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Reservations 777-5148 2 The New .Journal/March 2. 1984

Publisher H ilary Callahan Editor-in-Chief W. H ampton Sides Designer Tom McQuillen Photo.t:raphy Editor Christine R yan Business Managers R obert Moore Peter Phleger Managing Editors J im Lowe Morris Panner Production Manager Tony Reese Associate Business Managers Katie Kressmann Vanessa Sciarra Marilynn Sager Associate Editors Anne Applebaum • Laura Pappano Paul H ofheinz 1 'ina Kelley Art Editor Beth Callaghan • Associate Photo.t:raphy Editor Mark Fedors• Associate Production Managers Lauren R abin Christianna Williams Circulation Manager Rob Lindeman• Staff Christina Baker• J oyce Banerjee R ich Blow• Nicholas C hristakis Eduardo Cruz Andrea Fribush •eLected February 15,

Larry Goon Dani Morrow Betsy Nix• Sally Sloan Corinne Tobin K atie Winter 1984

A-fnnbrrs and Dirutors: Edward B. Bennett • Henry C. Chauncey, Jr. • Peter B. Cooper • Andy Court • Brooks Kelley • Peter Neill • Michelle Press • Thomas Strong Board of Advisors: .John Hersey • Roger Kirwood ! Eli:taberh Tare Frimds: Anson M. Beard . .Jr.t • Edward B. Ben· nerr,.Jr . • Blaire Bennett • .Jonathan M. Clark • Louise F . Cooper • .James W. Cooper • Peter B. Coopert • .Jerry and Rae Court • Ceoffry Fried • Sherwin Goldman • Brooks Kelley • Andrew .J . Kuzncski. Jr. • Lewis E. Lehrman • E. Nobles Lowe • Peter Neill • Fairfax C. Randallf • Nicholas X. Rizopoulos • Arleen and Arthur • • Sager• • Dick and Debbie Searsf • Richard Shields • Thomas Strong • Alex and Betsy Torello • Allen and Sarah Wardwell • Daniel Ycrgin fhas given a second time (Vulumf' 16 . Numbrr ~) Tlu ""''"' jofU'flal i-t publi.shnl six dmes dunnf( thf' ~ hooJ

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Special Issue

e

Letters

4

AIDS and the confidentiality issue.

8

John Kerry: Campaigns of the New Soldier

Features When a Yale graduate left Vietnam in 1969, he came home with three Purple Hearts and a commitment to speak for the veterans' growin.t: anti-war movement. This leading war protester now wants to return to the Capitol as a Massachusetts senator. By Tina Kelley

..

12

Kristaps Keggi: Second Opinions of an Army M.D. A supporter of U.S. involvement in Vietnam learns to live with liberal views and war-time memories. By Joyce BanerJee

18

Dick Pershing: Letters from Quang Tri Richard W . Pershing, class of 1966, died in combat somewhere near Hung Nohn, Vietnam, on February 17, 1968. His death brought the war home for a generation of Yale students. By Paul Hojheinz and Morris Panner

26

T he Thirty- Four A tribute to those from Yale who gave their lives and left their names.

28

William Sloane Coffin : T he Uncomfortable Gospel Yales controversial chaplain from 1958-1974 provided sanctuary to draft resisters and helped to hold the university together dun"ng the most radical years.

By Anne Applebaum

34

Arthur Galston: The W ar Against the W ithering R ain How a botanist unwittingly discovered the formula for Agent Orange and later led the fight against chemical defoliants in Vietnam. By W Hampton Sides

Essays

6

R ethinking the Sixties Myth •was it really as glamorous as all that?" By W. Hampton Sides

42

Getting Back to the Garden •1 had returned to an even bleaker battlifront than the one I had left."

By Jack Fuller

48

Renegades and Trou blemakers W e were hardly heroes, but we dreamed heroic dreams. • By Jerry Brucie

Chronology

The War Years: Yale and Vietnam from 1964-1973

by Jim Lowe and Tony Reese

The New .JoumaUMarch 2. 1984 3

The New journal thanks Alumni Records Tim Bates Ed Bt·nrwll Wendy Brandes Danielle Bryan Jerry Bruck Bernadine Connelly Kate Davey Amy Davidson Dean Arthur Ebbert Alvin Eisenman Scott Fletcher Ford Foundation Library Nathan Garland Amy Gendler John Hersey Mandy Katz Pam Koffier Mindy Kotler Gloria Locke Lisa Magonelli Charlie Pillsbury Robert Raffeld Liz Rourke Mary Ann Rumney Jim Salzmann Judith Schiff Rose Schmitt Dwight Smith Richard So Mary Ann Sullivan Louis Thomas Pam Thompson University Information News Bureau George Vail Dave Vogel John Wilkinson Yale Alumni Magazine Yale Registrar's Office Jonathan ZaslofT

Bob Cardinal's

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4 The New .Journal/March 2, 1984

The AIDS Issue: A Question of Journalistic Ethics

Medical Confidentiality To the Editor: It was with considerable disappointment and frustration that I read your article, "Lana: A Story of Scarlet Let·ters and Public Risks" that appeared in the December 9th issue of The New journal.

Yale University has always been a champion . of the rights of the individual, stressing the uniqueness, importance and dignity of each person.

Therefore it was extremely disappointing to find a Yale student publishing information in a Yale journal that ignores these basic values. You can certainly argue strongly that in the current epidemic of AIDS the public has a right to know any epidemiological information that may help prevent the· further dissemination of this serious illness. On the other hand, one would hope that as a responsible journalist you would make sure that in presenting such knowledge to the public you would not risk damaging one or more lives that are already seriously compromised and underprivileged.

Your story is doubly disturbing for apart from the callous disregard of one less fortun ate's privacy, you have also been dishonest. Entering the hospital without permission, tracking down a patient whose name and condition were no business of yours, forcing your way into her room and offering to pay her if she would give you her story are all reprehensible acts. While, of course, I cannot prove it, I have reason to believe that the statements made to you by my patient were at best misquoted or perhaps even fabricated. Obviously what was said at that meeting is known only to you and my patient but I know her well and in discussing her problem with her frankly on numerous occasions, she has never suggested that she was unconcerned about her potential for infecting others. She has never verbalized thoughts such as, "It's too late to start worrying about it now." Your publication of such words, carrying with it all the inferences that suggest a lack of concern for one's fellow man, are most unfortunate.

Your photographer had no right to take his photographs inside St. Raphael's Hospital and then compound that violation with the dishonest inference in the article that the isolation room shown was where the baby in question was being kept. A number of readers have commented to us that it seems cruel to have kept the baby in such a small crib for such a long period of time. The fact, of course is that the baby, who is now walking, is not confined in such a manner at all. Obviously the article was read by my patient. In it she reads that the doctors feel that her baby will probably die within the next year. Nehher I nor the attending pediatrician on the case believe that.

We have never said such a thing to the mother. Obviously her confidence in us is shaken to read such a thing in the press. A cruel and inaccurate statement ,. on your part.

Equally disturbing was your comment that doctors are waiting for her to develop the devastating extreme form of AIDS. Again, all my efforts have been directed in assuring her, on the basis of the strong evidence that we have collected, that were she to avoid further exposure to those situations known to be associated with the risk of contracting AIDS, her disease would be unlikely to progress.

Obviously there have been many breakdowns in the privacy any patient should expc·ct when giving information to medical providers. Much of the information that you have obtained you simply had no right to know and certainly no right to use. Who told you that her routine urine tests had revealed that she was back o n heroin and that subsequently she had been dropped from a methadone program? How was it that you could obtain the results of her T cell counts? Your ability to find out such matters obviously makes all the patients with AIDS and AIDS related problems that we care for concerned that confidentiality in their case may break down.

In my mind the whole matter raises serious questions about whether some closer faculty supervision should not be

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supplied for the work of The New journal. If you use these comments constructively then it is my hope that the bad j udgement that you showed on this occasion will not be repeated.

S incerely, J oh n M . D wyer, M.D., P h.D. Associate P rofessor of Medicine and P ediatrics Chief, Clinical I mmunology Since February, Dr. Dw_yer has acknowlrrf.f!ed to the local press that Yale-New Hm•m Ho.\·pit{l/ is currmt~y treatin.~ threr othrr pm.l'titulr.l' fo r ear(y stages f!f AIDS. In addition. thr A I DS clinic has .rem three maiPs who.rr onlv suspected exposure to A IDS i.r throu.f!h C'Ollitlrl with prostitutes.

Public's Right to Know The author responds:

..

• I entered St. R aphael's Hospital with fu ll permission from ollicials there and followed the p roper pass procedu res. My name was entered in the guestbook and I was given protective clothing by the floor nu r·se before en tering the patien t's room. Our photographer received formal perm ission from the floor nurse at Yale-New H aven hospital to take photograph s of the isolation rooms.

• I did not "force my way" in to the patien t's room . M y visit was a n nounced by the nurse. I knocked on Lana's door and was invited in . She spoke with me for almost an hour, fully aware my account would be reported in a Yale magazine. I honored her wish not to be directly quoted or cited by na'me. The resulting paraphrase is e n tirely accurate.

• I made every effort to protect Lana's anonymity. I understood the potential consequences that my reporting might have for her from the begin.ning. Our decision to run the story came after much soul-searching. The execu tive board of thl· magazine felt then and now that the public issues and dangers were too important ·to conceal.

• M y assc:rtion that La na's baby "will probably d ie with in a year" was supported by L isa Stone of the New H aven

Health Department and reported in several articles by Joan Barbuto of the N ew Haven Re_~ister. According to the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, no stage-three AIDS patient has ever survived.

• My statement that "doctors are waiting for Lana to develop the devastating extreme form of A IDS" was based on information supplied by Ms. Stone.

• Dr. Dwyt•r refused to be inter·vicwed lor the story about Lana, despite my several requests. According to his secretary he was "too busy" and referred me to Dr. Randolph Young, whom I cited in the article. H owever, Dr. Dwyer, who appeared on 60 Minutes on February 19 with Morley Safer, confirmed not only that Lana has secondstage AIDS, but admitted that she posed a significant threat to public health.

• As for "faculty supervision," The New Journal has no faculty supcrvisor·s, nor docs it intend to get any .

- W. Hampton Sides

Congratulations The N ew J ournal is h appy to announce the election of T ina K elley as its n ew Editor-in-Chief. She was elected on February 15. T inajoined the magazine last J anuary a nd has been a n associate editor sin ce last April. She wrote the profile of J ohn K erry in this issue.

T ina will continue the leadership of graduating Ed itor-in-Chief H ampton Sides. She is alread y p la nning for her first issue, scheduled to appear in April.

We wish her the best o f luck.

In Appreciation T N] would like to tha n k the M asters' Offices for the ir generous con tributio ns to this project, offered in ho nor of graduates and studen ts o f their colleges who gave their lives in V ietnam.

W ithout the su pport of the Masters, this issue, reflecting o n Yale's involvem ent in the war, would n ot have been possible. Berkeley. Bra nfo rd , C alho un, J ona than Edwards, M orse. Saybrook, and Timothy Dwigh t Colleges have all contributed.

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The Ne" J o urnal/March 2. 1984 5

6

Th~

New Journal/ M arch 2. 1984

Rethinking the Sixties Myth W. Hampton Sides The last Amt•t ican soldit•t kfl Sai~on II years ago this month. but tht· \'i<.·tn.un <.'ta hng<-rs in its own way. For some tht• period of <,tudcnt protest now seems a quirk of history, a frivolou-. and misguidt·d amtir. But for many young peoplt•. it ha)i hl'f011ll' a subconscious soun·e or intimidation: Why, W<' may ask oursdves, "A-ere the P<'opk and th<.· idt•as and tlw music so alivt• and novel and spontaneous then? Why docs collq.{<' life appear so static and picked over today~ \\'hy ha\l' we !'<tiled to break m·w ground?

Living in the shadcl\\ of .John Lt·nnon and Abbie Hofl'man and Martin l.uthn King. Wl' cannot<.·asil~ picture our C1wn timt· a~ a part of hi,ton . l\1anv of out· t'ndea,·ors seem to palt• into tn'iignifirann: wlwn cornpared to the glamour and tht• gravity of tlw rnolution that pn•ceclcd us. Some of us wish that\\(' too 1 ould bt• pluggt•d into sonwthing- larg<.·r than ourst•ht•,, likt• thost• faint, almost imaginary figure-; who suppowdh man lwd "ith angt·r· through tear gas. against tlw flag. It ts ,, dilli< uh fi>lklorc to get beyond.

Of course, the Vit•tnam t•ra could not rt'allv have been as glamorous as all that. The students who li~ed through it were surely just as confused and st'lfish as we are today.

Those glorious marcht•s on Washin~lOn, I am wid, were often nothing mon· than grandiose t'xcuses for socializing.

The difference was that the draft was clamping down on them. Nineteen-year-old kids were dying in what seemed a senseless war on the other side of the planet. So Vietnam enabled students at home to throw themselves into an uncertain situation and come away from it with a feeling that they had left a mark. However naive or self-indulgent, they were surely part of something, part of some momentou s scene running through time.

In the liH·ral sense, tlwse arc conservative times at Yale, and conservatism bv its nature abhors a fire. What are we conserving? Tht• fu~·l of the sixties without its flame. The methods of the sixties without that passion for st'cing novelty around cverv bend. Instead of thinking of the upheaval in Central America as ant'"" and distinct problem, we tend to think of it a!> "another Viet narn. ~ The mvth of the sixties has also had the unfortunate t'llect of making students feel as though they must wt•ar the mantle of some political persuasion, that they must expr<.·ss themselves in some ,-ocal or visible way, without kno'"ing \\hy. Activism has for many become an end in it'>t'lf.

F<'" ,,._·opll' h." t ' htTn a hit· to l.{t'rwratt• the colleuivt· t-motion th.u tlw thinkt•r, .tnd politi< ians and pcrfornwr' of tht• babv hoom t'r:t \\t'll' ahk to gt·nt•ralt' on campus. Irom l\fakolm X 10 Glon.1 Stt'lllt'lll to Jim :'\1m-ri<;on to I. f.

Stone. ;'limhin~ i' hittm~ dtmn dt·ep in tlv·ir imaginations and p<>S'-l''-'illl{ thl'lll ,,, t)lll,t' angr·y, .tlmost imagina~ tl'enagt·rs in the \ u·tn;llll ~''·' 11111st "·" t• l)(•t•n posse\«ed. ()r "t•n• t hn·) Pl'r h.tp' t h<' "'" to c•mn i'e the old -;pi r·it that pt-rsist-- tod.tv j, to look at 'onw of' the peopk "ho li' l'd

through that turbuknt time here at Yale. One finds that thmrl{h this plan· was quite differ<·nt then, the pt•ople wert' n·markablv tlw same. And through all those pean:nik ..,logans and soul songs of the countt'rculture, tht·re's a familia~·· bright. ~rt·t· r. college kid up against an unfamiliar Sl'l of <II'<'UIItstant t·~ H t· was no extraordinary t-reature. li e was sirnply winging 11. ' Ovt•r three million Americans served in Vietnam, and more than 57,000 never returned. Thirty-four of those who died wt•rt• Yak· alumni or students, their names now etched into the.• marbk of Woolsey H a ll alongside the fallen warriors from Amt•rica's p ast.

But Yak'., im olvenwnt in Vietnam t'Xtt>ndcd well ht·vmlCI thi~ 'iOit·mn list of names. As one of Amc.:rica's dite in,titution~. Yalt• produn·d dozens of lead<'rs and polic.·ym.tker' on both .,ide., of tlw fem·e. peoplt' like A, erdl Harritu.m. \1c Gt·orgt• Bumh·. Staughton Lynd , Eugcnt• Rw.tm'. D.tH· Dellinger and Cyrus \'ance. The t•xarnples go on and on. aptly c.•nding \\ ith l\1aya Lin. a 1981 Yale.· arc hi t<.·ttun· major "hn designed the cont rovtTsial \'ietnam \\'ar .\lt·morial in \\'ashington.

In this issue we tell the stories of five less familiar Yale people and their lives during the Vietnam era: Dick Pershing. grandson of Gt'neral John Pershing and a 1966 graduate of Yale, who died in combat in Vietnam in 1968; Arthur Galston, a Yale plant biologist, who unwittingly discoven·d an early formula for the chemical defoliant Agent Orange in 1943 and later played a major role in the governmt•nt's decision to stop the spraying in Vietnam; William Sloam· Collin, Yale's outspoken chaplain from 1<>58-1974. who was criticized for providing sanctuary to draft resistt•rs and praised for holding the university together during the most radical years; John Kerry, Yale '66, who fought in Vietnam, won three Purple Hearts, or~anized tht· Veterans Against the War and is now running for Senatt• in Massachusetts; and Dr. Kristaps K eggi, a Yale.• Collc.·ge and Medical School graduate, who served from 1965 to 1967. V..'e have also reprinted a story from Tht .\'n( Journal of 1971 by Yale Law graduate Jack Fuller, \\ho'ie new novel about Vietnam, Fr~ts, was published la<;t month. Finally, the co-founder of ThL Ntw Journal of I 967. .Jcrrv Bruck, writes about his days at Yale.

Throughout, '"e hope to sh<'d light on the Vi~tnam period at Yale bv putting a face on this polemical subject.

Our goal is to try to see Vietnam for what it was: an event of human proportions, an event that did not simply transpire.• in the pages of history, but was shaped by people ht•rt• at Yak \\hose lives were not so different from our O\\ n .

•

~~ · Hampton S1dts, a smior in Ezra Stilts, is Editor-in-chit' o' TNJ . v ~

The New Journai/1\Jarch 2. 1984 7

,,

t9o4 1'2 h·h

J ohn Kerry , '66, wins sophomore speaking prize.

Speaks on "Civil Rights The Path to Patriotic Reality."

II Apr

2 Aug

7 Aug

14 Ou

Ki ngman B rt·ws~t·r, .J r. inaugunu cd as 17t h prcsidt•nt of Ya le .

North Vit•tnamcsc patrol boats a n ack tht> Maddox in tht· Ton kin Gulf. A doubtful sel'ond inl'idcm rcportt'd two days lata. Amt•rit·an airnafl bomb North Vit·tnam for the first time latt'r this momh .

Congre" pa""' the- T onkin Gulf Resolution gi,on~ .Juhn~on t' xtraor· chnan po"cr w act in S<>utheast Asi.1 Khn,i'>ht ht·' oustt·d: n·platt·d In Lt·ooud Rrc7hncv and Al..l.. ~t·i Kt)\\~on

26 Ort 3 ov 14 No" 2 1 No\'

Alexander Kt·rcnsky \iSIIS Y<tk.

Lyndon .Johnson dt'ft'al\ Ril r rv Gold" .u..r for thc prcsodt·m \ .

Bob Dvl,on play, \\ltl<>l'e) Hall.

Harqml lx··'" Y.olt•. 18· 14

9 Dec K e rry elected president of the Political Union.

1965 27 J an

I Feb

9 Feb 10 Fc:b II Feb

13 Feb

24 Feb

6 M ar 8 M ar

.John Pum n·signs as lontball wad1 for post "' I ndiana U . Caron Cuzza, fnrmcrlv bat klit• ld C't>at h. named head tuat h .

Y.olt• Corporation a p provl's t•xtt·n<kd paricw l IH>u": I I am 10 midnight on Frid,oys .oncl Saturdays.

Sc:nawo \ \ ayne Morse visits Yale: and aflat ks US polkv in Vit·tnam .

Poliut:al Unum oppost•s ~ithdrawal from South Vietnam. 72·:l4.

Yale professors addrrss 600 students at a rally a~ainst US polin· in \'ic:t· nam S tudents j oin m counter demonstra · tions for and a~tainst the war, about 200 auend cach Operation R ollon~t Thunder. sus· !<tined Ame roca n bombin~t of unh Victn.tm. begins Prom 1965. fcaturin~t appcarances b\ The Supremcs and Dukc Ellinl(ton.

Two marinc batt a loons land to defend Danang aorfic.-ld. the lirst American combat troops in Vietnam.

Kerry addresses Vietnam Veterans' Against the War at "Operation Dewey Canyon Ill" in Washington.

