ACID DREAMS, THE COMPLETE SOCIAL HISTORY OF LSD: THE CIA, THE SIXTIES, AND BEYOND

Gotta Revolution

Few people realized just how intense things would get in 1968, and no one was prepared for the bewildering series of events that unfolded. With each passing month the political temperature rose a few more notches. First there was the Tet offensive launched by the Viet Cong in February, which belied President Johnson's optimistic predictions of an impending US victory. Twenty thousand Americans had already been killed in action, a hundred and ten thousand were wounded, and still there was no sign that the war would be over in the near future. A "dump Johnson" movement mounted by doves within the Democratic party gathered unexpected momentum when Senator Eugene McCarthy decided to challenge LBJ for the presidential nomination. McCarthy scored an impressive showing in the early primaries, and on March 31, 1968, Johnson announced he would not seek reelection.

The demise of LBJ was a great victory for the New Left, but the euphoria passed quickly. Four days after Johnson's abdication Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. The death of the nation's most gifted civil rights leader sparked the worst domestic strife since the Civil War. There were riots in a hundred and twenty-five cities nationwide, including Washington, DC. Forty-six people died, more than twenty thousand were arrested, and fifty-five thousand federal troops and National Guardsmen were deployed to handle the emergency. In the wake of the ghetto uprisings a nervous Congress passed the so-called Rap Brown amendment, making it a federal crime to cross state lines with the intent to start a riot. This law would be used in subsequent years to prosecute antiwar activists.

Violent confrontations became a normal occurrence in 1968 not only in the ghettos and barrios of America, but also on college campuses throughout the country. The first pitched battle between students and police took place at Columbia University in New York City, the media capital of the world, when the local SDS chapter led a series of actions beginning in late April and lasting for several weeks. Hundreds were injured during the protest, which sent shock waves reverberating through all of academia. "This is a ferocious, but effective way to be a student -- to be educated," said former SDS president Carl Oglesby. "The policeman's riot club functions like a magic wand under whose hard caress the banal soul grows vivid and the nameless recover their authenticity -- a bestower, this wand, of the lost charisma of the modern self: I bleed, therefore I am."

Hundreds of campuses in the US enacted similar confrontations in the coming months. But academic insurrections were by no means exclusively an American phenomenon. During the late 1960s student radicals took to the streets in nearly every country in Western Europe, as well as in Japan, South Africa, Canada, Turkey, Latin America, and a number of Eastern bloc nations. The most dramatic upheaval occurred in Paris in May 1968, when left-wing activists at the Sorbonne succeeded in triggering a nationwide strike that threatened to topple the Gaullist government. [1]

During the peak of the Sorbonne uprising a group of artists and cultural workers got together to discuss how they could best show their support for those who were engaged in running battles with the police. Among those present at the meeting was Julian Beck of the Living Theater, an experimental performing troupe that traveled extensively in Europe. Controversy always surrounded the Living Theater, for they were among the boldest and most innovative experimenters of the 1960s. Their performances included rituals of love, affirmation, nonviolence, and communality drawn from various mystical and contemporary sources: Artaud, the kabbalah, the continuous use of drugs. The thirty members of the Living Theater frequently tripped together and often performed while high on LSD. "We were willing to experiment with anything that would set the mind free," Beck explained. "We were practicing anarchists, and we were talking about freedom in whatever zones it could be acquired. If drug trips were a way of unbinding the mind, we were eager to experiment."

The Living Theater was already heavily into drugs when the police chased them out of New York City in the early 1960s after many of them had been arrested during pacifist demonstrations. They fled to Europe on a wing and a prayer, hoping to avoid the legal hassles that plagued them in the States. Wherever they traveled on the Continent, the Living Theater interacted with the thriving acid subculture that took root in the mid-1960s. In each city they mingled with turned-on artists, poets, dropouts, and other nonconformists who shared their anarchist vision and provided them with cannabis and acid. The Living Theater, in turn, helped to spread the psychedelic creed as they moved from one locale to another.

Amsterdam was the touchstone, the magic city where every drug was readily available. It was also the home of the Provos (short for Provocateurs), a large anarchist tribe whose political art happenings anticipated the style and essence of the San Francisco Diggers. The Provos took Amsterdam by storm in 1965 when they plastered peace insignias across the city streets along with their own logo, an upside down apple, which represented the modern Johnny Appleseed implanting the seeds of a liberating culture. They unrolled reams of newsprint like carpets through the streets of Amsterdam to protest the "daily newspapers which brainwash our people." They also staged pro-ecology rallies and elected several of their pot-smoking members to the city administration.

