The White Album

Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like bushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.

© Julian Wasser

JOAN DIDION, HOLLYWOOD, 1968.

The White Album is an essay by Joan Didion published in 1979, completed by some of her best columns published at the time in Life, Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post, The New York Times or else The New York Review of Books.

A proponent of New Journalism, in the manner of a Tom Wolfe or a Norman Mailer, she writes in the first person, the style is sharp and the details precise. She doesn't bother with context. Insolently subjective, she gives up here her most intimate thoughts, which makes the book all the more powerful as it is ultimately very personal.

The text is made up of disjointed flashbacks, where like in an editing room, the rushes overlap endlessly, as if to better transcribe the apocalyptic essence of the end of the Sixties in Los Angeles, where nothing seemed to make sense or follow any intelligible narrative thread. America itself was in the process of falling apart and losing all its bearings, Joan Didion delivered to us a time capsule in that regard.

On September 23, 1967, her article “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” appeared in The Saturday Evening Post. It opened with the poem The Second Coming (1919) by William Butler Yeats.

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world . . .
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand . . .
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Verses that look like epitaphs for this report on youth culture and their drug use produced in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, and whose story ends with Susan, this five-year-old kid with odd white lips. For the past year, her mother had been fueling her by acid and peyote, Mind Expansion dictates. Already the seedy overrode utopia for these children of the American Dream.

She used it as the title of her second book published in 1968, which gathered other of her articles that came out in the press. In the preamble, she described the necessity for her to accept “disorder” (“it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder”). This time, at random of ordinary violence responded an internal agitation. Her body gave way the year she was yet named “Woman of the Year” by the Los Angeles Times.

By then, Joan Didion, the girl from Sacramento, an English Literature graduate of the University of Berkeley in 1956, went through New York where she earned her stripes at Vogue for almost eight years, and where she got married to the writer John Gregory Dunne. Now based in California with their two-year-old daughter Quintana, the couple collaborated for several newspapers and worked on various scripts for television and cinema. As part of Hollywood's crème de la crème, they happened to be frequently quoted in the “Great Life” section of the Hollywood Reporter, just like Bianca Jagger, Paul Morrissey or Linda Ronsdadt.

© Julian Wasser

JOAN DIDION, JOHN GREGORY DUNNE AND QUINTANA ROO DUNNE, HOLLYWOOD, 1968.

Their house on Franklin Avenue was located in a former swanky Hollywood neighborhood now slated for demolition. Huge unfurnished 28-room homes which once served as embassies and consulates were now rented by the month. Very popular among music bands, they also encouraged the establishment of communities of all kinds, a most eccentric area.

Joan Didion's home was a theater stage in itself. One could bump into Janis Joplin coming to have a “glass” of brandy-and-Benedictine after a concert, a babysitter who told her she saw death in her aura, a so-called delivery man from Chicken Delight or a former classmate who, after 14 years, resurfaced as a private detective. It was not uncommon for her to receive crazy phone calls from people wanting to save her through Scientology or enroll her in drug deals. It was a strange time, and yet few things managed to surprise her.

She mentions for a moment the case of Jody Fouquet, a symbol of that ordinary violence, totally arbitrary and without any apparent logic. At 7:15 a.m. on October 25, 1969, Thomas Craven of the California Highway Patrol went to Jody Fouquet’s assistance, a five-year-old girl, abandoned by her mother in the middle of the highway and who spent the entire night on the median strip. Betty Lansdown Fouquet, 26 years old and mother of seven children, claimed for her defense to have committed this act in order to save her daughter's life. Her husband, Ronald Fouquet, 31 years old, had been threatening to leave her to die in the desert. Betty had four children from a first marriage to Billy Joe Lansdown. Ronald happened to be Jody's stepfather and the father of her last three children. A violent person, who regularly rained blows on the whole family.

During this case, the court of law realized that one of the children was missing, little Jeffrey was nowhere to be found. Betty then confessed. She told how, three years earlier, in 1966, Ronald beat to death the little child, who was himself five years old at the time. She described a jealous Ronald who could not stand Jeffrey being the son of another man. The police had indeed discovered the body of a little boy at the foot of a dike, but his advanced state of decomposition did not allow him to be identified. After his death, Jeffrey's body was packed into a modest suitcase. She, her husband, and three other of her children drove into the desert where Jeffrey was simply dropped from the car.

Joan Didion also dwells on the murder of actor Ramón Novarro, then 69 years old. A world star of silent movies since his role in Ben Hur (1925), he was brutally murdered at his home in Laurel Canyon, not far from where she lived.

After Bob Dylan and the Greenwich Village, Laurel Canyon had become the epicenter of the rock revolution. From New York to Los Angeles, the music scene set up home in the West. Everyone moved to Laurel Canyon. Actors, musicians, artists formed a most open community where freedom and creative competition prevailed. In the neighborhood: the Rolling Stones, Frank Zappa, Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash, Neil Young, David Crosby, the Byrds, the Turtles, the Doors, Buffalo Springfield..., to name a few.

There was a lot of freedom. There was a lot of drugs. There was a lot of beautiful women. There was a lot of good rock n’ roll being made. It was a fabulous time.

(Graham Nash, guitarist of Crosby, Stills & Nash, in episode 10: « Sex, Drugs, and Rock N’ Roll (1960-1969) » from the documentary series about the Sixties. Cf. footnotes).

And yet, on October 30, 1968, the Ferguson brothers ended up shattering this idyllic setting. Nine days earlier, Thomas Ferguson, 17 years old, showed up in Los Angeles at his brother’s house, Paul, 22 years old, whom he had not seen for two years. He had just escaped from a reformatory in Illinois. The two brothers were not really close, as they only grew up for a short period of time under the same roof.

Coming from a family of ten children, the father was a steeplejack and dragged his family from one place to another, between Alabama and Illinois. When he wasn't away for weeks, he preferred to indulge in alcohol rather than provide for food or rent. Paul claimed to have prostituted himself since the age of 10 to meet his family’s needs. At 14 he definitely set sail. Hitchhiking, he worked on various ranches in Mexico and Wyoming. At 15, he joined the army, lying about his age. He was honorably discharged the following year.

As for Thomas, he went from juvenile detention centers to stays in psychiatric establishments. He ran away at the age of 15. When Thomas arrived at his home, Paul had been married to Mari for three months. The two lovebirds met via Larry Ortega, Mari's brother, a prostitute who played pimp from time to time. Paul just got fired from his last job and he and Mari were penniless. The tension was mounting and Mari left to live with her parents for a while. Paul then decided to arrange a deal for “Tommy”. He therefore called Victor Nichols, a real estate developer with links to the world of prostitution, and he was given the telephone number of a man named Novarro.

The Sixties were far from being a time of tolerance and the actor lived his homosexuality in a hidden way. He often called on escorts. This is how, by the coincidences of life, the Ferguson brothers found themselves at his house, on that eve of Halloween.

After years of alcoholism, Novarro's career had long been on the decline. That did not prevent him from wanting to impress the Ferguson brothers who probably thought they had stumbled upon the goose that lays the golden eggs. With the help of alcohol, things got out of hand. Paul and Thomas expected to find 5000 dollars; they went back home with 20 dollars in the bag and left a swollen, naked, bloody corpse, tied to an electric cord. The autopsy revealed that Novarro had choked on his own blood due to multiple traumatic injuries to his face, neck, nose and mouth.

JOEL MCCREA AND RAMÓN NOVARRO IN THE WESTERN THE OUTRIDERS, 1950.

About the summer of 1968, Joan Didion would say: “an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response.” And for good reason, to ordinary violence was responding political violence. In barely two months, America successively lost two of its greatest leaders: Martin Luther King, assassinated on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee, and Bobby Kennedy, assassinated on June 5, 1968 (he died the next day) in Los Angeles, after winning the Democratic primary in California. And Lauren Bacall to let out this cry:

I mean, what happens to the country? I mean, you wonder if it’s worth saving, you know. What is it? What’s left of this country?

(Episode 8: « 1968 » from the documentary series about the Sixties. Cf. footnotes).

But we have to rewind the movie to understand to what extent the poison of violence had permeated all strata of American society, being testament to a general crisis of political and moral values ​​that was shaking America in the Sixties.

On November 8, 1960, John Fitzgerald Kennedy won the presidential election against Republican Richard Nixon, who was none other than Eisenhower's Vice-President (1953-1961). The Harvard Dream Team, the Best and Brightest, hence acceded to the White House at the start of 1961. Kennedy was young, barely 43 years old. Beautiful, brilliant, dynamic, in the spirit of the times, he embodied a breath of renewal and hope, in an America where one in two Americans was under thirty. This was a president who looked like them. He “became the hero of all those who remained convinced that America, through its intelligence, its resources and its quality of life, would constitute a model which would peacefully demonstrate the superiority of its system and its institutions over the barbarity of communist regimes.[1]” In short, the wish for a fairer, less puritanical and more humanist America.

Many also expected him to confirm Black people Civil Rights through legislation. “In the Southern states, Black people were still considered second-class citizens. Since 1896, their social life had been governed by the formula “separate but equals”. The founding principle of all apartheids.[2]” They did not have the right to vote, contrary to the Northern states, and in addition to being exploited, were often victims of lynchings and summary executions. Thus, the populations of the industrial cities of the North, youngsters, Black people, women, students and intellectuals were behind Kennedy. But make no mistake, with a record turnout and a gap of barely 113 000 votes with Nixon, that being 0.07%, America was well and truly cut in two.

As pledges to the Republicans, Kennedy kept in office Allen Dulles and Edgar Hoover, respectively heads of the CIA and the FBI, even if the latter remained totally assimilated to the Cold War and McCarthyism. Suffice to say that the time of schemes was not about to end.

The President also had to deal with the “Dixiecrats”, these Democrat parliamentarians from the Southern states, segregationists and for the most part ultraconservatives. Originally, Dixie or Dixieland, was the nickname given to the territory covered by the former Confederate States of America, namely South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas, to which were added four other secessionist states, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina. They were sometimes associated with the equally slave states that were West Virginia, Missouri, Kentucky and Maryland, but which them remained loyal to the Union during the Civil War (1861-1865).

To understand correctly, on this year of 1961, all the governors of these states, without exception, were Democrats. “No Southerner would have condescended to vote Republican, the party of Lincoln and Grant, of Emancipation and Reconstruction. Permanent paradox of the Democrat Party, libertarian and progressive in the North, segregationist and conservative in the South.[3]” Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant were both Republicans. Respectively 16th President of the United States (1861-1865) and 18th President of the United States (1869-1877), one proclaimed the abolition of slavery in 1863 when the other commanded the Unionist armies during the Civil War. We then understand better the old overtones and the aversion to the Republican Party still present at that time. However, it was in these Democrat lands that white supremacists were acting without any qualms in complete impunity and where the all range of segregationist laws called “Jim Crow” applied. Black people obviously wanted to definitively shake off the shackles of domination and for the decisions of the Supreme Court to finally apply in these Southern states.

To help him, Kennedy would rely on the second on the Democrat ticket, Lyndon Baines Johnson, a Texan and wise politician, he was also leader of the senatorial majority. Even if at that moment, the President found himself his hands tied, not having a “liberal” majority in Congress; therefore, Black people had yet to be patient and wait at least for the midterms of November 1962 to take place to witness any progress in the territory of Civil Rights.

To tell the truth, on this year of 1961, JFK's attention was rather focused on the Soviet Union. In line with the doctrine of “containment” (keeping communists within their territorial boundaries) stated by Truman (President of the United States from 1945 to 1953) whose logic led Eisenhower to support the bloodthirsty dictatorship of Batista in Cuba or else the despotic regime of Diem in South Vietnam, Kennedy took a very dim view of the bridgehead offered to the Soviets by Castro about sixty miles from the American coasts.