8 The New .Jou rnal/M arch 2, 1984

•

,John Kerry

Campaigns of the New Soldier Tina Kelley W ASHINGTON DC, April 19, 197 1 - They call it O peration Dewey Canyon III, successor to p revious m ilitary moves in Vietn am. E leven hundred men d ressed in camoufl age march towards the Capitol building, some in wheelchairs, some on crutches, a ll calling for an end to fighting in Southeast Asia. T hey are the Vietnam Veterans Against the War , the first group of soldiers in Amer ican history to demand the end of a war still in progress. During this week some camp out o n the Mall, some throw their medals on the steps of the Capitol and some turn themselves into the Pentagon for their war crimes. One hundred ten demonstrators are arrested and later released. john Forbes Kerry, a clean-cut Yale graduate described as "the least likely protester in the entire organization," speaks before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, justifying this "limited incursion into the country of Congress."

Dressed in an olive d rab uniform, he asks, "H ow do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a m istake?"

BOSTON MA, January 26, 1984L ieutenant Governor of Massachusetts john Kerry announces his intention to run against Republican Edward Markey for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Paul Tsongas. Kerry hopes to return to the country of Congress to work inside the Capitol, not on its steps. "fve always said basically the same thing. I think I'm being true to the points of view I came back from Viet-

nam with ," Kerry says in his persistent baritone. "I think I've grown up a bit since th en, but my basic thrust is for a governmen t that cares for its peop le, cares for the rest of the world , and cares to protect itself."

NEW H AVEN CT, June 12, 1966John K erry addresses his graduating class on the Old Campus of Yale University. "We suddenly find ourselves ... d u bbed the revolutionary generation," says Kerry, a member of Skull and Bones and the varsity soccer team. "Th is revolution is one of the strangest in history, for the revolutionists bear no arms against their government, set up no street barricades . . . and with remarkably few exceptions, initiate no violence . . . We are all entitled to choose our own battle.

Society cannot force a man to join a fight he doesn't want."

SOMEWH E R E NEAR TH E MEK ONG D ELTA, VIETNAM, April 1969- L ieutenant John Ker ry, one o f the most decorated naval officers o f the war, earns his third purple heart for shrapnel wounds during his year-long tour of duty in Vietnam. Previously an officer on a guided missile frigate in the Gulf of T onkin, he has served as the skipper of a patrol boat in the Mekong Delta. Kerry returns home to Massachusetts, determined to protest against a war he has found to be immoral and wasteful.

The tall, brown-haired young man with the I rish face was not earmarked for a

"He wanted to go as far as possible , even to becoming President. It was very much in his political goals to model himself a fter Kennedy."

career as a radical spokesman against the war. K erry, whose fath er worked with the State D epa rtment and Army Air Corps d uring W orld W ar II , did not participate in anti-war activities as a n u n dergraduate. "I think I was fairl y moderate at that time," he now recalls.

"I was not yet opposed to the war o n ideological term s." The year he graduated a Yale Political Unio n poll found strong student support for continuing the war in V ietnam. Kerry had been president of the Union his junior year, and served as chairman of the Liberal P arty and as treasurer of the Young Democrats. H e also won several oratory prizes, and was a member o f the Yale Debating Association.

"As far as I thought, he was, even at that time, very ambitious and very much one to carve out a political . . . career," said a fellow member of Skull and Bones that year. "H e wanted ¡ to go as far as possible, even to becoming President. It was very much in his political goals to model him self after Kennedy."

Kerry had signed a contract with the Navy in 1965 as an alternative to going to graduate school. H e felt a responsibility "to give something back to the country." But by the time he arrived in Vietnam in 1968, Yale's view of the war had changed significantly, and so h ad Kerry's.

"By the time I went over, there was considerable unrest here," he says. "I had some serious reservations. I doubted if the United States was following actions which could achieve its ends, I questioned the legality o f the government we were working with, and I wondered if we should be part of a civil war, if we could have any impact there. A lot of us in the service were asking that at that point, questioning, but finding no real answers." H e sensed a similar uncertainty in the South Vietnamese. "In the Vietnamese R egional The- New .Journai/Mar.¡h 2. 1!184 !I

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Popular Rt·< onnai~.,ancc FonTs then' was \'t'rv litrl<- dt·\il'l' to fight . . . It seriously hurt American morale.

"Onn· you got over tll<'n:, you'd se<· with your own <'yt•s how it worked out.

There w('r(' lots of pn>ple who askt•d what tlw ht'll \H' wt·n· doin~ therl'. [Our unitj n:sponded by bcC'oming outspoken in opposition to what \H' v.en· doing. Wt· dd>att·d \'- ith ourselves and our sup<:rior ofli< t•ro;;. Some of our superior<; <H(rt'l'd and sent lllt'ssai{<'S back to Sail.{on, otlwrs didn't. "\.\'hen I \"""a skippt·r of a swift boat on the rivt't'i mt•r there,~ Kerry t'('call~.

"I g01 inro ~crious arguments about our shoot in!.{ at !lll'l{l't~ W(' did not St't', at tht' free-lire zorws, at sampans. You rnighr fire at an old l.{randmother or <(randfarber and \·ou did not know if thn wert• VietCong \\hat .... as rhe moralirv of thar~ Or \\e'cl bt• ordcrt•d to desti'O) liule vill.tl{t'" and -.aw no objecr in ir. \\'e'd jusr be dt•nvinl.{ our own capa< il) ro \\in mer rlw 1wopk later. I think our unit benr ovt•r ha< k\,,a.-cls to see that people wen· rt"<nwd '' lwnever po!-.sible.

We'd take tht•n• to ho:-;pitals, we ('\Cn delivered habit'\ ~Th<· ab\urclit\ of rlw missions. tht· (orruprion of rlw ~O\Trnment we were trvinl{ ro uphold. tht' inabilitv to fight the kind or war \\l' \\('rt• tryinl{ to fi({ht. all mad<· it< lea•· to nw thar we ''en· on a mission rhat \hi\ \\rorH{ and \\asrelul ~ t:.; pon hio;; n·turn to the · nitt·d Stall'S in l <>69 he de< idt·d to '-pc.tk <>UI for an end ro the '"ar. ~lrhmk I be({an lo ha\t'

att liiHlt•r-,tanding of tht' dupli<·ity of the 1.{0\t'rninl.{ prcwess I hadn't had bdore: sar' Kt-rry. who was a political s(·icm:e major in .Jonat han Edwards. " I bt·){an to Ull<it-rstancl the limits of foreign policy" in real r<·rm-;, not jusr thost• karnt:d in tht' framt·work of a classroom. I saw a lot ol qut•stions ro bt• ans"en·d- why did rninoriti(·s beat· rh<· brunt of rhe fil{htinl{ in Vietnam, why wer<· there lt·,·wr of us from Yale m <'r there? I l{airwd a dt•t·p conviction of how you \hould and shouldn't approach another < OUlltl\'.~

Durin!.{ the 1971 march on Wa:-;hington Kt•rry helped publici/.e rll('sl' issues.

Spt·aking bd()rc rht· Senate Foreign Rdar iom Cornmiuee lw said. "To at· tt•mpt to justify r he loss of one Amni«m life: in Vi<:t'ham, Cambodia or Lto'i by linkinl{ such a loss to rhe J>lt''it'l' .11 ion of frct·dom is to us 1he ht•ight of niminal hypo< ri~y .. Our la ... t 1111\.,ion is to s<:ar('h out and dcstro)' tlw lasr 't'Stig-e of this barbariC' war."

T odav. Kerrv believes the rnarch was a major succ~ss. "We got pl·ople to understand that a large number of vert•ran'> fdr tht• same war a lot of people lwrc had felt. It changed the whole corn· pll'xion of tht• anti-war effort. Those '~ho'd bt•t•n afraid of spt•akin~ our agam't the war for lear· of cult ing down on 'support for the b<)v..,' 'udclt-nlv sa" tht• troop'> ''-<'1'<' ;-tgain-.r 11 too.~ ll o\\t'\(·r. Kt•rn· and th<' \\'A\\' ret \'1\ t·cl ~tronl.{ l·ri.ti< i'illl frorn <onscr· '.Itt\<'' at home. In Tht' National R nit'lt

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William F. Buckley, Jr., '50, called rheir efforts "an assault on the proposirion that what we have in America is truly worth defending," and asked, "How will the words of J ohn Kerry stand up in years to come?"

Those words p robably hurt Kerry in his unsuccessful Senate race in 1972, in which he says his past as an activist "came up sign ificantly" as a campaign issue. Now he feels that his service in Vietnam has had a positive effect on his more recen t political career. "I see a change in attitudes since 1972," he says.

"There's a much greater tendency to accept Vietnam veterans and the difficulties they faced over there and when they ret u rned." In Stanley Karnow's book Vutnam, Ker ry is quoted saying, "The country didn't give a shit about the guys coming back, or what they'd gone through. The feeling towards them was, 'Stay away. Don't contaminate us with whatever you've brought back from Vietnam."'

Veterans also had to cope with feelings of guilt for their wartime activities.

In The New Soldier, Kerry's ch ronology of the m arch , written in 197 1, which includes stories of brutality which veterans have painfully related, Kerry wrote, "Individuals are trying, by denying themselves the luxury of forgett ing about their acts. to spare others the agony of having to commit them at some time in the future." H e believes that effort has been partly successful.

"Attitudes towards Central America and Leban on ar e clearly influenced by the reservations th is country has about its involvement in Vietnam."

In the epilogue to The Nav Soldier, Kerry wrote, "There are two Amer icas, the one the speeches are about, and the one we really are." He and the veterans' group he represented wanted to reconcile the two. "As for making speeches," Kerry now says of his lifelong practice, "it's our p rocess to create change. You open your mouth and compel people to change their points of view."

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17 Apr

150 students join in the " Manh on to End the War in Vietnanl."

T om Hayden. former chairman of Students for a Democrauc Society (SDS). addresses 300 ~tuden ts in SSS 114.

National Security Advi~or M cGeorge Bundy joins with four faculty members in a nationally televi~d teach-in on Vietnam in the Law School Auditorium.

American command in Saigon reports that Vietrong have put live South Vietnamese tnmbat regiments and nine battalion' nut nf dCtion in recent months.

Wa~hington

2 May

12 May

26 .J u n

K r istaps K eggi '55, arrives in Saigon with th e 17 3 r d Airborn e Division , the firs t regular a rmy u nit deployed m Vietna m .

28 Sep 21 Oct

4 Nov 16 Nov 20 Nov

Dec

16 Dec

25 Dec

1966 6 J an IRJ a n 6 Ma r 14 May 12 Sep 16 Sep

22 Sep

Ronald Reagan speaks at the New Haven Arena.

1000 students rally agaonst the use of civil disobedience. calling 11 "morally wrong."

The Rolling Stones play in the New H aven Arena.

Tuition raised to S 1,950; room and board to Sl ,050.

H arvard beats Yale , 13-0.

American troop strength in Vietnam reaches nearly 200.000.

SDS chapter formed at Yale; about 50 initial members.

Yale assistant history professor Stausthton Lynd visits Hanoi with Tom Hayden.

J ohnson suspends bombinst of North Vietnam in an attempt to mduce the Communists to negoti<llt' Political Union attatks Lynd's visit to North Vietnam.

Brcwâ&#x20AC;˘tcr criticizes Lynd\ trip .

YDN poll linds 55 percent of students support the draft.

SDS protests a draft deferment exam in New H aven .

World's lirst Van de Craaf nu< lear accelera10r opens at Yale Socioloczy professor Roben Cook, campaigning for Con~tl't' s. attacks ~t udent apathy.

Eu!{enc Rostow, Master of Trumbull, named Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs.

12 The New .JournaUMan:h 2. 1984

Kristaps Keggi

An Army M.D:s Second Opinion Joyce Banerjee In one room of the large Victorian house in Middlebury, Connecticut, portraits of past Yale fencing teams line the wall. On a nearby bookcase, Anthony Grey's Saigon leans against a volume of Cmtury of Surgery. Close to the bookcase stands the slide screen. Dr. Kristaps Keggi of the Yale School of Medicine leans forward in his chair and presses the control button. The slide snaps into place.

A group of white-coated men hides the soldier's face. His arm lies over the edge of the stretcher, and someone's hands rest delicately on his throat. His chest is tan and hairless, his pants tattered and muddy, and each of his thickly bandaged legs ends just below the knee.

"They arrived by helicopter like this," says Keggi, "I operated on this guy five times and I couldn't save him."

"The daily picture of the wounded was this soldier coming in. He was a radio operator hit by a Claymore mine: a little gadget that looks like a cigar box.

It explodes into high velocity pellets, and it's close enough and low enough to blow the legs off. Everyone in his squad was wounded. He put on his own tourniquets, crawled to his radio, calibrated it and called in the helicopters. He stayed on the radio until every last man was evacuated. He was the last one brought in. He developed a malignant infection in his legs similar to gangrene, and it spread up and up and up . . . " Dr. Keggi walks to the back of the room and turns on the lights. The tall, silver-haired man does not resemble the stereotypical anguished Vietnam sur-

vivor. His memories do not torment more choice in what he wanted to d<.. him. Rather, Keggi lives comfortably than under any other system." with his decision to serve in Vietnam Upon his arrival in Saigon, Dr. and to return to a Yale violently op- K eggi traveled 15 miles north to Bien posed to the war.

H oa, the site of the Third Surgical ArBorn in Latvia in 1934, Kristaps m y Hospital. Quickly, Keggi realized Keggi grew up in the midst of World he would not be working in ideal condiWar II. Fleeing from the Russian Ar- tions. The hospital consisted of canvas my, Keggi's family moved to Germany tents arranged in a rectangle, with an when he was ten. He still remembers artillery unit uncomfortably close by. the sound of planes strafing a train and Dust blew into the operating rooms the saturation bombings of Cologne. In from flights at a nearby airstrip. The 1949, his family left Europe for the unit had no blood storage facilties, and United States. Two years later Keggi medicine was often limited. As K eggi entered Yale. He majored in French remembers, the first time he asked for and was a nationally ranked fencer. plaster of Paris, the corpsman gave him Graduating in 1955, he studied surgery a box containing enough plaster for a at Yale School of Medicine, where he half-dozen casts- the unit's entire suplater received his commission from the ply.

Army.

Though later in the war many physiIn 1964, Keggi joined the Army and cians would protest any doctor's support taught orthopedic surgery in El Paso, of the Army- "an organization whose Texas. Then in February, 1965, he was primary function is to kill"- Keggi does placed on 12 hour alert, issued a duffie not see a conflict between his Hipbag and rifle and asked to make out his pocratic oath and his military career. will. Keggi left in August for Indochina Rather, he believes that his war exwith the 173rd Airborne Division, the perience proved to him the importance first regular Army unit deployed in the and humanity of his profession. "Our Vietnam war. achievement in Vietnam was the saving He had no moral qualms with of arms and legs and lives," says Keggi.

American involvement in Southeast "We were sending people back to walk Asia. "We were there for a very again, to live, to function. It was a good idealistic reason: to give the average job, it had its rewards and we did it as Vietnamese the chance for self-determ- well as anyone." ination. I believe in that 100 percent," The attempt to save life and limb he explains. "We had no intention of placed great demands upon the physistaying in Vietnam as a colonial power. cians of the Third MASH (Mobile ArHad South Vietnam remained, it my Surgical Hospital). Operating seswould've been like West Germany or sions of 12 and 14 hours were comSouth Korea. Under our system, the monplace, though Keggi remembers average Vietnamese would've had a lot one session which lasted over 30. At times of fewer casualties, the tedium of MASH life increased. K eggi and his tent-mates sometimes resorted to Hawkeye Pierce-type feats to relieve the boredom. Recalling his theft of a convoy of Navy goods, K eggi smiles wryly and explains, "On R&R in Bangkok, I met a Navy lieutenant who was number

"There was so much emotionalism over the war that, instead of seeing shades of grey, people would call you a fascist pig."

The New JournaVMan:h 2, 1984 13

.,

23 S<'p

26 St•p

27 Sep

30 Sep

2 Oct

3 Oct

Su<'ce~~ nf Coke machines in Morse and Calhoun dining halls forces YUDH to in~tall the mat·him·s in all collcg('s.

Brew~lt·r calls Vietnam "a symptom of th(• inability of the world to k(•cp peace" on "Meet the Press.~ One-third of law students sign a peace petition f(>r Rostow to hand to .Johnson .

The S8.5 million Park Plaza opens its doors.

Rev. William Sloane Coffin and Richard Russell move to send metlical supplies to North and South Vietnamese civilian~.

Lt. Gen. Lewis B. Hershey, director of Selective Service, speaks to the PU. "I think we should make 'it harder for people to go to school right

now."

5 Oct

Leg injury sidelines sophomore quarterback Brian Dowling for the ~cason.

10 Oct

19 Oct

27 Oct

30 Oct 8 Nov

10 Nov

15 Nov

17 Nov

Treasu ry Department approves medical aid plan to Vietnamese civilian~ but sets a S300 limit. A peti· tion against the effort collects 413 stu· dent signatures; 968 New Haven residents sign.

Psychology professor Michael Kahn advocates a college-operated clinic to "make an expertly guided session (with psychedelic drugs) available to those students willing to prepare for it."

Silent vigil organized by Oiv students; one hour vigil planned every Wednesday until the war ends.

Robert Kennedy cheered at a Democratic rally at the Park Plaza.

Election Day 1966. Cook defeated in race for congressional seat; Ronald Reagan elected governor of Califor· nia; George Wallace elected governor of Alabama. Selective Service extcn· sion of draft eligibility to age 35 causes several junior faculty members and administrators to take draft physicals.

Stephan J. Perry, '68, dies in Laos when his helicopter comes under ground fire. Perry was visiting his parents in Laos before returning for his junior year.

Stokely Carmichael speaks to 1200 at Woolsey Hall on non-violence, in· tegration, the Vietnam War. and Black Power.

William F. Buckley. '50, debates Cof· fin at the PU on the question of government action versus private enterprise.

14 The New .JournaVMarch 2. 1984

Keggi in the Vietnam highlands with the Montgnard chiefs.

three in charge of the port of Saigon. I told him stories about our lack of penicillin and refrigeration, and he said we could get whatever we wanted at the Saigon Navy warehouses. Later, I filled out a stack of requisitions and went to Saigon. Well, the Army had sent a new colonel to be in charge of the port. We needed him to countersign the forms, but when we went to his office, he blew his stack. He signed only one of our 1000 or so requisitions. So after we left his office, the lieutenant and I went to the Saigon PX and got some Army second lieutenant to countersign all the other forms. Pretty soon, we had the best outfitted MASH in Vietnam."

Pranks like these helped Keggi cope with the tedium and strain. On a broader scale, Washington's handling of the war constantly frustrated and angered him. Keggi feels the fighting would have ended in six months had America properly utilized its great military superiority. "Fifty thousand deaths would have been avoided if we had fought the war the way it should've been fought: if we had been allowed to go after· the North Vietnamese into Cambodia, if we would've bombed Hanoi and Haiphong and all the other places from where they were runntng arms into the south in 1965-66. The on-

ly time we bombed Hanoi like we bombed Europe in World War II was during Christmas of 1972. Soon after that, we were talking peace. It was the first time in the entire war when we fought realistically."

While in Vietnam, Keggi learned that the national sentiment toward the war differed greatly from his own.

Yale's anti-war position particularly annoyed him, and he was infuriated by faculty member Staughton Lynd's role in the peace movement. Lynd, an assis· tant professor of history.from 1964 to 1968, visited Hanoi during the winter of 1965-66. Keggi believes Lynd's ac· tions indicated support of the North Vietnamese communist regime. Moreover, Lynd's trip proved to Keggi that civilians knew very little about the Viet· nam situation. "People can do whatever they want in our democratic society," says Keggi. "But Lynd went to Vietnam when we had POWs there and was ac· tively supporting the enemy. Our POWs were being tortured and shot, and some idiot from Yale went over there and came back with glorious reports saying that they were being treated well. Under normal circumstan· ces of war, that's called treason."

Despite his disagreement with Yale's anti-war stand, Dr. Keggi began

20 Nov

J I

•

;2

22 Nov

I Dec

6 Dec

7 Dec

8 Dec

12 Dec

13 Dec 15 Dec

17 Dec 31 Dec

1967 u .Jan

"We were ther~ for a very idealistic reason: to give average Vietnamese the chance for self-determination. I believe in that 100 percent."

tO jan

18Jan

Charging that the National Col· legiatc Conference on Selective Ser· vice had been called to discuss reform of the draft not abolishment. Yale's two student delegatell walk out before the conference votes to call for an end to the peacetime draft.

Thirteen students form Ad Hoc Croup to protest the Vietnam War by refusing induction if drafted.

Pvt. David Brown, formerly '67, is held in an army stockade in Fort Dix. Brown became a conscientious objec· tor (CO) after joining the army and n-fu~e' to cooperate.

