Good evening, everybody. Can everybody hear me . I am and events professor. Thank you for coming out tonight and supporting your local independent bookstore we are thrilled to have you. I would like to begin by asking everyone to turn off or silence your cell phones. Give them a check for me. I will tell you we are full of talks like the one you will hear tonight presented by those such as Michael Harvey who will be here tomorrow with their respective novels and on monday we will hear from steven axelrod. If you would like to hear from those followers on facebook, twitter or instead graham on your way out tonight. Claire bingham is the author of revolution resisters and classaction the landmark case that changed Sexual Harassment law which was the best book of the year and one speaking out against justice award and has offered women on the hill challenging the culture of congress. The former Newsweek White House correspondent and rising uwritingappeared in vanity fai harpers bazaar, the washington monthly, and other publications. Shes also produced documentary of the Last Mountain a critics pick of the new york times. Before she speaks, we will be playing a short trailer for witness of the revolution and we are going to watch that right now. Good evening. Tonight i want to talk to you on the subject of many people in all parts of the world. I would like to answer some of the questions that i know are on the minds of many. [inaudible] we were kids. We were people who came up and activism in the Civil Rights Movement we were born in the Antiwar Movement and the womens movement, so all this ferment of whats happening in the principle was the combination of the term shocked the nation. People went nuts. I am a revolutionary. He didnt know that i was incarcerated at the time. I knew immediately the Police Officers that have gone through and later it was proven. [inaudible] i was convinced. How ridiculous would be until i saw the ground in front of me turned off and at that moment they were like bullets shot at that point. 51 to 61 bullets. [inaudible] you had people linking arms and being pepper sprayed or beaten. The human spirit was at its be best. I think it is fair to say that we lost. We didnt end capitalism or imperialism. We didnt actually end of the war in vietnam, however we did win all the cultural ballast. Theres an environmentalthere il movement, alternative short movement. These things are inserting all the pressures that are suddenly transformative. And it was our assertion that they were more powerful hello, everybody. Thank you for inviting me here. Is this working there are so few independent bookstores left so im pleased to come to one this big and vibrant that has the community center. It required a lot of work as you could imagine so im glad shes here. The voices were tape recorded interviews that i conducted with 100 different people obviously not in that video but i talked to 100 people over the course of about three years who are involved in different parts of the movement. All of them lived in america. I decided i was born in 1963. I grew up in new york city on Central Park West in the Antiwar Movement i knew it. I had them on my wall and i was a young feminist at the age of seven all of this was theater tv and when i graduated from college in 1985 it was exactly 15 years after the largest student strike in america. And the invasion of cambodia in 1970 the one took finals and yes i graduated to just 15 years later to the middle of the administration and we went to battle on the streets against apartheid to try to get them to divest but otherwise it was very quiet. I knew that my life was different because of what happened in the 60s for any career that i wanted and any life i wanted to leave but i wanted to know what it was that i had missed and that it followed. I think youre allowed to go back every decade or so if it had been written about. The library that i collected in my research was aske vast swathf it was a little cheeky of me to take this on as a kid who wasnt even there. But it seemed like the right time to visit the decade and talk to people who were activists because many of them were in their 60s and 70s and there was a lot of talk about. I wanted to catch them at a time they still remembered what they had done and wanted to reflect. So i sat about traveling the country to focus on the school here from august to august which is a period of time i considered to be the crescendo of the 60s in some ways i try to create a narrative in first person voice woven together. I recreated many of the big events that occurred enough time from personal stories of the people i talk to. So, it was a really moving experience to get people to tell me what had happened to them. Everyone remembered everything because it was so traumatic. That really wasnt the case. Everyone was traumatized whether they had come back from the war or they were fighting against the war on the streets here or part of the counterculture or the feminist movement. Everyone had done things they felt were extremely important and committed their lives in a way that no one in my generation had ever really done. So it was exciting for me to revisit all of that with them. August of 69 as many of you may remember was woodstock. I looked at woodstock through the eyes of david harris who at the time was in jail and his wife was pregnant with his child and singing on stage telling everybody that 500,000 people who appeared at the farm in new york all about her husband who has started the resistance. It was a large group who decided to fight the draft which by the way affected the lives of 27 Million People between 1965 to 19,732. 