The Congressional elections in November 1994 were won by an ultra-conservative Republican cabal. Many of the candidates had been quietly chosen and trained beforehand by the man they elected Speaker, Newt Gingrich. Once in office, he announced that the victory meant an endorsement of his Contract With America. This was a list of measures repealing or reducing the social gains won initially under Franklin Roosevelt 60 years earlier, and expanded and enlarged under a succession of presidents, up to and including the moderate rightist Nixon. Polls later showed that most voters had never heard of the so-called contract. Their ballots had been cast on the customary American basis of dissatisfaction with the state of affairs rather than preference for a specific program of change. Most candidates in both parties had, as usual, avoided discussion of real issues.

After the election, affirmative action became the wedge, the issue that would run interference for the rest of the "contract." The reasoning was simple. Allege that minorities, particularly African-Americans and women, are taking the jobs of white males, and distract public attention. The arms budget, an anachronism once the Soviet Union had collapsed, could then be maintained essentially at its cold war level. Aid to families with dependent children could be wiped out, on the vile racist notion that ignorant young women have babies to obtain the pittance provided by the welfare system through its demeaning procedures. Social Security could be converted into market insecurity, by transferring payments not into a federal fund, but into the shell game of the stock exchanges.

The argument was subtler than in the past. We should be ""color-blind," and think of the poor without regard to color, language, gender. The reasons why the percentage of poor among non-whites, people native Spanish-speakers, and women, was vastly higher than among white males, were ignored.

I reacted with amazement and rising anger to this ocean of one-sided propaganda. When a local daily newspaper columnist with an excellent record on civil liberties, civil rights, the Vietnam War, and militarism, denounced affirmative action in terms that were objectively falsehoods, I could take it no longer.

KPFA management had convinced me to give up every second weekly evening broadcast in exchange for a brief morning drive-time spot with a listenership several times as large, in which I was interviewed. One morning in March 1995 I came in and handed the interviewers a sheet with the introduction and questions I wanted asked. What I said that morning led to my morning spot being cancelled and, indirectly, to my being taken off the air entirely after 37 years on KPFA. It quite literally brought part of my life to an end. Therefore it merits extensive quotation. The show opened with one of the co-hosts saying:

"Bill has decided today we're not going to talk about things formerly Soviet; we're instead going to talk about Art Hoppe of the San Francisco Chronicle."

On the air, I said: "When the hysteria about affirmative action reaches the point where a man whom I regard as honest tells what are unquestionably lies, has psyched himself into that situation, then I feel that this is something that requires discussion. He's got classic sentences like this: 'Surely it is unfair to give the son of a Black banker preference over the son of a white sharecropper.' There are actually a couple of Black bankers in this country....

"Yes, there are white sharecroppers. But the ratio of white sharecroppers to the white farming population is a tiny fraction of the ratio of Black sharecroppers to the Black farming population. This business of putting equal signs where equal signs do not exist is in some ways the mildest of what he has to say. Here is a statement, he's my age: 'As far as my career goes, I would have had an easier time of it in many respects had I been Black.' His job is poking barbs into the Establishment. Find me today, in 1995, a Black man in this country in a general medium whose job is poking barbs into the white Establishment! His job could not have been given to a Black man, and I don't believe it can be given to a Black man today.

"He goes on to say: 'It would have been easier for a Black to be admitted to Lowell.' [the academic high school in San Francisco]. That is a lie. There was no affirmative action [in his youth]. No Black kid squeezed into the high school I went to, which was the New York equivalent of Lowell. In a racist society, admissions officers, teachers, take it for granted that if you come in looking Latino, looking Black, and, for many purposes, if you come in looking female, you are not going to be tracked into the top level of anything, because either it was taken for granted that genetically you did not have the brains or it was taken for granted that you had no future in that field...

"He has a sentence: 'The Chronicle was eager then as it is now to hire Black reporters, and a Black columnist would have been a feather in its journalistic cap.' That last sentence means that [he believes] there was no Black person who had the brains to be a columnist."

"I think of my daughter, going to a school that was 90% Black, because that was our neighborhood school; her boyfriend, going to a school that was overwhelmingly white because that happened to be his neighborhood school. In her school, the classes were 40 to 45 kids, the textbooks came two months into the school year. In his school, the classes were 30 kids, and the textbooks were there right at the very beginning, so - yes, a Paul Robeson is going to make it - but your ordinary kid, who has to fight this and then apply to Lowell High School? And don't tell me things are different today. One of my sons is a school teacher in Oakland, and the only difference between Oakland today and my daughter's day is that they've got the fig leaf of Black administrators. In all other respects, the underfunding...this is typical.

"What white people have to understand is that Black people, and not only Blacks, grow up in neighborhoods which are consistently mistreated in terms of street lights, in terms of paving, in terms of garbage collection, in terms of the presence and the purpose of the police, so that a kid who grows up under those circumstances starts ten yards behind the other in terms of competition, and so the gap can never be closed if we simply leave it to color-blindness to solve it. Here are the actual figures of...Black representation in the major professions...today. Blacks comprise 12.4 percent of the U.S. population but only 1.4 percent of America's lawyers. In short, of every nine [Black] lawyers there would be on a population basis, there is one; 4 percent of physicians: there is one Black physician for every three there would be; 3.7 percent of engineers....I would lay a rather heavy bet that the figures for journalism are pretty much the same. So unless we give [preference to] the kid who grows up under the circumstances we have described, plus the racism that pervades the white mentality in this country, whether it is executives, whether it is government officials, or whether it is journalists, [nothing will change]....

"This is characteristic of the society, and if we don't understand that, not only is there going to be unending injustice to Black people, but there is going to be unending turmoil because, in the world of today, oppressed nations and nationalities just aren't taking it any more, as the area of my specialty, the ex-Soviet Union, will tell you." In closing my segment, the co-host, Phillip Maldari, also co-Public Affairs Director of KPFA, said, "Bill, I certainly thank you for bringing this column to our attention, and opening the issue."

Top management thought differently. The Program Director sent me an Inter-Office Memo: "I have written to you and spoken to you...about our requirements for the segment you do on the Morning Show...that you stick to issues of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe....Therefore, effective immediately, I am cancelling your appearance as a regular guest on the Morning Show."

Because of KPFA's reputation, this gained national attention. An article in The Nation called it "scarcely credible arrogance." But it was also unquestionably a matter of political judgment. The Examiner, San Francisco's afternoon daily, quoted me on this as follows: "I believe the station committed suicide in terms of the old KPFA when it did not pre-empt programming to broadcast the U.C. Regents meeting...That decision on the regents personified the switch they have made from a station that sought to be a leader in social movements to one that is looking solely for an increased 'market share,' a term I find wholly inappropriate to a public radio station."

I waited for over a month for management to offer some explanation to listeners of my disappearance from the Morning Show. None was forthcoming, but the station had the unmitigated brass to ask me to appear on its quarterly fund-raising marathon. I declined. A listener in his 20s, in Fresno, where I was carried by an affiliated station, wrote me subsequently that he had thought I had passed on, as he knew that I was quite elderly. Ultimately I used my remaining once-in-two-weeks evening program to explain the situation.

The station used my on-air explanation as excuse to terminate my remaining program because I had violated the gag rule against discussing station affairs on air. There was no such rule during the first quarter-century of KPFA's existence, and I had deliberately violated it at least once each year during the following decade as a matter of democratic principle, with no action ever taken against me previously. Over 500 listeners now signed petitions demanding my reinstatement. A large number were young people at an anti-Gingrich demonstration of thousands in San Francisco. How many letters were written to the station I have no way of knowing, but senders provided me with copies of more than a hundred. Some of them posed a problem of self-evaluation. I was simply overawed and taken aback by letters like these:

"One of America's foremost progressive thinkers." "Bill remains one of the most politically perceptive and morally persuasive intellectuals in our contemporary society. We are fortunate indeed that he lives in the Bay Area." I measured those expressions against my own mistakes and failures, and came to the sad conclusion that there is a much wider range in the ability to think than I, as a believer in Carl Sandburg's "The People, Yes" would like to grant.. The letters to management were all the more convincing to me because they did not ignore my faults, and comparisons they made showed the writers to be deeply rooted both in classical and contemporary culture:

From the world of music: "Take an analogy. Say you're Director of the Vienna Philharmonic sometime in the latter half of the eighteenth century. You contract with this kid named Mozart for five new symphonies for the season. But the kid is arrogant and difficult, and he gets his scores in late, and they're full of coffee stains. Worst of all, instead of a symphony, sometimes he tries to hand you a piano concerto, or even a divertimento. It's enough to drive you up the walls. So what do you do? Do you say, 'That's it, Wolfgang. If you can't follow the rules, we won't do your stuff anymore'?