Students organi:r.e a "Kennedy for Pre~idcnt in '68" committee. Kennedy write~ and expresses his support for Johnson and Humphrey. Visiting Professor Margaret Mead advocates universal national service for men and women. Former Presidential A,llilltant Richard N . Goodwin speaks at Yale; denounces Johnson admini stration for carrying on a "futile war."

Div School cancels clallscll for a sym· postum on Vietnam: Yale refu ses a plan to donate rebates for meals of fasung students to Vietnamese civilians.

Paul Mellon, '29. donates his British an collection of more than 8,000 piece~ (valued conservatively at S35 million) to Yale.

Three M orse corridormates and a female companion arrested for posse· sion of two pounds of marijuana. justice William 0. Douglas addresses a Senior Dinner: "Get on the side of revolution-get used to the word."

Ric hard Could, '68, noulied that he wtll be inducted in February for neglec ting to take the Selective Ser· vice deferment exam. Could will apparently be the first Yale student to be inducted before graduating.

Official co nsideration of the Yale- Vassar merger announced.

American troop strength in Vtetnam reaches nearly 400,000 by year·end.

Thonias M cLaughlin, '68, is revealed as the model for Time's cover illustra· tion for "Man of the Year: The New Generation.• Nme professors urge the faculty to sign a letter asking Johnson "to declare an unconditional halt to the bombmg of Nonh Vtetnam • Cook asks. for a faculty meeting to constder his proposal that Yale not release class standings and grades to draft boards.

The New j ournaVMarch 2, 1984 · 15

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16 Tht' Nt"w .Journal/ March 2 . 1984

teaching full-time at the School of Medicine upon his return to the States in 1966. H e had decided to teach orthopedic surgery while working in Vietnam. Due to what he calls his "medical idealism," Keggi felt a great need to share his unique experiences with students. At the med school, he established a war surgery lecture series, drawing almost entirely from his work in Vietnam.

Initially, most people within the Yale community reacted to Dr. Keggi and his Vietnam service with curiosity and sympathy. "But the lines were drawn by 1967," saxs Keggi, alluding to the deep 1 division o f opinion over the war. "Any debates about Vietnam would degenerate into shouting matches. There was so much emotionalism over the war that, instead of seeing shades of grey, people would call you a fascist pig." • Keggi quickly recalls a psychiatric social worker whose son had a broken arm.

The social worker refused to let Keggi treat the boy because of Keggi's voluntary service in Southeast Asia.

Beyond his own experiences, Dr. Keggi remembers the harassment of student veterans at Yale. "They were spat upon," says Keggi, his slow, casual speaking style growing emphatic. "The Yale undergrads who returned here were typically looked upon as warmongers or as idiots who had allowed themselves to be drafted. The average Yale student did everythiJl€ to avoid the war, the idea being that you shouldn't sacrifice intelligent lives."

But Keggi sees Yale and the nation atoning for their hostility toward Vietnam veterans. "The war is viewed now in realistic terms, unemotionally and impartially," he says, "The discussions over V ietnam are much fairer. Now, General Westmoreland could lecture at Yale without being called a baby killer."

Though the actions of the anti-war supporters bothered Keggi, he bears no grudge against the majority of Yale activists. Rather, he perceives most of them as sincere but misguided people.

"They were all well-meaning," explains Keggi, "but they played right into the hands of world communism. Of course, none of them were communist spies or

on the KG B payroll, but the R ussians were very clever about manipulating American peace movements for their own needs."

K eggi believes the Vietnam-era chaos had a number of effects on Yale.

He believes the university lost su bstantial alumni moneys due to then-P resident K ingman Brewster's attacks o n American involvement in the war.

More importantly, Keggi maintains that the past activ ism at Yale has instilled a "reverse M cCarthyism" in th e faculty. "It used to be if you had communist ties, you couldn't work," expla ins Keggi, "But now the faculty is so liberal that anyone who h as an opinion to the right of the far-out views of the department is looked upon as a nut a n d denied a job."

Through all h is experiences, Kristaps Keggi remains true to his ideals. T he events of the sixties have reinforced his belief in a strong national defense a n d universal civilian and military service.

S ince the dismantling of ROTC at Yale, Keggi no lon ger contributes to u n restricted alumni funds. Ya le's guarantee of financial aid to registration resisters prompted K eggi to voice his dissatisfaction to President A. Bartlett Giamatti, whom he had known as an undergraduate. According to K eggi, their b rief correspondence ended with each man telling the other he was wrong.

Today, K eggi has a private practice and continues to teach m ed school residents the skills o f reconstructive surgery. Methods of copin g with pressure he learned as a resident helped him greatly in both V ietnam and New Haven. "As a surgeon ," K eggi says, "you develop a cert ain defense mechanism to cope with the gr im facts of life. It was a tremendous waste to see 18-year-old boys come in wounded who shouldn't have been wounded. r ve learned to m in imize and forget a lot o f memories because it's so . unpleasant."

•

]o;•ce Banerjee, a sophomore in Timothy Dwight, is on the staff of T NJ.

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28Jan

30.Jan 31Jan

I Feb

6 Feb

9 Feb

Nonh Vi c:tnamese Forei~n Mini~te r Nguyen Duy Tnnh ~ay~ United States must stop bombing Nor th Viecnam before wlk11 can begin .

Guffin lead~ a pmcc~t of Clerf(Y and Laymc·n Cnnn•rncd Ahnul Vietnam.

William Male,, '68 overcomes "op· posiciun from six police departments and a large Gnman shepherd" to ar· rive al Smith after a sevenly·eighl· hour running odyssey.

Lcx·al 35 of the• Federaciun of Univer· ~icy Employee·, begins auempls to unionize I 700 white collar workers.

Cook, Lynd and 20 students march nuuide the induction renter in a 12" snow, corm with 35 mph winds and 0 • IC'mJ><'raturc~ 10 protest the imprison· ment of New Canaan resident David Miu·hdl. a non-cOOJ><'rator. Snow· storm virtually shuts down New Haven: local ho,potal s and Yale re· maon OJ><'n .

Yair Law Journal publishes an exten· sivt' lcl(al eriticosm of the Selective Sel"\ot(' sv~tem .

13 FdJ

22 Fc·b

23 Feb

Scudenl Commiuee on Teaching calls for truer l(rading and a pass-fail sy,tem Guffin <ails fur ,tudent, to join in an ac 1 uf ma,~tve c·ivol disobedience and ~url't'ndc·r 1hc•ir draft card,, Republican Town Committee of Wallingford tablc·s a resolution rc· qu<'stinl( Connectirut Governor Dconp~c·y l<l t'UI off all Slate aid 10 Yale• until Brewster di,misses faculty members who have protested the Vircnam war. The commiuce seeks the nu,lt·r of 500 faculty who signed the anti-bombing letter. Security Dirrc tnr and A,'«l<"iatc Dean J ohn Pm-.dl c alh fur more c·ampus police pnwrr 10 prntc·c·c ,tudent, with un· Amcrin•n inccn.~~t

.' i I' •,

Dick P e rshing tra nsfers from F ort D ix, New J ersey to Fo rt Benn ing, Georgia to begin t ra ining with the l Ol st Airborne Divisio n .

28 Feb

Po-.rll is revealed 10 have kept files on "subvenive organizations, ac· tivuirs . and indo\"ldual, ~

Persh at the Skull and Bones retreat on Deer Island in 1966 .

18

Th~

New .Journai/Mart·h 2, 1984

Richard Warren Pershing

Letters from Quang Tri Paul Hofheinz and Morris Pann¡er Quang T ri Province 30 Dec 67 Bo, of the monolithic mandible, . . . A thought from the mysterious East . . . Happy New Year and all trite things that are customarily uttered at this time of tlu year. How was your Christmas? There is no way it could have compared to an evening in the T a little over a year ago when you and your elf hadyourfinest hour. Many moons ago and Jar away . . .

We have run a couple of operations over here and the battalion was bloodied two days after Christmas . ..

Richa rd W. Pershing, Lieutenant, lOlst Airborne. Division, United States Army , had seen his friends for the last time barely a month before at the YaleH arvard football game. It somehow made sense that Persh , as h is friends called him , would see the group for the last time at The Game. For even though ~e never ceased poking fun at traditiOns, he could not seem to escape them either.

As his father before him, P ersh attended Yale where he stood out as much for his flamboyant personality as for his athletic prowess. On Tap Day, in the spring of '65, he was selected to participate in one of the most traditional aspects of a tradition-bound institution, Skull and Bones. And when Persh left ~ale, he decided to enlist in the army, like his father and his grandfather, General J ohn J. "Black J ack" Pershing, Commander of American Forces in World War L His friends remember that_ Persh never bragged about his famtl y but, as one of his close friends

recalls, "There was no other honorable thing for him to do but join the army. It was a legacy for him as much as being at Yale was a legacy for him."

Yale in 1966 was not radically different from the Yale of the 1950s. People still wore ties to dinner. The residential colleges had guards posted at gates that were left unlocked. There were no women either. "Ironically, the war was almost a non-issue at that time," fellow Bonesman Chip Stanberry recalls. "It was distant, almost nonexistent, not something worth thinking about, certainly not something worth protesting about."

Persh formed many special bonds with his fellow members of Skull and Bones: Mack Bradford, the Captain o f the lacrosse team, Michael Dalby, a scholarly intellectual studying Asian history, R on Singer, Phi Beta Kappa graduating 3rd in his class, Jim Howard, a lacrosse player and offensive halfback on the football team. "We shared a lot of emotions," recalls Dave Laidley, the captain of the football team, dubbed "Bo of the Monolithic Mandible" by P ersh. "It was a highly charged, very candid year." All of the original group have been successful: some have gone on to national prominance: J ohn Kerry , now the Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts and Freddie Smith, the president and founder of Federal Express. The group met twice weekly and spent much time together outside of their society.

Persh was not the only person in Bones that year who went to Vietnam.

John Kerry," David Thorne and Fred Smith also saw combat. They went partly out of curiosity and also because

"He had this crazy kind of luck and ability.

We all thought this pluckiness would get him through Nam."

they didn't want to go to graduate school or Canada, the only alternatives to military service for young men just out of college. "We were all, even Persh, interested in the question of war in our generation. Would you run away or would you go deal with it, look at it?"

David T horne, another Bonesman who served as an officer in the Navy recalls.

"There was a certain adventure about it."

Of all the Bonesmen who served in Vietnam, Persh was the only one who did n ot return. Now, a white tombstone sits atop a hill overlooking Washington, D.C. It is isolated from the rows upon rows of similar slabs which dot the landscape of Arlington National Cemetery like daisies in a spring pasture. OfT in the distance are the Washington Monument and the United States Capitol.

Persh's tombstone stands in a small clearing near the grave of his grandfather, one of the country's great war heroes and the namesake of the Pershing II missile. . .. In the same fi.refight a Huey 1-B gunship (helicopter) was blown om of the sky- carbonizing two pilots and two gunners.

I cam'ed one of the bodies in to be taken back by chopper-and was shaken by that as I have ever been in my short life. The immediacy of death is startling. One man was shot through the temple so it was instantaneous but ug!Ji as sin. Now it seerns remote and almost not important, but at the time, it twists you up inside . ..

At a lean 6'2", Persh cut a dashing figure on campus. His theatrical mannerisms and wild antics gave him a high profile both in a nd out of Pierson College. In Skull and Bones, Persh was th e iconoclast, the one who kept everybody from taking themselves too seriousl y. "Suddenly he'd be Nigel, a character he invented in a debate at M ory's, with an English accent," recalls The New journal/ March 2, 1984 19

. \

3 Mar

Prom 1967 features Woody Herman and his Band, Martha and the Vandellas , and the Orlons (of "Watusi" fame) .

II Mar Polo wins 1967 National Intercollegiate Championship.

Associate Psy c hology professor 6 Apr Michael Kahn proposes legalization of marijuana and sale over drug store counters. .

9 Apr 40 students join the New Hampshire to Milford leg of a 500 mile marathon tn protest the war.

10 Apr Fourteen Yale groups sign leiters urging faculty support of massive antiwar demonstrations in New York City on April 15. The leiter is signed by Galston, Bergin, Emerson, Hersey.

Kahn and Scully.

12 Apr Strom Thurmond warns in a PU speech against a stalemate in Vietnam and calls for a complete and final . vi<·tory incuding "revolutionary and <TI'ative development of the coun·

Laidley. "H e'd p ick up a soup bowl and use it for a helmet. 'Nigel standing at the head of the Sahara sands,' he'd say."

I nside the H all on High Street, few of the solemn rituals of Skull and Bones escaped Persh's ridicule. "We'd get to tak ing it all a little too seriously, and suddenly he'd be Cyrano de Bergerac," add s Laidley. "H e'd slap somebody with a glove and challenge them to a duel."

In a time conspicuously devoid of protests or inspired causes, Persh's friends remember him for his warmth a nd generosity. Born into a prom inent New York family o n October 25, 1942, Persh was the son of a successful stock . b roker who was well-known in New York social circles. The family had a large apartmen t on P a rk Avenue a nd a summer house in Sou thampton . Persh o fte n liked to treat h_is friends at one of lrvsidt·." h is favorite spots in the city. l"S'" Apr · "He knew all the good bars on the 500 Y alies march as East Side," says j im H oward. "H e could Division K in "Spring go to Trader Vic's without money Mobilization to end the becau se everyone knew h im there."

War in Vietnam" in New Often the group wou ld end up sleeping York City, from Central in the City at the P ersh ings' place after Persh had treated everyone to di n ner Park to the U .N . Martin and drinks. "We used to call those our Luther King addresss the Trader V ic's seminars," recalls Laidley. march, and leads it with These trips were an important time for Dr. Benjamin Spock. Persh a nd h is friends to get together. e was the catalyst for that whole Galston , Scully, Kahn, "H grou p," recalls M ary Ann H oward, j im and Cools march as well . H oward's wife. "H e was the o ne who 19 Apr Maryland Governor Spiro Agnl'w •·nwould call and get them all together." durses Nelson Rockefeller as t ht• At times, Persh's antics bordered on COP's best presidential candirlaH· in the reckless. Howard recalls flying back 1968. to New Haven o n Fred Smith's p rivate 22 Apr In a panel discussion at thc• l.aw p lane, after a party on Long Island . "At School Brewster endorses abolishing one point, I looked up and Persh was at s tudent deferrments and allowing 18 the controls. I'm certain he'd never and 19-year-old draftees to choose their time of service between 19 and flown anyth in g before, b u t he insisted 23. on doing it." Stunts like this both am27 Apr Faculty adopts a resolution "urging used a nd ann oyed Persh's friend s. "tie the abolition of student deferments." was so delightful and fun ny, you Westerfield and Scully are key in couldn't get mad at him," recalls R on drafting the resolution .

I May History professors Harry Benda and S inger. "H e could flick cigarette ashes .Jonatha n Spence warn of a possible o n your clothes and you had to laugh."

2 M ay

US invasion of North Vietnam .

New Haven Young Friends Stw·il't\' announces it has sent a second illq(a1 $500 to Canada for medical supplit·s for North & South Vietnanw«· .-ivilians.

20 The New .Journal/March 2, 1984

. . . This is an ugry, amorplwus on again, qff again war. W hen in base camp, its touch football, beer and bridge- On our operations it.r sw~at, slogging Lhrou.~h lcnee deep wale" in

the paddies, vicious red ants and bugs. Tht heat is ungodry dun"ng the day and while it cools off at night, the mosquitoes have been known to band together and carry men and machines off . . .

Persh's friends recall that he never worked very h ard at anything, preferring instead to rely on his natural grace and intelligence. Often he wou ld stay out late drinking and smoking cigarettes the n ight before a lacrosse or soc· cer game and d eliver a stellar perfor· mance on the field the next day. "He was ser ious about the-.games, b u t he partied h ard after them," recalls Mack Bradford. Persh brought h is antics out onto the field as well. "We used to carry him out onto the field in a lau ndry basket. H e'd get out' and dance a round in a really fun ny way," K erry reme m bers.

Exams were always a crisis. "He used to hit the infirmary during exams: Laidley says. Despite the u nending acad emic crisis, P ersh graduated with a BA in English. "H e didn't have m uch in common with the E n glish metaphysical poets, b u t I guess he liked them: Michael Dalby says, remembering the drawn out cra m sessio ns he an d Persh had together. After their last exam, the Bones group took a trip to Deer Island, the StK'i<'ty's private island o n the St.

i

Lawrence R iver. Thev returned to New pluckiness would get him throu gh H aven after only a few days to hear Nam." Kerry deliver the Class Day speech.

Looking ba<·k on those close calls, . . . We've pazd ou.• own priu for thr carP ersh's friends remember that pan of nage-yesterday I los• 111) companJI comhis charm was his ability to get out of mander, a goodfn.end "nly weeIs old" than I, tight situations. "li e was the kind of guy a dn'nking buddy and o finr Joldz.-r. Hnd a who could write excellent term papers piece of shrapnelftomfnmd(}' artillrry• trar m on subjects he knew nothing about," to his chest collapsing a lung. Hr toppled ovl'T recalls AI Cross, a fellow Bonesman. in the rice paddy and watf'r su rpt into hi1 Academic trouble was not the only pro- chest cavity drowning him. I watched the blem Persh got himself into. Howard chaplain unzip the plastic hod} ba,l( to adtells ho"" ht· and Pt·rsh wound up in minister extreme unction, anointing a yellowGrand Central Station om• morning at gray eyelid on a faa that u•m ru•arly Wl5:00 a.m. afrt•r a long night on the ucognizabk in its death pallor. Hn-r u;a.r ont tovm. They had spent all of tht·rr money of my closest frimds in m} am!y carrrr u•ho and had no ""•l\ to get back to New had ceased to exist now zipped up and plaad H aven. Pt·...-h approached somebody in with eight others in a contamn- for shi'pmmt one of the caflott•rias and <·on" inced him home . . . . to lend tht·rn SIO .. He "'as ah.. ays getOn October 10. 1966, Pt•rsh enli•aed ting into trouble and corning out smellin the Army. H e rqx)rll·d to Ft. Dix, ing like a ro...... ~ Srngt•r n·rnembcrs.

T o some of hr., fnends, it st·emed as if New Jersey, where tht• Command sinPe...-h had a guardian angel. .. He had gled him out for trainin~ as a Lit•utethis craz\ kind of luck and ability,~ nant because of his Yale edu(·ation and Laid ley <;ays ..We all thought this military background. H t• t•ntered Of-

Lt. Pershing in jump training at Ft. Benning, Georgia, in 1967.

"There was no other honorable thing for him to do but join the army. It was a legacy for him as much as being at Yale."

The New journal/March 2. 1984 21

· •'

P ersh with varsity lacr osse t e amma tes Jim Howard and John K e rry in 1966. fleer Candidate School (OCS) where they taught him to use an M-14 rifle.

The following spring, they sent him to Fort Benning, Georgia, to learn to parachute. On August 17, 1967, he was made a Second Lieutenant and assigned to the 101st Airborne Division.

Persh's friends report that the military began to interest him more afte•· he joined it. "H e got caught up in the whole OCS thing." Cross recalls.

"He seemed anxious to succeed in the military." Jim Howard remembers driving Persh down to Fort Dix after a weekend together in New York. "He was pleased with what he was doing, but he didn't know what to expect in the future."

In the fall of 1967, Lieutenant Pershing began preparing to go on active duty in Vietnam. The Army sent him and his unit to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, for a series of exercises in preparation for combat. Persh also got engaged to Shirley Gay. a woman he had been dating since he broke up with Kitty H awks, his college sweetheart, just after graduation. His parents threw an enor22 Tht> Ne" .Jnurnai/ Man·h 2. 1984

mous engagement party at their house on Long Island and invited all of Persh~ old friends. They were surprised when D_ick wore his uniform to the party.

Persh was nervous about his upcoming tour of duty though he took pains not to show it except to his close friends. Laidley remembers seeing him for the last time at the Yale-Harvard game. "We went to some bar somewhere and ordered a couple of glasses of champagne. He threw his arms around my neck and we started wrestling, just like old times. Suddenly he grabbed me as hard as he could and hugged me. 'God I'm scared,' he said.

We both started crying. The moment passed and soon he was jumping up on the table doing his Zorba dance again."

In December, Persh received his orders w assume active duty in Vietnam. . . . The "VC can be workin,{? in the paddies one minute and in a clump of trus the next firing at _you - _you can i tell who or when or wherr-and finally-why . .

