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Kent State Shootings: Oral Histories
Doug Weiskopf Oral History
Kent State Shootings: Oral Histories
Doug Weiskopf Oral History
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Doug Weiskopf, Oral History
Recorded: January 18, 2023 Interviewed by: Elizabeth Campion Transcribed by the Kent State University Research & Evaluation Bureau
[Interviewer]: This is Liz Campion, May 4 Archivist, speaking on Wednesday, January 18, 2023. As part of the Kent State Shootings Oral History Project, we are recording an interview over the telephone today. [00:00:16] Could you please state your name for the recording?
[Doug Weiskopf]: Doug Weiskopf, W-E-I-S as in Sam, K-O-P as in Peter, F as in Frank.
[Interviewer]: Thank you, Doug. I would like to begin with some brief information about your background so we can get to know you a little bit better.
[Doug Weiskopf]: Sure.
[Interviewer]: [00:00:34] Could you tell us where you were born and where you grew up?
[Doug Weiskopf]: I was born in the Hollywood area of Los Angeles, California, October 27, 1947.
[Interviewer]: [00:00:50] And where did you grow up?
[Doug Weiskopf]: I grew up in the Hollywood area, graduated from Hollywood High School.
[Interviewer]: Great, thank you. [00:00:58] When did you first come to Portland State University?
[Doug Weiskopf]: My first year, I was at LA City College, Los Angeles City College, and my father was hired on by the City of Portland to start an opera company from scratch to perform in their new auditorium that was halfway built, and he had already been the conductor in Seattle years earlier, but the company folded because the opening night of the season was on November 22, 1963, and we all know that that was when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and, so the opera couldn’t—nobody came. But he went up there and I joined my parents later to attend Portland State, my first term was spring 1967. And I graduated, well, I graduated in June of ’70, but I had to finish up a couple credits, so officially in ’71.
[Interviewer]: [00:02:10] What was your major when you were there as a student?
[Doug Weiskopf]: Education and sociology.
[Interviewer]: Okay. [00:02:19] As a student, how did you view the protests and the Vietnam War?
[Doug Weiskopf]: Well, my first encounter with the war was as a junior in high school. I’d never heard of Vietnam, I couldn’t have found it on a map, as could anybody else at my school even though we were all, mostly all college-bound, smart kids, but Vietnam was just this kind of fantasy place that we’d heard of, this little country with rebels in the jungle wearing black pajamas and primitive weapons. And we were told, in 1965, that we were going to war. Well, actually in ’64 was the—the fall of ’64 was the Bay of Tonkin Resolution, when the—what we found out years later, with the Pentagon Papers in ’71 I think, was that it was a manufactured sea battle. Completely fictitious, but it was used by the Johnson administration to declare, basically, unlimited war on Vietnam. And I was not excited about being in the military, especially when I had to go down for a draft physical and run around for half a day in my underwear being yelled at. And this just wasn’t my cup of tea so, I got into college and got a draft permit, just like, you know, millions of other young men.
And my first year at Portland State I was just basically a student. I went up there, just like, happy being in college, and it was in spring term of 1968 when Robert Kennedy came to speak at our campus in the gym, to an overflow audience. He had just announced he was running for president and had entered the Oregon primary. And my girlfriend and I waited in line, and got in, and got a seat pretty close to where he was speaking and, he inspired me to become part of his campaign. But just weeks later, he was assassinated in Los Angeles and then I joined the campaign in the fall for Oregon’s anti-war senator Wayne Morse. He lost his close reelection, and millions of students all over the country, at that point, who had seen their heroes, Martin Luther King [Jr.], Robert Kennedy, assassinated that year, and then Chicago police beat up friends of ours; there were students at Portland State who had gone to Chicago as McCarthy campaign aides, and they were beaten up by the police. We had seen what had happened to young protestors in the streets of Chicago and then, Gene McCarthy—basically sandbagged by the Democrats running the convention—and we were stuck with Hubert Humphrey. He [editor’s clarification: Hubert Humphrey] came to Portland right after, a week after that convention, and we filled the auditorium with McCarthy supporters. As soon as he started speaking, we all stood up and walked out on it and it was like half the audience.
And then, we went down to where his hotel was and when his car pulled up, we were there chanting protests at him and that was basically how I kind of got sucked into becoming a protest organizer. There was a dozen of us who had been in the Morse and McCarthy and Kennedy campaigns and we kind of banded together to start a campus protest group. There hadn’t been one in Portland State. It was a commuter college basically at that point. It was a college and it wasn’t until ’69 when it became a university. And we stuck together through the next couple of years and a few dropped out and a few added on, but it always seemed to be about a dozen of the core organizers. We considered ourselves organizers rather than leaders. I mean, the term leader I think is presumptuous and I think people might resent being told that we were their leader. But if we said we were organizers, that seemed to be more acceptable, so that’s how we described ourselves: protest organizers.
And we were kind of raw in the beginning and made mistakes and the university administration was rather contemptuous of us. They saw us as snot-nosed kids, but over time, we got better at it. We got smart, we learned from our mistakes, we learned how to do effective planning and, also just as important, we were able to adjust tactically in real time as circumstances demanded. And as we got more and more into the protests, we organized four moratorium marches through the city with up to 12,000 people marching behind us. We had some campus protest actions when the military recruiters would come on campus, we would try to interfere with what they were doing, and that became a year-long kind of test of wills with the administration.
By the end of the school year, 1970, the last moratorium march was on April 15 and it became kind of like the smallest march we had had and people seemed pretty dispirited. It was like the fourth time we had done it and everybody was getting kind of weary of trying to make protest a real thing that had an effect on the world. After that, I thought, Well, that’s it, I’m graduating in a couple of weeks and I’m going to be out of here and, probably, this is my last action. And then, Nixon, on April 30, two weeks later, he decided he was invading Cambodia. That spawned Kent State and then that just completely, as it did in 450 campuses [00:09:11] in the country, just exploded and the lid came off.
[Interviewer]: To go back a little bit, [00:09:16] could you describe the prevailing attitudes or the moods among the Portland State students in the late Sixties and early Seventies? I mean, you mentioned a lot of these huge, historical moments: assassinations, the war going on, political strife. I’m just curious what the attitudes among the students, and even the faculty and staff, were.
