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Narrated by Jo Anna Perrin
Clara BinghamUnabridged — 18 hours, 40 minutes
Narrated by Jo Anna Perrin
Clara BinghamUnabridged — 18 hours, 40 minutes
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Many of Bingham's interviewees are well known: Daniel Ellsberg, Jane Fonda, Carl Bernstein, Oliver Stone…But some of the people here are not so familiar, and their interviews are among the most valuable…The familiar voices and the unfamiliar ones are woven together with some documents to make this a surprisingly powerful and moving book.
★ 07/11/2016
In this oral history of the American counterculture from August 1969 to September 1970, Bingham (Women on the Hill) assembles an impressive who's who of the activists, outlaws, and idealists who sought to bring America to its reckoning, for better or worse. Perhaps the most astonishing part of Bingham's account is the sheer number of memorable events that occurred in this "school year": Woodstock, Kent State, Nixon's invasion of Cambodia, the Weather Underground's campaign of bombings, Seymour Hersh breaking the My Lai massacre story, Robin Morgan publishing her feminist essay "Goodbye to All That," and Fred Hampton and Mark Clark being murdered by the Chicago police. Vietnam vets were coming out against the war and youths were opening their minds with LSD. It would be a mistake, however, to assume Bingham's book is an uncomplicated celebration of the "awakened generation." Many of the reminiscences end in regret; ironically, just as the New Left's antiwar message was beginning to hit home with the American public, the movement itself was self-destructing. By the end of Bingham's history it becomes clear that time has done little to cast these crucial events in any clarifying light. Agent: Esther Newberg, ICM. (June)
In her excellent oral history of the tumultuous events of 1969 and 1970, . . . [Clara Bingham] does a fine job conjuring the sense of a looming apocalypse. . . . It’s surprising to be reminded how many of the decade’s signature events occurred in a single year. Woodstock. The trial of the Chicago Eight. The My Lai massacre. The first efforts to publish the ‘Pentagon Papers.’ Altamont. The rise of the Weather Underground. The invasion of Cambodia. Kent State. The bombing of the Army Math Research Center in Madison, Wis. Witness to the Revolution offers an impressive list of actual witnesses to these events and more, including some sharp contextual asides explaining the rise of the antiwar movement and the fallout from its messy end. . . . Especially for younger generations who didn’t live through it, Witness to the Revolution is a valuable and entertaining primer on a moment in American history the likes of which we may never see again.”—Bryan Burrough, The Wall Street Journal
“A gripping oral history of the centrifugal social forces tearing America apart at the end of the ’60s . . . This is rousing reportage from the front lines of US history.”—O: The Oprah Magazine
“[One of the] best paperbacks of 2017 so far . . . The book is a rich tapestry of a volatile period in American history.”—Time
“[An] Enthralling and brilliant chronology of the period between August 1969 and September 1970.”—Buffalo News
“The familiar voices and the unfamiliar ones are woven together with documents to make this a surprisingly powerful and moving book.”—New York Times Book Review
“[Bingham] captures the essence of these fourteen months through the words of movement organizers, vets, students, draft resisters, journalists, musicians, government agents, writers, and others. . . . This oral history will enable readers to see that era in a new light and with fresh sympathy for the motivations of those involved. While Bingham’s is one of many retrospective looks at that period, it is one of the most immediate and personal.”—Booklist
“An engrossing oral history of the youth rebellion of the 1960s . . . [A] remarkable account of the anti-war movement . . . There are revealing stories about Weathermen on the lam, government sabotage and surveillance, courtroom theatrics, police riots, President Richard Nixon’s late-night meeting with protesters at the Lincoln Memorial, the Pentagon Papers, and the incessant organizing behind events that ‘would profoundly and permanently change the nation.’ The cast is a who’s who of the ’60s: Daniel Ellsberg, Jane Fonda, Julius Lester, and others, from undercover FBI agents to rock musicians, most of whom offer sharp insights into the period. . . . People like Bingham (b. 1963), who ‘missed the party,’ may be astonished by aspects of this tumultuous story. Baby boomers will find themselves infuriated once again by vivid accounts of the My Lai massacre, the Kent State and Jackson State shootings, and other tumultuous events.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Witness to the Revolution is vivid, compelling, and addictively readable. Clara Bingham has captured the lightning of the 1960s in a jar, where it blows the reader’s socks off. Whether you lived through this period or want to know what you missed, this is a popular history everyone should read.”—Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money
