David Harris - My Country Tis of Thee

My Country Tis of Thee

Also by David Harris

Dreams Die Hard:

Three Mens Journey through the Sixties

Goliath

I Shoulda Been Home Yesterday:

20 Months in Jail for Not Killing Anybody

Our War: What We Did in Vietnam and What It Did to Us

Shooting the Moon:

The True Story of an American Manhunt Unlike Any Other, Ever

The Crisis: The President, the Prophet, and the Shah1979 and the Coming of Militant Islam

The Genius: How Bill Walsh Reinvented Football and Created an NFL Dynasty

The Last Scam: A Novel

The Last Stand: The War Between Wall Street and Main Street over Californias Ancient Redwoods

The League: The Rise and Decline of the NFL

Reporting, Sallies, and Other Confessions

David Harris

Heyday, Berkeley, California

Copyright 2020 by David Harris

All rights reserved. No portion of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from Heyday.

The essays and articles in this book originally appeared in the following publications, sometimes under slightly different titles: the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Penthouse, Our War: What We Did in Vietnam and What It Did to Us (Random House, 1996), An Actual Man: Michael Murphy and the Human Potential Movement (Minuteman Press, 2010), and The Once and Future Forest:

Californias Iconic Redwoods (Heyday, 2019).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Harris, David, 1946- author.

Title: My country tis of thee : reporting, sallies, and other confessions / David Harris.

Description: Berkeley : Heyday, 2020.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020022143 (print) | LCCN 2020022144 (ebook) | ISBN

9781597145152 (cloth) | ISBN 9781597145213 (ebook) Classification: LCC PN4874.H2285 A25 2020 (print) | LCC PN4874.H2285

(ebook) | DDC 071/.3--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022143

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022144

Cover Photo: Jason Henry

Cover Design/Typesetting: Ashley Ingram

Published by Heyday

P.O. Box 9145, Berkeley, CA 94709 (510) 549-3564

heydaybooks.com

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This collection spans much of my career, and I was boosted by the help of hundreds of people along the way.I am grateful to all of them. I offer particular thanks to Steve Wasserman, my friend, editor, and now publisher at Heyday, and to his colleague Marthine Satris, who made this volume happen.

I have earned my living reporting and writing stories for forty-seven of my seventy-three years.

I started my professional career in March 1973, after the signing of peace agreements that withdrew American combat troops from Vietnam. I had been organizing civil disobedience against the war for almost a decade at that point, including the twenty months I spent incarcerated in federal prison. I was not only a convicted felon but I had dropped out of college (having left Stanford University six years earlier, just fifteen units short of my bachelors degree), I was divorced and sharing joint custody of my then three-year-old son, and I was close to broke. I knew I could write, having already authored a peace movement memoir published while I was in prison, but I had never taken a journalism course or worked for a newspaper, and I had only the vaguest idea about the workings of the wordsmithing business I was about to enter.

I started by sending an unsolicited letter to Jann Wenner, the founder, publisher, and editor in chief of Rolling Stone. His magazine had run a story about my release from prison two years earlier, and I thought he might recognize my name. Wenner wrote back and told me to bring him a magazine story and hed see if I was up to the task. A month later, I returned with Ask a Marine, which was not only published but eventually selected for the anthology The Best of Rolling Stone, a volume published in 1993 for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the magazine. After Wenner read my article, he offered me a contract as a contributing editor, a job that paid fifty cents a word plus expenses. I signed on without hesitation and have been at it ever since.

It was a fortuitous time to have entered journalism. With the Watergate scandal inching closer and closer to presidential impeachment, the staid gray lady that journalism had been during the sixties was undergoing a transformation as the mantra Speak Truth to Powerheretofore the marching orders of the peace movement I had been part of for a decadewas now becoming the mantra of the fourth estate as it pursued the corruption, dishonesty, and hypocrisy infecting the American body politic at its highest levels. The investigations at the core of this new journalistic flourishing became the principal instrument for bringing transparency, values, and accountability into the heart of democracy. I didnt need to think twice about adopting that purpose for my own, and it defined my professional life for almost five decades.

The collection of writing in this volume samples the arc of my work, which altogether generated some eleven books and four dozen articles, from its roots in the war and the counterculture that had dominated my coming-of-age; through the stature and professionalism at the New York Times Magazine, where I landed for a decade and won my spurs as a true professional; and eventually to the vagabond life of a freelance wordsmith, still speaking Truth to Power as best I was able. Each of these pieces carries a backstory about their making as well. The article titled Behind Americas Marijuana High was, for instance, the greatest risk I ever took to secure a story, and even though it was run on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, I swore afterward never to repeat such risk again. Understanding Mondale (published in this volume as Will the Real Walter Mondale Stand Up?) was the apex of my journalistic stature, reporting on the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination for the New York Times, again on the cover, and after it came out, I received a telegram from the Timess executive editor, the legendary Abe Rosenthal, calling it a purely fine piece, such high praise being accounted a considerable achievement in the internal byways of the Times. Writing The Agony of the Kurds was another risk, but it was also the result of the best expedition I ever mounted on a publishers nickel: in tracing the plight and flight of Kurdish refugees as they fled to the West to save themselves, I spent five weeks following them around Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Lithuania, and Germany, travels that included my sneaking into Saddam Husseins Iraq in a rowboat across the Tigris River.

And so I went over the decades, hopping from one story to the next, convincing one editor after another to back my play, always motivated by the belief that the more America honestly examined itself, the better a people we would be.