“There’s a memory hole about Kennedy”

Oliver Stone speaks out in the Hollywood Reporter about the Cannes premiere of JFK Revisited, his new Kennedy assassination documentary. Stone deserves a medal for compelling Congress to pass the JFK Records Act after the premiere of his explosive feature "JFK" in 1991. As he points out, despite the flood of government documents following passage of this law, 30 years after "JFK," "There's a memory hole about Kennedy." Mainstream historians STILL studiously ignore the government documents released under the JFK Act. (I was one of the independent historians who heavily used them, for my books "Brothers" and "The Devil's Chessboard.") President Trump was set to release more JFK documents in 2017, including thousands of pages still locked away by the CIA, but he wimped out at the last minute. Here's Oliver on why he needed to make a new documentary about the Kennedy assassination -- a documentary that scandalously STILL can't find U.S. distribution:

"There was a motive to kill Kennedy. He was changing things too much. He was a reformer. He was going to break up the CIA into a thousand pieces. Kennedy was pulling out of Vietnam and was looking for detente with Russia, making peace with Cuba. These things were denied by many historians. Not all the serious historians are really looking [now] at the documentation. And there’s plenty of it. We don’t have time to go into everything. But we’re going to release a four-hour version of [the documentary] as well."

The Next American Revolution — Will It Come from the Left or Right?

My sister and coauthor Margaret Talbot — who worked with me on the new book, By the Light of Burning Dreams — and I call the upheavals of the 1960s and ‘70s “the Second American Revolution.” And we narrate the tragedies and heroic achievements of this second revolution with unflinching candor. Because if we don’t learn from this history, we’re doomed to repeat it. But as we’re being interviewed about the book, a question always arises: Who will make the next American revolution? (Btw, here’s a good recent interview with us, by historian Jon Wiener, on his podcast for The Nation magazine. We come on the show about 13:30 into it.)

At this point, it seems like far-right militants — who are pumped up, well-organized and fully armed — have the momentum to revolutionize America. They were not only able to violently storm the Capitol in January, but also block an independent investigation of the insurrection. They wield power at the grassroots level and in Washington D.C. And their white nationalist vision of America is deeply chilling.

Activists on the left have shown glimmers of political passion — particularly in the occupation of Wall Street and other urban centers in 2011 and the wave of George Floyd uprisings in 2020. But we’ve not been able to sustain our protest movements over time, nor elect enough progressives to Congress to redirect national policy. Currently we must concede that it’s the far right that has more momentum in America.

That’s why the stories and lessons in By the Light of Burning Dreams are so important. Yes, as a coauthor of the book, I’m not simply an objective observer. But Margaret and I are talented journalists, and the history we’ve compiled here is incendiary and illuminating. And as a popular historian — and a former foot soldier in these in the struggles of the ‘60s and ‘70s — I know how important this book is. As in the past, we need to build a Movement again. We need to forge bonds of solidarity across class, race and gender lines. We need to fight for our vision of America — and this time we need to win.

Footnote: Before his assassination in April 1968, the increasingly radical Martin Luther King Jr. was building a remarkably diverse coalition — including the Black Panthers, as Bobby Seale himself told me — to not just march on Washington, but to occupy the capital until Congress agreed to divert spending from the Vietnam War to urgent domestic needs. That’s why King was viewed as “the most dangerous Negro” in America by the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover. And that’s why he was killed.

We Will Survive — Creating a Post-Pandemic San Francisco

As the Covid shock and awe begins to wear off cities like San Francisco, we are predictably being caught up in an ideological war over the city's future. Right-wing media outlets, like Legal Insurrection, fret and fume about crime and homelessness and blame progressive city officials like District Attorney Chesa Boudin for an exodus of solid, tax-paying citizens from SF. According to a recent Chamber of Commerce poll cited in this conservative article, over 40% of San Franciscans are now considering leaving the city because of its increasing squalor. (Of course, these conservative pundits never blame officials like Mayor London Breed, the corporate-backed official who's actually responsible for the decline in San Francisco's quality of life, not to mention the spike in City Hall corruption.)