[Doug Weiskopf]: Well, one of the great myths of the Sixties, I think, the late Sixties and into the early Seventies, was that there was this big mass of emotionally charged activist students who were out there and they were protesting and they were committed and they were going to change the world. But the truth is, that there would be short-term events, there would be a march, thousands of people would show up and then, they’d go back to doing whatever there was that they were doing and the few activists, the handful of us, would continue as a full-time vocation kind of thing. We believed in what we were doing too much to stop and I think that there was mostly just apathy, that would be the prevailing thing, probably ninety percent of the time, it was apathy.
The faculty, a lot of them were—there was a famous old saying that the media just loved to quote. It was like catnip to them, it was, somebody, some radical student in about ’67 said, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” And the media just, there were jokes about that and it was always being brought up. “They don’t trust anyone over thirty.” But the thing was that, if you were over thirty in the late Sixties, you were part of a whole other generation. You were part of what they call the Silent Generation, the Fifties or you were a World War II veteran who was hyper-patriotic and believed in the war–because why?—because our government says it’s the thing to do, so we have to salute and march off and, if you don’t, you’re a traitor and a coward. And those of us who were Baby Boomers, who were in our late teens, early twenties, we saw the world completely different from them and a lot of our professors would either be hostile or they would be condescending. You know, the word “liberal” was actually a term of derision by young people. They said, “Oh, you liberals. You have no core convictions, you just mouth the nice words, but you can’t be counted on when the chips are down.” So, we honestly didn’t trust anyone over thirty much. I mean, there were a few and the old Lefties were not people we admired because they still adhered to— they had their loyalty to the Soviet Union and Leninism and we thought they were just sad leftovers from the Fifties, too. There was a group of protest organizers in New York I read about and they were being interviewed by a CBS newsman and he asked, “Well, who are your heroes?” And they thought a minute, one of them said, “We are our heroes.”
[Interviewer]: Wow.
[Doug Weiskopf]: “Us. We have no heroes beyond ourselves. We trust ourselves.” And that’s how a lot of young people felt. That’s how I came to feel. My parents were very sympathetic to what I was doing but they were, at the same time, worried that I was going to get in trouble, as any parent would. And I’d say, “Look, just you have to trust me.” I mean, one of the things that we started off with in 1968 when we first came together was we made a commitment to adhere to the principles of non-violent protest as taught by Martin Luther King [Jr.] and [Mahatma] Gandhi. We stood on the shoulders of the early Civil Rights activists of the early 1960s who had gone to the South and registered voters and we were inspired by that. We were inspired by the people who were attacked on the [Edmund] Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Those people were our heroes. And we decided that that was the way to be most effective, both morally and tactically. As long as we were being nonviolent and not out becoming violent, the system would have a very difficult time coming after us. Once we started breaking windows and doing damage, they could scoop us up and throw us in a jail cell for months. And we’d become ineffective as organizers.
[Interviewer]: [00:14:55] As time went on, can you recall any of your memories from the day of the Kent State Shootings on May 4, 1970?
[Doug Weiskopf]: Yes, vividly. Vividly. In Portland, we were three hours behind Kent State and when I first heard about it, I was coming out of a class in the early afternoon and a friend ran up to me and said, “There’s a university in Ohio called Kent State that—they shot thirteen students and killed four.” And I just—stunned, wow. And the word went around that we were going to have a meeting that late afternoon on campus. We had already been marching against Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia, but it was not a big-time thing. We had our usual followers with us, but it wasn’t really taking off in any big way.
But once Kent State happened, it seemed to just send a bolt of electricity through the entire campus and hundreds of people showed up to our meeting and wanted to know, well, what should we do? And we said, “Well, at Brandeis University, there’s a central office where they’re taking in all the information and sharing it and we’re in contact with them. We’re calling Brandeis and they’ve organized a national student strike.” When we talked to them and asked what they’ve recommended we do, they said, Look, just organize your campus. Start protesting. Try to close it down. Go on strike. Just do what you can. Be creative. They didn’t give us anything more specific than that. And from then on, we wouldn’t rely on the media to tell us what was going on. We would keep in contact with the organization at Brandeis to keep us informed because they had a pretty good handle on everything happening.
It was pretty heavy times. We closed our campus on the 6th [of May]. They announced that we were shutting down after. There were some conservative students, some frat boys and jocks, and they and us had a near physical altercation and the president of the university said, “That’s it, I’m closing it down.” So, I think that was on a Friday and we were closed into the following week up until May 11, was Monday, May 11. What happened was we occupied the building and there was a strip of parkland that ran parallel to the university buildings and that was called the Park Blocks or the South Park Blocks. At the time, there was car traffic that ran through and we barricaded the streets and people camped out. Someone compared it to a Civil War encampment, where you had people huddled together around fires and luckily, we had pretty good weather in otherwise rainy Portland. It held that week and it was pretty amazing. There was eleven barricades and each one had its own name and its own little group of people who named their barricades and one of them was called “Fort Tricia Nixon” in honor of the president’s daughter who was quoted in the paper saying she couldn’t believe that students in America were protesting her father. So, we said, “Well, let’s just show her that we are. We’ll name this barricade in her honor.” And it became the infamous “Fort Tricia Nixon.” So, we just camped out 24/7 in the Park Blocks and in the building and we had access to the offices and phones. The university president tried to have a meeting with us, but he had basically dealt with us in what we considered bad faith all that school year. He was a kind of a slick customer. He worked for the government and it was believed he had been in the CIA at one point and he considered us like—a country he was an occupier in and us radicals were just the insurgence out in the jungle. He dealt with us kind of on that basis. And so, when he genuinely wanted to work with us to kind of get a handle on the out-of-control, or what he considered out-of-control situation during the strike—and, by the way, we kept things pretty much under control. We didn’t allow the building to be vandalized. We had marshals running around. We told everybody that there were rules that they had to behave themselves, there would be no violence, there would be no physical destruction of property and we wanted to be able to say, when things were over, that we’d behaved ourselves with a certain amount of honor.
[Interviewer]: Right. [00:20:53] Can you briefly describe what the roles of your marshals were?
