Free Jeremy Varon by Bringing the War Home

their country’s past and present, their stance toward the United States, and their understanding of their protest were mediated through one another. In this complex way, national memory and notions of collective identity played themselves out on a global stage.
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    If you plant ice, you’re gonna’ harvest wind.
    The Grateful Dead, “Franklin’s Tower”
    (lyrics by Robert Hunter)
    As the protests in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, and elsewhere erupted in violence, establishment voices increasingly denounced students and youths as hooligans and malcontents with no respect for law and order. Yet such violence and the anxiety it elicited were only a small part of a larger climate of crisis driven by violence in various forms; for New Leftists to gravitate toward violence—whether as a means of self-defense, an expression of outrage, or a broad assault on their society—was to cross a threshold commonly transgressed.
    Above all, there was the violence in Vietnam. By the end of 1968, over 30,000 American servicemen had died there, with the television news reporting the daily losses.40 In this manner, violence entered American families and communities, steeping everyday life in bitter and often confusing loss. Through the draft, millions of American men confronted the possibility of killing or being killed in a war whose purpose many questioned. There were also the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968 and Robert Kennedy in early June, which produced a widespread sense of devastation and foreboding. To many blacks, King’s assassination was the ultimate affirmation of the virulence of American racism, which claimed the life even of a man of peace. For some, it was an incitement to violence. On the night of King’s murder, the Black Pan-36
    “Agents of Necessity”
    ther Leader Eldridge Cleaver insisted in a radio broadcast that by 1968, King was hated both by racist whites and by black people “who wanted to be rid of the self-deceiving doctrine of non-violence.” Declaring a “re-quiem for non-violence,” he warned that “the death of Dr. King signals the end of an era and the beginning of a bloody chapter that may remain unwritten, because there may be no scribe left to capture on paper the holocaust to come.”41
    Blacks responded to King’s death by rioting in cities throughout America. These riots repeated the massive “civil disorders” in Detroit, Newark, and elsewhere of a year earlier, when police violence triggered the eruption of poor black neighborhoods. The Kerner Commission, appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the causes of the 1967 riots, declared in its 1968 report that “two societies, one black, one white—
    separate and unequal” had emerged in the United States.42 Cautioning that “[d]isruption and disorder nourish repression, not justice,” the report warned of more unrest if racial and economic inequality were not addressed by all levels of government.43 What the commission intimated by calling for an end to violence “in the streets of the ghetto and in the lives of people,” radicals boldly asserted: that poverty, lack of opportunity, and racism were themselves forms of violence whose consequences were despair and, inevitably, violent rage.44
    The police themselves, as they dealt with demonstrators, set a course of collision. The future Weatherman Jim Mellen vividly described another event from 1968 that provided a chilling sense of things to come. Born in the mid 1930s, Mellen was older than the others who would make up Weatherman. After earning his Ph.D. at the University of Iowa and being forced out of a teaching job in New Jersey for his opposition to the Vietnam War, he went in the spring of 1966 to teach in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania. He returned in April 1969, two days after Dr. King had been shot, to what seemed a different student movement in a different America. A week or so later, he attended a demonstration near New York