Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap.1: At Flushing H.S., 1964

Chapter 1: At Flushing High School, 1964 (iii)

Most of March and April in the Human Relations Club was spent rehearsing the anti-bigotry play. Because Rona had the most expressive and clearest speaking voice, she was chosen by Mr. Freedman to play the teenage woman character that had the main role in the play. Around school, I would bump into Rona and say “hi.” But I couldn’t figure out any way to interest her in more than just a casual acquaintanceship. By the end of the school year, I was as lovesick as Romeo at the beginning of Shakespeare’s "Romeo and Juliet."

Outside of the Human Relations Club meeting discussions, I can recall very little intense or significant discussion with any students at Flushing. Most of my conversation with people there was on a superficial level. I just couldn’t wait to get to college and get away from my parents’ apartment and be on my own and get away from the public school system.

Although I strongly identified with the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, I kept most of what I was feeling about the System inside of me. At Flushing High School, I never really found anybody else who fully shared my sense of alienation and was willing to talk for long hours about what we could all do, as a generation, to secure more freedom.

When the weather was not too cold after classes, I spent many afternoons playing basketball in the Whitestone playground at 149th St. and Willets Point Boulevard, just north of Memorial Field. Most of the other guys I played with attended one of the local parochial high schools: Holy Cross High School or Bishop Reilly. After the pick-up games ended, we each went our separate ways.

In the playground, if you played enough basketball games with each other you would get close on a certain level. But high school guys never really talked deeply to each other, if their only point of contact was meeting in the playground and they attended different schools. Most of the guys I played basketball with were Italian-American or Irish-American. But none of us working-class guys thought ethnically very much, in those days. Each of us thought of ourselves as being, primarily, white American. Being ethnically Irish, Italian or Jewish was felt as a secondary identity.

To get into Columbia College in the 1960s, an applicant had to submit to a personal campus interview. In early 1965, I dressed up in a suit and tie and took a bus and subway to the 116th St. and Broadway station in Manhattan. I walked through the kiosk exit/entrance that used to be there (before Columbia had their station modernized in the 1970s) and located the School of Journalism building, where my screening interview was to take place.

Glancing around Columbia’s campus between Low Plaza and South Lawn, I felt that it looked more like a real campus than Queens College’s campus. The campus seemed much smaller than Indiana University’s Bloomington campus, with which I was familiar as a result of visiting my older sister there. But Columbia’s campus, situated in the middle of Manhattan apartment buildings, interested me more, because I wanted to be involved with people who lived in Harlem. Indiana University’s large campus could not fulfill that desire.

In the early 1960s, the large Midwestern state universities seemed to offer just size and football teams. I assumed Columbia would offer me both activist intellectual stimulation and interaction with the cultural riches and neighborhoods of Manhattan. I assumed that Barnard and Columbia students interacted with each other easily on a daily level, because of the closeness of the two schools.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 1: At Flushing H.S., 1964

Chapter 1: At Flushing High School, 1964 (ii)

I fell helplessly in love with Rona the year before I went off to Columbia. Rona was a National Merit scholarship finalist who seemed love-filled and was quite popular. She was also a first clarinetist in the high school band; and she seemed like she would make a great companion. But I found it impossible to transform our casual acquaintanceship into a love affair, although we were thrown together occasionally around the high school for eight months. Another thing I liked about Rona was that she wasn’t into dressing up too much when she was outside the school building; and, instead of just wearing dresses and skirts, she also wore slacks in the early 1960s.

I first noticed Rona in Spanish class. She was a year behind me in school. But the juniors who were honor students in Spanish were put in the same class as seniors like me who were taking their fourth year of Spanish. Rona spoke often in class and was one of the pets of the teacher. But when the teacher had his back turned during Spanish tests, she was willing to pass out the answers to multiple-choice questions to the students who sat in the back of the classroom.

We were both in the Human Relations Club of Flushing High School, which met every Friday afternoon. This was a new club organized by a young social studies teacher named Mr. Freedman, who came on to his students as a friend who really loved being with his students.

Each week ten women students, three men students and Mr. Freedman would discuss at the Human Relations Club meeting topics like racial prejudice, high school dating, politics, the press, TV shows, war and peace issues, anti-Semitism, education and miseducation at Flushing, religion and school regulations. We also gossiped about everybody else at the school.

