![]() By then even those who cared deeply about the country were thinking, 'What the hell, why bother? I run into people every day of my life who say that that was the last campaign that they really believed in. Then Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were slain. The failure of my campaign took the bloom off the rose of idealism in American politics. "Had we prevailed, our plan was to strengthen the idealism unleashed in the 1960s, to build upon the progress of the civil rights and antiwar movements and begin to pursue the environmental and women's causes, which were just starting up. "I believe 1972 marked a watershed, in its own way," he told me. Photo by Archive Photo/Pictorial Parade Getty Images That's certainly how the Democratic nominee George McGovern saw it. The central premise of my story was that the 1972 conventions served as the unofficial end of the Sixties, when the principled activism of that era gave way to a lassitude that would eventually corrode our political system and mire our citizenry in cynicism. "The whole endeavor was half serious and half lark," the writer John Rothchild told me in 1992. Despite a few squabbles (quickly quelled by the liberal use of tear gas), the convention went off without a hitch. In the end, more journalists showed up than actual protesters. The short version is that antiwar activists were hoping to mount protests on a scale large enough to disrupt the GOP conclave, or at least overshadow the made-for-TV pageantry of Richard Nixon's re-nomination. The piece detailed the dramas that unfolded around the Democratic and Republican national conventions in Miami Beach, the last time both were held in the same city. I thought a lot about that summer on the Land as I revisited the cover story I wrote 30 years ago for Miami New Times ("Where Were You in '72?" embedded at the bottom of this story). So it sort of came down to whoever got to the eggs first." "Because that work was in conflict with the hippie ethic of doing your own thing. "There wasn't a large enough nucleus of people dedicated to the work of living communally," my dad explained to me recently. I was also unaware, until years later, that my mother got up at dawn every morning and went to the henhouse to collect eggs, because she was concerned that Mike and I might not get enough protein otherwise.Īll of which is to say: The grand vision of communal life on the Land crumbled pretty quickly. As it turned out, my dad had dropped acid, something that happened a lot that summer on the Land. For instance, I remember taking my father's head into my lap and telling him that I was the doctor now and would cure him by pouring a thin stream of sand onto his forehead. Other memories were a little harder for me to parse. A pack of naked kids ran around a creek howling the song "American Pie" was always on the radio, with its mystifying lyrics about Chevys and levees. I remember inviting a man named Big John into my evening bath and the delight I felt when he lowered himself into the tub, fully clothed. I remember the smell of body odor and incense. ![]() ![]() I remember fresh milk from that cow being poured onto my bowl of corn flakes and the peculiar horror of encountering tiny chunks of cream. Miami New Times My memories of that summer are vivid fragments.
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