“For those who ‘missed the sixties’ (like most of us, whether demographically or spiritually), this vital book goes a long way toward explaining the original wound that festers in our ‘culture wars’ still. Witness to the Revolution is to the counterculture what Howell Raines’s My Soul Is Rested is to the civil rights movement, a pageant of humanness that induces throat-clogging wonder at then and now.”—Diane McWhorter, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Carry Me Home
“At once reliving and reflecting on the end of the 1960s, the voices in Witness to the Revolution provide a compelling history and an authentic testimony of a turbulent time. As we live through a new moment of political turmoil, it’s critical that we revisit an era when arguments over politics and culture were palpable, urgent, and revolutionary. Clara Bingham takes us there.”—Gay Talese, author of A Writer’s Life
“The cities and campuses were blowing up, the races and generations were at war, sex, drugs, and violence gripped our young. How the hell did that happen? Clara Bingham, a gifted reporter with a great sense of story, tells us in this moving, funny, horrifying, clarifying book. This is the best sixties book since Edie.”—Evan Thomas, author of Being Nixon
“In her compelling and dramatic oral history of that fleeting moment when America seemed to be a nation on the brink, Clara Bingham directs the choir of Woodstock Nation—an artfully composed collection of voices of those who went ‘up the country’ or on a ‘long strange trip,’ those sent off to Southeast Asia and others who stayed home and were driven mad by the Vietnam War. Singing a song of would-be revolution, this collection of antiwar veterans, Black Panthers, radicals, rock stars, and others who let their freak flags fly, not to mention a few Nixon intimates and fellow travelers, defies the notion that if you remember it, you weren’t there. Vivid, vibrant, and crackling with energy, Witness to the Revolution takes you to the exact spot where the wave of the sixties, the Movement, and the Age of Aquarius crested. You can almost smell the tear gas.”—Nick Turse, author of Kill Anything That Moves
“Witness to the Revolution is a remarkable oral history, deftly weaving together vivid characters, traumatic events, and fractious movements. As we stand again as witnesses to a vertiginous period of change and challenge, Bingham’s book is powerfully relevant. Above all, it is a vibrant and critical guide to a time that changed our nation forever.”—Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation
"Bingham (Women on the Hill) assembles an impressive who's who of the activists, outlaws, and idealists who sought to bring America to its reckoning, for better or worse." —Publishers Weekly Starred Review
05/15/2016
In her latest work, Bingham (Class Action) has compiled an assortment of oral histories ranging from August 1969 to August 1970. Organized into narrative form, the accounts capture volatile and revolutionary change, relaying a feeling for what it was like to live during this period. The material includes profiles of participants associated with the Black Panthers, the trial of the Chicago Eight in 1969, Kent State University in the wake of the 1970 shootings, the My Lai Massacre in 1968, the Nixon administration, the Pentagon Papers, the Weathermen, and Woodstock. Broader topics touch on the Vietnam War, the draft, domestic terrorism, and the peace and women's movements. Together the descriptions of events reveal the radicalness and turmoil of the era. Bingham's prose is often engaging and dramatic, transferring the experience of these times to readers. Additionally, the reports draw out the earnestness of the participants as players within this political and cultural conflict. VERDICT Recommended for readers of U.S. history.—Scott Vieira, Rice Univ. Lib., Houston
★ 2016-04-07
