In “Witness to the Revolution,” Clara Bingham weaves segments of interviews with 100 individuals — witnesses, whether prominent, or all-but-forgotten — to bring to life a vital period in U.S. history. Recent events suggest there are vital lessons in looking back at August 1969 through September 1970.
People may associate the 1960s with Beatlemania, the race to the moon, assassinations and riots — but Bingham brings readers up close, as the decade flamed out with an incredible mix of highs and lows. It was the time of the original Woodstock — but also the Manson family killings. It saw American soldiers taking lives of My Lai civilians and Kent State students. Some underground groups made themselves heard with bombs, even as citizens learned to exert their political power through moratoriums. Bingham wraps her arms around it all with the book’s subtitle: “Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul.”
As Bingham shared in a phone Q&A with LEO, her most affecting discussion was with Daniel Ellsberg. Once just another hawk supporting the Vietnam War from a defense-contractor desk, he had a moral epiphany about how America was waging that war. He began making photocopies of a trove of documents containing dirty dealings, and soon the press released what came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. It’s the original model for what has been carried out these days by Edward Snowden or Julian Assange.
Ellsberg was a reluctant contributor to Bingham’s history, at first. The author-journalist worked at establishing trust and, as she recalls: “Then it was as hard to get out of the interview as it was to get in! Over six hours. I ran out of pages in my notebook. He was very emotional: He cried a few times. It was really a groundbreaking interview for me, because it helped me understand how fresh the wounds still are 45 years later from this very tumultuous, violent, traumatic time in American history.”
LEO: From what you’ve learned, does it seem that institutions of today — such as government, college boards — are repeating mistakes of earlier times? Clara Bingham: Back then, [colleges] were reporting your grades to the draft board. If your grades were bad, you could get drafted. There’s much more privacy today for students. The area that’s particularly suspect, and some people think it’s repeating previous mistakes, is in government surveillance. NSA spying on citizens. People who were involved in the Occupy Movement say to me they’ve been followed. If the government is so involved in trying to repress — that would be a mistake of repeating history.
America seems to be at a very culturally- and politically-divisive time right now. Much the same as your 1969–1970 period? The country’s very polarized — that’s very similar. The Trump supporters and the Sanders supporters are two ideological wings of the country. I think those two candidates represent a certain amount of unfinished business from the ‘60s.
But I find comparing today to then a little facile. It’s just not anywhere nearly the same. We don’t have a war like the Vietnam War, you don’t have a draft, you don’t have segregation. There were so many things that people were fighting against, that galvanized millions of people. •
Clara Bingham, ‘Witness to the Revolution’ Tuesday, Sept. 27 Louisville Free Public Library (Main Branch) lfpl.org Free (tickets required) | 7 p.m.