Now I've been advocating a deep, post-Covid soul-searching by San Francisco for months. SF, like many cities coming out of the pandemic, doesn't know what the hell it is anymore. In fact, San Francisco began losing its identity long before the plague hit -- with the sudden influx of tech wealth, and the massive dislocation of longtime residents and the surge of homelessness triggered by this corporate tsunami. The shuttering of the city during the pandemic, with scores of stores and restaurants boarded up, many forever, completed the city's loss of identity.

Now, as work-at-home mandates have become the new norms for many corporations, and tech towers once stuffed with employees become empty or half-filled echo chambers, I feel that SF has a chance to throw off the tech domination of the past decade and reinvent itself. I don't freak out about the exodus of some of our newer residents -- especially those techies who never sunk roots in SF and never contributed anything to the life of the city.

But I do think that San Francisco's progressive leaders -- not just elected officials, but activists, commentators and all engaged citizens -- need to step up now and begin the process of urban self-renewal. We must not leave this process to the billionaires and right-wing grievance crowd. These moneyed elites are predictably targeting public leaders like Chesa Boudin now, throwing a fortune into a recall campaign against him.

Instead, WE need to take charge of the debate about SF's future. Nobody likes urban squalor. But we need to advance our own agenda for how to clean up SF. And beyond that, we need to hash out a new economic plan for the city -- one that seeks to restore San Francisco's diversity and affordability. I'm calling on visionary leaders like Supervisors Hillary Ronen​ and Dean Preston​ and Matt Haney​ and many other longtime city activists to start this process of urban introspection and revival.

And if we lose some techie taxpayers and "disruptors" in the process of reinventing our city, that's not the end of the world. In fact, it's probably for the good of San Francisco. As the tech industry is always telling us, you can't have progress without disrupting the status quo.

Song of the Week: “Have a Little Faith”

Questlove saves the best for last, with Sly and the Family Stone’s electric performance at the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival closing his wonderful, uplifting documentary Summer of Soul. But equally powerful to me was a song I never heard before that Questlove picked for the final credits — the Chambers Brothers’ “Have a Little Faith.” I adore the Chambers band, four brothers from Mississippi (and a white dude on drums) who pioneered the psychedelic soul movement — along with with Sly, Arthur Lee and Love, and Jimi Hendrix. Rooted in the gospel music of Mississippi, the brothers took their mixed-race audiences even higher with their unique blend of church harmonies and kick-ass rock. They’re best known for their hit “Time Has Come Today.” But I love the righteous funk of “Have a Little Faith.” Give it a listen — and then go see Summer of Soul. It will make you feel again.

Oliver Stone vs. the Gatekeepers

There's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in... Very interesting that Oliver Stone scores a European distributor and a prestigious Cannes premiere this month for his new documentary about the JFK assassination -- but still no U.S distribution deal. I admire Oliver's fortitude, and the way he corralled an army of historians and investigators to make his case that JFK "conspiracy theory" has become "conspiracy fact." I sat for an interview with Oliver's film team back in 2018 -- and I'm honored to be included in the film.

Will the political and media gatekeepers in the U.S. ever decide that enough time has elapsed for the truth about Dallas to be fully revealed? Probably not. But fortunately we have bold truth-tellers like Oliver Stone.

Donald Rumsfeld, R.I.H.

One of American democracy’s greatest enemies, Donald Rumsfeld, has shuffled off this mortal coil at age 88. He died peacefully in his home in Taos, New Mexico — which was once a sanctuary for bohemian artists and Native tribespeople. Now what the hell is it? Speaking of hell, Rumsfeld should roast in it. Along with his evil twin, Dick Cheney, he mired the U.S. in a Middle East nightmare that continues to claim lives and rock the region. In my book The Devil’s Chessboard, I called Rumsfeld “George W. Bush’s smugly confident conqueror of desert sands.” But he and Cheney had an even more devious plan to sabotage American democracy — a “change of government” plot, exploiting the 9/11 shock and awe impact on U.S. society, to replace our Constitutional freedoms with authoritarian rule. Rumsfeld and Cheney partly succeeded — and much of their secretive, anti-democratic infrastructure is still in place, two decades after 9/11.

