So it was on to UWF, or back to UWF, however I wanted to think about it. The organization was in a new office, near Thomas Circle, not far from the old one on Thirteenth Street. If I felt like it, I could walk from my apartment just north of Dupont Circle, on 19th Street, but it was almost a mile, and I was not much of a walker in those days. In the fall, after I had moved into the communal living arrangement we then called a co-op, but later came to be known as a commune, a few blocks up 19th Street, one of the male residents there occasionally gave me a ride on his motorcycle, but I didn’t want to encourage him.
I worked for Al Mark, who was director of public relations and also membership. UWF did direct mail drives, both for renewal of current members and to solicit new ones. I don’t think I ever knew where the mailing lists for new member solicitations came from. But I’ve always remembered that a 10% return (which doesn’t sound like much) on a direct mail mailings was considered very good. My boss also collected publications from “the other side,” including “Red Channels” and the “National Review,” and documents from HUAC and organizations like the American Nazi Party and the John Birch Society. As I filed these, I’d read bits and pieces, but it was sometimes hard for me to understand their points since what they described bore no relationship to anything I was familiar with.
More interesting, and more pivotal for me, was that UWF now had an Antioch co-op, someone I knew from my freshman first quarter. Janet was working on the Student Federalists, which had first been formed in the 1940s, then joined UWF in the early 1950s as its youth division. Specifically, she was working on organizing a conference to be held in New York City in late November. And personally, she stressed that I should return to Antioch College. I had already started taking courses at American University, a political science class on international affairs that summer and in the fall a class on 19th century American novels. (One book I read was Moby Dick; I skipped all the chapters about whales. Another was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, based on his time at the utopian Brook Farm; I didn’t at the time understand his skeptical attitude toward the communal community, perhaps because I was on some level taking seriously the communal community I had just moved into. More about that later.)
1963 had many political events worth remembering. At the end of August was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. I was eager to go, but Susan, my roommate, had reservations. For some reason, she believed rumors that with many residents attending the march, there would be a rash of burglaries; she intended to stay home to protect our apartment. This seemed ridiculous to me, though I didn’t have the political sense to call out her implicit racism. I went with Anne, a co-worker. The day was easygoing and friendly. As Anne and I walked along Constitution Avenue toward the Lincoln Memorial, we got into conversation with a teenage girl from North Carolina, who’d come on a chartered bus that had traveled all night. It was exciting to meet someone from a part of the country I knew only stereotypes of. The whole Mall was filled with groups of people; this was long before police corralled demonstrators between and behind barriers. People walked as close to the Memorial as they could, where speakers, including John Lewis, Bayard Rustin, and A. Philip Randolph, orated all afternoon. It was hot, and the crowd was thinning where I stood. I decided to make my way home, but I’d only gotten halfway across the Mall when Martin Luther King Jr.’s words caught my ear; it was partly his repetition of his “dream,” but his mention of “the red hills of Georgia,” where “the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood” stopped me. I stood there to the end of his now famous speech, feeling touched and elevated by this appeal to the best in human nature, and still too naïve to imagine the worst that was to come later.
A few days later, Susan moved into her own apartment, and I needed to find a new place to live. How did I find the commune? Michael, the resident manager, was a grad student at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, which the center where Susan worked was connected to, so I may have learned about available space that way. I met him at a civil rights meeting and had an instant crush — he was just my type, blond, blue eyes.
He was resident manager of two adjoining buildings, also on 19th Street, just a couple of blocks from my partment: one a rooming house, the other with two upper floors that became a communal home for six people with a political purpose. We were to be a research group for peace candidates in the 1964 elections, called the Political Action Information Service, or PAIS. “We” consisted, in mid-September, of Peter, a political lobbyist for the United Auto Workers, and also an Antioch College dropout; Ed and Gerald, undergraduates at George Washington University; and me. There needed to be six of us for the rent to be reasonable (was that $50 a month per person?). Will, a leftist who worked as a messenger, was part of our group, but living in the rooming house. (Will had been dishonorably discharged from the army, perhaps because, during the Cuban missile crisis the year before, when one of the NCOs had said, “We might be going down there,” Will had replied, “You might be going down there, but I’m not.”) There was also a teenager, recently graduated from high school, named Doug. Theoretically, he was going to be a paid worker for PAIS, but he didn’t stay long, then left, supposedly with our mailing list, and went to work for the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee.
