Rebels in White Gloves (18 page)

Kris worked for Legal Aid in New Haven jails and mental hospitals and juvenile institutions, monitoring inmate conditions and developing alternative sentencing and rehabilitation programs. With Hillary Rodham, she edited the
Yale Review of Law and Social Action
. She did not, however, put to rest the question of whether she was “selling out” by getting her law degree; in late-night conversations with Hillary, she wrestled with the tension between conscience and pragmatism, between moral purity and political effectiveness. When Oregon U.S. attorney Sid Lezak came to talk to the students, Kris was among those who heckled him for being Nixon’s henchman and prosecuting draft dodgers. He responded by describing the possibilities open to a prosecutor: to divert first offenders out of the system so they would not have a record and to influence policies at the Justice Department. His insistence
that “you can do more on the inside” fell on fertile, if still ambivalent, ground.

Kris had grown up believing in a “responsive government” but had direct experience as well of the ill uses to which the forces of law and order could be put. She had seen Bobby Seale bound and gagged in the New Haven courtroom and had herself been put under surveillance by the FBI after going in and out of Panther headquarters several times for documents on the case. (The agents were easy to spot, she says, because they “always kept their shoes shined.”) She’d heard a firsthand account of the brutal police beatings at the ’68 Democratic Convention from Hillary, who’d ridden a bus downtown that summer from her suburban Chicago home. Kris herself was working in a prison in 1971 when the police stormed Attica under orders of Governor Nelson Rockefeller, killing thirty-nine people and wounding eighty more. The same year, she helped wade through the Pentagon Papers for the
Boston Globe
, learning with the rest of the nation of covert bombing missions in Laos and Cambodia and the widespread discrediting within the State Department and the military of their own geopolitical rationales for the war.

Through her boyfriend, Jeff Rogers, the son of Nixon secretary of state William Rogers, Kris also came under the sway of Jeff’s mentor, Charles Reich, author of
The Greening of America
. Dedicated “to the students at Yale and their generation” and first excerpted in
The New Yorker, The Greening
was an influential synthesis of the ideas that would enduringly shape many of the bookish women of the Wellesley class of ’69.

Following on Marx and Marcuse, Reich argued for the central significance of “consciousness” in social change, and mapped three kinds of consciousness in America. He rejected the essentially libertarian “Consciousness I,” with its faith in self-reliance, as naive, suitable for the craftsman and small landholder in the eighteenth century but a hoax in the context of advanced industrial capitalism. He praised the liberal “Consciousness II” for recognizing that large corporations robbed ordinary people of their full humanity and autonomy, turning employees into factory parts and the public into dupes to be manipulated into consumerist excess and political docility. But Reich questioned the liberal faith in government’s ability to subordinate corporations to the public interest by making laws to protect labor and the environment, redistribute
wealth, ensure fair competition, and weave a safety net for the weak. The efforts by Progressives and New Dealers and Great Society-makers to use law and politics to restore equality and individual liberty, he argued, had only enlarged the reach of the Kafkaesque organizations and hastened their creation of a streamlined “new man,” cured of all vitality and resistance like the lobotomized McMurphy in Ken Kesey’s
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
.

The IIs had failed to touch the fundamental problem of the “loss of meaning” in America. But a new consciousness was dawning, Reich said. Flower Power marked the dawn of a new age. Hippies were the prophets of Consciousness III and would save the world: “Woodstock in time will include not only youth, but all people in America.” In a society that was dead, he argued, the only ones alive were those who were “antisocial” in the conventional sense: Hippies refused to be made into “instrumental beings” in organizations, rejected rankings by wealth or merit, threw over a “legalistic view of marriage” in favor of a higher natural law that recognized that to observe “duty toward others, after the feelings are gone, is not virtue and may be a crime.” Through their clothes and illegal activities, hippies became models of independent consciousness, of a self broken loose from the constraints of society. At the same time, Reich’s hippie was a natural communitarian, living “as if the corporate state did not exist and some new form of community were already here,” opening free schools and free clinics and the door of his pad to anyone wanting to “crash.” In short, the personal was the only useful politics: “When liberal reform and radical tactics prove powerless, the hippies’ new lifestyle will dismantle the corporate state.” That was not, remarkably, a fringe view. Even
Time
magazine, two years earlier, had decided that in their “independence of material possession, their peacefulness and honesty, their calls for an end to profits and empire and violence,” hippies are “considerably more virtuous than the great majority.”

