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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
A letter from an old friend stirs up passions from one of the most disturbing, yet little-known, crimes of the New Left era. It happened exactly 25 years ago.
Dec 13, 1999 | Twenty-five years ago Monday, my friend Betty Van Patter disappeared from a tavern on University Avenue called the Berkeley Square and was never seen alive again.
Six months earlier, I had recruited Betty to keep the books of the Educational Opportunities Corp., an entity I had created to run a school for the children of the Black Panther Party. By the time the police fished her battered body out of San Francisco Bay in January 1975, I knew that her killers were the Panthers themselves.
At the time, the Panthers were still being defended by writers like Murray Kempton and Garry Wills in the pages of the New York Times, and by then-Gov. Jerry Brown of California. The governor was even a confidant of Elaine Brown, who had hired Betty and whom Huey Newton had appointed to stand in for him as the Panther leader while he was in "exile" in Cuba.
At the time of Betty's death, Elaine was running for Oakland City Council and had just secured a $250,000 grant from the Nixon administration under a federal juvenile delinquency program. J. Anthony Kline, the consigliore to whom she had been able to turn when the party's enforcers got in trouble with the law, was about to be appointed to Gov. Brown's cabinet. (Today Kline is a justice on the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.)
In pursuit of answers to the mystery of Betty's death, I subsequently discovered that the Panthers had killed more than a dozen people in the course of conducting extortion, prostitution and drug rackets in the Oakland ghetto. While these criminal activities were taking place, the group enjoyed the support of the American left, the Democratic Party, Bay Area trade unions and even the Oakland business establishment. (The head of Clorox, Oakland's largest company, for example, sat on the board of the Educational Opportunities Corp.)
On a far smaller scale, the Panther killings were an American version of the "Katyn massacre," the infamous murder of Polish officers carried out on Stalin's orders that the left had denied and kept hidden for decades, until the opening of the Soviet archives settled the "dispute" for good. It was much harder for me to understand why the Panthers should be able to get away with these murders in democratic America, and why the nation's press should turn such a blind eye to a group that the nation's law enforcement had made an object of its attentions.
Whatever the reasons, the fact remains that to this day not a single organization of the mainstream press has ever investigated the Panther murders, even though the story is one that touches the lives and political careers of the entire liberal establishment, including the first lady and the deputy attorney general in charge of civil rights for the Clinton administration. Both Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bill Lann Lee began their political careers as law students at Yale by organizing demonstrations in 1970 to shut down the university and stop the trial of Panther leaders who had tortured and then executed a black youth named Alex Rackley.
This silence is even more puzzling since, despite the blackout by the national media, the details of the story have managed to trickle out over the years. This has been the result of efforts by me and by my colleague Peter Collier, by radical journalist Kate Coleman, by Hugh Pearson, by the nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting, New Times magazine and one or two others, including most particularly David Talbot and David Weir, now editors at Salon.
Because of our efforts, informed citizens are at least aware of these murders. On the other hand, unlike in the Soviet Union -- where testimonies emerged as soon as the threat of retaliation was gone -- in the 25 years since Betty's death, few additional witnesses have come forward to add to our knowledge about her case or these other American crimes. There are hundreds if not thousands of veterans of the '60s who have at least some knowledge of these deeds, but who have remained silent and therefore complicit to this day.
These include notable figures like Tom Hayden and journalists like Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer -- both of whom promoted the Panthers as revolutionary heroes at the time, and have failed to correct that impression ever since. But it also includes many lesser figures who worked day in and day out to facilitate the Panthers' rise to power and to cover up their crimes along the way. Evidently, these fellow travelers have remained convinced that even though the crimes were committed, it was (and is) no responsibility of theirs to help solve them.
I am constantly asked by people who have read my autobiography, "Radical Son," or who have heard me talk about these events, how it is that my former comrades on the left can remain so silently and stubbornly devoted to "experiments" like the Panthers that failed, to doctrines that are false and to causes that are demonstrably wrongheaded and even evil.
On Nov. 20, an answer to these questions came in the form of a letter from an old friend, a Berkeley writer named Art Goldberg, who was himself deeply involved in the activities of the Panthers and in their deceptions, and who remains a faithful keeper of the progressive flame today.
Goldberg and I grew up in Long Island on the same block in Sunnyside, N.Y. -- a neighborhood of Queens that had been colonized by the Communist Party, to which both our parents belonged. Because Art was a few years older, he and I weren't that close as children, but we became friends after college when we found ourselves together in Berkeley, in 1960, as members of the nascent New Left.
Art was a writer for the Berkeley Barb and other "Movement" papers. He made himself particularly useful to the Black Panther Party. So valuable was Art's propaganda to the Panthers that eventually Huey Newton assigned him to write the official biography of Charles Garry, the lawyer who defended Newton against charges that he had murdered a young policeman named John Frey. Newton had indeed committed the murder, but in Art's account and in all the writings of New Leftists at the time, Huey was presented as the innocent victim of a racist conspiracy by the state.
