They Marched Into Sunlight (31 page)

With McCarthy, as with most people, there was a difference between how he dealt with individuals and how he viewed groups. Even as he joked and grew oddly attached to Elson and Mate, he hated the campus and detested long-haired students as a type, especially antiwar radicals or “outside agitators.” To “ninety percent of the guys in the department,” he estimated, the flag and the military “were two things that meant the most to us. To see somebody put the flag on the seat of their pants, or even drag it down the street or cut it down, it was like, you would almost die to keep the flag from hitting the ground. And ‘one, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war’…well, we had very strong feelings about the war. Right or wrong, my country. Yeah, I hated them. They hated me and I hated them.”

How much did he hate them? Once as he was riding a city bus from his home over near East High down to headquarters, he saw a long-haired antiwar student come aboard and was so agitated by the sight that he barked aloud, for the entire bus to hear, “If they want to practice dropping the bomb, they should drop it right on the top of Bascom Hill and let it go off!” It wasn’t right to feel that way, McCarthy knew, but that’s the way he felt.

McCarthy might have been correct in his assumption that students, at least the ones who called him a pig, hated him as much as he hated them, but their feelings were more complicated about Ralph Hanson, the cop they knew best.

Hanson took over as the campus police chief in the spring of 1965, just after the marines landed in Da Nang. As the intensity of the war in Vietnam increased, so too did the tensions on campus and the pressures of his job. He had started his law enforcement career as a trooper for the Maine State Police, and back then he could drive for hours along the highways near Houlton, his hometown up near the Canadian border, without seeing anything but stands of tall pines and maybe a deer or two. When he arrived on the UW campus, he would joke, the most hostility he faced was if one of his officers issued a parking ticket. Within two years even those days seemed ancient, as buried in the past as the tranquillity of northern Maine. But Hanson was an inveterate diplomat with a ready sense of humor and what his wife, Lucille, called “a knack for socializing” that helped him talk his way through most difficult situations. He was six foot and stocky with a big, open, heavy-browed face and receding hairline that he covered with a Badger-red baseball cap in good weather or a Russian fur hat in winter.

Seasoned antiwar activists on campus got to know him during the weeklong antidraft sit-in at the Peterson Administration Building in the spring of 1966, when he spent as much time inside the building as most of the student occupiers. At one point when they took a vote on whether to seize another room, Hanson loudly recorded his own “No!” eliciting some sneers but more laughs. It was that year, after the release of the movie
Alfie,
starring Michael Caine, that they began greeting him at demonstrations by singing a variation of Burt Bacharach’s title tune: “What’s it all about, Ralphie?” (Hanson secretly appreciated this so much that he later borrowed the line for the title for his unpublished, and unfinished, memoir.)

Hanson was a student of human nature. His father, a house painter, was an alcoholic who had been away from the family for long stretches and was finally gone for good when Ralph was eighteen. Early on during his stint with the Maine State Police, Hanson realized that if he did not further himself through more training, “the inevitable would happen—marriage, family, and living in the Houlton area” for the rest of his life, a future that he did not want. He trained at the Northwestern Traffic Institute in Evanston, Illinois, and when he returned to Maine was eventually promoted to run the state police traffic bureau in Augusta, the capital, where one of his assignments was chauffeuring the governor, Edmund Muskie, whom he greatly admired. After ten years with the state police, he headed out for Madison, first taking a job as security chief at Truax Air Force Base. The university recruited him three years later.

The week Hanson was hired, Wilbur Emery sent a congratulatory note, chief to chief. “May your new position be replete with pleasantries,” Emery wrote, “and each challenge you confront an instance where the state university and our community benefit from your administrative ability.” Though he did not have a college degree, Hanson took UW extension courses all through the 1960s and was studying sociology and constitutional law as the world was cracking around him in1967. He read David Riesman’s
The Lonely Crowd
and Paul Goodman’s
Growing Up Absurd,
looking for lessons on alienation and the reasons for youth rebellion. His instructor gave him a B, but his ability to deal with confrontational students won him even higher marks from the administration. After the 1966 sit-in at the administration building, then-chancellor Fleming sent him a note of praise: “Not only did you keep hours which must have pushed you close to exhaustion, but you remained good humored throughout and managed to maintain rapport with students.” After the first Dow protest in February 1967, which was decidedly more confrontational, Joe Kauffman wrote to him: “In the past year we have all come to realize how sensitive a position such as yours can be in calming or irritating highly emotional situations. We have all learned a great deal from our confrontations, including the fact that some cannot be prevented from being disruptive. But your reactions illustrate our reasonableness, as well as firmness, and this makes all the difference in maintaining the respect of the entire campus community.”

