Make Trouble, Not War: Nancy Kurshan Tells Her Story

The first time I heard about the Yippies, I was almost thirteen.  The Democratic Convention was going full swing in Chicago in August 1968.  I delivered the Washington Post back then and read the reports from the Chicago streets each morning before I began my route.  Cops were beating on everyone with the full support of Chicago Mayor Daley.  A few months later, I saw a photo of Abbie Hoffman with the word FUCK scrawled across his forehead.  A year later, I discovered that there were women Yippies, too; a fact that the men in the group didn’t talk about and neither did the mainstream press. A few months after that, I remember seeing a picture of her and Anita Hoffman burning judges’ robes after the verdict in the Chicago Conspiracy Trial was delivered.  I was living in Germany then and I’m pretty certain the photo was in a British underground paper sold at one of the newsstands downtown, but it might have been somewhere else—perhaps the Frankfurter Rundschau, a German student paper or maybe even the newspaper for the US military called Stars and Stripes.  Anyhow, it made an impression.

In her new book, a memoir titled Levitating the Pentagon and Other Uplifting Stories, Kurshan writes about the influence the antiwar and Black liberation movements had on high school and junior high students in the 1960s and 1970s, acknowledging that it was part of the movement’s intention to recruit them.  Groups like the Yippies understood this and realized that the counterculture was a point of entry.  Speaking for myself, it was an important element in my move to radical left anti-imperialist politics.  My experience was repeated thousands, if not millions of times over.  Kurshan’s text describes what it was like from her particular perspective; a perspective perhaps best described as being part of what could be considered leadership, but with virtually no acknowledgement of that role at the time by the media and even other “leaders”.  In other words, Kurshan was an important part of a group of individuals organizing protests, creating organizations, and publicizing it all.  However, due to the sexism of the movement and the media—a sexism prevalent across most of US society at the time—she and other women organizers and activists were given little credit.  This book is both a corrective to that history and a look at how this dynamic was maintained, perpetuated and ultimately altered, albeit not destroyed like it should have been.

Kurshan begins her narrative by describing her youth as a red diaper baby in New York.  Like many other new leftists, she spent summers at camps run by socialist organizations, listening to and singing with folk artists like Pete Seeger, dreaming about teenage crushes and learning about struggles against racism and for labor.  Her trajectory was typical for a middle-class US resident of the time.  Good grades in high school, acceptance to college and living on her own.  Being a leftist, Kurshan joined various groups organizing protests against US apartheid and racial discrimination, nuclear war, and ultimately the expanding US war in Vietnam.  She became involved with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and attended the first national protest against the war in 1965.  After getting accepted into a graduate psychology program at UC Berkeley, she moved there and got further involved in opposing the war, ultimately meeting Jerry Rubin, who was part of the leadership of the Vietnam Day Committee (VDC), a direct-action mass organization actively opposing the war.  Ultimately, her involvement with the VDC and Rubin would bring her back to New York City after militant pacifist Dave Dellinger hired Rubin to help organize the October 1967 protest against the Vietnam War, a protest that ended up in a mass arrest at the Pentagon.  It was also the protest that showed the nation that the movement against the war was intensifying its opposition.  Her chapter discussing this organizing and the protest itself opens with a paragraph regarding the 1967 Israeli war that resulted in Tel Aviv’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.  This provides an opening for Kurshan to begin a book-long thread regarding her growing identification with the Palestinian struggle against the colonialist occupation of Palestine.

One element of the Yippies that was never truly appreciated by the mainstream media in the United States was their seriousness.  In part, this was due to the often-satirical approach of those who called themselves Yippies.  Yet, underneath the antics splashed in the press were several longtime leftists with years of organizing in organizations with more conventional tactics.  One important element of Levitating the Pentagon is that Kurshan makes clear how serious they actually were.  In terms of her personal trajectory, that seriousness becomes especially clear in her determination to join the Weather Underground (WUO).  Like many other antiwar radicals who had gone from protest to resistance to revolution, by the early 1970s, Kurshan believed the time was right for a clandestine revolutionary organization in the United States.  Although several Like-minded groups of varying sizes existed at the time, Kurshan sought out the WUO, ultimately joining the group and its aboveground support called Prairie Fire Organizing Committee (PFOC).  Her descriptions of her time with the organization reveal some of the internal history of the group that was previously unknown.  Her perspective includes discussions of the influence of the feminist movement (especially its radical element) inside the WUO and in the greater New Left milieu.  All the while, the reader is told about Kurshan’s personal life, both in terms of her relationships with family and various friends and in terms of her understanding of her position as a woman and a revolutionary in a male-dominated society.  This interweaving of the personal and political continues throughout Kurshan’s life; from the WUO to work with prisoners and against the torture of prison control units; from her relationship with Jerry Rubin to the birth of her children and the love of her life, radical public health advocate Steve Whitman, who died of cancer in 2014.

Kurshan’s Levitating the Pentagon is a brilliant endeavor.  It’s a unique history of the period we call the Sixties told in a manner both personal and archival.  Her anecdotes bring new life to stories some readers will remember from their youth and others are hearing for the first time.  At the same time, her critical look at those stories and the times they took place in provides an important understanding as regards mistakes that were made and analyses that proved incorrect.  I trust that this will be the lasting legacy of the text.  That, and the fact that Nancy Kurshan continues to be engaged in radical left politics to this day, almost sixty years since the beginning of Yippie! on New Year-s Eve 1967. It seems almost trite to write these final words of this review, but, at the same time, it seems entirely appropriate:  Nancy Kurshan, live like her!

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