Radical Chapters: Pacifist Bookseller Roy Kepler and the Paperback Revolution

17 Counterattack

301 17 Counterattack The war came home, as wars always will. October 1968. Violence was manifest, sheet lightning across the skies. Nearly half a million American troops were enmeshed in South Vietnam. Constant tumult shook Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue. Space cases and speed freaks haunted the streets around Kepler’s Books & Magazines, City Lights, and Cody’s. Rhetoric ran hot and heavy, though Roy tried to dampen the powder. In late summer he joined Fred Cody in a joint KPFA show, musing about the nature of violence and the persistence of its arising. But Kepler’s, too, was also adorning itself provocatively; or so some thought. That October, Kepler’s front window display facing El Camino Real featured books about China and an iconic poster of Mao Tse Tung. The display was not an endorsement, though some thought it might be. Roy and Ira were, in fact, as vocally opposed to the oppressions of Chinese communism as they were to the war policies of the U.S. government. But when Kepler’s workers arrived the morning of October 16, they discovered a broken front window, a hatchet, and a note. “First Chairman Mao,” the note warned. “Then Kepler.” Several hours later, the mess cleaned up and the store open for business, three men entered and took note of the broken window. They seemed to shake their heads at the way of things; it was a shame such violence should happen. There was something about them, though. They seemed pent up. The three men wondered why the store lacked a picture of George Wallace. There’s a picture of a Chinese Commie but not of a good American war hero like Wallace, a bona fide presidential 302  Radical Chapters candidate. It made no sense. Then the three men left, some unsaid message remaining behind them.  Roy had always excited opposition. He craved it even, as the sign that competing ideas were truly met. And he knew that sometimes promoting peaceful ideals could provoke violent opposition. But by 1968 Roy feared the Left by its own acting out had drawn upon itself a commensurately physical response. Everyone was angry at everyone else. First the rhetoric escalated and then, when words no longer suf- ficed, the fists started swinging. He could see it, all around him. The thrown hatchet was part of a pattern. On the night of September 2, 1968, the Free U offices several blocks away from Kepler’s had been broken into. The vandals trashed equipment and files and painted the words “Communist swine” on the walls. The next month brought the hatchet tossed through the Kepler’s Menlo Park store window. The night of November 13, employees at the Los Altos store observed two suspicious men lurking nearby after closing. Later that same night, a brick was tossed through a window at the Menlo Park store. The following night, two five-gallon gasoline cans were found in the rear of the Los Altos store. About eleven o’clock at night on November 24, a pipe bomb blew out a four-foot hole in a window at the Los Altos Kepler’s store. The next morning, store manager Betty Sumrall found shards of glass stuck in books on the other side of the store from the blown-out window. “I suppose someone is mad at me for not being violent,” Roy sardonically told the Palo Alto Times. Nor was Kepler’s the only target. On Sunday, December 1, a small bomb tossed through the back window of a house near downtown Palo Alto blew out windows and knocked a door off its hinges. The house was used by several peace groups allied with the Free U, The Resistance, and the Concerned Citizens of Palo Alto. The next night, a pipe bomb careened through the window of the Free University ’s office on El Camino Real. The blast shattered the windows and wrecked an estimated $1,000 worth of arts and crafts. Counterattack  303 The police seemed powerless to stop the attacks. Perhaps, some activists thought, the police were willfully turning a blind eye. It was time for self-help. The Free U convened a December 8 meeting to discuss what could be done. Some suggested secret surveillance teams. Others worried secrecy undermined the Free U’s commitment to open thought and action. So the meeting adjourned, but Bob Cullenbine and four others stayed afterward for a second meeting...