Claire Conger

I watched this documentary, Berkeley in the Sixties, fascinated, having spent the sixties trapped in Southern California—my only window on the world was network TV. I remember the Watts riots of ’64, me sitting snugly in a beach house in San Juan Capistrano and my mother saying, “Don’t worry, it won’t reach here.” Later I was rivetted by images of flagged-draped coffins returning from Vietnam. By 1968 I knew all hell was breaking loose right outside my teenage grasp.

So it was with great interest that I watched Berkeley in the Sixties. With a background of contemporary music including Joan Baez, Jimi, and the Dead, this film divides its time between gut-wrenching footage of cops beating young people and current (1990) interviews with people who were there, such as current (2008) UC Berkeley Philosophy Professor John Searle and former Black Panther Bobby Seale. (Seals’s interview is excellent. He talks about guns, how they got the money to buy them by selling Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book, which they hadn’t even read (I had a Little Red Book and I didn’t read it either), and how he considers that guns were ultimately the Panthers’ undoing.)

Interviewees differed in their opinions: Some experienced a successful revolution, others that efforts toward change clearly weren’t working. The movie starts with the Free Speech Movement and Mario Savio—he was rather blond, Who knew? I was nine years old and running loose through sage-brush covered hills. It continues chronologically through civil rights, Vietnam protests, counter-culture hippies, and the women’s movement.

In a very telling sequence, Governor Ronnie can’t understand why university officials don’t just take back People’s Park—it belongs to the university after all. “Negotiate what? You should know better!” he tells the faculty. That the university is a public institution and belongs to the people is completely lost on him—so lost that in his meeting with the Berkeley faculty he guarantees himself the last word with a chair-scraping exit—a foreshadow of things to come. Those things to come included occupation by the National Guard and tear-gassing by helicopter students sitting en mass in Sproul Plaza, not to mention a pervasive perception that 40 years later hasn’t changed much from “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.” (This saying is generally attributed to Charlie Wilson, former president of G.M. and Secretary of Defense 1953 until he resigned in 1957. The following quote is from the Time Magazine website. Go there to read more about Engine Charlie.)

During the closed hearings of the Senate Armed Services Committee on his confirmation, Wilson made a comment that was widely misquoted and was to dog him throughout his governmental years [as Secretary of Defense]. According to the press, Wilson told the Senators: “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.” What he actually said: “For years I thought that what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.”