[Doug Weiskopf]: Well, they were pretty simple. People were told, if you’re going to be part of what we’re doing here, you’re going to not be violent, you’re not going to spray paint buildings, you’re not going to break windows, you’re not going to be abusive to passersby. This is going to be an operation that we’re going to have discipline within our ranks. The great Chinese philosopher, Sun Tzu said, “Discipline in the ranks is the most important thing. That’s what you start with and you build on top of that.” And so, we said, “We are going to have discipline in our ranks. Everybody’s going to follow the rules. There was one group of, kind of, the high school-dropout types that had one of the barricades and they were kind of rowdy. I just pulled them in, I was like a football coach in high school pulling the kids in, and I gave them a talk and I said, “Look, you are going to behave yourselves or you’re going to answer to me.” I’m a big guy, so they listened. They nodded their heads and I said, “First one of you guys gets out of line, I’m going to be looking for you.” And they behaved themselves after that and that was basically how it was. You have to have order. You have to have internal discipline, or everything goes crazy.
With what happened in Portland the last two years was you didn’t have an effective organization with marshals keeping things under control and then, once they spin out of control, it just feeds on itself. It just grows exponentially and then the violence becomes uncontrollable and it broke my heart to see that in Portland. I’m down here watching it on the news in Los Angeles. I saw it and I said, “I wish we had been there at the beginning.” It was right after the George Floyd killing that it all began and it just got worse and worse. And I thought, God, if we had been there from the beginning, had passed on our traditions of non-violence and talked to them about the teachings of [Mahatma] Gandhi and Martin Luther King [Jr.], I think we could have had an effect on them, we could have encouraged them to have marshals and get control and not let things start to spin out of control. It was a shame. But that was what we did back then. We didn’t, I mean, the school tried to say that we had created damage to the building, but we hadn’t. There were no holes in the walls. There were no burnt carpets. It was just kids that had been camping out there for a week and it was a little messy, but all it needed was a cleanup crew.
[Interviewer]: To go back a little bit, right after the Kent State Shootings, I know that Portland State closed on May 6th. [00:24:06] Do you remember the administration’s response, the community response, or the media response to the shootings and how you felt as a student at that time?
[Doug Weiskopf]: Well, the administration, of course, and I think you could find this at every college campus in America, it wasn’t unique at Portland State, was that they just wanted to have things go along in their nice, bureaucratic order and not have to deal with unpleasant situations. We told them, I said, “Look, this is—students are being shot on campuses in this country and we’re invading countries abroad and things are such that these aren’t normal times and business as usual just can’t be allowed to be tolerated.” We’ve got to upset things and we purposely wanted to upset the public because at least we were getting through to them. In the worst of times in the Vietnam War, life just went on in America. It was something you saw on the news which people just didn’t want to think about it. But with us creating a lot of noise, it was shoved in their faces and their anger was directed at us, of course. But that’s fine. I understood that we became an object of hostility and I thought, I’d rather they be angry than apathetic.
[Interviewer]: [00:25:49] Do you remember, were there any specific reactions your parents had once they found out about the Kent State Shootings, knowing that you were politically active at that time?
[Doug Weiskopf]: Well, it was a very tense time for me personally because my dad had died the previous March [1969]. He died just after conducting Lucia di Lammermoor with the world-famous soprano Anna Moffo on stage, and he went out and took his bow and walked off and collapsed with a heart attack and died instantly. My mom was pretty much a basket case after that, as was my younger sister in high school, and I was trying to be there for them, but this came up, and it was emotionally putting me through the ringer. I had to kind of put off dealing with my father’s death during all of this, all through the summer. As I think I was telling you earlier, we had a unique set of circumstances before us at Portland State. A unique opportunity that none of the other four hundred and fifty colleges and universities were going to have. They all pretty much ended their protest when school let out in early June of ’70. And in most campuses, when school’s over, they all just go their separate ways to the far corners of America. We all lived in Portland and we were friends. We lived in the same off-campus neighborhood, in old houses and apartments, and we were constantly getting together socially as well as for political meetings and organizing meetings.
We had known that there was going to be the National American Legion Convention in Portland that summer and they were planning a grand march for victory in Vietnam right down the center of our downtown in the main street. Nixon was going to be their keynote speaker and he scheduled his speech for the 2nd of September which was the 25th anniversary of the end of World War II and the surrender of Japan on USS Missouri on what’s called V-J Day [Victory over Japan Day]. We said, We’ve got to take advantage of this opportunity. We can have this mass protest that will be covered with national media with Nixon coming. We just got to do it. And Kent State was a big inspiration to us. We said, Look, the kids at Kent State were all sent home on May 4th. They closed that campus for the rest of the year and we’ve got to pick up that torch and keep it going. We can’t allow America to go back to normal after that. These four students can’t have died for nothing. And we knew we were going to be—that summer, we were going to be the last campus group standing and we were. There was nothing else going on and we were able to get donations to open up a storefront in downtown and paint a big sign in the front. We called ourselves, “People’s Army Jamboree.” It was just kind of a joke, but it stuck. What really launched it though, what really launched it is I had a friend in Los Angeles I’d known since middle school, junior high, we called it then. He was on the staff of the Los Angeles Free Press which was the original and large underground newspaper which got enough—I don’t know if you’re aware of the power of underground newspapers in America at that time.
[Interviewer]: Absolutely.
[Doug Weiskopf]: Every city had their own underground newspaper that came out once a week and had radical articles and advertisements for rock shows and head shops and the like. Los Angeles Free Press had a weekly circulation of 100,000 and I talked to my friend. I said, “Look, I’m going to come down there and let’s put together a series of articles to run this summer advertising our protests in Portland and we’ll advertise it as fifty thousand screaming radicals showing up there to jeer Nixon and the legionnaires.” He says, “Sure, come on down.” So, I came down and we sat in his apartment in Los Angeles and wrote a series of articles that were going to run every week through the summer, but he took it a step further. They had something called “Liberation News Service,” which was a list of all the underground papers in the country that shared information with each other. It was kind of like a UPS for radical newspapers. What he did is, he put together two dozen press kits in large, brown envelopes with glossies of all of the articles and photos, and we mailed them to two dozen underground papers around the country along with a cover letter saying, “Please print this, we’re for sure trying to put on a great protest against Nixon.” And a great many of them actually did run them.