Provo groups sprang up in Milan, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Brussels, and Antwerp (a transit point for shiploads of Congolese grass) as the drug scene spread rapidly throughout Europe. London emerged as a major psychedelic center in the summer of 1965. Acid was also plentiful in Munich and Berlin, where hippies were called Gammler. Rome had its capellones who liked to get stonati by ingesting hallucinazione. LSD trickled into Paris, Zurich, Madrid, and the Greek Isles, and a Czech expatriate reports that young people in Prague were turning on to acid in the months prior to the Russian invasion in August, 1968. As Beck put it,

LSD carried with it a certain messianic vision, a certain understanding of the meaning of freedom, of the meaning of the as yet unattainable but nevertheless to be obtained erotic fantasy, political fantasy, social fantasy -- a sense of oneness, a sense of goodness, a marvelous return to the Garden of Eden morality.... That's why we thought if you could put it into the water system, everybody would wake up and we would be able to realize the changes we were dreaming in terms of societal structures. People wouldn't be able to tolerate things as they were any longer. They'd realize that something is wrong out there, something is wrong inside me, something is too beautiful, too indescribable, too irresistible to put off any longer.

During their travels the Living Theater befriended many leaders of the student movement in Europe, who were also concerned about selfhood, new human beings, new possibilities. But the hard-politicos were not overly enthusiastic about psychedelic drugs. "We pushed reefers on them all the time," Beck recalled. "They were getting high, but not enough." Most left-wing activists in France, Germany, and Italy saw drugs as a pleasant diversion at best; they never thought the most effective way to organize people was to turn them on. As a general rule there was far less overlap between the drug scene and the New Left in Europe than in the United States. This became apparent to the Living Theater when they returned to North America in the summer of 1968, after four and a half years of self-imposed exile.

Much had changed on the cultural and political front in the US during this period. The peace movement, having grown by leaps and bounds, was now a mass movement. Polls showed a majority of Americans disapproved of the administration's Vietnam policy. As opposition to the war became more respectable and mainstream, the New Left as a whole edged toward a more radical posture. The V sign for peace gave way to the clenched fist, denoting a change not so much to violence as to militance. An increasing number of activists came to view the war not as an error in judgment or an aberration of American foreign policy but as the latest in a series of imperialist interventions in many countries. The emphasis on vigorous street tactics and a sweeping anti-imperialist analysis set the young radicals apart from the reform-minded liberals and moderates who after years of bloodshed in Southeast Asia finally decided to give peace a chance.

Buoyed by the surging popularity of the antiwar cause and the heightened tempo of the black rebellion, many people began to take for granted a context of political extremity. Predictions of the coming revolution were rampant, and much of the New Left assumed it was on the threshold of a political transformation that was actually way beyond its means. Indeed, it was hard for radicals not to get carried away as the decade rocked to a bloody climax in 1968. They had forced LBJ into early retirement, and now the whole lousy system seemed to be teetering on the brink. A few shouts, a few kicks, a good hard shove in the right place, and surely Babylon would fall.

This was the unspoken assumption behind the Yippies' decision to stage a massive demonstration at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago during the last week of August. At the heart of the Yippie scenario was a "Festival of Life" that would offer an enticing alternative to the "death politics" inside the convention hall. Plans for the festival included a variety of counterconvention activities: a nude grope-in for peace and prosperity, a joint-rolling contest, the election of Miss Yippie. All the top rock and roll acts would perform, the hippest poets would recite the best poems. And what demonstration would be complete without a bell-festooned contingent of holy men leading the protesters in life-affirming incantations? There'd be free food for everyone and workshops on drugs, communes, guerrilla theater, first aid, and draft dodging.

It was an ambitious scheme for a group of dope-smoking misfits who had no political organization to speak of. But the Yippies knew they had the media at their beck and call, and they hoped hype would make up for what they lacked on a grassroots level. They tantalized reporters with visions of a Chicago inundated by a million stoned freaks who would force the Democrats to conduct their business under armed guard. The Yippies, meanwhile, would nominate their own presidential candidate -- a pig named Pigasus, whom they vowed to eat after he won the election. This, the Yippies maintained, would reverse the normal procedure in which the pig is elected "and proceeds to eat the people."

