They Marched Into Sunlight (66 page)

John Pickart, the music major from Madison, who had witnessed the violence inside Commerce while trying to talk his friend Everett Goodwin out of participating in the sit-down protest, felt torn by competing impulses once again. He did not think a strike was the best way to protest the situation, but “decided to go along with it for one day” to show his sympathy for the strikers. “Obviously, a mistake or a series of them had been made somewhere,” he explained in a letter to his friend, Pam Crane. “When you see something like that you feel that somehow you have to do something actively.”

Betty Menacher, the freshman from Green Bay, who had stepped out of her classroom to witness the police charge, walked over to the rally from Sellery Hall that night, the memory of what she had seen inside Commerce fresh in her mind. For eighteen years she had “gone with the program,” but now, for the first time, she felt an urge to reconsider her basic assumptions and think about the world around her. October 18 was “a turning point.”

Jane Brotman was also in the crowd. The freshman from New Jersey had not changed her politics. She had only the vaguest comprehension of napalm, and she still thought the protest leaders were strange and frighteningly unlike her. But she felt she had “a personal responsibility” to go to the rally and make a statement about what she had witnessed. She found herself part of “a huge mass” of people who seemed as “personally upset” as she was. The issue, for her, was police brutality. “That’s what I felt I had to take a stand on,” she said later. “I did not like the protesters. I didn’t feel like I was supporting the people. But I had witnessed something and I felt I had to take some action. I kept thinking, if my parents were here, they would do the same thing. I had no doubt in my mind.” After the students had voted to stage a protest strike, Brotman called her parents from her room at the Towers and told them that she was not going to take her French exam the next day. She was anxious about her decision and felt she had to tell her parents about it, desperately hoping for their support. She knew that her mother was against the war, and that her father, while supporting the war, was a man of deep moral principles. He would understand, she thought. Instead her parents “freaked out” at the news. They could not believe that she would miss an exam. And Brotman found herself struggling again, just as she had hours earlier when she had to choose between watching the protest and going to her review class. Now what should she do?

That night, while students debated whether to strike, President Harrington, Chancellor Sewell, Dean Kauffman, and Chief Hanson gathered at Kauffman’s house on Celia Court on the far west side. Kauffman’s wife and teenaged son drove to Kentucky Fried Chicken and brought back dinner. Harrington constantly worked the phone, dealing with legislators, the governor’s office, faculty members, and regents. With frequent interruptions the four men huddled late into the night, discussing how they should deal with the faculty, the legislature, and the press. It was difficult for them to understand or accept the reality of violence that had erupted on their campus, on their watch. The police had overreacted, they thought, and the students had turned on them with a vengeance. It was a mess and would only get messier, they knew. Now the university would be portrayed as an out-of-control institution and there would be more pressure from state legislators and the public to crack down on radical students.

William Sewell was the most traumatized. He said little that night, then retreated to his house on Countryside Lane and slumped down in the blue leather easy chair that usually gave him so much comfort as he dug into his copies of the
American Sociological Journal.
Now he was overcome by dread. Feeling drained and defeated, he thought to himself, “My God, I’ve just screwed everything up. It’s my fault. I let those police go in there and I shouldn’t have. I’ve bollixed it up. I’ve just ruined my career. I’ve never been involved in anything in my life before where anyone was hurt. People won’t remember me for anything but the Dow riot.”

Chapter 24

“Bombing Washington”

T
HE RELENTLESS DIFFICULTIES
of war and peace had consumed Lyndon Johnson that Wednesday. At a midday Cabinet meeting, while the Dow protest inside the Commerce Building in Madison was devolving into chaos, the president and his department secretaries gathered in the White House Cabinet Room, where they received a detailed briefing from Attorney General Ramsey Clark on the massive peace demonstrations to be held in Washington a few days later under the sponsorship of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam.

It was still “undeterminable” how many citizens would travel to the capital to protest over the weekend, Clark said, but FBI agents and informants had picked up signs that the crowds might be less substantial than antiwar leaders were predicting. While “they sincerely believe they will get 100,000,” Clark reported, the government’s “best count at the moment” was less than a third of that number. Clark then recited statistics that could be gleaned from any newspaper or wire service report. A four-hundred-car train was conveying an antiwar battalion from New York. There were 243 buses scheduled to bring protesters down from Connecticut and New Jersey, but only a hundred had been filled. Philadelphia was “down from fifty to thirty-six buses,” but Baltimore had three hundred buses making the trip.

The Department of Justice itself would be the first protest target Friday afternoon, Clark reported. He expected a few hundred demonstrators “to seek access to the building to turn in their draft cards.” Two days earlier, as part of Stop the Draft Week, young men who opposed the war had turned in draft cards at rallies around the country. At the largest rally, an interfaith peace service at Arlington Street Church in Boston, eighty-seven men had burned their draft cards and another two hundred handed theirs to the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, chaplain at Yale. Coffin was now coming to Washington as part of a team of antiwar luminaries, including Dr. Benjamin Spock and writer Norman Mailer, to take part in the demonstration and deliver the card collection to government officials. Clark told the president and his Cabinet colleagues that the full group of antidraft protesters would be denied entrance to the Justice building, but a delegation led by Coffin would be received. Since Selective Service regulations required that draft cards “be in the registrant’s possession,” they would not be accepted by government officials during the protest, although, to be sure, FBI agents would be hovering in the shadows to gather “abandoned” cards from which they might launch investigations.

The large demonstrations were scheduled for Saturday, October 21, with speeches on the mall, picketing outside the White House, and a mass march to the Pentagon. The “risk of unplanned incidents remains,” Clark said, but “police and military manpower have been marshaled in anticipation of unexpected outbreaks.” In addition to the D.C. metropolitan police force and federal security guards, three thousand army troops were on standby and fifteen thousand in “deeper reserve,” some from as far away as Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Fort Hood in Texas, and the Presidio in San Francisco.