Now, here’s the thing—the Nixon administration was super obsessed with war protestors. It kept Nixon awake at night, it got into his head, and he wanted to have information coming to him, and he didn’t trust the FBI to tell him everything he wanted to know. So, he gave them an order that they were supposed to monitor the underground press around the country and report to the White House. And who was in charge of receiving all that information but a fellow named John Dean. He was hired in July of 1970 to gather the information and then process it for Nixon to look over. And I know this because, well, he actually showed up in Portland his first week on the job, in July. And he was escorted around town by the U.S. Attorney Sid Lezak [editor’s clarification: U.S. Attorney for the District of Oregon]. He told Dory Hylton, who wrote a PhD thesis on this whole subject, he told her in an interview that he escorted Dean around town to report back to Nixon. And then later on, John Mitchell showed up and he [editor’s clarification: Sid Lezak] escorted John Mitchell around town, he was the attorney general, because Nixon was obsessed with what was going to happen in Portland, and his information on that was all those underground papers that we had sent our press kits to that were printing it. So, the fact that they were getting it from FBI offices, all around the country, got them believing that this was a national conspiracy. When, actually, it was just a couple of kids in Portland. And me going down to LA to write articles with my friend, I mean, it was like a very small thing. A very small-time thing that we were having trouble getting off the ground.
So, Nixon sends the FBI to Oregon to meet with the governor, Tom McCall. They told him, We have information that there’s going to be a massive influx of wild-eyed radicals headed for Portland this summer to protest the Legion and Nixon. And you need to be aware of this. There could be up to fifty thousand. And coming after the Kent State upheaval, when there really were millions of students all over the country protesting, it was believable. And Tom McCall, he wasn’t the brightest bulb in the room. He went for it, hook, line, and sinker, and proceeded to go on TV and there was like a news—at the time, I was really getting worried that we weren’t getting the response we wanted to our big protest. It was summer, beautiful in Portland, everybody was just kicking back, and students weren’t—people were thinking, Let’s just pick it back up in the fall. And I was sitting at home watching the news, the noon news and feeling kind of depressed and suddenly, it was like there was one of these news breaks, and it was McCall doing a press conference that he had just called. And he was announcing that there was this major threat coming to Portland, thousands of wild-eyed radicals, and what he was going to do was activate the National Guard, they were going to patrol the city of Portland during the summer, and get this—he was authorizing, thirty miles outside of town in a state park, a rock festival. A rock festival. Hopefully to siphon off young people out of the city.
And I’m sitting there with my jaw down to my knees. What is he talking about? And it was announced that there would be no enforcement of laws against illegal drugs and nudity. So, it would be a Woodstock, it would be kind of a Woodstock thing, and anything goes. As long as you get out of Portland, and stay there, you can do whatever you want. And I jumped up and I ran to the TV screen and I kissed McCall’s image on the screen, saying, “Thank you, you big dummy, you just put us back in business.” And basically, it was the momentum of all of the Kent State upheaval that created this panic in the government. And we, again, we adhered strictly to the principles of non-violence as taught by [Mahatma] Gandhi and Martin Luther King [Jr.] throughout the summer, and during that entire summer there was no violence, arrests, or physical damage to the city.
And it was basically because a small group of young PSU students just organized it and kept it under control. And there were agent provocateurs who came to town and tried to stir up trouble. There was a couple of guys who we’d never seen before or since, who hung, at one of our rallies, hung an American flag and soaked it in gasoline and burned it. And that ended up in LIFE magazine. Oh yeah, we were in LIFE magazine, we had a four-page spread on September 11th, 1970. And if you know anything about LIFE magazine at the time, it was on every living room coffee table in America. I mean, it was a big thing. And we got four full pages, in-depth, of all of our protests. But they had the picture of the flag burning, which we had nothing to do with, and we’ve always believed was done by government provocateurs that were sent to make us look bad. I mean, the sight of an American flag burning is not anything that we wanted to have out there. But there it was.
But what happened was concurrent with what we were doing. There was a low-level White House aide named Tom [Charles] Huston. And he was tasked with the job of organizing an intelligence and hit squad to go after the protest movement in what became known as the infamous Huston Plan, which I first heard about during the Watergate [Scandal] Hearings in 1974. Now, if you noticed, in one of the documents I sent you was a memo sent from Tom Huston to H.R. Haldeman, the Chief of Staff for Nixon. And he specifically talked about Portland and how it was going to be a launching pad for mass protests going into the fall and that something had to be done about it. Did you see that memo?
[Interviewer]: Yes, yes.
[Doug Weiskopf]: Okay. That, and then also, I sent you the memo of, or not the memo, but I sent you entries of the Haldeman diaries. [Editor’s clarification: the narrator is referring to original diary entries that he accessed in the H. R. Haldeman Diaries collection at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library]. If you looked at that, there were, I think, five entries that never made it into his 1993 posthumously published book, The Haldeman Diaries. [Editor’s clarification: the full title of the published book is The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House]. None of those entries were in that book, for some reason. He wanted left out that entire Portland American Legion convention fiasco. And we can only speculate why he might have never wanted that.
See what happened was, it was 2019, and I had spent nearly fifty years looking for any kind of documentation I could find showing what Nixon’s reaction was to what we did in Portland, because I thought it was important. The fact that that was what we were doing—and we were the only protest group going. And the fact that the Huston Plan was being hatched at that same time made me feel, all those years, there had to be a connection. Nixon had to have gone, like, insane and wanted to strike back at us. The Haldeman diaries specifically, over a period of weeks, shows how it was a big item of concern to the Nixon White House.
Nixon kept vacillating about going to Portland for the speech and not going, and going, and not going. And if you noticed in his diary entries, it said that the day before, he had spent hours working on his speech to the Legion. Which tells you he saw it as an important moment. It was the 25th anniversary of V-J Day and he, at the very last minute, I mean, at the very last possible minute, cancelled and sent [Spiro] Agnew instead. Only to find out later that there was not just one rock festival, by the way, there were two. There was another one that was put on by a Seattle group that came down calling themselves the Sky River Rock Festival. The one in Oregon, at the state park, was called Vortex One. And there was never a Vortex Two. But the one in Washougal, Washington, just across the Columbia River, was also about thirty miles out of Portland. And between those two rock festivals, there were seventy thousand young people there having a good time.
[Interviewer]: That’s impressive, that number.
[Doug Weiskopf]: All we got was about 1,200 people showing up for our march.
[Interviewer]: Wow.
