REBEL

14. The Indictment Begins: Berkeley, 1969

303 The Indictment Begins: Berkeley, 1969 With the election of Richard Nixon, a new period of political repression began in America, the first since the McCarthy era, during which Nixon served as vice-president and learned the usefulness of questioning others’ patriotism. Under Nixon, a variety of surreptitious and illegal “counter-intelligence” actions were authorized, heading finally to the 1972 Watergate break-ins and the subsequent impeachment scandal. One of the Nixon administration’s first moves to restore “law and order” was the indictment in March 1969 of the Chicago conspiracy defendants. In less than a decade since being inspired by John Kennedy, I was indicted by the same federal government—or was it the same? The cold chill of indictment now fell not only on myself but on the whole protest movement. I emphatically did not want to be on trial in Chicago. Six months earlier, the day after the Chicago battle, I had driven to a nearby farm for a one-day respite. I took a walk with Joan Andersson, an old friend from the Newark project. It was the first time I had experienced soothing peace and quiet in months. I was tired, not simply from the street battles, but from the rootless and faction-filled organizing within lifeless bureaucratic structures like the National Mobilization. Farewell, old Mobe; I was leaving the national scene. I felt bad only in abandoning Rennie, who was determined to continue resisting the war at the national level. I now wanted to be in a community again, where both politics and life could be carried out on a human scale. I caught a plane to the Bay Area. At twenty-eight years of age, I had not lived in a college town since Ann Arbor five years before. I had missed the flowering of alternative politics and lifestyles that had swept the youth communities of the sixties . I wanted to settle in, reinvigorate myself with different friends, an infusion of energy, a fresh base. Living on a book contract and occasional speaking fees, I rented an apartment on the top floor of a building in 14. 14. Rebel 304 north Oakland near the Berkeley border, with a magnificent view of the sunsets over San Francisco Bay. There was no escaping the rush of continued post-Chicago conflict, however. The first night I arrived in Berkeley I found myself strolling, without notice, alongTelegraph Avenue, the colorful Main Street of youth culture, amid a crowd of ten thousand people who were demonstrating their solidarity with Chicago, with the French students, and with the suppressed people of Prague. That fall marked yet another upsurge of militant protests on campuses across America, with Berkeley very much in the forefront. University and city authorities were deeply threatened by the rising wave of change that had begun with the free-speech movement and now threatened to engulf all local institutions. In addition to being the campus focal point, the Black Panther party, whose national headquarters were near the Berkeley city line, was engaged in seemingly endless confrontations with the Oakland police. The swirling violence I left behind in Chicago was reappearing with full force in this idyllic community known as the “Athens of the West.” Governor Ronald Reagan and many Sacramento legislators were overstating the crisis for political gain and placing intense pressures on the university’s board of regents. “Preservation of free speech does not justify letting `beatniks’ and advocates of sexual orgies, drug usage, and ‘filthy’ speech disrupt the academic community,” Reagan declared on the campaign trail. Reagan appointed Edwin Meese III, a hard-line, anti-student prosecutor from Berkeley’s Alameda County, as his chief of staff, and the pair jointly pursued a war against campus radicalism. (According to a later review of the Reagan years by The Sacramento Bee, the Reagan-Meese team only “aggravated” the campus climate, causing “unrest to escalate under the Reagan Administration.”) The triggering issue in September 1968 was a decision by the regents of the university, under pressure from Reagan and the legislature, to deny academic credit to students taking a lecture course by Panther leader and author Eldridge Cleaver.The popular Cleaver series, which had been initiated by students and approved by a faculty board, was terminated three weeks into the semester. Demonstrations involving up to four thousand students immediately erupted, calling on the regents to reverse their Cleaver decision and add more minorities to the university faculty. In late October, hundreds of protestors occupied several buildings. I...