© Michael Heller
A PERSONAL PHOTOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVE
1970 UCLA Student Strike
Two things stand out about the '60s and early '70s in LA. The first was the the Student Strike. It was a spontaneous response to the United States' move into Cambodia during the Vietnam War. At the time the academic atmosphere was so charged that any pro-war event would have been cause enough for an anti-war protest. The other thing that stands out was the June 5, 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy in the kitchen of the Ambassador hotel. At the time, I was working with three friends in a film-making and still photography business that focused on the then new phenomenon of laser light. The wife of one of my partners was a court reporter, and she was involved in taking the transcript for the Kennedy investigation. I was doing some photography for the L.A. Star, a counterculture newspaper of the day. The paper had aquired photo-micrographs of the bullets recovered from the assassination scene. Two of the bullets showed a noticeable difference in the angle of rifling ( a ballistic fingerprint) caused by the gun barrel. Such difference could have only been caused by two different guns. I was called upon to make prints of the negatives, which ultimately appeared in the paper. Within a week my partner's house was broken into and the court transcripts of the hearing were stolen from his wife's dictograph. That same week, the actual bullets, the primary evidence in the assassination investigation of Robert Kennedy, disappeared from the police evidence room. Numerous explanations for the two events were presented. I did not believe any of them. I had Angela Davis as a teacher at UCLA. She advocated "change for the sake of change." She was a real radical. Today, looking back, I think Thomas Jefferson might have liked her.
