When the members of the Woodstock generation came to inherit the world, they brought Woodstock ideals right along with them.
What happened to Hillary? The same thing that happened to countless other promising young Americans in the 1960s: she went to college and learned that the Constitution was flawed, that America was evil, and that capitalism was the same thing as imperialism. She emerged—just like her country—as something her parents couldn’t recognize anymore.
Of course, Hillary being Hillary, she also got her radical tutelage from leading lights of the progressive and radical Left, including pen pal Saul Alinsky, the godfather of “community organizing,” who would prove to be an inspiration to both Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. This “community organizing”—a nice branding term for radicalism bordering on terrorism—would turn into the mayhem of riots, terrorism, and lawlessness that would come to define the 1960s.
On January 31, 1967, with his popularity beginning to fade, Lyndon Johnson accepted a portrait of FDR at the White House. He immodestly recalled that he was a “proud friend and follower of President Franklin Roosevelt,” to whom “any likeness” is “an inspiration.”
Almost three years earlier—on January 30, 1964—Johnson had made glowing remarks to celebrate the eighty-second anniversary of Roosevelt’s birth:
The place of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in our history and in the history of the human race grows steadily with time. Few men in history have served freedom so effectively and so nobly as did he, both in our own land and around the world. His liberal compassion towards his fellowman, together with his conservative respect for the institutions of our economy and society, guided this Nation past the shoals of radicalism and reaction. He provided our ship of state with both the ballast to hold a steady and stable course, and the sail to move us forward progressively toward the broader horizons of human hope.
Such was Johnson’s devotion to Roosevelt that as his final act as president, on the morning of his last day in office, he signed a proclamation to create the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial Park.
That was one of the only bright spots in an otherwise dreary end to the LBJ administration. The nation was embroiled in the Vietnam War and overcome with riots and protests by marijuana-smoking young people (the millennials of their time). School buses had been brought to the White House to act as barricades against the thousands of protesters who sang antiwar songs and held up peace signs day and night. The collective chants of “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” could be heard in every room of the White House.
LBJ was leaving the presidency in disgrace, with anger over his failed policies in Vietnam threatening to consume any hope he had of a decent political legacy. Eventually, the man who had worked so hard to gain power had no choice but to walk away from it all. On March 31, 1968, he announced: “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”
None of this was what he had envisioned on that tarmac in Dallas just hours after JFK’s assassination, but he did accomplish one thing he’d set out to do: he’d realized his Rooseveltian ambitions to remake the federal government and forever shift the popular culture to embrace progressivism.
He’d outdone his idol FDR, and the consequences for America would be far more disastrous.
* * *
PROFILE IN FEAR:
PHILIP BERRIGAN AND THE ANTIWAR MOVEMENT
The Ardennes Forest
December 1944
The sun was just beginning to set when the trucks finally began to roll in.
Phil Berrigan heard them coming before they came into view. The young artilleryman from Minnesota stood next to his howitzer, along with the other men of his battery, and listened to the low rumble of the convoy of 2.5-ton, “deuce-and-a-half” Army trucks.
Berrigan knew their cargo: the trucks were bringing death.
Just a few hours earlier, Berrigan’s ears had been assaulted by another rumbling, this one sharper, harsher, and far closer. It was the sound of his own guns. His artillery battery had been busy that afternoon, launching 105-millimeter shells toward the German lines, which, Berrigan knew, lay somewhere inside the tree line a few miles away. The Americans and their British allies elsewhere were launching a counteroffensive, pushing the Germans back through the massive “bulge” they had smashed in the Allied lines earlier in the month.
Berrigan and his comrades had loaded and fired shell after shell as men and trucks and tanks streamed past their position on the outskirts of a bombed-out town, crossing the snow-covered fields on their way to meet Hitler’s forces. It was the artillery’s job to “soften up” the enemy positions, but by the sounds of the subsequent fighting and the limited reports they’d received from the front lines, the infantry and armor had a real battle on their hands. Now, with the guns silent, the casualties of the day’s action were starting to stream back toward the rear.
Berrigan heard a mechanical coughing and sputtering and turned to see another truck approaching from the opposite direction, back toward town. It pulled up to the battery, and a lieutenant poked his head out of the cab.
“Supply depot sent up some more ammo for you boys,” he announced. “I need one man from each gun to unload.”
Berrigan’s gun crew looked at their sergeant, leaning against one of their gun’s wheels, who curled his lip around the cigar clenched in his teeth. “Berrigan!” he barked. “You heard the lieutenant!”
“Yes, Sergeant,” Berrigan responded, and shuffled toward the supply truck with the other men on the unloading detail. But inside he burned. He had known Sarge would pick him. He was always “randomly” chosen him for extra duties—digging the latrine, cleaning the gun axles, peeling potatoes. Sometimes Sarge would lose his head completely, and the whole gun crew would catch hell, but Berrigan got it the worst, and it made him burn with a fire he knew all too well.