Of course, the Yippies realized that nowhere near a million people would turn up for the demonstration, but exaggeration was the crux of their organizing strategy. They inflated the figures to attract more publicity, hoping to create a snowball effect and draw a large crowd. "We competed for attention like media junkies after a fix," Rubin admitted. "Television (kept) us escalating our tactics." Whereas a sit-in or a picket line might have made headlines a few years ago, now it took bloody heads and tear gas to get coverage on the evening news. In the months preceding the convention the Yippies flatly predicted violence and spiced up their rhetoric to keep their audience enthralled. "We will burn Chicago to the ground!" "We will fuck on the beaches!" "We demand the Politics of Ecstasy!" "Acid for all!" "Abandon the Creeping Meatball!" And always: "Yippie! Chicago -- August 25-30."

A handful of Yippie stalwarts worked long hours at an ad hoc office in New York, printing tens of thousands of posters, leaflets, and buttons as part of the PR campaign for the Festival of Life. Getting stoned was standard operating procedure among office staffers, and their fanciful literature carried their dope-induced hallucinations. They kept in touch with young people throughout the country by issuing sporadic press releases that were picked up by the Liberation News Service and disseminated to three hundred underground newspapers.

The Yippies were preparing monkey-warfare hijinks and other street theater actions, but their plans did not call for organized violence or rioting on the part of demonstrators. Nevertheless, they made no secret of the fact that they relished the possibility of a showdown with the "pigs." By forcing a confrontation the Yippies hoped to reveal the "true nature of the beast," as the saying went, and make the fence-sitters take sides. This, they believed, would automatically benefit the radical cause. "It's not the Republicans and Democrats," Rubin asserted. "It's what America is doing and what it stands for and against. And when that becomes clear in every living room in this country, wow -- our side's gonna win."

Victory for the Yippies was nothing less than "total revolution" -- or something like that. Just what they actually meant by "revolution for the hell of it" or how such a thing would come to pass was never very clear, but it hardly seemed to matter. They were confident that their moment of shining glory had arrived. "We want the world and we want it now!" sang Jim Morrison of the Doors (who took their name from Huxley's The Doors of Perception) in what became the anthem of the young rebels who dismissed any notion of temperate or deliberate change. Those who combined youthful anger with untrammeled experimentation had little patience for the politics of the long haul. Things had developed so quickly and so far beyond expectations that the only honorable course was to take every idea to the limit, to indulge every form of excess. Surely all this energy would lead to something amazing, something chaotic, a crisis so massive that it would sweep aside the gray-haired masters of war and bring the government to its knees. For a generation "born to be wild," anything less seemed like a cowardly evasion of destiny.

And it wasn't just the Yippies who entertained this fantasy. Caught up in their own inflated rhetoric, almost everyone associated with the New Left began to lose track of what was politically feasible. Radicals blithely spoke of revolution as if it were just around the corner, a historical certainty as imminent as tomorrow's sunrise. And why not! The flamboyant images of revolt were everywhere -- in the daily papers, in the underground press, on the TV news. In a society thoroughly bombarded by media images, who could tell what was real? Stoned or otherwise, the baby boom rebels were tangled in a net of reflected events, a hall of mirrors; they related to a distorted picture of reality that filtered through the cracked looking glass of the mass media. By focusing on highly charged incidents and giving the greatest airplay to the wildest and most aggressive gestures, the commercial media reinforced and accentuated the social chaos. Add to this confusion the sudden explosion of the acid scene in the wake of the Summer of Love, and one begins to get a sense of the hallucinatory nature of this period.

The revolutionary fervor of the late 1960s was amplified by the widespread use of LSD and other hallucinogens. These drugs tended to blur the distinction between the imaginary and the real, so that daily life for frequent users became infused with the exaggeration of a mythic dream. Many political activists who got high regularly behaved as though they were living in the midst of a revolutionary situation.

"The effect of LSD was really heavy," acknowledged John Sinclair, former head of the White Panther party in Ann Arbor, Michigan. "Acid blew all sense of proportion, all sense of a frame, to smithereens. I mean it just blew the frame right out of the picture.... It gave you a sense of infinite possibility. You could do anything if you just did it-totally! You could walk right into the sky." Sinclair now considers this attitude foolhardy. "All your big decisions were made on LSD. And while that might be an exciting way to operate, it's not the most intelligent way. To think that your personal consciousness can overcome historical forces is a mistake."

