A Soporific Evening with Angela Davis

I had expected the audience to include colorful personalities of the New Left, frenetic teen-agers of the SDS (or what remains of them) on a jubilant rampage, show-business personalities offering champagne and sympathy, and beautiful black people in all their magnificent plumage. But the “Evening with the Stars” at Madison Square Garden to celebrate the acquittal of Angela Davis proved to be a gloomy and interminable affair.

The only stars announced or observed in the auditorium were the General Secretary of the U.S. Communist Party, Gus Hall, and Bella Abzug. Most of the people in the hall seemed wellheeled, middle-class, middle-aged, bourgeois and, judging by their reactions to statements made from the podium, committed hard-line Communists. They were present on party business. There were few smiles and the only laughter I heard was sarcastic and angry. Serious party-line planning and fund-raising for the overthrow of the American social and political system were obviously the order of the day; the adventurists of the New Left were elsewhere.

JB

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John Browne

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William F. Buckley Jr.

I had expected the audience to include colorful personalities of the New Left, frenetic teen-agers of the SDS (or what remains of them) on a jubilant rampage, show-business personalities offering champagne and sympathy, and beautiful black people in all their magnificent plumage. But the “Evening with the Stars” at Madison Square Garden to celebrate the acquittal of Angela Davis proved to be a gloomy and interminable affair.

The only stars announced or observed in the auditorium were the General Secretary of the U.S. Communist Party, Gus Hall, and Bella Abzug. Most of the people in the hall seemed wellheeled, middle-class, middle-aged, bourgeois and, judging by their reactions to statements made from the podium, committed hard-line Communists. They were present on party business. There were few smiles and the only laughter I heard was sarcastic and angry. Serious party-line planning and fund-raising for the overthrow of the American social and political system were obviously the order of the day; the adventurists of the New Left were elsewhere.