Another musician, thousands of miles away, wrote: "Salieri's claim to fame is his reputed murder of Mozart. There are a lot of people out there who would remember...[the KPFA manager] as the young punk who shot Bill Mandel in the back. Could you live with that?"

Art: "Like a Picasso it looks [like] we are lucky enough to have found a asshole that loves us & we have only to look at his scars to appreciate the depth of that life."

Learning: "Playing tapes of Noam Chomsky is not the same as employing a broadcaster of Noam Chomsky's calibre, responsible to, and resident among those whose understanding he has helped to develop."

I look at those last and reflect that it had been quite a radio station that could attract listeners whose searches for parallels would draw upon that range of interests, and could express themselves with such style.

A galaxy signed the petitions: actor Ed Asner, environmental icon David Brower, journalist Alexander Cockburn, Mime Troupe founder R.G. Davis, novelist Tillie Olsen, folksinger Pete Seeger, stage and screen director Luis Valdez (who had once been a student of mine), clown and ice-cream flavor Wavy Gravy. At least as important to me personally was the signature of Maudelle Shirek, an African-American Berkeley city councilmember re-elected when in her mid-80s.

Maudelle Shirek, an African-American Berkeley city councilmember re-elected when in her mid-80s.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the most widely-published contemporary American poet, and 1950s broadcaster on KPFA, wrote the station that its founders would be "turning over in their graves" over "the recent treatment of one of your oldest and most respected programmers, Bill Mandel."

As a father, I was most moved by a letter son Dave wrote to the manager: "WE [my children] know the price better than you can ever hope to, yet WE applaud Bill and his equally courageous partner, Tanya, and honor them for their incredible courage, unending honesty, selfless lifetime of (unpaid) contributions to world peace, civil rights, common decency, and anti-fascism - hell...you name it and, if it's in the name of humanity, they've fought for it....Tell me that you are not such trash that you would beat up on an old but fearless man who has given his life for his country! Tell me to control the terrible rage I feel towards you, to put it away 'cause it was all a thoughtless accident....Tell me I'm wrong, apologize to Bill like brave humans, and let's get on with the task of rebuilding human decency around the world."

The anger was not limited to my family. A listener my age, referring to the Pacifica Executive Director and the KPFA manager and program director, wrote: "A great many people over the years have sacrificed much to create a unique institution, Pacifica Radio, and you come from nowhere to destroy it. Who invited you to the party in the first place?"

All to no avail.

My supporters were by no means confined to people from one side of the political spectrum. Rush Limbaugh, on the far right, was far and away the most popular national radio talk-show host at this time. A listener in Sacramento wrote me: "Even Rush Limbaugh regulars such as I are willing to put their money where their mouths are when it comes to high-quality, listener-sponsored personalities like William Marx Mandel....Rush Limbaugh would treat you with a lot more respect and deference. He may agree with little that you opine, but he would treat you right."

It was time to crystallize this spontaneous outrage into organized opposition.

In the mid-1990s, Bolinas, California, was still a time-warp. A small community of three or four thousand perhaps, it lies on a coastal plateau peninsula above the Pacific ninety minutes north of San Francisco via twisting, sliding U.S. 1. Until I was fired from KPFA, Bolinas was simply the place where Tanya and I routinely stopped on relaxing drives for lunch in its funky eatery, The Store.

In May a stranger there phoned to say they were organizing a meeting in its school to hear why I had been removed from the air. I attended. Thirty were present, the equivalent of a thousand in Berkeley in proportion to population or a full Yankee Stadium in New York. Half were, in dress and manner, typical northern Californians. The other half were hippies who didn't care that they had aged: long hair tied in buns, beards, tie-dyed shirts and sandals. When the discussion turned to what to do, I suggested that a picket line be held at KPFA. All agreed, and some said they would help distribute an announcement of it at a major demonstration to be held in San Francisco that weekend against the rightist legislation being pushed through Congress.

This tiny town of Bolinas had a tinier every-other-daily, the Hearsay News. Although the Hearsay News was xeroxed, all the original material was ordinary typewriter copy with old-fashioned ragged right margins. The retro appearance of the Bolinas paper was no handicap to the quality of its journalism. Five issues of May 15-24, 1995, serialized a report on the picketing by Peter Axelson, which opened as follows:

"When I showed up in Berkeley on Wednesday afternoon I was ready for anything. I had on me: $40.00 in cash for bribes; some loose change; a mini FM stereo walkman; a Canon S-6 camera good to fifty feet underwater (because one never knows); earplugs; a pair of John Lennon purple moonglasses; a ¼ ounce of pot; a few sticks of Nom Champa incense; and a rubber, unribbed."

"I was ready."

"And this was good because the story of people picketing the studios of KPFA in protest to the firing of Bill Mandel was news of historic proportions. After all, wasn't KPFA supposed to be an oasis of sanity and culture in the dangerously narrow-minded world of media? You don't protest before such an institution lightly because you may be shooting yourself in the foot...."

"I ambled over to KPFA and MY GOD! There it was: a hundred-plus people walking in a circle in front of the doors....There was a drum beating and a trumpet tooting. There were people in costumes, and gold toilet seats (toilet seats?)."

"We were all part of that strange and beautiful phenomenon called a Berkeley demonstration. And right in the middle of all this, wearing a suit and tie, carrying his briefcase and looking distinguished as hell, walked Bill Mandel himself. With his silver hair and his head held high this was his big moment, and the smile on his face showed that he was enjoying it completely...."

"In boardrooms, classrooms, and nursery schools across our country these two rules are practically universal: 'color within the lines' and 'don't talk back.' Except that in the case of Bill Mandel talking back is his life and we depended on him to do this. So we came to KPFA with Bill Mandel so we could all talk back."

I asked a man festooned with bandoleers of toilet tissue rolls, who had trucked the bowls - no mere seats - what they meant. He replied: "They treated you like shit, didn't they?"

Within weeks after being dropped by KPFA, I had two invitations, entirely unsolicited, to do ongoing broadcasts on other stations. One series lasted a year, the other, on "pirate" Free Radio Berkeley, continued for three years until the Federal Communications Commission obtained an injunction against its further broadcasting from a federal judge. The former program took the form of reading an earlier version of this autobiography, followed by phone-ins. One caller described it as "inspirational" while another asked: "Who was this entertainer Robeson?" Yet another: "How does one become an activist?" To me, they all justified my writing and broadcasting it. This was a college station in Silicon Valley with about a million people living within its signal range, including the Stanford University community. This station also depended largely upon on-air appeals to listeners for funds. I thought my host's requests were too modest, with $20 being asked for. So I pitched. One listener, having heard that Tanya and I were then married 60 years, gave $60, another $100. The total for our three weekly shows during that drive were the highest of any on that station. Earlier, during that fund drive, I had played my 1960 testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The next week a listener, saying he was 20, informed me that he had duplicated that and my McCarthy hearing of 1953 and sent them to friends. There were questions about McCarthyism and the Soviet Union.

My dismissal from KPFA was followed by a general housecleaning in which dozens of programs were cancelled, including that of the only broadcaster on its air longer than I, Phil Elwood, jazz critic for the San Francisco Examiner. The night before the changes went into effect, a meeting was held in Berkeley, attended by 300 listener-subscribers, to protest the massive dismissal of community-based broadcasters each with weekly programs, to make room for three national "stars" with daily hour-long programs. An ongoing organization, Take Back KPFA, was established, led by long-time friends like Lester Radke and Hulda Nystrom, former station executives such as Maria Gilardin and Bob Bergstresser, and activists among whom Jeffrey Blankfort was the most devoted and creative. Former executive John Whiting, now long resident in London, helped via brilliantly-written polemics on the Internet and published articles in England, where the similar decline of BBC was an issue among intellectuals.

I parted company with the group, without rancor, when it seemed that we could not win without obtaining, by whatever means necessary, the full list of subscribers without which we had no way of presenting them with our point of view. But the persistence of Take Back KPFA and the efforts of employed staff at other Pacifica stations, particularly WBAI in New York, ultimately won broader and broader support in the progressive community nationwide.

The person presiding over the changes in the Pacifica chain was its Executive Director, Pat Scott, a Black woman. In responding to a question about the self-perpetuating nature of Pacifica's board from Per Fegereng of the Portland Free Press, Scott said that if the board were elected it would be all white. Fagereng published a rejoinder by me. I wrote that her statement was totally contrary to the history both of Berkeley, where the chain originated, and of KPFA and Pacifica.