Sinclair first turned on to psychedelics in the early 1960s, after reading Ginsberg and the beats. Known among his peers as a poet and jazz aficionado, he got involved with the Detroit Artists Workshop and started turning on more frequently with his creative clique. After the Detroit riots in 1967 Sinclair began to study the literature of the black power movement. "Anything to the right of Malcolm X just wasn't happening," he asserted. At the time there was a lot of acid floating around. "In my case it was the idealistic poetry stuff coupled with the black militant stuff and the turned-on black jazz artists, " Sinclair recalled, "and all those things came together in my little psyche, 500 mikes a week, and POW! After one particularly stunning LSD experience, I got to the point where I felt that writing and poetry and all that was cool, but it was really important to develop some sort of instrumentation to make it relevant on a larger scale."

Sinclair credits LSD with facilitating the transition from the secretive, cabalistic mentality of the beats to the collective orientation of the 1960s. "When the beatniks started taking acid, it brought us out of the basement, the dark place, the underworld, the fringes of society.... all of a sudden one was filled with a messianic feeling of love, of brotherhood.... LSD gave us the idea it could be different. It was tremendously inspiring. We thought this would alter everything. We were going to take over the world. This was the general belief. It was the LSD.... Acid was amping everything up, driving everything into greater and greater frenzy."

In retrospect Sinclair wonders whether the CIA was behind the acid craze. "They're the ones who had it," he says. But the notion that LSD might have been part of a government plot was the furthest thing from Sinclair's mind when he moved to Ann Arbor with a coterie of radicals in early 1968 and formed the White Panther party. One of their main objectives was to spread the revolutionary message to high schools throughout the Midwest with the help of a politically dedicated rock and roll band, the MCS, which Sinclair managed. "School sucks," declared the White Panther manifesto. "The white honkie culture that has been handed down to us on a plastic platter is meaningless to us! We don't want it! Fuck God in the ass. Fuck your woman until she can't stand up. Fuck everybody you can get your hands on. Our program of rock and roll, dope and fucking in the streets is a program of total freedom for everyone. And we are committed to carrying out our program. We breathe revolution. We are LSD-driven total maniacs in the universe."

When Sinclair heard about the Yippies' plan for Chicago, he thought it was fantastic. "I could never see what was more important than cultural activity, what people did each day to reflect the way they thought and felt about things," he said. "To me that was really political." For a while the White Panthers even considered becoming the Michigan chapter of the Youth International Party. They were, after all, natural allies; like the Yippies, Sinclair was high on the revolutionary potential of drugs and the druggy potential of revolution. The Festival of Life was particularly appealing to the White Panthers, who liked the idea of merging rock music with politics. It was also an opportunity for the MCS to perform before a national audience. Thus, on grounds of politics and promotion, the Panthers wholeheartedly endorsed the Yippie festival.

With the Democratic Convention only weeks away, the Yippies persisted in needling Mayor Daley as much as possible. They circulated a list of demands including the legalization of marijuana and LSD, the abolition of money, the disarming of the Chicago police, and -- not to be overlooked -- a statement in favor of general copulation: "We believe that people should fuck all the time, anytime, whomever they wish." When the Yippies slyly let it be known that they intended to put LSD in the water supply (a scenario cooked up by the CIA fifteen years earlier), Daley ordered a round-the-clock guard at the local reservoirs. Hoffman and Rubin countered by threatening to dispatch Yippie girls dressed up as whores, "but young, you know, and nice," who would pick up convention delegates and slip acid into their drinks (another scenario reminiscent of CIA escapades during the Cold War). Moreover, thousands of protesters would run naked through the streets while "Yippie studs" seduced the delegates' wives and daughters.

Apparently these fictive threats touched a raw nerve somewhere and were taken quite seriously by Daley's men. The Yippies were humiliating the old fogies by reminding them of their fading sexuality as well as heaping scorn on their patriotic ideals. Rubin again: "We were dirty, smelly, grimy, foul, loud, dope-crazed, hell-bent and leather-jacketed.... We were a public display of filth and shabbiness, living in-the-flesh rejects of middle-class standards. We pissed and shit and fucked in public.... We were constantly stoned or tripping on every drug known to man.... Dig it! The future of humanity was in our hands!"

