Bild Zeitung,
launched in 1952, became the centerpiece of an empire of right-wing press that became the largest in Europe with
Bild
’s circulation of four million, the largest of any daily on the European continent. Fourteen Springer publications, including five daily newspapers, had a total circulation of fifty million. The papers were not only anticommunist but also racist, and many felt that they were appealing to the very beast the new Germany was trying to lay to rest. Springer always claimed that he spoke for the way the average German thought, which was exactly what many feared. Springer did not deny that the paper sometimes got carried away. “You should see me falling out of bed in the morning with surprise at what I read in my own papers,” he once said.
It was not only students who were angered. Even before the shooting, two hundred writers had asked their publishers to boycott his papers. But while Bachmann’s claim that the newspaper had inspired him resonated with many, Axel Springer himself was more complicated. He was known as an excellent employer who treated workers so well that despite his right-wing politics, organized labor supported him. And despite the Nazi-like tone of his papers, Springer was a strong supporter of Jewish causes, to which he contributed generously from his own fortune. He campaigned tirelessly for German reparation payments to Israel, and his papers were strongly pro-Israel. But in 1968, what Germany’s New Left was most aware of was that the Springer press had declared war on them, demanding repressive laws to curtail demonstrations and to deal harshly with demonstrators, whom he called “terrorists.” He urged vigilante violence against the students.
The response was immediate: The anger over the shooting instantly transferred to anger toward Springer, because of his campaign for years against the Left, but also from a long-simmering rejection of the notion that Europe could be run by powerful press barons. A forerunner of Murdoch and Berlusconi, with an empire that seems quaint today in its lack of broadcast holdings, the question remained—how was it that this man, scooped up by the British from Germany’s rubble to run a radio broadcast, had become the most powerful opinion maker in Europe?
Only hours after the attack on Dutschke, a crowd of angry young people gathered in front of the nineteen-story steel-and-glass office block in the bohemian Kreuzberg section of Berlin. Springer had chosen the spot to build because it was defiantly right up against the Wall. He put a neon sign on the building that said, “
Berlin bleibt frei
”—“Berlin remains free.” Police used water cannons to disperse the crowd of students who threw rocks and flaming torches. The following day, columns of students, arms linked, marched in waves toward the West Berlin Springer building. By the time they reached it, it was already fortified with barbed wire and riot police. The crowd chanted Dutschke’s name and “Springer, murderer!” and “Springer, Nazi!” The police turned on their water cannons and began arresting demonstrators. At the City Hall demonstrators chanted, “Fascists!” and “Nazis!” The students also marched to the American radio station, where windows were broken. Munich demonstrators did better, actually managing to get inside the Springer building there before being driven off by police. Failing to take over buildings, students burned delivery trucks. Thousands of students also clashed with police in Hamburg, Esslingen, Hanover, and Essen. Mostly it was student clubs pitted against police water cannons, and the high-pressure water won the day. But the demonstrators stopped or delayed delivery of Springer papers. In Frankfurt they also stopped the leading West German business paper,
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
because it was printed at a Springer plant. Demonstrators also appeared in front of Springer buildings in New York, London, and Paris. In London Tariq Ali led a group that broke away from a Martin Luther King memorial in Trafalgar Square and attempted to take over Springer offices. In Paris Alain Krivine recalled, “When Rudi was shot was the first spontaneous violent demonstration in Paris. The police were not even in riot gear, no helmets or shields, when suddenly the students in the Latin Quarter began to hurl tables and chairs at police.”
In Germany, the event fell on an Easter holiday, and five days of street battles followed the shooting. In these riots two were killed—an Associated Press photographer and a student, both from objects thrown by students—and several hundred were wounded. Many hundreds were arrested. It was the worst German street rioting since before Hitler came to power. Remembering the consequences of German political instability, most West Germans did not approve of the street violence. In June 1968 the German magazine
Der Spiegel
conducted a poll in which 92 percent of Berlin citizens were opposed to “the use of violence by protesting students.” The students were failing to appeal to the working class: 78 percent of Berliners under thirty from working-class homes said they opposed the student violence. Even some students were outspokenly opposed to the violence.
Dutschke survived his wounds and even wrote a letter to his would-be assassin, explaining his ideas of socialism. But Bachmann hanged himself in his prison cell.