2 million were drafted so it was a politicizing experience. He tried to convince as many people as possible to take the act of civil disobedience and go to jail. David harris like many of the activists during this time was raised in the Civil Rights Movement. So he had gone to mississippi as A Robin Morgan added us s s. Soy people who were later in the Antiwar Movement they worked in the south end of david harris was a student at stanford so im going to read this section it was david harris speaking. I considered myself part of the movement from the day that i left mississippi will recall the movement. They call us the new left because it wasnt an ideology. There wasnt a specific politic attached to it. It was a set of values in finding ways to express themselves. I was in marches and rallies and demonstrations that there was the question of the construction system and when any male turned 18 hmail turned18 he had to go t office and register for the Selective Service system. When you registere registered iu two cards, one was proof that you registered and the other was classification because under the Selective Service and there were various classifications which meant you were going to get a notice in the mail reporting which meant you were physically unable to perform. Anybody in college making reasonable progress to a degree. That was a system that covered all of their lives. Always there was floating out there when they call your number. We understandably focused on the a lot. I mean, there were people going to graduate school, so they wouldnt get drafted. There were people getting married so they wouldnt get drafted because early on being married was an exemption. They were going to draft family man and they thought if you want to take a year off and go to paris and bright poetry you are headed for the tall grass. This defined everybodys life. So the draft is the spine of the story in many ways and it is probably in many ways the reason why. It was the weekend at generation because theres nothing that wakes you up more than realizing who you are voting for and how you act will have an impact on whether you live and die or go to the war or not. We had the vietnam war in the draft and the political side of the revolution and working arm in arm there was also the psychedelic revolution and also how it had a profound impact towards the establishment so by the end of the 60s there was a Massive Movement of uprising. I conclude in many of the people i enter you they concluded that lsd played a part to some exte extent. I said in the buck its why in the late 1960s with the secret ingredient that helped to propel a transformational attitude and lifestyle of the challenge nearly every principle that support of American Society and culture in the 1950s. It was called a revolution by consciousness or a psychedelic revolution. By 1970, at least 2 million americans have dropped out of it. And one third of all College Students who smoke marijuana, then the escalation of the vietnam war an war and the resie to the draft in the second half of the decade combined with the counterculture created a nationwide spontaneous combustion. And again, david have a lot to say about that. He was at stanford in the mid60s he was elected a student body president and he had long hair. At one point of Fraternity Brothers kidnapped him and shaved his head and it became very big news in San Francisco it was on the front page of the papers. Meanwhile, even though for a long time during the 60s the political left and the counterculture were not always simpatico and they have different ideals and different objectives. David harris found himself right in the eye of the two revolutions taking place because he was in palo alto. This is what he told me about that. At the same time i took acid at the same time, he was doing a festival in the city. He was also a figure around stanford because he lived in the hills in the back of stanford. Eventually we all took acid with him several times in a lot of hippies were looking to get stoned and dance and play. But Serious Business was how to deal with the machine chewing of southeast asia. All those things were mingled together and insisted of writing their own ticket because the tickets that were being written for them when i had and it wasnt just them it was the whole thing, growing your hair out, wearing clothes that didnt come from jc pennys. You have to remember we grew up in the 60s. The 50s was the time of no options. There was only one way to be. You could be john wayne. What happened in the 60s was summarized as making options. There were other ways to be than the one everyone was insisting we were supposed to be and we were going to find them. After august, a group of antiwar activists, many of them shaved their beards and cut their hair up in New Hampshire the organized something of the Moratorium Committee to end the war in vietnam. And on october 15, there was the largest ever protest against the war they had teachings in different events to oppose the war. It proved it wasnt just a radical fringe or hippie freaks against the war. It was multigenerational now and they were turning against the war by 1969 more than 50 of americans were against the war. So the moratorium really proved that this was no longer a fringe movement, it is a much broader movement. They tried to intimidate the members of the committee. One of them was a man named david and he was gay. Im going to read up a bit of a precursor that the early Nixon Administration or the fbi was involved with. So i will call you what happened. It was quite shocking. I was terrified to tell my dad that if i was drafted i wouldnt serve which was the joke now because all i have to do is tell them i was gay and id have been out instantly. But being in jail for five years appealed more to me than letting anyone know i was gay. Its pretty powerful thats all i have to say. I would rather have gone to jail than to have every one know the truth about me. I wouldnt have been able to do anything i was doing would have been the cochair. I had to fight to get on board when they were not given good roles. I was one of the supporters. I movement was still misogynist at this time. Gay, not a chance in the world i would be able to do any of it. I would have