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antoine-roquentin · 6 years ago

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Perfect equipoise: a perfect fantasy. A more realistic American tableau was unfolding in Chicago, where the conspiracy trial was at its entropic height.

During jury selection, the questions the defense wanted the pool to be asked included “Do you know who Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix are?” and “If your children are female, do they wear brassieres all the time?” In a pretrial hearing Judge Hoffman described the “intent” standard by which the defendants were to be judged: “The substance of the crime was a state of mind.” (That was just the way Time had defined Middle America: a state of mind.) To that standard, the defense was glad to accede. When the twelve jurors turned out to be middle-class and middle-aged, except for two girls in their early twenties, Leonard Weinglass, the lead defense attorney, moved for a mistrial, claiming his clients weren’t being judged by a jury of their peers—which would have to be chosen also from people not drawn from the voter rolls, because blacks, the young, dropouts, and misfits were not well-enough represented on them.

The government had selectively indicted to display a cross-section of the monstrous personages rending the good order of American civilization: the older guru (David Dellinger); two long-haired freaks (Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin); the by-any-means-necessary Negro (Bobby Seale); two SDS militants (Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis); two radical young faculty members (a chemistry professor, John Froines, and a sociology professor, Lee Weiner, who were supposed to have planned a bombing). The prosecutors warned on TV that the defendants might walk into court the first day naked.

That didn’t happen, though when court adjourned on New Year’s Eve defendant Froines and his girlfriend did pass out autographed nude posters of themselves.

The jury was sequestered every minute they were outside the Federal Building: if states of minds were on trial, even the cultural air was prejudicial (some stories they missed: the Mobilization, the Silent Majority speech, the Moratorium, the rise of Spiro Agnew, the second moon shot, the My Lai massacre). They received a respite from cabin fever the day after Christmas when they were treated to a Disney on Parade show. But even that was prejudicial: the monkeys in the Jungle Book number were go-go girls. Alice in Wonderland was done up in psychedelic patterns.

Jerry Rubin called his indictment “the Academy Award for protest.” Judge Julius Hoffman seemed to relish the notion. “Tell me something,” he asked New York Times reporter Tony Lukas, who had called up to ask for press credentials. “Do you think this is going to be the trial of the century?”

Outside, trial marshals confiscated spoons, books, compacts, nail clippers, attaché cases—and two pistols. Defense sympathizers waited half the night in line for a spot in the gallery; the judge gave seats instead to Chicago socialites (one hippie who survived the gauntlet leapt up in the spectators’ gallery during a defense argument to cry “Right on!” and was swarmed so badly a witness thought marshals might have broken some bones). When Bobby Seale’s family managed to get seats, Judge Julius Hoffman summoned a marshal and had these strange people with bushy Afros removed. The jury wouldn’t be able to watch his child’s and wife’s reactions when Seale was bound and gagged like a slave. They weren’t there on November 5, 1969, either, when Judge Hoffman sentenced Seale to an unprecedented four years in prison for sixteen counts of contempt of court and severed his case from the rest, turning the Chicago 8 into the Chicago 7. Reporters made a mad dash for the phones. The courtroom marshals unpinned their badges, put them into their pockets, and scoured the jammed courtroom for anything else sharp, fearing an outbreak of hand-to-hand combat.

The next day a defense lawyer argued the four-year sentence was illegal and asked the judge to explain himself. Judge Hoffman replied, “I have known literally thousands of what we used to call Negro people and who are now referred to as black people, and I have never heard that kind of language emanate from the lips of any of them.” That was the day Bob Hope sent out his letter to senators “FOR A WEEK OF NATIONAL UNITY.”

Judge Julius J. Hoffman was a strutting, little bantam cock of a man. On the first day of jury selection he read out the indictment to the jury pool like a nineteenth-century thespian. Defense lawyer William Kunstler objected. Judge Hoffman boomed, “Motion denied!” and said he’d never apologize for “the vocal facilities the Lord hath given me.” When one of his young law clerks was told to prepare a denial of the defendants’ motion to see the wiretap logs and replied, “But, Judge, that’s not fair,” citing the plain letter of the law, the old man flew into a rage that awed his clerk—who was told not to return to work after his vacation.

