Jon Wiener

took me ~4 months on and off but i finally finished it!!!!! i liked this book a lot but it was Very long and at times unfocused, so i found myself taking regular breaks. i was particularly unimpressed with the chapter on women's lib, tacked on towards the end, that mostly covered the early 70s - it's like... okay to acknowledge that women's lib wasn't a major issue in LA in the 60s and leave it there... i would prefer that to feeling like an afterthought! but that said all the content was interesting, and in particular the two chapters which recounted events for which mike davis was present were absolutely riveting reading. if you have the time and patience, much of this is essential reading for understanding the social climate that shaped not only LA but america in the latter half of the 20th century.… (altro)

This is the book on which the excellent Netflix docu-drama about the Trial of the Chicago 7 is based, and I wanted to read it after watching that film (highly recommended). While the book is informative, it does not provide much more detail or depth than you could glean from watching the movie or living through the events and reading daily news reports (as I did).

The book begins with a brief introduction including thumbnail sketches of the major players, as well as a very brief sketch of the time period--1969--to provide context: the anti-war movement, the Black Panthers, the youth counter-culture, etc. There is a chronology of the 4 days of the Democratic Convention over which the alleged "riots" took place, and a longer, although barebones, chronology of the major events of 1967-75, including the trial, the appeals, the course of the Vietnam War, and Watergate. We also learn what happened to each of the defendants after the trial.

The bulk of the book consists of verbatim excerpts from the transcript of the trial. This is only about 190 pages out of about 22,000 pages of trial transcript. Most of the excerpts are short snippets of some of the more lurid and/or egregious events during the trial. Nevertheless, these excerpts make for very interesting reading, and there's quite a bit that wasn't included in the film. Many celebrities, including Judy Collins, Allen Ginsberg, Arlo Guthrie and Norman Mailer testified.

To be clear, the book is exactly what is is advertised to be: a limited but accurate description of the parties involved, a description of the context in which the trial took place, including the legal issues at stake, and excerpts giving a feel for what went on during the trial. Nothing stellar or exceptional here, but it does the job.

3 stars… (altro)

"The atmosphere was charged with the special excitement that occurs when a group of people can see and visibly measure their potential power for the first time."

I wish this could've been the epic sprawl Mike Davis and Jon Weiner hinted at in the beginning of the book (the main text is ~640 pages, the rest being references and notes). Instead, due to publisher concerns—and maybe lack of endurance—we're provided with an account that mostly focuses on the city proper. A damn good one, mind you.… (altro)

In How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey Across America, Jon Wiener argues, “Despite the immense effort by conservatives to shape public memory of the Cold War, their monuments weren’t built, their historical sites have had few visitors, and many of their museums have shifted their focus to other topics. The public did not embrace a heroic story of the triumph of good over evil in the Cold War” (pg. 2). He continues, “The launch of the Victims of Communism Memorial project was something else. It came with all the trappings of official Cold War ideology, starting with bipartisan support in Congress and approval by a Democratic president. The initial proposal, of course, came from the heart of the Reagan right” (pg. 30). Further, “Another kind of skepticism about the proposed monument was expressed by historians and journalists who had long criticized the conservative argument about the Cold War. The Cold War, they argued, should not be seen as a struggle between good and evil but rather as a more ordinary conflict between states with particular interests that they worked to defend and advance; this was the ‘realist’ view” (pg. 31). To this end, Wiener traveled the U.S. to study the narrative presented at various national parks and monuments with a connection to the Cold War.
Wiener writs, “The world’s leading conservatives have come here to declare, again and again, that the Cold War, like World War II, was a good war, a war to defeat totalitarianism, and that victory in the Cold War was equal in significance to the defeat of Hitler” (pg. 45). He continues, “Naming names was one of the central features of Cold War America, and even today looms large in the memories of those required to participate” (pg. 65). Looking at nuclear tourism, Wiener writes, “According to the conservatives’ ‘good war’ framework, the United States was able to prevail in the Cold War first of all because American nuclear weapons deterred the Soviets from attacking the United States and then because the Soviet Union was bankrupted by a renewed arms race in the Reagan years – which included nuclear weapons testing…Thus the Nevada Test Site ought to provide a place to tell the story of how active testing of nuclear weapons, the weapons that defined the Cold War, guaranteed America’s freedom and then brought America’s eventual victory in a fifty-year struggle to defeat an enemy that was as significant, and as evil, as Hitler” (pg. 113). In this way, “Conservatives were trying to find ways to commemorate victory in the Cold War. They hoped to bring coherence to their cause by enshrining nuclear weapons in an honored place in American history” (pg. 121).
Turning to the role of media, Wiener writes, “Eisenhower’s Farewell Address is regarded as a classic today, but at the time it was a different story. The warning did not receive a lot of attention, in part because it was overshadowed by Kennedy’s Inaugural Address three days later, with its potent ‘ask not’ rhetoric” (pg. 196). In this way, “Although Eisenhower’s warning against the military-industrial complex constitutes one of the key moments in the history of the Cold War, it has received little attention in the official repositories of public memory. The video of the speech at the unofficial site YouTube, on the other hand, reveals just how widespread is the popular interest in Eisenhower’s address” (pg. 209). Further returning to nuclear threats, Wiener writes, “The fallout shelter demonstrated the determination of ordinary Americans to survive Soviet attack and thus constituted a key element in America’s victory in the Cold War. That was the idea. You’d think it would provide a popular subject for exhibits on the 1950s. But fallout shelter exhibits are few and far between. I couldn’t find any in New York or Chicago or L.A. One of the few can be found in Bismarck” (pg. 206). Finally, of Nixon, Wiener writes, “Liberals may still hate Nixon, but that doesn’t mean conservatives like him. For those on the right celebrating Cold War victory, Nixon was part of the problem. Instead of fighting as Reagan did to roll back and eventually defeat communist totalitarianism, Nixon negotiated détente with the Russians and traveled to China to open relations with Mao” (pg. 241).… (altro)