They Marched Into Sunlight (82 page)

And it seems to me, sir, that in a democratic constitutional society this is a very necessary, indeed an inevitable means for people to make known their feelings, their attitudes on questions that are near and dear to them and…may not be as important to other people. And it is for that reason that we have tolerated in our society those who speak out against what they see to be wrong with society…. And it is true that the legislative process, whether at the state or at the federal level, is slow to recognize the demands of people.

You can speed this process up doubtless by making yourself heard, by bearing witness to your cause. This I see as a great sociological, a great moral value of protest. It seems to me on the other hand that when you come to the point where you…you are not arousing enough attention to your cause by lawful, orderly protest, that you must resort to disorder, you must resort to disruption, to the invasion of the rights of others, then you may get yourself on television. You may get yourself headlines in the newspapers. But my guess is that you lose supporters and respect for your cause. This I think is carried to the extreme when you are willing to resist lawful authority even after it is called to your attention….

And again, since you offered me the opportunity, sir, to digress and to lecture a bit, I want you to know, and I think it is only fair that you should know, that I have personally from the beginning opposed the policies of our government in Vietnam. I have signed petitions to that effect. I have written letters to our representatives. I have written letters to the president. And not more than four days before this event took place, I had again signed a petition opposing our policy in Vietnam. I do that as a free citizen in a free country. It is a recourse that is available to me as a free citizen in a free country. It is a right that I have as a citizen regardless of what my position may be in the university. It is a right that I guard more than any other right, the right of freedom of speech, freedom to dissent.

Later in the hearing it became clear that some state legislators were furious with Sewell for his reluctance to rid the university of radical teachers who were on the state payroll, either as faculty members or untenured teaching assistants, and were inciting radical behavior. Senator Robert W. Warren of Green Bay, who later would become a federal judge, pressed the issue most closely with Sewell.

Warren:
Chancellor, I think that all of the witnesses that have preceded you would probably agree with the statement that there is a hard core of extremely radical, revolutionary militants on our University of Wisconsin campus. Would you agree with that statement?

Sewell:
I hate to agree with other people’s statements, sir.

Warren:
All right. Let’s go ahead this way then. What I am interested in getting at is that most people prior to you indicated that they would acknowledge the existence of a very militant minority on the University of Wisconsin campus. They talk about rights and all of us on this committee are perfectly willing to recognize the existence and the vital necessity of protecting those rights, but we on this committee and in this legislature and in this Capitol also have the responsibility of determining how we are going to allocate the financial resources of the state of Wisconsin. In the past I think that the legislature has been highly generous with the university…and the problem that arises is we keep finding this hard core of people who I personally feel are not entitled to the protection—well, let me state it differently, who are not entitled to my financial support in the long run—and we seem to be utterly unable to reach this cancerous sore and we keep finding them coming in greater and greater numbers in certain areas of the university. Is the only way in which we are going to be able to return to what at least I consider some quality to some of this university faculty by the fiscal appropriation route, is that all we can do? For instance, do we have to say that the college of philosophy is going to lose X amount of dollars? What can we do in your opinion to take care of—I am not talking about freedom of speech now. I am talking about violent revolutionaries—

Sewell:
You are speaking of faculty of the university?

Warren:
Yes. I have watched faculty members jump up and down when the youths talk about imperialism.

Sewell:
I am afraid, sir, you have lost me completely. (Laughter from the audience.)

Sewell:
No…I am trying to be honest with you. But you have made what sounds like a speech rather than a question. But let me say as follows: that you surely will never have a great university—and you have had one for a hundred years in this university—if you are going to say that the political views of professors are somehow going to be screened. Is that your question?

Warren:
I agree with that statement.

Sewell:
Okay. Then what are you saying? That a professor can’t condemn imperialism?

Warren:
No, I am saying—

Sewell:
Or condemn our policy in Vietnam?

Warren:
No, no, not at all.