Among the 230 students arrested in Berlin was Peter Brandt, the son of Willy Brandt, former Berlin mayor, minister of foreign affairs, and vice chancellor of Germany. Willy Brandt had always been the good German, the socialist who had opposed fascism and had nothing to hide in his past. But Peter said he was disappointed in his father, that since he had gotten into government he had lost his socialist fervor. He was a social democrat, the German equivalent of a liberal. “I never said that my father should leave office. That’s not true,” Peter stated. “But I think that he has changed and I regret it. He is no longer the same man. He is no longer the socialist who went to fight in Spain during the Civil War. We don’t agree anymore.” When his father suggested that he was spending too much time on politics and not enough on his studies, he said, “If I find that something needs to change, I find that it is my duty to do something to make that change happen.”
One of Peter’s professors warned his father, the vice chancellor, “In another six months your son Peter will become a communist.”
Brandt shrugged. “Anyone who has not been a communist at the age of twenty will never make a good social democrat.”
CHAPTER 10
WAGNERIAN OVERTONES
OF A HIP AND BEARDED
REVOLUTION
I had been raised on Errol Flynn’s
Robin Hood
and the endless hero actor fighting against injustice and leading the people to victory over tyranny. The Cuban thing seemed a case of classic Hollywood proportions.
—L
EROI
J
ONES,
The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka,
1984
I
N FEBRUARY
1968 a group of twenty young Americans arrived in Havana from Mexico City. The trip had been organized by the American SDS. In the group was a twenty-year-old Columbia University junior from New Jersey named Mark Rudd, who had raised money for his Cuban trip by selling hashish at the West End Bar, a student hangout in upper Manhattan.
The group met with the Vietnamese diplomatic delegation and were surprised by their extreme courtesy. The Vietnamese ambassador said that he understood there were important differences between the American government and the American people. Though the students accepted the ambassador’s gracious remark with relief, Rudd seized the occasion to point out that while he wished the ambassador’s comments had been correct, in reality, most Americans did support the war.
The Vietnamese diplomat smiled at the earnest young blond student. “This will be a very long war,” he said. “It has already lasted for us more than twenty years. We can hold out much longer. Eventually the American people will tire of the war, and will turn against it. Then the war will end.”
Rudd realized the ambassador was right. One of the diplomats said he had fought in South Vietnam for seven years, living in tunnels and emerging at night to attack the Americans. Everywhere in Cuba that winter, there was news from Vietnam. A large neon sign over a main Havana street, La Rampa, gave the current total of planes shot down. When the students went to the countryside, they found Cubans standing around transistor radios getting news of the Tet Offensive. Someone gave Rudd a ring that was said to have been made from the metal of a shot-down American plane.
The students met many Cubans who were their age, including Sylvio Rodriguez, who sang ballads in the style of Joan Baez. They spent time in the leafy tropical park with the famous ice-cream shop Coppelia. Rudd later remembered: “We hung out at Coppelia eating tomato ice cream and went to great parties with Afro-Cuban music, which I had never heard before and didn’t quite understand. I saw in Cuba what I wanted to see: factories, farms, and institutions that were owned by the state, socialized. I wanted to see a different way to organize society. But I didn’t see the obvious, that you can’t have a one-party state, that you have to have elections.”
Fidel Castro, bearded and in army fatigues, the surprising and slightly offbeat sensation of 1959, had become the New Left hero of 1968.
He had been neither bearded nor revolutionary in 1955 when he visited the United States looking for financing to overthrow the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, who had seized power three years earlier and had banned all political parties. Batista was corrupt and disliked, and Castro, Dr. Fidel Castro as he was known in the United States in deference to his law degree, was reasonable, earnest, clean-cut, and reassuringly middle class.
In December 1956 Castro landed a yacht in Oriente province with a fighting force of eighty-two. The Cuban government reported that almost all the rebels, including Castro, were killed. This was only a slight exaggeration; the casualties included all but a dozen survivors who made it into the Sierra Maestra mountains with Dr. Castro among them. This was not known for certain until a retired
New York Times
correspondent, Herbert L. Matthews, accomplished one of the most famous and controversial newspaper scoops of the twentieth century by finding Dr. Castro alive, bearded and talkative in his mountain hideaway along with eighteen colorful bearded rebels, including one who had been a pro baseball player in the United States.