Federal judge selection was supposed to be random. But in Chicago, the fix was always in. In big mob cases, the state always angled to argue before Judge Hoffman: he always decided against the defendant and made the prosecuting attorneys look like heroes. He “is the bane of do-gooders who would give every bum a second chance, and a third and a fourth and a fifth,” Chicago’s American said. He was also a self-hating Jew who took willful pleasure in mispronouncing his fellow Jews’ names (Weinglass: “Fineglass,” “Weintraub,” “Weinruss,” “Weinrob”) and wouldn’t let one witness wear a yarmulke in court (“Take off your hat, sir”). He popped a vein when Abbie Hoffman called himself his “illegitimate son,” but hated David Dellinger (“Derringer,” “Dillinger”) most of all: he was a WASP who’d surrendered privileges the judge so dearly wished to possess. Hoffman was especially taken aback when one of the defendants informed him that the plaque for the Northwestern Law School classroom named after him had been ripped from the wall.

“The plaque?”

“Apparently while the board of trustees feels affection for you, the student body does not.”

The defense was determined to put the war on trial and the defendants’ lifestyle on proud display (the Boston 5 had “sat like good little boys called into the principal’s office,” Dr. Spock had pointed out, and were railroaded nonetheless). The Chicago defendants were determined to show why their state of mind was morally superior. The seventy-four-year-old they called Mr. Magoo was a hanging judge, hired to grease the rails for a conviction that would only be overturned on appeal. It was a show trial. So why not put on a show?

The prosecution presented its case first. Their witnesses were undercover infiltrators. Once, when a witness was called just as one of the defendants exited a side door, the rest of the Chicago 7 braced themselves: was one of their own a police spy? (Actually, he was just going to the bathroom.)

One prosecution witness was simultaneously a member of the executive committee of Veterans for Peace, the Chicago Peace Council, the New Mobilization Committee to End the War—and the Chicago Police Department Red Squad. The people most useful in the movement, radicals often learned too late, were the ones later revealed to be spies; being paid for their time by the government, they were the most avid “volunteers.” Another had enrolled in the Northeastern Illinois State College SDS and had led a group that pushed Northeastern’s president off a speaker’s platform. (The most militant activists, radicals also discovered too late, were often police-agent provocateurs.) He testified that Rennie Davis said their plan to recruit for Chicago was to “lure them here with music and sex”; at the meeting where he claimed he heard that, he himself had suggested disabling army jeeps with grappling hooks. A third prosecution witness was a college newspaper reporter hired as a spy by the Chicago’s American columnist Jack Mabley. A fourth had worked as Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin’s dirtbag motorcycle-gang “bodyguard.” A fifth was a policewoman who’d dressed for her work in Lincoln Park every day in white hippie bell-bottoms carrying a .38 Colt in her bag.

This witness, Officer Barbara Callender, testified blushingly, “Every other word was that F-word.”

Cross-examination: “Haven’t you ever heard that word in the station house?”

The government objected to the line of questioning. The objection was sustained. Part of the prosecution’s strategy was to establish that the defendants were obscene. Ten days later, when another Red Squad member testified, he said he’d told a newsman “to turn the censored cameras around because of that civilian brutality.” His side believed it was obscenity to say [censored] without blushing; the other believed it was obscenity during an evil war to save your shame for mere words: the war was the obscenity. (A joke going around the New Left: a policeman tells a protester to come back after she has removed the obscenity from her FUCK THE WAR placard and she returns with one reading FUCK THE.)