I referenced The Devil’s Chessboard — my dark biography of Cold War spymaster Allen Dulles — because Rumsfeld was a young acolyte of America’s most evil conspirator in the 20th century. As a fresh-faced Illinois congressman, Rumsfeld helped rehabilitate Dulles — who had been forced out of the CIA in disgrace by President Kennedy after the spy agency’s Bay of Pigs debacle. As I write in my book, in March 1963, Rep. Rumsfeld invited Dulles to address a congressional group he led — on Cuba, of all topics.

Dulles was Rumsfeld’s kind of guy — conniving, power-hungry, contemptuous of democratic institutions and customs. Like other Dulles proteges — including Reagan spymaster William Casey — Rumsfeld kept the “Old Man’s” spirit alive long after his death in 1969.

Somewhere in the swamps of Washington — or Florida — there is an evil successor to Donald Rumsfeld, who will keep his dark force alive in American politics.

“Every person on Earth today is living in a crime scene.”

That’s the arresting opening line of the article by my friend, environmental journalist Mark Hertsgaard, in today’s Guardian. Mark and I have been talking for some time about how the climate crisis should be covered by the media as a crime story — and now thanks to Mark’s group, Covering Climate Now, a consortium of media companies led by the Guardian, that’s what is finally happening.

You don’t need to tell the people evicted from their homes by the wildfire blazing around Mount Shasta — the latest inferno to ravage California. Or the people suffering in freakish triple-digit weather under the heat dome suffocating the Pacific Northwest. Or the people who lost family members and neighbors in the wintry blast that stormed through Texas. Climate change is a murder story. And it’s an arson story. And it’s a home invasion story. And it’s a vandalism story. It’s a crime against nature. And it’s a crime against humanity.

And there are powerful men who are responsible for these massive crimes — men who should be held criminally accountable. Energy executives — like those at Exxon — who knew the dire environmental truth and covered it up for decades. Politicians and scientific “experts”who took cash from the Koch brothers and became leading climate deniers. Fossil fuel investors who put their profits ahead of the lives of their own children and grandchildren.

Led by the Guardian and other members of the Covering Climate Now consortium, the press is finally treating this global crisis like the epic crime story it is. When enough climate profiteers and propagandists are dragged into courts because of this reporting, maybe they’ll finally get the message. Their day is over.

“By the Light of Burning Dreams” Continues to Win Critics’ Praise

The Library Journal is the latest to give its blessing to the new book by my sister Margaret Talbot and me, spotlighting the way that By the Light of Burning Dreams offers “a loving but critical portrait of an (activist) generation whose effects are still felt today.” (The review will run in the July 1 issue.) Even more important to me are the personal responses I’ve received from radical activists who were leaders or foot soldiers in the great conflicts of the 1960s and ‘70s — including people we profile in the book, such as Bobby Seale, Heather Booth, Bob Zimmerman (who among many exploits led the daring air relief squadron over Wounded Knee in 1973) and Lenny Foster (who heroically led AIM leader Dennis Banks through the militarized encirclement around Wounded Knee on the final night of the siege).

One veteran activist who makes a brief appearance in our book (and deserves a book of her own) buttonholed me at a Berkeley party that I co-hosted last evening (our first big post-vax celebration). She analyzed my book chapter by chapter, taking issue with some of my points of view and offering her own fascinating personal takes on the historic events covered in the book. This is the kind of close reading of a book that, as an author, I find challenging but exhilarating.

As Margaret and I emerge more into the spotlight, holding safe book parties and speaking in public, I expect to have more of these encounters with men and women who shared the “burning dreams” that we write about. I’m ready and eager to hear these personal reviews, especially from those who helped make this history.

You can buy our book here.

Bobby Seale, seen here addressing a Black Panther rally in 1968, was among those profiled in our book who contacted me after it was published. The photo by Stephen Shames is included in our book.

It’s Time for Summer of Soul!