As the second coming of Dow approached in October, Hanson understood that his skills would be put to their toughest test. Although few at the university knew it, he was also dealing with a career distraction. He had driven down to the University of Chicago early that month and interviewed for its chief of security job. Along with an expense report—twenty-four dollars for gas at eight cents a mile, three ten for tolls, twelve dollars for lodging, and a buck and a quarter for breakfast—he also sent word back to UC that he found his discussions there “inspiring” and that he had “no doubt that whoever gets the appointment will have plenty of challenge, but he will also have plenty of backing, which is most essential.” Hanson’s wife was from Chicago, they had just had their second child that August, a son, and the job at the private school paid better. The decision would take several weeks. In the meantime there were preparations to be made for Dow.

At meetings with Kauffman’s team in the dean’s office, Hanson was noted for both his humor and his endearing way of mangling words. His favorite phrase, when presenting a plan, was “Okay, here’s the scene-a-rio.” “The what?” Kauffman might say. “The scenario?” “Yeah, the scene-a-rio.” The scene-a-rio after Kauffman’s October 11 statement was not so bright. A collision of wills now seemed likely, especially since the student activists voted at that October 13 meeting of their ad hoc committee (the one Hanson was asked to leave but that the undercover Madison cop attended) to go ahead nonetheless with plans to sit in and obstruct the Dow interviews. Hanson’s officers, and the off-duty city cops who would supplement them, had no riot training. There had been no physical confrontations at previous demonstrations, aside from a few minor shoves between individual officers and activist leaders. He did not expect violence this time, but it was possible, and he wanted to make sure that at least the men under his command knew what they should and should not do, so he prepared a six-point plan on police guidelines and another five-point memorandum explaining the “limitations” of police action.

Every instruction Hanson put on paper seemed aimed at avoiding violence. Police would “exercise patience, tolerance and restraint, as well as good judgment,” he wrote. If established rules were violated, the first response would be for university officials to talk to student leaders. If violations persisted and police had to act, first they would inform the students of the violations and again ask them to conform. If that didn’t work, the students would be asked to identify themselves. If they did and the problem stopped, no further action would be taken. If the violators refused to identify themselves and kept breaking the rules, they would be subject to arrest. But arrest was the last resort, and if “in attempting to implement an arrest” there were “significant physical efforts of other students” to thwart it, the police would not force the issue but instead back away “to preclude further physical violence.” In that case they could prepare arrest warrants to be issued later. “Mass noise-making, chanting, and other disruptive tactics, short of blocking, obstruction or physical harm” would not be reason for arrests. And mass obstruction that was “beyond the control of police manpower at the scene” would be “tolerated” until a decision was made “to involve further police manpower or cancel the interviews.”

Chapter 11

Johnson’s Dilemma

F
OREIGN CORRESPONDENTS WHO STROLLED
over to the Rex Hotel in the hot, leaking heart of Saigon wanted numbers at the daily five o’clock military briefings, if only to question them. The Pentagon needed numbers, if only to bolster believers back home. So numbers in endless procession are what U.S. public affairs officers in Saigon provided. In the late afternoon of October 15, the numbers of war seemed imposing even at the end of a quiet Sunday.

American and allied forces were in the field on sixty operations of battalion size or larger that day in South Vietnam. The Ninth Infantry Division had seized nearly five hundred weapons in Viet Cong tunnel complexes east of Saigon. Although cloudy weather over Hanoi forestalled bombing near the northern capital, U.S. air power pounded the lower panhandle of North Vietnam, with marine, navy, and air force pilots flying 125 missions. In the South, U.S. aircraft made almost five hundred tactical air strikes, and helicopter and fixed-wing support aircraft flew nearly eleven thousand sorties. Three U.S. marines died near Con Thien when an American bomb fell short of its mark, but an estimated forty enemy troops were killed, placing the “kill ratio,” as it was known at the Pentagon, comfortably above General Westmoreland’s preferred rate of four to one.

