Photo by Lloyd Francis of Rear Adm. Poindexter, Beckler during Iran-Contra Hearings in 1986. Not the subject of text below, but heavy coverage of such events are standard programming on KPFA radio in Berkeley. Ronald Reagan was then U.S. President.
321.
Published news story by Lurene Helzer for Berkeley Daily Planet, April 16, 1999, “KPFA supporters rally.” Story regards fans of Berkeley radio station KPFA, their street gathering to support well-known station employees Larry Bensky and Nicole Sawaya. (See this entry also with other, similar KPFA stories posted on this blog as a group.)
Bensky and Sawaya were then in conflict with the Pacifica Foundation, confronting possible termination of their contracts.
In the 1999 news photo running alongside my story, San Francisco area broadcaster Bill Mandel addresses the crowd of about 400 Bensky and Sawaya supporters. The crowd was gathered on Berkeley’s Martin Luther King Jr. Way with temperatures nearing 80 degrees Fahrenheit. They were calling for mediation.
A second photo by Berkeley Daily Planet Editor Rob Cunningham runs inside. That photo shows the crowd that day from a different angle. Most at the demonstrators held signs:
As the rally was going on, KPFA was simultaneously celebrating its 50th year on the air with the rebroadcast of many of its most memorable shows since 1949, including writer James Baldwin and labor leader Cesar Chavez.
It added a strange, historical feeling to the protest. One could have been at the rally and put a headset tuned to KFPA on to hear, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…” in beat poet Alan Ginsberg’s scratchy 1957 broadcast of “Howl.”
Larry Bensky was there to speak. Rally organizers had constructed a kind of stage in the bed of a small truck with microphones. He stepped up into it.
“I’ve been known for a lot of things in my life, but now I seem to be known as the person who was fired for speaking freely on free speech radio,” said Bensky.
There was a large variety of homemade signs at the rally. “Lynn Chadwick and corporate mind-set have to go,” read one.
“While Clinton attacks Yugoslavia, his friends attack KPFA,” read another, drawn up by Aaron Aarons of Berkeley. He said he had made seven or eight signs. Some other attendees, lacking a sign with a slogan, had dipped from his cache of placards.
Laurie MacKenzie, a sample of the small but fiercely dedicated core group of financial do contributors that keep the station afloat, came from San Francisco with her 8-month-old son, Duncan Rocha to attend the demonstration.
She said she had been listening to KPFA for the last 20 years.
“It shouldn’t be run like any other broadcast corporation. The staff and listeners should have a say in the programming – especially the staff,” said MacKenzie.
But who were some of the attendees in the crowd? That was almost the whole story. You had Bill Mandel, after all, who is best remembered for his famous words during the Cold War 1950s.
Whatever your position on the various news events of the long Cold War era, Mandel was one of the more colorful speakers called to speak during the McCarthy spree:
“This is a book-burning! You lack only the tinder to set fire to the books as Hitler did twenty years ago, and I am going to get that across to the American people!” Mandel said before Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1953, according to transcripts.
When in 1960 a member of the House Un-American Affairs Committee, then in San Francisco, asked Mandel if he was a member of the Communist Party, you can imagine Mandel’s response. Now, the House was in Mandel’s yard:
“Honorable beaters of children, sadists, uniformed and in plain clothes, distinguished Dixicrat wearing the clothing of a gentleman, eminent Republican who opposes an accommodation with the one country with which we must live at peace in order for us and all our children to survive…” began Mandel.
“...where a son of a friend of mine had his head split by these goons operating under your orders, my boy today might have paid the penalty of permanent injury or a police record for desiring to come here and hear how this committee operates. If you think that I am going to cooperate with this collection of Judases, of men who sit there in violation of the United States Constitution, if you think I will cooperate with you in any way, you are insane!” Mandel is recorded as saying in 1960 San Francisco.
You could not have paid me enough to live in the former Soviet Union, but I quickly concede McCarthyism in the United States was no fun, either.
Communism revealed deep rifts within American society and Europe, but also fatal flaws with liberalism itself. With all respect to KPFA, I think the American left needs to be far more candid in portraying the Soviets and the American left as they honestly were in those decades. We may never quite see it, though.
Mandel himself is still around Berkeley. He will be 92 on June 4, 2009. So, covering Berkeley was innervating.
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