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The transformation, indeed, seems almost complete. Marshall now directs a 900-acre project for a housing development company. In 1977 he won in the primaries for Seattle city council, but lost in the general election because of opposition from Seattle's still active radical community. He says uncertainly, "I freaked the liberals out by getting the police to endorse me. I was too Machiavellian."
Joe Kelly, 34, one of Marshall's closest "cowboy" comrades from Cornell and Seattle Liberation Front days, is almost bitter about Marshall's deradicalization. "He talks like a politician," says Kelly. As for everything that he and Marshall agitated for a decade ago, Kelly is unrepentant. "Basically, I think we were on the right side of history," he says of his and Marshall's support for Hanoi during the Viet Nam War. Such long radical memories are appropriate for Seattle. America's first general strike took place there in 1919, and during Marshall's own revolutionary prominence, the Wall Street Journal described it as "the bombing capital of the U.S." because of the ratio of bomb explosions per inhabitant.
By contrast, the University of Washington campus itself barely flickers at the memory of thousands shouting "Peace now!" At the largest demonstration in recent memory, protesting Iran's seizure of the U.S. embassy last fall, Old Glory was waved instead of burned. Even the Maoist activists have vanished, though they have been replaced by a group of socialist puritans who are convinced that true socialism's last earthly habitat is the People's Socialist Republic of Albania.
But few pay attention. In a classroom in Smith Hall, one of the buildings invaded ten years ago by the Seattle Liberation Front, young students are discussing that distant era with a teaching assistant. Says Bruce Parks, just eight in 1970: "I thought activism was something that just happened. You went to college and you joined the movement." Adds Dan Lovitt, also 18: "I feel kind of jealous I wasn't there. The campus activities had the air of a carnival."
Suddenly looking vulnerable, back in the Red Robin, Chip Marshall pauses after a question about the thousands of drowned Vietnamese boat people. He says slowly, "Sometimes I feel really terrible. Maybe we were completely wrong on Viet Nam."