The prosecutors, U.S. Attorneys Richard Schultz and Thomas Aquinas Foran, were perfectly cast. Schultz was so ploddingly literal-minded he could call the most obvious Yippie put-ons devious incitements to riot. Foran was a Democrat who said he had been a closer friend of the late Bobby Kennedy’s than Tom Hayden had been. In his summation he spoke of his empathy for the kids, who “feel that the lights have gone out in Camelot.” But “these guys take advantage of them. They take advantage of it personally, intentionally, evilly, and to corrupt those kids, they use them, and they use them for their purposes and for their intents. And you know what are their purposes and intents?…This is in their own words: to ‘disrupt.’ To ‘pin delegates in the Convention hall.’ To ‘clog streets.’ To force the use of troops. To have actions so militant the Guard will have to be used…. ‘Tear this city apart.’ ‘Fuck up this convention.’…‘We’ll lure the McCarthy kids and other young people with music and sex and try to hold the park.’”

The prosecution’s aim was to reduce a complex stew of motives, interests, approaches, and personalities to a concentrated, unified plot. They said David Dellinger, the Gandhian who had little direct role in Chicago, was only pretending to be a pacifist and was really the rioting’s “chief architect” (“Oh, bullshit. That is a complete lie,” Dellinger shouted. “Did you get that, Miss Reporter?” Judge Hoffman replied, and revoked Dellinger’s bail). Prosecutors said the ham-handed self-defense training in Lincoln Park was combat training. Patrolman Frapolly described a meeting in which he claimed he heard plans to throw burning flares at the cops.

Mr. Foran: “Were any of the defendants present?”

The Witness: “Yes. Weiner and Froines were at this meeting. So was Abbie Hoffman.”

Mr. Foran: “Do you see Mr. Hoffman here in the courtroom?”

The Witness: “Yes, I do.”

Mr. Foran: “Would you step down and point him out, please.”

The Witness: “Mr. Hoffman is sitting with the leather vest on, the shirt—he just shot me with his finger. His hair is very unkempt.”

The hippies’ hippie-ness was on trial; style was a battleground. Abbie Hoffman, asked why they lured innocent youth to Chicago with sex and rock bands, replied, “Rock musicians are the real leaders of the revolution.” Posture was a battleground. When Judge Hoffman admonished William Kunstler not to slouch on the lectern designed by the Federal Building’s distinguished architect Mies van der Rohe, Abbie replied, “Mies van der Rohe was a Kraut.” He added that the courtroom was a “neon oven”—thus deploying his Madison Avenue brilliance in the service of the defendants’ pet theory that America was becoming Nazi Germany. Pencils, even, became a battleground: “primly squared off and neatly sharpened beside a few neatly stacked memos on the prosecution table,” the Evergreen Review’s John Schultz wrote; “askew and gnawed and maybe encrusted with a sliver of earwax,” a proud part of the “unholy clutter,” on the defense table. (When Abbie Hoffman, a very hard worker, took the stand, he said, “Work is a dirty word instead of fuck is a dirty word.”)

Humor was a battleground most of all.

The judge fancied himself a rapier wit. But when the defense table laughed at him, or with the defense—as when Abbie and Jerry showed up in judicial robes—he made sure the court reporter got it in the record, for in the courtroom laughter wasn’t appropriate. Which jurymen laughed when was how both sides kept score.

Based on that calculus, when the prosecution rested on December 9, the day after the Nixon press conference that earned him a snap 81 percent approval rating, movement sympathizers predicted a hung jury. That prediction led to a debate in the defense camp. Tom Hayden said that, since they weren’t going to be convicted, they could best get on with the revolution if they rested their case without mounting a defense, ending the affair in a mistrial. Others—Abbie, Jerry—said the trial was the revolution. The Yippies won: they would use their defense to introduce “Woodstock Nation”—the title of Abbie’s new book—to America. They would fight through the jungles of TV.

They spoke at colleges, women’s clubs, and churches to raise money for their defense, to warm receptions. At a tony synagogue in suburban Highland Park, Illinois, fourteen hundred turned out to hear them. At universities they were treated like the Beatles. At a University of Chicago rally, Rennie Davis announced he would continue fighting the way he was fighting even if they put a pistol to his head: “How can you be a young person and have any other position?”

