Max Watts – James Bond of the left
Max Watts in the
Negev, Israel '52
A high government official described
Max, on the eve of his expulsion from France, as part Lenin, part James Bond.
Max Watts was his political pseudonym – his real name was Tomi Schwaetzer.
Born in Vienna during the interwar
period, Max and family fled Austria one step ahead of the Holocaust. They took
refuge in Paris, but as war closed in, Max and his father went to London while
his mother and sister made it to Lisbon and a ship bound for America.
But Max’s father, failing to find
work, committed suicide in England, so as a boy of 10 he was stranded for
several years as the war raged on the Continent and in the Pacific. As a
youngster on his own, he became politically involved on the left, his lifetime
commitment.
Eventually making it to New York to join
his mother, Max earned a BA at New York University where he joined the Young
Communist League, moving later to the American Communist Party. Eventually Max
would eschew parties and the dogmatics of ideology and adopt a kind of
ecumenical spirit toward the diverse factions of the left writ large.
Against war, he left the US to avoid the
Korean War draft and lived for a time in Israel. From Israel Max went to Paris
where he studied for a PhD in Geophysics and participated on the left, namely
for the Algerians in their war of liberation against the French. In the early
‘60s his work as a geophysicist took him to revolutionary Cuba where he met the
Castro brothers.
Returning to France as American
involvement in Vietnam heated up, Max became a founding member of ‘Resistance
inside the Army’ or RITA, a group that helped and hid American deserters sought
by the French police and the US Army. Among other notables, he worked with Jane
Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave on behalf of the beleaguered GIs.
His work with his partner June van
Ingen was so effective that the government determined his presence in France
was not in the country’s best interests. Max was to be deported, but his
homeland, Austria, refused to take him, so the French police banished him to
the island of Corsica.
However, resourceful Max met Danish
activists making a port call who sailed him back to mainland France. Slipping
into Paris, now a fugitive himself, he nonetheless continued his antiwar work,
including helping to publish Act, RITA’s newsletter.
Eventually caught again, Max was
deported to West Germany, settling in Heidelberg, headquarters of US forces in
Europe. There he continued his opposition to the Vietnam War. Now working as a
journalist in several languages, Max collaborated with a GI whistleblower to score
a media coup against US military surveillance of anyone in Germany thought to
oppose the war.
In the early ‘80s Max was on the move
again, this time to Australia, where he spent the rest of his life working as a
local activist and international left freelance journalist. He took up many
progressive causes. A skilled sailor, he once maneuvered his sailboat to block
a US nuclear missile cruiser from entering Sydney Harbor.
It was in Australia that I ‘met’ Max by
phone and email. Back in Europe of the ‘60s he had known of brother Jeff
Sharlet and his underground paper Vietnam GI, and admired him from afar.
Although the two of them never met, they moved on parallel tracks in the global
struggle against the American war in Vietnam.
Max, an extravagant personality, was prodigiously
effective on four continents – his death in 2010 was echoed throughout the
world in left circles.
Michaela ‘Miki’ Lang – Long lost, but
found
Miki Lang,
Sausalito CA '10
By an extraordinary stroke of luck we
finally found Miki after a long search. During their senior year at Indiana
University (IU), Jeff and Miki had been an item. I was hoping to talk with her
about that time. We had photos of the two of them together, but Miki was
nowhere to be found on the Internet.
However, my research assistant Karen
Grote Ferb, was determinedly persistent and eventually found Miki’s long cold
trail by an unusual route. Although we assumed she had probably married and
taken her husband’s name, Karen tried a wild card approach of searching under
Miki’s surname.
Her search for ‘Lang’ brought up a German
web site about paintball, an unusual sport. Featured was an American, Oliver
‘Ollie’ Lang, rated the best player in international competition. To round out
the homage to Oliver, there was an interview with his mother, none other than
Miki Lang of Sausalito, CA.
Miki had finished up at IU with an MA in
’70 and a few years later joined the Peace Corps. Thus began her long career
abroad, later working for C.A.R.E. and the US Agency for International
Development. Miki began her service in Sierra Leone, but then worked in Chad,
Mali, and Cameroon, as well as India.
After
16 years in Africa and South Asia, she finally returned to the States in ’88.
She remembered Jeff well as one of the
first voices at IU to bring back from Vietnam dire warnings about US
involvement in the war. Miki had been especially struck by “the intensity with
which he talked about Vietnam and how relentlessly he pursued the subject.”
Looking back over time, she recognized that opposing the war was Jeff’s
singular purpose in life. So true.
