Witness to the revolution Radicals, resisters, vets, hippies, and the year America lost its mind and found its soul

Review by Choice Review

Bingham, who comes from a distinguished newspaper family and as a former Newsweek correspondent covered the George H. W. Bush administration, has written a unique volume covering the crucial 1969-70 period of US history. Though only a child during the 1960s, Bingham has reconstructed the scene of antiwar and anti-government protests through interviews with still-living participants--members of the Chicago Eight, the Black Panthers, Weather Underground/Weathermen, on the one hand, and the administration response (Nixon) on the other. Bingham also describes events such as Woodstock and Altamont to show the relationship of war protest and the cultural estrangement of the hippie generation. Bill Ayers, David Harris, Jane Fonda, Seymour Hersh, Daniel Ellsberg, among a cast of hundreds, are portrayed recalling the moment key issues brought to light secret Vietnam war policies (Nixon)--My Lai Massacre, the invasion of Cambodia, and the Kent State shootings are prime examples. The author has done a credit to 20th-century chronicles of US history by compiling an intensely accurate record of personal interviews mixed with sharp and poignant introductory passages not only to remind the boomer generation of what went on in the 1960s, but to educate later generations as to how difficult the struggle was for the protestors during the Vietnam era. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. --Andrew Mark Mayer, College of Staten Island

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by New York Times Review

"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. 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 F.B.I. 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 - among them Kent State, after National Guardsmen killed four students there. Allison Krause was one of them, shot when she was 343 feet away from the guardsmen. Laurel Krause says, "My sister bled to death, for 45 minutes, before an ambulance came, yet ambulances were available over the hill, reserved for guard and authority injuries only." 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 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. (I've interviewed her myself, along with a dozen of the other people here, for radio or print.) 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. Bingham talked to a police officer from Madison, Tom McCarthy, who was part of a street war with the counter-culture there; he says, "Everyone on the Madison police force celebrated after we heard about the Kent State shootings." And she interviewed an F.B.I. agent, Bill Dyson, whose job was to listen in on leaders of the antiwar Students for a Democratic Society (S.D.S.). (Disclosure: I was a member.) He was impressed by their "dedication," and had his own doubts about Vietnam, telling Bingham, "I really didn't know why we were there." The familiar voices and the unfamiliar ones are woven together with some documents to make this a surprisingly powerful and moving book. The Vietnam War itself gets less attention here than the Weather Underground, the group of onetime S.D.S. 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. S.D.S. 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 to end the war - 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 Rudd's words, "the nonwhite 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 S.D.S. 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," Dohrn recalls. 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. Rudd calls that "our arrogance." THE MOST ARROGANT of the Weather Underground leaders, it's clear from these pages, was Bill Ayers. Here he declares that he will "say what I did that was wrong" when Henry Kissinger appears onstage with him and says "what he did that was wrong, because he killed three million people, and I killed no one." But Ayers did help kill S.D.S. Rudd says it best: What he regrets most about the Weathermen is that "we destroyed S.D.S. at the height of the war." That happened, Tom Hayden emphasizes, before the Moratorium in October 1969, when two million people participated in the largest antiwar protest to date, and before the nationwide student strike against the war in May 1970. "There were many student uprisings to come," he says, but "the group that had triggered it... was actually dead. Unbelievable. And this was not seven years from the time when S.D.S. was formed." The only real flaw in the book is in the title, which refers to 1969-70 as a year of "revolution." 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." As for Bingham herself, she was not a "witness to the revolution" - she was 6 years old in 1969, and writes that she always felt as if she had "missed the party." 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." 'The war was incredibly unpopular, but the antiwar movement was also unpopular.' JON WIENER is a contributing editor at The Nation. His latest book is "How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey Across America."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 12, 2016]