[Doug Weiskopf]: And when Nixon realized that what we had done basically could have been handled by city cops; ours was pretty small, small potatoes in the end. The fifty thousand people we kept promising never showed. They went to the rock festivals. I was really bitter for a long time, years after that, that all those rock promoters just took our audience away and our potential marchers. But then, reading in the Haldeman diaries, he mentions the rock festivals, and it was like he saw them as a potential threat and I thought, The Nixon people don’t know what’s going on. To them, it’s all one big thing. All those kids there at the rock festivals, they’re like, right there with us and they had no way of knowing what those kids were going to do and so, even the rock festivals worked to our advantage, I came to find out. I found this out with these documents basically because, by 2019, I realized we were coming up on the 50th anniversary of Kent State [Shootings] and our protests and we were going to have a big event in 2020, but it got postponed for two years because of COVID restrictions. So 2022, we had our gathering which I understand Kent State also had their big event in 2022 as well because of COVID.
In 2019, I said, You know, I haven’t found anything. All these years I’ve gone on the internet, I’ve gone through files, I’ve been to libraries, sent away some stuff, and I can’t find anything about what actually happened in the Nixon White House. And I thought, if there’s anything at all, there’s one place I could possibly find it and that’s at the [Richard] Nixon [Presidential] Library [and Museum] down in Yorba Linda, California in Orange County, which is about a two-hour drive south from where I lived in Burbank.
I called up the library and I asked for the archivist, someone in your position, and I said, “I really would like to come down there and look through some files and make an appointment with you.” She was very nice, very cooperative and said, “Sure.” So, I had an appointment, I drove down there, and they had like a special room for people doing research and I said, “I’d like to have all the documents between spring and fall of 1970 of Haldeman and Mitchell and John Dean.” So, she brought me stacks of folders, of actual old papers, old, yellowing papers that had been there for decades. And so, I spent half the day looking through them and I finally found the Haldeman diaries. And I recognized instantly that, those entries that I sent you copies of, I hadn’t seen in his book and he specifically mentions Portland and the American Legion and the problem with protesters and Nixon vacillating back and forth over a period of weeks and all of the angst it caused everybody.
It sounds like a cliché out of a movie, but I gasped and I suddenly thought of myself as a Perceval spending his life searching for the Holy Grail and, finally, I’d found it. I found exactly—I found the evidence I had been looking for all those years. And I found the letter from Tom [Charles] Huston where he specifically mentioned Portland and the American Legion and the protests and there was a file on John Dean for when he had worked—his first job at the White House was basically to monitor the anti-war movement. He wasn’t this big-time White House counsel like we think of him today—an important guy—he was just this low-level flunky that they hired to keep an eye on the protestors and keep Nixon informed. And I could see from his reports to Nixon, by the way, that he purposely exaggerated the information that came across his desk when he made a summary for Nixon. It became like, you know, more dramatic. And I thought, You know, the guy is such a weasel. He knew Nixon wanted to hear that, so he purposely exaggerated so that he’d have job security. And that’s the kind of people Nixon had under him. With Tom Huston, he was just a low-level guy.
By the end of the summer, Huston had got on the wrong side of J. Edgar Hoover. He said, Hey, what is this little pipsqueak doing talking about putting together a big operation? He’s impinging on my territory. So, to placate Hoover, they got rid of Tom Huston, but the Huston plan was never discontinued. I sent you another document showing that John Dean reported to, I think it was the attorney general’s office, that they needed to proceed with the plans that have domestic surveillance. And, in three different times in one paragraph, he talks about having a unit. They didn’t call it the Plumber’s Unit at that time, they called it the surveillance unit or this unit or that unit. But it became known as the Plumber’s Unit, obviously because that’s what he was talking about having a full group of people that went out and did dirty work, they did surveillance and they did subversion. [Editor’s clarification: also called the White House Plumbers]. And it started out as going after the anti-war movement, but then it grew to become Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, and the media, and the Democratic [National Committee] Headquarters at Watergate, where they finally got caught. I think if you connect the dots all the way back, all the way back and I think the documents help make that case, strongly, that they were obsessed with the anti-war movement, they were obsessed with what we were doing in Portland. By the way, what my friend and I worked on with writing those articles, and if you read those articles from the LA Free Press—did I send those to you?
[Interviewer]: I do not recall getting them.
[Doug Weiskopf]: I believe I did. If I didn’t, I’ll send them. But the articles that we wrote didn’t talk about violence or threats or anything that was in any way provocative in that sense. What we were trying to do was to insult Nixon, was to make fun of him, was to talk about what a nerd he was. The study I had done on him showed that when he was in college, he wasn’t a very handsome boy, he wasn’t a good athlete. He was a third string benchwarmer on a third-rank football team at Whittier College and all he did was—used as a practice dummy and I’m sure having been on a football team myself in high school, those kind of guys generally weren’t very well-respected. They were kind of abused and bullied and that’s probably what he went through. He came from a poor background. His dad was always broke and the other kids had a lot more going for them in family wealth than he did. I always felt that he must have had—he was a smart guy and he was an over achiever and he had this seething resentment that he’d carried with him all those years for all the people who had sneered at him and bullied him when he was young. I thought, if we, as these young college kids, become his demon and start making fun of him and our articles just treat him like a jerk, that that’s going to penetrate his psyche more than anything else we could do. It’s cruel, yeah, but we were at war. We were at war with the man and all bets were off and all rules were null and void. My goal was to get inside his head and live there all summer, rent free. Sun Tzu said, “In the art of war, when small try to appear large, when weak try to appear powerful.” And we were a mouse confronting an elephant, so what we had to do was somehow crawl in his ear and get in his brain and start chewing on it and drive him mad with rage and make him go insane and overreact, do something stupid. In his case, he cancelled his trip to Portland. He missed out on that 25th anniversary of V-J Day, in front of the American Legion where he could have been the big hero and talked about how he’s going to win the war in Vietnam.
[Interviewer]: One of the things I really want to make sure our researchers can get a better understanding is [00:53:09] May 11th, 1970, was an impactful date, especially for Portland State.
[Doug Weiskopf]: Oh, absolutely, yeah. Yeah, I haven’t really gone into that too greatly yet, but I’ll do that if you’d like.
[Interviewer]: Absolutely. And I was just hoping that you could describe the events, the kind of lead-up of that day, and the result of what happened that day.