Sewell:
Okay, then what are you saying about imperialism?

Warren:
What I am trying to say, it seems to me if in fact you as an employer can no longer fire a faculty member apparently—

Sewell:
Oh yes, I can.

Warren:
Not without a hearing.

Sewell:
Well, obviously not. This is the United States of America, sir, where people have…where there is due process.

Full of vigor, emerging from the despair that had engulfed him in the hours after Dow, Sewell might have won the rhetorical debate with the legislators, but his arguments, presented with what his interlocutors considered an air of arrogance, situated him, more than ever, in the middle of an impossible situation. Student antiwar leaders felt betrayed by him and blamed him for sending in the cops. Now more legislators disliked him too. The Senate investigation would go on for two more weeks, attracting headlines but leading to no major findings.

T
HE
H
OMECOMING PARADE
was held the next day, Friday the twenty-seventh. “If you want to be a Badger, just come along with me, by the bright shining light…” The old-style University of Wisconsin scene of bratwurst and red sweaters and cheerleading and the stench of stale beer in the Var Bar and panty raids and fraternity bonhomie was on display again, competing for attention with the emerging sixties counterculture. A northern chill blew into Madison as crowds lined the sidewalks to watch the fraternity and sorority floats glide around the Capitol square and down Langdon Street. There was Popeye and his can of spinach, the work of the Tri Delts and Alpha Epsilon Pi. Here came Delta Gamma and Phi Gamma Delta’s float showing Bucky Badger dunking a Northwestern Wildcat in a shower. Dennis the Menace, Pogo, Snoopy, Snuffy Smith—one after another the cartoon characters rolled into view and drew laughs and claps and cheers and rolled on down the street.

What a classic fall football weekend this promised to be. The Chi Phis were preparing for a special guest, one of their old fraternity brothers, Charles S. Robb, who had marched proudly around campus and up Langdon Street in his drill uniform as the ROTC brigade commander during his senior year at Wisconsin in 1961, an era just before the rise of the Anti-Military Ball. Robb was now a U.S. Marine Corps major stationed at the White House in Washington and engaged to marry Lynda Bird Johnson, the president’s daughter. He already had papers to leave for Vietnam early in 1968, not long after their December wedding, but that seemed distant. He and his famous fiancée were mostly oblivious to the political and cultural changes swirling around them, preoccupied, as Robb later said, by the “whirlwind of prenuptial activities.” Those included, for this one weekend, a football game at Camp Randall Stadium, where they would be greeted by Chancellor Sewell; a dinner with old fraternity brothers in New Glarus; and then a reception the next day at his parents’ house in Milwaukee. Robb’s father, a regional representative for American Airlines, had switched his party affiliation to LBJ’s Democrats by then, but he could not yet say the same for his military son.

There were no antiwar demonstrations in Madison to counter the Homecoming hoopla. Paul Soglin was preoccupied with a valuable bit of information that his ex-girlfriend, Cathy Dietrich, had passed along to him when she knocked on his Bassett Street apartment the night before. She had worked late as a waitress in a private room at the Madison Club, and while serving a table of state senators, she overheard them discussing ways to embarrass the protest lawyer, Percy Julian, and to go after Soglin and other out-of-state students. They were going to go after Julian for using the state telephones inside the Capitol to make free long-distance calls. The word went out quietly; people were exhausted, regrouping, or, in a few cases, hiding.

They had been scrapping away at the war for years, this messy, bedraggled student band, with no money or power, only the will to dissent. The selfless and the self-involved, the peaceful and the reckless, the righteous and the contentious, their differences were covered over by their overwhelming opposition to U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. It was simplistic to say that events were turning because of them or in spite of them; the culture was accepting, rejecting, co-opting, adapting, disapproving, and absorbing them at the same time, and the results were complex and contradictory. If citizens outside the cauldron of the university were offended by the excesses of young radicals, more of them were growing anxious about Vietnam and what it was doing to America, and in that sense the chaotic Wisconsin protesters were in the vanguard of a movement that would be embraced by millions of people from all walks of life.