The
Times
ran Matthews’s interview as a three-part series on February 24, 25, and 26, 1957. It has often been attacked by anti-Castro elements for presenting Fidel as a sympathetic freedom fighter similar to a World War II partisan. Of course, Americans conveniently forget that many World War II partisans had also been communists. The most remembered attack on the Matthews series was a 1960 cartoon in the conservative
National Review
showing an avaricious-looking Castro hunkering down on an island labeled “The Cuban Police State.” The caption read, “I got my job through the
New York Times.
”
But the
Times
was far from the only media outlet that ran favorable coverage of Dr. Castro at the time. A rabid anticommunist Hungarian exile named Andrew St. George wrote favorably of the Cuban rebels in
Look
; Jules Dubois gave sympathetic coverage in the Red-baiting, right-wing
Chicago Tribune
; photojournalist Dickey Chapelle spent three weeks with Castro for the extremely conservative
Reader’s Digest. Time,
another right-leaning publication, ran thirty-two articles on the Cuban rebels in the two years leading up to their victory, most of them favorable. In December 1956
Time
called Fidel “Lawyer Castro” and said that he was a “well born, well-to-do daredevil of 29.”
American reporters always emphasized Castro’s middle-class character, origins, and education and invariably mentioned his pure Spanish blood. It was never said, but it was reassuring to know, that the Cuban rebellion was no dangerous “Negro uprising.” To the American press he was a good story, a colorful and uplifting tale of a struggle for freedom. But what was starting to become more important was that he made for great television. He looked dashing in fatigues, and his uncertainty in English showed a touchingly vulnerable, less assured side that in reality he never had. He was simply uncomfortable in English. Three months after Matthews’s scoop, a CBS News team traveled to the green, thickly overgrown tropical mountains of Cuba’s Oriente province and shot a prime-time news special that aired in May called
Rebels of the Sierra Maestra: The Story of Cuba’s Jungle Fighters.
Television had come along too late for the Mexican revolution. It had missed the romance of the beautiful Emiliano Zapata, famous for his exquisite horsemanship, and the wild, mounted northern bandits of Pancho Villa, although they were captured in the fifties by Hollywood with romantic rebel stars including Marlon Brando as Zapata. But now television had a live revolution, with the large and rugged-looking Dr. Fidel Castro and his heartthrob Argentine sidekick Che. The Barbudos, the bearded band of rebels, cigars clenched in their teeth, dressed in green, toted huge guns more impressive for portraits than military tactics—but the weapons were reminiscent of the Mexican revolution, which was the very image of a fabled Latin revolution. In between climbing down green slopes to attack the evil dictatorship and its underpaid and undermotivated henchmen, Fidel could squat in the jungle just south of Miami with CBS correspondent Robert Taber and speak into a microphone. Not nearly as graphic as the live warfare from Vietnam of 1968, this coverage felt immediate but was appealing in its bloodlessness.
Students tried to go to Cuba and fight for Fidel, but the rebels did not encourage them. Frenchman Régis Debray managed to fight with Che only later, in Latin America. Bernard Kouchner, age twenty the year of Fidel’s triumph, was discouraged when he attempted to join up with Fidel and returned to France, where he went to medical school and formed Médecins Sans Frontières, Doctors Without Borders, a medical response to the ideals of third worldism.
The New York Times
reported that twenty-five Americans were fighting with Fidel and there may have been more, though only in a few cases do we know their names. Three sons of American sailors serving in Guantánamo joined up with the guerrilla forces, and unexplained gringos were occasionally referred to in rebel communications. In March 1957 a Berkeley undergraduate student, Hank di Suvero, wrote Herbert Matthews about the possibility of taking a group of friends with two jeeps to Oriente province after the spring semester to help Fidel. Mathews was kind enough not to dwell on the notion of Castro holding up the revolution until the spring semester was over, but he was discouraging, so instead di Suvero stayed at Berkeley that year and became one of the founders of the student political party SLATE, which was the beginning of activism on that campus.
It seemed everyone loved Fidel. Even Eisenhower negotiated secretly with Batista in 1958, trying to persuade him to step down and be replaced by a coalition that would include Castro. America and much of the world thrilled to the film footage of the bearded revolutionaries led by Fidel and Che, as photogenic as anyone Hollywood might have cast, triumphantly taking Havana on New Year’s Day 1959. Everyone wanted Fidel on television. Both Ed Sullivan and Jack Parr flew down to do Fidel shows. But this euphoric state where television, journalists, the student Left, and the political establishment were all in love with Castro would not last for long.
