Irrepressible (41 page)

Here was an entirely new generation, unpredictable and crazily brave in its own way. They were willing to stop the daily world to stop the war—get in the way of commuters, interrupt the workday, even block train tracks. In Chicago, one seventeen-year-old protester had jumped on the back of a burly policeman and ridden him for several blocks before the cop had shaken her off, busted her head with his nightstick, and arrested her. In the provocative teases, anti-authoritarianism, and other antics of the Yippies (a group of radical and theatrical hippies whose more famous members were Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman), Decca recognized shades of her own subversive nature. At
Ramparts
, she shared a masthead with Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, the author of
Soul on Ice
. She cheered the witty way that political tricksters Hoffman and Rubin manipulated media coverage. Their energy and passion spoke to her and brought back that distant moment, during the Spanish Civil War, when she, Esmond, Philip Toynbee, and their friends thought young people might stop fascism forever. Here was another chance, and she was a living bridge between those times.

I
N MARCH 1969,Decca and Marge Frantz attended the end of the conspiracy trial of the Oakland Seven. Alameda County District Attorney Frank Coakley had indicted the seven leaders after a Stop the Draft protest march to the Oakland induction center, with conspiracy to commit a felony. His primary evidence was an audiotape recording of the Berkeley campus rally, which had occurred the night before the demonstration. However, instead of proving the pernicious influence of these particular leaders, it did the opposite—capturing an event that was in the “great tradition of open, democratic meetings.” When the jury members listened to the tape, they heard dozens of people representing views across the political spectrum: geniuses, visionaries, and boors among them. In the end, so many people—including “opponents of the demo”—had addressed the rally that the prosecution could not prove that the leaders they’d charged had conspired at anything. The atmosphere in that courtroom offered a terrific contrast to the Boston Spock trial.

Visiting an Oakland courtroom meant that Decca was on her home patch. If she wasn’t a legal expert, she was certainly a celebrity pundit on conspiracy trials. At one point, the judge even asked to meet her; they spoke of the mystifying knot of statutes and regulations that composed the canon of conspiracy law, agreeing that its many ambiguities had “got to go.” After the jury acquitted the Oakland Seven, the judge chastised the District Attorney’s office for wasting jury time and taxpayers’ money. This rare triumph for antiwar activists represented “a kind of low-water mark for prosecutors.” It made a nice change. The district attorney’s team had been beaten fair and square and embarrassed, too. Coakley had been outmaneuvered, and Decca was delighted.

IN MAY, DECCA went to Paris to visit her sister Nancy, then sixty-five years old, whose terrible back pain had been diagnosed as a degenerated spinal column. Worse news revealed a mass on her liver. Nancy was housebound, and pain kept her in her bed during most of Decca’s stay.

It had been just a year since the French student rebellions of 1968, and the consequences must have been visible—though perhaps slightly less so in tony Versailles, where Nancy lived. In Paris, red banners hung from windows and fluttered on rooftops. On the Left Bank, hippies swaggered in full plumage, philosophers and militants disputed in the cafés, the neighborhoods around the university still seethed, soldiers carrying guns seemed to be everywhere; anything might still happen. Before she’d grown ill, Nancy Mitford had kept a journal she called “A Revolution Diary,” noting that one of the leaders of the French student movement, Danny Cohn-Bendit (whom she called “Bandit”) was “very reminiscent of Esmond Romilly—a bounding energetic little anarchist giggling from time to time but not making jokes which one might have liked.”

Decca didn’t take much note of the postrevolutionary moment in France. She arrived from Berkeley, where such images had come to seem normal. Instead, the domestic routine in her sister’s household, keyed to the season and hour, was all-absorbing. She looked for ways to help Nancy. It was necessary to pay attention, to adapt, which she did with gratifying results. She walked, she said, a “slight tight-rope—between going up to her room too much, with the attendant danger of either tiring her or boring her . . . and not going up enough, danger of seeming to neglect.”

For Decca, Nancy’s life in Versailles conjured “another planet, another century.” At first, Decca had waded in, thinking she might help increase efficiency around the place by suggesting that their food be delivered in bulk, rather than purchased daily, and that Nancy’s doctors visit her at home. These innovations were so un-French they hadn’t a chance in hell. But contemplating them, submerging herself in this entirely other world, afforded Decca a real break from politics, her own children’s dramas, and her literary life, particularly
The Trial of Dr. Spock
. She “rather lost interest
in the book, in all the worry over Nancy.” The book was in the hands of its editors, publishers, marketers, and reviewers, and there was nothing she could do at that point.

Nancy’s live-in housekeeper, Marie, ruled their home. At seventy-five years old, Marie sometimes required assistance and might assign Decca various tasks like walking to the farther market stall for the better butter, the fresher potatoes, the superior cut of meat. After shopping, Decca might be put to work weeding the poppies and peonies. There were parsley beds, lettuce beds, roses, and lavender. Sometimes, when Nancy felt well enough, she would join Decca outdoors. In the evening, Nancy, Marie, and Decca might gather around the television to watch soap operas or the French presidential debates.

Afternoons, the other sisters would “swoop in,” and there would be “nothing but rapid-fire jokes,” Decca wrote to Aranka. To Virginia, she said, “Even when N. was in the worst pain she still managed to shriek, it is her way of life.” Decca’s friends were curious to know how she got along with sister Diana, whom she hadn’t seen or spoken to for thirty-four years. The Mosleys’ Temple de la Gloire was about twelve miles away, and Diana a frequent guest. In advance, Decca had written to Debo, “who was the go-between, the manager of it all, and said that . . . of course I’d never dream of being unpleasant in the presence of [Nancy], so it was made clear [Decca and Diana would] discuss the situation with Nancy, and what pills she was having—the usual sick-bed talk. And not a word of politics.”

