http://www.beauty-reality.com/travel/travel/sanFran/peoplespark3.htmlThe Battle of People's Park
Rolling Stone Magazine, June 14 1969
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COVER PICTURE:
This is Corporal Feliciano of the National Guard, one of 2000 men called up by California Governor Ronald Reagan to bring a halt to the Battle of People's Park. The Guardsmen were used to herd the students from one end of the campus to the other, advancing with their bayonets before them. They put up barricades, manned them, flew over the area in helicopters, cleared the streets and assisted in making arrests. After six days of this, the Guardsmen began to tire of the game. They are young men-many of whom are in the Guard because the prospect of serving more than six months in uniform is so distasteful. Feliciano and his squad were detailed to clear Telegraph. His associates hassled one student after another and finally Feliciano had seen enough. He threw down his helmet and his rifle and said he'd do no more. He wasn't about to put any more people through all this bullshit. He was arrested himself and taken away. The battle continues. meanwhile, with no light visible at the end of the tunnel.
The following reportage from the Berkeley campus of the University of California was done by John Burks, John Grissim Jr. and Langdon Winner.
BERKELEY- People's Park was just starting to amount to something when the war broke out. There were ten rock gardens, several swings, sand boxes, parallel bars, monkey bars for the kids. Over half was covered by new sod. There were three apple trees. The first seeds in the People's Revolutionary Corn Garden had sent down roots and had begun to sprout. The park was sanctified by a cross section of young Berkeley clergy, and architectural and environmental critic Alan Temko had called it "the most significant innovation in recreational design since the great public parks in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."
Street people and Berkeley students had built it - or were building it - they had lots of plans. But now the State, propelled by the will of a Governor who has vowed to put an end to demonstrations on California campuses by any means necessary, was going to take back People's Park. The University had posted notices saying they planned to take back what was theirs. The street people began circulating a "Proclamation by Madmen" which promised that five million dollars in damage would be done to the University if it reclaimed this one million dollar, block-sized plot of land. There was a lot of brave talk and the battle lines were drawn. And the war began at 4:45 on the morning of May 15, when 300 police cleared the park and took up positions. At 6:00 A.M., with a smallish crowd of onlookers in attendance, a seven - man crew started at their work of.erecting an eight foot steel mesh fence around the University's "property." The crowd had grown - and the taunting had gotten heavy - by noon when the crew had finished.
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At mid-afternoon on Thursday,
Governor Ronald Reagan called in 2000 troops of the National Guard, and as police squad cars smoldered (having earlier been torched) and the cry of "We want the park! We want the park!" filled the air, they advanced in their
flak suits to sweep the parks, bayonets fixed. The early evening stung with shots and shouts, sirens, shattering glass, and, against this rising crescendo, the cries of the injured, 25 police among them. Everything was perfectly staged for violence and turmoil and there was plenty of it. There were random clubbings by police throughout Friday as the demonstrators regrouped. A bit of light comedy on Saturday when a dozen National Guardsmen began wandering around and acting funny. A Guard medic discovered all of them had accepted oranges or brownies or both from hippie chicks and deduced that they had been slipped some acid. Sunday was the occasion for a free-form march through the city - with a neat surrealistic touch: the marchers planted plants and flowers along the line of march and the cop, who followed along behind, pulled up the plants, confiscating them. For what use?
But Tuesday was, in some ways, the most frightening of all...
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From the second-floor balcony of the Student Union came a garbled bullhorn message from a campus cop. "Chemical agents are about to be dropped. I request that you leave the plaza." With that, all the cops and deputies and Guardsmen put on their gas masks.
Then came the whack and whine and whir of a hulking brown Sikorsky helicopter carrying a bellyful of National Guard tear gas. It came low over the treetops, no more than 200 feet, laying down a veil of white, powdery vapor for 500 yards before it got to Sproul Plaza. Brigadier General Bernard Narre the field commander at the scene and who called in the helicopter attack later said "It was a Godsend that it was done at that time."snip
the fatally wounded James Rector lies on rooftop
police take aim at the rooftop
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On the day of the attack from the sky, Governor Reagan chose to do some tough talking. He called the building of People's Park "a deliberate and planned attempt at confrontation," and defended the use of birdshot to repel it. He didn't say anything about buckshot but he did say that
cops had to fight back against the "well-armed mass of people who had stockpiled all kinds of weapons and missiles." There was no mention of it in his speech, but four tanks out of the National Guard arsenal stand ready to do combat at the Berkeley Marina, where the troops he called out are quartered.
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And so for days the helicopters have roared overhead, looking for trouble, leaning into endless turns, rotors thumping the spring air with a high whistle. By evening, Guardsmen cluster at street corners, reading, smoking, hefting rifles from shoulder to shoulder. It's impossible to find out the total number of enforcers - troops, cops, deputies, highway patrol. "We don't," chuckles Reagan's press aide Paul Beck, "want to give our troop strength away to the enemy." Berkeley has always been the enemy to Reagan. He holds the opportunity to make it the first permanently occupied college town in the country and may prove loath to let it slip away from him.
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