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Can people without means afford to go the distance in academia? Weigh in on paupers and scholars in the Education area of Table Talk

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Competing for grades is one thing. But facing off for parking spaces means all-out war
(10/16/98)

Geometry and hot pix
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Returning home from college, a young man is caught between his troubled younger brother and X-rated Web sites
(10/14/98)

Financial roulette with Sallie Mae
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Make no mistake, the corporate mistress of student loans will get you in the end, but in the meantime you can play her at her own game and sometimes win
(10/12/98)

Creeps on campus
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Do bad guys have a right to higher education?
(10/09/98)

My crabs or yours?
By Dan Stern
Protecting yourself from the creatures of the sexual swamp
(10/07/98)

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THURSDAYS AT THE CLAMBUCKET | PAGE 1, 2
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In the many tributes written to the radical heroics of the 1960s, the cops on the streets, whether in Berkeley or Chicago, remain frozen in time as villains. They were the reviled forces of oppression, while we (the demonstrators) fought for an assortment of freedoms -- free sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll and other slogans for utopias long since crashed and burned. At a time when one boomer failure and hypocrisy after the next is exposed, perhaps my generation needs this last sacred cow to continue believing in its inherent goodness and in the justice of its causes. We were right, and they were wrong. Right? Nowhere in the wave of self-congratulatory nostalgia writing about the 1960s have I found the least inclination to look behind the gas masks, to learn how the cops viewed those events, or even to find out who they really were.

The key to my question was in a manila envelope I have kept in an old wooden sea chest for 31 years. It's a newspaper clipping with a photograph taken at 7:02 a.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 17, 1967, when I was transformed from a 19-year-old junior at UC-Berkeley into a full-fledged participant in two days of chaotic street battles in downtown Oakland -- courtesy of the Oakland police.

The demonstration was part of a loosely planned week-long series of anti-war actions called Stop the Draft Week. It was supposed to physically block the doors of the Oakland induction center and thus keep draftees from getting processed into the Army and shipped to Vietnam. On Monday, about 1,000 demonstrators watched 68 people, including Joan Baez, get arrested as they sat in the induction center's doorway, models of Gandhian nonviolence.

Tuesday had been earmarked for the militant radicals who felt that pacifist tactics had failed. They wanted confrontation. Many wore helmets and padded clothing and were prepared to use their picket signs as shields and weapons. When a bullhorn declared the assembly unlawful and ordered us to disperse, the insults, catcalls and chants to stop the war grew louder. What the demonstrators did not know was that the Oakland police had infiltrated their planning meetings, knew the mood of the organizers and had decided to take preemptive action.

One of the infiltrators was Jack Richardson, now 80, who was working undercover, wearing a helmet liner on his head with the words "flower power" painted on it. "I don't think anyone was fooled, since I was 6-3 and 240 pounds," Richardson says, chuckling. Indeed, the spectacle of this meticulously neat former homicide detective donning such a ludicrous disguise seems especially absurd when he begins to wax nostalgic for the military-style actions of the police.

"I never was so proud in my life as on 15th and Clay," he says. "It was really a precision military operation. I thought it was good."

Ford describes the same maneuver as if he still practices it daily: "You went in with your 36-inch baton, the size of a broom handle. It was used as a rifle held at high point to shove people back. When you stuck them with the end of it, it hurt. You moved until you created an opening."

As I hear these clinical descriptions of the drill that unleashed its fury on the demonstrators it dawns on me that this is vintage cop talk, rife with jargon that conveys the ugly and unpleasant in cooler, more palatable terms. Every trade in which contact with the messy and traumatic sides of life is commonplace develops its own vernacular to help maintain that thin veneer of civilization that masks fear. Until I talked to George Hart, a former Oakland police chief who does not frequent the Clambucket, it never occurred to me that the cops might have been afraid of us.

That morning, Hart was at the command post looking down at the street. "It was still dark," he said with an intensity as if it had all happened yesterday. "The demonstrators were very hostile, and the line was very thin. We began to question whether we had enough resources."

These are the unsullied views of men in command. What these guys did not see in the chaos -- or chose not to see -- were those among them who lost control and flailed away at anyone who got in their way. Reporters, who had covered riots before and were accustomed to working from behind police lines, suddenly found themselves attacked by club-wielding officers who did not discriminate between them and the rabble. The reporters were insulted, stonewalled, pushed around and beaten. "The Preliminary Report on the Involvement of Police With the Press the Week of Oct. 16-21 in Oakland, California," issued by the San Francisco-Oakland Newspaper Guild (Dec. 5, 1967), was produced as an expression of media outrage. The police behavior seemed inexplicable to most of the 34 newsmen who contributed eyewitness accounts to this astonishing document. Many were combat vets from World War II and Korea, with backgrounds similar to the Oakland officers', and in some cases, they knew them personally. KGO-TV cameraman Buck Joseph's terse statement expressed his sense of betrayal: "I've worked with those guys and they know I'm not a cop hater."