Jim Wallihan, California radical
Jim Wallihan
addressing Governor Brown, Sacramento CA '64
A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech
Movement (FSM), Jim arrived in Bloomington in the fall of ’65. He had come to
Indiana University (IU) for grad school from the University of California (UC).
When the mass arrests of student protesters occurred at Sproul Plaza on the
Berkeley campus, Jim, having eluded the sweep, became spokesman for FSM before
the governor in Sacramento.
Unbeknownst to Jim, the Davis CA police
had sent ahead to the Bloomington authorities an unsolicited warning that a
California radical was on his way. Outlandishly a couple of years later, while
on trial for a raucous anti-Dow Chemical demo at IU, the local District
Attorney asked Jim, “Isn’t it true that you organized the California riots?”
Jim had been a so-called faculty brat at
UC-Davis, not far from San Francisco. When his father, a noted agricultural
biologist, was invited to spend a year in the Philippines, Jim took a leave of
absence and joined his parents. Later he did a summer stint as a smoke jumper
fighting fires in the Alaskan wilderness.
Arriving at IU,
Jim naturally sought out the small coterie of New Left students who were
stirring the pot on that conservative campus. He met Jeff, who had returned
from the Vietnam War the previous year. Jeff hung out with the activist group,
but had not joined their efforts to launch a chapter of Students for Democratic
Society (SDS) at IU.
Jeff was skeptical of the efficacy of
student protest against the war. At that point in the antiwar movement, SDS was
not well focused or effectively organized. Jim persuaded him to join the new
SDS group and lend his authority as an ex-Vietnam GI opposed to the war. Jim
and Jeff soon reorganized the chapter and became part of the leadership of campus
SDS. Later, under Jeff’s aegis as SDS president, the frequency, focus, and
effectiveness of antiwar actions greatly increased.
Jeff moved on to grad school at
University of Chicago, but his heart wasn’t in the academic game. After just a
semester he withdrew and used his fellowship funds to launch a GI antiwar
paper, Vietnam GI. Jim joined him several months later, lending a hand
on the paper as its circulation grew rapidly.
Together they travelled the country
visiting military bases looking for returning combat GIs with stories about
what was really going on in Vietnam. During the summer of ’68 Jeff and Jim took
off for the West Coast. Chicago was hosting the Democratic Presidential
Convention, sure to be a magnet for unrest, and the Chicago police, with help
from the Army, was gearing up to block the massive, planned antiwar protest.
Work was underway on the August issue of
VGI,
and Jeff and Jim felt the better part of valor would be to temporarily move the
editorial process out of town. Around that time the two of them sat for a long
interview with a major underground paper – their topic: How civilian antiwar
protest could benefit from working with the numerous disaffected GIs. The GI
antiwar movement was gathering steam.
Jeff died before the war he fought in
and against, came to an end, but Jim retained his memories of their joint
struggle, which when we met early in the new century he shared with me.
Showdown in
Kyoto
Japanese riot
police at the ready
Late summer ’68 – Jeff was supposed to go
to Prague. A group of US antiwar leaders was to parley with a delegation from
the National Liberation Front (NLF), the shadowy political arm of the Communist
insurgency in South Vietnam. The NLF was particularly interested in emerging GI
protest against the war and hoped to meet Jeff.
Jeff was interested, but didn’t want to
go. He had worked in intelligence in Vietnam, and was under interdiction not to
travel behind the Iron Curtain for five years after finishing his tour in ’64. Penalties
for violating the restriction were stiff, and Jeff had more important work
editing Vietnam GI than doing time in federal prison.
Just about the same time, Jeff’s deputy
editor, Dave Komatsu, was invited to Japan as a representative of the GI
antiwar movement. As a Japanese-American Dave felt he was chosen for his
language ability, and he wasn’t enthusiastic
about going. However, Dave came up with a solution – he would replace Jeff in
Europe, and Jeff would head for Japan – to the city of Kyoto.
The Japanese peace organization, the
host group, was harboring nearly 20 US deserters from the Vietnam War, but they
were proving hard to keep safely hidden from the Japanese authorities and US
military police. The peace activists needed counsel from someone of authority on
the rising GI antiwar protest.
Jeff was their man, but to cover his
real purpose in Japan, they folded him into an international peace gathering in
Kyoto. There Jeff did his thing – spoke publicly at the conference by day, and
in the evenings privately counseled on the deserter problem.
