60
DOTSON RADER
"Why did you give up?" Hank asked, as we crossed Broadway
and went inside the West End Bar. "How come you lost the Liberation?"
A good question, yet considering the source, considering the fact
that he hadn't been there at the time, I thought he was in no position
to criticize us. My age showing, defensively. "There were the cop busts,
you know. Awful things. And then a division in our camp. We were
outnumbered."
"Why didn't you blow up some buildings, or take more hostages?
Why didn't you do something effective?"
"I'm not at Columbia anymore," I said, by way of a dodge.
Hank was sixteen years old. He was dark-haired, handsome in an
athletic way. He wore his hair long; it curled at the root of his neck
and hung in long ringlets above his eyes. He affected, as did most of
the kids, working-class dress, blue jeans, work shirts and construction
boots. He had been active on the lett
l()IY
over a year, taking two weeks
off from high school earlier in the year to participate in the troubles at
San Francisco State. From a wealthy family, jetting to revolution, cam–
ing back and believing, as most of us, that the San Francisco confronta–
tion had been a success because it had produced, for the first time, the
active support of organized labor, a sympathy strike at the Richmond
Oil Refinery.
We talked for a time, he asking me questions about the SDS Na–
tional Convention that summer, about Progressive Labor. He asked me
if 1 knew Norman Mailer, said he had read the b.ook on the Pentagon
protests and thought Mailer was a bourgeois leech using the Movement
to make money. He implied as much about me, since I too had written
a book on the left. Then we discussed tactics. I told him I believed
violence to be premature, even thaugh I admitted the terrorist cadres
and the appeals to violence. I believed it counterproductive. We were
woefully outnumbered. We would be mowed down like children in any
violent encounter with the authorities, witness Chicago.
"What we should do," I said, "is to organize the poor, the young
workers, like in France, the armed forces. Win the generation. Christ,
when the army's morale is weakened, discipline shoddy, when the soldier
wins his freedom and doesn't have to fight wars he hates, then, baby,
the ball game's over for the Establishment."
So
simple.
Then Hank said, and this is when I knew I was dated, losing
touch, knew the game had gone far beyond me, "I think we ought to
assassinate Mayor Lindsay."
"Why?" I found the idea mad.
"Why?
Because every goddamn left-lib will
ask
why,
that's
why! To
most Americans it makes no sense."