I know the first movie that will lure me back to a theater — Summer of Soul, the documentary about six magical days of music at the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, featuring such brilliant performers as Stevie Wonder, the Staples Singers, B. B. King and Gladys Knight and the Pips. But it was the spotlighting of Sly and the Family Stone, one of my favorite acts of all time, that got me really pumped up for the San Francisco premiere of the film on July 4 weekend. New York Times critic Wesley Morris crafted a beautiful essay about the film, whose long-forgotten footage was unearthed and turned into a feature by Questlove. Here’s how he ends his review, and I wholeheartedly share his awe for Sly and his band:

“(Questlove) winds things down with Sly and the Family Stone doing ‘Higher.’ That band was male and female, Black and white — weird, rubbery, ecstatic, yet tight, hailing from no appreciable tradition, inventing one instead. It’s been more than half a century, and I still don’t know where these cats came from. They simply seem sent from an American future that no one has to mourn.”

Sly and his fellow musicians came from the East Bay — but it’s true they might have come from outer space, extraterrestrials sent to take us higher. They were racially and sexually ambiguous in the same way that two other West Coast musical phenomena of the time were — Jimi Hendrix and Arthur Lee, leader of the band Love. Like Hendrix and Lee — and the Chambers Brothers (also featured in the film) — they were African American and Native American and white hippie soul brothers who could play R&B, gospel, jazz, rock, flamenco, you name it. They were intergalactic shooting stars — here and gone in a flash. But I’m so glad that some of their lightning was caught on film. “Everybody is a star.” We need that inspiration again.

Nikole Hannah-Jones and the Retelling of American History

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who led the creation of the New York Times’s revisionist 1619 Project, finds herself at the eye of the latest storm over America’s past. Offered an esteemed position as a full professor at the University of North Carolina’s journalism school, Hannah-Jones saw the offer demoted to a non-tenured position after she became the target of conservative blowback — including from Walter Hussman Jr., the wealthy newspaper publisher and UNC benefactor whose name adorns the university’s J-School. The 1619 Project, a series spawned in the wake of recent Black Lives Matter uprisings, dared to re-conceive U.S. history from the year that African slaves were first brought in shackles to our shores, to work on Virginia plantations. Americans of all ages desperately need to learn the true origin stories of our nation, whose soaring revolutionary ideals as expounded by the Founding Fathers immediately clashed with the harsh realities for Black slaves, Native peoples, women and workers.

Indeed, Marquis de Lafayette, the French nobleman who fought heroically on the side of the American Revolution — and was like a son to the slave-owning father of the nation, George Washington — expressed his bitter disappointment in the American experiment after he failed to convince Washington to free his slaves. “I would never have drawn my sword in the cause of America,” Lafayette declared, “if I could have conceived thereby that I was founding a land of slavery.”

Republican legislators and conservatives are now fighting attempts to tell American history accurately. Meanwhile, establishment historians like Jon Meacham and Ken Burns are putting their own nostalgic spin on our history — a sugarcoating of the truth that I find even more insidious than the right-wing counter-assault. History, as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once observed, is “an ongoing argument” — one that exposes our nation’s deep guilt and anxieties.

I applaud the stand taken by Hannah-Jones, who is demanding the respect of a tenured position before she joins the UNC faculty next month. Her academic battle is part of a much larger struggle for historical truth-telling. As we all know, if the nation can’t face the dark truth of its past, then we are condemned to repeat it.

Nikole Hannah-Jones

Leonard Crow Dog, 1942-2021

The “Red Giants” of the American Indian Movement, as Navajo warrior and AIM foot soldier Lenny Foster called them, have fallen one by one. The latest is Leonard Crow Dog, the Lakota spiritual leader, who died earlier this month from liver cancer. Chief Crow Dog was in charge of maintaining spiritual resistance at Wounded Knee, the sacred site on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota where over 200 AIM warriors and Lakota tribespeople took a stand against the militarized might of the U.S. government for 71 days in the wintry months of 1973. The fact that Chief Crow Dog — as well as fellow AIM leaders Russell Means and Dennis Banks — died peacefully as old men is a remarkable achievement in itself. Chief Crow Dog called the courageous Wounded Knee occupation — which withstood over 500,000 rounds of fire from federal forces and vigilantes — “the greatest moment in my life… and the greatest deed done by Native Americans in this century.”

