Rennie Davis was a prominent U.S. protest leader in the 1960s. The son of President Truman's chief of staff of the Council of Economic Advisers, Davis was an early opponent of the Vietnam War, traveling to Hanoi to draw attention to U.S. policy. He became national director of the community organizing program of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and was one of the "Chicago Eight," charged with conspiracy to incite riots during the 1968 Democratic national convention. Davis was interviewed for COLD WAR in November 1996.

On the 1960s:

It was very similar to the Renaissance, I would say. You got a society that's very structured, closed down, everybody looking over their shoulder in fear about what other people think; and then suddenly this passion and curiosity and intellectual willingness to explore new paradigms and thinking. It's that kind of energy that, I don't know, quite honestly you almost feel like it's more on a metaphysical level; it just does not root itself in political institutions or any easy explanation. Suddenly there is a birth, and then it takes on a form; in this case, it took on the form of civil rights, then into community organizing projects, and then from there, as the Vietnam War started to come into the decade -- especially with the landing of Marines in 1965 -- then the great coming together was really around the war. But what was the energy that was underneath all of that? That's really still the mystery, I would say, of the Sixties. ...

We can learn from the Sixties. I mean, I think there's something about passion for life and curiosity for life, and the willingness to kind of explore new ground, that is very enriching and nourishing to any society that can encourage that. Anyway, it just came full-blown out of nowhere in the Sixties, and went away again; and underneath, it is that passion that then gave rise to the particular issues and the particular focus. The Vietnam War obviously became the rallying point from about 1967 through 1973; but all the other issues -- women's rights and what was going on with civil rights and Black America and poor people -- were very much alive and well underneath all of that.

On the role of drugs in 1960s counterculture:

Even the word "drug" has so many connotations today, you know, I don't know what to say. There was a willingness to experiment externally and internally, and the difficulties that a drug culture has brought into this country and most countries in the world, really, in the Eighties and the Nineties -- it was a very different world, and so if you look at it through the eyes of how we experience a drug situation today, it almost takes away really the meaning that was there.

What is it to go into nature and to leave a city and just to live in the woods, like Thoreau? That's something that's very unconventional, not done at all, and yet there were thousands of people wanting to do that in the Sixties. It was in that same spirit that inner worlds were beginning to be explored; and there's certainly a rich tradition in human history with inner worlds. Mostly they tend to be rooted in religious traditions. But it was in that sense that there is more to understanding the human being than meets the eye. You know, mostly we walk around kind of closed down. And to realize that we have a rich, powerful, incredible universe upon universe within our own physical bodies, that can be accessed, that seems to open up the realm of thought, that seems to open up other dimensions within the human being... What is the dream state, and how do you go into a dream state when you're fully awake?

Questions like that were being pursued; some by just being quiet in nature, and some by the use of recreational substances. And what I think I believe about the whole so-called drug experience was: it was that innocence again that was operating underneath it all. So, I mean, I'm not into promoting drugs, but I'm also not so quick to judge it, in terms of what really it did cause and did open up for so many people to explore themselves in new ways.

On the anti-war movement:

I would say that [nonviolence] was the overwhelming, dominant viewpoint. The large protests that I coordinated -- there were about 150 national organizations -- and they were united fundamentally around a commitment to nonviolence. It didn't mean that there weren't elements within the movement that felt more aggressive means was essential to take; but relative to all the major mobilizations and to anything that represented a real coming together of people and forces, nonviolence was an absolute bedrock to the American movement. ...

And yet the war continued and continued, and so it came down to: is the nonviolent position of the movement going to be abandoned, or are we going to take up guns, or what's going to happen? And these were the kinds of discussions that ultimately defused the sentiment. You know, it was just like: what more can be done? And I would say the process of Martin Luther King, the Kennedys, riots occurring all over the country, the increased political suppression through the use of agents and other means, ultimately just brought the whole thing to a standstill, where the government did end the war.

On visiting Hanoi during the Vietnam War:

I was very much kind of self-righteous about that in many ways. I was an American first and foremost, and as far as I was concerned, this war was wrong. It was just wrong; that was it, you know. And so, that it needed an American to go into Hanoi to refute the Pentagon claims -- I mean, in 1967, the Department of Defense took the public position that it was only bombing military targets, steel and concrete, and I was the first person to come back to this country and say, "Every day I was in Hanoi, I was in bomb shelters. Bombs rained down all over the city. I saw whole city blocks wiped out by air raids, and they're certainly not coming from Europe or the Soviet Union; they're American planes." And villages. I would go into a village clearly that had been hit by an anti-personnel weapon. It's hardly a military bomb for purposes of steel and concrete: it's anti-personnel. And the Pentagon took the public position that I had been brainwashed and that this was a lie. And I was [amazed]; [it was] one of those times like, "What? How could the government lie to the country?" That was kind of my level of sophistication (Laughs) at the time.