That morning's police actions did create a lot of new cop haters, as well as a huge public-relations victory for the anti-war movement. The afternoon San Francisco Examiner's front-page headline read, "Draft Pickets Routed, 3,500 in Protest -- 22 Hospitalized." Just below were two photographs. One is a bird's-eye view of the police phalanx advancing and clearing the block below. The other shows two cops poised to club a long-haired demonstrator. It's me, my right hand still cradling my soon-to-be-lost camera and my left grabbing Barbara Fisher's arm.

The next morning that photo was plastered on the front page of newspapers across the country.

The 19-year-old who collided with that wall of Oakland police in 1967 was impatient to change the world, but woefully inexperienced. My own feelings about the war itself had always been divided. Even then, I refused to march behind the North Vietnamese flag. I refrained from joining any political group and took solace in describing myself as an anarchist. Being against everything spared me from having to embrace creeds I did not trust, but there was still a seething sense of injustice, and I was determined to make these feelings known. There must have been thousands like me out there, politically naive and ready to explode with the passions of youth. Once bloodied, I was outraged and saw the police as the enemy. It was exactly what the demonstration's organizers had hoped would happen. I was the model stooge for what they called "radicalizing the students." Abandoning any broader political ideals, from that moment on, my motive was to protest police violence itself.

While the retired cops at the Clambucket sometimes discuss the police brutality in terms of "lapses in discipline," at least one man convinced me that things could have been worse. A small man with kind dark eyes and a soothing voice, Gil Souza is so personable I can picture him charming a bank robber into a pair of handcuffs. A retired sergeant and Clambucket regular, Souza was at Berkeley during some of the '60s demonstrations and had to restrain the men under his command, "because they were picking on the guys with beards and long hair. My son was a Cal student," he says. "I told them, 'Don't mess with my son, because then you're gonna have to mess with me.' We learned to be objective, to judge the situations, not the way a person looked."

"Although we were reluctant to admit it," he adds, "on the Vietnam War, those kids were right. We, the public, were wrong." I ask Souza if he felt the same way back then. "Oh yes," he says. "Of course, I had my son by me. I loved my son dearly."

At first Souza's political sympathies seemed idiosyncratic among his fellow Clambucketeers, but over several lunches I realized that many others shared his criticism of the war and often agreed with the protesters. After 30 years I have come to the opposite conclusion about the war, convinced that the abandonment of Indochina by the United States brought even more suffering to the people of Cambodia and Vietnam than the war had. The idea that many of these cops seemed to share the anti-war feelings of the demonstrators even then surprises me; it also shows how deeply unpopular the Vietnam War was at home. Clearly, it was never really ideology that divided us.

After almost a dozen trips to the Clambucket, the notion that these cops were once my enemy seems hopelessly contrived. Of course, our easy affinity is in part due to my own departure from the commonly held wisdom of my generation and the fact that we are all older now. If anything, I'm a little disappointed in these men for not blaming us more.

One aspect of the demonstrations will keep the police and demonstrators who fought each other connected for life: I had almost forgotten the excitement, the euphoria of being on the street, in danger, facing the unknown, when Bob Ford began remembering what was "fun" about those days. "You're flexing your muscles, you're getting the adrenaline out," he says. "We enjoyed what we were doing, and not because it was mean or because we were being ugly to people, but because we saw so many interesting things. Afterwards you tell stories."

The yarns swapped around the Clambucket are parables of human frailty, stupidity and the basic unfairness of life. The carnival of snitches, cons and cops gone bad who populate these stories could easily come from one of Jim Thompson's crime novels. Like the two drunken cops who attacked the Black Panther Party headquarters one night with shotguns: They ended up blasting a hole in the roof of their own cruiser, and went on to kidnap a prostitute in order to create a cover story. And between the "lighter" stories come the accounts of absurd tragedy, like the Irish officer hired to play a movie cop in San Francisco only to die of a heart attack his first day on the set.

"My first six months on the job," says Ford with his now familiar blend of drama and sarcasm, "I had two rapists and two policemen charged with murder who had killed their wives. That was my introduction to law enforcement."

One day when we are alone in the dimly lit bar, Jack Richardson, the former infiltrator, takes a sip from his beer and explains why he keeps coming back to the Clambucket lunches. "I was blind lucky to have grown up to meet and to work with those guys," Richardson tells me, close to tears. "For a long time it boggled my mind when I'd think about it. You didn't all love each other. But after you're retired, you forget what it was that used to nettle you about a guy. And he forgets that you used to irritate the hell out of him. The only thing you remember is the good stuff. Then you leave here walkin' on air. Nice feeling."
SALON | Oct. 19, 1998

George Paul Csicsery is a documentary filmmaker and writer who lives in Oakland, Calif. He is working on a documentary film and book on the Thursday Club.