[Doug Weiskopf]: Well, what happened that day was the culmination of the entire school year of—we had been marching through town, we had been these brass, not-too-respectful kids. Never violent, never destructive, but not at all respectful of authority. When we saw the police and they would look at us threateningly, we would just taunt them. I’m rather ashamed to say today. We didn’t treat them with any respect. There was one time when the Navy recruiters were on campus and we had been protesting them and, all of a sudden, the riot squad turned up in formation in the hallway and they stood there at attention and we just kind of walked around and took their badge names down and laughed at them. There was a young woman who had been a contestant in the Oregon beauty pageant, she was a contestant to be Miss Oregon, and she and I were walking down the line and she was writing their badge names down. She was just so pretty and so scornful of them, I think it just irritated them to no end.
By the time May 11th came around, and we had occupied the campus from the 6th to the 11th, at that point. At the end of the day, in the late afternoon, the city had finally had enough and they sent the entire Portland Police Department to Portland State and nothing was going on, we were just all sitting around and we were talking about how we could best end the strike, it had to come to an end at some point. We’re saying, why don’t we have just one last gathering and then just announce it’s over and dismantle the barricades and go back to class.
And suddenly the police show up, and they’ve got a string of dump trucks, the city sanitation trucks, and they proceed to march down the Park Blocks, looking like an army, and they’re dismantling our barricades. And we just kept backing up, we said, Let’s not fight over a bunch of trash in the street, let’s let them do their thing. But they got to this large geodesic tent that had been constructed out of aluminum piping and canvas, and it was twenty feet high and about thirty feet long. It was huge. And a bunch of Vietnam Veterans Against the War had been manning it and they used it as a first aid tent. And it wasn’t blocking any traffic, it was in the middle of the park and the cops said, Well, that has to go, too. And we told them, We’ve got a city permit for that. The guy who actually owns the tent wanted to make sure he was on solid ground, so he went and got a park permit to have that here. And the police captain at the scene said, “Well, your permit is retracted as of this moment.” And one of the leaders of our group, a close friend, he’s been dead for several years now, but his name was Kevin Mulligan, and he shouted at the police captain, “F-you,” to put it politely. And that just seemed to send this bolt of electricity throughout the whole scene, through the cops’ ranks, with us, and we started cheering him for saying that. And we all bunched together, about 150 of us had linked arms, and the cops then called for the riot squad who had been in reserve. And then we saw them marching down the Park Blocks and they had black leather motorcycle jackets, and knee-high boots, and they had forty-two inch long riot batons that looked—and they looked very much like the storm troopers in Star Wars, you know what I mean, with those long weapons they had? And, in fact, the director of Star Wars was interviewed in ‘77 and they asked where he got the idea for the movie Star Wars. And he said, “Oh, well, I was just a student at USC in the late Sixties and it was a time when every college and university in the country had an anti-war group, large and small, and the media called them ‘rag tag rebels.’ So, I got the idea of having the rag tag rebels fighting the death star and the empire.” And he said that Darth Vader’s voice was—he wanted it to sound like Nixon. And so, there is a connection I think, between the anti-war protests, the Vietnam War protests, and the Star Wars series, that’s where the original inspiration came from.
So, they replaced—a lot of the time factor, the lapse in anything happening was because they had to replace that officer with a different officer. And the officer they brought in was more of a yes sir, no sir, kind of guy and he thought he was going to follow Ivancie’s orders to remove the tent. And there was half a dozen professors, first of all, pleading with the police not to attack us. When the police said, Well, we are going to remove the tent and if those students are in the way we’re going to just deal with them, too, then they came to us and pleaded with us to disperse, and I first thought of—I had heard about the geology professor at Kent State who had pleaded with the students to disperse after the first set of shootings.
[Doug Weiskopf]: I’m sorry?
[Doug Weiskopf]: Yeah. I had read about what he had done, and I think he did the right thing. There had already been thirteen students shot and four dead and they were about to open fire on a whole other group of students. He had to try to stop that and he prevailed on the students to disperse and it’s good that that happened. There had been enough bloodshed that day at Kent State. But I thought of that and it just grated on me that those students had to back down to the brute force of a murderous authority. And I thought, I’m not doing it. I said, I’m not backing down. I’m standing right here and then I thought of the Civil Rights protestors at the Selma, Alabama, bridge, the Pettus Bridge. That had happened only five years before; we were in high school when that happened, in 1965. And now, here we were, and I wondered at the time, God, would I have had the courage to stand there when those, when those state troopers, some of them on horseback, with bullwhips, charged, they just stood there and got trampled and acted non-violently. I said, Would I have had the courage to do that? And the commitment to what I was doing. And I thought, God, now I have the chance to find out, these cops are going to come over the top of us and they’ve all got side arms, they’ve got pistols on their belts. It was like one week almost to the moment after the Kent State Shootings, May 11. And, I said, What are we going—as I said in my speech, last May when we had our ceremony, I said, “We feared for our lives but, peacefully, we stood our ground.” We didn’t take a vote, we didn’t have a discussion, we just all came to the conclusion, individually, to stand there with our arms linked with each other and saying, “We’re not moving. Come at me. Do your worst.” And the professors kept begging us, like the Kent State geology professor, they begged us to disperse. And I finally said to them, I said, “Look, either join us or get out of the way. We’re not listening to you.” And so they left. And there were a large group of students that stood around and watched while knowing what was about to happen and, so the police finally got the order to charge and—did you watch that documentary, The Seventh Day [01:04:44]?
[Doug Weiskopf]: Well, you saw what happened and I think I also sent you a local news broadcast that showed even more of the beating.
[Interviewer]: Yep. [Doug Weiskopf]: And, so, I don’t need to describe what happened, but I got knocked down and I got stomped on by a heavy boot in my back, and I got hit on the head with one of those clubs and I was carried off and thirty-one students were hospitalized that day. Thank God no one was killed, but it could happen, could have been another Kent State. If one cop had pulled his pistol and started firing maybe the rest of them would have, too, just like what happened at Kent State.
[Doug Weiskopf]: Oh yeah, well, that night, we had a big meeting and there was just—even the students who had opposed us all year, the jocks and the frat boys, they were outraged at what happened. They said, We didn’t have any love for you, but the cops didn’t have any right to do to you what they did. And it felt like—and to them it was kind of an ethos among jocks that I understood. It’s like the concept of taking one for the team. If you sacrifice your body to take a charge in a basketball game and you get knocked to the floor, you’re taking one for the team. And they looked at us, and they saw us standing there and resisting the cops, and they went, God, they had the guts to do that, they took one for their team.
