ON THIS 35TH anniversary of Woodstock, everyone who was there has their own specific memories and associations. The 60s were over. Negroes had become blacks. Girls had become women. Hippies had become freaks. Richard Alpert would become Ram Dass. Hugh Romney would become Wavy Gravy. San Francisco Oracle editor Allen Cohen would become Siddhartha and move to a commune, where everybody called him Sid.
There was the music and the mud. There was the dope and the dancing. There was the free food and the free love. There were the Port-o-Potties and the politics. Most of all, there was a sense of community. The political contingent was encamped in a red-and-white-striped tent called Movement City. In the afternoon, Yippies were churning out flyers proclaiming that the festival should be free, and at night they were busy unscrewing the chain-link fences.
While The Who was performing, Abbie Hoffman, tripping on acid, climbed up on the stage with the intention of informing the audience that John Sinclair (manager of the band MC5 and chairman of the White Panthers) was serving 10 years in prison for possession of two jointsthat this was really the politics behind the eventbut before he could get his message out, Pete Townshend transformed his guitar into a tennis racket and smashed Abbie in the head with a swift backhand.
My yellow leather fringe jacket, which I had been wearing for the first time, was stolen from the Movement City tent. But I found myself dealing with a much more significant kind of paranoia. I had been informed by a reliable source that a think tank, the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, CA, was contracted to determine how Americans might react to a cancellation of the election in 1972 because of "internal civil unrest" in response to the Vietnam war. Investigative journalist Ron Rosenbaum was able to determine that I was the fourth person down from a leaker in the White House.
Feeling like the Ancient Mariner waving his filthy albatross in front of anybody who would listen, I did my best to spread the word, regardless of the possibility that I was being used to float a trial balloon. I worked my way up from the underground papers to the reporters in the press tent at Woodstock. I blabbed about it at campus appearances and in alternative radio interviews. Ultimately, the story filtered up into the mainstream media.
Attorney General John Mitchell announced that whoever had started this rumor should be "punished," I sent him a letter confessing my sin, but I never heard back. Meanwhile, the RAND Corporation concluded that the average American citizen would not stand for a cancellation of the election.
Now, 35 years later, that same possibility has been floated publicly from the White House by Condoleezza Rice and others, a trial balloon propelled by the arrogance of power but pricked by the polls. Oh, well, there's always the possibility of declaring martial law. o
