A Bomb in Every Issue by Peter Richardson

Author:Peter Richardson [Richardson, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781595585462
Publisher: The New Press

7

THE BATTLE’S CONFUSION

As the nation lurched into the summer of 1968, the Democratic Party wasn’t doing any better than the magazine. Antiwar activists were thrilled when President Johnson unexpectedly announced he wouldn’t seek reelection, and many were encouraged by Robert Kennedy’s entry into the 1968 presidential race. But when Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968, the Democrats lost an important (if recently converted) critic of the war. Scheer, who was skeptical of Kennedy’s transformation, was at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when Kennedy delivered his victory speech following the California primary. After conducting what turned out to be Kennedy’s final interview, Scheer arrived in the ballroom just moments before shots rang out in the kitchen.

Once again, the nation recoiled in horror. Even Tom Hayden grieved, despite having called Kennedy “a little fascist” in a private conversation a few days before. With his Cuban fatigue hat in hand, Hayden wept at Kennedy’s casket in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. “With King and Kennedy dead,” SDS leader Todd Gitlin wrote later of the New Left, “a promise of redemption not only passed out of American politics, it passed out of ourselves.”

Even before the 1968 assassinations, however, violence had become a New Left preoccupation. According to Gitlin, thoughts of violence “organized the movement’s fantasy life.” As the Democratic national convention approached, some of those fantasies began to look plausible. In Chicago, one of the last bastions of old-school Democratic machine politics, young radicals could confront the party of war under the bright lights of the national media. That summer, movement leaders lined up permits and recruited antiwar activists, but many had misgivings about the violent overtones in these internal discussions. “In my recruiting trips around the country,” antiwar leader Dave Dellinger wrote later, “the two questions I was always asked were: (1) Is there any chance that the police won’t create a bloodbath? (2) Are you sure that Tom [Hayden] and Rennie [Davis] don’t want one?” At some conferences during the spring, a majority of activists preferred to continue organizing in their communities, but Hayden and other movement leaders reserved the right to call an action in Chicago.

That confrontational spirit informed Hayden’s Ramparts articles earlier that summer. His June 15 essay, “Two, Three, Many Columbias,” echoed Che’s famous slogan about Vietnam and celebrated the occupation of several buildings at Columbia University, where protestors objected to the university’s war-related research as well as its plans to build a gym in Harlem. The occupation lasted for five days and led to the arrest of seven hundred protestors, including Hayden. In his article, Hayden depicted that action as a refutation of the older generation’s teaching about social change.

American educators are fond of telling their students that barricades are part of the romantic past, that social change today can only come about through the processes of negotiation. But the students at Columbia discovered that barricades are only the beginning of what they call “bringing the war home.”

One Ramparts reader, seventeen-year-old Maurice Isserman, eagerly ingested Hayden’s article as he prepared for his freshman year at Reed College.

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