After the Bay of Pigs fiasco on April 20, 1961, yet an operation he gave the green light to, the Vienna Summit of June 3 and 4, 1961, between John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev ended in failure. That meeting aimed to attempt to appease tensions between the two blocs. However, Soviet nuclear tests resumed on August 5, and at the end of August the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union finished the construction of “his” Berlin Wall. Tension kept intensifying with the Russian leader, peaking during the second Cuban crisis, where from October 16 to 28, 1962, we verged straight on the Third World War, before Khrushchev finally packed up his nuclear missiles.

The conflict could have meant mutual destruction, carrying off the entire planet with it. The idea of ​​a nuclear war was on everyone's minds and was far from being an abstract notion for the Americans who came out of this crisis traumatized. Consumer society dictates, air raid shelters became really popular, bunkers being more and more sophisticated. As for the young Americans, since Truman and the establishment of "school drills", they were periodically subjected to simulated nuclear attacks where they were taught to hide under their school desk like Bert the Turtle. So nothing that felt reassuring. Kennedy's composure in this matter was in any case remarkable and allowed him to restore his image internationally. So, in the absence of waging a conventional war, the competition between the two powers took place in space.

Since the Beep-Beep of October 1957, the sound of the signal transmitted by the Russian Sputnik, the first satellite put into orbit by human technology, 560 miles above our heads, American space science was behind the times. On April 12, 1961, Russian scientists sent this time into orbit the first man into space. Yuri Gagarin carried out a 108-minutes flight aboard the Vostok 1 spacecraft. That was it for Kennedy, who appeared before Congress on May 25, 1961. He proposed an increased budget of 7 to 9 billion dollars in order to finance the conquest of the Moon. This was the birth of the Apollo project. The goal: to send and safely return a man to the Moon within the next decade. It received the support of the overwhelming majority of Congress.

Truman had ordered the resumption of research and testing of the H-Bomb, the thermonuclear atomic bomb; Eisenhower in his end-of-term speech oddly warned against the uncontrolled militarization of society. We were right out in it. Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, a new military budget was presented before Congress. On a considerable rise, it was supposed to be added to NASA's budget for the Apollo project. The proposal was passed without difficulty. All this money, which must be counted in billions of dollars, could have been used to finance the long-awaited social and educational reforms, in a country where one in five Americans, so 20% of the population, still lived below the poverty line. However, with unemployment reaching a record rate of 8% and growth below 4 points, the new administration was choosing to respond to the recession with a massive injection of military credits. From capitalism to economic planning, the line became increasingly tenuous.

On May 17, 1954, the United States Supreme Court declared segregation in schools unconstitutional. Nine years later, George C. Wallace, the governor of Alabama, was still trying to ban the enrollment of two young Black students at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Vivian Malone and Jimmy Hood, both twenty years old, were to their detriment, the heroes of a saga that kept all of America on tenterhooks at a time when almost 88% of the population owned a television set.

On June 7, 1963, Governor Wallace ordered the presence of 500 Alabama National Guardsmen near the university. On June 11, 1963, the situation becoming untenable and not wanting to repeat the experience lived by James Meredith, this Black student and former US Force, for whom it took three months and the presence of 400 federal agents to finally be registered at Oxford University in Mississippi, and whose riots cost the lives of two people in 1962, President Kennedy finally used his power. Paying no heed to the old feud over state law, he federalized Governor Wallace's troops, which aimed to place them directly under his command. A clear message was sent, no one was above the law and from now on the fight for Civil Rights would become the top priority of the Kennedy administration.

Until then, he and his brother Robert Kennedy, the brilliant Attorney General, had known how to defuse situations with understanding, preventing violence from worsening, negotiating with governors to resolve problems one by one. But there was no real policy designed in favor of Black people. They were the ones, who through their courage, their determination and their non-violent strategy, with their numerous sit-ins and the famous "Freedom Riders", who did not hesitate to venture into the most racist towns of “Dixieland” where each time angry packs of the KU KLUX KLAN and local sheriffs conspicuously silent awaited them, when they did not send their dogs or water cannons to disperse the crowd before carrying out mass arrests; they were the ones who shook the foundations of segregation. They were finally going to be heard. That same day, President Kennedy delivered his magnificent “Civil Rights Address”.

“This is not a sectional issue. Difficulties over segregation and discrimination exist in every city, in every State of the Union. […] But law, alone, cannot make man see right. We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. […]

Next week I shall ask the Congress of the United States to act, to make a commitment it has not fully made in this century to the proposition that race has no place in American life or law. And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.”

A few hours later, Medgar Evers, a Black Civil Rights activist and World War II veteran, was murdered in front of his home in the presence of his wife and children, in Jackson, Mississippi.

1963 marked the hundredth anniversary of the abolition of slavery. A peaceful march “The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” was held in Washington in front of the Abraham Lincoln memorial on August 28, 1963. Bringing together nearly 300 000 people, a quarter of whom were White, it was the largest demonstration ever organized in the federal capital until then. A feeling of hope for all these activists and anonymous people, and a way of reminding Congress of the urgency to pass a strong bill for Civil Rights within the year. “We Shall Overcome”, a gospel song performed by Joan Baez, was followed by the unforgettable “I Have a Dream” by Martin Luther King, to which responded, two weeks later, the bombing of Birmingham in Alabama. Perpetrated on September 15, 1963, against a Baptist church, the attack killed four Black young girls and left a fifth one partially blind. The road to freedom promised to be long still.

In Vietnam, the situation was being monitored closely. Convinced, according to the famous domino theory, that if South Vietnam happened to fall into the hands of the communists then the rest of the countries of South-East Asia (Laos, Cambodia, Philippines, etc.) would follow the same path, The United States did not hesitate to put in place and support the dictatorial regime of the catholic Diem. A proven tyrant at the head of a corrupt and isolated regime, whose army was trained and financed by the CIA, he continually lashed out at Buddhists, excluded from political life and yet forming the majority in the South. Some bonzes even went as far as setting themselves on fire as a sign of protest. In June 1961, 600 “US military advisors” could be counted on site. In August 1963, while Diem organized the repression of bonzes throughout South Vietnam, no fewer than 16 000 American soldiers were now in the country.

From an ethical and moral point of view, the United States found itself in a difficult position. How far to go to contain the communists within their borders? While Kennedy had promised peace and prosperity to the rest of the world, the showcase presented by Diem was most embarrassing. On November 1, 1963, it was in any case a victorious coup d'état which got over this hated president, under the watchful eye of the Americans.

Just a few days later, on November 22, 1963, a shock wave crossed America. President Kennedy had just been assassinated in Dallas, Texas, in the middle of an official parade. A sniper's bullet hit his brain. He died at one in the afternoon. Probably the beginning of twilight and the turning point of the Sixties.

Lyndon B. Johnson as Vice President deputized and was elected 36th President of the United States in the elections of November 1964. Concerns remained unchanged; the Johnson administration still had its eyes fixed on Vietnam.

On August 2, 1964, we learned by the press that three PT boats (torpedo boats), identified by the American State Department as being North Vietnamese, attacked the USS Maddox, a destroyer which was operating in the Gulf of Tonkin, about 40 miles off the North Vietnamese coast. The reality is that this attack was a response to covert operations led by the United States against North Vietnam. Two days later, the press reported new naval battles in the same Gulf of Tonkin, citing unofficial sources. This information turned out to be inaccurate and just an excuse to show off some muscle.

America was going to succumb to the pressure of its right wing, listening ever more carefully to its military advisors. This resulted in the Gulf of Tonkin resolution of August 7, 1964, which gave President Johnson full powers. He was now able to use all the American military force he would deem necessary to defend American interests without prior control from Congress. This is how the United States gradually slipped into a most deadly spiral.

Johnson did not have the composure of Kennedy and at the beginning of 1965, he authorized Operation “Rolling Thunder”, a sustained bombing campaign against North Vietnam. “Then landed the first operational contingent, three thousand five hundred marines to protect the Da Nang air base, from where the B-52s, the gigantic strategic bombers built by Boeing, were taking off.[4]” The toll was heavy, 25 000 civilians killed within the year, the American army was not known for its intricate work. The Vietnamese jungle was beginning to smell strongly of napalm.

We were blowing up and burning down this country we were supposed to be saving.

(Neil Sheehan, former correspondent of UPI (United Press International), in episode 4: « The War in Vietnam (1961-1968) » from the documentary series about the Sixties. Cf. footnotes).

On July 28, 1965, in a live television address from the White House, President Johnson announced the immediate sending of 50 000 additional troops, bringing the total American presence there to 125 000 men. To do this, he increased the number of the Draft Call (the call of young boys over 18 years old in a fit state to serve) from 17 000 to 35 000 men per month.

The Draft (or conscription) was implemented during World War II. At the age of 18, American boys were required to register in the draft lists for a possible mobilization. Depending on its needs, the army called on these young men who became the Drafted (the enlisted). With this irony, that they were considered too young to be able to vote but not to go to war. Exemptions existed, particularly for those continuing a college education, thereby favoring children from the well-off. Thus, many children of parliamentarians did not go, which kept fueling a feeling of injustice.

As for the others, they hence only had their eyes left to cry or the difficult option of going underground. Little by little, the Draft Resistance was organizing. Like David J. Miller, this 22-year-old pacifist, who on October 15, 1965, did not hesitate to publicly burn his Draft Card (his order of enlistment) during a demonstration in New York, thereby risking a $10 000 fine and a sentence of up to five years in prison. Thousands of young people would follow his heels, before ending up, for some, getting lost in the wandering of artificial paradises.

Like Kerouac's heroes in the book On the Road, an emblematic work of the Beat Generation published in 1957, thousands of young people were about to start their initiatory journey to the West, heading towards the Promised Land, San Francisco, “the craziest city in America”. There the Beautiful People awaited them, who, by way of LSD, were promising fraternity, love and peace. In search of a new horizon and eager to find some spiritual meaning in life, far from the materialist paradigm offered by American society, these uprooted kids would for a time succumb to the call of the Other World thanks to the wonders of chemistry.

Discovered in Switzerland in 1938 by Albert Hofmann, a researcher at Laboratoires Sandoz, working on the development of analgesics, the hallucinogenic effects of LSD were immediately identified. The Nazis took advantage of the opportunity to conduct multiple experiments with the aim of eliminating the will of the subjects treated with the ambition of being able to exercise total control over the brains of their enemies. The CIA, which thereafter laid hands on these reports, got the green light from Dulles to deal with this research in depth. Large doses of acid were first imported from Switzerland, before being gradually replaced by a domestic production. In order to carry out this research, numerous scientific foundations were about to see the light of day, not hesitating to set foot on American campuses.

LSD was not yet an illegal substance and the researchers had no trouble recruiting a cohort of volunteers, paid $20 per session, who came to enjoy a “trip” at the CIA’s expense. Among them, Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962). With his band of Merry Pranksters, he became the champion of acid consumption and one of the main architects of the propagation of psychedelia.

He thus organized the Acid Tests, these giant parties, where the acid was diluted in large pitchers of Kool-Aid, a sort of punch, and where rock music, beating to the sound of the Grateful Dead, dance and the strobes light, were enabling the crowd to access the Holy Grail. The idea was to be in tune with the Universe, free humanity from its bad vibrations by taking LSD and, in this collective effort, purge the world of its hatred and ugliness; a utopia that spit out thousands of junkies.

Already in 1956, Allen Ginsberg warned in the poem Howl:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for
an angry fix…

These young people in great distress could be found in the famous Haight-Ashbury district and the only ones to show some concern and come to their aid were the Diggers, an avant-garde theatrical troupe.

Each day, they collected huge sides of beef from nearby butchers and cooked a stew which they distributed for free. They also organized clothing collections which they stored in a warehouse where everyone could come and find something to wear. They were finally an attentive ear for this desolate and suffering community. They did not hesitate to regularly publish press releases that they displayed in town, some of which send shivers down your spine:

Pretty little 16-year-old middle class chick comes to the Haight to see what it's all about & gets picked up by a 17-year-old street dealer who spends all day shooting her full of speed again & again, then feeds her 3000 mikes and raffles off her temporarily unemployed body for the biggest Haight Street gang bang since the night before last. The politics & ethics of ecstasy. Rape is as common as bullshit on Haight Street. […] Kids are starving on the Street. Minds & bodies are being maimed as we watch, a scale model of Vietnam. […] Are you aware that Haight Street is just as bad as the squares say it is? 

