Ken McKenna

I’ve been told that you were on The Hill during the infamous riot. What do you remember about the riot?

It was more of a drunken brawl than a political protest. It was more of a conflict between the cops and the street people. It was propagated because they closed the bars down early. They kicked two hundred people out of Tulagi’s. So two hundred drunken people went out on the streets and then the cops started giving them shit. One thing led to another and pretty soon they were busting windows. I think, from my perspective, it was instigated by the cops as much as anything. If the cops had shown some restraint, the people would have dissipated. And it was . . . They were intent on a confrontation, and that’s what they got.

Did you graduate from Boulder High School in 1967?

Yes. I wasn’t very political in high school and I wasn’t a very good student either. It wasn’t until after I graduated that a friend of mine who was pretty straight – we were talking about the Vietnam war and my comment was, “Well, I suppose it’s all right. It’s probably OK.”

And he said, “No. It’s absolutely not OK, it’s wrong. We’ve got no business being there!” And I had never placed him in that fringe element of anti-war weirdo – which is people who were against the war in pre-1967, the peacenik-type people.

He kind of opened my eyes to it a little bit. When I started analyzing it myself, I could see that our government was giving us a lot of half-truths. So I became an advocate against the war and for peace.

I wasn’t very active (in the peace movement) when I went to my freshman year at Western State College in ’67 and ’68 in Gunnison. I think that it was about that time that I figured I had better be a good student or (else) get drafted. So I applied myself to academia.

At the end of that year at Western State, I had had a pretty good year. I had skied a lot and made a number of close friends down there, all of whom had decided to go elsewhere the following year. So I transferred to CU for my sophomore year.

I committed myself to being a good student at the time and lived with four former high school buddies of mine in the University Townhouses up on 1200 College. I think we were probably pretty typical sophomores in college. We played a lot of Bridge, smoked a lot of pot, chased women, the usual college things.

It wasn’t until Spring that another high school friend of mine by the name of Ron Page convinced me to run with him on a ticket for junior class officers. I didn’t really care, but I knew a lot of Boulder High School people who were going to CU and I think that he thought that I was a good addition to the ticket. So I said, “OK, I’ll be your Vice President for the junior class if you want.”

I was kind of half-hearted about it. We lost the campaign, which was pretty insignificant, but I did get introduced to student government mechanisms and started going to the Student Moratorium Committee meetings. SDS had been banned on campus by then. A lot of SDS people, by then, had joined SMC. I started going to all the SMC meetings and all the demonstrations. I had a long pony tail and wore a headband.

What did you major in?

(I majored in) political science. I was very interested in politics and a very avid spectator. I watched as many newscasts as I could during the day, as much to see what sort of stuff they were feeding the American people as to see what really happened in the news. What the media thought was happening, I thought, was pretty fascinating.

A year or so later, I moved in with three grad students on Arapahoe that I had never known before. I needed a place to live and they had a spare bedroom in their house, so I moved in. These guys were all business students, conservative, and Republican-type people, and we would engage in long conversations in the evenings about the war and about America’s imperialistic policies abroad.

At one time, one of my roommates said he was tired of hearing me whining and complaining about everything and why didn’t I damn well do something about it? After that, I ran for Student Senate and I got elected.

I was pretty active and it was the same year that John Hilson, who was a very eloquent student spokesman against the war, became quite a figure on campus. He was not at all reluctant to stand up and directly confront the President of the University in a crowded setting and ask him, “Why are University monies going to war-related industries? Why is the University supporting the war in Vietnam and practicing genocide on the Vietnamese people? This was some of his rhetoric, of course.

Was Quig Newton still president of the university?

No. This was Patrick Thieme. The student senate was pretty much split. Glenn Porzak, who is still in Boulder and an attorney in town, represented the ROTC side – the right wing side. He supported Nixon (and) the war – and he did it with style. He did it very well. He antagonized the hell out of the Leftists, but he was respected by the people, because he was sincere and honest in his beliefs.

It was pretty heady times! There was a lot of symbolism going on in the student government. The senate would vote to condemn Nixon’s latest policies, whatever they happened to be. The conservatives would argue that it was not our business to be passing judgment on national policy. We argued that it was our business to speak out on issues that effected students. We were the ones getting drafted and sent over there.