Margaret Talbot and I tell the searing and inspiring story of Wounded Knee — including how Foster led AIM chief Banks on a daring escape on the final night of the siege — in our new book, By the Light of Burning Dreams.

Leonard Crow Dog

Happy Father’s Day, Lyle! *Wherever You Are

I often think of my father, the late actor (and cofounder of the Screen Actors Guild) Lyle Talbot, so I don’t need a Hallmark Card day to remind me. I see flashes of his handsome face in my sons and in my nephew. I loved how Lyle came home late from work, after a long day at the studio, still wearing makeup and full of hot Hollywood gossip and fun stories. Sometimes, as I watched him rehearse for plays, he seemed like a kid to me, so eager to please the director. (I decided right then and there that I needed to have more power in my own life.) But more often, he seemed like a man to me, one of the few actors who managed to make enough money (more in some years than others) to support a family of six. And to stay warm and loving to his wife and children through all the ups and downs.

One of my favorite memories of my dad is in his theater dressing rooms in the minutes before he went on stage. During the 30 minutes before stage time, a theater manager would rap on his door and bark, “Thirty minutes to showtime, Mr. Talbot!… 15 minutes to showtime,…. five minutes to showtime!” With each announcement of his impending stage entrance, I would grow more and more nervous on his behalf, my palms growing moist (a family affliction) and my heart starting to thump. By the time he finally had to get up and head toward the stage, I was a nervous wreck. But throughout these ticking minutes to curtain, Lyle remained cool as a cucumber, asking us about our schoolwork, telling amusing stories about his fellow cast members. I was in awe of his professionalism, and his ability to focus on his family even at stressful times. Grace under pressure — that’s my memory of my father.

He was 50 by the time I was born. He had costarred with many leading ladies, and had been lovers with a number of them (including Loretta Young and Carole Lombard). His marriage to my much younger mother was number five for him, but it was the one that stuck. She kicked him out of the house when he couldn’t stop drinking and partying —even though she had three young kids at the time. But he came back, after committing himself to AA and getting sober. He always liked strong women, including his leading ladies like Barbara Stanwyck and Ann Dvorak. In fact, he was raised by one, his grandmother. And my mother, Paula, ran our show in her firm but loving way.

I was with him when he died, peacefully in his own bed — luck of the Irish. (Ironically, he outlived my mother — but her spirit had visited him in his new San Francisco apartment, a story I tell in my memoir, Between Heaven and Hell.) I scattered his ashes in a cove beyond the Golden Gate, where I had scattered my mother’s ashes a few years before. I think of him every time I cross the bridge. In my mind, he’s always looking elegant in a tuxedo, with silver lighting.

Lyle with Ann Dvorak, in Three on a Match

We All Shine On — John & Yoko and the Politics of Stardom

Celebrity activism is a tacky commodity these days. Movie stars and pop divas use causes to safely grab the spotlight and advance their careers. But once upon a time, radical politics was dangerous for those few celebrities who were brave enough to jump into these roiling waters. In By the Light of Burning Dreams, Margaret Talbot and I devote a chapter to John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s years of living dangerously. Holed up in a modest Greenwich Village flat between October 1971 and February 1973, the former Beatle and his essential partner escalated their militant activism. They played benefit concerts on behalf of the jailed hippie radical John Sinclair and the families of Attica State prisoners slaughtered on the orders of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller; they aired their radical views about peace, feminism and racial justice on network TV; they hung out with Yippie leaders Jerry Rubin and Stew Albert, radical feminist literary critic Kate Millett and Black Panther leader Bobby Seale. Most important, Lennon and Ono tried to revive the fatigued Vietnam antiwar movement and defeat President Nixon’s bid for reelection in 1972. Nixon, the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover and their repressive machinery saw Lennon as a dire political threat — especially in the first presidential race to include 18-year-old voters — and they did everything in their power to “neutralize” him.

