"Does it matter?" he answered slyly, reminding me of the way Bobby Kennedy used to handle the carpet-bagger question in his New York Senate race.

"Yeah. Where are you from?"

"I've lived all over. I'm from New York now. But I lived here in Boston for a couple of years, Berkeley too."

The black man dropped the subject and the tall New Yorker began to hate the cops out loud again.

By 2 a.m., the circle had broken up. It was fairly cold, so people started building fresh in trash cans. They stood around in small groups, talking. One long-haired youth got into a discussion with a middle-aged husband and his petite wife, who had been standing around watching the meeting. The woman kept insisting that she sympathized with the hippies, but why did they have to use such vile language, and why did they want to fight with the cops. The youth answered that they just wanted the right to sleep on the Common.

A black man announced that he was going to leapfrog two burning trashcans. "Clear the runway," everyone buzzed. After a false start, he came racing down the runway, leaped and landed in a crash of flames. He was not hurt. The cans were uprighted, and everyone went back to his small group.

At a distance, near the hippies who had been singing through the entire political circle discussion, sat Barney Frank, Harvard '62 and administrative aid to Boston's Mayor Kevin White. Frank sat with some other aides from the Mayor's office, and a couple of Boston reporters. He told us there would be a bust soon.

"Those middle-class spoiled brats, Frank lamented. "They're using up the mayor's political capital. Because he's not taking a harder line than he is against the hippies, White is making enemies in the city. It's a shame he has to waste so much of his time and political capital on these kids, when there's so much to be done in this city."

Frank claimed that these kids were not the hard-core hippies, whose only desire was to be able to spend the night in the open air. "Most of these kids here are SDS," Frank said. "They're trying to organize hippies. The real hippies are these people," he continued, pointing to the small circle which was still sitting there as it had been for hours, now singing "The Answer Is Blowing in the Wind." "And most of the real hippies," Frank said, "have gone elsewhere. They don't want to fight with the police."

Frank insisted the curfew was a necessity because residents around the Common complained about the noise. He said that since the hippies had moved in there, merchants on Charles Street were complaining that the street had become uninhabitable. "These older people have a right to live, too," he concluded.

Now, it was nothing but waiting. Frank and his aides waited on the grass. Press cars waited across the street. The hippie-radicals waited in small groups around fiery trash cans. Rumors began to circulate about a squadron of police cars over on the other side of the park. At 2:45, Frank said that he guessed he would take the next day off from work. At 2:50, the Record-American car went home, having missed the final deadline.

At 3:05 a.m., a couple of police cars came into view. One rode up on the Common grass and the driver bellowed through a loudspeaker, "The curfew is in effect. All persons will leave the Boston Common immediately, or be subject to arrest."

"How much time have we got?" screamed one kid.

"The curfew is now in effect. All persons will leave the Boston Common immediately, or be subject to arrest."

Slowly, everyone began to leave. It appeared for a few moments as if there would be no arrests, no confrontation. But it was just the first stage of the agreed-upon mobile tactics. A crowd of 75 or so left the Common, but returned 15 minutes later. At 3:40 a.m., a line of police cars and paddy-wagons formed a few hundreds yards from the crowd.

By now, there was dissension among the demonstrators. A small hard-core group was standing on the Common proper, goading others to join them, but most of the others remained in the relative safety of the pavement circling the Common. The police cars made their move. It was total confusion. Kids who had been listening to the tall New Yorker with sideburns now didn't know which way to go. Were they supposed to run, or stay? Some people scattered. Some began to battle the police. It was impossible to tell whether this was a public protest, or a battle out of the American revolution. Kicking kids were dragged by three cops into a paddy-wagon. Cop cars chased individuals across the grass. One young boy threw an empty bottle against a paddy wagon, and immediately five or six policemen and a couple of other citizens descended on him, and dragged him into a wagon, apparently breaking a couple of his limbs in the process, or so it seemed.

As the confused police tried to deal with the kids who were scattering and regrouping but never leaving the Common, I remembered something else the tall New Yorker had said; "We haven't really enough people here tonight to make mobile tactics offensively effective. But there will be other nights." And then as I saw that kid getting his arms and legs twisted as the cops dumped him in the wagon, it occurred to me that talk of police brutality in a situation like this was almost meaningless. This was no protest; this was a miniature war. Most of the kids on the Common hadn't wanted a war, but they nonetheless listened as the tall New Yorker told them that it was like the American Revolution, "and we're the ones who are gonna fight like Indians."

By 4:15 a.m., it was pretty much over for the night. Not as big a bust as the night before, a bit bigger than the ones which would follow on the two nights afterwards. Frank promised that there would be a police sweep every night if it was necessary to enforce the curfew.

The Man, in the guise of Barney Frank and Mayor White, was not taking the hippie challenge lying down. Somehow, one got the feeling after watching everyone chasing everyone else around for an hour, kids screaming, bottles smashing, blue lights flashing, that the police could do this every night forever, if so ordered. Somehow, even if one sympathized with the hippies' right to sleep on the Common, one wondered what was accomplished that night.

But the saddest part was that it seemed that most of the kids hadn't really wanted the evening to end this way; that next night the leaders were going to have to find some new followers because a lot of this batch of troops had had enough. There was so little real emotion and revolutionary fervor behind it all.