Thomas Aquinas Foran would have said the same thing, if asked about his own position.

It seemed an auspicious week to indict an Establishment gone mad. As Wednesday night, December 3, 1969, became Thursday morning, December 4, what the Chicago Tribune had called the “wild gun battle” at Black Panther headquarters in a West Side apartment building left two Panthers, twenty-one-year-old leader Fred Hampton and lieutenant Mark Clark, twenty-two, dead. Lewis Koch, the young New Left producer for the local NBC affiliate, smelled a rat in the cops’ claim they were met with “a shotgun volley.” He’d seen film of the cops leaving the building: smiling, embracing, exulting as if they’d won a football game—not the behavior of men who had just survived an ambush. He put Panther Bobby Rush on the afternoon news the next day, who called it cold-blooded murder and invited viewers to the apartment to see for themselves. The Chicago Daily News columnist Mike Royko took him up on his offer. The morning that the conspiracy-trial prosecution rested its case, Royko published a column called “The Hampton Bullet Holes.” According to the police account, Royko wrote, “miracles occurred. The Panthers’ bullets must have dissolved in the air before they hit anybody or anything. Either that or the Panthers were shooting in the wrong direction—namely, at themselves.” Royko had examined the building with a ballistics expert, who identified at least seventy-six bullets coming in, including twenty-four in the wall near Hampton’s bed—and not a single one coming out.

Chicago cops failed to secure the crime scene. People lined up around the block to tour the open-and-shut evidence. Years later it came out that the FBI COINTELPRO had provided Chicago cops with the floor plans of the apartment, and an FBI infiltrator had slipped secobarbital in Fred Hampton’s drink the previous evening to make it easier to murder him in his bed. Such revelations would only have confirmed what the Chicago 7 defense already knew: the “justice system” wasn’t a system of justice, “law and order” was a cover for state-sponsored crime.

Those same days the last cop indicted for crimes during convention week was on trial. The jury absolved him of beating a twenty-year-old hitchhiker after only an hour of deliberation. The prosecution was so convincing, the defense so obviously false, the shocked judge implored of the foreman, “Are you certain, not guilty?”

The Silent Majority was practicing jury nullification, just as the Chicago 7 opened their defense.

The first defense witness was a supervisor at a candy factory. He displayed slides he had taken of police chopping their way through a crowd, kicking kids when they were down—without provocation, he said. The next day he was fired from his job. And any pretense to a straight defense was abandoned. The prosecution said the Chicago 7 had lured lambs to slaughter with music and sex. So the Chicago 7’s defense would be…music and sex.

Jacques Levy, director of Oh! Calcutta! (the off-Broadway play where the cast took off their clothes), Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Country Joe McDonald were all called to the stand. (“Dr. Leary, what is your present occupation?” “I am the Democratic candidate for governor in California.” “Doctor, can you explain what a psychedelic drug is?”) Judy Collins broke out into a chorus of “Where have all the flowers gone?” (Judge Hoffman: “We don’t allow singing in this court.”) William Kunstler presented folksinger Phil Ochs with exhibit D-147, the guitar he’d used to perform “I Ain’t Marching Any More” at the Festival of Life. He, too, tried and failed to sing.

The following colloquy ensued: Abbie Hoffman had “led the crowd in a chant of ‘Fuck LBJ,’ didn’t he?”

“Yes, I think he did….”

“Now, in your plans for Chicago, did you plan for public fornication in the park?”

Allen Ginsberg had been in Chicago helping calm things with his Buddhist chants. Judge Hoffman had once been an ally of Ginsberg’s. He’d ruled in 1960 that the avant-garde Chicago literary magazine Big Table wasn’t obscene, noting that William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch was intended “to shock the contemporary society in order perhaps to better point out its flaws and weaknesses,” quoting the Ulysses decision on the subversive necessity of art. But that was a different age, when such nuances were possible. Now everyone had to choose a side.

