Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, and two months further along Senator Robert Kennedy was murdered in Los Angeles. Soon enough, a new Nixon/Kissinger administration doubled down, expanding and extending the war indefinitely.
And so it did not end, and it was back to the front, back to work, and back to the streets, but now with a determination edged with despair. Every week that the war dragged on, six thousand people were murdered in Southeast Asia.
Every week
—
six thousand lives extinguished
—with no end in sight. Six thousand human beings—massive, unthinkable numbers—were thrown into the furnaces of war and death—napalm and carpet bombing, strategic hamlets and tiger cages, My Lai and mass murder. We had tried everything, and everything had proved to be inadequate; the war was lost, but the terror continued. Everything added to the crazy sense that we were falling into the abyss.
None of us knew precisely how to proceed, for we’d done what we’d set out to do—we’d persuaded the American people to oppose the war, built a massive movement and a majority peace sentiment—and still we couldn’t find any surefire way to stop the killing. Millions mobilized for peace, and still the war slogged along into its murky and unacceptable future, trailing devastation and death in its wake. The political class had no answers to the wide expression of popular will, and the ensuing crisis of democracy became a profound turning point for the peace movement as well—the antiwar forces splintered.
Some activists (including one of my brothers) joined the Democratic Party in order to build a peace wing within it. Some fled to Europe or Africa, while others migrated “back to the land” and built rural communes and intentional utopian communities to escape the madness. Some created tiny but humane and hopeful organizing projects, from women’s health clinics to alternative newspapers, from gay pride marches to environmental action, from street theatre to underground comics—all of which would, surprisingly, change the culture. A few went into the factories in the industrial heartland to radicalize the unions, create a workers’ party, and build toward a general strike to transform the country. And I took a different path altogether.
Malcolm X had called for liberation by any means necessary, and the Black Freedom Movement rose up and was met with escalating repression and police violence. Black Panthers were exhorting people to “pick up the gun”; Lorraine Hansberry, beloved and stunning author of
A Raisin in the Sun
, and Nina Simone, the dazzling jazz diva, urged Black people to arm up. After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the idea spread like wildfire. The editorial board of the
New Republic
was at that moment debating the value and the efficacy of armed struggle, while the high-minded
New York Review of Books
featured an oversized depiction of a Molotov cocktail on its cover. A small group of us from the radical student movement—lacking experience and skill but compensating, we hoped, with determination and will—actually did it: we created a clandestine political force outside the reach of the FBI and the national security forces that would (we believed, but couldn’t be sure) survive the approaching (we were sure) American totalitarianism and that could fight the war-makers by other means. In a great river of excess our words were surely excessive, but we were determined to meet certified state violence with a fierce eruption of our own, and for a moment a few of us—myself included—flirted with matching their official and systematic terror blow for blow. But we never did it; we drew back and reconsidered just what we were in fact willing to do, what our own reverence for life and moral outlook required of us for real, as well as what would be effective in the long run. Dramatic sabotage and precisely targeted vandalism as agitprop, yes; propaganda of the deed, always; but