“Above all,” Clark said, without apparent irony, “we want to maintain the appearance of business as usual.”

According to notes of the meeting, Vice President Humphrey inquired about protecting the Capitol, two other department secretaries discussed security plans for their buildings, but LBJ himself remained silent. That was uncharacteristic of Johnson, who had been obsessed with the protest for most of the month and had been pushing Clark and other administration officials to let friendly journalists know about any and all communist affiliations of left-wing demonstration leaders. “The fact of communist involvement and encouragement has been given to some columnists,” Clark had reported at an earlier Cabinet session. “Let’s see it some more,” Johnson had replied. He always wanted more of it for himself. The bundle of papers his secretaries prepared “for the President’s night reading” often included documents about the protesters. One aide saw Johnson perusing a list of “antiwar leaders and their communist connections” as he got his hair cut at the White House barbershop.

The administration’s campaign questioning the allegiances of protesters was now leaking its way into newspapers across the country. In Madison, editors at the
State Journal
were laying out their Page of Opinion for October 19, choosing the headline “Reds Publicize Peacenik March” for a piece by conservative columnist David Lawrence. His column, datelined Washington, quoted at length from a promotion of the antiwar rally in the latest issue of the U.S. Communist Party newspaper,
The Worker.
Detailed instructions were given in the party organ, Lawrence reported, “as to the exact time and location” participants could catch buses to Washington. There was even a local angle to the list, and hence Lawrence’s column, with the revelation that “In Madison, Wis., several campus and community groups have joined to charter buses for Washington.” Lawrence cited
The Worker
’s interest in the rally to make LBJ’s point. He charged that “there are influences at work in this country and abroad which are trying to break down the spirit of America’s armed forces and to mobilize public opinion, if possible, in the U.S. to bring about a withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam.”

When the Cabinet adjourned, Johnson slipped out the White House’s southwest gate and rode up Pennsylvania Avenue to his old hangout on the Senate side of the Capitol where the luncheon host, Senator Allen Ellender, Democrat of Louisiana, was serving his signature dish, succulent shrimp and crab gumbo.

T
HAT NIGHT,
while antiwar students in Madison planned a class boycott and University of Wisconsin administrators huddled at Dean Kauffman’s house, trying to figure out how to respond to that day’s violent turn of events on campus, President Johnson reconvened his war council. The session this time was expanded to include—along with the regulars Rusk, McNamara, and Rostow—Associate Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, an old LBJ confidant who moonlighted as a presidential adviser; Undersecretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach, General Maxwell Taylor, and unofficial White House counselor Clark Clifford. There was one other special guest. It was not McGeorge Bundy, who had slipped LBJ a memo urging him to maintain his gradualist course and then retreated to New York, but Dr. Henry Kissinger, the Harvard professor and national security consultant who had been overseeing back channel negotiations with the North Vietnamese through two French scientists. Kissinger’s improvised effort revolved around a question that had dominated White House discussions about Vietnam all fall—when and whether to implement a bombing pause in an effort to bring Hanoi to the bargaining table.

Secretary of State Rusk opened the meeting by hailing Kissinger. “I am sure I speak for all of us in expressing appreciation and admiration of Professor Kissinger,” Rusk said. “He handled a very delicate matter in a very professional manner. I think we may wish to begin this discussion with Professor Kissinger’s explanation of M and A.” (M and A were the initials and code names of the two Frenchmen: Herbert Marcovich and Raymond Aubrac.)

The professor offered his hard assessment of the two men: “M is a biologist with very little political judgment. He is similar to many American scientists who are carrying placards. His primary motive is to bring the war in Vietnam to an end. A is probably a Communist. He is very aware politically. He has close relations with Ho. In 1946, Ho stayed at his home in Paris. I have little confidence in M’s judgment. I have greater confidence in A’s judgment.” However, Kissinger added, “if it served his purpose, A might color his report.”

Since late August, with the Frenchmen as intermediaries and Kissinger overseeing them, the White House had exchanged three sets of messages with the North Vietnamese. As soon as the process began, the Americans decided not to bomb within a ten-mile circle of central Hanoi. This was regarded by the White House as a gesture of goodwill. There had been no reciprocal gesture by the North Vietnamese, Rusk said, and no indication that they would not take military advantage during an American bombing pause.

Now he read aloud the key paragraph of the most recent message to Hanoi:

The United States Government understands the position of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam to be as follows: That upon the cessation by the United States of all forms of bombardment of the DRV, the DRV would enter promptly into productive discussions with the United States. The purpose of these discussions would be to resolve the issues between the United States and the DRV. Assuming the correctness of this understanding of the position of the DRV, the United States Government is prepared, in accordance with its proposal of August 25, to transmit in advance to the DRV the precise date upon which bombardment of the DRV would cease and to suggest a date and a place for the commencement of discussions.

The response from Hanoi seemed unpromising. Rusk read it to LBJ:

At the present time the United States is continuing the escalation of the war in an extremely grave manner. In these conditions words of peace are only trickery. At a time when the United States continues the escalation we can neither receive Mr. Kissinger nor comment on the American views transmitted through this channel. The position of the Government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam is perfectly clear. It is only when the United States has ceased without condition the bombardments that negotiations can take place.

Nothing constructive had come from the exchange, Rusk concluded. The North Vietnamese said talks
can
start with a cessation of bombing, but not that they
will
start. And they were silent on the request not to press forward militarily in the South during a bombing pause. This indicated to Rusk that they were planning a “negotiate and fight” strategy.