Nineteen Sixty-Eight. I was in Chicago working in the national office of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) on Madison Street. The office was in a run down building in the two-block buffer zone between the black ghetto to the west and skid road to the east. The street below our office was where the prostitutes with blood trickling down their legs from multiple needle sticks tried to come up with a few more dollars to feed their habits. It was there that I watched as a good-looking young woman in her early twenties plied her trade to feed her habit and became an old hag in less than a year. It was the place where a young black man tried, with limited success, to convince the local drunks that LSD was a better way to get high than drinking MD20-20. It was in 1968 that I found a human hand one morning and a human foot the next inside the entryway to our building. They were gifts from the gang of sub-teenage boys who played on the streets of the ghetto. It turned out that when the neighborhood went to hell the local chiropractic school moved to a better location leaving a basement full of bodies hanging from hooks just waiting for a gang of kids to break in and take a few body parts.
Madison was the kind of street where the noise of the people, false alarms, police sirens, and the occasional gun shot mingled with the sound of the Thursday evening choir practice and Sunday morning choir at the predominantly African American church somehow gave the impression that there was hope, even though slight, that everything would come out all right.
Nineteen Sixty-Eight got off with a bang. Our government had been assuring the American people that there was light at the end of the tunnel in Vietnam and then it turned out that the light was the Vietnam Liberation Express attacking every provincial capital at once during the Vietnamese New Year called Tet. This general uprising shocked the American people and finally tipped the scale so that a majority of Americans opposed the war. In spite of that the war continued and spread across Southeast Asia. The reaction of the government on the home front was to increase the repression of the anti-war movement.
When Martin Luther King was assassinated in April, 1968, the rioting happened in front of our office. The mobs of people were replaced first by a National Guard unit then by an Army tank that was parked in front of our office. At one point the tank crew rotated the turret so that the cannon aimed straight at us as we watched from the second floor.
We didn’t know what the government was doing to stop us but we assumed that they were taping our phone and might have an infiltrator in the office. At one point an entire issue of the SDS weekly newspaper, many tied bundles sorted by zip code, got “lost” in the post office. Two weeks later the missing bundles were “found” and sent on their way. We figured the FBI needed a couple of weeks to copy down all the addresses. The FBI contacted the IRS asking for an audit of our tax returns. The IRS determined that my income of $267 for the first half of 1968 was so low that I didn’t owe any tax.
Jeff, a friend of mine, had been found guilty of refusing to be drafted and was out on appeal. He got a call from his lawyer saying that he had been requested to come to the Federal Court House to clarify his status with a federal judge. “No big deal. Just routine”. He and I planned to go see a movie afterward. I was amazed as the judge revoked his bond and he was sent to the federal maximum-security penitentiary in Springfield, Illinois. Years later in copies of my FBI files I discovered that this action was considered a success for the FBI’s “Counterintelligence Program, COINTELPRO. The goal of this program was to use whatever means necessary to destroy the Black movement and the movement against the war. I was included in the “Rabble Rouser Index” and later in the Security Index and the words “Neutralize” and “should be considered dangerous” are everywhere. This led to the addition of a certain level of surreality to my life. I was pulled over and searched on suspicion of robbing a bank while in Chicago. In Austin the Army tried to set me up on helping a soldier go AWOL. We left him standing by the road in the Texas hill country waiting for his next ride on the “underground railroad.” Several jobs I had were sabotaged. Job records were mysteriously lost. At one point, while in rural Arkansas, the FBI raided our farm looking for a draft dodger. Then the Forest Service sprayed Agent Orange on our watershed. Later a group of three fighter bombers pretended that we were the Viet Cong and ran a series of extremely low elevation bombing and strafing practice runs on our farm.
All in all, nineteen sixty-eight was indeed an “interesting year and helped me understand the meaning of the Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.”
Robert Pardun
March 6, 2008 at 6:05 pm |
Robert,
All of us lived through those interesting times but how you lived them always seems more interesting than how most of the rest of us lived them. I find it remarkable that my card-playing beer-drinking gentle friend would have been considered dangerous by the FBI.