June 1 1968
[image redacted: alt-text: non-combatant Igbo children starving during the mass blockade of Biafra by the Nigerian military government]
The ethnomusicologist Charles Keil had previously commented, in 1966: “After counting the disemboweled bodies along the Makurdi road I was escorted back to the city by soldiers who apologised for the stench and explained politely that they were doing me and the world a great favor by eliminating Igbos.”1
June 5 1968
THE CINCINNATI ENQUIRER
“IN WHAT SHADOWS DOES MURDER FLOWER?”
“RFK Hangs On: Papers Hint He Was Marked Man”
“Shock… Fear… Confusion—Indignation Grips City”
“Agents Guarding Major Candidates”
…
“S. Viets Push VC Back in Saigon Battle”
Rina speaks:
By June I began to get myself together to struggle my way back across the country. It took days, and looking back, it feels like I walked most of the way. Sometimes I’d hitchhike, or ride the bus, but even that required more contact with humans than I wanted. Orlin, and Wells, and Logan—I veered north of the Mormon craziness in Salt Lake—and tried to stay in the woods and on the high prairies as much as I could. I skirted the southern edge of the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Rez—I couldn’t go nearer, because I was afraid I’d be able to hear those Lakota women and children screaming as they died in the snow at Wounded Knee, seventy years before. I was pretty much off my head: I wasn’t eating much, and I was always scared of predators, and I might have been raped once, in Sioux City, but I was so dissociated that I’m not even sure, now, if that’s a nightmare or a horrible memory.
I made Chicago in August, and even though I knew better—I knew I should just put my head down and keep going, to the east coast, and a boat for Europe—I felt like, if I didn’t reconnect with my friends from the Band, I might go all the way crazy—might wind up just dying, or getting killed, by the side of the road. I’d seen enough of that, by the ragged end. From Grant Park, I tried the the only number I had—for a bar on the Lower East Side in Manhattan—because I thought maybe whoever picked up the phone on the other end would know someone in Chicago who could help me.
August 8 1968
Richard M. Nixon: Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida
Mr. Chairman, delegates to this convention, my fellow Americans.
Sixteen years ago I stood before this Convention to accept your nomination as the running mate of one of the greatest Americans of our time—or of any time—Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Eight years ago, I had the highest honor of accepting your nomination for President of the United States.
Tonight, I again proudly accept that nomination for President of the United States.
But I have news for you. This time there is a difference.
This time we are going to win…
August 20
Prague
Olenev slipped into the smoky bistro, jammed to the rafters with animated young people talking and shouting about politics and thrusting mimeographed leaflets at one another, and, using her tiny frame, and here and there a judicious elbow, made her way to the rear, where the Colonel sat at a small round table, arms folded and his head down, looking out from under the brim of a cloth cap, quartering the crowd. She pulled a chair around to sit beside him, so that she too could look out into the room, and spoke without turning her head.
“The bastards have arrested Dubcek; no one knows where they’ve taken him. And our friends elsewhere say there’s armor massing, just over the border.”
Though her tone was even and quiet, there was fear in her voice. “And there are hundreds of them, Colonel—not just one column, but five or six, or more, and they’re coming from all directions: north and east and south.” She moved closer and held out a wire-service form, printed on cheap brown paper, and the Colonel bent his head and squinted in the dim light of the smoky room. Olenev watched him.
1968.08.19
LANDES FOR TORRES. BELTWAY ALLIES CONFIRM NO ARMED REAX FROM ALLIES WRT BEARS ZONES INFLUENCE. NO REPEAT NO NATO RESPONSE.”
The Colonel lifted his head to look at Olenev, who searched his face; his eyes were hard. When he spoke, his tone was equally hard.
“The West’s abandoning the Czechs. The reformers aren’t going to be able to stand. We’re going to have to shift tactics, and concentrate on getting our people out.”