It may . be r~y worm's c_ye vit'w of thr co'!flict, but iJ

makes no sense. These people could care less about words like democracy or popular representation or elections. They want to farm, to grow rice and chickens, to make love and to be lt;ft alone . . .

Many of Persh's friends were shaken by the change that had come over th eir friend since he had gone to war. At Yale, "he was rather apolitical, not really all that well -mformed. But I guess he was fairly conservative," recalls Thorne, now a consultant working in Boston. From Vietnam, his letters indicated at least a new awareness if not a change of heart. More striking than the change in his view of the war was the new ser iousness and the weight of Persh's responsibility. "It was a different Dick Pershing who wrote me from Nam," Laidley recalls. "No more igel." His roommate also detected a change. " In the war, he found a group of people whose Ji,·es he was responsible for," Singer explains. "That was not something he'd had before and I think he became responsible as hell when he

Quang T n· Provinct 3 Feb 68 Dear Bo, Just a short note to let you know that Persh is still in the pink of good health despite half of the slope heads in SE Asia taking out their own personal vendella against him. On the bad guys' side may be numbered the myriad beasties that go bump in the n~t:ht ... and believe me a 3 7 lb. mosquito will go bump as he busts against the crust of dritd sweat, 4 day old insect repe/lant, conl:ealtd C-Ration juices and dessicated night soil-bloated leeches. . . . We move into paddies tom'w for 10 days ofcombat assaults by chopper- workin.t: company stu units in an area reputed to house 3 NVA REGIMENTS-a lillie like the Parsons' Institute for the Blind playing the Padcns in Green Bay

Two weeks after Persh wrote that letter, the IOist infantry received orders form the American command in Thua Thien to lead a combat assault on Hung Nohn, a small village some 400 miles North of Saigon reported to contain a North Vietnamese baualion headquarters. The routine was not

new to the 101 st. They had been on several missions like this one since Lieutenant Pershing took command of Company A in Dccembet·. . .. Presently workin.t: near the DMZ in the town of Quang Tri. R1:~ht wlurl' thl' action is -to be sure- but thr .~to~}' of war doern 't come on as strong as its suppoud to- We've killed nearly 700 NVA troop.1 in this area in the last three days and the on(y results I've seen are random bodirs -luadleu or without limbs strewn by the road, irride1crnt due to the blanket of jlirs on the hodit's- left ~y a cruel and unconarned populau- or American troops taking pictuu1 with Kodak 104's of bodies slacked liJ..l' cordu•ood in a town squart' .

As the American soldiers approached the village, the North Vietnamese opened fire on them. The Americans began to retn.·at. but Company A and Lieutenant Pershing stayed behind to provide a base of (ire to allow the Americans to pull back.

Unfortunately. not all of the members of Company A n•turncd to headquarters that night. The fighting

"The feeling was no longer 'What's going on over there?' I t was, 'Oh God, this is real.'"

5 May

6 May

10 May

II May

23 May

19 St'p

2 Oct

3 Oct

II Oct

Freshman "riot~ on Old Campus, numerous fires staned.

The New Republic accuses Yale of engagin~ in classified research on Chemical and biological warfare for the Pentagon. The administration and faculty deny the charges.

"Day of I nquiry~ organized by Senior Advisory Board, Yale Daily Ntws, Dwight H all and Battell Chapel Deacons features a series of five lectures in the Law School Auditorium, student-faculty lunch and dinner discussion and prayer for world peace.

Seven faculty members (including Scully. Blum and Hersey) ask New Hav<.'n teachers to participate in a peat·e demonstration May 23: S<.-ek extension of Vietnam Truce Day on May 23.

600 students and faculty march on the Green, asking that "the truce become the Peace.· Cook returns from C:z.echoslovkia after meeting with North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front rcpre~ntati,·cs: senses a "hardening of the Vietnamese line on the war.• C.O. Brown found guilty o f disobeying a superio r officer.

Sentenced to 18 months of hard labor. bad conduct discharge and forfeiture of all military pay.

Eleven students invite all Yale students to commit themselves to a "We Won't Go~ Pledge; form Yale Draft Refusal Committee.

Pierson College establi~he~ a military service· information agency. Coffin promises to offer Battell Chapel as a sanctuary from police action for any Yale student conscientiously resisting the draft.

Scully and Law Professor Charles Reich begin to circulate petition to entire faculty condemning war in Vietnam and asking LBJ to seek peace at on...e.

Lady Bird Johnson visits Yale, addres!<t:S Political Union on "Beautification in America.• 1500 to 2000 students hold a silent vigil to unte an end to US bombing of Nonh Vietnam Over 600 students and faculty sign an open letter to that effect.

Dwight Hall surveys claim a majority of under-grads oppose Vietnam War. Three professors ask faculty to join a national group of writers. profes'IOrs and clei"!O' demonstrating in Washmgton O...tober 21 in solidarity with draft resistors .

The New JournaVMarch 2, 1984 23

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had been intense : There had been casualties. One of the men had fallen in the field and remained unaccounted for. Lieutenant Pershing decided they should go back and look for him.

The 101st returned to Hung Nohn the next day and began searching for their fallen comrade. They were met again by enemy gunfire, but they continued to search through the knee-deep mud in the rice paddies on the outskirts of the town. Lieutenant Pershing called for a troop deployment from his exposed point position at the head of the p latoon. "Shift over to the left," he yelled with a wave of the hand. Just then, a rocket-propelled grenade round flashed in from a bunker. It hit a rice dike with a blinding flash. The force threw him to the ground. Fragments of the grenade tore into his neck and shoulders.

Though critically wounded, Lieutenant Pershing refused to relinquish his command. He attempted to withdraw to a better vantage point from which to direct his troops and reassess his situation. Minutes later, he was wounded again, this time by ..1 gunshot to the neck. His shoulders, neck and face now ragged, he died in the field. . . . I'm a little tired to wax long on political philosophy but all I want to do is put in my time and come home. There are too many people over here sweating and cb!_ing and getting crippled to leave now- even ij I could- and maybe I can keep some ofour people healthy if I can imbue them with my own brand of orthodox cowardice. Fear is there all the time, but generally too busy or uncomfortable to notice-you become pretty resigned and just hope you'll be Lucky . . .

Persh's friends felt that in dying while searching for a lost comrade he had lrved up to his own character rath~ than any military code he might have' learned. "His belief was in people more than in the military," AI Cross claims. "I don't think he wen~ back to look for his friend out of military commitment. His friend was out there and he needed help."

Even more than the grief that 24 The New .Journal/March 2. 1984

Persh's death caused his friends, it also brought a new awareness of the war which they had hardly thought about two years before. "It was the first time I thought what a waste this is," recalls Mack Bradford. "The feeling was no longer 'what's going on over there?' It was, 'Oh God, this is real."' Others had similar reactions. "It contributed to the futility. It brought home the senselessness. It crystalized my feelings of the waste involved in th at effort," accord ing to Stanberry. "I was ambivalent to the war at th.e time we graduatedIf I had a view, it was probably more pro than con- but by 1968 and Persh's death, all that changed."

The funeral tOok place in New York on February 27. Most o f the old clique ,., was there: Laidley, Bradford, Cross, Dalby, Stanberry, Howard. After the ceremony, several of them boarded a private plane with the coffin and flew to Washington. A funeral cortege met them at the a irport and carried them to Arlington National Cemetery where Lieutenant Pershing was buried with full military honors.

After the coffin was lowered into the ground, the group flew back to New York in time for cocktails and dinner.

It was the last time they were all together.

Take care ofyourself Bo- please drop a line and bring me up to date on happenings back in the world- in turn I'll continue to keep our country .free from Communist oppression and continue to spread the good word about apple pie, motherhood, the .flag- and the glory of the great American way to a body of people who share their dirt floor with chickens, P~t:s and water b~ffalo. No, I'm not b~t:.for flower power, but you can't force feed a programmed system to people who work on a candle power land- no matter what the tall 1 e.>. an ltlYf . . .

As ever, my scurrility rernains untainted by the n:r:ors tif this barbarian police action. May .~our vast mandible l~row florid with good livln[!.

â&#x20AC;˘ Paul H ojheiru, a s.mior in Silliman, is Associate Editor ofTNJ. Morris Panner, a smior in Ezra Stiles, is Mana.r:in.t: Editor.

Night Is Mother To The Day

by Lars No r~ n translated by H arry G. Carlson directed by Goran G raffman

March 6 - March 24 The play that has stunned audiences in Stockholm for more than a year is now an American premiere at the Yale Rep!

Call the Box Office. Charge by phone.

AmE.x, Vila&: MasterCard accepted .

~486-1600 The New .Journai! Man¡h 2. 1984 25

..

At The University Memorial in the Year1976 A strut door opens, claUers, closes.

Silence.

A voice: Is someone here?

Silence.

Is someone here? the voice says.

Names, the silence answers.

What names?

Names without their . lives, . the silence answers.

Carved names on a curving wall.

Names no longer spoken.

Speak them.

We are the young, the silence answers.

The young who died> the silence answers.

Died in the wars, the silence answers.

Wars! says the voice. God damn the wars!

Died in the wars, the silence answers.

The Revolution. The Rebellion.

The war to .end war. The wars after.

What has a university to do with war?

What had we to do with war?

You went to it.

It came to us.

We were the young. It called us. And we died.

The university would not have listened.

It had no need to: we had listened.

You believe that? You believe you gave your lives for that? Died for the university? For light? For truth?

You are the dupes of death . You fought for nothing, died for nothing . . perished at the iron gate.

It's always at the iron gate truth takes stand and men must fight for it.

And afterward the truth they fought for turns to lies, dishonor> public shame.

Even the dead learn that, the voice says.

The truth they fought for, maybe, says the silence.

The truth they died for} no. It's there.

Where? says the voice.

Where truth is duty: where the university grows great.

The university-' the voice says.

Truth in the university is true: It has no truck with death, with duty.

The university, the silence answerstruth in the university is where the young have found it.

Where? The voice says.

Here> the silence answers. At the iron gate. copyright 0 18711 by Archibald Macl.al•h Aeprln1ed with penniMion of Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston

26 The New Journal/March 2 , 1984

The names form a solemn list on the wall of the archway outside Woolsey Hall rotunda. We pass them everyday, but it is hard to imagine the lives these names represent. Etched in white granite, the names have b ecome abstractions William Marcus Barschow . . . Howard Jon Schnabolk . . . thirty-two others. They died in · places like Quang Tri Province, Hai Yun, or "somewhere near Danang."

Over 58,000 Americans were killed in V ietnam. Thirty-four of them were from Yale. Not all of them graduated from here; some came here only briefly.

Most of them were lieutenants, though two were corporals, and three were not directly affiliated with the military.

They are all nonetheless united by the fact that they once walked through this corridor, past the wall which now bears their name, rank and place of death.

Here is a brief description of the lives of some of these men.

After recuperating from his wounds, he volunteered to return to active duty.

He was killed in action a few days later in Bien Boa, a small town about 40 .., miles north of Saigon.

JOHN CLYDE WHITE, III was born and raised in Dayton , Ohio. He came to Yale in 1962, after a brief stint at prep school in Pennsylvania.

White quickly distinguished himself as a first-rate debater. He was a member of the Political Union during his freshman and sophomore years and an important member of the Yale Debate Team. In 1964 he won third place in the Buck-Jackson Oratorial Contest and in 1965 he finished second in the Ten Eyck Oratorial Contest.

White was also a dedicated athlete. A friend once described him as "the fastest man in Dayton, Ohio." He ran track all four years at Yale and lettered his senior year.

'·

The Thirty-Four

..

DONALD PORTER FERGUSON He graduated in 1966 with a B.A. in was born in New Haven on October 4 , English, and went into the Marine 1947. He grew up in the Elm City and Corps. After receiving his commission graduated from the Hopkins Grammar from OCS, the Marines sent him to School where he was the editor of the Vietnam on March 7, 1967. He died of school paper, The Razer. wounds suffered in combat on NovFerguson entered Yale in the fall of ember 1, 1968, shortly before he would 1965. His friends say he was bright, but have ended his stay on active duty. he left Yale after a semester and a half, apparently disenchanted with the rigors JOHN ABBOTT entered Yale in 1945 of a Yale education. after graduating from a military Fergt;son joined the army not long academy in Carlsbad , California. He after leaving Yale. The army made him left Yale after his sophomore year to a corporal and in April of 1967, they enroll in flight school and become a sent him to Vietnam. pilot for the Navy.

In November of that year, Ferguson Abbott flew numerous missions in was severely wounded by a hand the Korean War where he was promoted grenade. His best friend was killed in to the rank of lieutenant. He was on the the same incident, though the experience flight that downed the first Soviet MIG only redoubled Ferguson's desire to of the war. fight the war to its conclusion. He wrote Abbott returned to Yale in 1955 and to his parents from a hospital bed in enrolled in the School of Engineering.

Cam Ranh Bay, "Some people say He graduated in less than two years 'bring the boys home.' They had better with a Bachelor of Science degree. A check with the 'boys' first. We'll come non-resident member of Trumbull Colhome when we're damn good and lege and an excellent student, he was elected to Tau Beta Pi and other ready, when this is over." academic honors societies.

..

Abbott resumed active duty in the Navy in 1957 and eventually rose to the rank of captain. His plane was shot down over North Vietnam in April 1966. The Navy listed him as missing in action until the signing of the Paris Peace Accords when the North Vietnamese confirmed that he was dead. In 1974, the government of North Vietnam returned his remains to the United States. Abbott was buried with honors in Arlington National Ct¡nll'tl'ry.

R ICHARD McALLISTER FOSTER was born on May 17, 1900, in Sewarren, New Jersey. He barely missed fighting in the First World War. He entered Yale in 1919, the year the Big T h ree met at Versailles to negotiate "an end to war for all time."

Foster left Yale after the first semester of his sophomore year and embarked on a career in sales and management. He worked for a time as a salesman for the

H ookless Fasten er Company of Meadville, Pennsylvania and later as an assistant to the general manager of the Crown Fastener Company.

At age 64, he joined a company wh ich specialized in construction work in foreign countries. On December 29, 1964, he was killed by Vietcong guerillas while directing the building of a railroad in South Vietnam, part of the extensive American economic development of the region.

ART HUR DANIEL STILLMAN graduated from Harvard magna cum laude in September 1963 and joined the Peace Corps later that year. H e spent three years in Thailand and six months in Laos on a special state department program, before returning to the U n ited States in 1966.

Stillman entered Yale Graduate School that fall and be~an a Master's program in Southeast Asian Studies.

After graduating in June 1968, he went back to Laos as part of the International Voluntary Services (IVS), an interna-

tiona! relief agency. By the summer of 1969, he was Deputy Chief of the IVS Laos operation.

On August 5, 1969, Stillman was returning from a meeting with Laotian agricultural officials in Paksane, a small town 70 miles northeast of Vietiane. A guerrilla fired a rocket into his jeep and killed him . He was 28 years old .

FREDERICK WOODROW K NAPP was born in Oakland, California, on .July 29, 1943. He came to Yale in 1961 on a Naval Reserve Officer T raining Corps Scholarship.

Knapp majored in history and worked to fulfill his NROTC requirements. He was a member of the Christian Science Organization for three years and vice-president of the group his senior year. He was also a member of DKE. The stocky young man who liked to be called "Woody" was a dedicated

athlete. He played on the freshman baseball and football teams and made the varsity football team his sophomore year. He went on to earn a letter in football and also played intramural basketball and baseball for Ezra Stiles College.

Kingman Brewster presented Knapp with his commission during commencement ceremonies in May 1965. A year later, he made junior grade lieutenant and the Navy stationed him in Vietnam as a jet pilot with Naval Attack Squadron 164. From his base aboard the USS Oriskany, he flew missions over Hanoi and Ita phony. He was wounded in combat and received a Purple Heart.

On November 2, 1967, his plane was reported missing after a sortie over North Vietnam .

â&#x20AC;˘

Paul Hcifhnnz and Moms PanncTh~

Nc:w J ournal/Mart h 2. 1984 27

Coffin lead s delegation of draft resistors to turn in 1000 draft cards (including 28 from Yale) to Justice D epartment m Washington.

21 Oc·t

23 Ou

25 On 28 Oc·1

~wrm Pentagon: violence erupts. Thn·c.> Yale ~wdents and an a~si~tant c·haJ>Iain are arrested. 400 Yale ~wdems partitipate.

FBI interviews at lea,t 12 $1Udents ~hn ha'e allegedly ~urrendered their clrart cards. Dean Robert .John•on of the Divinity Sch()()l refuw' to 1(1"<' the FBI permission to be on Otv S<h()()l property. Branford M.1~tc•r .J P .

Trinkau~ says no FBI agcrH ~hall int<•rrogate a Branford studc•nt withoul his t'Onscnl.

60 students pit•kt·t lh<• Army-Navy ROTC n•nter a1 SLEM R;c~slt·r crilicizt"\ Coffin fnr hi~ lactin al(ainst Vie1nam War hut dc·ft"nds his ri~~:ht to dissent •.- ,, member of a

55.000 march in D.C.,

•frt•t"

8 r-:o,

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universicv ."

"Dump .Joh.;snn" \tUdt·ms hold orl{ani7.ationl mc.-t"tinl{. 1()0 atu: nd and n>mmit tu nK.tlt~m~~: and nrl(ani7.inl( oppmition tn Pr<·sidt·nt Johnson .

150 •tudents pic·ket Ch.tpt·l Stn•t•t indue 1um n·ntl"r: :10 arrntnl SDS pit"kt·t~ Dow Cht•mtt al ,.., ruiu•r on can1pus.

1968

8Jan

10 .J.tn

17 .J.tn 21l.J.m

Coffin indicted by a Federal grand jury for conspiring to cou nse l and aiding draft resisters.

Enl(lish instructor \ltth.U"I Hnlah.ut dedart"d delinquc:m lor r<·lurntnt( his dr<1ft card: urdcrt"d In .tppt·ar htr induninn Feb. 1 Fatuhv offers two •uuc•mt•nt\ ol support lor Coffin, o'er :u;o ~tgn •Cnn•ucntt". 1hc.> l..t" . •tncl lht" 'A'ar" confert"nct" ht"ld: •pt.·alo.t•rs .til nppt.>•t" c·onnuinl( Coffin

Coffin speaks to May Day protestors at Ingalls Rink. A bombing occurred at Ingalls later during May Day protests.

28 The Nt"w .Journai/Mar<h 2 . 1984

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William Sloane Coffin

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Reverend Coffin turns from his window overlooking 122nd Street, and with characteristic irony says, "When I'm introduced, it's a lways, 'who became famous in the sixties,' as if I'd slipped or disappeared." He smiles. "You know what I mean- they say, 'here he is, less hair, gained a little around the waist.'

Of course, I think I'm working harder than ever , but I guess it's only if you're on TV, then you're really doing something."

Yet undeniably, as Yale Chaplain from 1958 to 1974, William Sloane Coffin did become famous in the sixties.

"The greatest sin in the world is to be boring," Coffin said in 1967. The image of him exhorting Yale students to resist the draft, waging verbal warfare with Kingman Brewster, and going to jail in protest remain the epitome of Yale in the sixties for many students whose lives he affected, as well as for alumni who looked on in horror. He was castigated as a corrupter of youth, characterized both as excessively flamboyant and tremendously dedicated, and immortalized by Gary Trudeau as Doontsbury's "fighting young priest who can talk to the young."

Yale was forewarned . Richard Sewall, a former Yale English professor, remembers Coffin telling the Yale Chaplain Search Committee, .. 1 preach the uncomfortable gospel." As soon as he arrived, Coffin began to fulfill his promise, not an easy job in a secular university setting, especially one as conservative as Yale in 1958. He remembers his job requiring him to ..take people who have roots in faith and try to

show them that the purpose of h aving roots is to grow branches. At Yale you take the majority of students- those with branches-and teach them to develop roots. I discovered that it's easier to develop branches from roots."

Despite what he calls the "dullness" of the fifties, Coffin realized early on that problems which were dormant h ad to emerge. Civil rights in particular was a movement whose time had come. Coffin's dislike of racism began in childhood, was exacerbated by the army, and became his most important cause after he was arrested and jailed for taking his first "Freedom Ride" in the back of a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. He laughs recalling, "I didn't think that Freedom Ride would be all that big a deal. I just thought it was someth ing I should be doing. But after that I was a civil r ights expert, so I had to quickly do a lot more reading."

