Becoming a Sixties Student Radical
How is a red diaper baby to rebel? It’s complicated. I picked up a penchant for questioning the establishment from my leftist parents, who didn’t realize that in my young eyes, they were the establishment. To emulate them was to defy them, a paradox I resolved by adopting the annoying apostasy of political indifference. As a rebel without a cause, I happily forewent boring study groups and tiring protest marches, except for marching sleepy-eyed from my bedroom into our smoke-filled living room on meeting nights to enjoin the assembled comrades to pipe down.
In high school, as intimations of maturity gradually loosened the grip of juvenile alienation, my apathetic phase began to wane. It dawned on me that a cause could be worthwhile despite my parents’ commitment to it, and that Marx could have something consequential to say even if the old folks admired the bearded one. I was beginning a giddy thrill ride to an adult identity, my philosophical compass jiggling and reorienting. Impelled by nature and nurture, activism would be a key dimension of my life, after all.
In 1960, the moment arrived to launch my activist career on my own terms. The issue of disarmament loomed largest in those Cold War times, when nightmares of nuclear Armageddon invaded my nights and haunted my days. While the geopolitical insanity of “mutually assured destruction” was reason enough to act, it was also disquieting that the bomb was the child of physics, the field I aspired to, and that my future professors and colleagues were the midwives of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The potent combination of existential threat and moral unease forged a teenage peacenik.
One Saturday afternoon, I drove solo over the Hollywood Hills—a hair-raising ride in my nearly brakeless 1949 Dodge—to participate in a “ban the bomb” demonstration in downtown LA. A crowd of several hundred gathered in MacArthur Park to hear warm-up speeches before marching down Wilshire Boulevard to Pershing Square. At first, I felt awkward chanting with the boisterous crowd, which seemed decidedly uncool. Then I observed at the head of the procession a dignified man with unkempt white hair in the wind and an angular frame adorned in suit and flying tie.
Linus Pauling had won the Nobel Prize in chemistry, and two years later would win the Nobel Peace Prize. (He might have earned a third Nobel had Watson and Crick not edged him out in the race to decode DNA.) To a budding physicist and activist, watching this eminent man of science, proud and unabashed, acting on his convictions, served as enduring affirmation and inspiration.
UC Berkeley was the only entry on my short-list of colleges, although I also applied to Caltech, then the citadel of theoretical physics, as a backup. I was accepted to both places, but nerdy Caltech in smoggy Pasadena was no match for the exhilarating campus on the glorious San Francisco Bay. Berkeley was the ideal place to pursue my professional ambitions and nonscientific enthusiasms: folk music, politics, and romance.
So, on a beautiful September day in 1960, I headed for the Promised Land. I stuffed my gear into the MGA sports car bought from Uncle Walter with my ill-gotten poker winnings, sped up Route 99, turned west to the East Bay, and swung north on the Nimitz to the Berkeley exit. I was bursting with excitement as I drove up University Avenue toward the towering Campanile drawing me to intellectual adventure. I pulled into Ehrman Hall’s parking lot off Dwight Way, grabbed my duffle bag and banjo, took the elevator to my assigned room on the eighth floor, stepped into the hall, and got whacked by a water balloon. So much for the life of the mind!
On the very evening of the water bombing, my collegiate illusions suffered a second deflating blow. As several hundred hungry students in my dorm complex filed into the huge dining hall, our dour housemother, Mrs. Broomfield, rose from her commanding perch at the front table. She rang a silver bell for silence, then, after platitudinous greetings, rattled off endless admonitory announcements concerning house rules and expected behaviors. At last, she rang the bell again, giving us permission to sit down and dig in.
Condescending Mrs. Broomfield was a creature from the era when in loco parentis reigned on college campuses, but the nascent youth culture was about to crater that infantilizing doctrine. Memo from early Dylan to all the Broomfields: “Your old road is rapidly fading. Get out of the new one if you can’t lend a hand, for the times they are a changing.” Right off the bat, Michael Tigar, the head of Slate, a progressive campus organization, set the tone when he burst into the dining hall, literally stood on a soapbox, and exhorted us to “speak up and speak out.”
Formal Sunday dinners, with a dress code requiring coats and ties for the boys and dresses for the girls, were especially offensive. Attired in her prim Sunday best, Mrs. Broomfield delivered orations even more long-winded and patronizing than usual. At the end of her remarks, rather than ringing her bell to signal chow time, she invited the House Chaplain to lead us in saying grace. Really? To a Jewish atheist like me, the imposition of a Christian ritual was oppressive and intolerable. Prayer in a public university? What ever happened to the separation of church and state?
In another time and place, I might have given this provocation a pass, but the Berkeley ethos of 1960, and the aforementioned Mike Tigar, called on me to speak up and out. But how? Declamatory protestation was too earnest for my style, so I hatched a subversive plan: I would lampoon their religious grace by giving a sacrilegious grace of my own. Fortunately, my roommate John Gibson, a budding heretic from a religious Fresno family, happened to know a blasphemous ditty suitable for my purposes.