Chester Anderson
April 16, 1967

From dream to nightmare, 1967 marked the lost illusions of the Beautiful People. Haight-Ashbury had become a zoo where tourist buses followed one another filled with squares (middle-class persons) coming to witness the show of these young people on the road to perdition and where fraternity went out the window in a dog’s age. Them who were fleeing the rigidity of their homes and a sanitized world were now caught up by the leisure society, becoming despite themselves consumer goods. The loop was closed.

In 1966, California and Nevada became the first states to ban the production, sale and use of LSD. In 1968, a US federal law made its possession illegal throughout the United States. The end of recess had chimed. And yet, as a final nose-thumbing to the authorities, the summer of 1967 was dictated Summer of Love.

After the incredible Monterey Pop Festival on June 16, 17 and 18, which saw bloom Janis Joplin and Otis Redding become known, hundreds of thousands of young people would gather in the largest cities of America, from the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco to Los Angeles by way of New York, Detroit or Miami, to celebrate love in music and on acid.

Peace, Love & Rock’n Roll, and the group that was acing in 1968, were indeed the Doors. Since the success of the title Light my Fire, released as a single in April 1967 and which reached the 1st place on the Billboard 100 in July 1967, the group was experiencing a lightning ascent. It seemed a long time ago when Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek, both newly graduates from UCLA (University of California Los Angeles), met on Venice Beach one afternoon in July 1965, and decided to form, with this energy and enthusiasm of youth, what would become one of the greatest rock bands of all time, selling on their own more than 100 million albums around the world. That same summer, they would be joined by guitarist Robbie Krieger and drummer John Densmore. The legend could begin.

In May 1966, they landed a contract at Whiskey A Go Go, a trendy bar on the famous Sunset Strip, where all the youth of Los Angeles flocked to. They were for instance the opening act for Them, a band came straight from Belfast, and led by the sulfurous Van Morrison. The Doors were thus learning from the best. If the beginnings were quite timid, Jim Morrison having difficulty establishing himself in front of the public, he quickly found his footing and little by little his acting style was put in place. So when he launched into the verses of his song The End and added, probably under the influence of LSD, a:

Father? Yes, son? I want to kill you
Mother? I want to fuck you all night long

The group was squarely kicked off the bar. What does it matter? In November 1966, they signed a contract with Elektra Records, for a commitment to seven albums.

WHISKY A GO GO ON SUNSET STRIP, 1966.

On January 4, 1967, they released their first album, simply titled The Doors. It included in particular the songs Break on Through, Light My Fire and The End with the oedipal lyrics added to the recording. It remained in the top 10 of the American charts for almost ten months. Barely a few months later, on September 25, 1967, they kept it going with the release of their second opus, Strange Days. Despite being in the shadow of the first album which was still well ahead of sales, there was no lack of commercial success.

At the end of summer 1967, photographer Joel Brodsky immortalized Jim Morrison posing shirtless with his famous leather pants, in a series of black and white photos, entitled “The Young Lion”. Now set up as a sex symbol, the Doors frontman made the cover of magazines. In just a few weeks, he rose to icon status, idolized by thousands of fans. Finding it ever more difficult to cope with the pressure of fame, he then drastically increased his consumption of drugs and alcohol.

In December 1967, it was squarely on stage, in the middle of a concert, in New Haven, Connecticut, that he got arrested by the police for indecent conduct. A first in the world of rock music, which contributed to forge his image as a rebel and added to the mysticism that was surrounding him.

Right in the middle of his performance, Jim Morrison suddenly stopped, lighted a cigarette and began to tell a stunned audience about an incident that had just taken place a few hours earlier backstage. While he was in the shower area with a girl, a police officer surprised them and, not recognizing the leader of the Doors, asked them to leave. To which the singer would have replied: “Eat it!”. The policeman then took out a tear gas canister before warning: “Last chance!” and Jim Morrison answered back: “Last chance to eat it!” and ended up being sprayed with irritating gas. Obviously, during his story, Morrison took the opportunity to openly mock the police officer in question, going as far as to call him a “little blue pig”. The police officers ensuring safety on site most probably did not have the same sense of humor.

When in January 1968, the Doors went into the recording studio to produce their third album Waiting For The Sun, the atmosphere was far from being set fair. Joan Didion, who, one spring evening, dropped by Sunset Sound Studios, reported on that palpable tension.

Jim Morrison was missing. For some time now, he got into the annoying habit of coming late, most often in a state of intoxication when he was not completely stoned. The wait was becoming increasingly oppressive for the other members of the group. But there you go; Jim Morrison was demotivated and lacking inspiration. The recording of the disc took almost five months after a most laborious process. Joan Didion herself “did not see it through”.

On July 3, 1968, Waiting For The Sun was finally released. It would be the only Doors album to reach No. 1 for four consecutive weeks. The title Hello I Love You which opens the album also took the lead on the Billboard and became the group's best seller since the success of Light My Fire. And for the first time, the Doors entered the English charts, climbing directly to 16th place.

On July 5, 1968, they followed up with a legendary concert at the Hollywood Bowl, the only one to have been filmed in its entirety. For the opening act, they got none other than the Chambers Brothers and Steppenwolf. Jim Morrison was in good shape and gave a quality performance. Everything seemed to be going well. So there was a general amazement when he announced to the other members of the band his intention to stop playing music to dedicate himself exclusively to poetry and film production.

This year of 1968, definitely was placed under ill omens.

If you look at the whole year as theater, as real acts of tragedy, there’s an almost poetic feeling to it. 1968 was one goddamn thing after another.

(Lance Morrow, essayist at Time Magazine, in episode 8: « 1968 » from the documentary series about the Sixties. Cf. footnotes).

On the night of January 30 to 31, 1968, the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NFL), otherwise called the Viet Cong, taking advantage of the Tet festivities which mark the transition to the New Year, launched a general offensive throughout South Vietnam. Some 80 000 communist soldiers simultaneously assaulted the country's largest cities, including Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam. Key buildings were targeted, among which the brand new American embassy, ​​yet considered impregnable. The astonishment was absolute. Americans and South Vietnamese were taken completely by surprise, thereby exposing the weak control of the American army.

The imperial city of Hue, historic capital of Annam, was not regained until March 2, at the cost of fierce fighting. It numbers among the bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War, with several thousand civilians executed, lying in the middle of a city in ruins.

If the Viet Cong ended up suffering a military failure, with half of its men out of action, including more than 30 000 killed and thousands taken prisoners, the political success, as for it, was unequivocal. Indeed, the psychological impact of the offensive on American public opinion eventually got the better of the Johnson administration.

The United States counted more than 20 000 dead in Vietnam at the end of 1967, some 500 000 soldiers deployed and billions in military expenditures, the pill was therefore extremely bitter. Certain unease began to spread among the American population. Either the government had lied about the conflict proceedings, pointedly repeating “we are winning in Vietnam”, or it had no idea what was really happening there. And Walter Conkrite, star of CBS News, to sum up the general feeling:

It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam, is to end in a stalemate.

(Episode 4: « The War in Vietnam (1961-1968) » from the documentary series about the Sixties. Cf. footnotes).

On this February 27, 1968, with these few words, President Johnson was about to lose the support of Middle America.

1968 was an election year and opponents to the war were looking for a new leader. Like many others, Robert Kennedy was approached but refused the offer. Among the close relations of the Kennedy clan, it was considered that the nomination of the Democratic Party was in the hands of the President. LBJ seemed unbeatable; Bobby's turn would come in 1972. Indeed, running against the incumbent President of your own party remained a taboo.

Ultimately, the role fell to Eugene McCarthy, Senator from Minnesota. Coming from the left wing of the party, he was not considered at that time a serious potential candidate. Johnson did not sense danger. Yet, with his platform “Peace”, McCarthy became a sounding board for a large part of the youth overcome by frustration and even despair faced with the situation in Vietnam. Many students would join him, and also for the requirements of the campaign and the traditional door-to-door, cut their hair and shave their beard, with the famous slogan “Get clean for Gene”.

On March 12, 1968, the first primary of the Democratic Party unfolded in New Hampshire. If McCarthy reached even 30%, then he could legitimately claim a major victory. He obtained 42% of the votes.

It was a hard blow for Johnson who did not even campaign so much his nomination to run for a second term seemed obvious to him. But, combining all the votes, he was below the 50% mark. Such a humiliation facing a candidate almost unknown to everyone not long ago, spoke volumes about the President's vulnerability. Within the Democratic Party, everyone took cognizance of the result and repositioned himself. Thus, on March 16, 1968, Robert Kennedy, in turn, announced his candidacy for the Presidential election of the United States.

In view of this new political reality, and in a context of general discontent with the Vietnam War, where not a day went by without a demonstration taking place in the country, President Johnson ended up throwing in the towel. In a television address on March 31, 1968, he announced not “wanting” to run for office. It was a political earthquake.

He who rushed Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act in 1964, and signed the Voting Rights Act the following year, while initiating the implementation of numerous social programs such as Medicare, thus remained forever tied to the fate of this war, judged responsible for having sent thousands of Americans to be decimated on the other side of the world. Already in 1965, Johnson made this terrible admission:

… a man can fight if he can see daylight down the road somewhere, but they ain’t no daylight in Vietnam. There’s not a bit.

(Phone conversation on March 6, 1965, with Richard Russell, Senator of Georgia. Episode 4: « The War in Vietnam (1961-1968) » from the documentary series about the Sixties. Cf. footnotes).

He had just paid a high price for it that day.

It was in the same month of March that Joan Didion went to Alameda prison in California to visit Huey P. Newton. It could have been the banal story of a young Black man arrested in the United States, except that Newton was one of the founders of the Black Panther Party.

HUEY P. NEWTON, ALAMEDA COUNTY JAIL, CALIFORNIA, 1968.

I suppose I went because I was interested in the alchemy of issues, for an issue, is what Huey Newton had by then become. […] In many ways he was more useful to the revolution behind bars than on the street.

On October 28, 1967, around 5 a.m., while Newton was at the wheel of his car with a friend, John Frey, an Oakland police officer, carried out checks on it. Recognizing the leader of the Black Panthers, Frey called for reinforcements. What happened next is chaotic and uncertain. Newton was arrested and from there shots would have been fired on both sides. Officer John Frey was shot four times and died within the hour. He was 23 years old. His colleague Herbert Heanes was in critical condition, he was shot three times. As for Huey Newton, he was taken to Kaiser Hospital in Oakland to treat a bullet to the stomach. He was incarcerated immediately after. He faced the death penalty at just 25 years old.

At this time, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense was still in its infancy. Created a year earlier, on October 1966, by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, two former students of Merritt College in Oakland, their ideological line was inspired by the most emblematic or radical figures of the time, especially Che Guevara and Malcolm X.

From one they took over the military symbolic and from the other the criticism of the choice of non-violence made by the main leaders of the fight for Civil Rights. A few months before his assassination, on February 21, 1965, Malcolm X, however, performed a turnaround by calling to support any movement in favor of Black people, thereby promoting the fact of going beyond Black Nationalism and opening the possibility of alliances with leaders of movements led by Whites, which proved to be very useful when defending Newton.

The Black Panthers then advocated direct action and above all claimed the legitimacy of armed self-defense, always within the strict framework of the law. Newton believed that Black people were discriminated against in part because they were ignorant of the laws and social institutions that could protect them, namely, for instance, the permit of the unconcealed carrying of weapons, in accordance with the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution and the legislation still applicable at the time in the State of California.

This idea that violence could be considered as the essential vector for any social change had slowly gained ground among a growing portion of the younger generation. Black people were tired of mourning their dead and, for some time now, the pacifist doctrine of Martin Luther King, considered ineffective or even dangerous, had been eclipsed in aid of a more radical activism.

