Exit Stage Left : FOR...

So long ago, so far away was the afternoon of May 17, 1968, when an FBI agent got out of his car in front of the Catonsville, Md., draft board, recognized Father Daniel Berrigan and shouted, “Him again! Good God, I’m changing my religion.” The G-man had caught the Jesuit priest and eight confederates with the incriminating evidence in hand: a trash basket in which they had incinerated the records of 378 men eligible to be called up for military service in the war in Vietnam.

Murray Polner and Jim O’Grady describe this moment in “Disarmed and Dangerous,” their biography of the Brothers Berrigan, the indomitable twins of protest, who even now in the eighth decade of their lives continue to register their objections to the military by picketing and civil disobedience. The event took place in a time when Roman Catholic clergymen simply did not do things like that, and when other people of every faith, hue and background were also doing things people simply did not do. For weal or woe, 30 years ago, it seemed to millions that the earth was cracking open and bringing forth God knew what.

“Disarmed and Dangerous” arrives with two other recent books on the period, an autobiography by a repentant Marxist, writer David Horowitz, and a biography of the late Abbie Hoffman (a person who defies easy description, alive or dead). All three have an involuted quality to them, an interest in sectarian controversies and divisions of little long-range moment. They contain much information about the protesters of the 1960s, what they did, why they did it and what they said about it, but none gives the reader much more than an inkling of what may have been going on in a larger economic or cultural sense. There are, for example, patches in the Berrigan biography that are almost lyrical, but they are offset by longer stretches of descriptions about meetings and comings and goings that are meaningless to readers distanced by time and place.

There’s another pitfall: People love biographies because they have a simple story line, but biography in the wrong hands personalizes history too much, reduces it to the experience of the book’s subject and omits larger meaning. Old-fashioned historians who wrote “life and times” biographies were more aware of these traps than some modern writers. Certainly some people under the age of 40, and even some older people who lived through the period, are going to put down these books frustrated by their short focal length and lack of historical perspective.

Still, all three raise and struggle occasionally with larger questions. In his autobiography, Horowitz writes: “Once the Nixon administration made it clear that it was going to ‘Vietnamize’ the conflict and end the draft, it had removed the rationale for most people to protest. When this fact registered on me, its effect was devastating. The massive antiwar movement on America’s campuses had been little more than a way to avoid the military draft. Because of my early fatherhood, I had never been draft-eligible, so had failed to realize how paramount a factor this prospect had been in motivating college students against the war. Now, only the most hard-core of political believers remained to protest. And they had changed, too. The revolutionary fantasy had finally eclipsed the earlier free spirits of the Movement. Now there were only Castro wannabes . . . and others who had fallen prey to the totalitarian temptation, aspiring to become a domestic Viet Cong.”

Horowitz has his mitts on something important here, but he doesn’t pursue it, choosing instead to consecrate much too much space to calling his former radical collaborators cowards and poltroons. Page after page of this book is given over to settling old scores, attacking the writings of erstwhile buddies and generally presenting himself as a dislikable person, which is too bad because it is boring to read and a tad depressing, since the man reveals himself to be a person of ability. Perhaps he should be forgiven because he tells us that both his parents were Reds and that family life was something akin to a secret Communist cell, which makes for interesting reading and may explain his vindictive, unforgiving tone. That’s the way the Commies were, and even though now he is a Cappy (short for capitalist), the emotional modalities of Marxist-Leninism may die hard.

Jonah Raskin grapples briefly with a grand theory for the ‘60s in his life of Abbie Hoffman, but he’s on the wrong track: “For more than a quarter of a century, historians, sociologists, and political scientists have offered various, often conflicting interpretations of the events that took place in Chicago in 1968. No one has understood them as well or described them as clearly and as concisely as has New York Times reporter Tom Wicker. ‘Chicago, I think, is the place where all America was radicalized,’ Wicker wrote a year after the riots, on Aug. 24, 1969. ‘The miracle of television made it visible to all--pierced, at last, the isolation of one America from the other, exposed to each the power it faced. Everything since Chicago has had a new intensity--that of polarization, of confrontation, of antagonism, and fear.’ . . . On Aug. 30, 1968 . . . the New York Times ran John Kifner’s article ‘Chicago Protesters Say Police Action on Television Will “Radicalize” Many Viewers,’ the title of which says it all, or near so.”