When it came to Kris and Jeff and their classmates at Yale, Reich was divided. While he singled out the college graduates of 1969 as “the harbingers” of the new age, he also insisted that his favorite fictional icon of the new consciousness, Holden Caulfield, would surely “reject the legal profession.” To secure a Yale Law degree, he warned, was to buy a place in the meritocracy and probably be doomed for the big chill: “Reformers risk nothing and opt out in their stylish private lives.”

Kris had made at least one gesture worthy of Consciousness III when she moved into the Cozy Beach commune her first year at law school with an architect who designed Buckminster Fuller-inspired inflatable domes, and actor Henry Winkler, then a student at Yale Drama School. (The FBI would later interview “the Fonz” while clearing Kris for confirmation as a U.S. attorney.) Cozy Beach had ties with Ken Kesey’s Hog Farm in Oregon, whose members came for a visit soon after their Magic Bus had been given immortal life by Tom Wolfe in
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
. The Beach also had its own little road show: Hauling their geodesic dome around to the neighborhoods of New Haven, they put on psychedelic light shows and political plays. They all wore jumpsuits with their names stenciled on the back; Kris was called Package Deal. “I was the radical with the la-di-da Wellesley manners and middle-class hang-ups and white gloves,” she explains. “I could pour tea in the afternoon and put on a psychedelic light show at night. They were teasing me, but I’ve always believed that mixture of qualities enabled me to do more.”

The move into Cozy Beach cost Kris the financial support of her Goldwater-Republican parents, who refused to fund a lifestyle they abhorred; she put herself through law school, working forty-hour weeks and taking evening and Saturday seminars. By the time she announced her engagement to Jeff, however, a tall, rangy, somewhat taciturn young man of the finest Republican stock, Kris had been welcomed back to the parental fold. The couple had fallen in love at first sight. Jeff’s friend Bill Clinton was living with Kris’s friend Hillary, and the four spent a lot of time together, hanging out at home listening to Janis Joplin, the Jefferson Airplane, and the Rolling Stones. Engaged a week after meeting Jeff, Kris had a wedding shower in September 1971 attended by Mrs. Spiro T. Agnew, Mrs. George Bush, Mrs. John Connally, Mrs. John Ehrlichman, Mrs. H. R. Haldeman, Mrs. John Mitchell, Mrs. Elliot Richardson, Mrs. George Romney, and Mrs. George Shultz. Jeff and Kris were married two weeks later on Shelter Island. Secretary of State Rogers, acting as best man, read passages from
The Prophet
by Kahlil Gibran; Secret Service men listened solemnly in their boats lined up along the shore. Among the four hundred wedding guests were most of the Nixon administration, Chief Justice Warren Burger, Charles Reich, and all of Kris’s commune friends.