One day a clerk at Barbara’s Bookstore in Old Town saw a middle-aged man pacing around. A member of the prosecution team, he asked, “Do you have any of Allen Ginsberg’s books?” She went to hunt some down. He said, “Could you hurry up? The future of the country may depend on this.”

Later that day, on the stand, Ginsberg explained, “I was chanting a mantra called the Mala Mantra, the great mantra of preservation of that aspect of the Indian religion called Vishnu the Preserver.”

Thomas Aquinas Foran leafed through one of his newfound literary treasures.

Mr. Foran: “In The Empty Mirror, there is a poem called ‘The Night Apple’?”

The Witness: “Yes.”

Mr. Foran: “Would you recite it for the jury?”

The Witness:

THE NIGHT APPLE

Last night I dreamed

of one I loved

for seven long years,

but I saw no face,

only the familiar

presence of the body;

sweat skin eyes

feces urine sperm

saliva all one

odor and mortal taste.

Foran, sarcastically: “Could you explain to the jury what the religious significance of that poem is?”

Ginsberg, earnestly: “If you could take a wet dream as a religious experience, I could. It is a description of a wet dream, sir.”

Defense witness Linda Hager Morse was a pretty Quaker girl from Philadelphia who had won the Kiwanis Decency Award and first marched for peace on New York’s Fifth Avenue in 1965. She was now a revolutionary. The defense wanted her to talk about why it was necessary to overthrow capitalism. The judge ruled that out of order. The prosecution, however, was glad to pick up the thread in cross-examination, and the judge was glad to let them. What Morse said encapsulated the strangeness of the last four years of American history. One part sounded quite like Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society speech: “My ultimate goal is to create a society where everyone is fed, where everyone is educated, where everyone has a job, where everyone has a chance to express himself artistically or politically, or spiritually, or religiously” (Johnson: “a society of success without squalor, beauty without barrenness, works of genius without the wretchedness of poverty”). The other part couldn’t have been further afield from Johnson’s consensus bromides. Assistant DA Schultz posed the question: “You practice shooting an M1 yourself, don’t you?”

The Witness: “Yes, I do.”

Mr. Schultz: “You also practice karate, don’t you?”

The Witness: “Yes, I do.”

Mr. Schultz: “That is for the revolution, isn’t it?”

The Witness: “After Chicago I changed from being a pacifist to the realization that we had to defend ourselves. A nonviolent revolution was impossible. I desperately wish it was possible.”

Rennie Davis thought this was the defense’s most effective witness with the jury. He asked a reporter what he had thought of Morse’s testimony. The reporter’s answer spoke to the polarization: “It certainly was a disaster for you. Now you’ve really had it.”

Could your daughter kill?

The defendants had intended to win the sympathy of the big jury out there, the general public. Their message was seen through a glass darkly. “What did go on in Judge Julius Hoffman’s courtroom?” asked the back cover of one of the many paperback books that appeared later reproducing court transcripts. With no cameras to record it, it was hard to know. Afterward a friend asked Tony Lukas of the Times which of the defendants had defecated in the aisle of the courtroom.

Most newspaper coverage came from secondhand wire reports, built from a written record that the judge made sure reflected every defense outrage and whitewashed every prosecution one. The Times’s Lukas paid careful attention to such unfairness, but his editors pruned him ruthlessly: Abbie Hoffman always “shouted”; Judge Hoffman always “said” (even if it was really the other way around). To much of the public, the presumption was that the defecation was nonstop.

William Kunstler offered his summation to the jury on February 13, 1970: “I think if this case does nothing else, perhaps it will bring into focus that again we are in a moment of history when a courtroom becomes the proving ground of whether we do live free or whether we do die free…. Perhaps if you do what is right, perhaps Allen Ginsberg will never have to write again as he did in ‘Howl,’ ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,’ perhaps Judy Collins will never have to stand in any courtroom again and say, as she did, ‘When will they ever learn?’”

