A difficult decade to read

If you lived through them, you probably have your own private ‘60s. Bobby Seale and Paul McCartney have theirs, and so does George W. Bush. They would certainly all write different accounts of the rebellious decade. And if they put together an anthology of writings, they would surely offer very different selections.

And so it is with myself and Ann Charters. She was a college professor in the ‘60s and a much respected scholar of the Beats, especially Jack Kerouac. She attended four antiwar demonstrations but was not really an activist, and certainly not an organizer or leader. The center of her life was literature. I, on the other hand, was a full-time activist, a founder of an underground newspaper and an original Yippie. I was arrested 14 times and once ran for sheriff of Alameda County. The center of my life was revolution.

Like Charters, I, along with my wife, Judy Gumbo Albert, edited an anthology of ‘60s writings, titled “The Sixties Papers,” which was published in 1984 and is still used as a college text. So it’s fascinating for me to see how someone with a different background approaches the subject. Mostly, I want to see if her comments and choices resonate in my memory, intellect and emotions. The answer is mixed and occasionally frustrating.

Take her selection -- and placement -- of Hunter S. Thompson’s piece on the Hell’s Angels’ 1965 attack on the Vietnam Day Committee. This bit of writing oddly finds itself in the “Free Speech Movement and Beyond” section, but the only thing this conflict had to do with the Free Speech Movement was that it took place in Berkeley. Now, almost anything that Thompson writes is insightful, but his angle of vision here is from the seat of a Hell’s Angel motorcycle. Not that he romanticizes these outlaws, he calls them fascists, but his journalism has little to do with the committee or its intentions.

The Angels had attacked peace marchers at the Berkeley-Oakland line and were threatening to do it again in a scheduled second march. But they backed off, and Thompson is at a loss to explain why.

Well, I used to set up the Vietnam Day Committee’s table on the Berkeley campus and occasionally give speeches at noon rallies. Let me suggest that the radicals who would turn out 10,000 marchers were well prepared the second time around. Not all pacifists by a long shot, they far outnumbered the Angels and included in their ranks some ex-boxers, wrestlers and football players. The Angels would be overwhelmed. In addition, this time around, the VDC had a permit from the city of Oakland, and it was unlikely that the Oakland police would be looking the other way. No wonder the Angels took their complaints elsewhere. Charters could have greatly enriched the telling of this tale if she had included in her anthology writings by VDCers that appeared in the Berkeley Barb. (The sad ending of the Vietnam Day Committee ought to be mentioned. Person or persons unknown planted dynamite under its office and blew the building to smithereens. The police called it attempted murder, and the crime remains unsolved.)

Berkeley, the great melting pot of ‘60s radicalism, is given short shrift in Charters’ anthology with hardly a mention of People’s Park -- one of the great highlights of the ‘60s. It was created in Berkeley circa 1969 by thousands of students, street people and citizens. Originally an abandoned piece of university-owned land, it was seized and turned into a park. The park builders rolled out sod, planted flowers, constructed swings and planted a vegetable patch. When the regents of the University of California tried to evict them and erected a fence around the park, violence ensued. Then-Gov. Ronald Reagan called in the police, the National Guard and the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department. When it was all over, one person was left blind and another dead.

I was hoping that Charters would come up with some obscure masterpiece about the rise and fall of People’s Park. There was excellent writing about the park in radical magazines and newspapers; reprinting a portion from Mario Savio’s magnificent speech “Seizing the Means of Leisure” would have been perfect. But aside from a passing -- and incorrect -- reference to James Reston being killed in the battle for the park, we learn very little. As a participant in that protest, I can state that Reston was nowhere near the park. It was James Rector who was killed.

The further I read into Charters’ anthology the more frustrated I became, but then I read a selection from Norman Mailer’s award-winning “Armies of the Night,” an account of his participation in the 1967 march on the Pentagon and the sit-in that took place around that scary building.

Mailer’s work is a masterpiece. His account of some of the organizing activities that took place in the months that led up to the march is incomparable. The greatness of his account is diminished only by the fact that Mailer was arrested early in the confrontation and missed most of the best and most exciting action. He got much of the wild stuff from interviewing Yippie Jerry Rubin, who was the project director of the sit-in.

It left me wondering why Charters didn’t include something by Rubin on the clash and sit-in. Rubin covered these events in his bestselling manifesto “Do It!” He was there when it got hot and heavy, and so was Abbie Hoffman, and so was Phil Ochs and so was I, but the Yippies are mostly missing from this anthology. There is one odd work by Hoffman, a somewhat melodramatic attempt at forging a last letter from Che Guevara in Bolivia. But it contains none of the legendary Yippie surrealism. And it isn’t funny.

I have to think that the anthology would have been improved if Charters had done her homework. There is one selection from “Ringolevio” by Emmett Grogan that suggests what I mean.

Grogan was a near mythic figure in the mid-’60s. He was a very famous member of the Diggers, a San Francisco-based countercultural activist group that despised famous figures. By way of the media, Grogan came to represent the group. In the early ‘70s, he turned to writing, first his autobiography and then some novels. One day he died on the Brighton Local subway line in Brooklyn, supposedly from an overdose of heroin.

Grogan hated the Yippies. He claimed we stole his ideas and then corrupted them by playing to the media. So he took some revenge in “Ringolevio” by reporting on an embarrassing conversation that supposedly took place between Rubin and me, after Rubin spoke at the first San Francisco Be-In. Not only did Grogan misspell both our names, but he made the whole thing up. The day of the Be-In, I was in a Berkeley jail. And Rubin’s task at the Be-In was to raise my bail. I’m annoyed that such a dishonest account appears in Charters’ book. But then again, an anthologist on the ‘60s cannot censor the selections. If they were influential, they should be included, and Grogan was an important figure.

When we edited our anthology, we included a piece by the feminist thinker and former Yippie Robin Morgan that similarly located Mailer in the wrong place and falsely accused him of doing something bad. Mailer blew up at me for including Morgan’s essay and ended our friendship. His wish was that I have exactly the same painful experience. With the appearance of “The Portable Sixties Reader,” I can say I have.

That said, Charters also gets it right a lot of the time. You can’t miss with selections by Rosa Parks, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin and Ron Kovic. And she really catches fire when representing the literature of the era: works by such writers as William S. Burroughs, Diane Di Prima, Ken Kesey, Charles Olson, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Amiri Baraka, among many others. They were the creators of the ‘60s oversoul. They provided the image and imagination to elevate spirits and get the activists thinking about just where the next sit-in or riot should take place.

During the uprising that took place during the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968, I was cracked over the head. The doctors that sewed me up thought I had been blackjacked by a cop. Allen Ginsberg was quite proud of my scar and showed it off to Burroughs, Jean Genet and Terry Southern. Genet said “not bad,” and Burroughs gave me a pat on the back. These guys weren’t about to join the violent festivities, but their work had put me on those dangerous streets. At that moment I felt like a character in one of their creations.