Occupied Berkeley

The ominous motor noise was at first too faint to be heard by the crowd in Sproul Plaza below. Five hundred University of California students and other young people milled about, some lolling on the grass, some gibing at and singing to the National Guardsmen who surrounded them. Gradually, the grinding sound enveloped the plaza. A bulbous green helicopter swooped in over the treetops, belching white puffs of a potent military tear gas called CS. The powder settled indiscriminately on demonstrators and bystanders, drifting into classrooms and the campus hospital. The crowd in Sproul Plaza tried to flee, but gas-masked Guardsmen blocked the exits. The ubiquitous dust terrified women and children picnicking near by; youngsters in a playground half a mile away became hysterical. It disrupted the oral examination of a doctoral candidate. One gasping coed, found in a classroom alone, could only sob: "Bastards! I'm a sorority girl!"

Blue Meanies. She was not the only bystander affected last week by the violence that racked leafy, cerebral Berkeley and brought it under military rule. The trouble started May 15, when the university fenced off a valuable, three-acre lot that it owned and planned to develop. Police evicted students and street people, who had made the tract into a pleasant, albeit illegal, People's Park (TIME, May 23). When a rock- and pipe-throwing mob of students and radicals protested, Alameda County sheriff's deputies--dubbed by students the "Blue Meanies"--sprayed them with birdshot and buckshot. One bystander, James Rector, 25, died last week of buckshot wounds. Rector, a drifter and probation violator, had been watching the fracas from a rooftop. Police fired at his perch after bricks were thrown from an adjacent building.

Both sides quickly stiffened their efforts. Sheriff Frank I. Madigan, 61, empowered to act under a Governor's emergency decree issued during a previous student disorder, called in Guardsmen and police from surrounding areas. Soon 2,260 troops, plus cops and sheriff's deputies, patrolled the town and campus. Berkeley began to look like an occupied city, with Army Jeeps and trucks clogging the streets, helicopters patrolling the skies and "Yanqui go home" scrawled on walls. Protest marches of up to 4,000, though illegal under the emergency edict, became a daily occurrence. Late last week, Guardsmen surrounded and arrested 482 marchers in the downtown area. They were held in $800 bail each, in an attempt to break the back of the movement. In ten days of disturbances, there were 150 injuries on both sides and nearly 900 arrests.

The tougher the crackdown by authorities became, the greater the sympathy aroused by the protesters. One old man was seen smiling and waving a flower at demonstrators, and many homeowners offered garden hoses to thirsty marchers. Seventy-eight representatives of long-established student organizations called for continuing the unofficial development of the park, a course supported by 12,719 of almost 15,000 students voting in a referendum. Chancellor Roger Heyns refused. A boycott of classes until the Guard was withdrawn was called by 177 of the 1,000-member faculty.

Dogs of War. Eight professors went to Sacramento to ask Governor Ronald Reagan to pull out the troops, but Reagan supported Madigan's tough stand. "Once the dogs of war have been unleashed," the Governor lectured, "you must expect things will happen." One professor in the delegation, Leon Wofsy, accused Reagan of making a political speech and undercutting the authority of college administrators by trying to fire chancellors who opposed the statehouse. At that, Reagan slammed his hand on the desk, shouting: "Listen, you are a liar! I've fought to keep politics out of the running of the university." Reagan later blamed Rector's death on "the first college administrator who said it was all right to break laws in the name of dissent."

The university administrators began to realize toward week's end that they had miscalculated. Their hard-line decision to forcibly evict the street people from the park, which led to the military occupation, had backfired. In effect, they had relinquished their freedom of action to the police and troopers. Chancellor Heyns, who earlier had refused to compromise university control of the tract, now indicated that he might negotiate. The university issued conciliatory statements, and Heyns asked for removal of non-university police from the campus. A substantial number of police left the university grounds, and arrests in that area dropped. The young opposition, however, showed no signs of collapsing. Protesters kept busy slipping underground newspapers to troopers when Guard officers were not looking. At one point, 15 addled Guardsmen were relieved of duty; Major General Glenn C. Ames complained that "hippie-type females" had slipped his men brownies, oranges and apple juice spiked with LSD in a sort of chemical-war counterattack.

In the din of protest, People's Park seemed largely forgotten. The National Guardsmen who had moved in to save it for the university soon occupied it as a bivouac area. It was still fenced off, and where swings and benches had been, there were Jeeps, trucks, pup tents and latrines.

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