I was pretty active and conscientious about doing research, following up resolutions and looking into student groups that were requesting financing. Toward the end of that year, a good friend of mine who was also in the student government asked me if I wanted to run with him on a ticket for the executive position. I said, “I don’t think so, but let me think about it.” I consulted with friends and they pretty much said, “Why not?” I was scheduled to graduate in ’71. That would have been my fourth year in college. But I could see that it was going to actually take me another semester, anyway. I could see that I could stay on as a full-time student-politico and take six or nine hours of classes and get as good an education in the political arena there as anywhere. So I told him I would run with him.

It was pretty much a low point in student voting turnout. Our opposition was token opposition. They were nihilists . . . Paul Roseberry. I can’t think of his running-mate’s name, but they were definitely fringe-element. They didn’t have much of a platform. I can’t really recall the issues in the campaign. Gary Sdoboda and I were the more responsible candidates. There were less than two thousand votes cast in the entire election, but we were elected and won pretty handily.

The things that I felt were important at the time . . . we used to have different commissions, like a cabinet post or something like that. We had a Housing Commission . . . one of the things they did was they bought an old sorority house up on The Hill. Sororities and fraternities at the time were at their low-ebb. Nobody was into them. They were too rah-rah, so there were a lot of vacant houses up there. With the backing of the student government, they bought a sorority house and turned it into a cooperative. It was a dormitory-type arrangement. There was an acute housing shortage for the students at the time.

Another thing we set up was the Boulder Tenant’s Union, which I think terrified some of the landlords in town. To think that tenants could get together and strike! They actually did that a couple of years later at the Townhouses. I forget what the outcome was, but there was some sort of compromise reached. I don’t know if their rent was decreased or their deposits were decreased, but there was some sort of conciliation on the part of the Townhouses as a result of the strike. We had a city commission which dealt directly with the City Council members and conveyed the concerns of students to the city government.

Gary and I also met individually with each of the Regents which, I think, frightened the University Administration because, in a sense, we were going over their heads to the Regents. We established a rapport with the Regents. In spite of our appearance of wearing long hair and headbands, I think we gained their respect by meeting them on a one-on-one basis. We conveyed to them that we weren’t bomb-throwing radicals and that we were interested in non-violent protest against policies that we didn’t’ agree with and that we were interested in the betterment of the university.

We had draft counseling and birth control counseling. The birth control (counseling) raised the hackles of some of the conservatives because they didn’t think it was one of the auspices of student government to provide birth control information. That was the ‘60s and that was pretty scary.

What was unjust about the Vietnam War that upset everybody?

I think the bottom line was that people were getting drafted and being sent over there and getting killed. When the draft ended, the anti-war demonstrations tapered off dramatically. So it was a very self-serving kind of protest in that respect.

There was a lot of idealism among the students. Martin Luther King Jr.; the Civil Rights demonstrations; all men are created equal – that type of feeling. But I’d say eighty percent of the students went about their business on a day-to-day basis without giving it much thought one way or another.

It was a small handful of students who were active when the demonstrations finally did occur – when we took over the bridge on 28^th and Baseline and held it for thirty six hours. The students who were on the bridge started out to be just a handful. It expanded almost spontaneously to become a fairly large group. At night it dwindled to forty or fifty students who remained on the bridge all night.

The next day it expanded a little bit and the protest didn’t really peak until the cops came in and moved everyone off the bridge and all the fence sitters in the Kittredge Complex had all of their windows open and teargas started coming in the dorms. They couldn’t study, so they went out and joined the protest, so the ranks swelled considerably then.

That night there were a lot of forays into Boulder of students and cops. There were a lot of Jefferson County Police . . . helmeted with shields and Billy clubs. They hadn’t been trained in how to deal with crowd situations and their reaction was to bust heads . . . which tended to swell the ranks all the more because people saw their non-violent roommate get his head cracked open with a Billy club. They made it pretty easy to decide who was good and who was bad in that situation, so they would join the ranks of the protesters.