At the end of the conference, an antiwar
march on Kyoto town hall was planned. Jeff had seen such confrontations with
the Japanese police on television and wanted no part of it. He said he had
business elsewhere, but his hosts wouldn’t hear of it. As an honored guest as
well as an ex-Vietnam GI, they insisted Jeff join them – and in the front rank
no less.
He could see the massed police in riot
gear dead ahead and was filled with trepidation. Arms locked, the protesters
set off. A melee ensued, but happily Jeff got through it unhurt. Another day on
the Vietnam antiwar front.
Bernard ‘Bernie’
Morris – Mentor to the New Left
Bernie &
Betty Morris, summer on Cape Cod, '60s
Bernie was no stranger to bucking the
system. As a young man he went to Yale for a graduate degree, but was thought
too far to the left and pushed out. America was then on the cusp of WWII so
Bernie went to Washington and landed a job in the Justice Department.
At Justice, his office mate and friend
was a young woman named Judith Coplon. ‘Judy’ was later convicted as a Soviet
spy which subsequently created problems for Bernie when he moved to the State
Department. When the anti-communist Red Scare got underway in the late ‘40s,
simple ‘guilt by association’ could be a source of trouble.
Bernie survived that, but then at the
end of the ‘50s as the USSR and Communist China began to fall out, he offered a
novel explanation. As an intelligence analyst, he was among the first to spot
the coming split between the two Communist giants. However at State, the
prevailing consensus was of a unified Communist Bloc, and Bernie was told to
cease advocating a contrary interpretation.
A few years later in the early ‘60s
Secretary of State Dean Rusk became a key point man for President Kennedy’s
growing involvement in the civil war in Vietnam. At that point, Bernie had had
enough of government and left for academe.
He accepted a position as Professor of
International Relations at Indiana University (IU), offering courses on Soviet Foreign
Policy, International Communism, and the like. Within his courses Bernie
basically taught critical thinking on the great issues of the day. No longer
subject to Washington rules, he became an outspoken public intellectual.
As Bernie gained a student following, he
added a course on Marxism, the first time the subject was offered at IU.
Neither an advocate nor a critic, he taught Marxism as a course in political
theory.
Many students were drawn to the course
and reached their own conclusions. Campus New Left activists were especially
attracted to the course, including Robin Hunter, Paulann Groninger, and my
brother Jeff Sharlet among others.
As a chapter of the Students for a
Democratic Society (SDS) got up and running at the university, Professor Bernie
Morris became the group’s unofficial adviser. Though not an activist himself,
he did attend SDS’s Friday afternoon rallies and some of their major antiwar demos.
President Nixon’s 1970 invasion of
Cambodia transformed antiwar protest at IU and other schools from essentially a
minority voice into a huge expression of dissent. More than 8,000 IU students
turned out to register their protest and hear speakers condemn Nixon’s policy.
For Bernie, that afternoon was perhaps
his finest hour as mentor to the critically minded. Of all the speakers, he
received the greatest ovation. Professor Morris scorned Nixon’s plan for
terminating the war by widening it as
strategically unsound,
politically
self-defeating,
and morally
indefensible.
Ralph Levitt, A
life on the left
The Bloomington
3, Ralph Levitt (l), Indiana University '63
When I first met Ralph, he was intent on
pursuing an academic career. We were both newly minted graduate students in
Russian and East European Studies at Indiana University (IU).
Brother Jeff was also on campus as a
freshman. He too crossed paths with Ralph, but ‘politically’, as Ralph took a
very different path, eventually spending his life on the left.
The first intimations of protest against
the emerging Vietnam War were starting to stir on campus when Ralph joined a
nascent Trotskyist group, the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA). YSA’s political
writ was broad. During the Cuban Missile Crisis of fall ’62, the group
organized a protest march against the American naval blockade of Cuba.
That action, which took great courage,
was not well received either on campus or in town as the rally around the flag
spirit swept the country. Several months later, the YSA chapter brought a
speaker to campus. His remarks were in no way inflammatory, yet the county
prosecutor chose to indict Ralph and fellow leaders for inciting the overthrow
of the government of the United States, an absurd contention. Clearly it was
payback for the earlier provocative pro-Cuba march.
The charges were without merit, but
defending against them took up the next three years of the lives of the
‘Bloomington 3’ (B-3), Ralph and his co-defendants. They tirelessly traveled
the country, speaking wherever a sympathetic audience could be found – trying
to raise public consciousness about their case and raise funds to fight it.
By ’65 the indictment hanging over the
B-3 had been withdrawn, but by then Ralph Levitt never looked back to academe.