An engrossing oral history of the youth rebellion of the 1960s. Former Newsweek White House correspondent Bingham (Class Action: The Story of Lois Jenson and the Landmark Case that Changed Sexual Harassment Law, 2002, etc.) interviewed some 100 activists, veterans, government officials, and others—all now in their 60s and 70s—to produce this remarkable account of the anti-war movement. "The cross-pollination of left-wing activists with hippie drifters and dropouts, who were all part of the same Great Refusal to conform, created a brand new rebel," she writes. With a focus on the year 1969-1970—the "crescendo of the sixties, when years of civil disobedience and mass resistance erupted into anarchic violence"—Bingham captures telling moments (from campus protests to bombings, from Woodstock to My Lai) in the voices of those present. There are revealing stories about Weathermen on the lam, government sabotage and surveillance, courtroom theatrics, police riots, President Richard Nixon's late-night meeting with protesters at the Lincoln Memorial, the Pentagon Papers, and the incessant organizing behind events that "would profoundly and permanently change the nation." The cast is a who's who of the '60s: Daniel Ellsberg, Jane Fonda, Julius Lester, and others, from undercover FBI agents to rock musicians, most of whom offer sharp insights into the period. After all these years, many echo an LSD dealer's comments: "We were young and naïve, and drunk on idealism." "We were so arrogant," says Weatherman Mark Rudd. Most share feminist Robin Morgan's observation that in the civil rights and peace movements, "the human spirit was really at its best." Weathermen founder Bill Ayers says he will apologize for his actions when Henry Kissinger says "what he did that was wrong, because he killed three million people, and I killed no one." People like Bingham (b. 1963), who "missed the party," may be astonished by aspects of this tumultuous story. Baby boomers will find themselves infuriated once again by vivid accounts of the My Lai massacre, the Kent State and Jackson State shootings, and other tumultuous events.
| BN ID: | 2940170953264 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tantor Audio |
| Publication date: | 09/21/2016 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Chapter 1
The Draft
(1964–1967)
We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.
—Port Huron Statement, Students for a Democratic Society, 1962
The roots of the Vietnam antiwar protest movement can be traced to the American crusade for civil rights. In August 1964, Congress authorized the use of troops in Vietnam in response to the Gulf of Tonkin incident—the alleged North Vietnamese attack on a U.S. naval ship. That same month, civil rights workers put their lives on the line for voter registration in the Mississippi Summer Project. Seven months later, on Sunday, March 7, 1965, John Lewis and six hundred protesters were filmed being beaten as they walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, at the start of their march to Montgomery for voting rights; the images of the attack on a nonviolent protest vividly dramatized the stakes of the struggle. Just one day after Bloody Sunday, the first U.S. combat troops landed in Vietnam. “I don’t see how President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam and can’t send troops to Selma, Alabama,” John Lewis, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), remarked. The military draft followed soon after, ultimately calling 2.2 million men to fight in Vietnam. Skills learned on the battleground for racial equality in the South—mass civil disobedience and grassroots organization—were soon employed in the new campaign against the war in Vietnam. In reaction to the disproportionate number of black soldiers being killed in Vietnam, SNCC activists organized one of the first anti-draft demonstrations, at the Atlanta induction center in 1966, and coined the slogan “Hell no, we won’t go!” The war over there was soon to become a war over here.
David Harris (Stanford student, draft resistance organizer)
I came from Fresno, California, where I was Fresno High School “Boy of the Year” in 1963. Several weeks after I got to Stanford, there was a meeting about volunteers going to Mississippi. This was the first time that the black students in Mississippi had issued an invitation to white students to come down, and they invited students from Stanford and Yale. In the fall of ’64, I started classes and was meeting my girlfriend for dinner and she said, “I was at a meeting. There’s a car going down to Mississippi tomorrow.” They were running a parallel election in Mississippi called the Freedom Vote, to show what would happen if black people were allowed to vote, and they needed volunteers, so I said, “I’m going.” I told my brother to call my parents after I was gone, and I got a seat in the car and left that night.
Two days later, we were in Mississippi. I was worried about missing the great adventure of my time. You didn’t have to have an ideology or politics to go to Mississippi in those days. You just had to have values.
That summer of ’64 we had all been watching what was going on in Mississippi, so it was a no-brainer for me. Campaigning for the right of black people not to be lynched for trying to vote was a pretty easy call. So I went. I was eighteen years old.
