(This article was first published in the October 7, 1969, issue of National Review, and was written by the late John Coyne, who then served as a correspondent for the magazine. It is republished here as a small tribute to his tenure and a salute to his talent as a journalist.)

I went back to Berkeley last month. It was a beautiful summer day, the sky sharp California blue, much bigger and cleaner than the Eastern sky. The semitropical foliage blazed, all primary colors, no pastels. On campus things seemed normal enough. Dogs snarled, defecated and fornicated on the Plaza. Naked street people children ran among them, their proud parents sprawled fuddled in the sun. Little knots of New Leftists jabbered intensely, a couple of jug bands did their thing, imitation Africans beat on bongo drums and screeched like extras in an old Tarzan movie, and a pudgy blonde girl, overcome by the beauty of it all, shed her clothes and hopped about among the kumquat trees.

A typical day. But it had changed. Just beneath the funky atmosphere there was an edginess, an air of hard belligerence. A police car cruised slowly across the campus and when a frisbee bounced off the hood there was a short burst of hard nasty laughter. Three policemen sauntered gun-slinger style through the student union, affecting casual boredom. People fell silent as they passed, and one of them was unable to control a violently twitching nerve in his cheek. For this was post–People’s Park Berkeley, and it may never be the same again.

Even during the worst of times, there used to be an innocent sort of unwashed charm in it all. True, the resident radical groups, the deformed spawn of the Free Speech movement—SDS, Young Socialist Alliance, Independent Socialist Club, Progressive Labor Party—staged monthly confrontations, often destructive and always disruptive. But these were of short duration, usually more comic than chilling, and the turmoil subsided quickly, touching the great majority of students only briefly, if at all.

But the new mood had been growing, and as it grew the radical movement slowly pulled the pieces together. There were the Stop the Draft Week excesses of 1967; the Moses Hall occupation and the Cleaver controversy, important to the militants because they settled finally on a primary issue, racism; the Telegraph Avenue riots of 1968, when for the first time the New Leftists and the street people formed a firm activist alliance and carried the battle to the citizens of Berkeley; the winter riots of 1969, begun initially to divert attention from their failure at San Francisco State but building into something much bigger when the blacks joined the New Leftists and street people and the National Guard had to be called out.

Impossible in America?

And then, on May 15, the People’s Park battles erupted, and it all crystallized. The Berkeley community became radicalized, and the Oski Dolls and Cheer Leaders joined the New Leftists, the street people and the black militants on the barricades. Fifteen thousand students turned out to vote in a special People’s Park referendum, more students than had ever before voted for anything at Berkeley—more students, in fact, than had ever attended a football game, a graduation or any university function in memory, and 85 percent of them voted to reject the administration’s action on the People’s Park, an action which had set off the greatest confrontation yet to hit an American university community.

The People’s Park battles dwarfed the recent uprisings at such places as Harvard, Columbia or Brandeis and left a residue of radicalized bitterness thicker than that at any other campus. Not only more people were involved, but the nature of the conflicts themselves set a precedent, more like full-fledged guerrilla warfare than the campus riots to which we’ve become dangerously accustomed. There was the by-now famous helicopter gassing, catching hundreds of students who were, just at the moment the copter came over, changing classes. (An old friend described it to me. He, along with the dean of the graduate school and several university officials were meeting in Sprout Hall as members of the student disciplinary committee, debating, ironically enough, just how tough a line to take with militants. Gas suddenly came billowing through the open window, and they raced outside, choking. As they paused on Sproul steps, a policeman lobbed a canister of gas at them. It exploded at their feet.)

The scenes would have been thought impossible a few years ago. James Rector, fatally wounded, his blood running down the shingles of the rooftop. His friend, permanently blinded. A policeman taking deliberate aim at a fleeing Berkeleyite’s back. Other policemen grappling obscenely with hysterical girls. (There is ample evidence that some policemen from surrounding Bay area communities went berserk. The Berkeley City police, however, one of the best law-enforcement groups in the country, acted with their customary intelligent restraint, insofar as restraint was possible.) Other scenes: National Guard bayonets creasing the stomachs of spectators caught in a flanking movement; troops bivouacked in the streets of downtown Berkeley, cooking fires gleaming among stacked rifles. Impossible in America. As impossible as walking on the moon.

Three Reports

The hows and whats of the People’s Park war are fairly well known. Thus far, there have been three major accounts. One, by Berkeley professors Wolin and Schaar, appears in the New York Review of Books. Another has been printed in Ramparts, and the third is a detailed report compiled by Governor Reagan’s staff. The Wolin-Schaar piece is least revealing. The professors want Reagan and the administration to emerge as villains, and as a result much of the analysis is distorted, at points inaccurate. Although the piece is long, it seems both general and evasive, and one suspects that the authors did the whole thing primarily so that they could expound on the nature of bureaucracy, which they do at length in the final sections. And ironically, as a result, they end by doing exactly what they accuse the bureaucrats of doing—”the bureaucratic mode of knowing and behaving comes to constitute the things known and done themselves,” they say. Exactly. Wolin and Schaar translate the whole conflict into the unreal abstract world of academe, where today’s riots become just as immediate as the agitations of the Anti-Corn Law League. They set up chains of causality, find patterns for the patternless, make the irrational rational; and the academic method, like the bureaucratic method they criticize, becomes the thing itself, from which self-created thing they then draw tautological conclusions. Such is the way of abstract political theoreticians, writers of dissertations, directors of sanitation departments and professors.