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Review by Booklist Review

Vietnam, domestic bombings, marches, student strikes, political trials, Nixon, and the counterculture dominated U.S. news between August 1969 and September 1970. Former White House correspondent for Newsweek, Bingham (Class Action: The Landmark Case That Changed Sexual Harassment Law, 2002) captures the essence of these 14 months through the words of movement organizers, vets, students, draft resisters, journalists, musicians, government agents, writers, and others. Distilled from 100 interviews, these firsthand narratives from Bill Ayers, Bernadette Dohrn, Daniel Ellsberg, and many more paint a picture of life during the apex of anti-war, anti-government movements. Organized around major events, the stories are interspersed with striking photographs and government documents from the White House, FBI, and other federal offices. The individuals Bingham features led a seismic shift in American culture and politics that continues to resonate today. This oral history will enable readers to see that era in a new light and with fresh sympathy for the motivations of those involved. While Bingham's is one of many retrospective looks at that period, it is one of the most immediate and personal.--Kaplan, Dan Copyright 2016 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this oral history of the American counterculture from August 1969 to September 1970, Bingham (Women on the Hill) assembles an impressive who's who of the activists, outlaws, and idealists who sought to bring America to its reckoning, for better or worse. Perhaps the most astonishing part of Bingham's account is the sheer number of memorable events that occurred in this "school year": Woodstock, Kent State, Nixon's invasion of Cambodia, the Weather Underground's campaign of bombings, Seymour Hersh breaking the My Lai massacre story, Robin Morgan publishing her feminist essay "Goodbye to All That," and Fred Hampton and Mark Clark being murdered by the Chicago police. Vietnam vets were coming out against the war and youths were opening their minds with LSD. It would be a mistake, however, to assume Bingham's book is an uncomplicated celebration of the "awakened generation." Many of the reminiscences end in regret; ironically, just as the New Left's antiwar message was beginning to hit home with the American public, the movement itself was self-destructing. By the end of Bingham's history it becomes clear that time has done little to cast these crucial events in any clarifying light. Agent: Esther Newberg, ICM. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

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Review by Library Journal Review

In her latest work, Bingham (Class Action) has compiled an assortment of oral histories ranging from August 1969 to August 1970. Organized into narrative form, the accounts capture volatile and revolutionary change, relaying a feeling for what it was like to live during this period. The material includes profiles of participants associated with the Black Panthers, the trial of the Chicago Eight in 1969, Kent State University in the wake of the 1970 shootings, the My Lai Massacre in 1968, the Nixon administration, the Pentagon Papers, the Weathermen, and Woodstock. Broader topics touch on the Vietnam War, the draft, domestic terrorism, and the peace and women's movements. Together the descriptions of events reveal the radicalness and turmoil of the era. Bingham's prose is often engaging and dramatic, transferring the experience of these times to readers. Additionally, the reports draw out the earnestness of the participants as players within this political and cultural conflict. VERDICT Recommended for readers of U.S. history.-Scott Vieira, Rice Univ. Lib., Houston © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