In March 1965 we decided to hold a joint meeting to fight racial bigotry with the Jamaica High School Human Relations Club, and a meeting was scheduled for early May. As our contribution to the joint meeting, we decided to put on a play which would dramatize why it was stupid for young people to pick up the prejudices of the older generation.

I then wrote a one-act musical play, which attempted to expose the irrationality of bigotry, through satire and the use of musical comedy parody techniques. For instance, to the tune of “I’m A Yankee Doodle Dandy”, I had my main character—who was to learn, by the end of the play, that bigotry was an irrational thing to be into—sing “I’m a jolly, biased bigot, a biased bigot, do or die.” I think I was influenced somewhat by the That Was The Week That Was satirical TV show of that era and by Tom Lehrer satirical record albums. I felt racism could be attacked by using satire and humor and snickering. The white racists in the South and North at that time really seemed to be on the defensive, psychologically, and on the ropes, politically. In retrospect, I overestimated how effective the weapon of satire could be in attacking racism in the United States.

By the time I finished my anti-racist musical satire, however, Mr. Freedman had secured a script for a one-act drama in favor of brotherhood from the Anti-Defamation League [ADL]. (The ADL hadn’t yet become as hostile to the Black Liberation Movement then, as it would later become). Mr. Freedman, therefore, wasn’t open to even considering something more “way-out,” like my musical anti-racist parody.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chapter 1: At Flushing High School, 1964

Chapter 1: At Flushing High School, 1964 (i)

I was a Flushing High School senior in Fall 1964 when I heard about the Free Speech Movement [FSM] at Berkeley. I especially identified with FSM leader Mario Savio, who had grown up in Queens like I had. Savio had gone to Martin Van Buren High School. Van Buren was the high school that the older students in the Beech Hills garden apartment development where I used to live had attended.

What most touched me about Savio and the Free Speech Movement’s message was the assertion that we were “human beings” and “not IBM card numbers.”

I had concluded that the whole rat-race and competition to get into college was ridiculous. I looked down upon students in my classes who were mark-happy and super-competitive, instead of intellectually curious. The process I was compelled to go through in high school in order to get into college seemed emotionally empty. I felt unfree in high school. The 1964 Berkeley Revolt indicated to me that other people in my generation shared my disgust with the U.S. mass educational system.

Another aspect of the Free Speech Movement which caused me to identify with it was the link to the early 1960s Civil Rights Movement. Since the 1957 controversy over the integration of Little Rock, Arkansas schools, one of the passions of my life had been my support for the African-American freedom struggle. The people who were fighting the University of California at Berkeley Administration were often the same people who had gone down to Mississippi to work with SNCC to win freedom for African-American people.

I considered myself a writer-activist in high school, even when almost everyone else in the three high schools I attended was non-activist and not interested in questions of war and peace and racial injustice. In Bayside High School, in Broad Ripple High School in Indiana and in Flushing High School nearly all the students I met were just interested in getting into college, getting Saturday night dates, driving, sports or shopping. When I learned that the FSM students were involved with the Civil Rights Movement in a way my classmates had never been, I felt that FSM people were my kind of people.

My interest in the Civil Rights Movement was reflected in the writing I did in high school. I wrote a character study of a former African-American classmate, entitled “Benny”, which the English teacher, Mrs. Griggs, liked so much that she read it aloud to the class, which found the piece hilarious. Mrs. Griggs—who had some connection to the Columbia University School of Journalism’s high school journalism program—wrote the letter of recommendation that most likely was decisive in getting me admitted into Columbia.

I was restless and eager to get out of high school and into a more activist student setting. Senior year seemed like a waste. I was put in detention for coming late too often. I still liked to play saxophone in the high school band, though.

School’s only value seemed to be as a place to meet high school women in a classroom setting, and as a place to play saxophone with other musicians. My love of writing had no outlet because the school newspaper at Flushing High School was run by a clique that never printed “controversial” articles which criticized the educational process at Flushing, and the literary magazine wouldn’t publish my stories.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Prologue

PROLOGUE: Clubbed At Columbia, 1968

We sat on the floor of Fayerweather Lounge, our arms linked, singing a freedom song defiantly. We heard our barricade of chairs and desks being torn apart and tossed to the floor. We saw helmeted Tactical Patrol Force [TPF] cops entering the lounge.