The following Sunday, as the hungry multitudes, clad in their finery, assembled for dinner, I approached the Chaplain. Piously, I asked, “Would it be all right if I gave the grace today?” After a slight double-take, he beamed reverently, “Of course it would. How wonderful!” So, when Mrs. Broomfield signaled with her bell that it was time for the blessing, the Chaplain stood to announce, “I am delighted to tell you, today a student will lead us in prayer.”
I rose, gazed across the sea of fellow students, and bowed my head. “Dear God,” I began, then paused as a jovial murmur swept the cavernous room. (My friends later reported that it sounded like I was sending a letter to God). My homily continued: “Pass the bread, pass the meat, for Christ’s sake, let’s eat.” A beat of stunned silence, then total bedlam erupted as 600 students clapped, stomped, and cheered.
That evening, I basked in the limelight, but the next morning, a note summoned me to the Undergraduate Dean’s office. After a blustery lecture about “respect,” “maturity,” and “possible suspension,” the red-faced Dean sent me on my way, chastised yet unbowed. The denouement of this episode was deeply satisfying. I did not get suspended, the Sunday grace did—and it was never reinstated.
Compulsory ROTC, another appalling vestige from the fading era, was a burning issue for campus activists and unwilling conscripts; I was both. As a land-grant college, UC-Berkeley required all entering male students to endure two years of spit-polishing and degradation. Every Wednesday morning, I donned my Air Force uniform and reported for duty in North Field, where “officers” (upperclassmen destined for military careers) force-marched us for an hour. Not a rebellious peacenik’s cup of tea: I got straight As in my academic classes but was proudest of my D in ROTC.
Miraculously, I found a way out that, to boot, exacted revenge. Paul Guttman, a dormmate and ROTC officer, desperately wanted to play the banjo. He pleaded with me to give him lessons, but I wasn’t interested—until he made me a sweet offer. If I taught him banjo, he would get me transferred from marching to a desk job. Deal! From then on, I reported to the ROTC office on Wednesday mornings, where I was tasked with typing up the promotion slips submitted by officers to reward their most gung-ho foot soldiers.
Soon I realized that I didn’t need their slips—I could create my own promotions! Before long, my disheveled friends were calling out risible cadences for the dumbfounded troops. When the Board of Regents finally rescinded mandatory ROTC in 1962, they abolished a dissolute band of slackers, not the crack troops of yore. The topper came at the last “Officer’s March,” the annual June jamboree attended by outside military brass. As the grand procession began, rather than the traditional “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” the loudspeaker boomed M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E.
Compulsory prayer and mandatory ROTC were ludicrous indignities that invited the absurdist tactics recounted here. These shenanigans, as I saw it, were skirmishes in a larger resistance to the peddlers of false consciousness and chauvinistic jingoism. However, the struggle for civil rights, the political focus of my final years at Berkeley, demanded a no-nonsense strategy and a level of militancy proportionate to racist entrenchment.
Growing up learning about the life and times of Paul Robeson, the stellar man I was named after, made me acutely aware of our country’s foundation in slavery and its legacy of racism. The 1960 sit-ins by Black students at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, signaled that it was time to do something about it. The Jim Crow constabulary of Jackson, Mississippi, solidified my resolve in the summer of 1962 by roughly ejecting me from the “wrong side” of a segregated bus terminal.
Back in Berkeley, I joined the local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality. CORE’s strategy of challenging employment discrimination, a critical pillar of structural racism, made sense to me. At the time, the primary target was Lucky’s Market, a small East Bay grocery chain that refused to sign a pledge to change its hiring practices to align the company’s work force with community demography. We picketed and boycotted for months, but the company would not budge. Raising the stakes, we would enter a Lucky’s branch dressed as customers and proceed to shuffle products between shelves or stuff them into shopping carts, then leave when the police arrived.
Some in the movement opposed these “shop-ins” on the grounds that they overstepped the boundaries of nonviolence. Our view was that relocating groceries, a crime against property, was justified in the fight against bigotry, a crime against a whole people. As songwriter Malvina Reynolds put it in “It Isn’t Nice,” a song inspired by the Lucky’s action, “if that is freedom’s price, we don’t mind.” The philosophical debate persisted, but on the ground, Lucky’s signed the pledge.
After a summer tramping around Europe, I reported to Columbia University in September 1964 to begin graduate school. The genteel ambience on the stately campus on the Upper West Side contrasted with rowdy Berkeley, where the Free Speech Movement was about to explode. Apparently, the memo announcing the end of student apathy had yet to arrive from the Coast. The decorous atmosphere dismayed the activist in me but jibed with my resolve to study more and march less.