So, they joined us the next day in a march in downtown Portland. We marched from campus, 4,000 of us marched. A lot of the faculty members, who had not liked us all year, they were outraged. The president of our university had to tried to get ahold of the mayor up in his office the whole time before they attacked us, [before] the cops attacked us. He could never get ahold of the mayor and that night he was hospitalized with what was described as a nervous breakdown. These were scary times. You were at peril no matter what. Unless you were just not going to be anywhere near the action.
[Doug Weiskopf]: So, we marched downtown, 4,000 of us. We had our marshals ready to take care of anybody who was going to react angrily and do violence. And we didn’t storm—we could have stormed the City Hall. There was only a couple dozen cops there at the entrance and we could have stormed it just like what happened on January 6th, but we didn’t do that. [Editor’s clarification: the narrator is referring to the events of January 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.]
[Doug Weiskopf]: And we were kind of—we won ugly, is what they call it.
[Interviewer]: [01:10:54] How did that dedication impact you? [Doug Weiskopf]: Oh, it had been in the planning stage for quite a while. There’s a history professor at Portland State named David Horowitz who first came to work there in 1968 as a young man just out of grad school. And that was his first, it had been his only job, as a history professor there. They ought to name a building after him, for heaven’s sake, but he was part of our protest group. He was a young activist, just a couple years older than we were. And all through the years, he and I and a couple of other people had tried to keep the story alive. We kept telling it and retelling it to new generations of students. We would write articles. In 1995, we had our own retrospective, it was right after Kent State’s, May 11, 1995.
By the way, I did a thorough search on the internet about the four hundred fifty colleges and universities that went on strike in 1970 after Kent State. I wanted to see if there had been any that had done what we were doing, which was having a ceremony to commemorate it. And I found a couple of schools, they had Zoom conferences; they talked, they communicated, they did stuff online. But other than Kent State, we were the only campus that had a ceremony in 2022 commemorating the events. And I think that even in 1995 we might have been the only ones, too, other than Kent State.
[Doug Weiskopf]: That was just another thing that was connecting tissue between our universities that made us sister universities.
[Interviewer]: [01:13:05] Did you have a similar response—did your university have a similar response for the Jackson State Shootings? [Doug Weiskopf]: I’m sorry, ask that again please. [Interviewer]: [01:13:16] Did your university have a similar response to the Jackson State Shootings? [Doug Weiskopf]: Oh, yes. That happened right during the strike and when that happened, we had a march for that, too, and we had a ceremony in our auditorium, and we tried to make that as important as Kent State. People died there, too. And, yeah, forgive me if I didn’t mention that previously, but, yeah, Jackson State was well mentioned at the time.
[Doug Weiskopf]: I did.
[Doug Weiskopf]: Well, at the time, I was actually living in Cincinnati. My wife and I had moved there for a few years. And she had—her sister lived nearby in Aurora, near Kent.
[Doug Weiskopf]: And her mom lived not too far away, in Solon. So, when I heard they were having this big event at Kent State I said, “Well, let’s go up and stay with your mom. I have to go to that Kent State event.” And I already had flight plans to go to Portland for our event. But I wanted to go to Kent State’s, too. So, I went there and I heard Peter, Paul, and Mary play and Senator [Howard] Metzenbaum spoke. And I saw some of the students who had participated in the burning of the ROTC Building and they were still as arrogant as ever and I came close to going up and telling them what a bunch of jerks they were and how they got people killed. And they were not the kinds of people that we would have tolerated at Portland State, I can tell you that. They would have been told to pull it. And it’s a shame they were allowed to just run wild back in ’70. But, yeah, it was a great—and I met the young organizers. There were the sorority that had lost the sorority woman [editor’s clarification: Sandy Scheuer] in the shooting and then there was the—it was organized by the current 1995 students and there were a lot of people from ‘70 who were there that day. I spoke to everybody and I was so impressed meeting Mary Ann Vecchio. She was almost as tall as me; she’s about six feet tall. And, I just saw—I knew her story and I told her I wished I could have been her friend, or her dad, or her brother and protected her because what had happened to her was viciously foul, you know—people treating a little fourteen-year-old girl that way. And, if you look at that picture, she was the only one standing over the dead boy [editor’s clarification: Jeffrey Miller]. Everybody else was kind of holding back, we don’t want to get near him, but she was there waving her arms, pleading for help, she didn’t know if he was dead or not. And she was just a little girl, and what a fine woman and I guess she turned out okay. She had a pretty good life, but it was hard for a long time for her. And I met Dean Kahler, too, in the wheelchair. I was really impressed with what a calm and happy kind of outlook he has. He had every right to feel bitter and angry and just let it kill him off, but he was a good man. I admired him so much. As I said, I spoke to some of the organizers of Kent State from back in the day and and we just felt a kinship. It was wonderful. It was like we were part of the same thing. What drove us on at Portland State was definitely the reaction we had to Kent State. The Cambodia invasion, as bad as it was, wasn’t enough to launch what we did. And the fact that we were able to keep going all the way from May 4 into September. No other group of protesters did that summer, none. We were the only group left standing. It was scary in a way, and I was expecting, when it was all over that I might end up the like the Chicago Seven, I’d be indicted for federal crimes. At the time, the Chicago Seven had been—it had only been less than a year that they had been found guilty in Chicago and sentenced to five years in prison. And it wasn’t until ‘74 that their convictions were reversed, so I thought this could happen to us, we’re definitely in very dangerous territory and anything can happen, but we’d already gone well past the point of no return. There was no going back. We had to just see it through to the end.
[Doug Weiskopf]: Well, as I said, I felt like Perceval and the Knights of the Round Table and King Arthur spending my life searching for the Holy Grail, that I finally found at the Nixon Library, I think. I just never let it rest. Every time I started to drift away from those times, something would come along to make me jump back in and I just felt like I had become kind of the keeper of the story of myself and Professor Horowitz at Portland State. What was really moving for me at that 2022 ceremony was the current Portland State president and dean of students spoke. I don’t know if you saw that on that video.