The Ramparts and Reagan reports are much more useful. Both provide a detailed chronology and both agree in general on body counts, number of people injured, and most statistical matters. There are differences of emphasis, of course, Ramparts being concerned to chronicle the suffering of innocent bystanders, for obvious reasons, and the Governor’s report emphasizing police injuries and property damage. The Ramparts writers primarily blame the administrators; the Governor’s people, New Left militants. And it is here that one crucial difference between the reports emerges. For although the Ramparts people admit that the Berkeley radicals have long dreamed of radicalizing the Berkeley community, they maintain that the New Left did nothing to bring the People’s Park confrontation about. A bunch of innocent people, the Ramparts writers claim—mothers, babies, passersby—were suddenly sucked into the People’s Park whirlpool and emerged as radicals or potential radicals.

Not so, says the Reagan report. The People’s Park conflict was carefully planned well in advance by New Left agitators—and the report names a number of them whose pre-battle statements on the subject had appeared in such radical publications as the Berkeley Barb and the Guardian. The truth seems to lie a little in between. There were, as the Ramparts writers claim, thousands of innocents involved. But it is equally true that the New Leftists worked hard to bring about the confrontation. And this begins to touch on the why, the why of the militants being very simply that green grass and mothers over against soccer fields and parking lots provide a seldom-realized opportunity to involve a great segment of the community in an emotion-charged confrontation.

The administration’s why seems a great deal more difficult to fathom, however, and none of the reports deals adequately with it. Why would men like Chancellor Roger Heyns, long accustomed to dealing with militants, play so easily into their hands? Why would they call in the troops (and they were solely responsible for this; Ronald Reagan merely provided what was asked for) to protect their ugly chain fence against the anger of responsible as well as irresponsible Berkeleyites? How could they, in short, blunder in such a bubble-headed fashion?

The Radical Society

The answer is complicated, and it makes little sense without an understanding of the Berkeley context. Berkeley has long been a center of radical activity, one of the few places at this point with a resident radical population, the Yenan of the New Left movement. Radicals at Berkeley are deeply part of the scene, an accepted part of Bay-area culture. This is not yet quite true of other university communities—Harvard or Columbia for instance. At Columbia, it is still possible for students to mount an effective opposition, as the YAFers did during the most recent troubles. For at Columbia the YAFers are at least as much a part of the society as the SDSers, and as such they offer a recognizable cultural alternative.

Not so at Berkeley, however, where the whole notion of traditional values is as meaningless as the concept of laissez-faire economics in Albania. There are almost no alternatives left at Berkeley, and the radical groups are central, the hard intellectual dialecticians, codifiers of the values which have come to shape the society. And this society is radically different, with no objective correlative in the American experience. For what has grown up in Berkeley is a completely alien culture. Its values are not ours, its mores are unique, its life-style unclassifiable. And it is spreading, as witness the recent Woodstock festival at which thousands of youngsters appeared, not yet political but already on their way to becoming full-fledged citizens of the new society. They are not yet New Leftists, but they have taken the first giant step, and the New Leftists can afford to wait for them. They are already socially converted. Next comes the political conversion.

It has happened at Berkeley, and the radical movement has become definitive, as much a part of the culture as the Congregational Church in Cheshire, Connecticut. But, until the People’s Park, no one quite realized how central it really was, for the society of Berkeley, although a bit more eccentric, seemed not too different from the society which makes up any university town. There were cheerleaders, even prettier than the foliage. There were professors, importing from the East or from the Midwest via the East their button-down shirts, their Brooksy jackets, their ironic chuckles, their pipes. There were fraternity boys, sorority girls, business majors, library science majors, majors in landscapesmanship (or is it landscapery? or Landscape Science? “Now this here is a hedge trimmer.”).

Preview of the Seventies?

And then came the People’s Park and one suddenly understood just how much the alien culture had affected all these people. Most of them came to Berkeley not too different from students anywhere. But over a period of time their frames of reference slowly began to slide, their values being eroded subtly, bit by bit. Anyone who has served time at Berkeley knows how a tour of duty works. You experience cultural shock during the first few weeks. At the end of a couple of months it looks normal. And after a year or two you’re convinced that Telegraph Avenue is Main Street, U.S.A.