When he returned to New H aven after being jailed in Montgomery, Coffin not only got publicity for civil rights, but a great deal of criticism from alumni and certain members of the Yale administration. Stephen Buck, then Yale's provost, asked for his resignation: "It's damned undignified for the chaplain of the university to go to jail." Coffin was deluged with hate letters and anonymous phone calls. He was criticized for mixing religion with politics, and especially for dragging Yale's name into political squabbles and the limelight of national media attention. None of the criticism affected him in the slightest, except perhaps to make him angrier.

"It was no accident that other campuses were blowing up and Yale was calm and civilized."

C riticism grew to condemnation , however, when Coffin becam e aware of the Vietnam War, and the newly emergent resistance movement. He conducted a church service at Battell C hapel during which sixty resisters burned their draft cards. Coffin really h ad gone too far, even for an increasingly liberal Yale administration. About this time, his famous series of confrontations with Yale President Kingman Brewster began. Although both men claim a great deal of respect for one another, Coffin recalls his relationship with Brewster as "tifTy. I got on his nerves-a lot. I would say to him, 'Aren't you lucky you have me around to say all the things you're dying to say but you can't because you're president?'

He accused me of being strident, and I think he was probably correct."

Coffin's stance against Vietnam resulted in an indictment in 1968 for assisting draft evasion, a trial in Boston which attracted natio nal media attention, and an uproar among alumn i who threatened to cut ofT their support for Yale. But C_offin's liberal image may have helped the University more than the alumni realized. "It was no accident that other campuses were blowing up and Yale was calm a nd civilized," said John Wilkinson, Secretary of Yale.

At Yale's most volatile moment, when 13,000 demonstrators came to New Haven on May Day 1970 to protest the jailing of Black Panther leader Bobby Seale, Brewster welcomed them with open arms, and Coffin made sunthe demonstrators were fed ancf sheltered. "My interest was not in saving Yale," Coffin remembers, "but in keeping attention where it should be-namely, on Washington."

Coffin was anxious to avoid what IH· calls the "misdirected" a nger against rlw administration which was so potent .11 college campuses around the cm1ntn Coffin was born to wt·ahh' Th~ N~"

JournaUMart·h 'l.

1''11~

21}

29 Jan

:H .Jan

6 Ft•b 12 Feb

13 Feb 14 Feb

15 1-"t·b 25 Fd)

2 Mar

6 Mar

9 Mar

12 Mar

'27 Mar

:J I Mar

Coffin pleads not guihy at his trial in B o s 1 on .

Tel ullcnsive begins as Nonh Vietnamese and Vietc·ong allat·k South Vit·tnanu.·sc.· dli<·s eind towns .

Racial violence erupts in New Havt·n high schools .

Yalt· Draft Refusal Commillc:e sponsors Tcat· h·in on the. draft featuring Collin and Assistant Dean .John Wilkinson.

Yale Anti -War Cnalition fi>rmed by 12 anti-war groups.

Half of the Yale Law liu·uhy and 147 students sign a statement with Har-· vard and Columbia asscning that U.S. war aims cannot be achieved and catlin!( li1r a dt•· e,.·alation .

Racial violence in high schools t·on· tinut·s .

Ivy Lt·a~ue Stuclt-nl Bo<ly Presidents' Conl(·n:nn· nmdcmns tht• Vi,·tnam '-'' Ctr ;tnd Sl·lt•< 'l ivt• St·rvi<T. Cunrwcti<-ut's lirst statewide p.-an· march held nn tht· (;r.·~·n and around Yalt· .

PU Poll shows that half of Yale's sturlt-nts uwill allt•mpl to avoid bt·ing •·allt•d li1r induc·tion. • 29 studt•nts turn in draft c·ards at R.-sistann· Day rally in lkirwkt· plaza wht•rc Lynd and Collin spt•ak.

Yalt· Corporation approve-s n·admissiun polit·y fur ~raductll' and proft•s· ~ional studt•nts for .. vulunh·t·rs . draft<TS and thost· c·unvint•d li>r non<·nnlpliann.·."

Cnnnt•c·tic·ut 1961l primary. Eu~•·m· Mt·Carthy !(<'Is 41 1wrn·n1 of tht• Dc•mnc-ratic vott·: Rit·hard Nixon t•asily wins m ·,·r Nt·lson Rot k.-l<·ll•·r in tht· GOP .

St•l•·c·llv<· St.·n· rt..- unt·xplairwdly t'Hnt•t•ls l.awn•n<·c.· Francis', '70. in .. duc·tion onkr. ~-rands had r<·turnt.·d hi!. drafl C'ard. n·fus.•d stud~·nt ddi:rntt.. nt slatus. and inrt·ndt:d lo n:fuse his Man·h induc·tion ord.-r. .Johnson annoum·es partial hnmhing halt, olli.-rs talks . and savs ht· will not run t(,r n .•.. t•lt·<·tiun .

4 Apr

8 Apr

.

Martin J.utht·r Kin){ slain. Yalt.• dns.•s 8 Apr in his honnr . Admissions Dirt•t·tnr R . lnslt-t· Clark announc·•·s nt·gru admissions rt·at·ht·d 70 of 1470 siUdt.·nts fi>r tht· t•la" of 1'172.

Yalt.• Corpor;u ion r.·appoints Cullin as t·haplain .

Coffin and playwright Arthur Miller lead over 5,000 people in an a n t iwar protest on t h e New Have n Gre en. :~0

The New .Juurnai/Mart'h '2. 1984

"I would say to Brewster, 'Aren't you lucky to have me around to say all the things you're dying to say but can't because you're president?'"

Manhattan parents, and his childhood included years spent in Paris and Geneva, and at Andover and Yale.

There was talk of a possible career as a concert pianist. "But one can always transcend one's background." he says.

"The war made a democrat out of me, with a small "d" if you will." Not that Collin's war career was particularly average either; he not only spent time in the infantry, but also served as an army intelligence officer , and later as a C IA agent, mostly due to his ability to learn nearly fluent Russian in three months. H e remembers being "very much a Cold Warrior," in those days.

Only Yale Divinity School, Union Theological Seminary, and marriage to Arthur Rubinstein's daughter Eva settled him down enough to become chaplain of Andover, Williams and fi nally Yale.

The diversity of Coffin's background and interests, and his u n usual ability to bridge the gaps between different worlds is perhaps what stands out most strongly in the memories of Coffin's friends. W ilkinson recalls driving back to New H aven with Coffin after both had spent the night in jail after a 1963

B altimore civil r ights p r otest demonstration, and asking Coffin to slow down. "I'm sorry," replied Coffin, "I have to have dinner with J ock Whitney," one of th e most powerful fi nancial magnates in America. Coffin remembers tellin g Whitney, "I don't know what's more real, Jock, sleeping on the floor of that Baltimore jail or sleeping on you r monogrammed sheets."H is ability to JO<:late to extremely disparate groups of people helped Coffin attain the med iator's status he held at Yale in the sixties. H is aristocratic background and liberal convictions enabled him to talk with both conservative alumni and radical students, and his army and C IA records allowed him to denounce the Vietnam War without being called a traitor.

I n this respect , Coffin hasn't changed. Today, he is the senior minister of Riverside Church, an imposing edifice along the Hudson. Riverside was buill with R ockefeller money , but Coffin's congregation of 3,000 is one-third black, one-third H isp anic, and one-third white. H is vocal sixties activism had been translated in to the more subdued job of running the

Coffin speaks outside D epartm e nt o f Justice in Washington a fter retur n ing 1000 draft card s.

2:l Apr

100 ''u<knts blm k bulldut.t'rs trying

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Ft·dt•l.llion ol Univt·rsitv Empluyt·t·s stnkt''• dining hall and olht•r s~rvin•s I Urt;tilt-d Com rat 1 .lKil'l'llll'lll ll'ill ht•d bt'l"'l'l'll Y.1k .uul 'lriktng un11>n "it·n,llor Rnbt•t t F Kt"nnt·dy ·'"·"""·''''d in ),," AnKI'I••• <~her win· nu>K ('.tltlorm.• prnnarv V~tt··l'"'"dt·m lluht·rt Humphrt·y "in' Dt•nu><l.llll nnmin.tliun for J>n•,idt•nt 111 ('hll .tl(ll .mnd riots uut"dt• tht• <om t•nllun h.tll john"'" 'WP' ,,IJ lx>~nhlnl( nl onh Vit•tnam.

Bn'"'"'r 111 frt•,hman .ttldr<'" "'"rr" ._t~._tin'c ..... ._tJUUrt' b~ d1l\ urthtKiuxy - r..ulit. .tl. rt•._u. uun.trv. ttul'''"'·c.ui,·t· ur libn.1l Colurnb1.1 SDS k<ttkr Mark Rudd Ill '\()() m \'\'tK>I'l·~. 1),ums •,y,l<'lll,ll" altt·mpt w 'upprt'" th ... ratli· ( ,,, IIlii\ t'llll'nl Ill tht• u s Rrt·\,,h•r cft·nac.•, d \'nt.·u(·,,A. c.ttc.uunc th.ll lw h," lxTn "1nforrnall) t•nl"ll'd" to ._uht't' Nt,un un lurt·i'(n puhtv.

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2')0 \ludt·nt, .11 U(;onn- Sturrs hold tht• ·"'""""tr.lllllll hUtldllll( lor 24 hour- .

F." ull\ .tppm'<'' Brt'"'''·r·, prof><""' tn ,lllnut 'il)(l """'''n h' .1 'lOll- I ""'·: J'nn11hull Coli<' I(<' ;, 111 lx.· di"nh nl .tnd u,c.·cl ·'' tht•ir dunnttur.. jnnt llt·ndrt-c J>l,l\' \'\ <K>I"'Y H<tll .

Y.tlc: ._annuunu·, 'tudt·ru lilt·' drt.· nul npc.·n eo ttu· t(U\c.•rnnu:nl.

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"It's damned u ndignified for the ch aplain of the university to go to jail." church and its 70 different programs, including aduh education, sheller for the homeless, theater, dance, and music groups and a nursery school. The sub· jects of Coffin's personal pr~jects arc no surprise to anyone familiar with his anti-Vietnam back!o{t·ound: nudcar disarmament and non-intervention in Central America. Are there parallels between the <·urrent situation and the events in Southeast Asia twenty years ago? "Of course. Massive in tel'\ ention in the internal afTairs of '>mall thirdworld countries, blind anti-Communism, inability to understand that the roots of rebellion lie in lO<·al '>Oil rather than foreign, the gradual drifl Coffin has already be<.•n tc> Nicarai{Ua twice, just as he went to H.mot in IQ72 .

Riverside boasts an unusual numlx•t of speakers and \'isuors from Ct•ntral America and has been the site of s<.'v<.·ral protest fasts .

Coffin's rdati-.e silence doesn't bothl·r him, because he confidently prt•dicts the return of the "ethical unrest" of the sixties. H e perceives two dominant tradi· tions in American politi(al l<·ader'ihtp, one represented by the zealous sdf-

righteousness which led to Vietnam, and the other by the "Socratic gadnies" who opposed it. "Unrest has to return," he says, shrugging his shoulders, "because the line of oppression won't stop, and more and more people will get fed up. Besides, anger maintains your sanity- if you don't argue when Reagan says, 'the US hils never been an a~grt·ssor,' you've already slipped into some unreal situation. Or," he chuckles, "you might say a significant Satanic triumph has taken place."

What Coffin does miss is the "decent ang<.·r" which he felt among students in the sixties. He concedes that there were a "lot of 'right-ons' which were substituu.·s for good thinking," but nothing annoys him more than the apathy he so often encounters today. estx•<:ially when it is evinced by students at places like Yale. "It's so self· indul~ent. For a bunch of Yale students to feel like there's nothing they can do is just an excuse to lake another trip tO Mory's. If you're disillusioned, you have to take vourself to task for having illusions in the first place. Reality is wugh."

..

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Because of the power and prestige of its alumni and students, Coffin also has a special fear of what apathetic Yalies can achieve: "It takes a Ph.D. to blow up the world." H is feeling is that the u niversity's moral relativism tended to produce "kids who were so b right, so cleve r , and so lacking in wisdom and compassion."

Coffi n h imself hasn't slackened, nor does he believe most of his closer associates from his Vietnam p rotest days have. In h is case, one reason for h is persevera n ce despite changing political w inds has been h is religious orien tation , which not only doesn't preclude political activism, but is in fact the source of it. He considers himself an o rthodox believer, a lthough h is church is inter-denominational. H is relig ion is one of op timism; he believes that "the whole C hristian u nderstanding of sin , as well as the fact that there's m ore mercy in God than there is sin in us is absolu tely cen tral to my own personal well-being." Coffin's book~helves, which con tain po nderous-looking theological commentaries alongside the Journals of Sylvia Plath, My Harvard, My Yale and Soviet Policy in the Arc of Crisis, testify to the nearness of his religious beliefs to his other interests.

M ost importantly, Coffin believes that the triumph of the "gadflies" ultimately depends upon an ability to see the wider moral implication s of oneâ&#x20AC;˘s activities. "Of course if we had a really hot war on our hands, the reaction would be, 'Our sons should not be dying in a foreign land for a bad cause,' and you'd see protest. Now you'd hope people would take the next step: nobody's sons should be dying anywhere for a bad cause." A glint reappears in Coffin's eye. "After all," he adds "moral excitemen t keeps things interesting." And he has faith; he still believes that "T h ings do ch a nge. Things did change. And if you care about poor people at all, you've got reason enough to knock yourself ou t. All we have to do is take d emocracy more seriously at home, so we d on't destroy it abroad."

â&#x20AC;˘

Anne Applebaum is an associate editor of T NJ.

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The New Journal/ March 2 , 1984 33

\ I

'l l>t•t

1969 'II

.I,,,

Unl\t'r~otv puh)i,ht•, 7'l·pal(e pamphlt•t bv '·"' pruft•"or John Griffiths on tht· tlr.dt. St•lt't cin· Savit <' labdcd "K.ofk;tt''<l'"' "

lntlt•pt'rHknc ounsult.onc.- repon dc·d.ut'' .. 'r'alt: i~ an t•lltt~l in-.;titucion."

ROTC '' matl;• a non-credi t prol(ranr.

Collin 'llt';oks tn 2000 at Auburn untlo·r lwaV)' politt• pr<llt'<lion despite Auhu r 1 Univt•r,ic,.•, allt'lll)ll< to ba n him fmtu • 1wakint(.

.Jun II Ott

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hn· l(ut• Art and Art·hiteuun· Hurltlint(. ,or,on "''IH't ll'<l.

Kllti(III.UI B~t•w,u·r and Mavor R1t h.ortl l .t'<' 101n in ntllonl( f<~r a cnmplt•lt• """""""'' ol Arn;·nt.tn lrtK>JlS Irum \ ot•t n.om t)\ April I. 1971.

Mnn· chan lf)() nwtnbt·n of Black Studt·m Alli.tnt ,. ,,, Yale ( BSA Y) rnard1 on \ \'tK><Ibridl(t' Hall and meec \\Jlh Kinl{lll.on Brt''""'r In disruss nu tal hara,\niC"nt

15 O c t 50 ,000 people , including 2,000 stude nts, gather on the Green as part of national moritorium to end the war in Vietnam.

3 Nov

6 Nov

10 New 15 Nov

16 Nov 22

'm

47 \IUdt•Jit• an· ,U,J><'Il<kd afcer for· tibly <Kt up}ing ctw Univt•r\ity Persnnnd Oflitt•s in Wril(ht Hall li>r four hour\ . T h t• dt•mnn•tralion is lead by tht• Y.o lt· SDS. !\(k) <!udt'nl' fllt't'l in Band Chapd to tall lor rt·inswwwnt of students <U<pt·nckcl ov;·r tht• Wril(ht H all rn·cupallon Th;· su,pended studencs are rcin,t.tlt•cl .

Appro.,.imatdy 1000 Yale students att<'nd Jl<'•l< ,. rally tn \\'a~hin~nn "'hie h dra'" ovt•r 500.000.

Rc,ef.;tion nf tht• :'.hlai ma""' n·. "hich ll><>k plaH· the vear bt·fnrc· Val..- bt·at~ H arvard. 7-0. for third ~traol(ht h' Ill It'

Professor Arthur Galston testifies be fo re the Hou se of R e prese nta tives that Agent Orange m ay cause birth d e fects in Vietnam ese .

34 The· Nt•\\

Jnurnal/~t .onh

2, 1984

"ORANGE'' LOt IRS-7

2/23/70

Arthur Galston

Against the Withering Rain W. Hampton Sides In 1943 the United States Army Chemical Corps at Fon Detrick Laboratories in Fn.• derick, Maryland, wa-; at work on a scientific solution to the problem of visibility in jungk warfare. Thousands of Amt·rican combat soldiers were being killed by the Japanese on illland strongholds in the Pacific theater of World War II , cut down by an unseen enemy hiding in the dense underbrush.

In 1943 Arthur W. Galston (now a renowned plant biologist at Yale) was spending most of his time in a laboratory at the University of Illinois.

H e must have seemed innocent enough in those days, a 23-year-old botanist from Cornell, working away at his soybean pods fo•· a Ph.D. He had discovered that by spraying his plants with a certain concentration of a chemical compound known as TIBA, he could enhance the budding process and improve soybean yields by as much as 30 percent. Galston was pleased with his discovery ("I felt good inside," he later said, "you know- more soybeans, more happiness"). So he gathered together his evidence. wrote up his thesis and ga\'c it the innocuous title, "On the Physiology of Flowering, With Especial Reference to Soybeans."

When Galston handed in his thesis and headed off for the avy in 1944, he thought he was through with TIBA. Soon a company in Skokey, Illinois, patented a form of TI BA and successfully marketed it as a productive agricultural compound. Meanwhile, Galston, who m·n-r made a ce nt ofT his formula. served as an agriculture officer

lor the U.S.N. Military Governnwnt at Okinawa.

Othe rs became interesH·d in TIBA as well. The boys at Fort Detrick got wind of Galston's discovery. They wt•n· paying special attention to o•w inconspicuous paragraph in Calston's thesis in which he had noted that TfBA. when applied in slightly higher conn·ntrations, caused the lcavl'S to hlll off his soybean plants. Soon Army ollicials were contacting him to lind out mo•·e.

"They weren't interested in my soybean pods," said Galston, "They Wt'IT interested in defoliants. " The Chemical Corps spent . months studying the "abscission-promoting properties" of TIBA, mixing up other compounds. synthesizing chemical analogs, narrow· ing in on the perfect herbicide. In a time of all-out war, Galston was not going to argue with the military over tht• •:ights to his soybean compound. "That was in those dark days, when we w<.·rc.· all working furiously to clobbt·r Hitler."

Galston recalled . "Even had I bet•n fully aware then of the potentially dc~tnKti\-c nature of my research- which I wasn't - I still wouldn't have balked. We were all in this together."

The chemists at Fort Detrick did not find the formula they were looking l(>r in time lor World War II. President Truman ordered the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and soon thereafter interest 111 strategic defoliants diminished. ot until 1961. when tht• United States first entered thl· conflict in Viet:1am, was the Pentagon nmvitwed that the time was ripe for defoliants.

"Unwittingly'· in my attempt to solve a basic problem, I had spawned a destiUctive weapon."

M ilitarr expc.·•·ts argued that chemicals <·oulcl be ust•d not only to expose the hidden trails in the Asian jungks. but also to stm·vt· out tlw Viet Cong .

Another puq)oS<' li>r <'mploying chemicals would later be rn-eakd: by spraying and destroying crops in civilian areas, it was thought the Army could create a flow of rcfugl't'S from Communist-controlled villages into regions on·upied by the South Vietnanwse govcrntnent.

The nnv <·ht·mical the D<·partment of Ddi.·nsc was boasting about was known a-; Agt•nt Orange, so named because it was initially ston·d in 55-gallon drums idt•ntified with orange stripes painted on the side-;. Modeled aftc•· Calston's prototype TlBA, Agent Orange was essentially composed of two chemicals which in 1960 wen· generally thought to be sak, although DOD had clone little testing to detc.·t·mine pt·l·t·isdy how toxir thev were to humans. Biochemists did kn~w that one of the chemicals, called 2,4,5-T. wntained dioxin impurities. It was also kno.wn that 2.4,5-T could cause a skin t·ondition known as chloracne. and that it l'Ould produce st•rious birth defects in laboratory rats.

But DOD maintained that the potential hazards to humans were "so small as to be inconsequential."

"The Depanment of Defense made a less-than-zealous attempt to understand the possible biological consequences of using this chemical," said Galston.

