Chapter 5 - Civil Rights Activist and Vietnam War Resister

Summary

By the mid-sixties, Leonard Bernstein was engaging with the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War resistance. Bernstein took part in greeting Martin Luther King in the Selma Alabama fifty-four mile march to gain voting rights. He campaigned for war resistor Eugene McCarthy in the election of 1968. In 1970, Bernstein’s and his wife Felicia’s fundraising support for the Black Panthers Legal Defense brought him under public attack organized by the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover. In 1971, Bernstein’s support for war resistor Daniel Berrigan, and his seeking the latter’s help in writing the libretto for Mass, brought him again under attack by Hoover, this time with the connivance of President Nixon, who had missed the inaugural performance of Mass for fear that Bernstein would publicly humiliate him. Nixon now placed Bernstein on his infamous ‘Enemies List’, but Bernstein was saved from victimization by Hoover’s death and Nixon’s forced resignation due to the Watergate scandal.