It became obvious to me that we were manipulating another county’s interests. It didn’t take much research and you didn’t have to go to very many teach-ins to figure out that Ho Chi Minh carried the heart and soul of the Vietnamese people and, by Eisenhour’s own admission, would have been elected overwhelmingly as president of Vietnam had the U.S. allowed elections to occur in 1956. The U.S. government said, “No, we can’t allow Ho Chi Minh to get in there.”

Early on, right after World War II, he was pro-American and wanted to implement our Constitution in Vietnam. But just as we are doing in Nicaragua today, we succeeded in pushing him toward the communist countries for support.

It’s real similar. It’s absurd that we can have free trade with China and the Soviet Union and not with Nicaragua and Cuba. We can manipulate those people real easily through the free trade mechanism. We can indoctrinate them into our system of values by selling them television, and pretty soon get them into liquor and sports cars, and then they’ll get sucked into the system the way Americans are. WE don’t have to bomb them with weapons. We don’t need a stick. Let’s put a carrot in front of them.

I felt that was sort of the standard thing about Vietnam. We had a national policy that was a “bomb them back to the Stone Age” kind of mentality. “If they don’t agree with this . . . .” “The only good commie is a dead commie.” That, coupled with the awareness of the injustices of our society after having grown up in the ‘50s and gotten the indoctrination of how grand and glorious and free and democratic this country is; and how evil and godless and totalitarian the Soviets are; and then coming into the sixties and realizing that Black people aren’t free and that poor people aren’t free. The injustices in our own system led a lot of people to question the credibility of the government overall.

That was the political thrust of the movement – civil rights and war. But there was a social and cultural thrust, too, which (consisted of) music, lifestyles, and drug consumption – a general flaunting of the values of the Establishment. It used to be, “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” Now, with the new generation, I’m not sure you can trust anybody under 25.

If you took away just one thing, like the music or the drugs or the war, do you think the ‘60s would have gone down the way they did, or were all those ingredients necessary?

They were certainly all interrelated. A lot of the music was political in nature. Joan Baez; Bob Dylan; Crosby, Stills, and Nash: their songs were all political. The songs that were favorable to the right wing: The Ballad of the Green Berets or something like that, they didn’t receive the popular acclaim among the young people that rock and roll did. I think that’s kind of hard to say, if you take away one element, how it’s going to change things. It’s just speculation, really.

When the bridge was taken-over on 28^th Street (to block traffic on the Boulder Turnpike) in ’72, that was the most confrontational activity that I was involved in. In 1970, when Nixon invaded Cambodia and the students at Kent State were killed, the university students went on strike. That was the largest number of students involved in one strike. There were ten thousand students on the Norlin Quadrangle lawn listening to speakers expound on how unjust the war was and how it was a reflection on our society that we were waging that war – that this wasn’t what our society was about, that it was just our government at the time and let’s get rid of the government.

When all was said and done, Nixon’s “Secret Plan” (to end the war) never materialized and he didn’t end the war and he was re-elected by a landslide. McGovern certainly failed miserably for a number of reasons. Basically, people didn’t trust him. They thought he’d be too soft on the commies, so to speak.

One of the major issues on campus was the abolition of hours for women in the dorms. That was significant. That was ’67 – ’68. The students had sleep-ins outside the dorms in protest against the policies that discriminated against women. Women had to be in at certain hours during the week and on weekends and males could do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. It was pretty blatant sex-discrimination, I think.

At that time it was Joe Smiley who was president of the university. He recognized the problem, and it was at that time the university started changing its policies of in loco parentis. They began saying that when women came to this university they are an adult and they will be treated as an adult and that they were not going to monitor their hours or do anything else that a parent might do, and that the university is just a place to get an education. I think that it had a pretty significant effect on student life. The sexual revolution was certainly part of the sixties and the pill was certainly a factor in that. It allowed people to engage in sexual activity without the fear of consequences.

Was Boulder still a “dry” city then?

It went “wet” in ’67 or ’68, somewhere in there. It was before I was of drinking age. When I was in college, we used to go down to The Catacombs. There were bars in Boulder that were islands not incorporated into the city. When the city would incorporate sections on the outskirts of town, these bars would choose not to be incorporated.