[Interviewer]: Yes. [Doug Weiskopf]: But for many, many years after 1970, we were persona non grata, they wouldn’t even talk about us and what we did. We were blamed for having—that the state legislature cut the university funding in a fit of pique against our university. And we were not well thought of and to have the courage from the president to come and speak kindly about us and the young woman who is the dean of students who wasn’t born until 1975 say that she was inspired by what we had done and she had picked Portland State to go to as a student herself because she liked the legacy that we had left behind. The school has been a very active university ever since, in every way, in so many different areas. It’s just something I couldn’t let go of.
And, finally, one thing I read way back in the time was, somebody wrote, that said that the anti-war movement in America at every campus seemed to have a higher than would to be expected percentage of their organizers and leaders, if you want to call them that, who were second-generation Holocaust kids. Kids whose families had been touched by the Nazi Holocaust and had lost family in the concentration camps. And they didn’t have any answers for that, but I understood that because my father was a refugee from Germany and he’d lost family over there and my uncle was in a slave labor camp and my grandmother survived a concentration camp called Theresienstadt, near Prague. I think those of us who grew up in families where the Holocaust was this crushing burden to carry forward, we felt a calling to get involved with causes where there were great injustices and human lives were lost. I mean, in Southeast Asia, we found, all of Vietnam north and south and Cambodia, Laos, they don’t know if it was between two and four million died during the ten years America was involved over there in that war. They don’t know if it was as few as two or as many as four million. That’s a big margin of error when you think about it.
[Doug Weiskopf]: I think just to reiterate that I’ve always felt this spiritual connection to Kent State. I have since May 4, 1970. I feel like Portland State and Kent State are sister universities. I feel like we’re, more than any other campus in America, we’re connected to it because we kept it going at great risk to ourselves. Anytime I would think about trying to be cautious and not take risks I would think, There were kids that were dead at Kent State. I owe it to them, we owe it to them, to go on. There was this torch that they handed us that we had to carry forward. And, you might have heard of the People’s Park riots in Berkeley. And, when I went through Berkeley two weeks after it all happened and a couple people were shot dead, there was no one there, and I thought it was terrible that at least a few people didn’t hang on and keep protesting. And I didn’t want us to be part of the big cop out that summer. I wanted us to keep on and do it in the memory of Kent State and the students who lost their lives.
[Doug Weiskopf]: I hope I’ve given you a good story.
[Doug Weiskopf]: Yeah, thank you so much for giving me this opportunity. I mean, as I said, I feel this tremendous connection to Kent State and I’m so happy to have our story in your archives.
[End of Interview]
[Interviewer’s note—Doug Weiskopf sent the following unedited text from his May 11, 2022, speech at Portland State University, and asked for it to be appended here]:
Thank you for being here today, please let me say how grateful I am for the beautiful plaque that is being unveiled here in memory of all who protested the Vietnam War, including many returning military veterans. I hope this becomes a permanent gathering place of remembrance every May 11th. Nixon became president in that election and many of us who had been involved in electoral politics that year became soured on its ability to end the war, which caused a dozen of us to organize a protest group at PSU that continued into 1971. What followed in Portland and America was a civil war, where Nixon and anyone who supported his war policies became bitter opponents, including in some cases even family members...During the 1968-'69 school year we remained small in numbers and our impact was limited but we did organize around the solid foundation of nonviolent protest, which, standing on the shoulders of giants, we learned from the teachings & examples of MLK & Gandhi. Our strength and power to inspire followers came from this commitment and during the year between Sept. 1969 through Sept.'70 we were able to organize numerous marches, always peaceful, through Downtown Portland with crowds numbering up to 12,000. |
| Narrator |
Weiskopf, Doug |
| Narrator's Role |
Student at Portland State University in 1970 |
| Date of Interview |
2023-01-18 |
| Description |
Doug Weiskopf was a student at Portland State University in 1970. In this oral history, he discusses his involvement with the Vietnam War protest movement. He describes the impact that the news of the Kent State Shootings had on his campus in Oregon and provides his eyewitness account of a non-violent student protest that led to a confrontation with law enforcement officers on May 11, 1970, resulting in thirty-one students being hospitalized. He also discusses how these events affected the course of his life and drove him to continue researching the connections among the historical events of the 1970s and to become, as he terms it in this interview, “a keeper of the story.” |
| Length of Interview |
1:26:02 hours |
| Places Discussed |
Los Angeles (Calif.) Portland (Or.) |
| Time Period discussed |
1970 |
| Subject(s) |
College students--Oregon--Portland--Interviews Conflict of generations Domestic intelligence--United States--History--20th century Frank, Alan Glenn Haldeman, H. R. (Harry R.), 1926-1993 Huston, Thomas Jewish college students--Interviews Kahler, Dean Kent State Shootings, Kent, Ohio, 1970 Life magazine Los Angeles Free Press Nixon, Richard M. (Richard Milhous), 1913-1994 Nonviolence Polarization (Social sciences) Student movements--Oregon--Portland Students--Oregon--Portland--Interviews Underground periodicals United States. White House. Special Investigations Unit Vecchio, Mary Ann Vietnam Veterans Against the War Vietnam War, 1961-1975--Protest movements Violence--Oregon--Portland |
| Repository |
Special Collections and Archives |
| Access Rights |
This digital object is owned by Kent State University and may be protected by U.S. Copyright law (Title 17, USC). Please include proper citation and credit for use of this item. Use in publications or productions is prohibited without written permission from Kent State University. Please contact the Department of Special Collections and Archives for more information. |
| Duplication Policy |
http://www.library.kent.edu/special-collections-and-archives/duplication-policy |
| Institution |
Kent State University |
| DPLA Rights Statement |
http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
| Format of Original |
audio digital file |
| Disclaimer |
The content of oral history interviews, written narratives and commentaries is personal and interpretive in nature, relying on memories, experiences, perceptions, and opinions of individuals. They do not represent the policy, views or official history of Kent State University and the University makes no assertions about the veracity of statements made by individuals participating in the project. Users are urged to independently corroborate and further research the factual elements of these narratives especially in works of scholarship and journalism based in whole or in part upon the narratives shared in the May 4 Collection and the Kent State Shootings Oral History Project. |
| Provenance/Collection |
May 4 Collection |
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Citation
“Doug Weiskopf Oral History,” Kent State University Libraries. Special Collections and Archives, accessed December 22, 2024, http://omeka.library.kent.edu/special-collections/items/show/11682.