Once in power, Fidel began executing hundreds of Batista supporters. Suddenly the political establishment, the same people who would defend capital punishment in the Chessman case the following year, were appalled by state executions. And the Left, the Abbie Hoffmans and Marlon Brandos, the activists and celebrities who would stand vigil by the California prison, protesting the Chessman execution, had not a word to say for Fidel’s victims. But even within Cuba, revolutionary justice was being called into question. In March 1959 forty-four Batista airmen were tried for war crimes. Evidence that they had refused to bomb populations and had dumped their ordnance on fields led to their acquittal, whereupon the judge was replaced by a more loyal revolutionary and the forty-four were retried and all sentenced to prison terms. The minister of health, Elena Mederos, asked to resign, saying, “I am a different generation to you and your friends. We are quite opposed to each other in spirit. I must resign.” But Castro was able to charm her into staying.
Executions and revolutionary justice were talked about and criticized in the United States, too, but the fundamental issue was revolution. Down from the mountains and secure in the capital, Dr. Castro and his middle-class white rebels were not shaving off their beards! This was the sixties, when extra hair was synonymous with rebellion. In 1961 Matthews came out with a book that put it succinctly: This was “a real revolution, not a changing of the guard, not a shuffling of leaders, not just the outs getting in but a social revolution on the direct line of the French Revolution of 1789.”
As this reality became understood, in other countries the people of the establishment, with their fear and distrust of revolution, became vehemently anti-Castro. Many people could not decide. But a radical minority around the world, people who longed for revolution, believing it was the only hope for social change, the only way to move toward a more just society, were prepared to salute Fidel, whatever his faults, because he had not just taken power, he was really doing it—was really making a revolution. Fidel was in their pantheon, along with Ho Chi Minh and Mao. But Ho was a curious and stoic character, not hip like Fidel, and though Mao’s revolution fascinated, they would never completely understand his vast and complex China. For many radical students, middle-class people who dreamed of revolution, Dr. Castro, the middle-class lawyer-turned-revolutionary, and his partner, Dr. Che Guevara, the middle-class doctor-turned-revolutionary, were their ideal radicals.
In November 1960 C. Wright Mills published
Listen, Yankee,
the first of a number of leftist essays to reach the bestseller list in the 1960s. Most of the others, such as Eldridge Cleaver’s
Soul on Ice,
did not come until 1968. C. Wright Mills, a sociologist well respected in academic circles who died at the height of his popularity in the early 1960s, had been widely read since his 1950s book,
The Power Elite,
which told of the military-industrial complex before Eisenhower had coined the phrase in his 1960 farewell address. Mills had articulated a view of society’s power structure that was felt by many of the New Left youth. According to Mills, the ruling class was made up of a new clique of politicians, corporate executives, and military commanders who maintained their hold on power by perpetuating the cold war. In
Listen, Yankee,
Mills broke all the rules of academic writing and as a result sold four hundred thousand copies. The book is written in the first-person voice of a fictitious Cuban revolutionary who speaks rapidly, his commentary richly woven with asides—a fair approximation of what Castro sounded like in Spanish. The Cuban talks not only of his own revolution, but of the need for revolution in America. In 1960, unlike 1968, talk of revolution in America was rarely heard.
While Cuba was thrilling the Left, it was alienating most of its U.S. admirers. In early 1959, Camilo Cienfuegos, the head of the rebel army, visited the United States to garner support, and the trip was disastrous. These Barbudos were no longer picturesque guerrilla fighters, they were unshaven and uncouth radicals. But two months later, in April, Fidel himself came to America, and for a brief moment the country succumbed to his seemingly irresistible charm. A toy manufacturer produced one hundred thousand olive drab caps that said “El Libertador” and had the 26th of July logo of Fidel’s movement. Each cap came with a chin strap to which a black beard was attached. Fidel was particularly well received in New York at a huge Central Park rally. New York mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr., gave him keys to the city. But in what proved to be an omen for the future, his most successful stops were at Columbia and other universities. By springtime, polls in the United States showed an almost even split between those opposed to Castro and those who either supported him or hadn’t made up their minds. With a third to a fifth of the population solidly behind him, he had lost a great deal of support in the first six months of 1959.