I watched four TPF cops grab, rough up and drag the student in front of me out of the Columbia University building. It all seemed unreal. It seemed like a bad dream or some scene from a Hollywood movie. The cops were intent on getting us out of the building as quickly as possible. Students who refused to unlink their arms were roughed up and clubbed by the cops more than students who quickly unlinked their arms.

More helmeted cops poured into the lounge. I realized my turn to be brutalized was coming. I noticed a husky, tall, helmeted African-American cop. We looked into each other’s eyes and I noticed no sign of empathy in his eyes. I thought to myself: “Yes, some Black men will even fight for Columbia, if you pay them enough.” He then grabbed me and started to rough me up as efficiently as any white cop. I felt a club come down on my head during the one minute it took for the TPF cops to shove me from the lounge to the front steps of Fayerweather Hall and throw me onto the campus grass. My head was bleeding. I lay dazed, until I was approached by a medical student who gave me first aid.

It happened fast. One moment we were singing and watching them come at us. Then, while they were brutalizing me, I was wondering whether I was going to survive. And I thought: “Is this really happening to me?” as they passed me from cop-to-cop and out of the building. I felt completely powerless, because they had all the clubs. And I was not clear about what was happening until I was on the grass of Columbia’s campus and realized that I was still alive.

Dino was lying on the grass next to me. He was also bleeding from the head. He was crying and cursing the cops. Spontaneously, we grabbed each other’s hand.

Dino was a tall African-American non-student. A street-hustler, a grass dealer, and a street revolutionary. He looked like a SNCC person, although he never had been into Movement organizing.

A medical student helped Dino and me stand up. Other medical students escorted us into an ambulance. We were taken with other bleeding protesters to Knickerbocker Hospital further uptown in Manhattan. In the emergency room, a doctor sewed up our head wounds and put bandages on our heads, using about 10 to 15 stitches. Then we were released from the hospital. I walked back downtown to my dorm room in Furnald Hall, in the darkness of early morning.

As I re-entered Columbia’s campus, I wondered how many other people were injured, how many other students were arrested and whether the Black students who had occupied Columbia’s Hamilton Hall had been brutalized. I wondered whether the Columbia Administration was going to be able to get away with its use of police to evict us all from the campus buildings we had collectively liberated. I wondered how the rest of the campus and the rest of the world were going to react to the police invasion of Columbia’s campus.

I was angry. And I was ready to resume the fight against Columbia’s institutional racism, complicity with the Viet Nam War and its policy of suppressing student dissent. But were other students at Columbia and Barnard ready to continue the fight?

By the afternoon of April 30, 1968, crowds of students had started to form again on Columbia’s campus. It became clear that the police bust had led to a mass radicalization of the campus. The fight against Columbia’s trustees and the Columbia Administration was going to continue. Spontaneously, students were angrily chanting, over and over again outside of Low Library, “Kirk must go! Kirk must go! Kirk must go!” and, simultaneously, raising their hands in the peace sign to emphasize each word.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Table of Contents

SUNDIAL: Columbia SDS Memories

For Ted Gold and student activists of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 21st century.




C O N T E N T S

Prologue: Clubbed At Columbia, 1968

Chapter I: At Flushing High School, 1964

Chapter II: At UM & M, 1965

Chapter III: Freshman At Columbia, 1965

Chapter IV: Summer Folk Songwriting, 1966

Chapter V: In Furnald Hall, 1966

Chapter VI: Enter Ted Gold, 1966

Chapter VII: Into Columbia SDS, 1966

Chapter VIII: Discovering IDA, 1967

Chapter IX: Confronting The Marines, 1967

Chapter X: The Viet Nam Summer of Love, 1967

Chapter XI: Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert: Roommates, 1967