Thomas Foran offered his summation: “At the beginning of this case they were calling them all by diminutive names, Rennie and Abbie and Jerry, trying to pretend they were young kids. They are not kids…. They are highly sophisticated, educated men, and they are evil men.”

The jury returned their verdict after five days. All seven were acquitted on the conspiracy count. Froines and Weiner were acquitted of the charge they’d constructed an incendiary device. But Dellinger, Davis, Hayden, Hoffman, and Rubin were found guilty on the indictment’s counts two through six, which cited Title 18, United States Code, Section 201—the provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, passed to honor the martyr Martin Luther King, outlawing the “travel in interstate commerce…with intent to incite, organize, promote, and encourage a riot” and to “speak to assemblages of persons for the purposes of inciting, organizing, promoting, and encouraging a riot.”

The liberal editorialists praised the jury’s ruling as judicious and well considered, a complex split decision: the system worked. Spiro Agnew called it an “American verdict.” It was indeed an American verdict: almost as soon as the trial began, the jury had split into polarized camps. One believed the defendants were not guilty on all accounts. The other believed they were guilty on all counts. Only three jurors actually agreed with the decision as rendered.

They had socialized apart, eaten apart—and, when together, spent most of their time in the jury room debating child-rearing philosophy. One of the convict-on-all-accounts jurors talked about the time she took her willful daughter to see a shrink who said she just needed “love and patience”—and how she stalked out saying of her daughter that she needed to have something “shoved down her throat.” They voiced their fears that their children would end up hippies, said things like “They are evil” and “This is like Nazi Germany—hippies want to take over the country” and “They had no right to come into your living room.” The liberal jurors argued that slovenliness wasn’t a crime, the prosecution was corrupt, and that for the first time they were afraid the government might be spying on them. They wondered whether the antiriot statute was constitutional. At that, the conservative side wondered, if the law didn’t protect decent people from this, then what did it protect them from?

A journalist later observed the sociology that divided the two groups. “The convict-on-all-counts jurors tended to be people who had moved recently from the city of Chicago itself to the suburbs. They were the hard-line we-worked-hard-and-won-our-way-according-to-the-standard-rules-of-social-mobility-people…. The acquittal jurors tended to be those who had been longer situated in the suburbs or outlying parts of the city, and were easier in their attitudes about raising children.”

Franklins and Orthogonians: they hated each other too much to agree on anything. They sent out notes to the judge that they were a hung jury. The judge refused to accept them: “Keep deliberating!” A juror finally brokered the split-verdict compromise. Judge Hoffman still was not satisfied. So he exercised his discretionary power. Over two long days, he called each defendant and each defense lawyer before the bench and delivered contempt specifications for each act of schoolboy naughtiness, sometimes reading out long stretches from the record: “Specification 1: On September 26, during the opening statement by the Government, defendant Hoffman rose and blew a kiss to the jurors. Official Transcript, Chapter One.”

Abbie Hoffman got a day in jail for that. He got six days for calling the judge, in Yiddish, shanda für di goyim. (The judge read the phrase, which meant “a Jew who shames Jews in front of the gentiles,” from the transcript haltingly and pronounced, “I can’t understand the following words.”) David Dellinger had insisted, on Moratorium Day, on reading a list of the war dead. For that, he got six months.

The law had spoken. John Lindsay responded, “The blunt, hard fact is that we in this nation appear headed for a new period of repression—more dangerous than at any time in years.” Foran, at a booster club rally at a parochial high school, said, “We’ve lost our kids to the freaking fag revolution.” Rennie Davis said that when he got out of jail, “I intend to move next door to Tom Foran and bring his sons and daughters into the revolution” and “turn the sons and daughters of the ruling class into Vietcong.” Jerry Rubin signed his new book—Do It!—to “Judge Hoffman, top Yippie, who radicalized more young Americans than we ever could.” And Tom Hayden said, “Our jury now is being heard from.”

