Salon Columnists

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It is true that Bobby Kennedy made a feint in the direction of the anti-war crowd and a gesture or two for Cesar Chavez. It is also true that Hayden attended Kennedy's funeral and even wept a tear or two. But those tears had little to do with Hayden's political agendas at the time, which were more accurately summed up in Che Guevara's call to create "two, three, many Vietnams" inside America's borders. Hayden's tears for Kennedy were personal, and he paid a huge political price for them. After the funeral, SDS activists wondered out loud (and in print) whether he had "sold out" by mourning for a figure whom they saw not as a great white hope in the political struggle that consumed their lives, but as a Trojan horse for the other side.

With Kennedy and King dead, the stage was set for what Talbot calls "the inevitable showdown" in Chicago. And here a glimmer of the truth enters his narrative. "Both sides, rebels and rulers, were spoiling for a confrontation." But then, almost as quickly, he reverts to political correctness: "Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley made it possible. He denied permits for protesters at the Democratic Convention." The denied permits made confrontation inevitable.

In fact, the epigram from '68 that Talbot employs for his text -- "Demand the Impossible" -- explains far more accurately why it was Hayden, not Daley, who set the agenda for Chicago, and was therefore ultimately responsible for the riot that ensued. The police behaved badly, it is true -- and they have been justly and roundly condemned for their reactions. But those reactions were entirely predictable (after all, it was Daley who, only months before, had ordered his police to "shoot looters on sight" during the rioting after King's murder). In fact, the predictable reaction of the Chicago police was an essential part of Hayden's calculation in choosing to demonstrate in Chicago in the first place.

In a year when any national demonstration would attract 100,000 protesters, only about 10,000 (and probably closer to 3,000) actually showed up for the Chicago bloodfest. That was because most of us realized there was going to be bloodshed and didn't see the point. (Our ideology was clear on this -- the two-party system was a sham; the revolution was in the streets.) In retrospect, Hayden was more cynical and shrewder than we were. By destroying the presidential aspirations of Hubert Humphrey and, with that, the power of the anti-Communist liberals, he paved the way for a takeover of the Democratic Party apparatus by forces of the political left, a trauma from which it has not recovered.

One reason these historical facts have been obscured by the left is that the nostalgists don't really want to take credit for electing Richard Nixon. As a matter of political discretion, they are also willing to let their greatest coup -- the capture of the Democratic Party -- go unmemorialized. Instead, they prefer to ascribe this remarkable political realignment to impersonal forces that, apparently, had nothing to do with their own agendas and actions. Talbot summarizes: "'While the whole world (was) watching,' [Daley's] police rioted, clubbing demonstrators, reporters and bystanders indiscriminately. The Democratic Party self-destructed." Well, actually, it was destroyed.

When the fires of Watergate consumed the Nixon presidency in 1974, the left's newly won control of the Democratic Party produced the exact result that Hayden and his comrades had worked so hard to achieve. In 1974, a new class of Democrats was elected to Congress, which included anti-war activists like Ron Dellums, Pat Schroeder, David Bonior and Bella Abzug. Their politics were left as opposed to the anti-Communist liberalism of the Daleys and the Humphreys, and their first act was to cut off economic aid and military supplies to the regimes in Cambodia and South Vietnam. Though it is conveniently forgotten now, this cut-off occurred two years after the United States signed a truce with Hanoi and American troops were withdrawn from Vietnam.

"Bring the Troops Home" may have been the slogan of the so-called anti-war movement, but it was never its ultimate goal. The ultimate goal was a liberated Vietnam. Within three months of the cut-off, the anti-Communist regimes in Saigon and Phnom Penh fell, and the killing fields began. The mass slaughters in Cambodia and South Vietnam, from 1975 to 1978, which took place as a result of the withdrawal of aid, was the real achievement of the New Left and could not have been achieved without Hayden's sabotage of the anti-Communist liberals like Humphrey and Daley.