We were soon joined by one more male person, a guy named Jack. Jack was from Kansas, had come to D.C. a month earlier, and had been looking for an apartment at a bulletin board at George Washington University when he was told about us by a person whose name was unfamiliar to any of us. Will was immediately suspicious: “He’s from Kansas, he must be from the FBI.” The rest of us thought Will was taking us more seriously than the FBI was. Besides, Jack’s constant uniform of gray sweatshirt and sweatpants was not usual FBI attire. Jack moved in.
I was in a room for two, sharing with Janet until she returned to Antioch for fall quarter, so we needed one more girl. One came for a meeting. Since we were an organization, we wanted to know that whoever moved in was aligned with our actions; this girl seemed to have little interest in politics, so she was nixed. Next, I thought I might find a roommate among the girls I’d met at NIH; I’d kept in touch with Norma, one of the college-age schizophrenics being studied at the Clinical Center, who told me her therapist thought she could live outside the institution. Perfect, I thought, why not move in with me? Norma thought that was a good idea, but I think the commune was too chaotic for her. She moved into our shared room on a Friday, but by Sunday evening she’d become more and more dissociated from reality; by Monday morning she’d returned to the security of NIH. It was the first time I had ever seen a person have a psychotic break; it was alarming and scary.
Living in
the commune was a combination of study and play. Peter would hold educational
sessions in which he’d name a congressional district and we were to name the
congressman in that seat. Ed was clearly studying; he knew a lot. Gerald knew
some, but not as many. I was mightily impressed; I knew my congressman was
Richard Schweiker (I was still registered in Pennsylvania, where my parents
lived), but neither of my senators. Jack thought it might be a fun enterprise,
but he didn’t engage. He was more interested in drinking and in playing bridge,
as were others in the commune, so I attempted to learn. We played with Janet and Peter.
Meanwhile, I was getting other political lessons. Madame Nhu, the sister-in-law of the president of South Vietnam, had come to the U.S. to stir up stronger support for her country against North Vietnamese guerrilla fighters. (A digression: I had first heard of Vietnam at age 12, reading the September 1954 issue of “My Weekly Reader,” a newspaper of current events for students. On the left side of page 1 was a story about the historic Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision declaring segregated schools unconstitutional. On the right side was a story about the end of the Vietnamese war of independence against France, its division into North and South, and that Catholics were fleeing the North because it was controlled by communists. Having leftist parents who told us communism wasn’t the evil we were told it was on TV, I was confused about why people would be “fleeing” communists. And “Vietnam” stuck in my mind.)
Madame Nhu was scheduled to speak at the National Press Club in October, and the politicos in the commune decided to picket her appearance. Along with some other groups I wasn’t aware of (an internet search now says they included SDS and Women Strike for Peace), the demonstration was scheduled for lunch time on a Friday. The National Press Club was not far from the UWF office, so I went there on my lunch hour. When I arrived there was no one in front of the Press Club, but maybe a dozen people were across the street, walking in a circle with signs. Apparently, the police had arrested several people, including everyone I knew, because the police said they were blocking the sidewalk and the picketers refused to move, claiming they weren’t blocking the sidewalk—in fact, the police trying to persuade them to cross the street were the ones blocking the sidewalk. But I knew none of the remaining demonstrators. I’ve mentioned my shyness. This wasn’t like the March on Washington, where I was one of hundreds of thousands. Now I was uncertain.
Further down the block, however, I saw another line of picketers. These men were members of the American Nazi Party, swastikas clearly visible on their clothing and signs. I knew that the American Nazi Party had its headquarters nearby, in Arlington, Virginia. It was upsetting to see swastikas so near, but as I stood on the sidewalk trying to decide what to do, it felt clear to me that to do nothing would somehow mean that I didn’t see any difference between those protesting against Madame Nhu and the swastika-wearing Nazis. I had to show that there was a difference, so I overcame my nervousness and stepped into the picket line of people walking, walking, walking in the circle. Some smiled at me, and I felt welcomed into this small community. This was my first real political activism.
(P.S.: About a month later, there was a trial for the demonstrators who’d been arrested. Before a jury? probably not. Must have been before a judge. The verdict? Maybe it’s in an SDS history somewhere, but I don’t remember.)
