called Formosa. [back]

2. For more on the author’s views on the Free Speech Movement, see “FSM Reflections — On Becoming a Revolutionary,” by Bob Avakian, Revolutionary Worker, #882, November 17, 1996, available at revcom.us. [back]

3. The 1954 Geneva Agreements came out of a conference that included China and the Soviet Union, which were then both socialist, as well as the U.S., France, Britain and other lesser powers. This conference occurred in a situation where liberation forces in Vietnam, headed by Ho Chi Minh, had delivered a devastating defeat at Dien Bien Phu to the French colonialists who were attempting to maintain their domination of Vietnam — and in doing so were receiving major backing and aid from the U.S. The Agreements set up a commission to oversee the reunification of Vietnam, which was temporarily divided into north and south along the 17th parallel; the Agreements called for elections in 1956 throughout Vietnam to establish a single government for the country as a whole. [back]