In Ann Arbor, five thousand students and hangers-on marched to city hall busting windows and wrecking cars. The FBI put a “White Panther” on the ten most wanted list, who wrote from exile in the Michigan woods, “I don’t want to make it sound like all you got to do is kill people, kill pigs, to bring about revolution,” but “it is up to us to educate the people to the fact that it is war, and a righteous revolutionary war.” In Madison a student stole an Air Force ROTC training plane and tried to bomb an army ammunition plant (just as a student radical stole a plane in the newly released Zabriskie Point).

The preliminaries in the trial of the “Manson Family” were all over the news: Manson had hoped, it turned out, to foment a race war. Weatherman Bernardine Dohrn said of the murders, “Dig it, first they killed the pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach! Wild!” On February 17, what appeared to be a copycat crime emerged, a hideous attack on a military family: a Green Beret captain, Jeffrey MacDonald, reported regaining consciousness from a knife attack to find his wife and two children, Kristen and Kimberly, dead. He remembered what one of the intruders, a woman wearing a “floppy hat” and carrying a burning taper, chanted: “Acid is groovy, kill the pigs.”

In St. Louis, at 2 a.m. on February 23, the Quonset hut housing Washington University’s Army ROTC program was burned to the ground. In frigid Buffalo, on February 24, the president of the State University of New York campus summoned cops to control the threatened disruption of a basketball game. The next night, forty students stormed his office. A police squad chased them into the student union. Eight hundred students attacked the police. At the precinct house, amid the Jewish-looking haul, one arrestee heard a cop say that America “should have let Hitler win, he’d have known how to take care of these fuckers.”

That same day, William Kunstler, facing two years in jail for contempt of Judge Hoffman’s court, gave a speech at the UC–Santa Barbara stadium. Ten years earlier he had dropped out of the executive-training program at R. H. Macy’s; how things had changed. “I have never thought that [the] breaking of windows and sporadic, picayune violence is a good tactic,” he now said. “But on the other hand, I cannot bring myself to become bitter and condemn young people who engage in it.” Students whistled and cheered. Hundreds strolled to a rally in the adjacent town of Isla Vista. One of them idly swung around a bottle of wine. The cops, thinking it a Molotov cocktail, arrested him. Violence broke out. Kids burned down a Bank of America branch. Ronald Reagan ordered his attorney general to look into charging Kunstler with crossing state lines to incite a riot.

On March 6 a mysterious explosion collapsed an entire town house in Greenwich Village. Cops searching through the rubble pulled out three dead bodies and enough live-wired dynamite bombs to blow up the entire block if detonated at once. The house had been a bomb factory, and one of the bombs was intended to slaughter attendees at an upcoming dance at Fort Dix. One decapitated body was identified by a print taken from the severed little finger of the right hand: Diana Oughton, a Weatherman. Another was a leader of the 1968 Columbia University strike. The third was a Weatherman based at Kent State University, in Ohio.

On March 11 a bomb gashed a chunk out of the corner of the Dorchester County Courthouse in Maryland, site of pretrial hearings for H. Rap Brown for inciting the burning of the schoolhouse in Cambridge in 1967.

The next night, in Buffalo, hundreds of students fought a running battle with police, throwing Molotov cocktails at the faculty peace monitors trying to keep the two sides apart.

Three days later Judge Hoffman received an enthusiastic clap on the shoulder from Richard Nixon. He was a special guest at the president’s weekly Christian service in the East Room, where the Reverend Billy Graham preached that America’s “differences could melt in the heat of a religious revival.”

In New York City one day in March, fifteen thousand people were evacuated from office buildings from three hundred separate bomb threats. On April 4, Governor Reagan, in a reelection campaign speech to the Council of California Growers, said of government’s dilemma of beating back the mounting violence, “If there is to be a bloodbath, let it be now.” That America was in the middle of a civil war had once been but a metaphor. How soon before it became real?

- Rick Perlstein, Nixonland

#a real classic

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