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Volume CXXXI, Number 21 |
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Annus horribilis
LUDWIG RANG
ALUMNUS WRITER
My stint at the San Francisco Post Office came to an end
sometime in February '68, a horrible year for me and America. First came
the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., followed by that of Bobby
Kennedy, violent protests during the Democratic Convention in Chicago,
and- to cap it all off- the election of Richard Nixon as President.
On a personal level, King's assassination meant that Ronald,
just a friend now as far as I was concerned, decided he could no longer
be even that. Having come under the influence of the Oakland-based Black
Panthers, Ron, who'd passed for white in the army, suddenly became militantly
black. It was the end of more than a beautiful friendship.
Politically too, King's death came as a real shock. With
him it seemed the country's conscience was gone, both concerning race
and the war.
The only politician courageous enough to say the U.S. must get out of
Vietnam, at almost any price, was Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy,
about to enter the race for the nomination as his party's candidate for
President. The "Peace Candidate," he was called.
When Lyndon Johnson announced he wasn't going to seek re-election,
Bobby Kennedy threw his hat in the ring too. Being from neighboring Massachusetts,
Bobby, came in ahead of McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary, but also
possibly because he took a hawkish stance on U.S. involvement in the war.
But in Oregon, with McCarthy winning a famous victory, their
positions were reversed. Everything now depended on California, the biggest
prize in the primary contest between the two leading Democratic candidates.
Being passionately opposed to the war, I naturally backed
the Peace Candidate. After all, I had taken part in demonstrations against
the President, on a visit to San Francisco, shouting Hey, hey, hey, LBJ,
how many kids did you kill today? and picketed Chief of Staff General
Maxwell Taylor outside the Fairmont Hotel.
The time had come to take a stand. So I went down to the
Citizens for McCarthy headquarters on Market Street to volunteer my services.
They asked me to distribute leaflets, and to help decorate the Cow Palace
with flags and bunting in advance of a big speech the senator was going
to make to kick off his California primary campaign.
On my way down to Nellie's at Carmel for the weekend, I
stopped off at Monterey Airport where Bobby Kennedy, on a flying tour
round the state, was to hold a rally. A big crowd had already gathered
on the tarmac. So I climbed onto the flat roof of the one-story building
to get a better view, with no one preventing me from doing so.
As Bobby spoke from the gangplank of his plane, with the
familiar twang and gestures of the Kennedys, cracking jokes just like
JFK too, I couldn't help thinking that if I had a gun and the guts I could
easily have picked him off from my exposed vantage point.
Then came the terrible news that a Jordanian named Sirhan
Sirhan had shot Kennedy at the Biltmore Hotel in L.A., where his supporters
were celebrating their candidate's 2-1 victory over McCarthy. The shooting
was witnessed by many people on live TV, including Bobby's 13-year-old
son, who recently died of an overdose.
My God, Nellie said, what is happening to our country?
Actually there are parallels to what is happening to it
today I think, even though the U.S. has just won a big military victory
in its war on terrorism and has a President far to the right, even of
Nixon. Then, as now, anyone questioning the war was labeled a traitor
by right-wingers.
Particularly suspect were the 'peaceniks' on U.S. campuses,
the leading one among them Berkeley, headquarters of the anti-war movement.
One day while sitting in a café on Berkeley's Telegraph
Avenue, myself still with longish hair looking like a student I suppose,
someone, without asking my permission, took a picture of me with a Minox.
I nearly flipped out. Instantly, my paranoia returned. It
must have been an FBI agent, I thought.
It got so bad that when I saw a team of telephone company
workers digging up the street right outside my house, I thought they were
doing so on orders of the FBI, to tap my telephone: paranoia without rhyme
or reason.
All right, I thought, if they think I'm a spy I'll act like one, and afterwards
expose them. So, I decided to decamp to New York, but by a circuitous
route meant to make them think I was trying to put them off the scent.
Without saying goodbye to either Alice, Nellie, or my sister
in L.A., I took a bus to Phoenix, Arizona. Here I changed to one bound
for Denver, caught a plane to Chicago, continuing by train to New York:
intelligent enough not to think I was the Emperor of China, but conceited
enough to be convinced I was mistakenly considered an important spy.
Having got myself a temporary job at Doubleday's on Fifth
Avenue, not far from Tiffany's, I went to hear Black Panther Eldridge
Cleaver speak at a Humphrey rally, introduced by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr..
Fuck Nixon, Cleaver shouted, poor Arthur looking distinctly
embarrassed.
Among bestsellers that fall was John LeCarrée's Small Town in Germany,
a story of intrigue and espionage set in Bonn, then still the capital.
Every time I was asked for the title, I thought it might be an agent trying
to tell me to come out of the cold.