Member-only story
My Life of Crime
Memoir Excerpt ©2019 Steve Russell
By the time I talked my ninth grade dropout ass into the University of Texas and figured out that lacking funds for textbooks would not sink me, it was plain that candidate Richard M. Nixon’s “secret plan” to end the Vietnam War was still secret. Almost two years of the Nixon administration had passed and the war was still doing what wars do.
When I finished my four-year military hitch, I made a bargain with myself to do whatever I could to end that war I had been supporting, but I hoped to limit any prison time to four years, balancing my contribution to prosecuting the war with a contribution to ending it. I was not looking for illegal anti-war activities, but I had not been in Austin for a year when illegal anti-war activities came looking for me.
The Student Mobilization Committee (SMC) was founded in 1969, one of several offspring of The Mobe, as the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam had become known. The Mobe attracted a lot of star power and showed great creativity.
Norman Mailer wrote The Armies of the Night about The Mobe’s 1967 March on the Pentagon. Phil Ochs gave a concert at the Lincoln Memorial and Mailer got himself arrested on the steps of the Pentagon along with over 600 others as poet Allen Ginsberg, future founders of the Youth International Party (Yippies)…
