Two Sixties Stories

by Libby Hellmann

Following are two stories from the Sixties. Both are true. An abbreviated version of one is in SET THE NIGHT ON FIRE, but the other has an ending I just discovered, so it’s not in the book.

I lived in Georgetown near here during what I now call “The Summer of My Discontent.” I shared an apartment with four other people above a movie theater at 28th and M. (Both are gone now). I was working at an underground newspaper, selling them on the streets, and generally trying to make sense of the world. Next door to the movie theater was a head shop run by a weird – but sweet -- guy named Bobby. He wore black all the time, before there were Goths. The scent of Patchouli oil hung in the air.

I used to drop in every once in a while. Often two of his friends, Donna and Linda, would be there. They were a couple: Linda had long brown hair and appeared to be kind of spacey. Donna had short blond hair and wore a leather jacket, even during July. They were cool, though, in the way that everyone was cool back then, and we’d smoke a joint, laugh a lot, and discuss what a shitty place the world was becoming. Then, around August, they disappeared. After not seeing them for a week or so, I asked Bobby where they went. He hemmed and hawed and wouldn’t tell me. Finally, he did.

Donna used to be Don, he said. And was going through the process of becoming a woman, but hadn’t completed it when she met Linda. They fell in love, and because of that, they jointly (no pun intended) agreed that Donna should turn back into Don. So they hustled some money from someone and were off to California to reverse Donna’s transformation.

I never saw them again. But I still think about them.

The other story is more political. As I said, I worked at an underground newspaper in DC for a summer. I was just a flunkie, not even considered staff. But there was a photographer, Sal, who was in and out all the time. He took photos at every demonstration, interview, and event that could be considered “alternative.” I actually had a crush on him at one point. (Yes, I know. Very bourgeois).

At any rate, the editor of the newspaper was very cautious about trusting people, almost to the point of paranoia. He always thought the paper was being infiltrated by CIA or FBI types (these were the days before COINTELPRO proved the FBI was indeed infiltrating radical groups) At the time, I thought his paranoia was exaggerated. Triggered perhaps by an inflated sense of self-importance.

I left at the end of the summer to hitchhike across country (That’s a different story), but I heard a few months later that Sal had left too, and was off to Paris. He stayed there for a while, then disappeared. I never knew what happened to him. Then, about a month ago, well after I finished SET THE NIGHT ON FIRE, I Googled some of the people from the newspaper. Suddenly a photo of Sal popped up. It turns out he had been featured in Secrets: The CIA's War at Home by Angus MacKenzie.

Yup. You guessed it. Sal had been a CIA agent, recruited when he was in college in Chicago. The entire time he was taking photos for the paper, he was reporting to his CIA handler. Eventually, I think the editor suspected him. Maybe he even confronted him, which precipitated his abrupt departure.

It doesn’t end there. According to MacKenzie’s book, Sal went to Paris, befriended Philip Agee, himself a former CIA agent turned whistleblower, and fiddled around with the typewriter on which Agee was writing his story. Agee discovered it, and Sal fled. From what I understand he changed his name and now lives in Southern California.

True stories. Really. I mean, who could make this stuff up?

I Kinda Wish I'd Been in DC

by Libby Hellmann

I grew up in Washington (yes, in the city itself), so I never saw it as a tourist destination. Nor did I give much thought to the patriotism and symbolism its monuments evoked. I played and fought with kids from Lebanon, Morroco, and Rhodesia, whose embassies were on my block. I went to the White House for tea… smoked my first cigarette behind the Capitol… my first joint at the Lincoln Memorial. I demonstrated against the war on the Mall and sold underground newspapers on the streets of Georgetown. I worked at PBS and was probably the only person in the country to watch the Watergate hearings twice a day. I met people who only wanted to talk to me because they wanted air time, and I only talked to them because I wanted a story.

Before 1960, though, DC was a sleepy Southern town. Congress left in June and didn’t dare return until mid-September. Summers were hot and humid – DC is literally built on a swamp -- and it was segregated. There were separate water fountains for “Whites” and “Negroes.” But it was a safe city, and I took the bus or the streetcar or my bike all over town. There was an Easter egg roll on the White House lawn every spring, and if you looked carefully, you might spot Ike or Mamie smiling at the kids.

That changed when JFK was inaugurated. Overnight Washington became a glittering, sophisticated mecca. The Kennedys infused the town with excitement and hope and youth. You knew from the beginning, when Robert Frost read a poem at the Inaugural, when Kennedy asked what we could do for our country, that things were going to be different.

Which might have been why my mother took me to Kennedy’s inaugural parade. Traditionally, native Washingtonians never go near politically staged events. We know better. But my mother made an exception this time. I think she knew that Kennedy's election was a watershed event. I remember taking the bus down to Pennsylvania Avenue and standing on the sidewalks in the cold with the crowd. Since I was a kid, people let me through to the front – there was no phalanx of police then -- and I had a first-rate view of the procession. I remember the President’s car slowly passing -- it was a convertible – and how it seemed to stop as it came abreast of us. I jumped up and down, waving and shouting, and to this day I was sure Mrs. Kennedy looked directly at me and smiled.

For over forty years I never went to – or wanted to go -- another inauguration. The pageantry just wasn’t very meaningful. Until yesterday. I found myself wishing I could have taken my own kids down to Pennsylvania Avenue. It would have been tough to get through security, stand for hours in bitter cold, endure the lack of facilities. But the opportunity for a glimpse of history, to bear witness to another watershed event, would have been worth it.

What did you think of yesterday?