This radicalization of the common run of student is extremely significant. And extremely dangerous. The professed intent of the New Left has long been to radicalize and organize the young, to urge them on toward the destruction of the institutions of our society. Until very recently this seemed impossible for a number of reasons. But the People’s Park shows that it is no longer a completely far-fetched ideal. Each year Berkeley swallows a new crop of high-schoolers, and increasingly the more attractive and intelligent among them either help to people the street culture or, at the very least, feel comfortable in it. And the boundaries which formerly separated this alien culture from the traditional culture become increasingly blurry. The pom-pom girls may never in the near future, much to the disappointment of male militants, take to the street, but they are no longer uncomfortable with the radical street culture, and have come to accept it not only as an authentic one, but, most dangerously, a normal one.

It is against this background that the whole People’s Park mess and the administration’s handling of it must be viewed. The mores of the new culture are well known: the constant stimulation, riots, drugs, sex, the sex increasingly performed in groups, the theory apparently being that the best way of keeping excitement high and stimulation constant is to use a constant panorama of performers to combat the post coital slump. This, of course, the steady bombardment of the senses, leaves no room whatsoever for the exercise of reason, since the reasoning process requires not only common reference points but also non-emotional interludes. But the new mores allow for neither pauses nor reference points. There is no up, no down, no good, no bad. Only sensation. Against such a background, then, one essentially antirational, it is absurd to believe that administrators can exercise reason. The administrators are foreigners, trained in the universities of the East and Midwest. They dress and think like their Eastern counterparts, transients rather than expatriates. For the most part they never quite accept the whole Berkeley scene, and most of them put in time, waiting until they are called to accept the presidency of Muskingum College or the College of Wooster. Their approach to problems is anachronistic. Their method is the problem-solving method, the objective compromise, the tool being reason. But the people with whom they attempt to deal worship antireason. And so it has not worked at all. At best it has bought useless time, and at worst it has led to abject (although this they have not quite understood) surrender and made them laughingstocks.

The People’s Park, however, shows that much of this has finally penetrated the consciousness of the Berkeley administrators. They did what they had to do, although they did it much later than they should have. Their actions must not be viewed as springing from a sudden concern for property rights. The university has never shown this concern, and still does not, as witness the free use of the campus by the street people and the New Left, both of which groups daily bathe in the Plaza fountain, wash their feet in the Student Union commodes, sleep on the carpeted floor of the Student Union lounge, eat surplus food left on cafeteria tables (much as do the campus dogs), and make love on the well-tended Berkeley lawns (also like the stray mutts). In the past few years, in fact, legitimate students at Berkeley have come to fear to use those facilities for which they pay fees to support, especially after dark. “Hey, man,” it used to be, “got any spare change?” Now it’s “Gimme some money.” This can be less than pleasant, especially when uttered at night by wild-eyed, wild-haired, leather-jacketed types.)

But this, although well known, was all unofficial, something like occupying a country with troops without ever declaring war. The People’s Park, however, was official. The New Leftists and the street people, no longer content with unofficial occupation, decided officially to annex a chunk of university territory, and by so doing to legitimize their culture and make it a recognized force in the community. And it was the legitimacy of its authority, long undermined, which the university decided it must reassert. By so doing, and this is the central point, it finally attempted to check the growth of the alien culture which has put down roots along Telegraph Avenue and on the Berkeley campus. The People’s Park episode was the first overt attempt to uproot this culture, to begin to deny it growing space. It has already spread in frightening fashion across the campus, and many Berkeleyites believe that the New Left militants and their allies of the streets, really have at least as much influence on the affairs of the university as do the Regents, the administrators and, certainly, the faculty. It is absolutely essential, as the administration apparently finally realizes, that if the University of California and perhaps, eventually, all the universities are to survive, this culture simply must be checked and uprooted. The administrators had been willing to allow the new culture breathing space. They drew the line, however, at ceding living space.

And so the university administrators, their backs against the final wall, did what they had to do. Their action, inevitably, was ill-limed, the execution execrable and typically blundering. Had they acted steadily and systematically to achieve their ends, the problems would never have arisen.

But finally, they acted. It’s hard at this point to gauge the ultimate consequences of the Battle of the People’s Park and the skirmishes which will inevitably follow this fall. At best it will set a precedent, and the university, having taken the first step toward reasserting itself, will proceed until the subculture is uprooted and will be forced either to change or to take itself elsewhere. The first effects have been almost universally bad, but it is too late now for easy face-saving alternatives.

For this is civil war on the home front of what James Burnham designates the third world war. And we all should know by now that the collapse of the home front makes meaningless the efforts of the troops in the field. The Berkeley radicals understand that this war is a real one: “We recognize that there is a war going on in this country,” writes New Leftist Joe Pichirallo in the Daily Californian, “and have decided to wage it in Berkeley.”

Let there be no doubt about it. There is a war, and the New Leftists at Berkeley, having won the souls of many of their peers, are now attempting to seize territory. It’s on the line, and university administrators must realize, as Chancellor Heyns came reluctantly to realize, that what is going on cannot be handled with public relations. The Ramparts writers predict that the People’s Park uprising will prove “a preview of the riots of the Seventies.” If this is not to be true, administrators at those American colleges which stretch across the country like city-states must be willing to uproot the culture which sustains the revolutionaries of the New Left, before it plants its roots as firmly elsewhere as it did at Berkeley.