An engrossing oral history of the youth rebellion of the 1960s. Former Newsweek White House correspondent Bingham (Class Action: The Story of Lois Jenson and the Landmark Case that Changed Sexual Harassment Law, 2002, etc.) interviewed some 100 activists, veterans, government officials, and othersall now in their 60s and 70sto produce this remarkable account of the anti-war movement. "The cross-pollination of left-wing activists with hippie drifters and dropouts, who were all part of the same Great Refusal to conform, created a brand new rebel," she writes. With a focus on the year 1969-1970the "crescendo of the sixties, when years of civil disobedience and mass resistance erupted into anarchic violence"Bingham captures telling moments (from campus protests to bombings, from Woodstock to My Lai) in the voices of those present. There are revealing stories about Weathermen on the lam, government sabotage and surveillance, courtroom theatrics, police riots, President Richard Nixon's late-night meeting with protesters at the Lincoln Memorial, the Pentagon Papers, and the incessant organizing behind events that "would profoundly and permanently change the nation." The cast is a who's who of the '60s: Daniel Ellsberg, Jane Fonda, Julius Lester, and others, from undercover FBI agents to rock musicians, most of whom offer sharp insights into the period. After all these years, many echo an LSD dealer's comments: "We were young and nave, and drunk on idealism." "We were so arrogant," says Weatherman Mark Rudd. Most share feminist Robin Morgan's observation that in the civil rights and peace movements, "the human spirit was really at its best." Weathermen founder Bill Ayers says he will apologize for his actions when Henry Kissinger says "what he did that was wrong, because he killed three million people, and I killed no one." People like Bingham (b. 1963), who "missed the party," may be astonished by aspects of this tumultuous story. Baby boomers will find themselves infuriated once again by vivid accounts of the My Lai massacre, the Kent State and Jackson State shootings, and other tumultuous events. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Chapter 1 The Draft (1964-­1967) We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit. --­Port Huron Statement, Students for a Democratic Society, 1962 The roots of the Vietnam antiwar protest movement can be traced to the American crusade for civil rights. In August 1964, Congress authorized the use of troops in Vietnam in response to the Gulf of Tonkin incident--­the alleged North Vietnamese attack on a U.S. naval ship. That same month, civil rights workers put their lives on the line for voter registration in the Mississippi Summer Project. Seven months later, on Sunday, March 7, 1965, John Lewis and six hundred protesters were filmed being beaten as they walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, at the start of their march to Montgomery for voting rights; the images of the attack on a nonviolent protest vividly dramatized the stakes of the struggle. Just one day after Bloody Sunday, the first U.S. combat troops landed in Vietnam. "I don't see how President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam and can't send troops to Selma, Alabama," John Lewis, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), remarked. The military draft followed soon after, ultimately calling 2.2 million men to fight in Vietnam. Skills learned on the battleground for racial equality in the South--­mass civil disobedience and grassroots organization--­were soon employed in the new campaign against the war in Vietnam. In reaction to the disproportionate number of black soldiers being killed in Vietnam, SNCC activists organized one of the first anti-­draft demonstrations, at the Atlanta induction center in 1966, and coined the slogan "Hell no, we won't go!" The war over there was soon to become a war over here. David Harris (Stanford student, draft resistance organizer) I came from Fresno, California, where I was Fresno High School "Boy of the Year" in 1963. Several weeks after I got to Stanford, there was a meeting about volunteers going to Mississippi. This was the first time that the black students in Mississippi had issued an invitation to white students to come down, and they invited students from Stanford and Yale. In the fall of '64, I started classes and was meeting my girlfriend for dinner and she said, "I was at a meeting. There's a car going down to Mississippi tomorrow." They were running a parallel election in Mississippi called the Freedom Vote, to show what would happen if black people were allowed to vote, and they needed volunteers, so I said, "I'm going." I told my brother to call my parents after I was gone, and I got a seat in the car and left that night. Two days later, we were in Mississippi. I was worried about missing the great adventure of my time. You didn't have to have an ideology or politics to go to Mississippi in those days. You just had to have values. That summer of '64 we had all been watching what was going on in Mississippi, so it was a no-­brainer for me. Campaigning for the right of black people not to be lynched for trying to vote was a pretty easy call. So I went. I was eighteen years old. Wesley Brown (Black Panther, draft resister) My family moved to East Elmhurst, right near LaGuardia Airport, in 1952. It was formerly an Italian neighborhood, but as more blacks moved in, of course, the whites made their departure. By 1955 it was nearly an all-­black