438
PETER BROOKS
to talk with them and persuade them to calm. By four o'clock, with
the weather magnificent, it was like going down to the Green for
a picnic. There was too much talk, as usual, with statements from
Women's Lib and the Gay Liberation Front.
Jerry
Rubin was end–
less and shrill. I thought he had none of Abbie Hoffman's depth of
humor and warmth. He said that white middle-class youth was the
most oppressed group in America, that the conspiracy's true crime
was being child molesters. That was funny, but
it
didn't take you
very far. Then there was Ken Mills, relentlessly articulate and in–
telligent as ever, telling the crowd to go back to their universities and
make them strike. "Shut them down, open them up to reality." I
found the phrase offensive. What is closer to reality in America,
1970, than the open university? Finally there was Tom Hayden
with a long, thoughtful speech in which he compared Kingman Brew–
ster to Sihanouk: the liberal advocate of an intelligent, active neutral–
ism, providing a sanctuary to radicals. But you saw what happened
to Sihanouk. How long would it be possible to play the Brewster
role without a coup from the right? It was like the fair-trial hangup:
you had to raise yourself to the consciousness that the "facts" of the
trial were irrelevant, and take sides. Hayden ended by saying that
this was the last speech he was going to make, that he was going to
organize. The implication was that he was going underground.
It
was the right speech to end with, because most of us on the
left at Yale were still close to a Sihanouk position, our radicalism
tempered by liberalism and democratic proceduralism. The claims
of any other position seem dubious and dangerous, but polarization
is proceeding fast. I got some idea of how fast when I went, along
with a Yale senior, Geoffrey Davis, to speak to a group of upper–
middle-class-to-power-elite suburbanites a week later. We were trying
to explain what was going on in the universities, to explain the new
national strike and the meaning of its linkage of demands concern–
ing Panther repression and the Indochina war. We were trying to
make them see the connection between military adventurism in Asia
and repression of the internal "colony," to show them how the Chi–
cago trial, the New Haven trial, the shooting of Fred Hampton,
Mitchell's preventive detention, the Cambodian invasion, all came
together to force a consciousness of the crisis. Questions followed.
One man asked if we really approved of the tactics of the Vietcong.
Another wanted to know where our ideas came from. Another asked