It did indeed say it all for leftists of most persuasions a generation ago, but any living historian who thinks the United States was radicalized solely by these events is either caught in a time warp or is living in the delusionary world of a tenured professor of sociology. In the interval between the time of tumultuous protest and our own, the nation has taken a path that makes sense in hindsight but that no one anticipated. So what was all the protesting about?

This is one of the important historical questions that remains unanswered. If, for instance, as Horowitz surmises, the oomph behind the mass antiwar demonstrations was the draft, how do we explain their absence during the Korean War? If the public opinion polling means anything, the Korean War was markedly less popular than the war in Vietnam. The war was so unpopular that Harry Truman was defeated in the 1952 New Hampshire primaries, something that didn’t happen to Lyndon Johnson 16 years later when he, like Truman, chose the better part of valor and retired to private life.

How came it that the antiwar protesting of the 1960s was allowed? Why wasn’t it suppressed or, to use a favorite radical word of the period, why wasn’t it oppressed? The record shows that Abraham Lincoln would never have stood for it, and in our own century, Woodrow Wilson jailed every voice of dissent to American participation in World War I, a conflict violently hated by perhaps a third of our citizenry. How did it come to pass, then, that Richard Nixon--he of the Watergate break-ins, the enemy’s list and the telephone tapping--was the most protest-tolerant of our 20th century presidents?

Polner and O’Grady give us some sense of how the religious understanding of a handful of Roman Catholics brought them to acts of defiant rebellion against a democratic government, but what of the hundreds of thousands of students who took to the streets for that quickly ended period of time?

Before that moment and after, American college students, as opposed to students almost everywhere else in the world, may sometimes be riotous but are never political. How were they coaxed or induced or seduced or whatever to protest when they never did it before and they’ve never done it again? It is not surprising that the protests sometimes had a kind of panty raid quality to them, a texture not too different from the off-campus spring break rioting in Florida or the window smashing that occurs after Siwash U wins the NCAA championship.

Beyond toga party exuberance, there are the drugs. The topic takes up a significant amount of space in both the Hoffman biography and the Horowitz autobiography. Hoffman, let it be remembered, was a convicted cocaine smuggler and dealer, a man who preached to the young that drug taking was a form of protest against the powers that be. Now we learn that while Hoffman was playing the role of the slightly daft troubadour of the antiwar left, he had a secret account with a stockbroker and was deeply and secretly into the same world of investments that he publicly deplored.

We learn from Horowitz that the Black Panthers, allied with certain elements in Hollywood, were selling drugs, racketeering and murdering whoever got in their way. Horowitz depicts himself as a naif, a bumbling Marxist theoretician who lived among drug dealers and killers for years without a clue. Doubtless, he is innocent of the crimes he describes, but there is a what-did-he-know-and-when-did-he-know-it aspect to his tale that is difficult to believe. You put it down suspecting that the author has not been honest and that he knows more than he is saying about the killings, the beatings and the shootings.

Again, so many paths untrod, so many lines of inquiry not followed. Was Abbie Hoffman a criminal masquerading as an idealist? Was the protest movement in part paid for by drugs? Who was involved in keeping these crimes secret? Are they still doing so for ideological motives or other reasons? Given the subsequent history of drugs in the United States, these are not idle questions. We are alive with suspicions that the CIA at least winked at selling drugs to buy weapons. Could it be that both the right and the left were financing their schemes by debauching our people with narcotics?

Yet the Berrigans, the two priests who have served years in jail in the cause of peace and disarmament, are here to remind us that there were many others of every faith and nativity who did what they did in those days uncompromised and unsullied. They can take satisfaction in seeing that the generals and admirals who once commanded the nuclear strike forces are now themselves advocating the total destruction of such weapons of war.