It was a short walk to San Francisco's primary riot venues from my grungy tenement apartment at 925 Sacramento Street. Either up the hill to the Fairmont and the Mark Hopkins, or through the Stockton Tunnel to the Union Square hotels. War criminals were always coming to San Francisco. Still are, lots of them welcomed and feted.
One night at the Fairmont may have given the feminist movement major forward momentum when the “chicks up front” seated on the curb across the street from the Fairmont took the first blows from the Tac Squad's fungo bats when the sadists in blue jumpsuits suddenly charged across the street as all us stop the war cadres massed between the Fairmont and the Pacific Union Club. The Tac Squad was selected for their size; they were all big, agile bastards who enjoyed beating people up, especially longhaired, loud-mouthed, highly irritating people like us. (There was a Tac Squad offshoot on patrol at night in unmarked cars. These guys were described by a cop friend as, “fat guys who like to drive around beating people up.”)
That night, we were hollering up at the impervious hotel facade for Field Marshall Ky, one of LBJ’s interim Vietnamese stooges, to go home. Ky was home, as it soon turned out, melting into Los Angeles to run a restaurant rather than the second-hand country he'd been looting for LBJ’s blundering imperialists.
Someone, probably an undercover cop grandly rechristened as a provocateur by us lefties who were on perpetual alert for infiltrators, sabs, and miscellaneous running dogs, although the sabs couldn't have been better than we were at sabbing ourselves, threw a balloon full of red paint up against the implacable gray wall of the grand old hotel, monarch of San Francisco’s inns.
No sooner was the paint running bright red down the hotel’s wall, the Tac Squad was sprinting across the street and clubbing their pre-designated demonstrator of choice. The chicks up front got the worst of it because they were no sooner on their feet to flee than the clubs started falling on them.
My brother and I jumped the stone wall into the Pacific Union Club — no Jews, no people of color, no women, nobody with a net worth less than half a billion. We were sprinting for the relative safety of Huntington Park past the basement door of the Club when a man in the black and white checked pants and cook’s hat of the kitchen worker, a bona fide member of the proletariat whose interests my comrades and I were theoretically committed to advancing, yelled, “You can't come through here!” Bro straight-armed the kitchen man, sending him clattering among empty garbage cans, and soon we were beyond the big boys wielding the clubs.
Behind us we could hear the screams and curses of the targets of opportunity as they were beaten by the defenders of order, and then things deteriorated into the usual 60s demo ritual of back and forth stampedes, this one up and down the flat Nob Hill block of California Street between Mason and Taylor.
We’d re-group when the Tac Squad retreated, then they’d chase us down California again, and on it would go for several hours, romanticized later in song and selective memory as ‘Street Fighting Man.’ It was more like running the bulls, with one or two cops scattering and pursuing a thousand middle-class book readers who'd never been in so much as a fistfight. We certainly weren't the Frisco longshoremen of 1934 in support of whom San Francisco was completely shut down for a week. The old working class stood and fought. The 1967 working class was with the cops all the way. We represented no one but ourselves, although public opinion was beginning to oppose the war even while enjoying the weekly spectacle of us getting whacked around by the Tac Squad and their East Bay counterparts when the demo targets were in Oakland and Berkeley.
That night we got smashed with the fungo bats and ran up and down Nob Hill streets, and very soon the worst of us, the fanatics, the true nut cases, the stone killers, the dwarf Lenins, took over the left, such as it was, and here we are today with millions of young people aware that America is not a benign force in the world and only rhetorically benign at home, but facing forces far more formidable than those we faced then, the primary one being the destruction of the global show itself.
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