“Yeah, yeah, I know of him,” President Nixon replied.
“We had the head of the Mau Maus,” Rockefeller continued. “A motley crowd. And some good people, some legislators. And Tom Wicker was so emotional in this thing that it was unbelievable.”
“Which side?” President Nixon asked.
“Oh, on their side,” Rockefeller replied.
“Always, always,” Nixon said. “I know, I know.”
I was in the room when Tom Wicker; Clarence Jones, the publisher of the New York Amsterdam News, who had been one of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, key lawyers; and State Senator John Dunne made the eleventh-hour call to Governor Rockefeller at his 3,400-acre family estate in Pocantico Hills, begging him to show good faith in the negotiations by coming to the prison. I was there when he said no. In addition to the rain and growing squalor, there were limited amounts of food and water, and Warden Vincent Mancusi controlled both. The prisoners’ position on amnesty and going to nonimperialist countries would soften. They would get hungry. They would get more miserable. I had already negotiated a provision that prisoners would not be charged with crimes related to property damage. But even though there was virtually no hope we could expand the concept to limited amnesty, we needed to buy some time. Rockefeller declined.
In the morning on the fourth and final day of the uprising, the sound of helicopters signaled the beginning of the end. I didn’t know it then, but according to Tom Wicker’s report in the Times, the attack began at 9:43:28. New York State Police troopers dropped tear gas into D yard and they as well as prison guards let loose a barrage of gunfire, shooting into the thousand or so inmates huddled there. Some used dum-dum bullets, which killed and maimed as many people as possible—including the hostages—until the firing stopped. In a matter of minutes the smoke cleared to reveal a scene of slaughter. The observers inside the prison were safely away from where the shooting occurred. Guards came into our sanctuary and ushered us out of the prison shortly after the attack. Outside, the assembled townspeople jeered and cursed us. In the anguish of the moment, I have forgotten how we were taken away. Inside the yard the guards forced the inmates to strip naked and run a gauntlet, beating them with clubs.
If the Left called it an “uprising,” and to the mainstream it was a “riot,” Tom Wicker and I ended up calling it a rebellion because for those of us who were there, that’s how it seemed. After the prisoner takeover, they were getting a chance to be heard for the first time in America, but they were misheard, distrusted, and ignored while the administration representatives placed all the blame for what happened on them. In short, the keepers and the kept might as well have been speaking different languages. As much as I liked to think of myself as a person with one foot in each world, I was unable to translate, nor was anyone else able to say what needed to be said. In all likelihood there was no solution other than time, as Herman Badillo had put it. And time meant surrender, with whatever promises of reform had been made, something none of the observers was willing to say face-to-face at the negotiating table while they and the prisoners were together in the yard.
A few hours after troopers retook the prison, I was in the back of a cab heading south on Central Park West feeling defeated, angry, and depressed. I came home wearing the same suit. I stank. Where there had been a toehold to push against what looked like an impending disaster and a sense of mission when I left, there was now a massacre. I feared Maynard was dead. I wondered if any of the inmate leadership had survived. For days afterward my calls to the prison went unanswered.
While we were waiting for the light to change, I remember looking at the Dakota where the rich and famous lived, with its Victorian gas lamps and bathysphere-like guard booth. We rolled to a stop at my building six blocks south, just above Columbus Circle. I don’t recall who the doorman was that night, or the floor captain. I noted the difference between the stewards’ room at Attica, where the observers’ committee was camped out, and the shimmering terrazzo floors of the lobby as I trudged toward the elevator at the far end of the southern hallway. The elevator man