"Berkeley, predominantly a white city, was the first to introduce busing in an attempt to eliminate racially discriminatory education. Berkeley elected Black mayors. Its votes made possible the election of the first African-American member of Congress to come from a white-majority district, Ron Dellums....So there are absolutely no grounds for Scott's fear that an elected Pacifica board would be all white. On the contrary, the reason why it is now largely, perhaps predominantly non-white is because it reflected the culture of Bay Area progressivism regarding affirmative action, and of people in the other Pacifica cities who accepted that....It is a sorry reflection on this country that Scott's belief, expressed in that remark, and probably shared by her fellow non-white Pacifica Board members, is justified by her life experience. But it is not justified by the record of Pacifica..."

Within weeks after being dropped by KPFA, I had two invitations, entirely unsolicited, to do ongoing broadcasts on other stations. One series lasted a year, the other, on "pirate" Free Radio Berkeley, continued for three years until the Federal Communications Commission obtained an injunction against its further broadcasting from a federal judge. The former program took the form of reading an earlier version of this autobiography, followed by phone-ins. One caller described it as "inspirational" while another asked: "Who was this entertainer Robeson?" Yet another: "How does one become an activist?" To me, they all justified my writing and broadcasting it. This was a college station in Silicon Valley with about a million people living within its signal range, including the Stanford University community. This station also depended largely upon on-air appeals to listeners for funds. I thought my host's requests were too modest, with $20 being asked for. So I pitched. One listener, having heard that Tanya and I were then married 60 years, gave $60, another $100. The total for our three weekly shows during that drive were the highest of any on that station. Earlier, during that fund drive, I had played my 1960 testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The next week a listener, saying he was 20, informed me that he had duplicated that and my McCarthy hearing of 1953 and sent them to friends. There were questions about McCarthyism and the Soviet Union.

My second new outlet was Free Radio Berkeley, founded the previous year. FRB was one of the first micropower stations deliberately broadcasting with such low power that it could not be accused of interfering with any station licensed by the Federal Communications Commission. That government body refused to license broadcasts at under 100 watts and set other standards placing the air waves beyond the purse of ordinary citizens or neighborhood groups. In early 1996 it was already possible to hold a statewide conference of such stations. That gathering was thrilling, because among the hundred people present there were twenty Latinos from the barrios, speaking either Spanish or bilingually, including several women. There were also eight African-Americans, which is well in proportion to their share in the state's population. There was a representative from Haiti and one from the Zapatista rebels in Chiapas, Mexico (the founder of the micropower movement, Stephen Dunifer, personally built transmitters for them). My mere mention that I had been an activist from the 1930s on brought applause from these new radio pioneers. Those present knew they were building on previous history.

I guess the comment I like best on my broadcasting over Free Radio Berkeley was that in a letter from friend and screenwriter Steph Lady: "I must say it's a helluva man who turns outlaw at 75!" I was 78. No matter. But he showed foresight, for when, in 1998, the station was formally banned, I did a broadcast deliberately violating the court injunction, saying that I was willing to go to jail "to jolt the public into understanding that the only freedom supported by (broadcast regulators) is the freedom to sell air time to advertisers." So I turned outlaw at 81.

When I began those broadcasts, the audience of FRB was very small, but that had the same advantage that small class size provides in teaching. A young ultra-Leftie called one night, and I answered his questions for nearly an hour: why Soviet socialism failed; what I thought of the Black former Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, Colin Powell, who the Republicans would dearly have loved to have had as presidential candidate; my opinion of former California governor Jerry Brown, now a populist. When the listener finally hung up, he said, "Thank you for the wonderful conversation."

The FRB collective wrote and circulated a lengthy article, "How Free Radio Stations are Giving Communities Their Own Voice." Several hundred words of it were on my program. At that point I was the regular guest of another broadcaster, the "unabashed anarchist" Rad Man:

"The two work quite well together despite their different political philosophies. Mandel's years of experience complements what the Rad Man calls his own 'cynical optimism.' Together they make for very interesting philosophical discussions. Mandel entertains the possibility of a social democratic, labor based party in the U.S. whereas the Rad Man is fiercely anti-capitalist and opposed to statist government of any sort."

The end of the spring semester in 1995 gave Dave the first real breather in a year of graduate work at the University of Washington. We spent a week with him and Traci, his partner. We drove north along the coast, my most favorite trip in all the world. In Crescent City, northernmost town in California, we walked an endless pier enclosing the harbor to see what the peculiar white objects at its end were. They looked like children's jacks but turned out to be stupendous anchor-shaped concrete blocks deliberately heaped helter-skelter to resist dragging by the ocean.

In Portland it rained, of course. But the roses in its hilltop botanical garden were too numerous for the rain to have ruined them all. On the freeway north of Portland, however, the rain was the heaviest I could recall in half a century. Wipers were useless. We could move only because the headlights of cars on all sides in late-afternoon rush hour provided orientation.

Dave and Traci were renting a ridiculous cottage whose owner had permanently sealed nearly all the windows. However, Seattle weather permits front and rear doors to be kept open most of the time. Seattle, like San Francisco, is perfect for the kind of tourist, like us, to whom a city's outdoor qualities are at least as important as those indoors. The rain let up for the rest of our stay, and we took a fine ferry ride to Bremerton. It was spoiled a bit by the sight of an ugly monstrous submarine capable of exterminating a big fraction of humanity with a single salvo of its intercontinental nuclear missiles. The damn things look as beastly as their mission. While the body wallows heavy in the water, the diving fins rise above the tail in a satanic black cross.

We drove up alone to Vancouver, British Columbia, for a few days, and our fondness for Canadians and their civilized way of life was refreshed. The fine streetcar and bus system made it possible for Tanya, bad heart and all, to do a fair amount of walking: waterfront, Stanley Park, that great market where the World's Fair had been.

The art museum had a major show which prompted thought about the interconnectedness of the modern world across cultures and social systems. The theme was Canadian-Chinese art. The artists had all received first-class academic training in the socialist-realist tradition in the People's Republic of China. Having emigrated from a country where huge public walls were available for frescoes, their work was too large for anything but a museum. Yet the subject-matter was intimate. One painter, working on an immense scale, used the traditional Chinese scroll form combined with his realist schooling to show the people's recent rediscovery of Buddhism.

The trip home was lovely. The surf was up, way up, from the southernmost Oregon coast all the distance to San Francisco. We spent the night in redwood country where U.S. Highway 101 turns inland to by-pass the super-rugged Lost Coast. Garberville, the marijuana capital, is as mixed-up American as can be. We found perhaps the last supermarket in the country that didn't take credit cards. Was this a reflection of the anti-Establishment spirit of this town of ex-hippies, or of the illegal business that was the core of its economy, in which people stayed away from traceable records of expenditures?

The final day, we drove the coast the full length of U.S. 1 to Muir Beach. We walked the Mendocino headlands. In Richardson Redwood Grove we walked again, and watched convicts pulling truss bridges into place on the Eel River in advance of the rainy season.

Back home I found a message inviting me onto a special broadcast by WBAI, the Pacifica station in New York. It turned out to be a discussion of the Rosenberg Case in which the other guest was William Reuben, the journalist who 45 years earlier had been alone in the country to cast doubt on the government's charges, an act of most extraordinary courage at the height of McCarthy's power. We had had no contact in all the intervening years. During the broadcast he said, with utmost gratitude to those who had treated and nursed him, that he had just recovered from a life-or-death operation. I nearly broke down on the air. Afterward I thought about that and realized that I can retain the very warmest feelings for people yet have no need to connect unless there is a concrete reason to do so.

Another couple of weeks passed and I got a call from a man who thirty years earlier had been the first Black university professor of geography outside the Negro colleges, as far as I know. Bill Brown, now in Tacoma, had seen me the night before in yet another TV documentary on McCarthyism. There had been no identification of the man voicing the defiant words against the senator.