This new direction was also in line with Black Power, a concept defined by Stokely Carmichael, elected in 1966 at the head of the SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), one of the historic organizations of the Black movement. After his mandate, the SNCC would only keep non-violence in the name, Carmichael exhorting to the political autonomy of Black people and the necessity of the quest for power, the only condition according to him to their emancipation.

Present during the Selma March in 1965, alongside Martin Luther King, a journalist questioned him about the use of violence. Here is what he said:

Well I just don’t see it as a way of life. I never have. But I also realize that no one in this country is asking the White community in the South to be nonviolent. And that, in a sense, it’s giving them a free license to go ahead and shoot us as will.

(Episode 5: « A Long March to Freedom (1960-1968) » from the documentary series about the Sixties. Cf. footnotes).

In Oakland, relations between the police and inhabitants of Black neighborhoods had deteriorated for a long time. Between harassment and unjustified daily beatings-up, the population suffered the wrath of an endemic and institutional racism, less spectacular than in the South but just as devastating.

The Black Panthers therefore decided to traverse the city by car in order to oversee the smooth running of the various questionings or arrests, like a vigilanti patrol, ready to intervene in the event of any police misconduct. Always at a good distance but clearly visible, weapons in hand, they aimed to be a deterrent force. An affront to the authorities, who without delay whipped out the Mulford law, adopted in July 1967, prohibiting the carrying of loaded weapons in public spaces in the State of California.

In fact, forced to abandon armed patrols, the Black Panthers reoriented their action with the implementation of multiple social programs which found a positive response among the population.

For instance, they founded the Oakland Community School, a free school providing quality education to nearly 150 children from poor neighborhoods. They opened free dispensaries, to facilitate access to healthcare for the Black community, or even distributed breakfasts, also free, for the poorest children. More than 20 000 breakfasts would be served each week in 19 cities across the country, solidarity being their operative word.

A left-wing party, the Black Panthers saw themselves from the start as an anti-capitalist and internationalist movement. So for them, the fight for the emancipation of Black people was not part of a racial struggle but rather a class struggle. It would also be one of the first Black organizations in the country to claim to adhere to communism. It was enough to be in the crosshairs of a certain Edgar Hoover, who more than anything, feared the arrival of a new “Messiah”, and would not hesitate to describe this distribution of breakfasts as danger to the nation.

From then on, everything would be done to discredit the movement. Infiltrations, disinformation, mass arrests, or disguised assassinations, the dark hours of COINTELPRO (counterespionage program) were about to chime.

And yet, one just have to linger for a moment over the 10-point program drawn up by Newton and Seale, a sort of party manifesto, to realize that there was nothing very revolutionary about it. It by the way refers to the American Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Better access to housing, employment, education, the stop of lynchings and police brutality, fair justice, demands that seem to be self-evident today. Because if in the South they fought for Civil Rights, in the North they demonstrated above all for the right to work and to dignity. A profound anger was simmering in the ghettos of which the Watts district still bore the scars.

Like many others, Newton was one of the children of the 2nd Great African-American Migration settled around the San Francisco Bay Area. With his Executive Order 8802, signed on June 25, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt prohibited racial discrimination in the defense industry. A pull factor and an opportunity that more than 5 million Black Americans would seize, ready to give up everything in the hope of a better life. Destination the Northeast, the Midwest, but also the West Coast of the United States, to cities like Oakland, Phoenix, Portland or Seattle, which then benefited from numerous jobs in the military industry.

However, the welcoming committee was not the warmest, as evidenced by the discriminatory practice of “redlining”, consisting of preventing certain minorities, including African-Americans, from renting or buying houses in certain neighborhoods. Thus, in Los Angeles, most of the city was tacitly forbidden to them. Two of the few neighborhoods where Black people could settle were Compton and Watts. A segregation that did not have the name but that showed all its forms. And to this would be added a myriad of injustices.

For similar housing, rents remained much higher for Black people than for White ones, with buildings for the most part unsanitary and damaged. Regarding education, the lack of resources was also sorely felt. Two-thirds of the Watts neighborhood's residents did not complete high school and an eighth was illiterate, while at the same time, employment discrimination still applied outside the defense industry. Market prices also remained higher for Black people, with businesses run by Whites having a habit of underpaying Black employees while maintaining very high sales prices, making many goods de facto inaccessible. And if we finally tally the incessant police brutality – between 1963 and 1965, 65 residents of the neighborhood were killed by the police, including 27 in the back and 25 unarmed – we have here all the ingredients of a social powder keg.

On the evening of August 11, 1965, Marquette Frye, a young Black man of 21 years old, was arrested while driving his mother's car. He tested positive for alcohol after submitting to a Breathalyzer. The police officer in charge, Lee Minikus, therefore arrested him for drunk driving and called a reinforcement team to seize the vehicle. It was then that Marquette's brother, Ronald Frye, also present, left to look for their mother, Rena Price, who arrived a few minutes later at the scene of the incident. The voice raised in front of an increasingly large flock of passersby and police officers. Between melees, shouts and blows, the police officers were quickly overwhelmed so much so that they tried to pick up Ronald Frye by force. Witnesses to the scene then warned other residents of the neighborhood. Furthermore, a police officer would have hit a pregnant woman; they now came running en masse.

The result: six days of riots, where from August 11 to 17, 1965, the entire neighborhood was transformed into an absolute battlefield. Police Chief William H. Parker did not hesitate to involve the army and establish a curfew zone of 39 mi². Ultimately, more than 15 000 men of forces of law and order were mobilized. The death toll stood at 34, some 1000 injured and nearly 3500 arrests. The ghettos went up in flames, with many buildings and vehicles being set on fire to cries of “Burn Baby Burn”. Three years later, we would hear these same words resonate at the death of Martin Luther King. This time the insurrection would affect the entire country.

For the moment, the Black Panthers' concern was to do everything to transform Huey Newton into a political prisoner. The whole issue for the party was to succeed in establishing itself as a legitimate protest voice and in the long term becoming part of the Californian radical left-wing movement.

The task promised to be difficult. At the time Newton was arrested, the party counted barely more than the few members who formed its organizational chart. Namely, the President Bobby Seale, the Defense Minister Huey P. Newton, the spokesperson and Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver, or else the Communications Secretary Kathleen Cleaver.

This former SNCC recruit, she held the position of secretary in the New York division, knew perfectly the inner workings and organizational mechanics of a large-scale movement. She, who joined the Black Panthers in 1967 and married Eldridge Cleaver in December of the same year, was therefore going to be in charge of the campaign for the release of Huey Newton. Alliances would prove to be more than necessary, on the one hand to broaden the party base and on the other hand, to have at their disposal an operational structure capable of orchestrating the campaign.

A first rapprochement was carried out with the brand new Californian Peace and Freedom Party. This predominantly White political party campaigned in particular for women's rights, firmly fought against the war in Vietnam, and wished for greater support from the government to the Civil Rights movement, whose policy and measures taken were judged to be too slow and not quite effective.

In January 1968, more than 100 000 activists joined the party, thus qualifying Peace and Freedom for the November 1968 election. An alliance with the Black Panthers meant privileged access to the Black vote in the San Francisco Bay area. As for the Black Panthers, this allowed them to spread their message beyond the Black community, making Huey Newton the martyr-hero of the entire radical left. Newton was going to be tried by a mostly White jury, facing a White judge and White lawyers, so it was essential to emphasize the racial character of the trial, while relying on a large base of supporters, what is more, White and very active.

The masterstroke was not long in coming. On the occasion of Huey Newton's birthday, on February 17, 1968, two galas were organized, one in Oakland, and another one the next day in Los Angeles, under the joint aegis of the Black Panthers and the Peace and Freedom Party. Bringing together nearly 5000 demonstrators in support of Huey Newton, the slogan “Free Huey!” became the rallying cry of the protest; it would now be printed on buttons and t-shirts.

The event was also marked by the announcement of a partnership with the SNCC, the opportunity for Stockely Carmichael to take the floor. The catch was significant, Carmichael being considered one of the most famous Black activists in the world. SNCC executives were also appointed to key positions in the organization. Stockely Carmichael thus occupied the position of Honorary Prime Minister and H. Rap ​​Brown the one of Minister of Justice. However, the union only lasted for a short period of time before disintegrating a few months later, coming up against the intransigence of Black Nationalism advocated by the SNCC, which therefore took a very dim view of the alliance with the mostly White Peace and Freedom Party. But in this mid-February, the publicity coup was definitely real. So the Black Panthers were not going to stop there.

Every day, protests took place outside the Alameda courthouse, making the courthouse the focal point of activists, sympathizers, police and the media. The latter would have a field day with them. The Black Panthers were attractive. With their afro cut, their beret, their sunglasses, and their black leather jacket, they had a look that stood out and cut a fine figure. Everyone fought over them; the written press and television, papers about them were what sold.

The party would also ensure the regular presence of a certain number of its members and sympathizers in the public gallery of the courtroom. The objective being on the one hand, to show Newton that the Black Panthers were not abandoning him, to maintain constant pressure on the jury, and on the other hand, to suggest to the Whites that the movement was much more powerful than they could imagine, the people present in the courtroom forming theoretically only the tip of the iceberg. The revolution was underway.

This strategy was not without consequences for the party members. As the protests grew, police repression against the Black Panthers intensified. In the eyes of the FBI, the campaign to free Huey Newton did only confirm the need to neutralize the organization. Thus, Bobby Seale was arrested at his home, accused of conspiracy to commit murder.

The Cleavers, who lived in an apartment on Oak Street, were constantly being watched by the FBI. Suspected of hiding weapons, police searches were regularly carried out at their home. The excitement was therefore palpable when Joan Didion paid them a visit at the end of February. That same day, Eldridge Cleaver published Soul On Ice. In the book, he revisited his criminal past and recounted his experience at the Folsom prison, in California.

Arrested at the age of 18 for marijuana trafficking, he was convicted again in 1958, this time for rape, assault and attempted murder. The passage where he explained how he saw rape as an act of political inspiration caused a stir. For that matter he admitted having initially attacked Black women in the ghetto, in order to “practice”, before continuing and embarking on a series of White women rapes. Prison having transformed him, he said he unequivocally renounced the practice of rape and its insurrectional justification.

The success of the book was in any case immediate. Hundreds of thousands of copies were sold, fast-tracking Eldridge Cleaver, and even more so the Black Panthers, into the international foreground. Against all expectations, Eldridge Cleaver even became the moral backing of the intellectual left. Released in 1966 on parole, Cleaver's supervision was not supposed to end until 1971. The Sixties were magnificent in that everyone seemed to believe they could reinvent themselves. The presence at the Cleavers of the parole officer at the time of Joan Didion's visit demonstrated that this was not entirely the case.

KATHLEEN AND ELDRIDGE CLEAVER, ALGER 1969.

Huey Newton had become the symbol of the African-American struggle against White power. Proof of this sudden notoriety, the interviews came one after another for the co-founder of the Black Panthers. So Joan Didion was not the only one to show an interest in him. During their interview, a radio presenter and a journalist from the Los Angeles Times were also present. Eldridge Cleaver himself was there.

Political hero dictates, everyone wished for a piece of “God’s word”. Statements were needed to satisfy the press and activists. Thus we could hear Huey Newton quoting James Baldwin: “To be Black in America is to live in a constant state of rage.” No one could then imagine that a few weeks later, Martin Luther King would be assassinated, shot in the throat, while he was getting some fresh air on the balcony of his motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Once again, the heinous act of a segregationist.

The response came without delay. Riots broke out in more than a hundred American cities: Washington, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, New York, to name a few. Unable to contain their anger and indignation, Black people’s grief was being expressed through violent destruction. Once again the ghettos went up in flames. In Washington, the tension was such that machine guns were placed on the steps of the Capitol. At the end of three weeks of unrest, nearly 20 000 arrests could already be tallied.