immediately been discarded. And this is what happened right after. One night, i got drunk, went to a remote bar and a vision from god came in. He was exactly my type. Intelligent, handsome masculine, and we ended up going home together. He said i know who you are. I work for the federal government. I dont want you to panic. I want to create a safe place for you. I have feelings for you. All the great poets that i loved and janis joplin records come anyway to make a long story short we started an affair and he did become a very safe place for me. About 30 days into it, he said he had to go away for the weekend. I went to a shop and sat in the booth waiting for it. They pulled into the booth and sat across from me and showed me their badges. When chomsky because someone shows you a badge how many times have you taken a look at it in those days . I dont know if they were real. They poured out on the table some pictures of the two of us having sex and it was as if someone had stuck a knife into my gut. My first thought was i have to warn frank, so i ran to his apartment. I used my key, got in, and the place was totally empty. There wasnt a dust ball or anything else in the apartment. I never saw him again. They gave me three days to get out of the moratorium or they were going to send these pictures to my family and the press. So i got very drunk and told my friends i had a heart condition and was sick. I decided to kill myself. I bought a gun and put it under my mattress and was going to kill myself but i wanted to get drunk enough to do it. But then i had a moment of clarity and realized there was no way we could send the photographs to the press because how were they going to explain it . Did the government want them to know that they were filming homosexuals and blackmailing them . Maybe they have as much to lose as i did so i sobered up and when they met him when they met up with me three days later and asked me are you getting out, i said send it to them i dont care and walked away. Anytime the phone rang and someone said your mom and dad is on the phone i thought they had gotten the pictures. I dreaded hearing from them. Every time they worry that they had the photographs, so i immediately pulled back and stopped. There was another moratorium on november 15. This one took place in washington, d. C. 500,000 people came to dc for three days. It was absolutely one of the largest single events in one city after against the war and ended up with what david organized of people marching from Arlington Cemetery to the servicemen all thservice then ae Capitol Building putting the factors in makeshift coffins in the capital and carry him into the white house. So that was the best revenge. One of the things he participated in at that moratorium there were signs people have the same free the people in the reason why the signs had come up on november 13 and invested in the reporter who had just broken a story about the massacre they had moved into a village anthe village and kil4 civilians who were mostly women and Young Children and it was an absolutely devastating story that did more to help the movement than any protester march ever occurred and also revealed to many people how difficult the war was to win and also the u. S. Had an unspoken rule called kill anything that moves and across the body count that was important. So it was happening on a smaller scale and i interviewed some soldiers who were there. It wasnt just a one time events. It was symptomatic of one of the many problems in the war and how it was being fought. Was it Investigative Reporter who didnt want to talk to me and had to go through multiple people to get to him. Eventually, he told me the whole story of how they were doin doin investigative reporting of how he got the first tip about the lieutenant who was in trouble. He found his lawyer in Salt Lake City and they told him where he was and he went to South Carolina and after days of hunting in the military base kelly ended up telling him everything he knew which wouldnt benefit. Later on, he finds other people in the truth and one of the most important people that he discovered i wont argue about. Finding him wasnt that easy. The only thing i knew from the roster is that he was from indiana. So i just found every one that i could find them state. I finally found someone near a place called the go che [inaudi] i said im looking for paul is he okay. I said i was his leg. I said im just a reporter i want to talk about what happened in the war. She said i dont know if he will talk to you. Is it okay if i come . I cant promise. She had a deep voice. So the next day i went to indianapolis and drove. It might have been ten in the morning when i got there. I couldnt find his place for a long time. It was a chicken farm but when i pulled in i could see that it was all messed up and there were chickens all over the place. His mom comes out and shes a little old lady, shes 50 that looks closer to 70 beat down and living in an old wooden shack. So i ask is he in there is it okay if i go in and she said yes of course. I sent them a good boy and they made him a murderer. Its one of those wines that will stick with you forever. I sat down and asked him about his leg which is always what you do. Youve got to do that. After a few minutes i said okay tell me your story and he smiled happy to have somebody not pretending that nothing ever happened. He said i just began to shoot. I shot and shot. I spoke to the kids in the next six months to write the book after doing the first five articles. And of course he won a pulitzer for that. So that was november. We are not even into 1978 and by december, a few things happened but most notably, the leader in a very charismatic black panther based in chicago of the things he preached he was for racial unity and he wanted a Rainbow Coalition before Jesse Jackson which made the fbi very nervous. It was at its peak and thats what i wrote about it. It was the black Panther Party w