The Sink on The Hill was a great place – kind of Beatnikish. It was pretty spacey and you could feel pretty comfortable in there. They had good hamburgers. Tulagi’s had some good bands. I didn’t frequent the bars too much then. There were other things that I found more fascinating.

The summer of ’69 was the big summer for the transients and they suffered a big outbreak of hepatitis. City Park was closed to all people. There was no loitering or anything. A lot of people thought that it was just an attempt by the city to decrease the numbers of street people.

There were a lot of communes around Nederland and Gold Hill. Many of those people were pretty degenerate looking and living a communal-type existence. I think it was a pretty much hand-to-mouth lifestyle.

One of the more significant books on that era was The Greening of America by Phillip Reich. He had a chapter in his book about the attire of what he called the Renaissance Generation. He said that that period was, in terms of the arts and political and philosophical idealism, was comparable to the Renaissance or the Reformation in terms of its impact on the consciousness of the American people.

Do you think that was an inflated estimate of the impact of that era?

I see a lot of those values that have been incorporated into the national consciousness. Some of the styles have, certainly, but that’s all cosmetic. The basic values of truth and justice, right and wrong, were all incorporated, but when I look at Ollie North, I begin to wonder. He’s a national hero and a pathological liar too.

I think the kids then and today tend to vote the way their parents voted. Back when Penn Tate and Tim Fuller were on City Council, I think the city fathers were afraid that they were going to lose control of the city to radicals, including Karen Paget, who was an avowed socialist.

We had to put a lot of pressure on the county clerk to put voter registration booths on the campus. It was Henry Putnam, at the time, and he didn’t want the students to register. He kind of dragged his feet a little bit. We put a lot of pressure on him to do that and he finally put registration booths on campus. And the students turned out in large numbers to vote.

Were there any SDS Weathermen on campus?

I remember an ROTC demonstration on Bracket Field where a fairly sizeable group of students, mostly from SMC – about two or three hundred people were there to protest ROTC practice. They felt that the university was no place to be conducting military training.

The protest, for the most part, was non-violent. They just wanted to sit down in front of ROTC people and prevent them from doing their thing. I don’t know if there was a restraining order or not, but ROTC was going to continue doing it, and they would walk over the students as the students were on the ground. They would just step over them.

Then a couple of the more militant students started picking up rocks and throwing them. That led to a pretty big melee. The university police came over. I remember people running around campus and cops grabbing people. At one point, a cop tackled a demonstrator who had a Viet Cong flag and an NLF flag which he just left on the ground. I remember picking up the flag and thinking, “I’m not going to be seen carrying this – it’s like a lightning rod. “ And I rolled it up and put it away and later returned it to the SMC offices rather that carry it myself and wave it around. There were a number of dismissals from the university as a result of that incident. People who were apprehended or seen throwing rocks were kicked out of the university because of that.

It seemed to me that eighty percent of the students didn’t care. It didn’t bother them to have ROTC on campus. They were concerned about getting an education and not so concerned about stuff that didn’t directly affect them.

My impression was that in ’68 or ’69, (if someone were arrested) for shoplifting or (some other crimes), a judge would say, “You have a choice: Three months in jail or maybe a year in jail; or the Marines, Navy, or Army.” So a lot of those people ended up going into the service.

By the time I graduated in ’72, the military had had enough of these troublemakers. They wanted young people with minds of putty so that they could mould their minds according to the military philosophy.

If somebody came in and had definite ideas already, especially against the war, it wasn’t enough by itself to disqualify you from military service, but they weren’t going to chase them down. By the time I actually took my draft physical, I made it known to them in no uncertain terms that I didn’t want to have anything to do with their military machine, and that if I was sucked into it, I was going to cause more problems than it was going to be worth to them!

The military was getting tired of people that thought on their own and wanted people that wouldn’t give them any trouble. I remember being at the draft physical in Denver and talking to an officer there about my feelings against the war. He was called to the telephone while I was there and he said in a strange tone of voice, “Well, the Boulder bus is here today.” That meaning that the Boulder people there to take their physicals were considered long-haired weirdos who were uncooperative – implying that it would be much better to have a bus from Grand Junction or some town that wasn’t so politically enlightened as the Boulder people were.

 

Copyright 2026  S. Byron Gassaway