neighborhood. These were working-­class blacks trying to move up. They saved their money like my parents, and bought a home, and tried to enter the lower middle class. My father was a machinist at a tool and die factory in the Bronx, where he worked for about forty years. Queens at that time was called God's country. If you could get out of the projects and buy a house in Queens, you were on your way. It was a very solid, tight-­knit community where parents wanted to make a better life for their kids. In fact, Eric Holder, President Obama's first attorney general, lived on our block. My sister used to babysit him and his younger brother, Billy. So it was that kind of neighborhood. Everyone was trying to do the right thing, be responsible, and trying to make a way for themselves and their families. And of course, that leads to a certain amount of conservatism, a wish not to stir things up. These were black folks who knew their history, because they were only the second generation born after emancipation. My father's grandmother was born into slavery and he knew her. She would show him her thumb, which was all splayed out and deformed, because when she did something that the overseer didn't like, he would take a razor blade and split her thumb open, and it would never heal sufficiently before he would open it up again. My father was born in North Carolina and was the tenth of twelve children. These black folks knew what this country had been through with slavery and segregation and they weren't prepared for their children being boisterous and assertive in a way that they couldn't afford to be. David Harris Four of us were working together in a team trying to register people for the Freedom Vote, in the black part of a town called Lambert. After working all morning, we came back to where the car was parked, and the three guys wanted to go to the post office to mail some letters and I said, "I'll stay here by the car." I'm standing by our car, and up pulls a pickup truck with two white guys in it. They get out. One's got a shotgun; the other one's got a pistol. The guy with the shotgun sticks it right up against my nose and says, "Nigger lover, I'm giving you five minutes to get out of town before I blow your head off." I'm an eighteen-­year-­old Stanford student. "Well, what do you mean? Who are you?" And he just says, "Nigger, I said five minutes." At that point, the other three guys came back, took one look at the situation, and we all jumped in the car and left Lambert, Mississippi. Wesley Brown I remember vividly the photographs in Jet magazine of Emmett Till in his casket in 1955. His mother wanted an open casket so people could see what was done to him--­his misshapen face that was bludgeoned into nonrecognition. And I remember watching those kids in Little Rock in '57 trying to go to Central High and Eisenhower finally getting the National Guard to come in, so that they could go to school without being killed. The memory of those images and the virulent hatred directed at those kids was indelible for me. And of course, there were the Freedom Rides, the lunch counter sit-­ins by those students from Shaw University in North Carolina, and the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott. We got our first television in 1949, so all of these images were a part of my coming of age. David Harris Everything that followed grew out of the Mississippi taproot. We learned how to organize by working with SNCC in Mississippi, and perhaps much more important was the spirit of Mississippi; there was a kind of inspiration in the heroism of the black people in Mississippi. It's really hard to recapture what that was like. For example, we were working in Quitman County; the county seat is called Marks. There was a seventy-­five-­year-­old black woman there who walked into the registrar of voters office and said, "I want to register to vote." They arrested her, threw her in jail, tortured her with an electric cattle prod, and then released her from jail. She walked out of jail and down the street to the registrar of voters office and said, "I want to register to vote." These are people whose names are lost to history, but when you have that kind of encounter, somehow you get a whole new perspective on what's of value and how to behave in the face of oppression, and the strength that any single person or a group of people can bring with their own will. The third thing that came out of Mississippi was the experience of seeing America from a different perspective. You see what was being done to black people for simply trying to exercise the rights that we supposedly won with hard-­fought battles a hundred years ago. And to see not only that that was going on, but how the rest of the country had turned a blind eye to it and talked bullshit about the southern way of life, and courtly manners. Isn't it sweet? These were mean, vicious, narrow-­minded people, who were standing on the backs of people who were helpless to fight back. And everybody in America let that happen. So suddenly, you come back from that, and you can't look at it the same way. It was precisely that perspective that brought the Vietnam War into focus. Wesley Brown So I was at SUNY Oswego in January 1965, on Lake Ontario, in central New York, and some SNCC workers came to speak. I was already feeling that I wanted to be a part of something that was going on that I felt would make a difference. I was about twenty years old at that point. Their visit changed my life in many ways, and