As always in summer, I swam daily in Lake Anza, a five-minute drive from the house. One day in September, I met Sidney Clemens at the beach. She is the stepdaughter of Morton Sobell, the Rosenbergs' co-defendant who had served 14 years on Alcatraz although only a first offender. She knew of the CIA's just-released so-called Wynona papers, selected documents of electronic surveillance that claimed to be definitive proof of the Rosenbergs' guilt. Sidney had spent her entire life believing they were innocent, and said, "this is a terrible shock." What did I think? I described my responses to questioning on this subject by Senator McCarthy and Roy Cohn when the Rosenbergs were in the death house. I had carefully avoided any opinion on guilt or innocence, but attacked the outrageously tainted trial, the convictions, and the death sentences. Then I described how Phyllis had been affected as a 13-year-old. Sidney's composure cracked (she is Phyllis' age), and I hugged her. Then I broke down. Later, an elderly female friend of her's who had been present told her she regarded our conversation as a "historical event." I realized that what, to Sidney and myself, was simply a discussion of a part of our lives was, to this other person, a page of history come to life.

The following week I wore a different hat entirely.

Wilbur Hot Springs lies at the end of a bumpy, dusty, twisting gravel road high in the dry mountains a hundred miles north of us. The 20-room hotel at the springs was built in 1865, with no private baths, the toilet down the hall is still called the commodium. In a sense the whole place is a memorial to Yankee enterprise. Mexican government had been swept out only 18 years earlier, and the gold strike that populated northern California had come the following year. During the Civil War, mines in the area had provided potash and iron to the Union, hauled out by wagon train. No railroad existed.

Some of the hotel clientele must have been the owners of those mines and haulage lines, and of Spanish land grants in the central valley. But most must have been miners who had struck it rich days eastward by horse or stagecoach in the Sierra Nevada, or city folk nearly as far south in the new boomtown, San Francisco.

New Agers discovered Wilbur after its renovation in the 1970s, when a washstand with running water (cold only) was added in each room. Writers found it a quiet retreat. The old rectangular concrete hot tubs in the river had been replaced by a charming complex of soaking tubs under a partly-open gabled structure. There is also a kidney-shaped swimming pool at normal temperature sunk in an enclosure of natural boulders. Nudism is permitted in the bathing and swimming area, but the hotel requires that one remove shoes in the lobby.

Brigeda Bank and Jeff Goldsmith had found Wilbur for themselves in the early 1990s, not long after they found each other. Brigeda is a strongly feminist attorney. I met Jeff in 1989 after he had written me into his successful play, "McCarthy," on the basis of my testimony, before Jeff was born. It ran seven months in Los Angeles and a month in the senator's home state of Wisconsin. Jeff and I had become friends and I became for a period a father figure, because his own father, whom I had known, was long dead. I surprised Jeff once when I told him how much it meant to me that people so very much younger regarded us as good company. He said that thought had never occurred to him.

In the spring of 1995 they decided to marry, and asked me to become a minister of the Universal Life Church in order to perform the ceremony. This church requires adherence to no theology whatever, and does not mention Christ, god, deity, or a higher being. It is like the Quakers in regarding the individual as being sole repository and judge of the spiritual. I also knew that an effort to disqualify its ordination as minister of anyone who so desired had been rejected in the courts - a decision flatly recognizing that judges have no authority to define personal beliefs. I took it for granted that Brigeda, as an attorney in family law, would not have her own marriage solemnized in a manner about which there could be any legal question.

I said I'd be delighted, but I had never done anything of that kind before, and had no idea whether they would be satisfied with what I would say. Jeff said, "Brigeda has complete confidence in you." I replied that all I could do would be to pass on to them whatever a long married life had taught me.That was exactly what they wanted. The wedding was to be on September 10, absolutely the hottest time of year in California. The previous week there had been days well over 80Á even in our very temperate area, where the hills surrounding San Francisco Bay moderate the weather year round. Inland, where we were bound, the papers reported 95 to 100 degrees. But the heat wave broke two days earlier, the cooling fog rolled in from the ocean, and even the cloudless interior came down to temperatures that were tolerable when I stripped to the waist to drive.

The wedding became a terrific weekend. Brigeda and Jeff had scouted around Oakland clubs and hired a really fine small band that could both swing and rock. I found a young partner who responded to jazz as I do and danced my ass off. Tanya even swam in the mildest of the pools, the first time in a couple of years that she had found the air and water both warm enough. My sermon summed up what Tanya and I had learned from sixty years of married life. Some guest asked for my copy. Jeff wanted one, and I subsequently printed it out for him. Later he told me he consulted it repeatedly in rocky times. Here it is:

Tanya and I have managed to stay together for 60 years. And if we have, then perhaps there is something to be learned from us about how to do that, aside from the miracles of health and medicine that have kept us both alive. How do people of strong character overcome the disagreements thoughout a lifetime inherent in the fact that none but narcissists marry individuals they cannot distinguish from themselves in the mirror?

If I had to use a single phrase to answer, it would be: respect and shared joys. To marry a person one does not respect is stupid, because such a marriage cannot last, except in the horrible form, however common, of dominance of one partner over the other. That is dishonorable, and genuine honor - which is another way of saying adherence to principle, to ethics - is a major virtue.

Life does not leave the bases for respect undisturbed. It is tested most severely when children are born, and the two parents find themselves facing roles without precedent in their personal experiences, and the pressures of expectations and patterns imposed by society, relatives, friends. But there are few joys in life to compare with watching children grow and learn and become human beings standing on their own two feet, and some day giving one grandchildren and even greatgrandchildren. Perhaps the greatest happiness in that regard is when parents find that their efforts to transmit their values to the children have been successful.

That in turn creates the basis for the most important of all support systems toward the end of life, as inability to work and just plain decline must be made good by those who are near and dear: children first of all.

The joys of marriage include shared pleasures, both intimate and in the spending of leisure time. In the course of this each partner comes to rejoice in and gain by the qualities of the other.

Respect involves recognition of permanent differences in viewpoint over things that are trivial to outsiders, but very important indeed when one lives with them day in and day out. For Tanya floors must be clean; for me it is windows. Extend that to tastes in arrangement of the house, clothing, or, most difficult, explosive, and emotionally exhausting: how to guide and respond to the children as they grow. Consider the worst problem of all: finances. This is exacerbated by the fact that the ups and downs of the economy are beyond our individual control. When the other person's insistence upon a particular choice in any of these areas appears to you to be unbearable, ask yourself whether it overrides the respect you have for your partner and the joy of spending your lives together. If it is truly an equal marriage - and none other is worthy - each finds that there are things which to the other are absolutes, while to you they are not. So you decide that, when push comes to shove, you will yield in those particulars.

Only respect and shared joys, not love? If respect grows, as each sees the other's responses to the vicissitudes of life become more appropriate and courageous, love grows deeper. And nothing can so build respect as adherence to common ideals, and admiration for how one's partner's adherence manifests itself through thick and thin.

In the course of life, a woman inevitably encounters other wonderful and handsome men, a man other wonderful and beautiful women. But, given mutual respect and understanding, and the growing love that a life governed by those principles and shared experience engenders, a marvelous thing happens. One concludes that, after all is said and done, that there is no other individual on earth with whom one would rather have spent one's life.

The photographer got a particularly fine picture of Tanya and me on that occasion, because she is happy when others are happy. When our sixtieth anniversary date arrived a month later, John Whiting, former KPFA executive long resident in London, phoned to congratulate us. Hulda Nystrom drove across town to bring us half-a-dozen E-mail congratulations from others in the movement to take back KPFA. (I was still holding out against getting onto the Internet. I'm an information junkie, and doubted that I would ever get anything done with all that world at my fingertips.)

Although I had turned my own attention entirely away from the affairs of the former Soviet Union, it was good to find that my past work was still of interest to some in that field. Barbara Hazard is an artist friend who had opened the doors to exhibition in America for Leningrad artists whose non-objective styles had kept them barred from the public in Soviet times. She gave an American professor friend in the Soviet studies field a copy of The Struggle to Survive, the collection of letters to me from people in several republics I had published nearly a year earlier. Her friend said she had never seen any such material elsewhere. But I had not received so much as an acknowledgment of receipt from the hundreds of Sovietologists to whom I had sent it. After all, an essay I incorporated in it revealed that I had been a member of the Communist Party for many years, till 1957, and even now did not denounce it as a creature of the Evil Empire. One wouldn't want the CIA to find one's name in correspondence with such a person, would one?

But there were people who had no fear of the CIA or seemingly of anything else. Tina Naccach and her husband Albert, had returned to their native Lebanon with their young children in 1985 after his graduate studies, although civil war was raging. They simply felt that that was where they belong. Their apartment in Beirut is just a short walk from the green line that marked the boundary between the warring sides in a city ruined by years of fratricidal shelling and by Israeli aerial bombardment. Electricity was not restored until 1996. They are upper class, Tina a classmate of Lebanon's president at the time of their return. She is also the granddaughter of the head of the ancient Maronite Christian church. Albert is half-Jewish. Having conducted a polite, lady-like program of Near Eastern music on KPFA with the modest aim of convincing those who listened to her that Arabs are human, Tina had become a tiger when Israel bombed her native city in an effort to force the Palestinian independence leader, Yasser Arafat, to abandon it as his headquarters.

