In Seattle: Up from Revolution

By DAVID AIKMAN

He sits at a table in Seattle's Red Robin restaurant almost humbly, nursing a Rainier beer. The slightly graying hair is neatly combed, well trimmed and barely touching the ears. The suit is a conservative gray tweed, the tie quiet and reassuring. So are his soft-spoken musings, hard to hear over the taped jazz and folk music. "America is in good shape," he offers soothingly. "America is not ideologically racist. Americans are willing to give people a fair shake." He could be a small businessman decompressing amiably between a week's rash of orders and the idyl of a suburban weekend.

But he is not. He is Charles C. Marshall III, 35"Chip" to his friendsformer member of the national committee of Students for a Democratic Society, leading figure of the Seattle Liberation Front (a sort of 1970-ish club of leftist clubs), and a key defendant in the 1970 "Seattle Eight" conspiracy trial. Today three of Marshall's top S.D.S. colleagues of the tumultuous 1960s are still under ground. One of them, Weather Under ground Leader Bernardino Dohrn, has become something of a cult role model for the dwindled, sullen ranks of the New Left. Nor have Marshall's Seattle Eight co-defendants lapsed into torpor suburbanus. One was jailed only two years ago for conspiracy, another died after years of ruinous drug taking and late nights, and the others tend to espouse leftist causes that range in tone from Jane Fonda chic to Hanoi histrionics.

What happened to Marshall? "I could not quite accept the idea of mankind being all alone," he says, referring to the philosophical premises of his revolutionary years. "In the '60s we all flirted around with Marxism. But clearly there are powers beyond those solely generated by human societies. I learned a lot of things in jail too." In 1971 Marshall spent two months in Terminal Island Prison in Los Angeles and six more at Clearwater Prison camp in Washington State on a contempt of court conviction. "At Terminal Island I wouldn't shave, so they put me on death row. Prison shook a lot of my preconceptions. I met some characters in prison who were just plain bad."

Jail shook his ideological certitudes. "I knew I had to change," he says. "I might have gotten crazy. People in S.D.S. thought I was always too mass-oriented. I could never go the whole step of accepting Marx like the Bible."

Exactly a decade ago this spring, none of this was very obvious. Marshall's denunciations of the University of Washington's athletic links with Brigham Young University, a Mormon school that was accused of racism, helped provoke a nasty riot. Seattle Liberation Front and Black Student Union supporters surged off on a rampage through eleven campus buildings. They did little damage, but they roughed up some innocent bystanders and frightened others. Many carried pipes, chains and clubs. "Revolution" was Marshall's own word for this ominous wave of the future, but other rhetorical staples of the day went along with it: "Power to the people!" and "Smash the state!" The vague goal was communism"with a small c," Marshall now insists.

As a teenager, Marshall recalls, he was taken by his father, a liberal intellectual, to see Martin Luther King's 1963 march on Washington. The experience propelled himwith his parents' encouragementinto the civil rights movement, and then a gradual evolution into antiwar radicalism. By 1968, Marshall was one of the most experienced student organizers in the U.S. The next year, after graduating from Cornell University, he was paid $20 a week by S.D.S. to organize radical antiwar movements on campuses up and down the East Coast. "I was told they had 10,000 pages on me at the FBI," he says now, no doubt hyperbolically, but with a certain tinge of pride. "My career ten years ago was the perfect case of the outside agitator." In December 1969, no longer with S.D.S., he and three fellow Cornell radicals headed for Seattle, apparently drawn by the sheer glamour of the wild West. "We were East Coast boys who related very heavily to cowboys," says he. "We all had long earrings, long hair, and boots."

Marshall and his hard-drinking, smash-the-state buddies then plunged into a peculiarly American form of modern revolutionism for several months. By day, they harangued students at Seattle's high school and college campuses on the war, racism and capitalism. By night they caroused into the early hours in a blurry continuum of beer, pot, sex and leftist war cries. But the frenetic "mobilizing" and hedonism was itself a clue to Marshall's own eventual disillusionment with radicalism. He had broken with S.D.S. in 1969 when it was taken over by the hate-filled and paranoid Weatherman. He says now, "The cultural thing really freaked me: destroy the family, destroy monogamy. They wanted to destroy the specialness of all personal relationships. I knew Mark [Rudd] and Bernardine [Dohrn]. I saw them go over the edge."

But the headlong revolutionary plunge could hardly last. In February 1970 Marshall and others helped organize a downtown Seattle demonstration to protest the verdicts of the Chicago Seven conspiracy trial. By December, after a monthlong trial in which he and six others (the eighth alleged plotter went underground) were unsuccessfully prosecuted for conspiracy to damage the Seattle Federal Building, he was in jail for contempt of court. All seven would have been freed had they not provoked the elderly judge with catcalls during the proceedings. At one point, two of them presented him with a Nazi flag.

Marshall backpedals hard from all this today. "I did read Marx, but I was never really anti-American," he says, a trifle defensively. "I never thought America was fascist." He explains: "I think a lot of it was puberty. It was so exciting." If so, intense study in jail helped bring on Mar shall's capitalist manhood. He and his wife Dianne, 32, own a pleasant houseboat and mooring space on Seattle's Portage Bay. "Liberal economics just doesn't work," he now says firmly. "It did for a time, but not any more. Self-reliance, productivity and independence are important. We used to assume that the wealth of some inevitably led to the poverty of others. But business interests me. Even profit doesn't bother me as much as it did."

The transformation, indeed, seems almost complete. Marshall now directs a 900-acre project for a housing development company. In 1977 he won in the primaries for Seattle city council, but lost in the general election because of opposition from Seattle's still active radical community. He says uncertainly, "I freaked the liberals out by getting the police to endorse me. I was too Machiavellian."

Joe Kelly, 34, one of Marshall's closest "cowboy" comrades from Cornell and Seattle Liberation Front days, is almost bitter about Marshall's deradicalization. "He talks like a politician," says Kelly. As for everything that he and Marshall agitated for a decade ago, Kelly is unrepentant. "Basically, I think we were on the right side of history," he says of his and Marshall's support for Hanoi during the Viet Nam War. Such long radical memories are appropriate for Seattle. America's first general strike took place there in 1919, and during Marshall's own revolutionary prominence, the Wall Street Journal described it as "the bombing capital of the U.S." because of the ratio of bomb explosions per inhabitant.

By contrast, the University of Washington campus itself barely flickers at the memory of thousands shouting "Peace now!" At the largest demonstration in recent memory, protesting Iran's seizure of the U.S. embassy last fall, Old Glory was waved instead of burned. Even the Maoist activists have vanished, though they have been replaced by a group of socialist puritans who are convinced that true socialism's last earthly habitat is the People's Socialist Republic of Albania.

But few pay attention. In a classroom in Smith Hall, one of the buildings invaded ten years ago by the Seattle Liberation Front, young students are discussing that distant era with a teaching assistant. Says Bruce Parks, just eight in 1970: "I thought activism was something that just happened. You went to college and you joined the movement." Adds Dan Lovitt, also 18: "I feel kind of jealous I wasn't there. The campus activities had the air of a carnival."

Suddenly looking vulnerable, back in the Red Robin, Chip Marshall pauses after a question about the thousands of drowned Vietnamese boat people. He says slowly, "Sometimes I feel really terrible. Maybe we were completely wrong on Viet Nam."

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