Wesley Brown (Black Panther, draft resister)
My family moved to East Elmhurst, right near LaGuardia Airport, in 1952. It was formerly an Italian neighborhood, but as more blacks moved in, of course, the whites made their departure. By 1955 it was nearly an all-black neighborhood. These were working-class blacks trying to move up. They saved their money like my parents, and bought a home, and tried to enter the lower middle class. My father was a machinist at a tool and die factory in the Bronx, where he worked for about forty years. Queens at that time was called God’s country. If you could get out of the projects and buy a house in Queens, you were on your way. It was a very solid, tight-knit community where parents wanted to make a better life for their kids. In fact, Eric Holder, President Obama’s first attorney general, lived on our block. My sister used to babysit him and his younger brother, Billy. So it was that kind of neighborhood. Everyone was trying to do the right thing, be responsible, and trying to make a way for themselves and their families. And of course, that leads to a certain amount of conservatism, a wish not to stir things up.
These were black folks who knew their history, because they were only the second generation born after emancipation. My father’s grandmother was born into slavery and he knew her. She would show him her thumb, which was all splayed out and deformed, because when she did something that the overseer didn’t like, he would take a razor blade and split her thumb open, and it would never heal sufficiently before he would open it up again. My father was born in North Carolina and was the tenth of twelve children. These black folks knew what this country had been through with slavery and segregation and they weren’t prepared for their children being boisterous and assertive in a way that they couldn’t afford to be.
David Harris
Four of us were working together in a team trying to register people for the Freedom Vote, in the black part of a town called Lambert. After working all morning, we came back to where the car was parked, and the three guys wanted to go to the post office to mail some letters and I said, “I’ll stay here by the car.” I’m standing by our car, and up pulls a pickup truck with two white guys in it. They get out. One’s got a shotgun; the other one’s got a pistol. The guy with the shotgun sticks it right up against my nose and says, “Nigger lover, I’m giving you five minutes to get out of town before I blow your head off.” I’m an eighteen-year-old Stanford student. “Well, what do you mean? Who are you?” And he just says, “Nigger, I said five minutes.” At that point, the other three guys came back, took one look at the situation, and we all jumped in the car and left Lambert, Mississippi.
Wesley Brown
I remember vividly the photographs in Jet magazine of Emmett Till in his casket in 1955. His mother wanted an open casket so people could see what was done to him—his misshapen face that was bludgeoned into nonrecognition. And I remember watching those kids in Little Rock in ’57 trying to go to Central High and Eisenhower finally getting the National Guard to come in, so that they could go to school without being killed. The memory of those images and the virulent hatred directed at those kids was indelible for me. And of course, there were the Freedom Rides, the lunch counter sit-ins by those students from Shaw University in North Carolina, and the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott. We got our first television in 1949, so all of these images were a part of my coming of age.
David Harris
Everything that followed grew out of the Mississippi taproot. We learned how to organize by working with SNCC in Mississippi, and perhaps much more important was the spirit of Mississippi; there was a kind of inspiration in the heroism of the black people in Mississippi. It’s really hard to recapture what that was like. For example, we were working in Quitman County; the county seat is called Marks. There was a seventy-five-year-old black woman there who walked into the registrar of voters office and said, “I want to register to vote.” They arrested her, threw her in jail, tortured her with an electric cattle prod, and then released her from jail. She walked out of jail and down the street to the registrar of voters office and said, “I want to register to vote.” These are people whose names are lost to history, but when you have that kind of encounter, somehow you get a whole new perspective on what’s of value and how to behave in the face of oppression, and the strength that any single person or a group of people can bring with their own will.
The third thing that came out of Mississippi was the experience of seeing America from a different perspective. You see what was being done to black people for simply trying to exercise the rights that we supposedly won with hard-fought battles a hundred years ago. And to see not only that that was going on, but how the rest of the country had turned a blind eye to it and talked bullshit about the southern way of life, and courtly manners. Isn’t it sweet? These were mean, vicious, narrow-minded people, who were standing on the backs of people who were helpless to fight back. And everybody in America let that happen. So suddenly, you come back from that, and you can’t look at it the same way. It was precisely that perspective that brought the Vietnam War into focus.
Wesley Brown
So I was at SUNY Oswego in January 1965, on Lake Ontario, in central New York, and some SNCC workers came to speak. I was already feeling that I wanted to be a part of something that was going on that I felt would make a difference. I was about twenty years old at that point. Their visit changed my life in many ways, and I decided to go to Mississippi.