Albert is your classical academic, an authority on ancient languages in the area. When the war ended, the government undertook to rebuild Beirut. He regarded the approach taken as one that would ruin the largest archeological site in the world, and one of the most ancient. Tina wrote me in 1996: "5,000 years of history and 60,000 years of prehistory are in the garbage dump. Albert says I besieged by myself the whole parliament and forced upon the commission to listen to Albert's testimony." An ex-president "wrote beautiful praise of both of us" in a newspaper. Tina also worked on behalf of Sri Lankan female housemaids who ran away from their employers due to horrible conditions, including rape. She was arrested in this connection, and found prison conditions unspeakable. The Sri Lankan women now honored her with the title "aunt" in their language. Invited as a guest on a TV show, she turned the whole country on its ear by challenging the system under which life is officially organized on the basis of its 17 religions. Her clip was broadcast ten times a day for three weeks, and people came to recognize her on the street.

There is a phrase, love breeds love. I will adapt it to read, respect breeds respect. Perhaps it is the fact that when Tina had only recently struck out on her own as a public figure for the first time, I concluded from what she had done, and the manner in which she had done it, that her potential in that regard was unlimited, and wrote her that. Three years after the Naccaches returned to Lebanon, I wrote to Tina that her behavior in Berkeley in defense of her fellow-Arabs at a time when they were regarded as sub-human by most Americans caused me to think she would make an excellent president of her country. In her very-long-delayed response to that one she had written:

"Your letter was so moving that I couldn't write for months. You said some marvelous things about me as a person. If what you think was true and I was to accept its validity, thus a great responsibility rests on my shoulders. When I received your letter I was in one of those dark moments. I wasn't doing anything worth doing, moreover that I couldn't do anything that could make someone like you keep on having the same high opinion."

Eventually, Tina developed a self-esteem appropriate to what she had done. Even then, she expressed it with very level-headed realism: "Bill, I am so lucky to be who I am, to be outraged, to have the time to do something about it; to feel useful and to have the gifts in order to do something."

In April of 1996 Israeli artillery wiped out a large number of children in a UN refugee camp in southern Lebanon. A picket line, with open mike, was held at the Israeli Consulate on Montgomery Street in San Francisco, the equivalent of Wall Street in New York. The line was respectable in size, its composition impressive. Among the Arabs, it cut across all lines. There was a man in a very fine silk suit who looked as though he came from an executive suite. There were young women in head scarves wheeling baby carriages, who I realized may have been risking their right to remain in the U.S. There were African Americans, Anglos, and Jews carrying picket signs identifying themselves as such. I spoke, said I was a Jew, and expressed my horror and shame. I felt better when a young Arab thanked me for my remarks.

A few days later I spoke at a similar rally, sinfully small, held on what are now officially the Mario Savio steps of the administration building at the University of California in Berkeley. There was a fine response from the Lebanese present. Professor Laura Nader, anthropologist, sister of the renowned consumer advocate Ralph Nader, was in the audience and phoned a few days later to tell me of UN figures that the ratio of Palestinian to Jewish deaths over all the years was 1000-to-1. The San Francisco Chronicle published a letter of mine reading: "I am an American Jew, soon to be 79. I have seen the pictures of the dead Lebanese children in the UN camps. I will not give one penny to any organization, family, or individual in Israel that does not actively oppose Israeli slaughter of the innocents. I will not give one penny to any American candidate for any political office whatever or to any political party that does not call for an end to sending American taxpayers' money to Israel until that government stops murdering children."

The first reduction ever in American funds going to Israel, both from government and from Jewish organizations, actually did occur in the months immediately following. At the beginning of 1998 the Israeli government decided that it did not want the loss of face that would accompany further reductions. With the most extraordinary brass, it announced that it would forego all further American non-military aid if the U.S. increased its military assistance by some hundreds of millions of dollars. A letter appeared critical of me, and my daughter called to say she didn't like my letter. How about Hezbollah, the Arab group using terror, in which some children were also killed, to protest the occupation? I told her Hezbollah consisted of young people whose entire lives had been spent under Israeli occupation, and who could see no light at the end of the tunnel. A retired WASP physician whose father had headed a department at the American University in Beirut phoned to agree with my letter. He informed me that, at the Paris Peace Conference following World War I, the Zionists had asked that the Litani River watershed of Lebanon be included in the Palestine Mandate. They occupied it in 1948, but President Eisenhower told them to get out. Israel wants its water. This is the "security" zone it occupied since 1982, and it is where the camp massacre occurred.

As every spring, we went to the San Francisco Film Festival. A documentary, "Cardiogram," from Kazakhstan, reinforced my conviction that the Soviet era would leave a lasting impress upon the countries that emerged from it. This documentary made clear that in post-Soviet Kazakhstan it was still taken for granted that a poor herdsman's young son from the steppes would be admitted to a sanatorium for children with heart conditions without consideration of ability to pay.

Films at the annual Jewish Film Festival provided more food for thought about the Soviet Union. One from France, "Not Everybody Had the Luck to Have Communist Parents," brought home the sharp difference between European and American attitudes. In this semi-autobiographical film, a Parisian mother had been sent to the Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz by the French government of collaborators with Hitler. The advancing Soviet Army liberated the camp before her turn to be killed, so upon returning to France she joined its Communist Party and remained in it. The film demonstrated that this was typical of the Jewish population at that time, for that quarter of Paris is shown voting Communist overwhelmingly in a presidential election.

A very fine characteristic of the Jewish Film Festival, founded by two Berkeley women of the 1960s rebel generation, is that it always included films by or about Palestinians. On this occasion there was a documentary, "Forbidden Marriages," on a great variety of ethnic and religious mixed marriages in Israel and its occupied territories. The film had the very special merit of being the only one I can remember seeing that dealt with lifetime marriage in a positive way, entirely aside from ethnic aspects. And there was the very sad "Voices From Gaza," another documentary, in which a Palestinian truck-driving instructor has problems in teaching a released Palestinian prisoner because of the psychological consequences of torture by Israeli jailers. In all, 90,000 Palestinians had undergone imprisonment, of whom a majority suffered torture. Zvi Aharoni, formerly of Mossad, the Israeli secret service, has said of this:

"When I was head of the interrogation department, nobody would touch a prisoner. Sure, you could do all kinds of tricks, you could bug them, listen in on their conversations. But beating them? Torturing them? And today, not only is it being done, it's legal. Arabs can be tortured. It's legal in my country. It's not my country anymore." He now lives in England.

The summer of 1996 was an emotional roller-coaster. We flew to Seattle to be present when Dave got his master's in landscape architecture. A trip to Victoria, B.C., by ultra-fast and ultra-expensive jet ferry happened to be on one of the very rare days when Mt. Rainier is totally cloud-free. We were able to watch it the whole trip, both ways. The next day Dave drove us up to a pass on the shoulder of the mountain. Deep snow. A frozen lake. Magnificient landforms. On returning home, the first message on the answering machine was that Dad had died a few hours earlier. Totally peacefully and without pain. His companion of recent years, Mildred Schoenberger, had visited him the previous day. He had recognized her as she came in the door - remarkable given his near-total blindness. I wondered if that were not the body rallying itself for a last stand.

We held no memorial, feeling that the 100th anniversary celebration two years earlier had said all that needed to be said, all the better because he was present to enjoy it. San Francisco and Oakland dailies, and a Berkeley weekly carried extensive obituaries I wrote. While Dad did not live to know of the completion of the Siberian documentary, ñThe Island,î I know of no better memorial. My showings of the film as an episode in the history of both countries gave me the personal satisfaction that audiences learned of my father's existence and that he put his body and skills to the service of his ideals.

Not only human beings dear and meaningful to me died in 1996. A wake was held to mark the passing of a radical magazine, Crossroads, to which I had been a contributing editor. Held in a funky backyard in the Berkeley flats, rich in a wild variety of native and random tropicals behind a very ordinary workingclass home, the gathering featured lots of fine down-home cooking, African-American and just plain U.S. The editors put on a good musical skit poking fun at our joint failure. Some fine original poetry was read by a young Latino in that Spanglish which had appeared in recent decades.

