By Tom Gallagher

THE FAILURE OF George McGovern's 1972 antiwar candidacy is remembered as proof that you can't get elected president while opposing a war, yet the Democrats lost four years earlier as well, when their candidate, Hubert Humphrey, supported a war in Vietnam that was being passed from president to president, each of whom claimed that while he didn't start it, he sure would finish it. Then as now, the war's opponents, although en route to majority status, were shut out of the election.

Jo Freeman's At Berkeley in the '60s: The Education of an Activist, 1961-1965, is a thoroughly footnoted memoir whose central event is the 1964 Free Speech Movement. Freeman, who went on to become a sociologist and a lawyer, arrived in Berkeley in 1961 as a 16-year-old freshman from southern California. Several dozen UC Berkeley students had been arrested in a protest outside a House Un-American Activities Committee hearing at San Francisco City Hall the previous spring, and Freeman quickly became one of the students chafing at the campus's restrictive speech code. The Bay Area's civil rights movement effectively began in the fall of 1963, when the Ad Hoc Committee to End Discrimination picketed and then sat in at Mel's Drive-In in San Francisco, demanding that its owner, supervisor and mayoral candidate Harold Dobbs, hire more blacks.

The following spring Freeman, who later did full-time civil rights work in Mississippi, committed her first act of civil disobedience by taking part a sit-in for increased black hiring at San Francisco's Sheraton Palace Hotel. Demonstrations at the hotel grew to 4,000, and sit-ins for increased minority hiring by car dealers on Van Ness Avenue's auto row followed.

In the fall, the action shifted back to the other side of the bay, when the rules about who could say what where on the Cal campus led to the spontaneous occupation of Sproul Plaza by 3,000 students, of whom 768 were arrested in the state's largest mass arrest to that point.

Freeman hadn't previously known Mario Savio, "the philosophy undergraduate who articulated our innermost feelings so well," as she describes him, but she quickly recognized the ability to connect global and local issues that made him the movement's prime orator. She also noted the weaknesses that would plague the student movement as it turned its attention toward the war: a new "generation" of activists coming along every two years, the dream of "revolution on one campus," and the spirit of Savio's comment to her that "the difference between you and me is that you would settle for a drab victory, while I prefer a brilliant defeat."

Brilliant defeat is just what the Weathermen (whose name came from a throwaway reference to a Bob Dylan song in their founding statement) sought in the Chicago demonstrations they organized after taking control of part of the Students for a Democratic Society at the group's final convention in June 1969. To the credit of the loosely organized SDS, which had become the most significant left-wing campus organization in decades, most of the group's membership regarded the Weathermen's ideological battle with the Maoist Progressive Labor Party (later revealed to have been prodded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation) as increasingly trivial. In August, the New York underground newspaper Rat published a letter of resignation from the entire University of Arkansas chapter, and Drew University historian Jeremy Varon's Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies reports that only one in seven of those who pledged to come to the bizarre October Days of Rage demonstrations actually showed up. When only 350 people appeared, Weathermen leader Bernardine Dohrn described it as "like showing up at the wedding knowing this is a terrible mistake, but going through with it anyhow." The subsequent Weather Underground bombing campaign is best remembered for the March 1970 destruction of a Greenwich Village townhouse caused by the accidental detonation of a bomb that killed three of the group. The bomb was apparently intended for a G.I. dance, but the Weathermen were sufficiently chastened that they never harmed another person in any of their subsequent bombings.

The German Red Army Faction, whose story occupies the second half of Varon's book, picked up where the Weathermen left off, with kidnappings, assassinations, a plane hijacking, and the seizure of the German embassy in Stockholm, as well as the alleged prison suicides of the group's leaders. Varon explains that "the name itself was doubly provocative: RAF was, of course, the acronym for Britain's Royal Air Force, which had bombed Germany during World War II, and the 'Red Army' was the Soviet military, Germany's great nemesis." The RAF claimed the 1942 assassination of Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich in Czechoslovakia as historical precedent for its campaign, and Germany's adoption of strict laws to repress them and similar groups struck some as reprising Adolf Hitler's early efforts against the Socialists and Communists. But Marxists also denounced the RAF, calling the group's theories a sort of Stalinist fundamentalism that mistook Marx's analytical statements about the roles that people perform in a capitalist system for existential condemnation of them as individuals. Herbert Marcuse, the "philosopher of the New Left," wrote that their actions only strengthened the capitalist system's "repressive potential."

The Weather Underground got off relatively lightly when the government was forced to drop most charges against them in 1973 due to searches conducted without proper warrants and because "it appeared that the Central Intelligence Agency or the National Security Agency ... or both, had conducted illegal investigations."

There's Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence, by Brandeis University sociologist David Cunningham, is all about illegal investigations, specifically COINTELPRO, an acronym for a series of five separate FBI counterintelligence programs (defined here as programs "restricting a target's ability to carry out planned actions or encouraging acts of wrongdoing") aimed at the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, "Black Nationalist/Hate Groups," "White Hate Groups," and the "New Left." The latter two constitute the focus of the book.

Cunningham argues that while the FBI tried to keep the white hate groups from committing illegal acts, it tried to prevent the New Left from even existing. There was actually a great deal of liberal support for federal action against the Ku Klux Klan and its ilk since state governments in the South could not be relied on to curb their activities, and the internal culture of the FBI (which had no black agents and whose director, J. Edgar Hoover, had publicly characterized "colored people" as "quite ignorant, mostly uneducated") paradoxically made it quite effective in infiltrating these groups.

On the other hand, the cultural chasm between the bureau and the New Left made infiltration of this target group quite difficult. Agents adopting the long-haired guise presumably required for their undercover work might expect "scornful looks, offhand comments and public speculation about [their] gender" from their fellow agents, and the New Left even amused itself with events like the 1968 SDS National Convention workshop on "sabotage and explosives" that, according to the notes of one FBI participant, apparently succeeded in its goal of drawing all of the undercover agents into the same room. All of the COINTELPROs were officially discontinued after their existence was revealed in the publication of documents taken during a 1971 break-in at the FBI office in Media, Pa., by a group of activists calling themselves the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI.

Freeman's book may carry the greatest historical interest for readers in California, and particularly the Bay Area, who will find many current and recent political figures in its pages. The morbidly interesting stories of Varon's book may convince us that it isn't always the case that history repeats itself, the first time being tragedy and the second time farce; sometimes it's farce the first time around. The book also suggests an interesting similarity between the RAF's determination to bring true democracy to Germany by force and the U.S. government's current campaign in Iraq: neither had a practical chance of succeeding, but both the RAF and the U.S. government decided not to let that get in their way.

The wars in Iraq and Vietnam differ in many ways, and it may be the current war that poses the greater danger. Despite the government's insistence on viewing Vietnam as a cold war domino, we can now see quite clearly that the Vietnamese "enemy" never really hated the United States, which is clearly not the case with many of the enemies our government is currently creating. This makes any lessons the 2004 anti-Iraq war movement can derive from the 1968 election, which left the anti-Vietnam War movement high and dry, all the more urgent.

Tom Gallagher is a writer who lives San Francisco and a frequent contributor to Lit.

At Berkeley in the '60s: The Education of an Activist, 1961-1965

By Joe Freeman. Indiana University Press, 358 pages, $21.95.

Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies

By Jeremy Varon. UC Press, 394 pages, $21.95.

There's Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence

By David Cunningham. UC Press, 366 pages, $27.50.