So I viewed myself, quite honestly, as a patriot, and I viewed myself as supporting American GIs, and my way of supporting them was to get them out of that senseless war. And a lot of GIs related to that position. I spoke in military bases with very intense conditions and high security, and I set up coffee houses to support our GIs around the country. And that's one of the reasons the vice president called me so dangerous -- because we were going into the military arena. But we had many, many, many supporters among GIs.

On surveillance of the anti-war movement:

In 1968, two months before the [Democratic convention], I had two plainclothes policemen show up and show me a badge and just say that they were going to be following me ... through the duration of the demonstration. And they had a tone of threat; and they made it quite clear that if I tried to shake them, that that would not be a good idea. It was interesting: the only place for about four years that I could go where that [kind of surveillance] didn't exist in my life was when I would make trips into North Vietnam to bring out prisoners of war; that would be the one place they couldn't follow me. Other than that, it was pretty much, you'd wake up in the morning and look out your window, and there they were outside. ...

I had an apartment in Washington, D.C., for quite some time, because we put on many big mobilizations in that city. And it was very common for me to come down out of the house and walk through the alleyway behind my apartment. And maybe on a hot summer day there'd be this plainclothes car with just a crack in the window because of the heat, and then you could walk by the car and you could hear the conversation upstairs in my apartment in this car, you know. And these were -- I don't know, just a part of the life, you know, that was going on.

When Johnson was president, you felt like you were in a battle over policy. When Nixon was president, for me personally it got personal. These guys made it [that way]. The vice president of the United States openly, in front of television, called me the most dangerous man in America. And it was a definite personal thing: [they said] it was specific people that were doing these things, and they were bad, and that sort of thing. So it was a part of this "goody two-shoe" control mentality still existing with its roots in the Fifties against this kind of out-of-control, passionate group of young people that really didn't care what they did. So it was a very interesting dynamic.

On protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago:

What occurred was that the mayor of the city made the decision, somewhat unexpectedly, to not grant [demonstration] permits. When I say "unexpectedly," it's not that a mayor of a city might not take a strong action against what we represented, but this really breached the First Amendment and the right to assemble and the right to protest. And so I called Ramsey Clark, who was the attorney general under Johnson and said, "What's the deal here?" And he sent out a man named Roy Wilkins, who was his really right-hand man, to assist me in going to the mayor of the city to get permits. So I actually had the Johnson administration in my camp, going to a mayor of a city saying, "Give us permits." That didn't mean that the Johnson people supported what we would say, but they supported our right to assemble. And so, the mayor stuck to his guns and no permits were granted. ...

We did evaluate calling it off; we understood that there could be serious risk to the people coming, and really made a principled stand not to [put them at risk]. On my part, what I did was focus on marshals and the ability to have medical teams on the streets with a certain quickness to respond. And then we went in really with the intent to not just subject ourselves to billy clubs, but to withdraw and pull back. To not go into an aggressive confrontation. As an example, Catholic priests and nuns came to our support in Chicago on the second day of the demonstration, and gathered around a big cross, and I went to them and said, "Really, when the police come in here tonight, you should be departing. You know, we are not violent, but nonviolence does not mean that you need to subject yourselves to what will happen." And they did stay, and they got bloodied. ...

Chicago was very challenging; it was a life-threatening situation to people, it really was. And [the reason] why we had the slogan, "The whole world is watching," had to do not just with [the fact] that it was the demonstrators being clubbed by policemen; but anchormen from major network television were also having their heads bloodied, and people that were neighbors in local Chicago communities next to the park were pulled off their porch stoops and beaten senseless. And then the story of the Catholic nuns and priests; and many, many others. ...

On the first night, the park was cleared and it was very bloody; on the second night, the park was cleared again. And so we made the decision to move everyone down in front of the hotels, thinking we would have safety there in front of the delegates. And that night we did, actually; that was a peaceful night. But then, the third day, which was the night of the nomination, was perhaps the worst of all. At this point a world television audience is starting to approach the magnitude of the first man landing on the moon, watching people being clubbed senseless by a police force that appeared to be out of control.

On being attacked by police in Chicago:

There was a judge in Chicago -- he'd been an appointee of the mayor -- and his name of course was Judge Lynch. I mean, we all delighted in the serendipity of these characters. And he granted, right at the last minute, a permit for a rally in the afternoon; so we invited our adult friends to come out, and there were women with baby carriages, and everyone felt that this was going to be a safe event and just a political rally against the war. And some young person made the decision to lower the flag to half mast. ... The police just went hysterical and came in and grabbed him and pulled him out and arrested him. And I threw a martial line around the side of that part of the crowd and just secured our perimeter. I don't know; looking back on it, it had a sort of almost a military manuever to it: it was very quick and it was a little too efficient perhaps for the police.