Then there was the tragedy in November. Around lunch time, after all of the department heads had left for lunch, the husband of one of the secretaries called — and she told us that Kennedy had been shot. That was more shocking than anything I’d ever heard. I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. This didn’t happen in the United States. Could it be real? I called home and reached Gerald. Yes, he said, the president has been shot and there was no word about his condition.
The office was silent. No one knew what to say or what to do. After a while, I thought someone should find our bosses to let them know. But when I stood outside the restaurant, I could see there was a TV above the bar — they knew. They didn’t need me. Back at the office, nothing much got done, especially when we got word that Kennedy had died. We just stared at each other, mumbled about how insane this was. Our bosses came back from lunch and sent us home.
That evening I had a date with a guy named Lee, a musician, I think. We were supposed to see a movie at the Washington Film Society, but nothing was normal anymore. We went to a bar or café, sat at a table, and mostly just stared at each other, numb. Lee suddenly stood and went to talk to someone he saw at the entrance. “We’ve got to leave,” he said, back at our table. We drove to his apartment, where he flushed something down the toilet. A friend had just told him the police might be looking to search his apartment, so he had to dispose of a batch of magic mushrooms. This didn’t feel more outlandish than what had happened in Dallas that afternoon.
That evening there was a candlelight vigil in front of the White House. Gerald and Jack were among a few who’d also gone to the White House with different motives. Jack later reported that Gerald started to chant, “Ding-dong the witch is dead,” but Jack shut him up, not wanting to get them killed. Kennedy was not loved on the left.
(P.S.: Almost 30 years later, Oliver Stone made “JFK,” Jim Garrison’s conspiracy theory that the CIA killed Kennedy. In one scene, Donald Sutherland, playing an anonymous but in-the-know informant, tells Kevin Costner, playing Garrison, the New Orleans D.A., that all phones in Washington, D.C., went dead the afternoon Kennedy was shot. This is not true. I was there. Phones worked.)
The following weekend was Thanksgiving, but because many of us would be away, we’d planned to have a Thanksgiving dinner that Sunday. We sort of sleep-walked through the preparations. After our midday dinner, I was in the kitchen cleaning up and listening to the radio — the radio had been on all weekend — and heard the in-real-time report that Lee Harvey Oswald had just been shot as police were moving him from one place to another. This was really too much. I didn’t drop a dish, just walked upstairs to tell everyone else that Oswald had been shot. More numbness. More nothing feels real.
(P.S.: Conspiracy theories cropped up almost immediately, too many to describe. None made any more sense than the unbelievable events themselves. Neither Jack nor I ever thought it was more than what it appeared: a lone gunman got a lucky shot, and too many people in Texas can walk around with guns everywhere, even police headquarters.)
Working as a secretary even at a liberal organization like UWF, I felt like a lower form of humanity without a college degree. The Case of the First Names, as I called it in the paper I wrote to get work credit at Antioch, for example. There was the staff, the people with job titles, and the secretaries and guys in the mailroom. The staff people called everyone by their first names, but the secretaries addressed staff members as Mr., Mrs., or Miss last name. One day I called my boss by his first name, and he seemed fine with it, but I didn’t work that closely with other staff members, so didn’t feel comfortable addressing them familiarly. It seemed unfair that such a minor issue had meaning, yet I was sure that if I had a college degree I could be on a first-name basis with all my co-workers.
I had not yet committed to reapplying to Antioch, and at the end of December applied to Columbia University’s School of General Studies, a part-time version of Columbia’s program. But in January Janet was back in D.C. and now my roommate, and soon I’d written to Antioch and gotten transcripts sent to the college for the two classes I’d taken at American University. She wasn’t back at UWF, but awaiting notice whether she could work at the Peace Corps. That didn’t work out because she was associated with a known subversive; Peter, the UAW lobbyist, was refusing to cooperate with the draft, and by the next year had started a three-year prison sentence. (On receiving letters from the Selective Service System, he would write back: “Please take me off your mailing list.”)
On returning to Antioch, I wrote papers to get work credit for the jobs I’d had in the previous two years. Here's the title page of the one I wrote for United World Federalists — on tissue paper of what was called a carbon set. What did I mean by that title: “The Cause and the Calling”? Did I think a “calling” was more important than a “cause”? Was a “calling” more internal than a “cause”? Was it more admirable to feel a “calling” than to follow a “cause”? These are all my thoughts now, but what did I think at 21?
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