There was no "fucking in the streets" as the Yippies had promised. But even the thought of such erotic impudence was enough to jack up the angry riot squads and the secret service goons who had assembled in Chicago. Mayor Daley prepared for the acidheads and the foul-mouthed subversives by turning the city into an armed camp. He ordered twelve thousand police to work overtime, and hundreds of undercover agents were deployed on "special assignments." There were also six thousand National Guardsmen ready for action, and an equal number of regular army troops complete with bazookas, barbed-wire jeeps, and tanks. Then he issued a discreet warning: come to Chicago at your own risk.

Daley's intimidation tactics succeeded. In the end only about ten thousand protesters showed up, far fewer than the Yippies had expected. The much-heralded Festival of Life commenced on Sunday, August 25, the day before the convention. The protesters met at Lincoln Park, where acid was passed around in the form of spiked honey. A free rock concert had been announced, but all the musicians stayed away except for Phil Ochs and the MC5. Then the police moved in and started arresting people. Tempers flared on both sides, and the Festival of Life soon became a Festival of Blood.

The street fighting continued for the next five days while the Democrats deliberated inside the convention hall. The confrontation reached a dramatic crescendo during the middle of the week. Thousands of demonstrators massed along Michigan Avenue in front of the Conrad Hilton, where Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic nominee, was staying along with many of the convention delegates. It was late at night, but that portion of the street was floodlit for the sake of television. The crowd took up the rousing chant, "The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching."

The National Guard in full battle dress moved into position with M-I rifles, gas masks, and machine guns mounted on military vehicles. Tear gas was thrown and a gruesome melee ensued. The police attacked with indiscriminate fury, clubbing and macing young and old, male and female, protesters and innocent bystanders. News reporters and photographers were beaten along with the rest, while the powerful lamp of an army helicopter shone down through billowing clouds of orange smoke. Dozens of patrol cars flashed blue siren lights, and the silhouettes of mangled bodies were barely visible in the stroboscopic mist.

"For me, that week in Chicago was far worse than the worst acid trip I'd even heard rumors about," said Hunter Thompson. "It permanently altered my brain chemistry, and my first new idea -- when I finally calmed down -- was an absolute conviction there was no possibility for any personal truce ... in a nation that could hatch and be proud of a malignant monster like Chicago. Suddenly it seemed imperative to get a grip on those who had somehow slipped into power and caused the thing to happen."

Young people throughout the country shared Thompson's sense of urgency, as they watched the unmuzzled savagery of the police on television. (The Walker Commission later attributed the mayhem to a "police riot.") Over a thousand demonstrators had been injured, and one youth died during that tumultuous week. But even more significant than the number of casualties was the profound impact these events had on the New Left as a whole. The Battle of Chicago drew a line across the political landscape, marking the symbolic end of the resistance period and the turn toward revolution. It proved once and for all that the pernicious system was beyond any hope of reform; it would have to be completely dismantled. In the wake of Chicago, many activists concluded that peaceful means of protest, no matter how noble or well-executed, were not enough to eradicate the evils of America; social institutions grounded in violence would resort to violence if any serious challenge to the status quo was mounted.

The Yippies came away from Chicago strengthened in their resolve to fight the establishment by any means necessary. They felt they had won a great victory, and in some ways they were right. The ruthlessness of those in power had been laid bare for all to see in what was perhaps the most memorable media event of sixties protest culture. But the Yippies overlooked a very basic fact: getting TV coverage did not necessarily mean getting their message across. While the street brawl may have shocked some viewers into sympathy for the demonstrators, every poll indicated that a vast majority of the public applauded the brutality of the Chicago police.

To the average citizen the Yippies epitomized the calamitous upsurge of wayward youth gone anti-American and wild. Their obnoxious behavior offended millions who would no longer look upon student protest with indifference, much less with favor. But it wasn't just the Yippies who were putting people on edge. Not since the Civil War had life in America been so disorienting and confusing, so terribly violent, as it was during the late 1960s. Everything seemed to be spinning out of control. The assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the ghetto riots, the campus strikes, the soaring crime rate, the spread of drugs, the black power movement -- all these factors raised genuine fears that American society was coming apart. And then along came Richard Nixon, the law-and-order candidate, who promised to put the Commie-hippie-freaks in their place. Nixon won the '68 election in the streets of Chicago when the madness of an entire decade spilled into the living rooms of a nation of bewildered onlookers.

"Chicago, I think, was the place where all America was radicalized," wrote Tom Wicker of the New York Times. "The miracle of television made it visible to all -- pierced, at last, the isolation of one America from the other, exposed to each the power it faced. Everything since Chicago has had a new intensity -- that of polarization, of confrontation, of antagonism and fear."

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