And then I was standing there with a bullhorn and addressed the police, [saying] that our crowd had [been] secured, and if they would just pull back and withdraw, then we could continue with our rally. And the commanding officer made the decision to attack, and he did. And I, being in front of the martial line, was kind of the point person. It was quite an experience really, having ... 40 to 50 policemen yelling "Kill Davis!" -- with a much bigger group behind them. And the first hit was to the head, and drove me to the ground; and then it was just being beaten on the back over and over again. It was, I would say, probably the only time in my life where I really thought I might not [survive]. ...

I was able to pull myself with my hands to [a] fence and then get under it and then stand up for two seconds and get into the crowd before I passed out. And then it was very interesting: I went to the hospital, which was a county hospital of Chicago, and the police put out an all-point alert to have me arrested. To have me beaten and not arrested was not cool, that was not a good idea. (Laughs) And so they did a room-by-room search of the hospital, and to this day I'm totally amazed by this: I had medical doctors, nurses and staff of the administration, with me on a table with a sheet over me, rolling me down and hiding me from a police search room-by-room. And so I escaped the arrest and watched the events on Wednesday night from a television; then the next day, I spoke on a trash can in front of the Hilton Hotel, and looked like something out of World War II footage: you know, this big pressure bandage around my head. So that was my story.

On the "Chicago Eight" trial:

All of the witnesses for the government were paid government employees. And those that were the so-called agents, who had the real good stuff about how we wanted to create violence -- it was always interesting that [their story was that] you would go to [a] restaurant, let's say, and the undercover agent would come into the restaurant too, and there was no one else around; and then this conversation would take place, and [they would say], "Rennie Davis wanted to throw stink bombs," or create this violent kind of thing. And there was never a third party corroboration. Well, if that had occurred with one or two people, it would be perhaps understandable, but to see a pattern of just made-up stories, you know, from officials in the government who had so-called "infiltrated" -- you know, over and over again. I mean, it got so in the trial, we would just all sit there and just break up into laughter, and, you know, bring humor to the whole thing, because it was a profound pattern that so many people would literally make up stories, who were paid employees of some police or police, FBI and other agents really not telling the truth. ...

The country was very divided about [the events in] Chicago. There was a very strong "law and order" element of the Democratic Party that really felt that the mayor had done the right thing in Chicago. And so Nixon had a very interesting political opportunity to cement his own relationship with a lot of the conservative Democrats by indicting the so-called demonstration leaders.

It was a very bizarre law that has been only used once. It actually was directed primarily at Martin Luther King and certain black leaders who were going around the country and speaking, and then sometimes afterwards there would be disturbances and protests. And so it made it a crime to cross a state line with the intent to incite a riot, and "intent" of course had to do with what you wrote or what you said; and then a "riot" was defined as an assembly of three or more people, one of whom violated or threatened to violate the law. So you could have three kids on a street corner making a defiant gesture to a policeman, and that could constitute legally a riot; and if you had the intent, even though it might have been a year before this riot occurred, to incite that, then you could face prison of five years. Well, we were charged with the abuse of the substantive law, but also a conspiracy to do it, so it added up to a 10-year potential sentence. The conspiracy part was interesting, because certain defendants I had never met. Bobby Seale -- I met him for the first time on the opening day of the trial. So it wasn't really much of a conspiracy, but it was a showcase trial that allowed the government to focus its attention on what was really causing this unrest in America. For us, it was a showcase trial to focus on the policies of the government that we wanted to see changed. And you had almost this mythic, Shakespearean type of characters being played out; from the judge, who was so unfair and so unjust that he was really our major ally, to the defendants that sort of ranged the gamut of the political spectrum of the time.

On the legacy of the 1960s:

The capacity of the United States to wage war kind of [in]discriminately anywhere in the world, without the American public looking over their shoulders very carefully, I think has been changed forever. ... A president thinks twice now. You know, the Gulf War was a certain kind of situation, but to go off and exercise foreign policy through the use of military means is something that policymakers think long and hard about as a result of what happened in Vietnam. ...

There's so much to be done relative to equality within the society, but the days of the Fifties and what was going on in the South, as well as Northern cities, was radically changed by the Civil Rights Movement. I mean, just to have a national holiday with Martin Luther King is an amazing change in the culture of this country. I think, too, the launching of women into their own self-empowerment, their own decision to take control of their lives, has become a true mass phenomenon and has its seeds and roots in the 1960s. So these are some very, very big themes of social change that I think very objectively did come out of that turbulent era.