On Martin Luther King’s tomb is engraved this epitaph extracted from an old Negro-spiritual, the sacred music of Black slaves:

Free at last, Free at last
Thank God Almighty, I’m free at last

He had sung these same words at the end of his incredible “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963. Unfortunately, on this April 4, 1968, death still seemed the only possible liberation for Black people in America.

In retaliation, Eldridge Cleaver decided to lash out at police. According to him, to remain at the vanguard, the Black Panthers had to react firmly. He therefore spoke about his project to members of the Oakland party. The older ones all refused altogether, for them it was suicide. But the youngest did not have the same opinion. Thus, on April 6, 1968, Eldridge Cleaver and 14 other Black Panthers ambushed a patrol of Oakland police officers. Among them was Bobby Hutton, the party’s treasurer. The Black Panthers were armed with hunting rifles and M-16s, these assault rifles used by the American army. The police, who came under fire, then cornered the Black Panthers into a house. Entrenched in the cellar, it caught fire following a shot of tear gas grenade. So to avoid burning alive, the Black Panthers chose to surrender. Bobby Hutton went out first with his hands in the air. He was shot dead on the spot. He was only 17 years old. Cleaver did advise him to undress completely, but modest, Hutton kept his pants on. During the confrontation, two police officers were hit and Cleaver himself was injured. After this fiasco, and in order to avoid prison, Eldridge Cleaver fled to Cuba, before ending up going into exile in Algeria in 1969.

The war did not care about what was happening in the country and continued to rage. 1968 was the deadliest year on the American side, with the loss of nearly 17 000 men. That was almost as many as the dead recorded from the start of the conflict until the end of 1967, which goes to show the intensity of the battles that took place every day.

From their sofas, the Americans watched stunned the body bags of soldiers piling up. Massive bombings had long extended to Laos, then to Cambodia, supposed rear bases of the Viet Cong. On television, “testimonies multiplied about South Vietnamese prison conditions, the torture that the prisoners were subjected to in the presence of American advisors, some of whom participated directly in the sessions. Stories of civilian killings in villages were added to the images of daily bombings that Hanoi was suffering.[5]”

The left-wing student organization, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), formed in the early 1960s in the context of the nuclear arms race, had become one of the main voices of opposition to the Vietnam War in the student sphere. Its concerns were varied and covered topics ranging from economic and social justice to the fight for Civil Rights, from the dismantling of private monopolies to the promotion of participatory democracy.

Present on more than 50 campuses across the country and proud of some 100 000 members, it first organized the “10 Days of Resistance”. Sit-ins, “teach-ins” (small conferences on current issues), rallies and protest marches came one after another in American universities. On April 26, nearly a million students went on strike throughout the country. It was unprecedented.

On the campus of Columbia, events took a more militant turn. On April 23, students barricaded themselves inside university buildings, even going as far as taking hostage for 24 hours, the university dean, Henry S. Coleman. What were their grievances? On the one hand, the university collaboration with the IDA (the Institute for Defense Analyses), a think tank with close ties to the Pentagon, and whose research was dedicated to war armaments. And on the other hand, the building project of a gymnasium between Harlem and Morningside Heights, likely to induce de facto an unwanted segregation in the community.

On April 30, after eight days of occupation, the students were forcibly evicted after the intervention of the New York Police Department, the NYPD. That said, the university later agreed to dissociate itself from the IDA and abandoned its gymnasium project, proving to students that their actions could lead to change. Columbia then became the symbol of the student revolt.

Civil society was not outdone. On April 27, hundreds of thousands of people marched in 17 cities across the country to protest the Vietnam War and in some cases racism. In New York, more than 100 000 demonstrators thus met at Sheep Meadow in Central Park.

At Berkeley, students didn't even hide anymore. A ceremony, called “Vietnam Commencement,” was held on campus on May 27, in which students and faculty members signed an oath refusing to participate in the war and then openly proclaimed before the assembly:

Our war in Vietnam is unjust and immoral. As long as the United States is involved in this war I will not serve in the armed forces.

(Archives from University of California, Berkeley. Cf. footnotes).

There were some 900 signatories. Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, described this ceremony as indecent, bordering on obscenity. Although legal, this gathering was more than contemptible for him. The irony being that he argued that the only reason these demonstrators were not guilty of treason was the lack of an official declaration of war by the United States against North Vietnam.

The climate was such that it now became obvious to all the political leaders competing in the presidential election that this war had to be put an end to. The whole question remained to know how. In the meantime, the electoral campaign would resume its rights.

Robert Kennedy won the primaries in Indiana and Nebraska in turns, before suffering a clear setback in Oregon against McCarthy on May 28. To maintain his chances and obtain his ticket for the Democratic convention in August in Chicago, he absolutely had to win the California primary. After many scares it was taken care of on June 4 and with a large victory of 46%. The Kennedy clan could smile again and thousands of young people with it. Bobby Kennedy still remained for many the only credible hope to a real political change. After his victory speech on the morning of June 5, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, and while he was preparing to celebrate the result of the primary, he was shot several times in a corridor of the hotel, located behind the kitchens. He died the next day at 1:44 a.m., at Good Samaritan Hospital, at the age of 42.

This time that was it. Even Elvis wrote his own protest song with the title If I Can Dream, recorded in the NBC studios in June 1968 for his Christmas Special Comeback. And a question that tormented America: What was it becoming?

Unfortunately the country had more surprises to come. The month of August arrived and the time for presidential nominations. Hoping to obtain nothing from the Republicans, the SDS students, soon joined by the Mobe (the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam) and the Yippies of the Youth International Party, decided to go to Chicago to get themselves heard and put pressure on the Democrats at the party's national convention scheduled for August 26-29. The idea: to tip the scale in favor of an openly anti-war candidate.

All requests for having permission to demonstrate were refused by the mayor of Chicago, Richard J. Daley, one of the bosses of the Democratic Party. And yet, he knew full well that thousands of young people would still make the trip. On Sunday, August 25, the day before the official start of the convention, around 10 000 people thus found themselves wanting to camp at Lincoln Park. If the atmosphere was initially festive, between dance, music and improvised yoga sessions, helped by the somewhat sassy Yippies, who mixing happenings and politics, didn’t hesitate to show up with their own candidate, a 200 pounds pig named Pigasus, tension would quickly rise in the vicinity of the park.

Daley, wanting to enforce "law and order" in Chicago, words that he could have extracted from the mouth of Nixon, freshly invested by his party during the Republican convention, on August 5 in Miami, Florida, had just put his city in a virtual state of siege. For this, he called on, no more, no less, 12 000 police officers, 5600 men of the Illinois National Guard and 5000 soldiers who came straight from the Fort Hood military base in Texas. The International Amphitheater where the convention was to be held, looked like an authentic fortress surrounded by barbed wire. A curfew at 11 p.m. in all the parks of the city had also been established, forcing demonstrators to evacuate the premises. Every evening, they were driven out a little more violently by way of baton blows and tear gas.

Soon these scenes of violence would reflect the atmosphere inside the convention hall. The Democratic Party was in crisis. Lacking uncontested leadership after Johnson's withdrawal and shaken by the death of Robert Kennedy, the convention would lay bare for all to see the untenable divisions which pitted against delegates whose political currents were poles apart, between liberals from the North and conservatives from the South. Since the union could only be achieved on a ridge line, the debates around the Vietnam War and the choice of the next Democrat candidate would finish firing people up.

George McGovern, Senator of South Dakota, had entered the running. On the side of the opponents to the war, there was a free space and Robert Kennedy had many delegates who would now be divided between McGovern and McCarthy. Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey was also running for office. Supported by Johnson, he could rely on the backing of the party moguls who controlled enough delegates to override the primary process and the authority of the ballot, which obviously didn’t fail to irritate some people.

Invectives, shouts and jostles punctuated the debates. Connecticut Senator Abraham A. Ribicoff even went as far as declaring that with McGovern as President, they would not have had to deal with Gestapo-like tactics on the streets of Chicago. Mayor Richard J. Daley raised his fist; insults could now be heard flying from all sides. Dan Rather, a well-known journalist covering the convention for CBS, was violently grabbed by security agents while attempting to interview delegates. It was an appalling spectacle.

Outside, demonstrators had gathered in front of Grant Park, next to the Conrad Hilton Hotel where most of the delegates, including Humphrey and McCarthy, were staying, when the unthinkable happened. For almost twenty minutes, the police, literally raging, began to rain down blows, without any restraint, upon everyone present on site. People were screaming. Some, bloodied, were dragged by their feet to the police vans in total chaos.

There were pools of blood on Michigan Avenue.

(Gloria Steinem, journalist, in episode 8: « 1968 » from the documentary series about the Sixties. Cf. footnotes).

Americans watched this lynching live from their television sets, an absolute scene of carnage. The angry crowd chanted: “The whole world’s watching!” Later that night, it was finally Vice President Humphrey who was nominated as the party's candidate. The smiles were just a facade; any illusion of unity within the political family had just been left in tatters. The Democrats no longer seemed to be able to appease the nation. The contrast with the Republican convention, which took place in a most convivial atmosphere, marked by a certain enthusiasm, was scathing.

On November 5, 1968, the Americans apparently chose a return to order. Richard Nixon won the presidential election and was elected 37th President of the United States. We can still acknowledge the performance of Humphrey who only lost by a difference of less than 50 000 votes, in what remains one of the closest elections in American history.

When by a morning of November, Joan Didion went to San Francisco State College, she didn’t know yet that she would grapple with the longest student strike on an American campus in the history of the country. She, who missed Berkeley and Columbia, had promised to attend the current revolution in San Francisco. She simply emerged from it disappointed, taken aback by the scenes of "disorder" whose protagonists each seemed to play a role in what looked much like "a musical" rather than a serious and thoughtful approach.

It all began on November 1, 1968 with the suspension of George Mason Murray, a graduate student in the English Department who also happened to be Minister of Education of the Black Panther Party. Hired part-time as a professor in that same department, he was responsible for teaching introductory English courses for minority students accepted to the university under a special program. Following remarks deemed as incendiary that he would have made, the board of directors of the establishment was going to force his sidelining.

Thus, during a meeting at Fresno State College (California), he would have supposedly declared: "We are slaves, and the only way to become free is to kill all the slave masters." At San Francisco State College, he would have advised this time Black students to bring firearms to the campus in order to protect themselves against the White and racist administrators.

The incident would be the triggering factor for multiple confrontations within the very grounds of the university. The suspension of Murray being considered as racist and authoritarian, it reflected according to the students the proper downward slide of American society. On November 6, they hence started a strike that would last almost five months. At the maneuver, the Black students of the Black Student Union, the members of the Third World Liberation Front, a coalition of the various organizations representing each minority, and the sympathizers mostly white of the SDS (Students for A Democratic Society).

Facing them, the president of the university, S.I. Hayakawa, was intractable. As agreed with the board of directors and the governor of California, Ronald Reagan, he authorized multiple police raids within the campus itself in order to restore order. Billy clubs in hand, hundreds of students were arrested, not without first getting hurt.

The students’ main demands revolved around racial inclusion. Black students wished for more visibility, both in terms of the number of admitted students from different minorities than on the one of teachers of color recruited. They also wanted for the academic program itself to be in tune with their current issues and concerns and thus be able to offer an answer to the question of their place in American society. They were eager to learn about their history and culture in order to acquire the tools they could pass on in return to their respective communities.

If the atmosphere seemed festive to say the least, an appropriate optimism winning over the troops, only Black activists could be considered “serious” according to Joan Didion. Very critical towards the White SDS students, she then observed with amusement the talking points of these young bourgeois who suddenly took themselves for guerilleros. Indeed, during the 1960’s, about fifty countries achieved independence.[6] A wind of freedom was blowing across the world and the word “revolution” was slipping out of everyone’s lips.

And she was then far from being the only one to think that the SDS activists were ultimately made up of merely young, privileged White people from wealthy suburbs whose parents, perhaps despite themselves, continued to make difficult the liberation and fulfillment of the different communities that they nevertheless ardently defended. And that’s indeed where all the paradox lied in.