A wedding is, of course, the happy ending of every fairy tale, the ultimate feminine fantasy come true. By the early 1970s, with feminism blooming into the American mainstream, it was a ritual begging to be remade. Those Wellesley graduates who did not simply disdain the “bourgeois convention” entirely often subverted or symbolically transformed the ceremony or at least remained half indifferent to the whole affair. By remaking the public ritual—discarding vows of obedience; rejecting the name change, with its historic echoes of a wife’s legal status as her husband’s property; refusing the white dress, with its symbolic representation of virginity—perhaps they would get a head start on remaking the institution of marriage itself. Hillary Rodham lived with Bill Clinton before she married, and then forgot to collect her Empire-waist cotton wedding dress, picked out by her parents in a Fayetteville department store, until the night before. Nancy Gist refused to register for silver and china, “much to my everlasting regret.” Nan Decker sent out photocopied invitations (a picture of a couple on lawn chairs about to be crushed by a flaming blimp); her husband wore shower thongs, and a lesbian minister presided, and for a year after the wedding the bride continued to live in her Cambridge cooperative while the groom went off to medical school in Cincinnati: “My mother had been afraid I was going to move in with a man without getting married; instead, I was married and not living with him.” Jenny Cook, who had won the hoop-rolling contest that presaged the first Wellesley bride, skied into her December 1971 wedding in a log cabin in Alaska. She received no toasters, but ended up with three fondue pots: “That was a countercultural gift,” her husband says. Fran Rusan’s June 1972 wedding was a ceremony traditional to the Yoruba people of Nigeria. The groom, Ernest Wilson, was an aide to Representative Charles Diggs of Michigan, chairman of the subcommittee on Africa, and the couple had spent long periods of time on that continent, including a full month in Ghana at a religious shrine. Their two hundred wedding guests, most in African dress, participated in the ritual. With their shoes in hand, women lined up behind the bride and men behind the groom, and the whole congregation moved in two columns into the ballroom, singing ceremonial songs led by priests of the Temple Bosum Dzemawodzi. All two hundred knelt before the
priest while vows were spoken. Then, led by a chorus from the temple and a band of drummers, everyone stood and began clapping their hands while doing an improvised tribal dance around the floor. “The whole idea is to celebrate a feeling of community,” Fran told a reporter sent by
The New York Times
, while having her hair braided into an intricate arrangement. “The significance is not just that two people are getting married but that two families are being joined, with the approval and blessing of the community.” The daughter of a St. Louis doctor, “the bride did have a china pattern registered in a department store,” the
Times
noted, “and a white tiered wedding cake.”

In the five years after the graduation of the class of ’69, the second wave of feminism reached its crest. Between 1968 and 1973, more than five hundred new feminist publications appeared, with names like
Broomstick, Options for Women Over Forty
, and
off our backs
. Many were printed at the SoHo women’s press where Nancy Eyler, ’69, worked, and were sold at a cooperative feminist bookstore in Cambridge founded by Jean MacRae, ’69. In 1970, the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the suffrage amendment was marked with the first major demonstration in half a century: In the “Strike for Equality,” thousands of women unplugged telephone switchboards, put down mops, or dumped their kids at their husbands’ desks while they marched in New York, Boston, Washington, and San Francisco demanding day care, the opening of all jobs to both sexes, and greater involvement by fathers in parenting. Women staged sit-ins at women’s magazines and urged the boycott of products with sexist ads. They also made inroads into politics: In 1971, the National Women’s Political Caucus and National Women’s Education Fund were founded, in part due to the efforts of Jan Krigbaum and Betsy Griffith, both Wellesley ’69.

The Wellesley women fit the classic profile of the moderate feminist activist—young, white, middle class, well educated—and in great numbers they were active in such organizations as NOW and the movement to ratify the ERA, as well as in women’s health and reproductive rights and the education and welfare of children; only a very few involved themselves in either “radical” feminism or its opposite. Alison Campbell
remembers experiencing “the click,” as feminists called the moment that politicized a woman, when she learned from Ms. magazine of the aggressive marketing to Latin America by U.S. makers of infant formula: Mothers would let their milk dry up, then watch their infants waste away with dysentery from unclean water. That click propelled her into a conscientious study of natural maternity. Kathy Smith Ruckman, home with the first of her four kids, also found in feminism a guide to changing her domestic life. “Betty Friedan’s discussion of how women are slaves to housekeeping freed me right up. It let me reject many of the demeaning ‘housewife’ chores that I didn’t enjoy or think important—ironing, throwing the perfect dinner party, waiting on my husband and kids.”

Class members had varying views of feminism’s public style. Kathy thought their “stridency” a “disservice” to women—both self-defeating and fake. Jan Krigbaum, who with Betsy Griffith worked to increase the number of women delegates to the 1972 presidential nominating conventions (they succeeded in tripling the proportion to 40 percent), was also not entirely comfortable with the confrontational style of leaders like New York congresswoman Bella Abzug: “But I recognized then and feel even more strongly now that without their aggressiveness, none of the rest of us would have been free as quickly and as fully to adopt different styles. The barriers are real and enormous, and the front guard has to go through with enormous velocity to break them down and then the others of us coming behind have far more flexibility than the vanguard. I wince sometimes when younger women caricature Bella. I believe that the times forced her to those extremes, and then she made it possible for all of us to succeed—not just by wearing the three-piece suit that was the model for making it in the corporate sector, but by holding on to our individuality.”