Protest Activity
The convention was targeted for widespread protests, particularly against the Vietnam War, and the Nixon administration made efforts to suppress it. In 2005, files released under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit showed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation even monitored Beatle John Lennon after he was invited to play for Yippie protests. The monitoring of Lennon later concluded that he was not a dangerous revolutionary, being "constantly under the influence of narcotics."
The U.S. Justice Department indicted Scott Camil, John Kniffen, Alton Foss, Donald Perdue, William Patterson, Stan Michelsen, Peter Mahoney and John Briggs—collectively known as the Gainesville Eight—on charges of conspiracy to disrupt the Convention. All were exonerated.
Oliver Stone's film Born on the Fourth of July, based on Ron Kovic's autobiography of the same name, depicts Kovic and fellow Vietnam Veterans Against the War activists Bobby Muller, Bill Wieman and Mark Clevinger were spat upon at the convention. The scene was actually not in Kovic's autobiography, but was taken almost frame for frame and word by word from a documentary film made at the 1972 Republican Convention in Miami 1972 titled "Operaton Last Patrol" by filmmaker and actor Frank Cavestani and photo journalist Cathrine Leroy.
Read more about this topic: 1972 Republican National Convention
Famous quotes containing the words protest and/or activity:
“[University students] hated the hypocrisy of adult society, the rigidity of its political institutions, the impersonality of its bureaucracies. They sought to create a society that places human values before materialistic ones, that has a little less head and a little more heart, that is dominated by self-interest and loves its neighbor more. And they were persuaded that group protest of a militant nature would advance those goals.”
—Muriel Beadle (b. 1915)
“Every writer is necessarily a critic—that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on.... The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg—nine-tenths of him is under water.”
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