John and Yoko’s amazing political journey still hasn’t been fully understood or appreciated, but we tell their remarkable story in our book. When he was assassinated in 1980, Lennon was coming back into the public spotlight with Ono, and planning to become outspokenly active again — this time against the incoming Reagan administration. The Dream Was Over.

Craig Rodwell, Founder of Pride… and Other Unsung Heroes

Most of you have heard of many heroes in By the Light of Burning Dreams — like Bobby Seale, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, John Lennon and Yoko Ono. But Margaret Talbot and I took a special pleasure in spotlighting those whom history has largely forgotten — like Craig Rodwell, who founded New York’s Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, the first openly gay bookstore in the world. He then went on to organize what would become the first Pride March, in commemoration of the Stonewall uprising — helping to make internationally famous the “riot” that would become known as the opening salvo of the LGBTQ movement. Rodwell was also a lover of Harvey Milk when he was closeted businessman in NYC. With his freer and bolder attitude about his sexuality, Rodwell had a major impact on Milk’s eventual evolution into America’s most prominent gay political leader, before he was assassinated in 1978.

As Margaret and I write in the book’s introduction, we don’t believe in the “great man” theory of history, because epic change is wrestled forward by countless unsung individuals, like Rodwell — and like Ellen Broidy and Martha Shelley, two lesbian activists also profiled in our chapter on the making of Pride. But we do believe in the importance of leaders, both the famous and the forgotten.

Craig Rodwell at his Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in NYC in 1970.

Let’s Hear It for Dave Eggers — and for Indie Bookstores

Author (and old pal) Dave Eggers likes to push the publishing envelope. And god bless him, Dave is doing it again — announcing that his fall novel, The Every, will be sold only at independent bookstores in hardback. Fuck Amazon — which, like the giant corporate octopus in Eggers’s new novel, has wrapped up everything in is tentacles, including book commerce.

I wish I had thought of releasing my new book the same way, cutting out Amazon — which will NEVER be allowed to sell the hardback version of The Every. But, as Dave has explained, it’s very difficult to deep-six Amazon, even for McSweeney’s, the independent publishing company that Eggers started in 1998 (not long after he worked briefly for me at my online media startup, Salon.) Like all New York book companies, my publisher undoubtedly has an ironclad contract with Amazon that doesn’t allow an independent path.

But as a lowly author, I can — and do — encourage readers to buy my books from indie bookstores. In my hometown of San Francisco, my two favorite stores are legendary City Lights, which hosted my book launch event last week, and Green Arcade, which has thrown fun and wild book parties for me ever since the publication of Season of the Witch. I autographed stacks of my latests book, By the Light of Burning Dreams, for my good friend Patrick Marks, the effervescent proprietor of Green Arcade. And if you live in the Bay Area, you can buy one of those autographed copies at Green Arcade on Market Street (just a few doors away from Zuni Cafe), where Patrick is offering outdoor service.

Keep indie bookstores alive — coming out of the pandemic, they are more endangered than ever. Make an effort to purchase books from your favorite local stores. And if you don’t live near one, order online from one or from Bookshop.org — a consortium of indie bookstores.

Seriously — fuck Amazon.

Dave Eggers

Solidarity Forever… More Lessons From “Burning Dreams”

I like posting photos from By the Light of Burning Dreams, the new book by Margaret Talbot and me about the revolutionary leaders of the 1960s and ‘70s. Here’s antiwar leader Tom Hayden with David Hilliard (left), a Black Panther leader, at a Mayday 1970 protest in New Haven, CT, where Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins were being held in prison on trumped-up murder charges. (The photo was taken by Stephen Shames, who took some of the most memorable Black Panther pictures in the heat of action. ) The routine camaraderie between radical leaders and movements was a hallmark of the period. Today it goes by the clunky term “intersectionality” and is seen as a unique type of collaboration. But this solidarity between progressives should be commonplace.