He moved up and became a major activist in the Socialist Worker’s Party (SWP),
the YSA’s parent organization. As a party heavy he went wherever needed – to a
political demo or a labor action. His home base was the San Francisco Bay Area.
Intent on showing solidarity with the
proletariat, Ralph became a motorman in the Bay Area Rapid Transit system
(BART). His organizational talents recognized, he eventually moved up in the
ranks.
Upon retirement, Ralph moved back to his
home town of Indianapolis where his elderly parents still lived. Highly
intelligent and well informed, he continued his involvement in SWP, serving as
the party candidate in both statewide and federal elections in Indiana.
With few illusions about winning office,
Ralph nevertheless skillfully used the campaign platforms to reach a broader
audience with the party line.
A
lifetime on the left.
Susie ‘Creamcheese’, Antiwar groupie
The
real Suzy Creamcheese '67
I spoke to Susie Creamcheese just
once; that was over 40 years ago. I had no idea who she was, and she didn’t
identify herself. In a highly agitated voice, she said I must come immediately,
my brother was dying.
My brother Jeff was indeed very ill,
but my father assured me his condition was stable. I had planned to fly to
Florida two days hence to talk with his doctors, but to my profound shock he
died the next day. The caller was right, and I arrived too late.
I only learned the identity of the
young woman who called me decades later. She was nicknamed Susie Creamcheese.
Having driven from Chicago to Miami to visit my brother during his last days,
Susie was so stunned by his condition she called me to sound the alarm.
Susie’s real name was Susan Rosenberg.
From an affluent Chicago family, she neither had to earn a living, nor was she
going to college. Susie Creamcheese was said to have been on ‘the wild side of
hippyism’, styling herself in the manner of Janis Joplin, one of the zaniest
musical icons of the day.
She had hung out with Jeff and the
circle of people around his underground paper Vietnam GI – as a kind of
antiwar groupie. Susie got her moniker from a Frank Zappa song about a young
music groupie he called Suzy Creamcheese who followed the band on the road. Her
real name was Susan Zeiger.
By great coincidence, the original
Suzy Creamcheese is the sister of film maker David Zeiger, who in 2005 premiered
his award-winning documentary on the Vietnam GI antiwar movement, Sir! No Sir!, dedicated to Jeff Sharlet.
Lincoln Bergman,
Revolutionary poet
Lincoln Bergman in recent times, California redwoods
My brother Jeff died young – he was only
27. In the final years of the ‘60s, he
had become an admired leading figure of the growing GI protest against the war
in Vietnam. He knew the war well; he had served in Nam ’63-’64.
Decades on, Jeff is still remembered for
his leadership of the antiwar paper, Vietnam GI, an almost instant
success in the world of underground journalism of that day. His untimely death
was widely noted in the Movement press, in both civilian and GI publications
alike.
Among the many obits and death notes,
one particularly stood out, a eulogy framed as a long narrative poem by Lincoln
Bergman, a revolutionary poet. His poem was published in The Movement in July ’69 not long after Jeff’s death.
A man of the left, Linc Bergman’s
political activism went beyond the issue of the day, the Vietnam War. During
the ‘60s he had taught English as a second language in Communist China. And as
the war in Southeast Asia was winding down in the early ‘70s, Bergman had spent
a year in revolutionary Cuba broadcasting for Radio Havana.
In his poetic tribute to Jeff, Seeds of Revolution, he began, “Brothers
and Sisters, Part of us is dead. … He did time in Vietnam … And when he came
home, He gave [the GIs] something to believe in.”
Linc continued:
Not long ago he said:
‘We felt a newspaper Was the best way
to begin
To talk to the enlisted men
The guys on the bottom. …’
He was a quiet, vital guy
Who thought before he spoke.
Looked straight in peoples’ eyes
And those who listened learned. …
Talking to the men in uniform
Feeling the pulse of the people
Working long hours to help
The paper serve their needs.
Concluding his paean to Jeff, the poet
wrote:
He told us to plant the seeds
People had to change
Change through their experience
He spoke the truth. …
A good man.
So many things
Embodied in those three words
Death leaves so much unsaid.
Courage from his courage
Example of his deeds.
For Jeff is dead…
Like Johnny Appleseed.
In a note to the poem in a volume of his
collected poetry, which appeared several years ago, the poet added a fitting valediction
to Jeff. Within the antiwar movement,
Jeff Sharlet was an authentic leader,
modest and sincere, calm, a good
listener, with iron determination
and large vision.