Chapter XII: Marge Piercy and The Anti-Rusk Demo, 1967

Chapter XIII: Christmas Vacation with Mark Rudd, 1967

Chapter XIV: Back In Furnald Hall, 1968

Chapter XV: Steering Columbia SDS Into Action, 1968

Chapter XVI: We Shut Down Columbia University, 1968

Chapter XVII: Enter Bernardine Dohrn, 1968

Chapter XVIII: Summer In The Streets, 1968

Chapter XIX: Spreading The Student Revolution, 1968

Chapter XX: Commune On Staten Island, 1969

Chapter XXI: Weatherman Comes To Queens, 1969

Chapter XXII: At United Parcel Service and Queens College, 1969

Chapter XXIII: With Andrea Eagan and Newsreel, 1970

Chapter XXIV: The Explosion at West 11th Street, 1970

Chapter XXV: All Power To My Sisters, 1970

Chapter XXVI: Uncle Sam Don’t Want Me, 1970

Chapter XXVII: The Bronx and Kent State, 1970

Epilogue: Columbia SDS Memories: From Berkeley to Kent State

IDA's University Connections in 2005

As the Los Angeles Times observed in an August 15, 2004 article:

"During the U.S.-led attack on Iraq, the Institute for Defense Analyses provided senior Pentagon officials with assessments of the operation.

"Staff members from the institute formed part of an 18-member civilian analysis team working from the Joint Warfighting Center in Virginia.

"The operation was described in a June 3, 2003, briefing by Brigadier General Robert W. Cone of the Army. `This team did business' within the Army Central Command `on a daily basis, by observing meeting and planning sessions, attending command updates, watching key decisions being made, watching problems being solved, and generally being provided unrestricted access to the business of the conduct of this war,' Cone said, according to a transcript of the session."

The Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA]'s board of trustees in 2005 also continued to include members with connections to various U.S. universities. The University of South Carolina's president, John Palms, for example, was the chairman of the IDA's board of trustees in 2005. Sitting next to the University of South Carolina president on the Pentagon weapons think-tank board of trustees in 2005 were the Dean Emeritus of the University of Southern California (USC) Marshall School of Business, Jack Borsting, and the University of Texas at Austin's LBJ School of Public Affairs Dean, Edwin Dorn. A lecturer at Harvard University's JFK School of Government, John White, also was a member of the IDA board of trustees in 2005. In addition, the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [MIT] Center for Genome Research, Jill Merirov, and an MIT Institute Professor, Sheila Widnall, also sat on the IDA board of trustees in 2005.

In a June 2002 report that described how MIT faculty members continue to do secret war research for the Pentagon in this current "era of permanent war and blogging", Institute for Defense Analyses Trustee Widnall wrote:

"There exist several organizations that can provide access to classified facilities to enable MIT faculty to carry out the classified portions of their research. The most prominent of these is MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, but several other organizations could also provide such access.

"The management and oversight of Lincoln Laboratory are major components of the public service that MIT carries out for the nation...MIT should continue its active management of Lincoln Laboratory to insure that...Lincoln Laboratory provides an environment that enables faculty to do research with national security implications.

"MIT and its faculty have ongoing relations with a number of independent defense-supported research laboratories such as Draper Laboratory, Air Force Research Laboratory, Natick Army Laboratory, and the Naval Underseas Warfare Center in Newport, R.I.. These facilities offer opportunities to strengthen our activities in research that have applications to national security. In particular, MIT should strengthen its relationship with Draper Laboratory and have access to Draper as an off-site facility for research and administrative support for faculty requiring access to classified material...

"MIT currently undertakes classified research at Lincoln Laboratory...

"We estimate that there might be as many as seventy-five members of the MIT faculty who currently hold security clearances."

IDA's 21st Century "Warfighting Program"

In this 21st-century era of "permanent war and blogging", the Institute for Defense Analyses continues to help the Pentagon plan more wars abroad on behalf of special U.S. corporate interests. According to IDA's own website, for example, IDA's Joint Advanced Warfighting Program (JAWP):

"...serves as a catalyst for developing breakthrough improvements in military capabilities. The JAWP performs this role by helping to conceptualize and develop new warfighting concepts and capabilities, conduct joint experiments, integrate related activities, and prepare for implementations of the new warfighting concepts and capabilities.

"JAWP has a research staff of approximately 24 people, including several active duty officers representing the U.S. Navy,the U.S. Air Force, and the U.S. Marine Corps. The full-time staff is augmented by adjuncts and consultants as necessary.

"Sponsorship for JAWP's activities comes principally from Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Threat Reduction, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Deputy Commander in Chief, US Atlantic Command (USACOM)."