"DOD was saying, 'Look, we can do this ckanlv! All we have to do is knock the le;n es ·off the trees and we can fight our O\\n \'ar•· That was a message the field marshalls WlTl' eager to hear."

So at the in-;istt·nn· of his militarv advisors, President Kennedy autho~ized the lirst cxpet·imental sp•·aying of Agent O•·anl{e over \'i(·tnam in 1961. In the 10 yea•·s that followed the United States Air Force -;prawd O\Tr I 00 million The ;o.;e--. .Journal/ March 2 , 1984 35

; I

I "Introducing chemicals into the V ietnam W ar was just another tu rning of the screws." pounds of herbicides ovc·r Vietnam.

Cambodia and Laos in a full -scak chemical campaign that was given the code name Operation Ranch H anel.

"We were engaged in the;: largest opt·ration of its kind in hisrory," said Galsron. "It has bc.Tn !{ivc.·n the name of 't•cocicfto .' We sprayc.·d many tons of various kinds of dwmicals ove•· 5 million acres, whit·h is a mnsidt·rable p iece of real estate, almost the size of M assachusetts. And in so doing, ·we• not only caused vast devastation to the mangroves and the upland fclrests. and to a certain extent to cultivated lands. but we also cau sed va<;t devastation to the wildlife, and possiblv to man as well."

Today, many scient ists in Vit•tnam a nd the US are convmced that Agent Orange has caused substantial longterm damage to human ht•alth in Southeast Asia, most notably in the· form of congenital birth defects and a high rate of miscarriages among Vietnamese women. Also, some 60.000 Vietnam veterans at VA hospitals around the US have complained of m edical problems - ranging from respiratory ailments 10 skin cann-r to sterility-which they daim resulted from exposure to Agt•nt Oranl{<'. The war veterans in .January of f979 filed a class action su it in a Feckral Distriu Coun on Lon!{ Island again<;t tht· government and the Do"~ Chemical Company (the major manufanurer of Agent Orange durin!{ the· "'ar). "Do\' officials knew of the· harmful components of Agent Oranl.{e' bat k in tlw fifties," said Galsron, "and it'" on that basis that the vt·terans han· indudt•d Dow in the J;m.,uir. Bt•ntu.,t• if thn knew about the harmful compom·nt·, and did not tell tht• governnwnt. "h1c h was solidting 1he rnanuf~ll turin'{ of it. then Dnw is equally c.ulp.tbk."

Arthur Galston. the 64-yc.:ar·-olcl Eaton

Professor of Botany at Yale feels partly responsible for the whole amtir. "Unwit tingly, in m y attempt 10 solve a bask p•·oblcm," Galston later cold the Yal~ Daily New'S, "I had spawned a destructive weapon." He latc..·r wrote: "Evt•n the botanist, one of the last of the scientific innocents, can be..· involved in problt-ms permeating every aspc..·<·t of s<x·ic..·t y.

M any scientists arc nm' comin~ to f~·d that they cannot su1-rc..·nckr control of their findings w busine'lsme·n. politicians or others for indisniminatc..· and u nregulated use in so<:ial or military contexts."

Galston's conscicn<·c prompted him to study the cfTects of Al{ent Oranl{c.· in tht· rice fields and manl{rm·t•s of Vit·tnam. He has travdkd there on fiv1• different occasions sinn· 1971 t<l studv tlw environmental impact of the..· <It-foliation campaign. "It seemed to nw that it wasn't right to usc my education - \•.'hich after all the public had gi\'1'11 me-w find snmethi ng whkh could lx· socially detrimental and tlwn just wa~h my hands of it and walk away. r didn't think that was an cthic·al way to behave."

Galston is a short, pleasant man whose hair is now silvery gray. In his office on the ninth floor of Kline Biology Tower he keeps a small sample bottle of a Dow product marked, simply, ~oRANGE." On the walls are photographs of Galston posing with Asian leaders, among them, Chou EnLai of the People's Republic of China.

Galston. in fact, was the first Amerl<:an scientist to go to Red China. back in 1971. He has a way of making his listeners forget how unusual his life's work has been. He can make the most dramatic episodes in his life seem rather commonplace, like the time he was interviewed by the State Depanment as a "'China expert,"' after having spent 17 pre<·inus days on the main land. O r the· time he testified in a Congressional

1970 21 Apr

Nine colleges vote to strike in support of the Black Panthers on trial in New Haven . 4500 studentS and faculty gather at I ngalls Rink to hear Panther leaders.

75 percent of the student body rt·fusc~ 10 go 10 class in protest over the Panther lrial.

Faculty votes to support the ~trikl'.

22 Apr

23 Apr

1 M ay 10,000 ga t her on the Green for M ay Day to support t he P a nthe rs a nd to protest the wa r . At nigh t the police a nd N ationa l Gua rd are called to control the crowd .

Viole nce e rupts. 17 a re a rrested , 30 injured .

4

~lav

I Nu"

Large antiwar protests spread aero~• the U.S. National guard~mcn kill four studems ar K!'nl Stale Univf'r<i· ty in Ohio.

A rally on the Green in support nttht· Panthers draws 20,000.

197 1 IQ Apr

Thc Vietnam Veterans led by K crr y march on the Capitol.

29 St•p

A student charges that the Yalt· Polic-t• asked him to install a bug on anotht•r •tudent's phone in May .

1972 4 Apr

20 Apr 4 May

8 May

1973 27

.J.tn

General William Westmoreland tant·els a scheduled speech attht·I.<<"School due to student pmtesto.

Six colle~te• vote lor a o ne day •trike 10 protest thf' renewed bombmg on Vietnam.

1000 _jnin in a silent march in New Haven to protest the "ar.

45 •tudents are arre•ted during an anti·,.,ar •it·m blocking the intei"C<'Ilon of Church and Chapel Streets.

Cea•e-fire agreemenls formally ,.gned in Paris. Secretary of Oefen~ l.a.rd announce• that draft on the United State• has ended.

Left, US Army plant'!l sptay Agent Orangt" over Vietcong jungle territo ry in 1966.

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hearing on d efoliation in Vietnam. Just a week ago he was in Cuba on a scie ntific tour. Yet he always seems to come across as the same unassuming botanist who could spend a year working with soybeans back in Illinois.

Galston played an indispensible role in denouncing Operation R anch H and.

"By 1966 I was convinced that there was something to wor ry about, so I was now taking a ~il.{orous anti-herbicide spraying point of view. In the name of the American people, we wert' spray ing chemicals bver Vietnam that were killing plants, ruining the ecology, altering things. I started asking my colleagues, 'Is that what we as American people ought to be doing over there?' I mean, the whol<.- Vietnam busine ., was so complicau·d anyho~' ."

First, there was the que<>tion of whether we w<.-re violating the Geneva Gas Protocol of 1925 which outlawed chemical and biological warfare. The U nited State'! had never actually signed that document, but it had approved a UN R esolu tion which banned the us,.. of "asphvxiatin~. poisonous or other ga.;es., or •analt'X{ous liquids, materials, or devices" in war. Galston was not prepared to say whether the Americans were violating the letter of the R esolution ("that is a lawyer's question," he said) but he was fairly certain they were violating ItS spirit. Not "only was the United States using herbicide , Galston learned, but also millions of pounds of a "riot control" gas known as CS to flush out caves and structures occupied by the Vi<.'t Cong.

Ev<.-n more troubling to Galston was the fact that the milital")· spraying operation was affecting civilian population.; . Tht•n· wa~ im n'asin\{ t''- idcnc-t' that non-romh uants. partltul..trl\" Viet· llitrlll'~t· hll<111'11 Wt'rt." belnl{ do privl"d or food Froru early on II lx·ntrnt• appan:nt that the I{OVt'rnment was covt'ring somethin~ up. "The American and South V1etnamese autho rities in Saigon were hmdering our attempts to figure out "hat wac; ~oing on Clearl y we "'ert'n't getting the facts about the extent of the d<.-foliation. Until we staned

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"Every scientist must be on the alert to the possibility that his discoveries, however ethically neutral or benign they may seem, can be perverted to antisocial ends." to scream abbut it, the whole operation was kept secret. Operation Ranch Hand was carried out with great scientific rigor. The planes sprayed in formations, and the dosages were all very clearly worked o ut."

At a meeting of the influential American Society of Plant Physiologists in 1966, Galston suggested sending an official letter to President Lyndon Johnson protesting the spraying of Agent Orange. The Society's executive committee voted down Galston's proposal. (Galston later discovered that the executive committee's chairman had held a research contract on defoliants from Fort Detr·ick laboratories.) So as a substitute, Galston and a dozen of his colleagues sent Johnson a letter of their own :

military population . . . tht· fi"t and major f(xKI shortage or lanlint• . . . an· inevitably childrc·n. .-spt•t ially thrN· unckr fivt:. Thus. the c·ffet·t of our u<t• nf < lwmit al herbil'idt•> mav lx· tu st;trn· < hildren and othc·rs in the p;>pulatinn whom we· least wish w harm. vktin•~ of any

J ohnson's response came in the form of a letter from Undersecretary of State Dixon Donnelly, dated September 28, 1966: art' not h;orrnful tu people, animal<. soil ur wat.-r. Thl' t•limina· tion of kan·' and l>ru'h in junl{l<- <tr<'"' c'nahlt·' our mili1;ory fi>rn·<. both un tht· f{nnrnd and in tht· Hir. UJ <\pot the.· \ l it•t Con'{

hc:rbicides for tht• <kstruc cion of fi><>d .-rops and for defoliation npt·ration' in Vit•tnam .

and In fi)IIO\\. tht•ir t11Uvt'f1lt"nl' [),.,, r<u tiun uf fc><><l <mp' i' und<•rtakc·n on· lv in r<'lll<ll<' ancl thinly pnpulalc·d arc·:" un<kr \..'ic..·t ( ;nn't c.·ontn,J. and "hc.·n.· "ignifit"ant dc·nial of IC><><I ,upplit'' c·an he dlt"ttt"tl IJ,· "" h clestr<u lion. Thi' is dum· ht•t·au<t· in tlw Vit·t Con~ rt"(louht area~. f<HKI j, .. , irnportant (_ts '"c.·apuns. (:ivilians ur non-cumhalanl' "-ttrnt·d of such at linn in tulv•tnu" 1'hc.·\ an· askt"<i to lt'a\C tht• are.·ct o-tnd an.· prnvidc.·d fCwKI and '{Ood

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This admission made Galston and his colleagues all the more concerned. They continued to pressure the government until 1969, when Galston met with

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President Nixon's science advisor, Lee A. Dubridge, and demanded that the !ipraying be stopped. The government soon relen ted. In 1970 the Nixon Admtn tst rat ion officially terminated Operation R anch H and, although some unauthorized defoliation continued for several years.

However, the long-term environmental effects of the spraying in Vietnam still concerned Galston.

"Whether I liked it or not, I was hooked," he said. "I had to engage in whatever kind of social functioning was needed to .set the situation straight."

When Galston first went to Vietnam with Ethan P. Singer of MIT in April of 1971, he did so with mixed emotions.

For one thing, the Government viewed the trip with considerable displeasure .

"We were in contact with the Far Eastern desk of the State Department," said Galston, "and we notified them of our intentions to go to North Vietnam.

The State Department knew the North Vietnamese might try to usc us for propaganda purposes-which they did.

For instance, they lead us through an Amer ican War Crimes Museum in which we were shown all sorts of deformities supposedly caused bv America's use of chemicals. So we got the very definite impression that the State Department wasn't happy about our going. Here I was, an outspoken opponent of the defoli~rion program. I guess they sensed that if I found something and made it public, well , it just might light a fuse."

There were also those at Yale who viewed his trip as a political statement against United States involvement in Vietnam. "I was both applauded and casligated," Galston remembered.

"There were even some in the student body, who though t I was traitorous for going to North Vietnam. I had colleagues on our faculty who said I had done our country a disservice, science a disservice, the University a disservice, and so on." And when GaJston sat down with P resident K ingman Brewster and notified him of his forthcoming travel plans, Brewster was not thrilled about the idea. "Brewster said some wry

thin~s . Sonwthin~ to llw t•flnt that Yak had lx·t·n thnHtl{h all thi-. otH t' bt'liln' with R cwn·nd I\'Villia111 Sloam•l Collin and that it shouldn't ll<l\t' any problt•nl survivin){ round two . lit• ju-.t url{t'cl lltt' not to bt' li1olish.

"M ind VOll, t ht'IT Wt'l't' a Jot of conllicts withi.n llll'. as an Anlt'l'ican lovalto this country. I was in tht' st•t-vi;·t• in World War II . ancl111v son wa-. in Vil'tnam. and I didn't likl' th<' fact that I might turn up sOillt' '>lull' that wa" not going to hold my coun trv up in a favorabk light. But I hl'lit'\ t•d t hl' ddi>liation opt•ration wa-. a horrihk thing, and. lx·laH·dlv. -.o do all tlw tWopic who partidpaH·d in it. It \\asn't militarily "lllTl's-.tul. it introclut t•d a nt·w lt:vt·l of horror into an aln·a<h• horribk war. and it didn't n·dound io our <Ted it in anv wav. l .ikt• t'\ t'l'\ ont• d"t'. I was turm·d ~>llll\ tlw \'it·tnatlll''-t' \1\'a r. l thou~ht it"'"' an abomination. It \\as a pt.·a.,ant 'itxit·tv ht·inl{ dohl>t·n·d bv tlw most sophi-.titait·d high H'< hnolol{~' on earth. In troducing chemicals into the war was just anotlwr turninl{ ol thl' S<Tt.'WS." Galston has devoted a significant portion of his professional life to fi guring out how scientists in the future m ight avoid similar perversions of their discoveries. His numerous writings and lectures o n bioethics have touched upon one central theme: that socially concerned scientists must now follow thei r discoveries outside the lab to insure that they will not be used for destructive ends. "I used to think that one could avoid involvement in the a n tisocial consequences of science sim ply by not working on any project that might be turned to evil or destructive ends. I have learned that things are not all that simple, and that almost any scientific discovery can be perverted or twisted under appropriate societal pressures The only recourse for a scientist concerned about the social consequenc:es of his work is to remain involved with it to the end ...

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A FAM ILY ()F FINANCIAL COM PAN IES. Tlw :-;,•.., Juurnai/MM<' h 2. 1984 41

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And I dreamed I .raw the bombers Ridint shotgun in the sky And they were turning into butterflies.

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Joni Mitchell

Getting Back To the Garden Jack Fuller I had been drafted out of law school who served in Vietnam some years back Jack Fuller on:~inal(y wrote this article.for the Apn'l 11, 1971 issueq(TN.J , while he was a after only a semester and stumbled into told me he smiled a lot at things like first year law student. Fulli'T is now editor of an improbable labyrinth that twisted snow.) I lit a cigarette. ·thl' ;ditoria/ page q( the Chicago T ribune finally back to its origin. The Vietnam ' Two years ago I had thought about and author qf the n~w(y released Fragments, maze is "365 days or life, whichever breaking the habit. T~e evidence about a book ahout Vietnam. comes first," according to the black cigarettes all supported a decision to humor of combat. I had been lucky. quit. But then I spent an evening with a Now I was back, a little less confident friend on his first leave from a rmy adth an before and troubled by a few • vanced infantry training. H e set forth a recurring, terrifying memories that wager there was something to be said seemed inconsistent with Yale's strong for postponing a decision about smokMore than an occasional stammer of stone fortresses, droll stained glass win- ing at least until all accounts with the fear accompanied me back to Yale after dows and fireplaces in nearly every Arm'y were settled in full. I must have my two· year sabbatical in the Army- a room. looked unconvinced, because he per· fear that time had diluted my brain, But perhaps there were even more sisted. He explained that two yead and still more o minou s, a fear that war startling similarities lurking here . worth of tar and gunk in the lungs had depraved my sensibilities. What if M aybe the maze I'd followed was more didn't make much difference in the long Yale had changed, too? There were too intricate than extended. That was run, if there was a long run. But, he many variables to permit a methodical something I'd have to find out in time. said, what if you were to quit the weed, readjustment to the place. It had to be a It was o ne of those sharp cold nights go through the p ain and to rment of matter of blundering. If I had lost my when the snow along the edges o f the withdrawal, forgo the pleasure of that youth overseas, if I had lost my in- sidewalk squeaks underfoot. I was walk- first nut-like drag a fter a satiatin g meal, tellect, I would just have to stumble ing to a party, smiling anq t hinking and then walk into an evil bit of mortar through the rest o f m y education as best what a wonderful and mysterious stuff shell or bullet that lodges where the I could. is snow. (One acquaintance of m ine tumor would have grown? The weight 42 The New journal/March 2. 1984

11

of his argument fell heavy upon me, <¡hauvinism. Sex deprivation and the though I wondered academically extreme tension of the fight carry the whether continuing smoking and then grunts' sexist orations beyond mere horgetting zapped was winning or losing niness. under his macabre odds. I didn't ask, "When I get back across the pond but I stopped thinking about quitting there better not be no woman waiting for the time being. Sometimes the long there in pants." run is no later than tomorrow.

"There it is."

"No woman's gonna be talking shit to Now the probability of getting zapped was slim, indeed. The odds me. They're just gonna be fucking." seemed tipped. Now there probably was "Roger that." a long run worth considering. I pulled " "Yeah , but it's OK what they say long on my cigarette in contemplation about going without l:k as. I'm for that." of the new calculus and inhaled deep. I "That's a rog." tossed the cigarette into a pile of snow I imagined the sc4me of one of those near the doorway to the party and surly one-year killerS trying to make a entered. A conversational clatter ' pass at a feminist at the San Francisco airport on. the way home, and I laughed greeted me from the large, slightly unkempt living room. A thin, tiny out loud. Despite their virile liturgies, I supposed, the grunts learned to live phonograph played softly. Knots of people talked about law and other apwith American women eventually, just as they had learned to live with compropriate topics. I n one corner, som ebody was defending Charlie bat-as a matter of survival.

The girl asked me if I had seen any Reich . I didn't recognize many of the people or the notions they expounded. fighting. I said yes and half smiled. I didn't know why I had smiled. Maybe I One of the two people I had known was amused at the idea of how she from two years before asked if I was out would ask the question that probably of the army for good. I told them it was hard to tell- if I had learned anything ¡ bothered her a little-whether I had killed anyone. She never asked. Or in two years, it was that the future is maybe I smiled at the very unlikelihood equivocal. Another guy asked if my of a chain of events that had forced me ideas about the war had changed. I said to answer that, yes, I had been in comI wasn't sure m y ideas were changed in bat. Whatever, I didn't like my halfdirection, just in substance. Ti¼tt smile. It was depraved. "Shit," was all seemed to make sense to him, though I she said in awe or condemn ation. The don't know why. Then a girl came silence between us was filled by the folk toward me through the lagging converrock background music. sation to introduce herself.

"They invaded Laos today," she finalShe was small, with long black hair' ly said.

She wore a sweater, pants and long "The Americans?" I asked. boots. I vaguely recognized her from "Advisors, I guess, and some planes my first stay at Yale, and she said she and shit." vaguely recognized me. She was attrac"Christ." tive and assertive at once, talking to me as easily as a man to a man. That was good, but I wondered what a horror it must be to the grunts (light weapons infantrymen) when they return and meet their first liberated woman. The political consciousness on the issue of women's lib is about as low in the infantry as it is in a professional hockey team's locker room . The only chauvi nism a grunt has in combat is male

My memory wrenched me back to the Cambodian invasion, back through all the terror of that first trip across the border into areas the North Vietnamese Army had held for so many years, through despair at the death and capture of colleagues trying to report the new war and through the awe at the destructive power of American forces on the move. For some moments there was no more smoky living room at Yale, no more folk rock. J ust vignettes of armor columns gnashing up quiet Cambodian roads, of the town of Snuol destroyed by American tanks and jets, of the little children's bodies laid out in what was left of the town square, of an American grunt on a recon na~~sance assault poking his head up from a little clump of weeds where he had run for cover and saying, "Jesus this is a beautiful place. We're going to fuck ... it . . . up."

"It's too cold out for the kind of demonstrations they had after the Cambodian thing," she said, snapping me back to the living room. I halt excused myself and walked away. I realized I had been impolite, but I couldn't talk about the war in moral terms. It was easy to discuss in political and economic terms. I had thought out those arguments at length, but whatever moral arguments there were always stayed just below the surface, inarticulate and maybe even metaphysical, yet shaping every phrase. I couldn't recite them. Now I was back into the most visceral of memories, and I d idn't have the fortitude to explain them. H ow could I make someone understand the difference between morality and what happens to a man's soul when he leaps out of a helicopter on a combat assault?