My parents couldn’t believe that I would put myself in harm’s way, given what had happened in Mississippi the year before. They left the South in the thirties, as many blacks did, because of the Depression, to find work in the North as part of the Great Migration. They couldn’t believe that I would return to a place that they left.
I remember taking a Port Authority bus in June of 1965 to Memphis, about a twenty-eight-hour bus ride, and then having to get another bus to Holly Springs, Mississippi. So that began the four months I spent in northern Mississippi, right near the Tennessee border, working on voter registration.
David Harris
Right after I got back from Mississippi came the first major escalations of the Vietnam War, when all of a sudden we went from advisor status to deploying full combat units there, and the rise to six hundred thousand troops began. I marched in my first antiwar march about six months after I got back from Mississippi.
My father was an officer in the Army Reserve for twenty years. My brother ended up a captain in the Eighty-second Airborne Division. I’ve had ancestors in every war starting with the revolution. Like all my generation, I assumed that we would have a war to fight. We grew up watching Victory at Sea on television. But when the war that they had for us came, it was obvious this wasn’t what I thought I would be doing. This wasn’t about freedom or democracy or wearing white hats or helping people. This was essentially keeping a bunch of scumbags in power and prolonging the French Empire. Coming back from Mississippi, I could believe it.
Wesley Brown
A few days after my arrival, I was sent to Jackson, Mississippi, for a demonstration with the intent of filling up the jails. Within minutes of getting out of the car in Jackson, I was arrested, and thrown into a field house with hundreds of protesters, because the city jails were full. Before bail was set, the lawyers were interviewing people, and they asked me, “Do you want us to get in touch with your family to let them know where you are?” It was Father’s Day, and this lawyer talked to my father, and wished him happy Father’s Day for me. After I got out a week later, I contacted my parents and I let them know that I was okay. It was a very emotional and not a happy time for them.
Like any parents, my father and mother did not want their children to have to go through the things they had gone through when they lived in the South. They shared my beliefs but didn’t want me to have to deal with the consequences of my beliefs. My father used to say, “You can’t get up in the face of the powers that be. You have to find a way to work around the system, but if you make too much noise and draw attention to yourself, you’re just setting yourself up for a fall.”
David Harris
I considered myself part of the movement from the day I left for Mississippi. What we call “The Movement,” capital T, capital M, was a commitment to justice and the values of democracy. They called us the New Left because it wasn’t an ideology. There wasn’t a specific politics attached to it. What it was, was a set of values finding ways to express themselves.
I was in marches, I was in rallies and demonstrations. But there was always the larger question of the conscription system. In that era, when any male turned eighteen, he had to go to the post office and register for the Selective Service System. When you registered for Selective Service, they gave you two cards. One was proof that you had registered, and the other indicated your classification. Because under the Selective Service, there were various classifications, starting from 1-A, which meant you were cannon fodder, to you were going to get a notice soon in the mail saying “Report to 4-F,” which meant you were physically unable to perform and therefore exempt. In between that, the largest one was 2-S, which was the student deferment. Anybody in college making, quote, “reasonable progress towards a degree” had a temporary exemption until they finished their education. So that was the system that covered all of our lives—all of the male lives, anyway.
Always there was floating out there, what happens when they call your number? We—understandably—focused on that a lot. I mean there were people going to graduate school so that they wouldn’t get drafted. There were people getting married so they wouldn’t get drafted, because early on, being married was an exemption. They weren’t going to draft family men. They thought if I want to take a year off and just go to Paris and write poetry, you’re headed for the tall grass if you do that. This defined everybody’s life.
Wesley Brown
After I left Mississippi and returned to college, I went to the school registrar with a friend and we asked that our student deferment classifications not be sent to the Selective Service, because we felt that it discriminated against blacks who didn’t have the opportunity to go to college. The registrar went ballistic but honored my request, and my classification was changed to 1-A, which meant I was subject to be drafted. But because I had been arrested in Mississippi, my classification was changed to 1-Y, which meant that if you had an outstanding legal charge against you, you wouldn’t be among the first who would be called.