Hayden negotiated with Yale University President Kingman Brewster Jr. to make sure that the protest, which drew 20,000 to the elite campus, did not turn violent. Anne Weills, Hayden’s lover at the time, marveled at the smooth way that Hayden — the product of a humble upbringing in suburban Detroit — could toggle between radicals and the power elite. But she came to resent his sense of male entitlement and she later organized his ouster — not only from their bedroom but from Berkeley’s radical nerve center, the Red Family commune.

We tell this story in By the Light of Burning Dreams — and how the deeply demoralized Hayden then reinvented himself in Los Angeles with Jane Fonda, reviving the antiwar movement and jumping into electoral politics. The debates about leadership that inflamed radical circles in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s are still very much alive today.

Here’s a photo of Hayden and Weills in happier times taken by Richard Avedon during his famous shoot of the Chicago Seven.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men… and Women

As we all know, the corporate media overly celebrates the same limited number of prominent men and women. But my latest (and last) history book, By the Light of Burning Dreams (coauthored with my sister Margaret) shines a spotlight on several revolutionary leaders of the 1960s and ‘70s who have been forgotten by history — at least history as told by Ken Burns, Jon Meacham, Walter Isaacson, Malcolm Gladwell and the other mass-marketed gatekeepers of our past. Margaret and I are so delighted that our book events have drawn together a reunion of these Movement movers and shakers, including Heather Booth and Bill Zimmerman, who’ve joined us for some of our Zoom interviews. Heather and Bill were everywhere during this volcanic history. They both began their activist lives in the deep South during Freedom Summer in 1964. Heather then went on to organize the underground abortion collective known as Jane before Roe v. Wade and numerous other history-making groups. (Now 75, she’s currently organizing a campaign to support President Biden’s effort to tax billionaires.) Meanwhile Bill helped lead the 1971 Mayday antiwar protests to shut down Nixon’s Washington, founded Medical Aid for Indochina, led a relief squadron of small planes over Wounded Knee in 1973, and then ran Tom Hayden’s trail-blazing 1976 Senate campaign.

Sheila Smith, a member of the underground feminist collective Jane, was among those arrested by the Chicago police for performing abortions when they were illegal.

Lenny Foster — the courageous Navajo scout who led American Indian Movement leader Dennis Banks through the militarized noose that encircled the Wounded Knee camp in 1973 — also phoned me to say he had received his copy of the book and he was “honored” to be in it. I told Lenny that I was honored to have interviewed him about his daring mission, which is the climax of our final chapter.

Lenny Foster holds the rifle (inside a beaded scabbard) he used to defend the beleaguered Wounded Knee camp.

I’m also delighted to read Peter Dale Scott’s remarks about our book on his Facebook page after he began reading By the Light of Burning Dreams, which he called my most “important” and “timely” book. I still think that my 2015 book, The Devil’s Chessboard — which examined the dark side of America during the Cold War, and how our country went gravely wrong — is equally if not more important. But the two books together — about power and the brave if flawed resistance to it — tell readers what they need to know about the “triumphs” and “tragedies” of the American epic story during our lifetimes.

PS Speaking of Peter, there’s a snapshot somewhere online of a memorable afternoon I spent with him at his Berkeley home, with his good friend Dan Ellsberg, and fellow independent historians Russ Baker and Jefferson Morley. (The picture was taken by my research partner Karen Croft, who is camera shy.) On this 50th anniversary of the leaking of the Pentagon Papers, let us now praise Ellsberg and other courageous whistleblowers!

Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg defends himself outside a courthouse .

A Rave Review on Publication Day

It's June 8 publication day! And Margaret Talbot and I received our first pub day review for our book, By the Light of Burning Dreams -- in the San Francisco Chronicle -- and it's a rave. I was especially gratified by these lines in the review: “If you’ve read either of the Talbot siblings, you know they don’t write anything dry. Simple saviors and canned profiles in courage are not for them. These essays bristle with energy and contention. They enjoy a good rivalry. They’re aware that just about anyone with the gumption to start a movement might not play well with others. But the contributions (of the radical leaders profiled in the book), more often than not, make them worth the frustration.”