August 22
Grant Park, Chicago: 1968 Democratic National Convention
Hunter S. Thompson to Jim Silberman (Random House)
I wouldn’t have missed that nightmare for anything. Hubert [Humphrey, Democratic nominee] is right when he talks about a “new ear,” but he won’t be part of it. The thing that impressed me most about Chicago was not the crazed violence of the cops (even though I got punched in the stomach with a billy club at one point), but the style of the protesters. That scene in Chicago made all the Berkeley protests look like pastoral gambols from another era. On Monday night I saw 3000 lined up behind a barricade of park benches and garbage cans, beating on the cans with clubs and shouting: “Pigs East Shit!” … at a mass of 400 cops, about 100 years away, chanting “Kill, Kill, Kill…”
We’ve come a long way from Sproul Hall and “go limp.” No more of that… from now on it’s going to be hell; those freaks on the barricades stood in clouds of tear-gas and fired spray-cans of oven cleaner (a lye-acid solution) at the cops… they stood and fought, and took incredible beatings. I witnessed at least ten beatings in Chicago that were worse than anything I ever saw the Hell’s Angles do; at one point I stood about 20 years off, while four cops beat a photographer who was rolling around on the sidewalk screaming “Help, Help!”… and all I could was stand there, constantly watching around me to make sure I had running room if they come after me. A half hour later I was talking about what I’d seen in a bar when I suddenly started crying… the whole week was that way: fear and tension and super-charged emotions, sore legs from running, no sleep, and a sense of disaster pervading it all.”
—Fear and Loathing in America
August 23
Chicago Tribune headline: “HIPPIE KILLED BY POLICEMEN IN OLD TOWN”
“A youth from Sioux Falls, S.D., was shot to death yesterday in a gun battle with two policemen in Old Town. The youth, tentatively identified as Dean Johnson, 17, was killed after he fired a .32 caliber revolver at Detectives John Manley and Frank Szwedo.
“The detectives were unhurt.”
August 25
Rina speaks:
I was sitting in Grant Park with Ginsberg on the Sunday. The MOBE had scheduled a picket across the street from the Hilton, where the DNC was meeting—we didn’t know it, but they were going to pull out this sleazy deal and make Humphrey the nominee. McGovern had gotten creamed, and Bobby was dead, and so now the kingmakers—especially that scumbag Daley—thought they could nail things down in a room 25 floors up. And you could tell that Daley’s cops were just itching to bust heads. So we’d moved across the road, to try to defuse things with the cops. The night before, the 24th, I’d seen Allen do the same thing, when a bunch of cops were getting ready to wail on some protesters because they had built a fire in the park to get warm. Allen literally stood there and chanted ‘Om’ and the cops got so freaked out that they turned around and left.
We were sitting quietly against a big rock, at the other end of the park from where the MC5 was setting up to play, and there were a few people around, but we weren’t talking about politics. In fact, we weren’t talking at all. Allen was sitting there in the lotus, and he was absorbed in weaving a string of daisies that he must have found in one of the flowerbeds. I didn’t want to talk either; I was just happy that, for the first time in what seemed like months, I felt safe and peaceful, just being near him, and hearing him quietly chanting Om under his breath.
After a few minutes, Allen finished weaving the daisy chain. He stopped chanting, and looked up at me, and smiled. He beckoned me to lean forward, and gently placed the daisies like a circlet around my head. He leaned away, and straightened his back, and smiled again. Without changing his expression, he said,
“I think it’s going to be bad here tonight, Rina. I think people are going to get hurt. You’ve been hurt enough. I think you should go, while it’s safe.”
He pulled a small roll of bills from the the shoulder bag he always carried, stuffed full of poems, which lay on the grass next to him. He handed me the money, and, after a moment’s hesitation, I took them.
“Head for the Greyhound, buy a ticket, be safe on the road. There are friends in New York, but don’t stay there too long—I think it’d be better if you can make it all the way to Bassanda. Use the network in the Med ports, OK?”
I nodded, and my eyes filled with tears.
“Oh, and Rina?” I looked at Allen, and now his smile was gone, and his open, expressive face was sad.
“Peter saw Robert, in New York at the apartment, back in February. He said that Robert didn’t look good. Of course, Peter isn’t a great reporter, but he knows the signs.
“Peter thought Robert was probably strung out on H.”
Well, what can a poor boy do
Except to sing for a rock 'n' roll band?
'Cause in sleepy London town
There's just no place for a street fighting man
--Mick Jagger and Keith Richards
Quoted in A. Dirk Moses and Lasse Heerten (2018), Postcolonial Conflict and the Question of Genocide: The Nigeria-Biafra War 1967 – 1970 (New York: Routledge) 25.