"How could I make someone understand the difference between morality and what happens to a man's soul when he leaps out of a helicopter on a combat assault?"

The

ew journal/March 2, 1984 43

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How could I relate ethics to the smell of Journey to the East. Shaping a new nacarnage and cordite? That would take a tion: an imagination. Maybe it was merely a matter of my own limitations, novel to do, and maybe it was even impossible to do in a novel this late in the but even imagination recoiled at the day. I certainly had nothing prepared thought of turning bombers into butternies by a quick stroke of the mind. for conversation this late in the evening, . so I accepted the burden of being im- When a bomber does its job, there is no mistaking what the job is. The ground polite and left the party.

The Sunday Times at the 'newsstand shakes as if the world were suffering a carried nothing of the invasion. A brief seizure. The air is filled with fire and report on the radio indicated that the smoke ·and a roar so profound that the girl was wrong about American ad- whole earth is its sounding board. If ' visors, but that didn't change the feeling you are a few kilometers from where a deep in my gut. It was too cold out for B52 strike comes raining down, it is an the kind of demonstrations they had earthquake. Any closer and it is probafter the Cambodian thing. One more ably death. When there are survivors of tight knot in the intestines. I put a the bombings, they are dazed, bleeding record on the phonograph and lit a at every orifice from the concussion, deaf, and nearly insane with fear. The cigarette.

I didn't hear the song first at Yale, bombers that truly ride shotgun in the but that night I heard it best: a song by . sky do nothing but kill. They are no J oni Mitchell called Woodstock, a kind of butterfly. They a re products of beautiful song. Its harmonies are at another imagination than that fired by once disconcerting and enchanting, and the Woodstock experience, an imaginathe melody is one of her best. But when tion far less shifting as the foundation the lyrics reached the final stanza, I was for a nation, an imagination as old as man- the imaginatiotr of Power. I told jarred: an old college friend about all this once By the time we got to Woodstock and he b randed me too literal. I told an We were half a million strong ex-grunt, anti-war activist about it and And everywhere there was song and he nodded and said, "No amount of celebration grass or fantasy will turn a machinegun And I dreamed I saw the bombers into a vase for flowers."

Riding shotgun in the sky I wanted to believe those lyrics, sit· And they were turning into butterflies ting in my solemn room the night of the Above our nation.

Laotian invasion, but I simply could We are stardust not. The sentiment -like the sen· We are golden timents turning and churning in the And we've .t:ot to get ourselves counter culture movement - was pret· Back to the garden ty. It worked only if the bombers were Bombers into butterOies. There it was. in the imagination as well as the but· The nitch, the inevitable Oaw in the terOies, if everything for a time were a rapturous schemes I had been hearing pipe dream. J ust as counterculture so much about and feeling so uneasy probably works for any one individual. about since returning to Yale. Con- There is an ugly catch, though. Despite sciousness III. The other kind of absolute idealism. people die under

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REGULAR 'S HAPPY HOUR bombers. And despite the raised consciousness of one man, a fact remain s: power fills the vacuum left by the abrogation of power. In other words, there is always someone waiting to do despicable things if no one is there to stop him.

Something deeper than just the fatuity of the lyrics distressed me.

After all, it was a pleasant sort o f inanity. And weren't civilization's geniuses and augurs often a little in genuous?

W hat nagged at me that night was n ot a condescending disgust at a set of easy a nswers chanted in the cloister. I felt no disgust or condescension at all. In the bowels of all this there was something that brought Yale with its soirees and carillons and broad greens in tight with the Indochina war. A diabolical connection linked them together like two prisoners in transit. No, I thought as I smoked a final cigarette before trying to sleep, this is not condescension or disgust. This. is dread.

T he Vietnam Witness promised to be all about Laos. It promised, in addition, a clue to where it was I had returned.

Averell Harriman and Cyrus Vance, the Johnson-era negotiators at the Paris Peace Talks, spoke early in the evening at the Law School. The scenario called for sh o rt statements by each followed by questions from the audience. P redictably, the meeting actually con sisted of short statements from the statesmen and lo ng statements from the audience.

At Woolsey Hall, the entryways were gauntlets of leafletters. The broadsides proclaimed everything from a national "class action" strike against the war to the promulgation of a separate peace treaty between right-minded Americans and right-minded Vietnamese.

The hall filled slowly to capacity.

William Sloane Coffin was to moderate the alTair. I wondered whether this meeting would be more than just another long mea culpa for national sins.

So unsure was I as to what exactly a "witness" entailed that i brought a camera and two long lenses to record the action. There was no action. T here were mea culpas and contumelies against the evil, vileness, brutality and im-

morality of the war and its sponsors that were all accurate. But some of the speakers offered up their invective unconvincingly, more like cocktail party matrons carping about a new painter than like tormented souls expressing real outrage. Others like Frank Branfman, a graduate student who had spent time in Laos with the International Volunteer Service, almost wept at the images of "life under the bombs" he dredged up from a troubled memory.

The audience remained reserved throughout; it responded in blocs. A speaker dropped a good word for Mao, and the scattered Maoists rose to cheer.

A speaker pleaded for non-violent confrontation, and the pacifists rose.

Groups rose like sympathetic chords adding occasional depth to their favorite melodies from the stage. The movement had broken apart since I knew it last. Speakers hearkened wistfully back to previous rallies, former victories, the abdication of LBJ. This time it just wasn't the same. Jane H art, wife of the Michigan senator and a long-time peace activist, hinted at the reason. She told the students gathered to bear witness that they sltould not let Nixon get away with his scheme to undercut peace by ending tht" draft and cutting US casualities without reducing the aggregate level of violence in Southeast Asia or even that violenc<- attributable to America.

There was the crux nf it, that demonic link between Yale and the southeast Asian war that had eluded me for weeks since my return. There was the origin of my dread that evening listening to a song and remembering an invasion.

America has finally learned how to fight its land war in Asia, learned what the French never learned, learned that the war involves two fronts. The American strategy that involved only the Asian battlefield was destined to defeat by the sophisticated plan of protracted war, originally developed by Mao Tse-Tung against the Japanese.

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munist liberation army. It directs its tactics against the spirit o f the distant enemy's homefront rather than the enemy's battlefield formations. It seeks to b reak the enemy's spirit. Battles are fought in the paddies o f Vietnam, ambushes set in the jungles, sieges of forward positions laid as much for their effects on the second battlefield as to kill allied soldiers or destroy allied bases.

General Vo Nguyen Giap, a rchitect of North Vietnamese strategy, wrote of the French campaign in his book, People's War, People's Anny: "His (the French) weak point lay in the unjust character o f h is war. As a result, he was character of his war. As a result, he was internally divided, not supported by the people of his own country, and did not enjoy the sympathy of world opinion.

His army was strong at the beginning but its fighting spirit was deteriorating."

Therein is the thrust of the communist liberation.

I had travelled more than 10,000 miles from Vietnam to New Haven, then, and simply arrived on the war's other front. Along this local skirmish line Nixon's strategy was winning. It is unnecessary to see Nixon as an evil demon of a self-interested politician to understand what is happening. Nixon and his staff are extremely clever strategists on the American front. Nixon has felt the cross hairs of communist strategy zeroed in on the nation's

underbelly. Giap's aim has been a reality for years, but now Nixon has erected a defense. The defense isn't built of barbed wire and sandbags, manned with machineguns an'd mortars. The defense plan is to quiet the dissidents and bolster the national will the only way possible when there is no common enemy, real or imagined, compelling enough to legitimize authoritarian crackdowns. To defeat the dissidents and to seize the home front victory, you just stop sending the ch ildren off to be killed. Erase the personal threat.

Eradicate the dominant motive for activism.

The roar of protest' over the war's immorality settles to a murmur. Demonstrations give way to "witness" where the guilty can be cleansed. Only someone not preoccupied with fighting for his life can turn a bomber into a butterfly. Only when the stakes are low (and n ational humanism, the administration must be betting, is a low stake indeed) only then can a chill in the air limit demonstrations protesting allied invasion and destruction of a neutral nation .

So I had returned to an even bleaker battlefield than the one I had left, it seemed. But there was an optimist's corollary: the peace movement is the decisive factor in Nixon's war strategy. So far , the movement has reacted predictably, which is to say, it has not reacted to any extent at all. The acceptable level

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of American deaths in Vietnam apparently has been rcacht·d. But if the JX:ace movement brokt· away from Nixo n's analysis. the whole battle· plan would fail. This was never tt·uc durin'{ the Johnson regimt•. Johnson m·vrr understood the strategy wl'll. He m•vt•r saw the war as it was f(>ught on the st·cond front in the "hearts and minds" of Americans. H e took the <·urses of the "Peace movement~ personally, took them politically. J ohnson thought what was at stake was losing the election. I k forfeited his political ante and thought that ended the game. As a result, he almost lost all the chips. Nixon's tt·<·hnique is more subtle (ht· agrees ""·ith everyone). more successful to datt• and far more fragile. A massivt· atta<·k hv the peace movement- an attack that stayed within the mass toleration limits on violence but was aggressivt• t•nough to draw mass attention and mass svmpathy-would topple Nixon's militar-,: scheme. What scheme would n•plan· it is an ominous question. Whether any such attack would be forthcoming is a dreadful one.

I looked around the audieme 10 see peace's local baualion. Tht· tempest of fears and passions that had auended these meetings two years before was gone. These people now wt•rt• rightminded but docile. They wt•n• <oncerned but tired and fatalistic. Maybt• in a year and a half they would volt' Nixon out of office, but tht.·y probably would not force his hand hdi>H' that.

The acti"e fringes were clamoring f(>r action, all right. but their snt•atm, carommed ofT the audien<:e like nit•., in an empty arena.

I left \t\'oolsey H all after Ramo;e> Clark's honest, t'motional and mo,tng address. He began it saying. "\-'\'e'rc 25 years past the bomb. and Solomon was wrong, there is something ne" under the sun." H e might have c;aid \H''rt• 10 months past Cambodia. Tht• war in Southeast Asia had seemed tx•rilou~. perplexing. hopeless and eternal. Tht• war here seemed more clearh delineated but just as hopeless. I. o;mokcd another cigarette, as I am smokin\{ one now .

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RenegaCies and Troublemakers Gerald Bruck I'm told there's a feeling school is dull and aimless now, whereas in the sixties we had ideas, purpose, passion; that causes were worth it then and not today. Is this true? Does anybody really think that? As I remember the golden age we were typically young and stupid and unprepared for the education we were offered. (I hope this wasn't only me.)

Anyway: Magazines in 1964 said the world of youth had now begun. The elders were jumping to the sidelines, watching our arrival with awe. Cdlleges were "impossible" to get into; the new Ivy Leaguers would be "brilliant." I'd dreamed in hi ~h school of winding autumn roads, the weekend company of smart and perfect-looking girls, the daily fellowship of friendly geniuses and all of this and everything around us obscured in a golden, historical kind of mist. Admissions Director Inslee Clark, another dreamer, let me in.

I met some classmates and realized we were an ordinary bunch after all. Yet waiting for us just inside the gates were famous teachers and officials of the University, a Greek chorus of J ewish mothers disguis~!d as elegant old WASPs, telling us how special we were, how brilliant , how needed by the world. This strange sermon was preached by adults who must have known better, employed by an outfit whose motto was Light and Truth. It was Yale's way of minting its own Chosen. "Freshman: look on your God! H e's bigger and better-connected than anybody else's, and He loves o nly you."

Activities I heard Bob Dylan sing "Mr. Tambourine Man" in Woolsey Hall before the record came out . I met Alexander Kerensky. On field trips for "Rocks & Stars" (that is, geology and astronomy intros , the easiest way past science requirements) I discovered we were specks in time, living on a giant shifting granite geosyncline. I turned my visiting seventeen-year-old brother on to mar ijuana in 1966 and marvelled at his ability to keep laughing no matter how many serious people I introduced him to (he seemed to find the Dean especially amusing). We had the Beatles, fresh, through &rgeant Pepptr.

The University-sanctioned way to court the female was 48 The New .Journal/Man·h 2, 1984

the weekend "mixer." College girls arrived Fridays on chartered buses. The boys formed a double-line from street to residential college dance floor and the visitors walked the gauntlet of our insolent eyes. Beer drinking and dancing followed; Yale had an unwritten agreement allowing it to violate the city's liquor laws.

Trips to female turf were a private enterprise. They were called "road trips." Go ahead and laugh, go ahead and ~narl, but College was just boys, so you went campaigning for a woman's touch .

Even from those crazy women, who had no sense of what they were, only what they wanted to be. Hunting grounds of choice like Smith or Vassar were .far away, and road-trip crashes topped Beth Callaghan/The New Journal suicide and mountaineering accidents as the leading cause of undergraduate mortality.

It could be bleak , being Yalies together. One consolation was the Yale Dai(v News, of which our class produced a very dull version.

One reason for this was that the fvews, with its own stone building, panelled boardroom, and oversized attention from the outside world, stood in for student government and many of our most t•ncrgetic members were politicians before they were journalists or entertainers .•The trademark of the News politician in my day was bland, precocious solemnity. He loved the big issues and he loved to fill up space, which was how one rose through the ranks. Our front page was standard college mess: a visiting lecturer reduced and misunderstood, the central fact of a news story completely overlooked, the wrong thing covered in the first place. Even so, we inmates wanted to take over the asylum.

The News focused on education: reform of the grading system, an undergraduate say in tenure decisions, curriculum changes, coeducation.

Kingman Brewstt·t· was Yale's new president, an impeccably dressed man. Soon Prokssor Lynd would be among the first Americans in H anoi, aiding and comforting the enem)': later Chaplain Collin would offer a campus church as sannuary to draft resisters, while the thousands of rich old men who financed Yale threatened to storm to gates.

Brt·wster's speeches were written in numbing generalities that took on meaning only through the exegeses of others, imnpretations he remained free to deny. He'd even

developed a languagt' of hurnphing sounds that sounded friendly and direct but was not, in fact, composed of words.

We were living in the nursery of then-powerful men; I could feel the strong temptation to want to fit in. Connections existed. Perhaps forclx~aring, we could become powerful too. Neophyte politicians who thought like this dressed carefully. joim:d the Political Union and sucked up to senators. They tended to be Republican and resembled the Young Komsomols I met on a summer trip to Russia in 1966. They didn't seem to notin.: that the action had moved elsewhere.

Movement Ours was the first generation since the abolitionists' 10 grow up with some sense of the ra(·ist burden of American history (and very few of the abolitionists were much concerned with racism). It was a th··ill and a relief to see this burden start to lighten. I thought then we were the first to see things str·aight.

Religion at Yale was limp good will and empty chapels; the civil rights movement and then the war gave it something dignified to do. In 1964, the College was a center for student organizing in the South, thanks in part to the Campus Ministr·ics and Rev. Coflin. I can see the student leaders on a lecture-hall stage, late at night, 1964, handsome young men with old-American names like Payne and Wilcox. A standing-room-only crowd jams the Law School Auditorium. an Emeq:{t:ncy Meeting. A panelist arrives, late and out of breath, straight from a distant hot-spot. Another rushes out to arrange bail for· a jailed rights-worker in Mississippi. They look tormented. they are always exhausted, they are ha,·ing the time of their lives.

Midway between the Political Union and martyrdom was a humming zone called Allard Lowenstein. Lowenstein, now dead, was a Law Sd10ol graduate, untitled national politican and a speaker of real bt·illiance.

AI was always zipping in and ou1. gatherin~ lieutenants for crusades- now for the civil rights sit-ins, now against SNCC, now to influence the President, now to dump Johnson. His method was the familiar "you. you, and only you" (are great; can run the world) coupled ''ith inside info on Communist conspiracies among people you thought you could trust and vague promises of a pt·ivate meeting with Lyndon Johnson next week.

AI was tomorrow's Washington. a real Hollywood producer. You never knew what the hell was going on, what with midnight meetings and phone calls to the moon, but whatever it was, it was fa:.cinating. Polite, isolated moralists were drawn as if by ma~nets toward the flame of power, drawn by dreams .and the confusing glow of Al's deeply-veiled homosexual advances.

Selma, Alabama I remember being 17, standing

111

my dat·kcncd room,

looking through the window at the ghostly winter trees on the Old Campus. In a breath it will be next year, in a breath school will be over, in a b1·eath it will be twenty years from now. My freshmen friends and I were doing our homework, heeling the News, and growing daily dully sluggardized at Yale the winter of early '65. Outside our gates the world was breathing, turning, changing, while we played Requirement, manipulating abstractions, ignorant of whatever realities the symbols were supposed to represent, and knowing it.

The newspapers were full of gory sensation from Alabama, Martin Luther King, a coming voting rights march. The Campus Ministry provided warnings, the Chairman of the News typed out a press card, and I set out on my first-ever independent trip on an airplane.

I landed at the Montgomery airport in the aftermath of beatings there. The few agitators around tried not !O stand out and we waited for a convoy of cat·s the way people in a burning building wait for the ladder and try to keep calm.

This airport felt planets away from any kind of government I'd learned about in high school. In it I thought thoughts like, does it hurt to have your teeth kicked out? How would I behave when danger arrived? What does pride cost? How much for loyalty?

This threat of lead pipes and kicks was new, and it stayed new, day after day. Press attention protected the marchers from Selma to Montgomery, but fmm that visit on I could imagine what it might be like clsewhe,·e, or have been like before. Within a week my eyes had changed for good.

Businessmen, officials, community leaders, well-dt-essed men who didn't look much different from our fathers behaved with a viciousness I would never have believed at second hand. The police were much worse. It started as a vision of the end of everything, in this decent, known, American place. And then a motley crowd's passive resistance worked a kind of magic in the world. It was as if a crack was opening in reality, and the adrenalin of all our favorite songs could rule the future.

The non-violent struggle has come and gone. Some writers have belittled its nature and achievements. \YelL it was something to see! The organizers in Mississippi (a place so mean I saw blacks in Jackson scoot at my approach, from the sidewalk to the gutter, as if guided by invisible rails), the voter registration workers and the 1964 "Freedom Summer" educators, the locals who dared to follow and then to lead, will remain for me the heroes of my generation.

Reverend King still led events in Selma, but tensions between black and white, young and old, reformer and revolutionary, were just then bubbling up within the movement. Blacks our a~e were getting sick of having the glorious roles stolen. Racial culture became an issue. As dP jw. ,cgrco:ation died. the choice of the next direction started to matta. Battle lines sprang up everywhere. Everyone sounded convincin~ to me.

The;-.;.," Joumatl\lan.h 2. 1984 49

I watched all this, moving through the barricades and scribbling notes for the News. I returned determined to learn what it was all about. My South stories got me on the News and Staughton Lynd admitted me to his survey of Southern history.

Assistant Professor Lynd was a radical. He argued the existence of a moral code to which everyone everywhere was accountable. This sounded Christian to me, but he said it was independent of revealed religion. Demands of the state could not diminish personal responsibility. The historian's job was to find traditions and heroes to inspire the crushed. One of his extracurricular preoccupations was encouraging the poor and illiterate to record their stories, filling a perennial gap in the primary sources for future historians. His life over the past five years was wove.n with 1 the Movement's.

Crowds turned up at Lynd's office hours, filling the folding metal chairs that ringed his study, each visitor speaking in turn. There were white civil rights workers, unsure of their role in the face of Black Power; students with draft dilemmas; Christians in a crisis of belief; adversaries eager to tell him off; grinning undergraduates desperate for term paper extensions. ¡ If the matter was substantial, Lynd would hear his visitor out and meticulously summarize what he had heard , sometimes adding what he thought was meant or implied.

Then Staughton would say what he thought. Perhaps he would suggest the nature of a choice. He allowed everyone his mystery and gave full, sympathetic attention. In this way he disarmed his enemies and made us all simpler.

VIetnam By the fall of '66 the war was poisoning life at school. It started with the tightening noose of the draft, which in combination with the automatic exemption for full-time undergraduates, trapped what began t? seem like half the class on campus. Our situation grew so alarming that it led to thinking. Disaffection spread not because our leaders proved stupid, corrupt, and cruel, which they did, but because they started coming after us.

I think we had enough energy to fight two warshaven't you felt the urge? Hence the later macho posture"going to war against the war makers" became a slogan. I think many of us envied our fathers the clear and evil threat they'd been given to meet, the contribution they'd been allowed, the solidarity of their generation. But this war was something else. ¡ No one seemed to know for sure what it was even about.