Please join Margaret and me at 6 PM this evening for our free Zoom party, hosted by City Lights Books -- or for Zoom interviews with us hosted by 48 Hills on Thursday or the Praxis Peace Institute on Friday.

FYI, that's Black Panther leader Kathleen Cleaver, whom I interviewed for our chapter "Revolution Has Come, Time to Pick Up the Gun."

It’s Time to Fight Back: We Need Our Own January 6 Insurrection

Ever since Joe Biden was elected president, the Republicans have been on the assault, from the January 6 Capitol invasion, to the state-by-state attack on voting rights, to legislative rollbacks of reproductive rights, to censorship of disturbing historical truths about America. Now Senator Joe Manchin, the mouthpiece for West Virginia’s retrograde business class, has announced he will continue acting as a Republican fifth columnist, dooming the Biden agenda on everything from financing the modernization of America’s crumbling infrastructure to safeguarding democracy to protecting the world from rapidly increasing climate meltdowns. Republicans want to kill you, your children and grandchildren for short-term profit — or out of white nationalist/Christian zealotry. It’s that simple.

Up until last year’s elections, those of us who believe in life were also in a fighting mood. We wanted Trump gone, along with his racist and dictatorial ways. Well, Trump is gone (for now) — but Republican fanaticism is still alive and well. And, unfortunately, too many of us have taken a long lunch break, blithely assured that Biden is taking care of business. It’s true that Old Joe has turned out to be more “woke” than we imagined. He went big early on and got his Covid bailout passed over unanimous Republican opposition. But now the Republicans — with Manchin’s help — have stalled Biden’s progress and are swiftly completing the dismantling of democracy.

And we’re still napping.

Well, goodbye to all that. We need to feel the rage again. We need to get into the streets. We need to put the fear of our own righteous God in the hearts of the white supremacists, women-haters, End-of-Days wack jobs, and corporate toadies who are blocking our chance for national redemption. Remember — they are the minority. We have might and right on our side.

If you need some inspiration, pick up a copy of my new book, By the Light of Burning Dreams, the intimate story of the leading icons of the “second American Revolution.” Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, Anne Weills, Bill Zimmerman, Fred Hampton, Bobby Seale, Kathleen Cleaver, Heather Booth, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Craig Rodwell, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Dennis Banks, Russell Means, Madonna Thunder Hawk. Like all of us, they were flawed human beings. But they were warriors for peace and justice, and they never gave up. They radically changed America — but not enough.

Now it’s up to us, and to the next generation. Don’t let the Republicans steal America, my friends. Fight back — fight to win.

Book Party! You’re All Invited (You Can Even Come in Your Pajamas)

On Tuesday June 8 at 6 p.m. Pacific time, City Lights Books will be hosting a Zoom party for me and sister/coauthor Margaret Talbot — and you’re all invited. Come as you are and bring your own beverage. You can register for the party — which will feature a candid conversation between Margaret and me — here.

By the Light of Burning Dreams is my last history book — and I couldn’t have finished this one without Margaret’s help, as well as her husband, author Arthur Allen. It was a family affair, at first made necessary by my stroke in November 2017 as I was preparing to write the book. But as I healed, the collaboration became a source of great joy to me. Writing is a lonely grind, so it was wonderful to work for the first time with Margaret and Art. The delay in the book’s publication also made the book even more timely, as a new generation of protest has come powerfully alive.

By the Light of Burning Dreams has already received a lot of enthusiastic advance reviews. But I look forward to a dialogue with readers — including those of you who joined with a younger version of me in making this radical history, and with younger activists who will hopefully learn from our mistakes as well as our achievements. We moved America forward in many ways; my only regret, to paraphrase the late great novelist Robert Stone, is that we did not triumph completely.

But I trust that the warts-and-all stories of the revolutionary leaders we profile in the book will both inspire and enlighten, including Bobby Seale and Huey Newton of the Black Panthers; Dennis Banks, Russell Means and Madonna Thunder Hawk of the American Indian Movement; Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda of the Vietnam peace movement; and Heather Booth and the women of the underground feminist abortion collective known as Jane.

See you at the party.