In a few short months, the political quiescence on campus went up in smoke. The youth rebellion was a cultural wildfire that gained energy as it spread from hot spots in California and the Midwest. It hit Columbia at full force, transforming the sleepy campus into a New Left epicenter. Zelig-like, I found myself once again at the cutting edge of the Sixties zeitgeist. This time, I was a seasoned graduate student aligned with the “praxis axis” circle, pushing for patient organizing, while urging undergraduate hotheads in the “action faction” to dial it down. As history played out, both these tendencies seeded the mass revolt to come.
Two issues fueled the unrest: the university’s intention to construct a gym in neighboring Harlem and its association with war research. From its perch on Morningside Heights, Columbia, with bewildering arrogance, decided to build a gymnasium down the slope in the middle of Harlem’s Morningside Park. Predictably, community organizations and student civil rights groups mobilized to stop the project. On the second front, student researchers revealed that Columbia, as a partner of the Institute for Defense Analysis, maintained a formal connection to the Pentagon. Most provocatively, they reported that several physics professors (my professors!) were members of the IDA’s elite Jason Division, which was conducting advanced technical research in support of the US war effort in Southeast Asia.
The simultaneous battles to stop the new gym and end military research were local proxies for two great movements, civil rights and peace, then sweeping the country. To the student radicals who swelled the ranks of SDS, Columbia was doubly on the wrong side of history, but our demands to cancel gym construction and end war research fell on deaf ears. Imperious President Grayson Kirk’s ham-fisted response to escalating protests was to expel several activists, thereby generating a third demand: reinstate expelled students.
The antediluvian Fifties and insurrectionary Sixties were on a collision course. The reckoning came on April 23, 1968. Hundreds of us marched down the hill into Morningside Park to tear down the chain link fence protecting the gym construction site. When a police contingent appeared and scuffles broke out, we headed back to Hamilton Hall, where we locked arms outside Dean Coleman’s office. Inadvertently, we were holding him hostage. So began a week of multiple building occupations that culminated in a massive invasion by a large contingent of New York police officers, who cleared the buildings, arrested hundreds of protesters, and inflicted countless injuries. The “police riot” radicalized previously apathetic students and faculty, who joined in a month-long strike that shut down the university.
Meanwhile, pressure was building on the Jason physicists to cease their war research. That work focused on the so-called “electronic battlefield,” a sophisticated system of surveillance technology for “interdicting” North Vietnamese troops, that is, eliminating them with coordinated pinpoint airstrikes. Fully deployed, the electronic battlefield might have decisively tilted the war in favor of the US puppet regime in Saigon. In Pupin Hall, the physics building, the debate raged. Jason professors defended their work as a humane way to save lives by rapidly ending the war. We graduate students parried, no doubt histrionically, that the research marked them as willing soldiers in an unjust conflict and complicit in a crime against humanity—the quick and ethical way to end the war was to bring the troops home.
During the Columbia strike, some professors, convinced that the end of the liberal university was at hand, became overwrought, a few unhinged. One day, I.I. Rabbi, esteemed physicist and Nobel Prize winner, political liberal, and adviser to presidents, summoned me to his huge office on the eighth floor of Pupin. He greeted me with a red-faced diatribe against “you Jacobins” destroying this citadel of learning and precious beacon of civilization. Climbing on a chair (Rabbi was quite short), he looked out a window at all of Harlem lamenting, “These people don’t appreciate what a precious jewel this university is in the crown of their city.” As I helped him down, I tried to calm him with “Fear not, Professor Rabbi, Columbia will persist, and be all the better for confronting its bugaboos.” But the great man was inconsolable.
Indeed, in a matter of months, the gym was relocated to an on-campus site, Columbia severed its ties to IDA, and Grayson Kirk got the boot. Surely, I.I. Rabbi was pleased to see the university, a bit humbled and sensitized, revert to its elite mission, twentieth century style. At the 40th anniversary of the revolt in 2008, Lee C. Bollinger, the epitome of a modern, progressive university president, addressed the veterans of ’68 as one of us—“we won!” Well, yes and no. The Columbia revolt was a milestone of Sixties radicalism, but soon the student movement prematurely flamed out when its leaders, high on revolutionary illusions, joined the reckless spasm known as the Weathermen.
My stint as a student radical was coterminous with the Sixties, a decade so saturated with social transformation, tragedy, and triumph that it seemed longer than ten years, more like a historical epoch. Much like the decade itself, my journey through the Sixties began in naïve hope, veered wildly from highs to lows, and ended in thwarted expectations. I certainly would never be the same, nor would the world.
I count myself doubly fortunate to have come of age in such a passionate time and to have lived it in places highly attuned to the shifting weltanschauung. But as the Seventies loomed, I had the welfare of a young family to consider and a grown-up career to pursue. I was eager for a new leg of my journey, knowing I would carry the spirit of the Sixties to radical adventures sure to come.