’60s activists emerge again from left field

Jack Hoffman is wound up. At 64, he can hardly contain himself as he rails against the war in Iraq and frets over the presidential race. He hasn't felt this much fire in the belly, he said, since he shouted antiwar cries during the Vietnam War.

"I went to sleep for 32 years," said Hoffman, a Framingham resident and the younger brother of 1960s icon Abbie Hoffman.

If Jack Hoffman has been politically drowsy since he last participated in protests in the early 1970s, he could now be called something of a political insomniac: He is handing out leaflets, speaking to disciples of the left, participating in demonstrations -- anything to bash President Bush and what Hoffman describes as a wrong-headed war.

Hoffman is not the only aging Vietnam-era activist from the region agitating for Bush's ouster in November. For these veterans of political action, the consciousness of the late 1960s and early 1970s is seeing something of a revival: As they look to propel John Kerry to the White House, some say they haven't felt as driven since those heady days.

So what, then, do they make of their hoped-for commander-in-chief standing up at the Democratic National Convention to tout his valor in a war they opposed?

"I think it was done very cleverly. I mean, it wasn't to appeal to me," Hoffman said, explaining that Kerry deserves the hero moniker. "His Achilles is that he's weak on defense."

Or, consider Herb Chasan, a retired teacher active in antiwar protests during Vietnam. Back then, he marched in the streets; today, he is leading a group of volunteers who meet at an assisted-living facility to call and write potential voters in swing states.

Chasan, a former Howard Dean supporter, has thrown himself whole-heartedly behind Kerry, even if it meant swallowing his peace-loving inclinations when the senator introduced himself at the convention by saying with a salute, "I'm John Kerry, and I'm reporting for duty."

"We want to get this guy elected, and he has to compete with that idiot Bush, and this is the best way he can do it, and God help him," said Chasan, who called Kerry's speech "wonderful."

Of course, liberals also admire Kerry for coming back from serving in Vietnam and joining them, becoming one of the most prominent critics of the war.

But the fact that the Chasans and Hoffmans of the world are willing so enthusiastically to embrace Kerry today speaks volumes about how American politics have changed over the last half-century, according to Julian Zelizer, a history professor at Boston University.

"John Kerry back then was exciting, but the current version of John Kerry would not have been very exciting to antiwar protesters," Zelizer said. "He's much more like the Hubert Humphrey than the Eugene McCarthy of 1968."

For someone like the current Kerry to be a hero in the 1960s would have been unthinkable -- if you were part of the establishment, you were part of the war and couldn't be trusted, Zelizer said. The older Kerry would have been too conservative back then to those who embraced the young Kerry who spoke against the war.

"It just shows how much politics has shifted -- he's kind of the best they can get," Zelizer said. "Today, a lot of antiwar protesters are embracing the establishment. Part of that is because politics have become so conservative."

In the 1960s, suburbia might not have seemed like a breeding ground for revolution, but in the Vietnam era Framingham had its share of flower power, according to the lefties who were around then and still live in the area today.

They all recall marching down the steps of the Memorial Building and along Union Avenue on Oct. 15, 1969, the day millions across the country came out to protest Vietnam. They remember handing out leaflets at the old Natick Mall. And one of the youngest area protesters of that era, Anita DeFelice, now 53, started her own underground newspaper at Natick High School.

Today, some of those activists fighting to help Kerry are doing so reluctantly. DeFelice, for example, says she will vote for Kerry, but she is lukewarm about it and emphasizes that it's an anti-Bush statement. And not all of them are on the same page: DeFelice's sister, Maria DeFelice, plans to vote for the Socialist candidate.

But most see Kerry as a palatable alternative to another Bush administration.

Marianne Schafer, 74, says she is not doing enough for Kerry, even though she is hosting a fund-raiser at her house and has donated money to the campaign. But that pales in comparison to the time she spent trying to oust Vietnam supporters back in the day.

"I'd like to think we helped the war end five minutes earlier, and [President Lyndon] Johnson didn't run again, did he?" she said.

Schafer defends Kerry's vote on the war, saying she is frustrated that it isn't better explained as a vote to support it only as a last resort.

Helen Moore, 66, a retired nurse, disagrees. She will vote for Kerry, she said, but her antiwar views keep her from campaigning for him.

Moore is holding fast to the ideals of 1969, when she remembers marching down Union Avenue with her mother, holding roses they had brought from her home. She remembers being proud of the daisy-shaped McCarthy sticker on her '67 Plymouth because it was a hard-to-find political memento.

Hoffman says things have changed since then, and the left is more united than ever, because the current conflict is in some ways worse than Vietnam. Hoffman said he felt the change when he went to Boston to protest Bush's visit a few months ago.

"It was great just being there; the old spirit came back," he said. "But you know what was different about this one? The union boys were there. We never had that. In the '60s, they were throwing eggs at us."

Democrats will probably want to focus on the differences between then and now, because the similarities Zelizer describes won't be comforting. And there are plenty of differences: Then, there was a military draft, he said, and now Americans are living in the shadow of Sept. 11, to name the most obvious.

But there are parallels, too. Opponents of the war then and now talked about America undermining its stature in the world, Zelizer said, and during both eras popular culture weighed in -- Abbie Hoffman and Bob Dylan compared with Michael Moore and Howard Stern.

And the hippies got a revolution, Zelizer said-- it just turned out to have shifted the country to the right, not the left.

So if history repeats itself, guess who wins?

Consider both 1968 and 1972, he said, when antiwar sentiment was quite high and protests aired on television almost daily.

"It was a very intense period for the antiwar movement, but Nixon wins," he said. "The story you're going through now might end with George Bush winning."

Lisa Kocian can be reached at 508-820-4231 or lkocian@globe.com.