The most dramatic antiwar action that Friday took place at a Selective Service office in Baltimore. A minister for the United Church of Christ stood watch at the door as the Catholic priest Philip Berrigan and two other men opened plastic vials and poured their own blood into open file drawers containing draft records. The act, Berrigan said, was done in protest of “the pitiful waste of American and Vietnamese blood” on the other side of the world. “We shed our blood willingly and gratefully in what we hope is a sacrificial and constructive act. We charge that America would rather protect its empire of overseas profits than welcome its black people, rebuild its slums and cleanse its air and water.” The men were arrested by the FBI, and Berrigan refused to post bond, preferring to spend the weekend in jail.

In Madison the one reminder of the tumult in the world outside came from an unlikely source. After the parade the Homecoming floats were parked on the front yards of fraternity houses on Langdon Street. There, not far from the Chi Phi house, was the float constructed by Pi Beta Phi and the Evans Scholars, with a theme that lightheartedly connected the turmoil of the Vietnam war with the merriment of a football weekend. It was a likeness of President Johnson, Chuck Robb’s future father-in-law, with his long countenance, huge ears, and pronounced jowls, his right hand cocked and holding a football, his face rising above a stadium scoreboard, wearing not a helmet but a huge ten-gallon hat with a bright red W on it. The theme of the float was “Victory at Hand.”

College kids with the optimism of General Westmoreland. The Badgers would lose the next day to Northwestern, another notch in a winless season. As for the war, as 1967 neared an end, the American embassy in Saigon would beckon guests to a New Year’s party with the encouraging words: “Come see the light at the end of the tunnel.”

I
T WAS COINCIDENCE,
but nevertheless odd, that within a twenty-four hour period starting on that Friday, October 27, 1967, so many political players of war and peace were converging on the cities of Madison, El Paso, and Milwaukee.

The president’s daughter and her fiancé were in Madison. Vice President Humphrey was delivering the keynote address at a two-day conference with Mexican officials in El Paso, where Terry Allen’s funeral, forty-eight hours old, was now overwhelmed by other stories. Humphrey visited wounded Vietnam soldiers at the army hospital and handed out medals and worked the rope lines outside, greeting a throng of military wives, many of whom handed him notes that he promised to deliver to their husbands when he reached Vietnam, his next stop. President Johnson, who was also on his way to El Paso for the signing of the El Chamizal treaty transferring some borderland back to Mexico, had given Humphrey his own special message to carry to Vietnam. It was an urgent note warning President Thieu, whose inauguration Humphrey would attend, to “get moving” on economic and social reforms.

While Humphrey was in El Paso, Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York, the war critic Johnson feared most, arrived in Milwaukee that Friday to speak at a dinner for Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson. The heat was turning up: Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota had been quoted in the morning papers saying that perhaps someone should challenge LBJ in the Democratic primaries. Nowhere did Johnson seem more vulnerable than in Wisconsin, one of the key primary states. And now, hours after Kennedy, here came Richard Nixon, the former vice president, sliding into Milwaukee himself for his first Wisconsin visit in preparation for his 1968 run for president. The time seemed right, Nixon said, for a “peace candidate.” He was speaking of himself, though he added that his notion of a peace candidate might not be the same as anyone else’s.

Clark Welch and Sergeant Barrow were by then being evacuated from Vietnam to another recuperation hospital in Japan. Greg Landon, in Vung Tau, was writing a letter home about the beach he had visited that day and how he had looked out at the coastline of the South China Sea, so blue and peaceful, where the C Packet troops had come ashore almost exactly three months earlier. And across the world, in the middle of America, Jack Schroder was being buried. Machine Gun Red or Airborne Schroder, one of Welch’s kids in Delta Company, dead at twenty years of age.