Interview with Stephen Holbrook

ORAL HISTORY OF UTAH PEACE ACTIVISTS PROJECT UTAH VALLEY UNIVERSITY OREM, UTAH INTERVIEW WITH STEPHEN HOLBROOK Interview Conducted by Kathryn French 10/26/2006 Salt Lake City, Utah Page 1 of 22 Interviewee: Stephen Holbrook Interviewer: Kathryn French Date: October 26, 2006 Subject: Utah Peace Activists Place: Salt Lake City, Utah KF: This is October 26, 2006, Kathy French interviewing Stephen Holbrook. Stephen, where did we end up last time? Of course I don’t remember exactly. United Front to End The War. We haven’t talked about MX missile days. I don’t think we’ve talked about post-Vietnam at all. SH: No. I have a few more things to say about Vietnam and some of the other things that I think are worth talking about are the music, cultural aspects of the sixties and early seventies, as well as the assassinations, and our relationship or lack thereof with the police and FBI. KF: You go ahead and start talking. SH: The first large anti-war marches really came out of the University of Utah where I would say the predominately large number of people who came were from the University or who had some University association. Those were the moratoriums against the war in 1968 and 1969. The United Front To End The War was the predominant group that organized these marches. It kind of formed out of the marches. It wasn’t until… I believe it was the early seventies when the largest marches came from the capitol down to Pioneer Park. Those were around 5,000 people. But they were toward the end of the war, but after Nixon had broadened the war by invading Cambodia, and things like Kent State had taken place. A lot of things had really begun to anger people. I think it was in that context that what passed for extreme radicalism in Utah, with the Molotov cocktails in the ROTC building, and the burning down of the effectively empty multi-cultural center. But those things scared a lot of people, and it began to make some people afraid to be part of the movement. There always was a wide variety of groups involved. We’ve talked about the flower power kids— by that I mean the kids who were part of the cultural changes of the sixties in terms of music and dress. I would say that they didn’t have an ideological point of view. They didn’t like the war. Of course they wanted peace. You had a small group of pacifists. You had militants who might identify with a group called the Weathermen. Others who identified with political groups that we’ve mentioned before, the Progressive Labor Party, the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party. But the broad number of people were really just from average circumstances in Utah and did not have an ideological point of view. It was this group of people who made up the largest numbers. I believe we talked about the march on Social Hall Avenue where the TV stations were, and asking for time on the three stations because of the lack of conversation about the real issues as opposed to the nature of the marches. KF: Which was amazing. SH: During that period of time when the marches and various activities were taking place, several of us who were always part of the 50 group, but always took lead roles, maintained a relationship with the Salt Lake City Police Intelligence Division because we wanted to make sure that there were no incidents at the marches, that people were safe, the police knew where we were going. There was a guy by the name of Lieutenant Patrick who we particularly coordinated with. Harry Patrick later became a captain. I saw him not too long ago in a restaurant. We had a conversation. We would call them or go see them and say, “We’re going to have a march. This is where we’re Page 2 of 22 going to go. This is the number of people that we expect to see.” We tried to maintain some discipline ourselves, by having people wear arm bands who were march leaders, in order to avoid people being hurt, or agent provocateurs who were playing a double role, or something like that, going on. There was always an observation by the FBI but we had no real relationship with them. They were there to take pictures. We never saw them as our protectors. We always saw them as people who were trying to get something on us. KF: Did they identify themselves? SH: No. In those days it was actually pretty obvious who they were because it was almost a uniform that they wore, a certain kind of suit and a certain kind of shoes. Then of course when people were taking photos and you know that they’re not from the press. It was pretty obvious. Some of us had other interactions. We did have interactions with FBI where they came to ask us if we knew anything about certain events that took place. They were always courteous but they were not there for the purpose of protecting us, and that was very clear. As we know from uncovered history, both the Johnson and Nixon administrations had been seeking to prove or suggest that somehow we were all being manipulated by somebody. In fact, we knew who people were and what their point of view was. We had our little fights in these planning groups about the themes and exactly what would take place. There was not a conspiracy about who was there and whether we were being manipulated. The police in Salt Lake were actually quite good in protecting us. There was never a serious incident that I recall that was directly in our marches or something of that sort. There were a couple of things that happened along the way. One of which kind of had a lingering and dramatic story. One of our marches at the federal building, there was a fellow who showed up at the march with a picture. As I recall I believe he had Mao Tse-Tung and Stalin pictures. One on one side of his poster, and one on the other side of his sign. KF: A student? SH: I didn’t know who he was actually. Since I was always interested in public perception and the press coverage, I went over to him and said, “Look, you have every right to be here. You have every right to express your point of view. But the point of view you’re expressing doesn’t express what most of the people here feel, and it’s counterproductive to our purpose in being here.” So he took the sign down. Well about a week later he hijacked an airplane from Salt Lake. He wanted the jet to go to Hanoi in Vietnam, but the jet didn’t have that kind of range. So he ended up hijacking the plane to Havana, Cuba. I always felt slightly guilty because I thought maybe I had made him feel like he couldn’t express his point of view, so he took a more extreme measure. As I learned, later, this played out over several years. I learned that after he got there, he never did really approve of Cuban communism. His goal was somehow to be in Vietnam. There was no way to do that. Initially he was free in Cuba. Then because he was always creating some kind of problems, he ended up in jail. After he ended up locked up in Cuba his parents came to me, thinking that I had some kind of power to get to the Cubans. I didn’t know anybody in Cuba. But I did know Wayne Holly, the president of the Utah Communist Party, or the chairman I guess. I asked him if he had any ideas about how to approach the Cubans. This kid’s name was Mike Hansen. His parents wanted him to come and do time in the United States rather than be in what he regarded as a really lousy Cuban jail. Wayne gave me the name of somebody in their foreign ministry. I wrote a letter and I kind of gilded the lily a bit. I said I was a local socialist leader, and that this kid had come from a working class family. I sort of played all of the cards. And it was not too long after that that he was released, and he came back to the United States and served the Page 3 of 22 rest of his time in a U.S. federal penitentiary. It was a side show that had nothing to do essentially with what most of us were doing. I just somehow got roped in or agreed to help do something about it. I believe the last major march was the one in which we went from the state capitol down to Pioneer Park. We had Robert Scheer who was later a writer for the Los Angeles Times and at that time was editor of Ramparts Magazine. We had an entertainer by the name of Country Joe McDonald from Country Joe and the Fish who came and sang his famous Vietnam song. However, this 5,000 group got all of about three inches, one column in the Tribune. Any time you have 5,000 come together for a political event in Utah that is bigger than most people would tend to recall at a Republican or Democratic State Convention.

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