Was it against Communism? Was it against China without having to fight in China? Was it to help Vietnamese have a better life? Was it to use them as cannon fodder for our global strategy? Or was the goal of each new escalation to protect the Gls who were already over there? (A lot of people were hypnotized by Johnson into forgetting that the Gls were endangered in Vietnam because Johnson kept shipping them to Vietnam.)

50 The New Journal/ March 2 . 1984

It very slowly dawned on us we weren't just in the wrong spot but on the wrong sick in the wrong spot, trying to rescue a feudal order many times worse than anything that. had provoked the American Revolution. What looked at first like bad management revealed itself as evil. Our elected leaders were war criminals, personally responsible for hundreds of thousands of murders. They shamed our country to the world and undermined its faith in itself.

Hundreds of thousands with the innocence or sense of duty to follow them were left in their wake, maimed in body or in sp irit. These creeps step out in public today with their heads held high. They've never even apologized.

T he political spectrum seemed to split between gangsters and outlaws, with less and less in between. The lies from the top became increasingly lazy, as if Americans were moro n s who'd believe anything. So much for the illusion that law, words, logic or morality ruled the world, or at least our side's part of it. Much later on, when it finally becam e apparent that tomorrow's leaders were getting too alienated, acting too outrageous in greater and greater num be rs, Brewster-types recast themselves as social healers, against the war at last because it caused division at home.

A Field Trip In ear ly 1966, Staughton assigned me a paper on the political odyssey ofJulian Bond, a black state legislator and leadin g member of SNCC . .Julian read what I w rote and invited me to co-author another stab at his memoirs, the pu blisher's advance for which he'd long since spent.

That's another thing about those ti~es: we could do an ything, anything at all, everything was possible. To expose the world was to change it. Everyone was welcome to help draw the new map, even sophomores.

J ulian had been elected w the Georgia legislature from Atlanta in 1965 only to be barred for endorsing an anti-war statement. An historic voting reform had made his election possible; now the Georgia House was putting Soviet-style limits on what this newcomer could actually say or do. It took the US Supreme Court to set this straight. The incident seemed an omen of the pro-war orthodoxy LBJ was trying to promote, and it became a national issue.

My task was to detail the State's doings in this affair. In early 1967 I lugged my files to Atlanta ro prove my hunches about the political establishment's secret machinations. To do this I needed to move in high circles, put in time by the spittoon, banter with secretaries, whatever. But how do you make friends with Lester I\.1addox, who was famous for beating blacks away from his chicken restaurant with an ax handle and who'd just become Governor? There wasn't

anything in the library on that. (These people may sound like jokes wday, but they weren't at the time, believe me.)

Then I learned that Maddox's Executive Secretary was a Yalic, he'd majored in sociology. I invented a Yale Daily News series on "distinguished alumni" and asked for an interview. ''Terrific," said the Maddox man- I'll call him Buddy-but first he insisted on showing me a good time and there was no getting out of it.

There were four of us. Willie, who resembled Slim Pickens as last seen riding an H-bomb into the clouds over Russia, was the college freshman son of one of Buddy's business associates. Buddy procured two girls from the Governor's office. Mine ehe<.:kcd Maddox's letters, wrote some of them, and was authorized to sign. H er name was Kate.

Buddy fed us at a Chinese restaurant and brought us back to the Democratic Party's suite at the H enry Grady Hotel, where he took a guitar off the wall and sang the "Lester Maddox Fight Song- South Georgia version, not for publication."

"Mmmm! Are we eve1¡ going to have fun!" said Willie as Buddy released us with one of the Governor's cars. Willie drove it around, on two wheels, for a while. It turned out that to have fun you had to "get a bottle."

But if God was sound asleep and all of our parents far away, the liquor store clerks took us for the teenagers we were, so Willie led us back to the H enry Grady, where we found Buddy, and he went out and bought liquor for us. In a suburban parking lot near a children's night club called the Comic Strip, at the point of taking our first sip, we were arrested by two hundred cops guided by aircraft landing lights.

H ere's your researcher, inside a windowless police van racing through Atlanta at what feels like 100 mph, but nobody's singing "We Shall Overc<;>me," they're singing the "Lester Maddox Fight Song!"

"They're going to ask us, 'Who bought the stufl?"' said Willie, as the chief radioed ahead to "make accommodations for two white girls and their escorts."

"And what do we say? I've got it. We say that we saw a nigger on the street and he went and bought it for us, rightr Kate was sure our connections would get us out, but Maddox had campaigned in the countryside against Atlanta and its soft cops. The city's police and politicans hated him. More, Governor Maddox was a Bible-thumping teetotaler. \".'here would that leave our host?

"All right, where'd you ~et the booze?" asked the sergeant. "Don't fool around with me or you'll really be in trouble.~

"Freshman: look on your G od! H e's bigger and b etter-connected than anybody else's, a nd H e loves only you ."

The l"'t:" .Journal/March 2. 1984 51

"Well, you see, we saw .. : that nigger on the street, okay? And he, well he ... " "Mr. Buddy bought it for us," said K ate, "but he really isn't to blame."

"Who's Buddy?" asked the cop, already fascinated with the registration of our car. "I've heard that name before."

That was enough for Kate, who thought she'd found a fellow fan and told him everything.

Hour after hour we sat in the Fulton County jail tank, decked in all our finery and whiteness, while¡ police captains and state officials overrode one another's authority and the bail went up, then down, then up again. Our arresting officers "forgot to appear" at the subsequent trial and we were freed without any o f it getting into the papers.

There is life after arrest. Before this debacle, in fact, on the day Lester Maddox was elected, I'd discovered Ann Darling (that's really her name) who wrote for UPI , was beautiful, wore a pink miniskirt and zipped around Atlanta on a motorcycle.

I had our future together all worked out, though she did n't know it yet. First, I'd steel her tender woman's heart to ruthless practice. Together then we'd roam the South, unmasking villains no matter what the danger, escaping on her Honda 50 in to the soft Southern nigh t. Annie pitied me my night in jail and took me out to supper.

H er bureau chief joined us. They gave me all the week's gossip, wonderful inside stories that make you wish you had one just as good. I asked him how he stayed so relaxed that n othing ever seemed to surprise him. Alcohol helped, he said, and he bought me drinks. .

The room became a dancer, life on earth was fine, I am in love with Ann. Maybe she loves me too. She acts like she does. She asks lots of questions, especially about my night in the Governor's car. Yale was never like this. I traded in my story for her vows of secrecy, and we three friends laughted till the tables shook.

Ann Darling's expose, citing me-of-Yale as the source, appeared two days later on the front pages of both Atlanta newspapers. I hid out, eating Rolaids. Maddox fi red Buddy and the girls; Buddy was sure I had set him up, for fun.

Ann and her chief turned out to be lovers. Spring vacation was over.

The Deep North was a lot less inspiring than the Deep South. Articles about the squalor of black New Haven, the â&#x20AC;˘ uph ill fight of community organizers against the City and against Yale, aroused zero interest. Wasn't helping New H aven's underclass a challenge and an obligation? But Yale reasonably saw its job as investing in those most likely to pay !t back with interest, i.e., us.

Meanwhile, five courses. '"A dominant of the dominant starts, bar thirty-two, and the dominant of the dominant that closes bar fortyjive leads into the dominant and theme 'B'. "'I was beaten unconscious in the slums one night by six b lack guys, strangers who did it for fun. "The work of Francesco Raiboldini may be characterized by the representation of finely-molded and delicate things that do not transcend, as it were, their separateness from surrounding objects . .. "On the back of an envelope: "E, Sarah Lawrence Fri: train to Bxvl, uphill rd to lst dirt path on left, hole in fence. After 11."

By indirection we were learning how to bluff, bullsh it, and sneak by. This was arguably an important d iscipline for later life, but the glowing transcript meant nothing more. (Trapped in a crucial Poli-Sci final valued one-third on a book I hadn't read, a survey of political philosophies of emerging Africa's leaders t"Be specific! Name names!"] I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the boss. H ere he is, emerging from a limousine. He smokes filter-tip cigarettes through a holder and has nostalgic memories for his days at Yale or Harvard or Cambridge. At one of those places, he's read the same books I've been reading. I invented three ar.chetypes, including a Poet of the Future, and by the time I got to the names and specifics, I had so much to say that the pen could not keep up! I was generous with those names and places, every single one illegible. For this I received a perfect score and the second highest final grade in the class of 300.)

In 1967 a crew of radicals captured the US Student Press Association (which grouped hundreds of college papers throughout the country) and planned to use it on the cutting edge of World Revolution. They'd invited me to edit a student magazine, to be financed by diverting the Association's savings and its grants, that would begin with a circulation of one million. The chief wanted me to drop out of school for this. H e argued that we were living in the era of America's Third Reich. The future would judge us as jews judged Germans. The times did feel that bad, and my generation's sometimes morbid preoccupation with its image linked us to our parents' obsession w;th propriety.

The radicals were deposed in a bizarre coup at the Association's national convention, and in the course o( an unsuccessful effort to patch this up, I got myself elected Chairman. The deposed founded their own "Liberation News Service (LNS)," lived on the edge, danced with the Vietcong, and expanded their imaginations with fantastic quantities of dope.

A role in the apocalypse stayed open. Why, for example, didn't I invite Robert McNamara to address our mid-year convention? LNS and its far-flung allies would take care of the rest: a burst of smoke would obscure the Defense

What did w e do in the Templum? W e pontiffs put on our red pontifical robes, sat on benches and read each other essays!

52 The New .Journal/March 2. 1984

Beth Callaghan/The Naw Journal

Secretary mid-speech, the curtains behind him part, and there would be The Beatles, who'd start to play! This would signal the start of peasant uprisings around the world and in every American ghetto.

"But McNamara will have guards," I said. "Don't you think they could panic and shoot The Beatles?" If this was a convincing objection for my friends at LNS, there were others who saw only the potential ("GOVERNMENT SLAUGHTERS BEATLES!" "FIFTY MILLION TAKE TO STREETS!") My LNS pals heard even weirder schemes. "Jerry Rubin called today," Ray Mungo told me, "very excited with a new idea. He wants to organize book burnings at every college in the country and he wants us to help him do it."

"Any books in particular?"

"Doesn't matter, all of them. There's something there and I told him I appreciated the idea, but there was a connotation . . . well, I just told him it might be misinterpreted."

Logic, committees, professionalism, books, what was the use of any of it? Madness ruled the world. There was an element of envy in my horror at LNS's proclivity for stories that were "truer than true," or which "ought to be true," news stories, in other words, that their writers had invented from scratch.

To be as free and ruthless as our government, to fight fire with fire: hadn't the President himself wrecked the worth of fair practice and restraint? Every sensible, logical, moderate path seemed a trap in his game of dirty pool. If Sir Thomas More himself had come back from the dead to preach the rule of law in 1967, he might well have been written ofT as an agent for LBJ.

Yet to take up the rock, or the joint, or revolutionary disciplines to escape the dustbin of history, was to land squarely in the junkyard of contemporary politics.

There was a romance to that alien and helpless feeling, the romance of a link to hounded bands in historyRome's enslaved Greeks, perhaps, or the Jews of Renaissance England or of Russia, or Victoria's homosexuals, huddled in secret smokey rooms, alone in their time to see the whole world upside down. The guy in the bar knows what he knows, and so did we. Issues were decided by the inner eye; none of us with all our reading could know much about Vietnam, and going there to learn the truth just warped you worse. My certainties all came from one week in Alabama three years before.

Though we were by nature troublemakers who wouldn't have lasted three minutes in Russia, few of us dreamed of getting down on Russians or other types of adversaries.

Vocal anti-Communists were almost without exception America's own worst types. Sex-obsessed Bible-thumpers, virulent racists, war-lovers, they were the dregs of geopolitics and religion. In their contempt for the exercise of liberty, love of regimentation, consuming paranoia, the y closely resembled the foe they professionally opposed.

Above all, they stood for "no fun." The anti-war movement willingly surrendered to them flag and patriotic turf.

My generation, for all its alienation, lacked political culture. We were spoiled, used to getting our way. We expected fast action on our complaints. We Jacked the patience and the discipline and the generosity to do real work. slow, steady, compromised and undramatic. What was the real work, anyway?

The Vietcong would continue to kill our fellows; thar"s The :-.lew .Jounoal/ l\.lart h 1. 1984 53

''

how they vott·d on their future . Many of the war's opponents would continue to bait or confuse this country's votet·s in the name of peace. of "bringing home the war," (bombings, stret·t fighting,) of creating the New Order, etc.

All of this would melt into air· when the draft ended, and for ye<us thereafter almost everyone on every side would pretend that none of it had ever happened.

We had some cflect. Led by events, limited by who we were, we were hardly her·oes. But we dreamed heroic dreams.

Today's nuclear war and peace debate is much harder.

We're in a mortal fix because of the too-smart-for-our-owngood animals we've become. It's obvious the species has to g<'t more than a little like Jesus to save itself, and it's even more obvious that it won't. Can we be forced, like the South was forced by .Johnson's dvil right~ laws? Can we be trit·kt·d?

Neophytc nostalgia-buffs: a dr·awn-out invasion of Central Am.crica, fueled by a universal draft, will give you the sixties experience in person. Then you can call it the eighties. Central Amer·ica may not interest everyone, but few of us were interested in Vietnam either. It's amazing how quickly interest can pick up given the danger of being for<·ed to fight in a hot, wet, distant country on the wrong side against passionate .locals.

Back at the ranch What lurked inside the engine, in this hurricane's eye? I joined a spook. I don't remember what my doom was to have been for telling, but in the spirit of those fabulous sixties r invite you in to my Secret Society: Scroll and Key still occupies its own prominent corner in back of Woodbridge Hall, a leafy spot so still and dead f'd walked by it daily for three years without ever realizing it was there. Through it had passed leading war hawks, the then-Mayor of New York and his predecessor, even Dr. Spack. "Keys" was said by its proponents to be "as important" as Skull and Bones and "the best intellectual experience around," to boot.

We initiates entered a world of schoolboy secrets, complete with printed notices that said "DESTROY !" We were given keys to the immense outer double-doors of steel and the combination to the unseen vault just past it. Three levels of Tomb, a library and living rooms with green leather couches, an eternally-stocked fridge and freezer in the huge basement kitchen, absolute unbotherability and the valet services of a Negro servant whom we had to address as Wamba; all this was ours. A safe ;n the library contained bound volumes of essays handwritten by earlier ~cnerations. Behind their latinate mumbo jumbo was the unmistakable tone of adolescent girls weeping away the last . week of summer camp, mixed with that local combination of great expectations and pretension.

'1/1/e were known generically to one another as pontiffs, and '"·e had to assemble twice-weekly in the cavernous ~•4

Tht" N<·" .JnurnaiiMarch 2. lq84

basement to feast. On one of those days we gathered afterward in the top noor Templum, a wood-panelled vaultwithin-the-vault, sealed off from Wamba and the inneroutside bv a heavy wooden door and brass lock.

What did we do in the Templum? I wish I could confess to non-stop nights with pretty slave-girls bathing us in oil and cheerfully performing exotic pleasure rites we'd never have dared to ask of our girlfriends. Instead we pontiffs put on our red pontifical robes and, addressing one another by the secret names passed down pontiff-to-pontiff for one hundred twenty-five years, sat on benches and read each other essays!

No wonder the tomb had no windows; it was a monument to human frailty . We pontiffs were young and healthy. which in itself ce rtified us in those youthworshipping years as the crown of creation. We lived on the planet's richest and freest surfac<.~. protected by vigilant armies tnat kept the world in fear. We were part of one of this America's great t'lite institutions. And yet-or perhaps because of all this-in order to feel safe, to relax with one another, to confess our fears and ambitions, we were assumed to need all this as well.

I was the worst pontiff Scroll and Key ev~r bad. I snuck in girls, I skipped the meetings, lost my pin, forgot the secret words for the sacred initials. complained about calling Wamba, Wamba and finally quit. When T was in town - and I had to be away a lot- I tried to focus on my fellow pontiffs in the Templum, God knows I tried, but that hallucination of a setting just defeated me. I set upon the others and myself Chekhov's cold and gentle laughter, Gogo! wild with wicked glee.

Home work Talk your way into Scholar of the House and you get a year free from everything, in r·cturn for handing in something big at the end. I proposed a history of Rockbridge County, Virginia, from the Great Slavery Debate of 1832 to the denouement of Reconstruction less than fifty years later. It weighed in (late) at 150,000 typewritten words.

My cast included two locals who became Virginia Governors. Stonewall Jackson, even Robert E. Lee, who lived out his post-war years running Washington College, but most of my lives were obscure. Thousands of pages of letters, diaries, ledgers, and newspapers were miraculously preserved in archives at Yale, Washington, D.C., Richmond, Charlottesville, Lexington (Virginia) and Madison, Wisconsin. It was a giant jigsaw puzzle and I worked in hopes that accumulated elements would start to g low and tell me everything. v\'e lived with Vietnam but they lived with slavery. How?

Gerald Bruck '68, co-founded The New Journal with Daniel Yert:in in 1967. Bruck now lit•es in New York where he makes documentary films.

My tutor C. Vann Woodward was a patient and forgiving gentleman. I remember him ensconced in his corner office, looking like a melting icc cream cone, his eyes that seemed forever searching a library shelf in his mind. He said little in our meetings and then usually to ask, "Where is your evidence?"

But one day he said, "Why study history?"

"Why?" "Yes. Why?" "Well, to show where we've gone wrong, to find the reasons beneath it, to help keep it from happening again

"

4

"Nonsense," he said.

The angel of silence settled in the room.

"Then . . . why do you study history?"

"Because I like to."

Though Professor Woodward's contempt for racism helped distinguish him from the start of his long career, and his history of segregation, undertaken at the urging of the NAACP, was said to have influenced the Supreme Court in its 1954 Brown decision, he'd undertaken this last reluctantly and refused credit for his role. He wanted it understood that he would never compromise the web of curiosity and suspicion that partly formed his craft for the sake of serving the present. Not on purpose, anyway.

What a year to lose to school. At the very last minute I retreated to an underground seminar room at Yale, coming and going only for food or sleep through the subterranean tunnels that honeycomb Berkeley College, looking for order in a sea of notes spread across six banquet tables, sometimes standing on a chair pushing scraps of paper into patterns with a stick.

A standard Civil War bullet, huge and heavy. lay on the desk. It helped me understand the gruesome 1869 Surg~on Gmaal of tlu Unit~d Stat~s R~port on War Wounds-such a bullet in the arm or le~. to give you that war's ambience, didn't make a hole, it could tear the limb off. But my subjects stayed strapped to the rails of history and I could only watch as the men gallantly tied themselves down in its locomotive's path and the girls and women cheered them on. (Thank goodness, at least, that they lost.) The tale of how the slaves were freed and then enslaved again was so

full of surprises and pathos that I used to prowl around late at night in scan·h of someone who might like to listen to the latest installment.

Problems, problems- my actors faded in and outwhen two good letter-writers got back together the record vanisht·d. I thought for a while I had all of history decoded, until my friend the nursing student, looking in, said, "This Dexadrinc I got you, you don't just keep taking it!" so I learned to sleep on sec·ond nights.

"Where is your evidence?" the relentless Professor Woodward would ask whenever something caught his eye, and I'd have to recite chapter and verse. !'Jight after night my nose got rubbed in an irreducible, specific, blood-real past, chained to the tables by ribbons of footnotes that grew to seventy pages of • alphanumerics and arcane ~ asides. ~ lt My people lead the great : anti-slavery debates, first on

E

one

side,

then

the other.

~

They policed John Brown's :; execution and stared in mor~ bid fascination as he died.

One met and questioned President-elect Lincoln; another led Virginia out of the Union. Yet for all their inside vantage points they couldn't anticipate their future any more than I could mine.

I clung to my superiority -all of them were dead, after all; didn't that make me smarter? Irony or sarcasm broke through into the pages here and there, but I was beginning to see my su~jects trapped in the immense glacier that was history. You have to grow cold-blooded to get down in-side that ice.

The obscure few who saw a little ahead could only work their vein and hope the effort would fertilize an unknowable future. They sometimes paid a terrible price. But renegades and troublemakers made this modern world, all of it.

I visited Yale last fall; it was a shock to find most of the gates locked most of the time. I know you study more than we did, that you have to work harder against the future, that it's more of a risk now to step out and run the risk of being foolish. Listen to an ancient alumnus who hopes to look up to you one day and don't grow old before your time.

i

• The New .JournaVMarch 2. 198• 55

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