Welcome to the first installment of Hunted, an autobiographical account of God’s action in the life of a Vietnam War era radical activist. In case you haven’t see it, the series introduction provides context for the events described here. An index of other episodes, updated monthly, is also available.
February 1970. My first demonstration with the Progressive Labor Party (PL), a communist organization planning to spearhead armed revolution.A dozen of us students burst into the office of the president of Rhode Island College, only to be confronted by a small, balding man with black glasses, who told us the president wasn’t there.
“Call next week. Make an appointment.”
“Next week?” Bruce, our leader, laughed incredulously.
“Get out of the way, we’ll see for ourselves if he’s here,” someone shouted. A couple of people behind us pressed forward. Behind black glasses I caught a glimpse of cops. Where had they come from?
“Leave now,” advised black glasses.
The cops got between us and him. One of them gave Bruce a shove.
“We’re students, we have a right—”
Bruce tried to shove back. The cops, standing shoulder to shoulder now, appeared to be trying to force us out of the room. Were we supposed to resist? We hadn’t planned what to do if five burly cops appeared on the scene. People behind us were trying to push in the other direction. As I staggered to stay upright, a hand grasped my arm.
“Are they going to arrest us?”
The art student. A freckle-faced freshman in a frayed parka. I’d seen her at a few meetings, but she never spoke. According to Bruce she was from a working-class background and would be a great fighter someday. I wasn’t seeing it now.
“I can’t get arrested.”
“Then let’s get out of here.”
The cops herded us toward the open door we’d come in. The art student took hold of my hand. Somehow we squeezed through into the atrium, and she pulled me outdoors.
“If I got arrested my mother would kill me.”
Her mother? How would she know? Why even tell her?
“She’d look at me and she’d know something happened.”
What do you say to someone like that? Before I could try to reason with her, she was walking away, lurching a little to manage the bookbag she was trying to sling over her shoulder.
Bruce caught up with me as I headed across toward the cafeteria. An inch taller than me and 30 pounds heavier, he was wearing blue jeans and workboots and red flannel shirt, the fashion statement of a proletarian leader. Bruce was a member of the Party and de facto leader of its front group on campus.
He asked what I thought of the demonstration and what Eileen, the art student, had said. I told him—maybe too bluntly because he cocked his head, squinting facetiously at my skeptical tone.
“So what if she was scared? Who wouldn’t be their first time? She has questions. So answer them. Don’t think we’re not going to turn this situation to our advantage.”
I didn’t see how, but that was Bruce. As a PL member, he knew “the line”—what Party doctrine dictated in any given set of circumstances. Bruce knew what was going to get us to a mass working-class uprising someday. If he thought that included answering questions from a shy, clumsy art student who obviously didn’t know the first thing about politics, I would just have to trust him.
It didn’t bother me much—not then anyway. Even when Bruce gave someone a hard time, he did it in a humorous way, and you couldn’t help liking him. When you worked with “the Party,” as those in the know referred to PL, you got used to a certain level of arrogance. If you were serious about revolution, which a whole lot of people in our generation claimed to be but were not, you understood there needed to be a vanguard to lead, guide, and keep the whole chaotic mess organized. As a Party member, Bruce was part of that vanguard. If I worked hard and played my cards right, I was pretty sure I would be too.
When we gathered the next day to plan what to do next, Bruce spoke with confidence and authority. I could tell he’d talked all this over with Party leaders in Boston. Over the next few weeks we tried several strategies. We went back as a group, unannounced. We tried making appointments. Bruce went back on his own several times. Nothing doing. The nearest we ever got was that anteroom. Wherever the president was, he wasn’t there, and we got a pretty clear sense that if we tried anything, the cops would be waiting.
It was frustrating. At the height of the antiwar movement, we ought to be making more headway. Could this much bad luck be accidental? Was there a back exit we didn’t know about? Did the president just slip out whenever we appeared on the scene? Did the police know in advance when we were coming? Could there be an informer among us?
I did my best to be deferential to Bruce, but as the weeks passed I couldn’t help but have doubts about his leadership. I wondered what the Party leaders in Boston thought of the job he was doing. Were they aware of how we were floundering? Were Bruce’s reports sugar-coated to make himself look good? I started thinking what I might do in his shoes. I wasn’t sure exactly what that would be, but I was pretty sure if I had the leadership of America’s most militant revolutionary group behind me, the results would be a whole lot better than Bruce had achieved.
Thoughts like this were disloyal. When they surfaced, I did my best to push them out of my mind, but they still lurked there, nagging from the fringes of consciousness. At the time I thought of these doubts as just overeagerness, the enthusiasm of a new recruit impatient to get into the fray, reluctant to bide his time and get more experience under his belt. It didn’t occur to me that these early misgivings might be a harbinger of a much deeper disillusionment. It would never have crossed my mind in those days that through Bruce, God offered an object lesson about the character of PL itself. I did not stop to think what these reservations I was starting to feel might expose about the lifestyle of radical activism. The furthest thing from my mind was that, in my extreme naivete, I had been given a foretaste of the precarious human condition you and I and everyone else who has ever lived in the world are all heir to.