While Talbot forgets the denouement, he does get the significance of the war correctly: "The war in Vietnam and the draft were absolutely central. I remember a cover of Ramparts magazine that captured how I felt: 'Alienation is when your country is at war and you hope the other side wins.'" This is a softened version of what we actually felt. As the author of that cover line, let me correct Talbot's memory and add a detail. The Ramparts cover featured a picture of a Huck Finn-like 7-year-old (it was art director Dugald Stermer's son) who was holding the Vietcong flag -- the flag of America's enemy in Vietnam. The cover line said: 'Alienation is when your country is at war and you want the other side to win.' That represented what we believed -- Hayden, Gitlin, Steve Talbot and me. It is not that important to me what lessons my former comrades draw from our service to the wrong side in the Cold War. I just wish they would remember it as it happened.

I also wish they wouldn't project on themselves retrospective sympathies for the latter-day struggle against Communism, whose true warriors and champions -- however distasteful, embarrassing and uncomfortable this must be for them -- were Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, leaders they hated and despised. Go over the 50 years of the Cold War against the Soviet empire and you will find that every single political and military program to contain the spread of this cancer and ultimately to destroy it was opposed by those who now invoke the "spirit of '68" as their own.

"Assassinations, repression and exhaustion extinguished the spirit of '68," Talbot concludes his story. "But like a subterranean fire, it resurfaces at historic moments." Citing socialist writer Paul Berman, the originator of this particular myth, Talbot argues that "the embers of '68" helped ignite the revolution of 1989 that brought liberal democracy to Eastern Europe and ended the Cold War." The distortion of memory is one thing for Berman, who belongs to a minuscule faction of the left that was indeed anti-Communist, while hating American capitalism almost as much. (How much? In Berman's case, enough to support the Black Panthers -- "America’s Vietcong" -- and to regard the secret police chief of the Sandinista dictatorship as a "quintessential New Leftist.") But it is particularly unappetizing in Talbot, who made films into the '80s celebrating Communist insurgents who were busily extending the Soviet sphere in Africa. America, bless its generous heart, has already forgiven Steve Talbot for that. So why lie about it now?

Of course, the New Left was critical of the Soviet Union (and so, at various times were Khrushchev, Castro and Ho Chi Minh). But its true enemy was always democratic America -- a misguided hatred that was never merely reactive, never truly innocent and that remains remarkably intact to this day. The worldview of this left was aptly summarized by I.F. Stone's adoring biographer, who reported approvingly Stone's belief that "in spite of the brutal collectivization campaign, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the latest quashing of the Czech democracy and the Stalinist takeover of Eastern Europe ... communism was a progressive force, lined up on the correct side of historical events."

Berman, Gitlin and now Talbot have mounted this preposterous last ditch effort to save the left from the embarrassments of its deeds by attempting to appropriate moral credit for helping to end a Communist system that in spite of everything the left aided and abetted throughout its career. The New Left disparaged the threat from the Communist enemy as a paranoid fantasy of the Cold War right. The unseemly attempt to retrieve an honorable past from such dishonorable occasions might be more convincing if any of these memorialists (including Berman) were able to recall a single left-wing demonstration against Communist oppression in Vietnam, the Cambodian genocide, the rape of Afghanistan or the dictatorships in Cuba and Nicaragua. Or if one veteran leader of the New Left had once publicly called on the Soviets to tear down the Berlin Wall, as Ronald Reagan actually did. Support for the anti-Communist freedom fighters in Afghanistan and Africa and Central America during the 1980s came from Goldwater and Reagan activists on the right, like Grover Norquist, Oliver North and (now) Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, whom progressives -- for this very reason -- despise.

It would be nice if we could use this 30th anniversary of the events of 1968 to end the cold war over our past, and start restoring a sense of the tragic to both sides. But to do that, the nostalgists of the left will first have to be persuaded to give up their futile attempt to rewrite what happened and start telling it like it is.
SALON | Aug. 31, 1998

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T A B L E _.T A L K

Discuss David Horowitz's column in Table Talk.

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R E L A T E D_.S A L O N_.S T O R I E S

The year of dreaming dangerously This is the 30th anniversary of a series of tumultuous events that shaped a generation. To understand the activists of the '60s, you have to revisit 1968 and consider what it was like to those who lived through it.
By Stephen Talbot
July 22, 1998

The prince who came down from his tower Authors battle to define the life and legacy of the last American politician worth caring about.
By John Leonard
June 2, 1998

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