His father, Tom Berrigan, had been like that, too. A man of quick temper, prone to violent mood swings, he ruled over his wife and six sons with impunity—“tyrannical,” as Phil would later describe him. Raising his family amid the ravages of the Great Depression, he had young Phil working on the family farm by the age of five.
But Tom Berrigan was also a man of great passion. Always a proud union man—he’d worked on the railroad before losing his job—he eventually became a committed socialist. He raised his sons in his own Irish Catholic tradition but also subscribed to the progressive Catholic Worker newspaper, which highlighted the church’s work in social justice. Phil’s mother, Frida, was a believer in progressive causes, too, and the conversation around their house frequently questioned the established order of things, even of the Catholic Church itself.
The Berrigan boys inherited a complicated legacy from their parents. While Phil was inspired by his father’s convictions, he chafed at the despotic manner in which Tom ran his own household. In some ways, Phil was an enhanced reflection of his father. He inherited his father’s antiauthoritarian nature, but this was, in turn, amplified in Phil as he grew up under his father’s strict rule.
Now, as his artillery unit advanced across Europe after the Normandy landings, Berrigan had already looked death in the eyes a thousand times over. He had seen the bodies of fellow soldiers, mutilated beyond recognition, eyes missing from their empty sockets, shredded muscles and shattered bones sticking out of lifeless torsos. He had seen whole towns destroyed. He had seen the aftermath of the indiscriminate bombings on civilians. Some lay dead in the streets of their villages; others wept over the charred rubble of their homes.
The images stalked his every waking moment. And they didn’t leave him when he closed his eyes. The nightmares were intense and unrelenting.
Through it all, the demons in Phil Berrigan’s head danced. They followed him and his comrades on the long march to Berlin, leading them on periodic side trips to hell. They coordinated every ambush and guided every sniper’s aim. They inhabited the minds of his friends who’d gone
stark raving mad under the pressures of combat. They sent artillery shells astray so they landed in the middle of friendly villages rather than on enemy positions. Berrigan had even seen American soldiers pour their fire into a body of troops, only to find out too late that their targets were Americans, too.
Who but demons could have orchestrated that?
And now came the latest pieces of their hellish handiwork. As Berrigan unloaded artillery shells, he had failed to notice that the trucks from the front had made it to his position. They were rumbling past now, into the village beyond, where a field hospital had been set up. Berrigan had seen these grim caravans before. The trucks carried some wounded, too crippled to walk, but mostly they carried the dead. The frozen corpses with rigid arms and legs bounced on tailgates as the truck tires ran over the cobblestones.
The walking wounded shuffled in the wake of the trucks. Those with lighter injuries, only one arm in a sling or a bandage around their heads, helped along their comrades who couldn’t walk. Some leaned on their rifles for support. Here and there, a man was carried on a stretcher—the trucks had run out of room. The men were coughing, wheezing, moaning, cursing with every painful step. Cigarettes dangled from some lips, all unlit—not even the smallest fires stood a chance against this cold.
These were shells of soldiers, bearded and bedraggled, only shreds of clothing between them and the frigid wind. They reminded Berrigan of the vagrants who’d come begging at their door during the Depression. Those men would always get a meal from his mother, cooked with whatever she had to spare. But there was nothing Berrigan himself could do for the men who now passed by him.
As Berrigan looked up from his work, he saw that interspersed with the walking American wounded were German prisoners, many of them wounded themselves. They were carrying wounded Americans with M1 Garand rifles pointed at their backs every step of the way. As he looked at the worst of the German wounded—men with legs, arms, whole chunks of their bodies shot away—his insides began to twist themselves into knots. These weren’t wounds made by bullets or even hand grenades, he realized. These were the victims of artillery shells, his shells. These were the men who’d been right under their initial “softening-up” barrage. Maybe the shells that had ripped their flesh had even been loaded by Berrigan and fired from his howitzer.
Yes, these were supposed to be his enemies, but they were men first, and he had harmed them. And for what? Because his cause was supposed to be more just than theirs? What was just about this violence, this brutality? What was just about killing any of God’s creations?
As this macabre procession of broken men straggled by and these thoughts played in his mind, Berrigan and his comrades unloaded more and more shells. These shells would make more carnage, which would make more broken and dead men, who in their turn would straggle past Berrigan’s artillery position later on. On and on it would go.
And suddenly, it all became too much. The fear of death and war consumed him. Carrying a 105-millimeter shell toward his gun, Berrigan closed his eyes to try to shut out the demons from his brain. He was shaking, his arms trembling under the weight of the shell and his anxiety about who else it might kill next. He lost his balance and tripped, falling to his knees in the snow. Sarge started barking immediately. Berrigan knew he had to get up, and he would. But now, finding himself kneeling down in this forsaken place, still cradling his weapon of war, he lifted his face to the cold, gray, and ever darkening sky.
“Never again,” he vowed silently to the God he’d grown up worshipping. “Once I get through this, never again.”
Then Phil Berrigan got to his feet and went back to war.