In June the seat of Tanya's exercise bike loosened, she fell backward, and broke a rib. She also had unpredictable bouts of angina resulting in headlong drives to the emergency room via our twisting hilltop roads at all hours. Add her tremor and frequent digestive upsets, and it is not surprising that she became fearful and unwilling to be alone. Twice during the summer, son Bob stayed with her for a day to give me a chance to relax. Once I went to San Francisco, watched the sea lions that had taken over numerous pleasure-boat docks near Pier 39, had fish soup in a workingclass Salvadorean restaurant in the Mission district, walked around the peak of Mt. Tamalpais in Marin County, then up to the fire lookout at the top, and had a great drive back via Fairfax through the redwoods and past stunning local reservoirs.

Tanya had long hoped for one more trip to London for theater, but worried whether her body could handle it. When the doctor said that her recovery from the rib injury was progressing satisfactorily, I urged that trip on Tanya. The doctor agreed enthusiastically. We had thought our overseas travelling days were over, but we were wrong. Extraordinary. I saw nine plays, heard six concerts, pushed Tanya around four great museums in the wheelchairs they provide. She conserved her energy, skipping two of the plays and a concert. The weather cooperated: only two days of rain in 13, in London!

Several of the plays simply could not be produced in the United States, because they require a level of social consciousness American audiences do not possess. William Morris was a great English interior designer a century ago, famous enough that London's Victoria and Albert Museum ran an immense centennial exhibit while we were there, with long waiting lines to get in. He was also a revolutionary socialist, friend of George Bernard Shaw and of Karl Marx' daughter Eleanor and her womanizing, swindling, brilliant husband Aveling. The playwright took these facts, plus Marx' actual illegitimate son born to the family's housekeeper, and made Shaw's character Eliza Doolittle from Pygmalion (My Fair Lady, for those who don't know the original play) a living being. The dramatist contrasted her, as a practical woman from the poor, wanting her's now, to the courageous intellectual dreamers. Both sides are treated with the greatest sympathy and respect. How many Americans would pay to hear Shaw argue for socialism? The play is called Wallpaper, because some of Morris' designs are still in use.

I had known all my life about Gerhart Hauptmann's The Weavers, thanks to the lithograph of the same title by his fellow-German, KÉthe Kollwitz. His was the most famous, if not the first, of social realist plays. It told of a rebellion of those who worked at that trade in Germany before real factories were established. They would slave at their looms at home endless hours on wool provided by a capitalist, whose foreman would then pay them on his judgment of the quantity and quality of their weave. The weavers teetered on the edge of starvation. The rebellion was led by a local boy home on leave from the army, in which he was a corporal, and who was rich by comparison to those he had left behind. The quality of the play derives from the fact that its types are not caricatured. The capitalist in his finery, for example, sincerely pitied himself for the risks he was taking in an unpredictable market. A very modern touch is provided by a weaver wife more courageous and militant than her husband.

These "fringe" ("off-Broadway") actors are something else. For them, the play's the thing. The Weavers was staged pit style, with the audience looking down from elevated seats in a rectangle around the action. In this case, 32 viewers watched a show in which the cast numbered 20.

The last of these nowhere-but-in-London plays described an episode in the city's modern history. In 1938 the leader of Britain's avowed fascists, Sir Oswald Mosley (brother-in-law of left-wing humorist Jessica Mitford, whose memorial I had attended in San Francisco only days before this trip) organized a parade through the East End, then the Jewish workingclass ghetto. The local Communist Party branch - the largest in England - disobeyed their top leadership by deciding to stop the fascists physically. The entire Jewish population, sweatshop clothing workers for the most part, turned out - 250,000 in all - plus local Irish and English workers. After a while, the police gave up their attempt to clear a way for Mosley, in an exceedingly rare retreat by the bobbies. The leader, a young clothing worker, was later elected to something equivalent to state assembly here, on the Communist ticket.

The play, not great theater but very interesting, was written by a 90-year-old who had been a participant in this event. The audience covered the entire age spectrum, including others who had taken part, as we learned while hoisting a pint during intermission in the pub below. One of them later mailed me a volume, The Story of Unity Theatre, a history of Left theater in England from the 1920s on. It emerged that many of the plays of social awareness in the United States that I had seen in New York in the '30s had later been staged over there. Some day we should return the favor. Our knowledge of the world would benefit.

Our return home was a nightmare far beyond travellers' complaints. American Airlines sent us via its hub city of Dallas, a nine-hour flight from London. After seven hours, the recycled air and less-than-normal air pressure brought on an episode of Tanya's angina. A physician aboard recommended that we not continue until Tanya could be thoroughly examined.

During our six days in Fort Worth, I learned that the South had changed seriously for the better. Nursing staff was entirely interracial, although the only Black physician was an African. Blacks also worked in the front office. The paramedical team that took Tanya from the airport to the hospital consisted of three properly-trained police officers, of whom the man in charge was an African-American. They clearly respected each other and worked well together. Nearby fast-food places had Black managers over white and Latino staffs. But local TV made clear that Texas was not about to give up its distinctive ethnic hierarchy. African-American newscasters and other on-camera people were omnipresent, but Mexicans and Chicanos, a larger proportion of the people, comprising the traditional local exploited population, were totally absent. True, a Chicano was one of the two candidates for governor of Texas in the election that occurred while we were there, but he lost by a margin that clearly indicated that a great many white Texans would not vote for anyone of Mexican origin.

Mario Savio, leader of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California thirty years earlier, died the day after we returned from London. The following day, students protested against the fact that California voters had just passed by referendum misleadingly-worded Proposition 209 which effectively abolished affirmative action. They occupied the Campanile at the University of California and were forcibly ejected and arrested. I went to the campus to see what was happening, listened to a spontaneous mass meeting, stepped to the open mike, and said that they needed to work for overt majority student support and off-campus community support. Having stated that I had been an FSM Executive Committee member, I was asked if its success was due to having older advisers. I said no, that each generation has its own style, and that the situation in 1996 was different than in 1964-5, but that the experience of elders can help. I did not think that there was anything notable about my remarks in content or delivery, but ten months later a stranger, graduate-student age, stopped me on campus, asked me if I were the man from that occasion, and said, "You are a seeker for the truth, aren't you?"

The evening of that spontaneous meeting I skipped ahead in my reading of this autobiography over Free Radio Berkeley to read the chapter on FSM so listeners could learn about Mario. The next night, at a national conference of micropower stations, I was asked to open it by talking about him, and the weekend meeting was then formally dedicated to his memory. Three days later, I attended the open student meeting to plan to nullify the anti-affirmative-action proposition. As with the Mt. Madonna statewide student meeting 36 years earlier, I was the only off-campus intellectual who appreciated the meaningfulness of the event sufficiently to come. Not one faculty member was present. The meeting was extraordinary in that all three people conducting it were female. There was no sign of resentment of this by the males present, who were of five races. That represented a nearly complete turnaround from attitudes during FSM. In the course of the meeting, with 400 attending, a Chinese-American student who occupied the next seat to mine rose to say that the struggle should be aimed at changing the composition of the highly corporate Board of Regents. I wrote him a note recommending he contact ex-FSMer Prof. Bettina Aptheker at UC Santa Cruz, explaining that I had been associated with that earlier movement. Later, he nominated me on that basis to close the meeting, and I did. Many reached out to shake my hand as I left.

A memorial for Savio was in the planning during these weeks. The San Francisco Chronicle published a letter of mine on him. It closed: "This country is a somewhat better place for Mario's having lived. We are all a little diminished by his passing."

The memorial, attended by 800, was a lovely reunion. Art Goldberg, a lifetime poor people's lawyer in Los Angeles, hugged me and expressed delight that I had not yet suffered any serious health setbacks. I exchanged hugs, too, with Burton White, cheerleader against HUAC at the 1960 hearing, subsequently a KPFA staffer for years, and now a nurses' union representative in Portland. Meredith Burke, a genuine conservative and at this point a Hoover Institution scholar, told me she had xeroxed my Chronicle letter on Mario and circulated it to friends. Another FSM veteran, Richard Schmorleitz, gave me his long poem to Mario and family, which had some thought-provoking lines: "An arrogant humility, The courage to be afraid, Compassion thoroughly ruthless....His heart's voice...bled truth for mercy." Regrettably, the event as a whole was a wake for the Free Speech Movement. Had the organizers made an attempt to make a connection with the movement against the anti-affirmative-action proposition it could have been otherwise. But no Chicano or Asian student speaker was among the long list invited to the podium.