“Diana and I are getting on . . . rather well, actually,” Decca wrote Marge. “That is, whilst cutting the grass round the irises I forbore to say I was giving the irises
lebensraum
[or living space, Hitler’s justification for territorial expansion] although it came into my mind. In other words, all efforts are bent to Nancy’s welfare, & that’s all we talk about if we’re alone together.” After so long, Decca thought Diana looked like “a really marvelous statue that’s been left out in the rain for a long time. She was so beautiful still, yet ravaged, but only ravaged from old age.” Diana seemed to think the only great change time had wrought upon Decca was in her voice.

Nancy’s prognosis was grave. Decca alone of the sisters thought she should be told, but she was overruled by the others, who believed Nancy would lose interest in the book she was then writing, since work had always been the thing that gave her energy. To Decca, it seemed “a sort of awful betrayal not to tell the truth.” Once she was home, she wrote to Debo to restate her belief: “I do feel most terrifically strongly, and must stress this point Hen very much, that it is now verging on wicked not to tell Nancy, in view of Dr. Evans’ report. Because don’t you see, it’s awful enough to get such news when one is feeling fairly OK & strong; but if it is delivered very late in the thing, when one was completely weak anyway and in much pain, so much harder to bear, I should think. Now might be the time.”

IN AUGUST 1967,
The Trial of Dr. Spock
was published. The early reviews were respectable (not a rating she relished), but as she feared, its fizz factor barely registered. Decca’s identity in the movement was tied to her role as a radical journalist. In the literary world at large, the confiding, personalized tone of new journalism was the ascendant trend. Radical journalists and new journalists shared a legacy of social criticism, but radical journalists had a politically left agenda and were more often associated with the counterculture press. (Further left, writers for the underground newspapers were starting to call themselves revolutionaries.) The tone of the radical journalists was less confiding and more defiant. Their work was objective because they said so, and it offered an alternative to what they viewed as the false objectivity of a controlled and biased mainstream press.

Subjects for investigation were everywhere, flying past fast and furiously, but the better-paid writing jobs on Decca’s work calendar were light features and celebrity interviews. All had a highly anticipated quirk factor that often depended on the tension of some trendy subject in contrast with her background. These paid assignments were often so frustrating that in
October, Decca asked Marge, “Shall I give up writing & take Laurent’s massage class, instead?”

Once the trial of the Chicago Eight began, it was clear that this was the trial Decca should have covered. Its defendants, charged with conspiracy to induce a riot at the Democratic National Convention, included Tom Hayden (who had slept on Virginia Durr’s living room floor as a civil rights worker in the early 1960s) and other leaders of the antiwar movement—David Dellinger, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Rennie Davis, John Froines, and Bobby Seale, then chairman of the Black Panther Party. The trial had villains and heroes (among the valiant ones, defense lawyers William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass, who each received sentences for contempt), fools and knaves. It attracted intense press scrutiny for its contrasts: an ancient, anachronistic judge, a humorless prosecutor, Rubin and Hoffman (the two Yippie comedians), and a sequence of celebrity witnesses, including Norman Mailer, Phil Ochs, and Allen Ginsberg (who “
Om
ed” on the witness stand). All the chatter and tomfoolery of the early part of the trial could not prepare anyone for the moment when Seale, denied the opportunity to conduct his own defense, was ordered by the judge to be expelled from the courtroom. Marshals carried him back into the room, bound to a chair with a gag in his mouth, still demanding his right to defend himself. In the following moments of silence and profound shame, Seale’s codefendants, along with their lawyers, jumped up to protest.

In her book on the trial of Dr. Spock, Decca had wished to show how the government historically used conspiracy law to silence its opposition. Dr. Spock and his fellow defendants had hoped to use their trial to demonstrate their loyalty to fundamental American ideals by attacking the legality and morality of the war on a public stage (material in support of which they’d never been allowed to enter into the evidence). The trial of the Chicago Eight was, as the Smith Act trials had been, about big ideas held by dissenters who threatened the status quo. Hoffman said theirs was a “state-of-mind trial”—they were “charged with carrying certain ideas across state lines.” The Chicago trial did what Dr. Spock’s could not, theatrically contrasting
a celebration of life and youth with a militaristic culture of death. The eight defendants weren’t interested in maintaining decorum; their support increased with their defiance. It was farce, melodrama, and
Grande Guignol
in the instance of Bobby Seale, whom the government could not silence without the clumsy accoutrements of tyranny.

The end of 1969 brought convictions for the Chicago Eight (all would be eventually overturned). That December, also in Chicago, a squad of police carrying machine guns broke into the apartment of twenty-one-year-old Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and shot him in his bed. The police called it a gun battle, but forensic evidence pointed to a murder and one of many actions initiated by the FBI as part of the counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO.

In September 1970, a memo from the director of the FBI to the assistant attorney general, Internal Security Division, requested a review to determine whether (in the face of burgeoning rebel movements: antiwar, black liberation, women’s liberation, gay liberation) it was still good value to continue assigning agents to observe the ex-menace Decca. The review affirmed unequivocally that her case “should be continued.” An attached page announced: “Subject one of speakers at National Guardian sponsored public meeting, attended celebration of release of MORTON SOBELL, gave support to Black Panther Party during 1968-1969. Is currently working on a book about prisons.”