The sixties constituted what we can call the golden age of idealism in the history of American youth. Never before had this many middle-class kids the time, energy and money to express their opinions. Their parents having insisted on the very importance of education to their future fulfillment, they would begin questioning whether what they learned in higher education establishments had any relevance with their lives, with their values ​​and if the country was going in the right direction. The university being a microcosm of society, a large part of the students as well as some professors had an eye for this wishful fantasy that was revolution on campus which in one way or another would change this society which they considered rigid and oppressive.

On March 20, 1969, the strike ended. Joyous chaos and relaxed atmosphere still had the merit of obtaining the creation of a unique department devoted to Black Studies, an interdisciplinary field of research bringing together the historical, sociological, political and cultural study of the experience of Black people and guaranteeing the issue of a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.). Another major advance was the establishment of a School of Ethnic Studies, the first of its kind in an American university. The right of minorities to access knowledge and quality education on the reality of their community's experience was finally recognized.

Just three months later, these same SDS students held their final national convention at the Chicago Coliseum. From June 18 to 22, 1969, some 2000 members gathered were about to seal the end of one of the largest student organizations in the entire country. Plagued by ideological disputes and internal struggles for power, a more left-wing faction, The Revolutionary Youth Movement, was therefore going to take control of the student organization; a real hold-up for some, obviousness for others.

Many came to the same conclusion that peaceful demonstrations, petitions, sit-ins were leading nowhere. The war continued to regurgitate corpses by the thousands. On the American side, a little less than 12 000 dead bodies could be tallied in 1969 alone, and 49 000 in total up to then. But on the Vietnamese side, the horror reached new heights. This war cost the lives of around two million people, something to make you lose your mind. In empathy with the Vietnamese people, a more militant fringe of the SDS did not accept that the American government could continue to bomb and machine-gun villages and hamlets despite their numerous protests and moreover in their name. They then became convinced of the necessity of violence as a prerequisite for any change. For them, it was a question of bringing the war back to the country in order to raise awareness, inaction in the face of such a tragedy being considered as passive violence. Their ambition: to overthrow the “imperialist” American government, fight capitalism and work to develop a more humane and overall communist society.

They would now call themselves The Weathermen, inspired by the lyrics of Bob Dylan's song Subterranean Homesick Blues: “You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”.[7] In other words, everyone could see that a world revolution was imminent and obviously they wanted to be part of it. Going underground, they were soon about to foment bomb attacks throughout the country.

But for the moment, summer was taking its course and enthusiasm was almost general. The date of the Apollo 11 mission was coming, with this completely crazy goal of seeing the first human beings attempt to land on the Moon. On July 16, 1969, entire crowds gathered around the John F. Kennedy Space Center (KSC) located on Merritt Island in Florida to witness the launch of Saturn V, a monster of more than 3000 tons.

Made up of three rockets, stacked on top of each other and on the upper level of a spacecraft with the three men of the mission on board, Saturn V was capable of placing 118 tons into low Earth orbit (up to 1243 miles from Earth), and a live load of 47 tons to the Moon, that is to say the combined weight of the lunar module and the command and service module (CSM). Because here is how things were going to happen.

Arriving in lunar orbit, only the lunar module called “Eagle” would go down to the surface of the natural satellite. On board this spacecraft used to land the astronauts on the Moon would be the mission commander Neil Armstrong, 38, and the lunar module pilot Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, 39. The third astronaut, Michael Collins, 38, the pilot of the CSM, would remain on board the CSM and in lunar orbit for the whole duration of his two colleagues’ stay on the Moon.

Once the mission objectives would be completed, Armstrong and Aldrin would have to take off from the Moon and perform a rendezvous maneuver with Collins. With the crew in full, the lunar module could then be abandoned, the service module being responsible for ensuring the return trip. Arriving near the Earth, the service module would in turn be jettisoned, the crew completing the last miles aboard the third spacecraft, the command module, which until then was thus grouped with the service module with which it formed the CSM.

The technical and human feat of the mission was without comparison. America, like much of the world, was holding its breath. At the launch site there were nearly a million spectators and in the official gallery it was all the upper crust of politicians that was gathered in the front row. Vice President Spiro Agnew, former President Lyndon B. Johnson and his wife Lady Bird Johnson, U.S. Army Chief of Staff General William Westmoreland, as well as cabinet members, State governors, mayors, ambassadors and several members of Congress. Not forgetting the radio and television teams present by the thousands, the event having to be broadcast live in more than thirty countries. No one wanted to miss this historic moment, the moment when three young Americans were about to begin a most incredible journey some 250 000 miles away from Earth.

Four days later, on July 20 at 9:56 p.m. (Houston time), Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the Moon. The crew returned safe and sound according to the planned scenario. The success of the Apollo 11 mission brought eight years of effort to fruition and opened up all possibilities for the future. The price to pay: more than $25 billion for the entire program. But now, the superiority of American power was indisputable.

And yet a gnawing and latent threat was already spreading throughout the country. “There were odd things going on around town. There were rumors. There were stories.”

On the night of August 8 to 9, 1969, the bad trip turned into butchery. Charles Manson and his gang of psychopaths began their sanguinary expedition.

Around midnight, strangers broke into 10 050 Cielo Drive. The villa was built in the 1940s for Michèle Morgan, then under contract with RKO. A haven of peace in the hills of Benedict Canyon; Cary Grant, Henry Fonda and George Chakiris lived there. Since February, Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate have been renting it for $1,000 a month. After climbing the pole in front of the property to cut the telephone wires, the intruders scale to open the gate. In the driveway, a car approaches: the driver [Steven Parent, 18 years old] is killed by four bullets. He had just visited the caretaker [William Garettson] who heard nothing and will hear nothing: in his bungalow, he listens to music. Sharon Tate |26 years old] (nine months pregnant) suffered sixteen stab wounds to the liver, heart and lungs. The friends with whom she spent the evening were also massacred: Jay Sebring [celebrity hairdresser, 36 years old] (seven stabs, a bullet in the head, emasculated), the screenwriter Wojciech Frykowski [33 years old] (fifty-one stab wounds, two bullets) and his partner, the heiress Abigail Folger [26 years old] (twenty-eight stab wounds). Before fleeing, one of the murderers wrote the word pig on the door, with Sharon's blood.[8]

Throughout the massacre, Linda Kasabian, 20 years old, was outside in front of the house keeping watch. New recruit of the “Family”, she showed up at Spahn Ranch a month earlier. Manson, as a crazy guru, set up there his community. In reality, a gang of lost souls who spent their time getting high on Benzedrine and acid, one of the ways to brainwash these mostly well-bred young girls, who saw in Manson the incarnation of Christ. So when the latter predicted the imminent advent of an apocalyptic war between Whites and Black people, nicknamed “Helter Skelter”, no one had doubts. Black people were to emerge victorious, but unable to manage themselves, they were going to call on the “benevolent” Manson to guide them. Such inanity would have made more than one person choke, but any semblance of rationality seemed to have long since vanished from these young people minds.

Wanting to hasten the realization of this prophecy, he asked some of the members of his cult to go commit murders in the chic neighborhoods of Los Angeles to then have Black people be accused of them, thus explaining the inscriptions using the blood of the victims to bring to mind the Black Panthers.

But where did he trawl such an idea? In the Beatles ‘work whom he compared to the four knights of the apocalypse. If you please! In November 1968, The White Album was released, a double album of thirty original songs with a completely white cover and no title. 9th disc from the British rock band, the record was largely conceived in India, during a stay of the group in the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, where they had gone at the beginning of the year to carry out a retreat and learn the basics of transcendental meditation. Already the beginning of the end for the four buddies whose disagreement kept growing. The presence of Yoko Ono in the recording studio only heightened tensions. As a result, each of them composed, arranged, sang on their own, often without paying much attention to what the others were doing. A sometimes disconcerting mix of titles from four artists at the peak of their art, who thus signed their best-selling album in the United States, with more than twenty million copies sold and which remained at the top of the charts for nine weeks.

The disc features the title Helter Skelter, composed by Paul McCartney. Manson understood these words as meaning chaos and confusion, whereas in Great Britain the term refers to a fairground attraction, a sort of spiral slide. But in his extravagant delirium, he was convinced that the Beatles were sending him a personal message. His obsession with the band was born in prison, having already spent more than half his life there, convicted of various crimes ranging from theft to sexual assault to pimping. In 1967, at 33 and finally free, he dreamed of a similar career and therefore sought to get his break into the music industry.

Equipped with a guitar, he first begged near Berkeley in San Francisco, where little by little he gathered his first disciples, before venturing into the suburbs of Los Angeles. In the spring of 1968, Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson picked up two young girls who were hitchhiking and took them home for a few hours at his house in Pacific Palisades. The next day when he returned from a night spent in the studio, to his great surprise he was greeted by Manson in the private driveway of his home. Inside, twelve members of the “Family” were already taking up residence. This number was about to double in the coming months. Wilson then offered to cover their expenses. He sang and talked about music with Manson and even went as far as paying for his recording studio sessions, while obviously taking advantage of the “services” provided by the young girls on site.

We find traces of this unexpected friendship with Wilson on the Beach Boys album 20/20 released on February 10, 1969 by Capitol Records. In it, is featured the title Never Learn Not to Love. Released in December 1968, as the B-side of the single Bluebirds over the Mountain, it was originally composed by Charles Manson himself under the name Cease to Exist. The Beach Boys kept the melody but changed almost all the lyrics, which infuriated Manson especially since no song credit was attributed to him. Yet, he accepted a sum of money and a motorcycle in exchange for his rights. That didn’t stop him from threatening Dennis Wilson and his family with murder.

Prior to this incident, Manson and his acolytes squatted at his house some more time before Wilson, the tenant, moved out and the owner eventually evicted them. It was then August 1968, and the “Family” found refuge at the Spahn Ranch.

Located on the outskirts of Chatsworth in the San Fernando Valley northwest of Los Angeles, this former movie ranch whose sets were used to shoot westerns overlooked Topanga Canyon. But the western was no longer in fashion and the film crews had long since pulled up stakes. This place, which had become a dilapidated wasteland, was therefore the perfect spot for a group of hippies wishing to live in community.

The owner of the place, George Spahn, an almost blind 80-year-old man, only survived on the meager income that he got from a horse rental business and which Manson and his followers would now take care of in exchange for free accommodation. At Manson's request, the girls would often pay him more than friendly visits, surely another part of the deal.

It was not uncommon to run into these individuals on certain street corners of Los Angeles digging through trash cans to find something to eat, so much so that in the neighborhood they were already nicknamed the Garbage People. Short of money, they got into the habit of furtively breaking into private residences at night, even though the occupants were sleeping. They took everything they could use and left without making any noise. Theft and other criminal activities therefore ensured their means of subsistence.

Manson exhibited an increasingly erratic behavior frustrated that his music career was not taking off. Terry Melcher, a record producer he met through Dennis Wilson, refused to sign him a contract and that made his blood boil. He attempted to harass him to his home several times, but Melcher had already left the premises, a residence located at 10 050 Cielo Drive.

After the tragic night of August 8 to 9, Manson, judging that the job had been “botched,” ordered his troops to start a new killing the following night. This time they stopped in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles and targeted the house of Rosemary and Leno LaBianca at 3301 Waverly Drive. He, 44, was an executive in a supermarket, and his wife, 38, owned a store specializing in the sale of dresses.

On August 10, in the early hours of the morning, a new scene of carnage was left behind by their attackers. Leno, who was snoozing on the sofa when the intruders entered the house, was murdered in the living room. His bloody body lay on the ground, lying on his back; both his hands had been tied behind his back with a leather strap. A cushion and a pillowcase covered his face. He received twelve stab wounds to the stomach and throat and fourteen incisions caused by a fork with which one of these lunatics wrote the word “WAR” on his abdomen. His blood was also used to write the words death to pigs and rise on a wall. On the kitchen fridge, the misspelled word Healter Skelter could be distinguished.

As for Rosemary who was in the matrimonial bedroom, her corpse was lying on her stomach in the middle of a pool of blood. Her head covered by a pillowcase and the electric wire of a lamp around her neck, she was stabbed forty-one times.