By this time I thought my association with the Soviet Union was a closed page in my life. But when I received from Kuzbass, Siberia, the finished film for which Dad had been interviewed the previous year, I found that segments of an interview the film-makers had done of me appeared at three points in it, in my capacity as Sovietologist. The notion that a documentarist in post-Soviet Russia, himself with no nostalgia, regarded my views as deserving presentation to his fellow-countrymen, was the kind of substantiation of my knowledge of the USSR that justified my six decades in the field. The film-maker's standpoint was quite interesting: the "American Industrial Colony" was a success while Lenin lived, because he let its Dutch Communist manager run it on capitalist lines, while it fell apart after Lenin's death when Russian ex-guerrilla apparatchiks incorporated it into the general Soviet bureaucracy.

I translated the script from the film, and in 1997 found broad-based peace organizations in the Bay Area interested in having me show it. It also led to my making the acquaintance, by mail, of a most remarkable figure.

Nearly fifty years earlier, I had refused a request by the New York Times to delete my specific defense of Prof. Dirk Struik and Dr. W.E.B. DuBois from a letter of mine attacking McCarthyism. Struik was a mathematician of national reputation at M.I.T. He was also an avowed Communist and the brother of one of those who had gone from the Netherlands, as Dad had from the U.S., to work in Kuzbass. This brother was interned by the Nazis when they conquered his country, and killed when a British air raid hit his prison. Dirk Struik, born the same year as my father, tells this story and other reminiscences in the Kuzbass film. But unlike Dad, who was clearly an ancient summoning up all his resources to make himself clear, Struik was hardly less vigorous than myself, a generation younger. At one point he pounds his fist in time with each word in a sentence in a letter of 70 years earlier from another Dutchman in Kuzbass: "'Every blow of a hammer brings us closer to a socialist society.' That was the spirit. 'Every hammer blow brings us closer and closer to a socialist society'."

The society failed, but the energy and total alertness of the centenarian Struik overawed me.

There were other reminders at this time of my career in Sovietology and the hypocrisy of the Establishment both in using and discarding me. The Center for Slavic and East European Studies at UC Berkeley publishes a newsletter. Its last issue for 1996 carried an article, "Jerome B. Landfield and the Beginning of Teaching of Russian History at the University of California, Berkeley," before the Russian Revolution of 1917. The article said that the university president and the head of the History Department wired this "young man, who had neither a professional degree nor teaching experience nor any publications to his name [my emphasis] to come to Berkeley as instructor in...Russian history...a field in which there were virtually no specialists." His qualifications were "money [enabling him to travel]...his knowledge of the Russian language...and no less important...his passion for Russia." He had been there twice. When the Hoover Institution invited me in 1946, I too had no degree, but had published two books and a string of publications in learned journals. I never stopped publishing. The one year I had spent in Moscow expanded into 20 visits over a span of 68 years, the most recent in 1998, giving me longer first-hand knowledge of Russia than any foreigner in recorded history. My academic teaching experience, beginning with a brief stint for the Army Specialized Training Program at Syracuse University in World War II, included six higher educational institutions by 1978. But when Cold War specialists had been trained, there was no longer room for someone who opposed it and did not have the protection of tenure. I had no degree!

Almost simultaneous with the appearance of that newsletter article, the mail brought a letter that told the same kind of story. The letter was from Vladimir Pozner, who wrote that the president of CNBC had found the show he and TV talk-show pioneer Phil Donohue had in 1996 "too liberal," and demanded editorial control. "I told him I had had enough censorship at" [the Soviet radio-and-TV monopoly], "Phil told him to go to hell, so the show was cancelled (this kind of thing is called freedom of speech)." Pozner returned to a fat TV contract in Yeltsin's Russia, where it was all right to be what was regarded as too liberal in the U.S.

Somehow early 1997 was a memory-jogger. We who had been active in Berkeley in the '60s had developed a bit of a tendency to mourn the passing of the good old days. But something happened that restored, at least somewhat, my faith in this remarkable city. An activist for People's Park in that earlier time, David Nadel, had opened a folk-music dance club, Ashkenaz, and operated it for 20 years. The bands that played there were from four continents and virtually every American ethnicity. He had fought continually to keep People's Park out of the hands of the University of California bureaucracy, which brought suit against him in a deliberate effort to cripple him financially. Toward the very end of 1996 David, a totally gentle, non-violent man, was shot dead by a drunken youth turned away from the club for rowdy behavior.

A memorial the following January was an outpouring of love by the dance and folk music community beyond anything in my experience. Homeless men, primarily African-American, for whom he would find some kind of work if only pulling placard staples out of walls, stood guard and directed traffic on busy San Pablo Avenue outside. A Black woman operating a shelter for battered women in Oakland spoke of his financial assistance to them, of which no one had known. He was not a man of means, but had lived in a single room attached to his club. Newspaper coverage made it clear that he was significant well beyond Berkeley - in part, of course, because Berkeley is significant beyond Berkeley.

The performances at the memorial were interracial and cross-cultural to a degree I had not seen since the Communist-led efforts of the '30s to '50s. An African sang a dirge and a rabbi chanted Kaddish, most beautifully. There was Jewish and Turkish folk-dancing, American clogging, Southern hymns by whites including an Orthodox Jew with temple curls, Anglo-Saxon women doing flamenco, an Asian man in a Jewish immigration playlet, an Asian and a Black woman in an otherwise white female chorus doing Russian songs, non-Slavic dancers doing a Russian sailors' dance in the constructivist style of the early 1920s. Bands represented every conceivable kind of music of folk origin. But not a single group came from a labor union, a shocking change from even the McCarthy period, when I did a study of union cultural activities and found an amazing wealth and variety.

The "wake" went on for two days, 14 hours each. Perhaps 8,000 people came, over the weekend. Food Not Bombs, whose founder, Keith McHenry, was a descendant of one of the writers of the United States Constitution and had been arrested innumerable times for feeding the homeless in San Francisco's City Hall Park, somehow resupplied the free food tables at the memorial for that unending crowd. Many individuals brought food for the tables spontaneously. I left with the feeling that Berkeley retained, although in diminished degree relative to even a decade earlier, the qualities that make it the best place I know. The city issued a proclamation honoring Nadel. I wrote city councilmember Dona Spring urging that public funds be used to keep Ashkenaz going, and noting that 8,000 votes in a place the size of Berkeley are not to be ignored. A foundation was, in fact, established, and the doors re-opened in mid-1997.

KPFA suddenly became central to my attention again when its management announced that it would hold meetings for listener input on programming in six cities within an hour's drive of its transmitter. They proved to be typical corporate consumer-research focus group meetings. Management, although present to listen, generally refused to answer questions except in Berkeley itself. The professional facilitator controlled the meetings tightly and was usually successful in preventing management from becoming a subject of discussion.

Mary Moore, an activist in Sonoma County, wrote of the major programming changes 18 months earlier: "The icons of that purge have become William Mandel and Mama O'Shea, two elders....As the final reports [from the focus groups] were given, we heard it loud and clear. Create a more open atmosphere. Get rid of the gag rule. Discuss the situation openly using the airwaves. Quit treating the listeners as enemies. Bring back the programs that people miss. More shows on Labor are needed. Get rid of the New Age & Yuppie focus....And most of all, mend the historical fences, simply apologize to those they have hurt and bottom line show some respect for the elders."

Sentiment at the other meetings was similar. Maurice Englander, a retired San Francisco schoolteacher I had never previously met, violated the dictated procedure at the meeting there to address the whole body and demanded an apology to Mama O'Shea and myself. Leslie Correll, daughter of old friends, informed me that at the Oakland meeting there was a lot about how I am a leading intellectual who should be on the air.

The rules specified that no individual could participate in more than one meeting. I attended my one meeting in Berkeley. It was held in the heart of the ghetto. I called attention to the fact that no African-American was present other than paid staff and a member of the station's appointed advisory board. In Oakland, largely a Black city, there had been only three in an attendance of 50. I said that that did not mean that African-Americans do not listen to the station, but that the current management had succeeded in creating a consumerist, non-participant attitude among newer listeners. Attendance at all the meetings was overwhelmingly of people who had been local activists in the '60s and surviving members of the generation that had founded the station in the late 1940s.

The cold statistics of the facilitator's report on these meetings gave me greater satisfaction than any kind of event in my honor could have. He wrote that 262 persons attending had individually written positive and negative comments about individual programs. Collective comments were submitted by 43 tables around which they were grouped for discussion. No subjects were suggested, so comments represented listeners concerns. Although I had been off the air for nearly two years, my name received more positive comments than that of any other broadcaster.