I decided to go to Mississippi. My parents couldn't believe that I would put myself in harm's way, given what had happened in Mississippi the year before. They left the South in the thirties, as many blacks did, because of the Depression, to find work in the North as part of the Great Migration. They couldn't believe that I would return to a place that they left. I remember taking a Port Authority bus in June of 1965 to Memphis, about a twenty-­eight-­hour bus ride, and then having to get another bus to Holly Springs, Mississippi. So that began the four months I spent in northern Mississippi, right near the Tennessee border, working on voter registration. David Harris Right after I got back from Mississippi came the first major escalations of the Vietnam War, when all of a sudden we went from advisor status to deploying full combat units there, and the rise to six hundred thousand troops began. I marched in my first antiwar march about six months after I got back from Mississippi. My father was an officer in the Army Reserve for twenty years. My brother ended up a captain in the Eighty-­second Airborne Division. I've had ancestors in every war starting with the revolution. Like all my generation, I assumed that we would have a war to fight. We grew up watching Victory at Sea on television. But when the war that they had for us came, it was obvious this wasn't what I thought I would be doing. This wasn't about freedom or democracy or wearing white hats or helping people. This was essentially keeping a bunch of scumbags in power and prolonging the French Empire. Coming back from Mississippi, I could believe it. Wesley Brown A few days after my arrival, I was sent to Jackson, Mississippi, for a demonstration with the intent of filling up the jails. Within minutes of getting out of the car in Jackson, I was arrested, and thrown into a field house with hundreds of protesters, because the city jails were full. Before bail was set, the lawyers were interviewing people, and they asked me, "Do you want us to get in touch with your family to let them know where you are?" It was Father's Day, and this lawyer talked to my father, and wished him happy Father's Day for me. After I got out a week later, I contacted my parents and I let them know that I was okay. It was a very emotional and not a happy time for them. Like any parents, my father and mother did not want their children to have to go through the things they had gone through when they lived in the South. They shared my beliefs but didn't want me to have to deal with the consequences of my beliefs. My father used to say, "You can't get up in the face of the powers that be. You have to find a way to work around the system, but if you make too much noise and draw attention to yourself, you're just setting yourself up for a fall." David Harris I considered myself part of the movement from the day I left for Mississippi. What we call "The Movement," capital T, capital M, was a commitment to justice and the values of democracy. They called us the New Left because it wasn't an ideology. There wasn't a specific politics attached to it. What it was, was a set of values finding ways to express themselves. I was in marches, I was in rallies and demonstrations. But there was always the larger question of the conscription system. In that era, when any male turned eighteen, he had to go to the post office and register for the Selective Service System. When you registered for Selective Service, they gave you two cards. One was proof that you had registered, and the other indicated your classification. Because under the Selective Service, there were various classifications, starting from 1-­A, which meant you were cannon fodder, to you were going to get a notice soon in the mail saying "Report to 4-­F," which meant you were physically unable to perform and therefore exempt. In between that, the largest one was 2-­S, which was the student deferment. Anybody in college making, quote, "reasonable progress towards a degree" had a temporary exemption until they finished their education. So that was the system that covered all of our lives--­all of the male lives, anyway. Always there was floating out there, what happens when they call your number? We--­understandably--­focused on that a lot. I mean there were people going to graduate school so that they wouldn't get drafted. There were people getting married so they wouldn't get drafted, because early on, being married was an exemption. They weren't going to draft family men. They thought if I want to take a year off and just go to Paris and write poetry, you're headed for the tall grass if you do that. This defined everybody's life. Wesley Brown After I left Mississippi and returned to college, I went to the school registrar with a friend and we asked that our student deferment classifications not be sent to the Selective Service, because we felt that it discriminated against blacks who didn't have the opportunity to go to college. The registrar went ballistic but honored my request, and my classification was changed to 1-­A, which meant I was subject to be drafted. But because I had been arrested in Mississippi, my classification was changed to 1-­Y, which meant that if you had an outstanding legal charge against you, you wouldn't be among the first who would be called. Excerpted from Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul by Clara Bingham All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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