• • •
After World War II, Phil Berrigan followed his brother Daniel into the priesthood. His fear of death and his utter revulsion at war never left him. He turned to Catholicism, but he embraced the new kind that preached social justice and liberation from the conservative orthodoxies that had dogged the church for centuries.
The terror he had felt on the battlefields of Europe compelled Berrigan to begin a crusade to ensure that others never experienced the same. He was not able to eliminate war, as he had hoped to do on that snowy evening in 1944, but the Berrigan brothers did wage their own “war against war” through the latter half of the twentieth century, with a militancy of method that was surprising in such self-described pacifists.
While they first preached passive resistance in 1967, as the Vietnam War protests grew, they declared themselves revolutionaries for peace and social justice and sought to achieve those ends by any means necessary. With a group of other protesters who would become known as the Catonsville Nine, they stole draft records from a government office in Catonsville, Maryland, and set them on fire using a concoction of their own design made to resemble napalm.
Blood was another one of the Berrigans’ weapons of choice. They doused draft cards in it and threw them at the doors of the Pentagon. In 1976, they picketed the home of then–Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, whose young children had to walk to school through a line of Phil Berrigan’s shouting acolytes. They were arrested only after they started digging a “grave” on the Rumsfelds’ lawn.
The Berrigans hatched plots to kidnap Henry Kissinger and plant bombs under federal buildings in Washington. They also cycled in and out of jail. By 1993, Phil Berrigan had been arrested one hundred times and had spent about six years in prison.
♠
Berrigan tried for decades to fight his way past the traumas he’d experienced in World War II, but he failed to realize that no amount of blood sprayed, draft cards burned, or criminal plots concocted can change basic human nature, including its violent elements. Being human means that our worst tendencies and instincts will recur, no matter how idiotic they might seem to the “enlightened.” As Rudyard Kipling wrote in Gods of the Copybook Headings after losing his son in World War I:
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man—
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:—
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire.
Human instinct, like that of dogs and sows, is impossible to change. No matter how many times we are burned, the fire still beckons for our hand once more. Most people understand these immutable ground rules of life.
Progressives do not.
5
Fourth Wave:
The Hope and Change of Barack Obama
We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.
—BARACK OBAMA, 2008
Chicago, Illinois
July 1995
The future president of the United States stood in the living room of a domestic terrorist.
They were in Hyde Park, a Chicago neighborhood of tree-lined streets dotted with handsome old stone and brick houses. In this highly segregated city, Hyde Park stands out as a vibrant, racially diverse but monolithically leftist melting pot. There couldn’t be a more fitting place for a future commander in chief to live, just mere blocks away from former domestic terrorists, not to mention Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.
Hyde Park is home to the prestigious University of Chicago, but venture just a few blocks outside the neighborhood, and you’ll find yourself in the middle of Chicago’s notorious South Side. The ivory tower of elitist academics looms over crippled communities riddled with drugs, gangs, and broken homes. The slums and Section 8 housing projects are home to some of the highest murder rates in the civilized world. The wreckage caused by decades of leftist rule ironically lies all around the progressive Hyde Park denizens, although they refuse to acknowledge it, let alone take any responsibility for it.
“Barry, if I have one lesson for you,” Bill Ayers said, “it’s this: if you really want to change things, you’ve got to drop the radical pose for the radical ends. You’re a talented community organizer; politics is just commun
ity organizing on a larger scale. People project their hopes, dreams, and aspirations on you. They don’t expect you to actually solve all of their problems, but they want you to say you’ll try.”
Barack Obama, a thirty-four-year-old aspiring politician, listened intently. “What matters more than what you say,” Ayers continued, “is how you say it. You can play on fear, but ultimately you also have to give people the antidote, and that is hope. We lost a generation of progress because we didn’t understand that simple rule.”
Obama grinned as he put out his cigarette, anticipating the arrival of his wife, Michelle, and Ayers’s wife, Bernadine Dohrn, as well as many guests whom he would attempt to dazzle out of their money that night. The duo of Ayers and Dohrn was nothing if not dynamic. The two had spent almost eleven years on the run, fugitives from the law. In fact, Dohrn had achieved the distinction of making the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, all the more impressive considering that only nine women have ever been listed there.
What were they running from? Ayers, Dohrn, and their Weather Underground coconspirators had sought to spark a full-on Communist revolution in the 1960s and ’70s, by destroying property and killing those who got in the way. After the two grew tired of running and finally turned themselves in to authorities, only Dohrn faced charges, and they were minor.
Blessed with unexpected freedom, the two revolutionaries continued to adhere to their beliefs, never expressing remorse for their crimes. Dohrn eventually landed at the prominent law firm Sidley Austin—the same firm where Barack would later meet Michelle—and she later served as a professor of law at Northwestern University. Ayers reinvented himself as a professor of education at the University of Illinois, where he got to shape young minds on a daily basis, this time without explosives.
As they finished their conversation, Obama, ever the shrewd politician, asked one last question: “What do I tell people if they ask about our relationship?”