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DAVID HANDSCHUH/ ASSOCIATED PRESS
cannthropology
WORLD OF Cannabis
44
Michael Kennedy
Weather Undergound leaders Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn with their lawyer Michael Kennedy (right) turning themselves in to authorities after 11 years in hiding.
COURTESY OF ELEANORA KENNEDY (2)
Radical Law leafmagazines.com
A profile of the late, great activist attorney Michael Kennedy.
The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, The Yippies, The Weather Underground, High Times … all these iconic counterculture institutions had one thing in common: When they needed legal help, they all turned to the same man – radical civil rights lawyer Michael Kennedy. EARLY LIFE AND CAREER Michael John Kennedy was born in Spokane, Washington in 1937 – the same year as marijuana prohibition. After graduating from Berkeley in 1959, he got his law degree from the Hastings College of Law in 1962. A year later, he was drafted into the Army, where he was frequently disciplined for his anti-war rhetoric. After leaving the service, Kennedy moved to New York in 1967 to work as a staff counsel at the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, where he immediately began making a name for himself by taking on some of the most controversial civil rights cases in the country – such as defending labor leaders Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta and conscientious objectors of the Vietnam War. MARIJUANA & THE MILITARY In the first-ever marijuana-related case in U.S. military history, Kennedy represented Private Bruce “Gypsy” Peterson – a soldier at Fort Hood who’d been busted for pos-
SEPT. 2021
Michael and wife Eleanora in San Francisco in the mid-1970s, after returning from their time on the run from the FBI. session. Peterson – who’d been publishing an underground anti-war newspaper called Fatigue Press – was targeted with a harassment campaign by the MPs, who began planting dime bags in his locker. Peterson was arrested thrice in one month (each time for minuscule amounts of pot) and sentenced to eight years of hard labor at Leavenworth. After appealing his case, Kennedy got the conviction overturned, and Peterson was exonerated and released after 13 months.