If there was still a need to demonstrate the sociopathic character of these criminals who had just committed a new atrocity, we can note that without the slightest remorse, they did not hesitate to take a snack break by emptying the refrigerator out, have fun with the recently murdered couple's dog or even take a shower before leisurely hitchhiking back to Spahn Ranch.

That Sunday morning, America woke up with a severe hangover. This series of murders definitively sounded the death knell for the counterculture of the 60s. Any zest of innocence had just evaporated in the Californian heat.

Linda Kasabian received immunity for her damning testimony as a prosecution witness in a trial that proved to be at the time one of the longest and most expensive in American judicial history. Present in the car which took her comrades to the LaBianca residence, just like Manson for that matter, she left as soon as the instructions were given by the latter and so did not attend this second killing. Two days later, pregnant with her second child and with her one-year-old daughter under her arm, she fled the Spahn Ranch to return to New Hampshire where her mother lived and where she had spent a large part of her childhood.

The trial was about to begin on July 24, 1970 in Los Angeles and Joan Didion found herself buying her a dress that she could wear to the hearing. The most banal thing there was, but in completely bizarre circumstances.

From these years, Joan Didion would have a particular interpretative framework. “All connections were equally meaningful, and equally senseless.”

By opening Bertrand Tessier's book on the life of Steve McQueen we learn that Jay Sebring was his best friend, “the eternal accomplice of his jaunts, always up for raising hell.[9]” But also his “candyman”. He supplied him marijuana and cocaine in particular.

On August 7, he stopped by McQueen to freshen up his haircut at his villa in Brentwood, another chic district of Los Angeles. A dinner was planned the next day with Sharon Tate and some friends of hers at El Coyote, a Mexican restaurant on Beverly in West Hollywood. They would then end the evening at Sharon's house. Quite naturally Sebring invited his friend to join them, which he hastened to accept.

The next day, McQueen asked his wife Neile Adams if she wanted to accompany him, but she preferred to stay at home. So he left alone and got on his Triumph to join his friends. On the way, he came across the smile of a pretty girl. He never reached his destination. His infidelity had just saved his life.

Barely a week later, like a parenthesis and as a sign of goodbye, 400 000 young people were going to converge towards the East, towards the Woodstock Music & Art Fair. In reality, at the last moment and after many twists and turns with the population and local authorities, the festival would be held in White Lake, in the town of Bethel, Sullivan County, in the State of New York, 105 miles away to the west of New York City. But the legend would keep the original name of Woodstock, which is located to the north of New York, the promotion of the event having been made about this place for months.

Several ads had been placed in the alternative press to present this Aquarian Exhibition, three days of peace and music. The organizers were counting on a maximum of 150 000 people, roughly speaking. After all, the Monterey festival in 1967 had welcomed 28 000 people per day, they expected to double that number and such an estimate already seemed more than optimistic. Based on these figures, the town of Bethel gave its permission and an agreement was reached with Max Yasgur, a local farmer who owned a dairy, to occupy his fields.

The bucolic and hilly setting made it the perfect place. But then there was only one month left to set up the stage and put in place delimitation fences. A titanic task awaited them. The hundreds of people working on the site would go out of their way day and night, but the big day was coming and a choice had to be made. Priority was given to the stage, they would figure out a way of collecting the concert tickets later; 7 dollars per day, 13 dollars for two days or 18 dollars for three days. The break-even point was estimated at $2 million, which goes to show the sums invested up to that point.

We might as well announce it straightaway, the festival was a financial disaster. From the first day, 250 000 to 300 000 young people showed up; an absolute flood of people. Lines of cars formed for several miles, blocking traffic on the only road that connected New York to Bethel.

The aerial shots were impressive; an incessant pile of automobiles, on the lanes, the roadsides, the surrounding streets and fields. There was no single place to park. And yet, no one got angry. A joy radiated from the faces, the Aquarians had finally found each other.

Woodstock felt like a pilgrimage for these young people eager for answers to their concerns about life, the world and the mold society wanted them to fit into. In 1965, one in two Americans was under the age of 25 and while the escalation in Vietnam directly affected them, they felt completely ignored. Most of them were old enough to go to war but not to vote. Therefore they wouldn’t be allowed any political expression or representation in Congress. Then it was in music that these baby boomers found a little comfort.

And what was their surprise to realize that there were thousands of them who felt the same unease faced with the diktat of the establishment. They were no longer alone, isolated in their family or their small country town. Each new arrival on Highway 17 experienced the same amazement facing the multitude. A new friend, a new brother, a new sister was hidden behind every car door and with it, the hope that was filling their heart. The lyrics of the Youngbloods were resonating in everyone's head, the adventure could begin.

Come on, people now
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another right now

From the scene below, you could barely see the horizon because there were so many people. It quickly became clear that it was impossible to manage this crowd to check who actually had a ticket or not. Fences poorly sunk into the ground were more of a danger than anything else. It was decided to remove them altogether and clear the way. From now on Woodstock would be a free concert. The festival-goers applauded. Bankruptcy was assured for the organizers who nevertheless kept a smile, aware of experiencing a unique and incredible moment.

Massive traffic jams made it impossible to transport artists and their instruments by land. Already well behind schedule, Richie Havens was asked to open the festival, even though his bassist still hadn’t arrived. After two hours of concert and after his majestic Handsome Johnny, he improvised Freedom. The crowd was won over, everyone was moved; a good omen for the rest of the festival.

In the sky, a continuous dance of helicopters came to drop off the different music bands. The performances followed one another and the atmosphere was most serene. This first folk day ended with Joan Baez. Pregnant, her husband David Harris, a Draft Resistant from the outset, found himself incarcerated for refusing to join the army. The symbol was even stronger for all these young people who had been schlepping a knot in their stomach since they were 17, panicked at the idea of ​​having to go to Vietnam.

At nightfall, with her captivating voice, she celebrated with Joe Hill the legacy of the struggles of the oppressed in America before humming a cappella Swing Low Sweet Chariot, a song composed by Wallace Willis, a former Indian slave. 300 000 people listened to her in silence. The field, illuminated as far as the eye could see by lighters and candles, seemed to be invaded by lightning bugs. The show was incredible. Faced with the huge crowd, the best thing for everyone was yet to sleep in their place while recovering some strength.

Day two would be rock’n roll. On the program: Creedence Clearwater Revival, Grateful Dead, Canned Heat, Janis Joplin, The Who; that is to say the best bands of the moment. No wonder then to see 100 000 extra people arriving at the festival site. 400 000 people were now camping on the fields of Max Yasgur, a town in itself.

On this Saturday, August 16, 1969, just to get warmed up, the morning began with Country Joe McDonald and his Fish Cheer / I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixing-To-Die-Rag. A true anthem against the Vietnam War, the eloquent lyrics reflected the feelings of an entire generation. Suddenly the crowd woke up and started singing along with the chorus loudly.

And it’s 1, 2, 3 what are we fighting for?
Don't ask me I don't give a damn,
The next stop is Vietnam,
And it’s 5, 6, 7 open up the Pearly Gates,
Well there ain't no time to wonder why,
WHOOPEE we're all gonna die

When they were not attending the concert, the Aquarians wandered around the different stands that lined the site; food, arts and crafts, marijuana and acid sales, an oasis within easy reach. Yoga sessions were improvised. Others preferred to swim in the nearby river.

The Hog Farm, a community run by Hugh Romney aka Wavy Gravy, had been recruited to ensure safety. Accustomed to large public happenings, they knew how to manage a crowd. Their expertise was therefore south after. A little further into the woods, they set up their tents, a kitchen and even built an alternative stage. Designated as a Please Force by antagonism to a police force, it was with good humor, kindness and by politely addressing people that they supervised the festival-goers. Their watchword: mutual aid.

Apparently the acid circulating was of poor quality. Announcements were made from the main stage to alert the audience. Obviously everyone was free to experiment, they only stated appropriate precautions and faced with the large number of people, bad trips were bound to happen. The people feeling sick were then directed to Freak Out Tents while simmering down and coming around. Once done, they in turn took care of a new arrival and so on.

Along the route, there was also an information booth where festival-goers could leave messages to their friends or families lost in the crowd. The most urgent were read on stage between each performance because ultimately the open microphone was the only source of information for all these young people who alone formed a mass similar to medium-sized American cities.

This statistic was not without bringing its fair share of inconveniences. Very quickly, the number of patients piled up and the diagnoses followed one another. Pneumonia, fractures, heat stroke, headaches, allergies, appendicitis, ear infections, pharyngitis, gastroenteritis... The medical tent found itself running out of medicine. No one expected such a turnout.

With traffic blocked, food booths could not restock and soon ended up empty. The festival-goers had nothing left to eat. The situation was becoming critical. The headlines in the press spoke of a disaster. Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, the governor of New York State, threatened to send the National Guard. The parents were then calling in panic.

The Aquarians suddenly heard the rumble of an army helicopter. Everyone looked at each other anxiously. From the stage the people in charge hurried to announce: “they are with us, they are not against us, they are coming to help us!” On board were 45 doctors who came voluntarily.

Hearing the news, the people of White Lake and Bethel showed incredible generosity. Everyone emptied their cupboards and shared what they had in their pantry. Everything was transported by air and the Hog Farm afterwards took on cooking and distributing the dishes.

The locals, pleasantly surprised by the good manners of these “young hippies”, who in town stood in line for hours in front of stores that were still supplied and paid high prices for foodstuffs without turning a hair, rolled up their sleeves. They thus offered another face of America, where intelligence, humanity, mutual aid and compassion made it possible to overcome divisions and face the current challenges together. After all, these children could have been their own. This gesture of affection alone symbolized the values ​​of Woodstock.

On Saturday evening, the concerts continued until the early morning. When the Jefferson Airplane appeared on stage, most of the festival-goers were totally worn out and slowly joining the arms of Morpheus. The Hog Farm later offered a breakfast in bed. Nothing very gourmet but it was enough to fill the stomachs. A bowl of oats with honey and powdered milk, mixed with some nuts and raisins.

Joe Cocker started the Sunday session. We would remember his magnificent performance of the title With A Little Help From My Friends. While he was finishing his set, a black cloud overhung the valley. In a matter of a few minutes, a terrible thunderstorm struck the crowd. Everyone working near the stage hurried to protect the equipment as best they could. The site became an absolute field of mud; the press then spoke of a “disaster zone”. Some, having kept their childlike innocence, began to play and threw themselves on the ground. Many, on the other hand, were already heading back home.

The most valiant were rewarded with the first concert of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young who got the ball rolling with Suite Judy Blue Eyes. The Band and Ten Years After were also there. The next day, Jimi Hendrix played the Star-Spangled Banner, the American national anthem, on the electric guitar. The distorted sounds called to mind the bombs and missiles crashing down North Vietnam. The festival-goers were stunned.

It was already the end of an epic weekend for these Aquarians who were heading home peacefully. The reality check was about to be brutal. For three days, these young people lived the utopia of an alternative life without violence and conflict; something never seen before in any American city of this size. Woodstock was theirs, their place, a summary of everything they stood for and the values ​​they held dear.

I’m a farmer. I don’t know how to speak to twenty people at one time, let alone a crowd like this. But I think you people have proven something to the world. Not only to town of Bethel, or Sullivan County, or New York State, you’ve proven something to the world. The important thing that you’ve proven to the world is that half a million kids… and I call you kids, because I have children that are older than you are… a half a million young people  can get together and have three days of fun and music, and have nothing but fun and music. And I God bless you for it.

Max Yasgur

In November 1969, Joan Didion watched the first reports on My Lai from the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honululu. The horror was displayed on the front pages of the magazines. On March 16, 1968, soldiers of Charlie Company, United States’ 1st Battalion 20th Infantry Regiment, most of whom were barely 20 years old and under the orders of Lieutenant William Calley, coldly executed more than 500 civilians. We were in the aftermath of the Tet offensive and they had already lost about twenty men.