What was the sum of all the numbers? Progress or no? Winning or losing? If only there were an easy formula that could provide the answer, the military equivalent of the Dow Jones average. Twelve mid-level Vietnam experts from the CIA, Pentagon, and other intelligence units were meeting in isolation at Vint Hill Farms in northern Virginia that week with the assignment of concocting an equation that would define American progress in Vietnam. Stay out there until you figure it out, they were told, but it would be a doomed mission. The war was beyond mathematical expression. Anecdotes and hunches came more readily, if with less precision. What did the numbers add up to? Readers of the
New York Times Magazine
would awake that Sunday morning to one old soldier’s confident answer. General Maxwell D. Taylor had made a grand tour of Vietnam in late summer, and now the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former ambassador to South Vietnam had his byline on an article asserting that “the cause in Vietnam is being won.”

At the White House, military aides in the situation room kept vigilant watch on statistics flowing out of Saigon, and Lyndon Johnson himself pressed constantly for more reports like the one from General Taylor. He was in never-ending search for evidence to disprove, or discredit, the pessimists who had pronounced the war an unwinnable stalemate. He hungered for numbers and good news, and many members of his staff were now reassuring him with confidential memos brimming with positive interpretations. From aide William Leonhart, who helped run the pacification effort and had once served in the U.S. embassy in Japan, came a report on “A Japanese View of the War” based on a dinner conversation he had that week with General Sugita, retired chief of staff of Japanese self-defense forces. Sugita had arrived in Washington after visiting Vietnam, where he spent time with the First Infantry Division at Lai Khe. The general came away convinced that “Hanoi and the VC have lost the war,” Leonhart wrote to the president. “Much hard fighting may be ahead, but the NVA and VC can only lose more the longer they hold out. In Sugita’s view, Hanoi’s military may already understand this.” That had been the word spreading through Lai Khe. Even Clark Welch had heard it, and in one letter home to Lacy he expressed surprise about a rumor that the North would stop fighting before the end of the year.

If Hanoi understood, why couldn’t the press corps and the American public? Along with the drumbeat of skeptical news reports from Vietnam, there were also increasing signs of uncertainty about the war at home. Every few months in 1967, the Gallup Poll asked the same question: “In view of developments since we entered the fighting in Vietnam, do you think the U.S. made a mistake sending troops to fight in Vietnam?” In May half the respondents said no. By July the figure had dipped to 48 percent, and by October only 44 percent of those polled thought American involvement in Vietnam was not a mistake.

For war managers in the Johnson administration, the art of persuasion now seemed as important as the art of war. “We are losing support in this country. The people just do not understand the war,” the president had lamented weeks earlier at a meeting of his war council. After that meeting a cable had gone from the White House to the embassy in Saigon urging officials there to “search urgently” for ways to show progress. Ellsworth Bunker, the ambassador in Saigon who had succeeded Henry Cabot Lodge in April, was on his way to see his wife in Katmandu when the cable arrived. (“Avast, belay, I am on the way,” the patrician Bunker announced joyously in a telegram. “Great day yesterday. Assembly validated election just before midnight…and Boston Red Sox won the pennant.”) First things first with the ambassador, so his deputy, Eugene M. Locke, took up the progress assignment.

Locke responded to the urgent plea from Washington with a long memorandum that was circulating through the White House in mid October. The embassy had stepped up its public relations effort, he said, and had developed a plan to “demonstrate to the press and the public that we are making solid progress and are not in a stalemate.” There would, Locke promised, be more comparisons of where they stood militarily compared with two years earlier, more use of captured documents to make the case, concerted efforts to brief the press in detail about pacification progress in specific villages, encouragement of “selected press-men” to visit those areas for in-depth stories, and “hard-hitting briefings” on subjects about which the press had expressed doubt.