The Whole World Is Watching: Who Makes History?

Finally… a smart critique of By the Light of Burning Dreams from the left. Jonah Raskin’s review of the new book about the radical upheavals of the 1960s and ‘70s by my sister Margaret and me is well worth reading — even if I strongly disagree with its major thrust. Raskin — a fellow veteran of the New Left — insists on calling the book’s focus on radical leaders a “celebrity” fixation. He would rather focus on the street soldiers who made the “second American Revolution,” as Margaret and I call it. Raskin does concede that we also tell the stories of relative unknowns like Heather Booth, Bill Zimmerman, Craig Rodwell and Madonna Thunder Hawk. But it’s true that we mostly focused on the celebrated — and targeted — leaders of the Black Panthers, United Farm Workers, American Indian Movement and other radical organizations. Because, as we write in the book, while Margaret and I don’t subscribe to the “great man” theory of history, we do believe in the essential role of visionary, brave leadership.

Yes, the leaders we write about could not have made history without the countless foot soldiers who followed them. But the political and social advances of the ‘60s and ‘70s would also never have been possible without the galvanizing effect of courageous leaders. Yes, they were flawed human beings — and we don’t ignore their manifold imperfections and mistakes. And yet, as we write, the “legacy” of leaders like Bobby Seale, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, Dennis Banks, Russell Means etc. is “immense.” To make deep and lasting change, we need the intricate interplay between mass movements and brilliant, accountable leaders. Today’s activists ignore this lesson at their own peril.

Rep. Katie Porter 1, Trumpies 0

Democracy -- it's not for the faint of heart. It's a district-by-district fight for the soul of America. Progressive Congress member Katie Porter found that out this weekend when her town hall meeting in her Southern California district was invaded by Trump stormtroopers led by a Republican challenger. Porter did the right thing -- wading into the melee to protect an elderly constituent and then vowing to keep holding public meetings. Porter is just the kind of gutsy, smart progressive we need in Congress. I donated money for her first Congressional run in 2020. when she flipped her Republican district. And I'm definitely going to give her more money for her 2022 reelection battle.

Everyone Loves Bernie… Even the New York Times

When Senator Bernie Sanders was a threat to the Democratic establishment, and actually looked like he could win the party’s 2020 presidential nomination, leading voices of corporate liberalism like the New York Times were apoplectic. During last year’s primary season, the Times sometimes ran two or three news stories and opinion pieces a day against Bernie. That’s right — even the Times’s supposedly “objective” news pages became a platform for anti- Bernie animus. But now that he’s become a Joe Biden loyalist — working hard to advance the president’s progressive legislative agenda — Bernie has become lovable again. Henry Louis Gates recently sat down with him for his Roots program on PBS, And now Maureen Dowd gives him a big wet kiss in her Sunday Times column.

To his credit, Senator Sanders wouldn’t allow himself to be diverted from his talking points about the national renewal program that America desperately needs. As Dowd noted, she wanted to talk to Bernie about Britney and “the absurd price of a Birkin bag.” But the senator — who, as chair of the Senate Budget Committee and an old comrade of Biden’s, suddenly finds himself in the middle of Washington action — stayed studiously on message during his interview with Dowd in a Burlington diner. Sanders did offer opinions about the suspension of Olympic track star Sha’Carri Richardson for using marijuana, whom he saw as a victim of America’s warped war on drugs, and the grotesque space race of billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.

“You have the richest guys in the world who are not particularly worried about earth anymore," Sanders observed. “They’re off in outer space” while people are sleeping on the streets. That’s why we need President Biden’s tax-the-rich legislation, the senator stated, steering the conversation back to his serious talking points.

Berne is now surrounded by a younger generation of democratic socialists and militant progressives on Capitol Hill, whom he has inspired and who have inspired him. But they sometimes part company with Sanders over his legislative alliance with the White House. But at age 79, Sanders has every right to use his political influence to win as much as possible for the American people. If Biden’s infrastructure legislation gets passed at close to the levels that he and Sanders want, it will be the biggest federal infusion in social spending since FDR’s New Deal.

If the Democrats fail to use their slight margin to deliver relief for the American people, Sanders is sharp enough to see the dark consequences — a further descent into Republican “delusion,” “authoritarianism” and even “violence.”

At the end of Dowd’s column, Senator Sanders offers a lesson on the difference between liberals and progressives — and it can be read as blunt message to the Times editorial board that helped block his “ascension” to the White House. “Liberals want to do nice things,” Bernie remarked. “And progressives understand that you have to take on powerful special interests to make it happen.”

Right on.

Bernie and his talking points

Turning Out the Lights on the U.S. Empire

A big cheer for Joe Biden, who strongly defended his decision to pull out U.S. troops from Afghanistan after our 20-year war there. Could this be the beginning of long-delayed national reckoning about the U.S. Empire? Here's what President Biden said yesterday: "Let me ask those who want us to stay: How many more? How many thousands more American daughters and sons are you willing to risk? And how long would you have them stay... Just one more year of fighting in Afghanistan is not a solution, but a recipe for being there indefinitely... No nation has ever unified Afghanistan, no nation. Empires have gone there and not done it." And now to the long line of failures in the graveyard of empires, we must add the United States.

I deeply sympathize with those many Afghan men and women -- perhaps a majority of the country -- who deeply fear a Taliban takeover, with its hardline Islamist and misogynistic beliefs. But it's up the people of Afghanistan to forcefully resist a Taliban victory. In some provinces, women have reportedly taken up arms to show that they are willing to fight and die to prevent a Taliban victory -- even if the men in the Afghan Army are not willing to do so.

Empires can't impose solutions on foreign countries -- that's been the bloody, tragic lesson that America refuses to learn, from Vietnam to Central America to the Middle East. But now, hopefully, President Biden has begun this much-needed process of national introspection. Of course, the president is still authorizing drone strikes all over the world and flooding client states with military hardware. So the process of demilitarizing America will be a long one.

“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.