My Lai village was located in the province of Quang Ngai, some 95 miles south of the Da Nang air base. Word was circulating that the FNL communists had taken control of the hamlet. Charlie Company was therefore sent on a search and destroy mission.

In the village, after the early hours of dawn, everyone was busy making breakfast. No fighters in sight, just old men, women, children and infants. However, Lieutenant Calley ordered his men to gather the villagers in the ditches and fire into the crowd. Some women were gang raped and their bodies mutilated. While a small child of two or three years old, protected by a mother, managed to extricate himself from the bodies, and escaped in tears totally panicked, Calley did not hesitate to catch him up and shoot him in the back of his head. The huts were burned, the village was simply razed.

The news of the massacre sparked off international indignation and irredeemably confirmed the moral disaster of the American engagement in Vietnam.

On December 1, 1969, a Draft Lottery was set up, a first since 1942 and the Second World War. The birth dates of boys born between January 1, 1944 and December 31, 1950 were drawn randomly. It was a question of determining the order of the draftees called up to enlist for the year 1970. Broadcast live, the young Americans were then scrutinizing the television sets in complete anguish. Were they about to “win” the direct ticket to the Vietnamese quagmire? In the land of show business, cynicism was king. Many were still those who would not return alive.

As Jean-Marc Bel points out, regarding this period, and reading this essay, one cannot help thinking of George Hanson line played by Jack Nicholson in the film Easy Rider: “You know, this used to be a hell of a good country. I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it.” And Joan Didion to conclude: “Writing has not yet helped me to see what it means.”

In September 1968, Huey P. Newton was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to 2 to 15 years in prison. On May 29, 1970, the California Court of Appeals overturned the conviction and ordered a new trial. Two other trials followed with an undecided jury which de facto led to their quashing. All charges against Newton were eventually dropped. From Messiah adulated in prison, he ended his life once free as a paranoid Mafioso.

Eldridge Cleaver returned to the United States in 1975, and unexpectedly joined the Republican Party.

On March 20, 1969, while the strike at San Francisco State College was coming to an end, on the other side of the country, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, John Froines, Lee Weiner and Bobby Seale were indicted by a grand jury accused of collusion and incitement to riot during the demonstrations that took place around the Democratic convention in August 1968 in Chicago.

In the press, they were now nicknamed the “Chicago 8”. The new Nixon administration wanted to thump the table and John Mitchell, the newly appointed Minister of Justice, was looking forward to embody law and order. Six of the eight defendants were none other than the leaders of the main left-wing organizations. Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin headed the Youth International Party, Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis presided over the Students for a Democratic Society, David Dellinger headed the Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam and Bobby Seale was the other co-founder of the Black Panthers. Putting them behind bars offered the government an opportunity to stifle any opposition.

For this Mitchell would rely on the “Anti-Riot Act” sometimes also called the “Rap Brown Law” which criminalized the fact of traveling between states with the intention of inciting violence and therefore promoting or participating to a riot. The maximum sentence was up to ten years in prison. This law was imposed by the “Dixiecrats” in Congress to limit the freedom of speech of Black Civil Rights activists. It thus equated political protest with organized violence. A poisoned chalice from the third part of the Civil Rights Act, dedicated to abolish all forms of discrimination concerning the sale, rental or financing of housing, it was signed on April 11, 1968 by former President Lyndon B. Johnson. Martin Luther King had just been assassinated a week earlier and riots were rumbling across the country.

All the defendants were represented by William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass of the Center for Constitutional Rights, with the exception of Bobby Seale whose lawyer was Charles Garry, the same one who had just pleaded at the trial of Huey P. Newton. In September 1969, when the trial of the “Chicago 8” began, Charles Garry was in Oakland hospital undergoing a gall bladder operation. At the hearing, Bobby Seale had therefore no legal representation and was prevented from defending himself, even though he was only present during the convention just enough time to give a speech and then immediately left. Wrongly accused of the murder of a police officer in Connecticut, he was the only one to be in prison during the trial.

Judge Julius Hoffman, on the verge of senility and with a more than disturbing behavior, would not let Bobby Seale speak. Each time his name was mentioned during the hearing, the latter did not fail to call out to the judge to remind him of the fact that he was unable to defend himself and that this constituted a violation of his constitutional rights. Judge Hoffman seemed to refuse to understand that the two other lawyers present did not represent him and therefore could not intervene. After several contempts of court, a disgruntled Seale called him a fascist dog, a pig and a racist. Then in a surreal scene, the judge had him gagged, his hands and feet handcuffed by a chain attached to his chair. In the court room a heavy silence set in. Everyone realized the monstrosity of the gesture. The unease was such that even the prosecution was pleading for Bobby Seale to be removed from the trial. Judge Hoffman eventually agreed and declared a mistrial for Seale. However, he received four years in prison for sixteen contempts of court, each contempt counting for three months in prison.

Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis were found guilty of incitement to riot and sentenced each to five years in prison. An internal investigation by the Department of Justice under the previous administration had yet revealed that the violence had been instigated by the Chicago police, but Judge Hoffman ruled the testimony inadmissible. The verdict would be overturned on appeal.

On December 4, 1969, the FBI and Chicago police orchestrated the execution of Fred Hampton, President of the Black Panthers of Illinois, at his home in the middle of the night. Nine asleep people were then also in the apartment located on the West Side of Chicago. In the evening, Bill O'Neal, an FBI informant, made sure he drugged Hampton. At 4:45 a.m., under the pretext of searching for illegal weapons, the police stormed the residence and literally machine-gunned all the walls of the apartment for fifteen minutes. A hundred shots coming from the police side compared to one single shot from the Black Panthers side. Fred Hampton, who was shot several times, died at just 21 years old. Mark Clark, Minister of Defense for the Peoria (Illinois) chapter, also succumbed to his injuries. He was 22 years old.

The other survivors, including Deborah Johnson, Fred Hampton's partner who was eight and a half months pregnant at the time of the incident, were arrested and faced numerous bogus charges, among which those of attempted murder. COINTELPRO had just struck again.

What was the crime of Fred Hampton whose kindness was recognized by all? That of being a magnificent orator whose talent galvanized and inspired the crowds.

You can murder a liberator,
but you can’t murder liberation!

You can murder a revolutionary,
but you can’t murder a revolution!

You can murder a freedom fighter,
but you can’t murder freedom!

In retaliation and more determined than ever, the Weathermen turned into “terrorists”. A state of war was declared against the United States. Among the organization's most notorious members were Bernardine Dohrn, lawyer and former national secretary of the SDS, and Mark Rudd, a former boy-scout and leader of the student revolt at Columbia University in 1968. According to them, the murder of Fred Hampton expounded the true nature of American state power, ready to kill if necessary and on its own soil anyone who would dare to challenge it. To better combat this official policy they described as systematic repression, going underground seemed to them the solution of choice. The SDS was officially liquidated; the bomb attacks could begin. 25 attacks were thus perpetrated by the Weather Underground, including the bombing of the Capitol in 1971 and that of the Pentagon in 1972. Warning the authorities before each detonation, these explosions caused nevertheless no casualties. Marginalized, most of the members ended up handing themselves in to the police at the end of the 1970s.

On August 2, 1964, George Stephen Morrison, admiral and naval aviator in the United States Navy, was aboard the USS Bon Homme Richard (CV-31), an Essex-class aircraft carrier. He was then the commanding officer of American naval forces in the Gulf of Tonkin when the destroyer USS Maddox was attacked. Thousands of miles away, his son was studying cinema at UCLA (University of California Los Angeles), a certain Jim Morrison.

“All connections were equally meaningful, and equally senseless.”

The Paris Peace Accords signed in January 1973 between representatives of the United States, South Vietnam and the Viet Cong, marked the end of eight years of American military involvement in Vietnam. On March 29, 1973, the last American combat troops finally left South Vietnam. 7000 civilian employees of the Department of Defense were still on duty in Saigon before the city fell into the hands of the communists on April 30, 1975, thus marking the end of the conflict. The final humiliation being that the last staff on site had to flee by helicopter from the roof of the American embassy.

Aside from the two World Wars, the Vietnam War remains the deadliest war abroad in the United States history. 58 220 American soldiers lost their lives over there.

Notes :

[1] Bel Jean-Marc, En route vers Woodstock : de Kerouac à Dylan, la longue marche des babyboomers, Paris, Éditions Balland, 2004, p. 99.
[2] Ibid., p. 41.
[3] Ibid., p. 92.
[4] Ibid., p. 200.
[5] Ibid., p. 250.
[6] In 1956, Morocco, Tunisia and Sudan gained independence. In 1957, Ghana followed suit, followed in 1958 by Guinea. Between January 1 and December 31, 1960, 17 sub-Saharan African countries, including 14 former French colonies, achieved independence immediately after: Cameroon, Togo, Madagascar, Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Benin, Niger, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Chad, Central African Republic, Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon, Senegal, Mali, Nigeria and Mauritania. That same year, Cyprus also became independent. In 1961, it was the turn of Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Egypt and Syria. In 1962, Algeria, Burundi, Uganda, Rwanda, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and Samoa followed. In 1963: Kenya and Malaysia. In 1964: Malawi, Zambia and Malta. In 1965: Gambia, Maldives and Singapore. In 1966: Botswana, Lesotho, Barbados and Guyana. And finally, in 1968: Swaziland, Equatorial Guinea, Mauritius and Nauru.
[7] The song Subterranean Homesick Blues appears on Bob Dylan’s fifth album Bringing It All Back Home released in 1965 by Columbia Records.
[8] Tessier Bertrand, Steve McQueen : L’envers de la gloire, Paris, Éditions l’Archipel, 2020, Preface.
[9] Ibid., Preface.

Sources:

(Books and press articles)

AP, “Mother Says She Abandoned Girl To Save Her Life”, Progress-Bulletin, 15/12/1970.

Bel Jean-Marc, En route vers Woodstock : de Kerouac à Dylan, la longue marche des babyboomers, Paris, Éditions Balland, 2004.

Didion Joan, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968.

Didion Joan, The White Album, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1979.

Ginsberg Allen, Howl and Other Poems, San Francisco, City Lights Books, 1956.

Kerouac Jack, On the Road, New York, Viking Press, 1957.

Tessier Bertrand, Steve McQueen : L’envers de la gloire, Paris, Éditions l’Archipel, 2020.

UPI, “Missing Boy Said Murdered”, The Desert Sun, 15/01/1970.

Van Meter William, “The Hustlers and the Movie Star”, Out Magazine, 23/05/2012.

(Online references)

Andersen Chester, “Uncle Tim’$ Children”, The Digger Archives, 1967.

Baker Matthew, “Background to 68 student movements in the United States”, SciencesPo Bibliothèque, 2018.

Kennedy John F., “Televised Address to the Nation on Civil Rights”, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, 1963.

Street Joe, “‘Free Huey or the Sky’s the Limit’: The Black Panther Party and the Campaign to Free Huey P. Newton”, European Journal of American Studies, 2019.

Whitson Helene, “STRIKE!... Concerning the 1968-69 Strike at San Francisco State College”, FoundSF - the San Francisco digital history archive, (s. d.).

“Anti-Vietnam War Protests in the San Francisco Bay Area & Beyond”, Berkeley Library - University of California, 2023.

“Vietnam War U.S. Military Fatal Casualty Statistics”, The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), 2022.

(Movies)

Easy Rider, movie directed by Dennis Hopper, 1969.

Woodstock, documentary directed by Michael Wadleigh, 1970.

The Weather Underground, documentary directed by Sam Green and Bill Siegel, 2002.

The Sixties, a series of ten documentaries directed for CNN channel and produced by Tom Hanks, Gary Goetzman and Mark Herzog, 2014.

Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, documentary directed by Griffin Dunne, 2017.

Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation, documentary directed by Barak Goodman and Jamila Ephron, 2019.

Black Panthers, documentary directed by Stanley Nelson, 2020.

Joan Didion died on December 23, 2021, at the age of 87, from Parkinson's disease.