Revealed: How Ronald Reagan, J. Egdar Hoover, and the FBI Plotted to Crush 1960s Dissidents

By Steve Wasserman

October 17, 2012  |  Berkeley in the years that I came of age was heady with the scent of night jasmine and tear gas. It whipsawed, sometimes violently, between clichés, from the Age of Aquarius to the Age of Apocalypse and back. I well recall the evening in February 1969 when hundreds of us, exhausted from a day of battling cops seeking to break the Third World Liberation Strike at the University of California’s campus, trooped down to the Berkeley Community Theatre, where we hoped to find relief in the much-ballyhooed provocations of Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s Living Theatre.

Much to our surprise, the production of Paradise Now was a bust. What was an outrage to bourgeois sensibilities elsewhere—nearly nude members of the troupe intoning mantras of prohibition against smoking pot and sexing it up in public—was greeted by the solemn radicals and spirited anarchists of Berkeley as feeble and largely empty gestures. “Super Joel,” one of the town’s more colorful and ubiquitous characters, stood up and loudly denounced Beck and Malina for their faux-radicalism, then lit a joint and began to disrobe. Others quickly followed. Hundreds surrounded the couple, angrily demanding that their tickets be refunded. Dozens of debates erupted all around—over the nature of drama and the character of revolution. The show did not go on. The audience stormed the stage. Finally, at midnight, the fire marshals arrived and kicked us out. Beck and Malina had inadvertently achieved what had previously eluded them: goading the audience into taking collective action, seizing the moment, arguing over whether to remain passive spectators or become actors in a drama of their own making. It was unforgettable. I also remember the denouement: no sooner had the Living Theatre departed than, the next day, a furious Governor Reagan arrived and threatened to deploy the National Guard, in addition to the hundreds of police from throughout Northern California that filled the streets.