Two very different books made clear that my role in the station had made a permanent impress upon people. The Radio Red Killer, by well-established mystery writer Richard Lupoff, a 20-year KPFA broadcaster, was published in 1997. In the words of a review in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the book is structured around the murder of "an elderly lefty political commentator...at radio station KRED, a Berkeley institution that bears a startling...resemblance to KPFA." The commentator "was engaged in a running battle with the station's new management - the "capitalist sellout gang"....Although the station is clearly fictional, its internal struggles do indeed echo those at KPFA."

The other volume was Dr. Matthew Lasar's Ph.D. thesis, Pacifica Radio: The Rise of an Alternative Network, published in 1999 by Temple University Press. After a description of the head of the network when I came on, he writes: "In retrospect, however, Harold Winkler's main contribution to Pacifica history can be summarized in the recruitment of a single man." This is immediately followed by a subhead, "The Dissenting Scholar," and ten pages on me there and elsewhere in the book. He wrote that I had played "a crucial role in the history of the Pacifica Foundation" and, at another point, that I was probably "KPFA's most popular commentator."

Carlton Goodlett, a medical doctor, publisher of San Francisco's Black weekly, the Sun-Reporter, died at this time. I had known him for 45 years, since seeking his assistance, when he headed the local NAACP, to find housing for a traveling theater company whose one Black actor had been denied accomodation in the hotel they had booked. We had both participated in the 1962 Peace Congress in Moscow. He had been a signatory to the call for a demonstration organized by our son Bob in 1981 to prevent a meeting of the American Nazi Party in San Francisco by any means necessary.

I attended the memorial. One of the speakers was Congressmember Ron Dellums. By now he had a quarter-century in Congress, and had headed its immensely powerful Armed Services Committee. Yet he spoke with the wonderment of a little boy as he recalled how, immediately after his first election, when he was, in his words, a Black Oakland kid who had never been abroad, Dr. Goodlett had gotten him to attend and speak at a meeting of the World Peace Council in Stockholm during the Vietnam War. He told of the tears that flowed from his eyes and those of an elderly Vietnamese member of the presidium after Dellums denounced the American invasion. After the memorial, I sought Dellums out and told him he was still a wonderful human being.

In closing that event, Rev. Amos Brown, pastor of Goodlett's church and also the one Black member of San Francisco's Board of Supervisors, proposed that the traditional main street of its ghetto be renamed for Goodlett. The city had torn it down as a slum and yuppified it, with the result that African-Americans, unable to afford skyrocketing rents and in their majority unable to purchase homes, were the only ethnic group to decline in population in San Francisco in the intervening years. But Goodlett's offices and the major Black churches were still in the immediate vicinity. The dailies set up a howl against Rev. Brown's proposal because of the discomfiture the change would cause to the new businesses on the street. I wrote a letter to the Sun-Reporter, which closed:

"Should Fillmore be renamed Goodlett? How can it not be? How can one compare a pro-slavery president" - he signed the Fugitive Slave Law - "with a descendant of slaves who demonstrated, by his Ph.D. at age 23, his exceptional diagnostic skills as a physician, his business acumen, his very early encouragement of talented young people of his race including Mayor [Willie] Brown and Congressmember Dellums, and his willingness to stand up against the foreign policy of his own country when he believed it wrong, the groundlessness of all claims of white superiority?"

Mayor Brown had no desire for conflict with the downtown big-money interests or the businessmen on the street in question, among whom distaste for Dr. Goodlett's politics was pronounced. The militancy of the 1960s in the city's African-American population was gone. The matter was resolved by renaming only the long block fronting city hall, the other side of which is a park. No business had to change his stationery, but all official San Francisco mail originating in City Hall now carries his name as its address.

Another death, that of my former son-in-law, brought the matter of race very much closer to home. He had been a longshoreman and the memorial was held in that union's headquarters. My grandson Danny, now also a longshoreman, presided. As the event opened, Danny, his brother Kevin, and a Black man of their age, Kelvin, son of Cassandra Lopez, longtime friend of daughter Phyllis, stood together. Danny referred to both of the others as his brothers. There was no blood relationship. Cassandra and Phyllis had lived together when their first children were born. Danny and Kelvin grew up literally as brothers and, now in their thirties, were as close as ever. When Cassandra spoke she referred to all three as her sons. Phyllis expressed herself similarly. I took it as a marvelous unspoken compliment to the late Keith's parents and to Tanya and me that we had raised our children in a way that had made it possible for such a relationship to develop.

When one is past 80, memorials become an all-too-frequent part of one's social life. But when the lives celebrated have been vivid, these events are not at all morbid. Mama O'Shea, the broadcaster other than myself whose dismissal by KPFA was most resented by listeners, died early in 1998. A woman whose skin color and features were totally Caucasian, her life could have been considerably easier had she concealed the fact that she was part African-American. Neither would she accept the identification, rooted in slavery, of anyone of mixed origin as Black. She referred to herself as bi-racial. The daughter of vaudevillians, she was show business all the way, and her vivacious ad lib commentary, ""Shoutin' Out With Mama O'Shea," greatly lightened the often self-righteous tone of KPFA's voice of dissent. She would have totally approved the fact that her memorial was held on the spacious bandstand of the town park in Petaluma without notice to any local authorities. I offered the thought that her joyous rebelliousness was exactly what the station needed when she, already in late middle age, had started her 20 years on it in 1975, a time when the youthful staff was badly demoralized because the '60s had gone down the tubes.

The San Francisco Chronicle gave the rare distinction of two full columns to the obituary of our friend of 40 years, Emmy Lou Packard, who died within days of O'Shea. Emmy Lou was the most widely-talented artist I have ever met. San Franciscans and enormous numbers of tourists visiting that city daily see her work when they view the murals of Diego Rivera at the Art Institute, at City College, and in the Stock Exchange. He had taken her under his wing as a 13-year-old when her father accepted a Mexican invitation to help with irrigation problems in the 1920s, and ultimately made her the physical conservator of his murals, which she helped paint as his assistant. She was also the best user of the linoleum-cut technique I know. Her cuts of the town of Mendocino and of a felled redwood tree sold in large numbers. She did an anti-nuclear-bomb color litho of children for Women for Peace that is internationally known. Students, faculty, and visitors to the University of California at Berkeley daily see her own immense carved concrete frieze, 85' by 4', over the lower plaza cafeteria next to the main performance venue, Zellerbach Auditorium. And thereby hangs a pertinent tale.

Emmy Lou believed that art should have meaning to the people. Therefore the only use she ever voluntarily made of abstraction was in predominantly realist pieces, such as a scene of farm laborers tilling artichoke fields beneath the looming peaks of the Coast Range, where she employed swirls of blue and gray to provide the sense of the fog that so frequently crowns them. But the architect in charge of the building on which the frieze appears insisted that it be abstract. When I saw it, about 1965, I told her I was amazed that she had done something that didn't say anything. So she came over to Berkeley and pointed out to me that it was actually a map of California, with curved streaks representing rivers, dots serving as the trees in forests, diagonal slashes rendering the farmlands of the Central Valley, and so forth. For how many years did we have it dinned into our ears that Soviet artists were required to be photographic representationalists against their will?

Emmy Lou, a Communist, was the best of good citizens. She organized a successful movement to save the Mendocino headlands from development, and a plaque on a bench there honors her for this. During the McCarthy years, she led a successful effort to prevent erasure of the history-of-San-Francisco murals in the Rincon Annex Post Office by an acquaintance of mine, Anton Refregier, also a Communist, and a Russian to boot. His sin was that he thought the anti-Chinese riots early in the city's history and the general strike of 1934 were legitimate parts of the city's history. Her most recent civic effort had been teaching young Chicano artists the technique of the mural, resulting in the extraordinary abundance of them all over the Mission district of the city, even in a branch of the Bank of America.

What of the future? I guess it is marked out in a letter received three years earlier when KPFA cancelled my broadcasts. It came from the Central Valley town of Lodi, and was signed Bill Scoville:

"I am homeless and poor. I listen in my vehicle. I am 65 and you 78, and I love you for your contribution to humanity and the enormously complex contribution you continue to make. I want your voice loud and clear and strong as long as you are able. Keep going Bill - remain strong and healthy - be your very best all of your life - I am with you."

Saying No To Power Autobiography of a 20th Century Activist and Thinker
- by William Mandel © 1999-2001 All Rights Reserved

Chapter 30
Not Yet Sunset

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