3

Creating Room for Dissent

That first April 1965 march in Washington suddenly shaped SDS into the spearhead of the opposition to a war that, at that time, had the support of almost the entire nation. Editorial pages of the nation’s leading newspapers supported the war. Virtually every single elected official in the land supported the war. Corporate leaders, cardinals, labor leaders, and university presidents all supported the war. We did not. Our first task was the difficult one of carving out space for dissent.

As Harvard let out for the summer, I returned home to live with my parents. Given their need for a financial contribution from me, I was immediately out rousting up jobs, reassembling my crew, climbing the ladders to paint the outsides of Brattle Street houses, all the time thinking about how to organize effectively against the war.

Unbeknownst to me that July, the FBI came to Harvard asking about me and others who had been active against the war. Mrs. Frances Osborn of the Harvard administration confirmed that I was indeed a student there and told them I had been granted sophomore standing in history and literature. The head of campus security promised the FBI that he and his men would keep a close eye on me and the other SDS members.¹

At the same time that the FBI was checking up on us and inspired by the “teach-ins” that had swept the campuses that spring, we decided to organize a big teach-in at Harvard. To make ours unique, we planned an all-night affair. We would start at 8 p.m. and run the program into the early hours of the next morning when we would break into workshops and greet the sunrise.

On a hot July evening, large crowds of young people streamed into Sanders Theater, totally filling it. We opened up nearby Lowell Lecture Hall where we could pipe in the sound from Sanders and soon it too was totally packed. Over 2,000 people were eager to hear the lineup we had assembled. We had tried to secure a prowar speaker, inviting George Cabot Lodge, son of the US ambassador in Saigon. But no supporter of the war would agree to share the stage with an antiwar lineup that included I. F. Stone, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Norman Mailer.

Things started uneventfully. The first speaker, Banks McDowell, a Boston University law professor, argued the illegality of the war. The second was Staughton Lynd, who had been in Mississippi for Freedom Summer, coordinating the Freedom Schools, and now was a professor at Yale. Lean and angular, normally a soft-spoken Quaker, Lynd launched into a vehement personal attack on President Lyndon B. Johnson, declared him unfit for office, called for his immediate removal and for civil disobedience at the White House. The audience cheered. Reporters scribbled. People flowed around the outside of both buildings trying to hear.

The next speaker was Mailer. Short, pugnacious, and intemperate, punctuating every other sentence with obscenities, he too attacked the president, calling him a “bully with an air force.”

“The great fear that lies on America is not that Johnson is privately close to insanity, so much as he is the expression of the near insanity of most of us.” Mailer went on, his thick short body tensed, straining, arms back, chest forward, looking as if he were about to punch somebody. He kept talking about Johnson’s psychic need for action, any action, and how Americans lived for action; this was the American disease that Johnson suffered from. I found him puzzling but then, I thought, novelists are not organizers. Mailer was followed by the cosmopolitan scientist Sal Luria, an Italian-born biologist who got us back on a more focused track.

I was looking forward to our next speaker, Stone, but was stunned when he started to tell the audience that Mailer and Lynd were completely wrong. “You cannot oppose the war by going out to the American public and personally insulting and attacking their president! That will never work! That’s just madness.” Mailer stood up and yelled something at Stone that I could not make out. For a moment, the two of them were frozen, two bantams caught in a moment of fury.

Then Stone turned back to the audience, addressing the fallacies of American policy in Vietnam. I realized I had been holding my breath.

After Stone, the speakers became even more focused.

The program went on until 3 a.m. at which point the remaining several hundred students broke into workshops on the grass outside, staying until the summer sun finally rose in the Cambridge sky. I, however, had left at three to catch a few hours of sleep before gathering our crew to paint another house.

As experienced in that teach-in, even as early as 1965, the antiwar movement was fractious. It contained those who felt the need for more disruptive protests, some who saw the war in stark moral terms, others for whom the war was an expression of a larger cultural psychosis, others who felt it was driven by a system of power and logic that had to be confronted, and some who strove to be pragmatic and some who were preoccupied with organizing. For the moment, the movement, small but growing, was able to contain all of us.

In 1965 questioning the war was restricted to a tiny minority. Few Americans were even paying attention to what was happening in those distant lands. The vast majority had faith in our leaders, especially the military and the president. We passed out leaflets at Harvard showing that President Johnson had lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Almost to a person the sophisticated students of Harvard responded by saying, “well you might, or might not, have a point about what is going on over there—but the president of the United States never lies!” It was indeed a different era, soon to be permanently swept away.

Unlike the rest of the country, we were increasingly preoccupied by the war.

At first, we thought Vietnam might be a mistake. Perhaps our government simply did not understand what it was doing. We felt a patriotic responsibility to speak up, to bring us back to our values, back to our senses.

In those days, the dominant metaphor in foreign policy was appeasement. The dominant framework was that of the Cold War. Both political parties agreed that the 1938 Munich appeasement of Adolf Hitler made the Second World War inevitable. Only by standing up to aggression early could greater disasters be averted. In the Cold War framework, the lesson of Munich was that the West must be strong in opposition to communist aggression. No appeasement. The domino theory was universally accepted—if we did not stop the march of communism in Vietnam, it would spread steadily, first to Cambodia, then to Indonesia, and then to the Philippines. In 1965, that foreign policy consensus appeared unbreakable.

To us that consensus discounted the history of Vietnam itself, reduced every conflict to a simplistic formula, insisted on monolithic communism and was profoundly ahistorical. Our job was to create room for debate and dissent, space for active opposition.

That fall of 1965, SDS became embroiled in national headlines. Among the most powerful newspaper columnists of the time, Rowland Evans and Robert Novak savaged SDS for what they said was a new plan to urge young men to resist the draft. The outrage gathered steam when Senator John Stennis denounced the organization on the floor of the Senate, demanding that the government “immediately jerk this movement up by the roots and grind it into bits.” Shortly following Stennis, Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and others held a press conference in Chicago attacking SDS and its plans for disruption of the draft.²

All of this perplexed us because the plans that everyone attacked were proposals that had been rejected by the September National Council. We were being accused of being traitors for planning draft resistance that we were not planning. Both the headlines and attacks only increased as we took to the streets in planned protest of the war in cities across the country.

The October sky has a fall rawness as I head to Cambridge Common for our march as part of the “International Days of Protest” of the war in Vietnam. I am excited and anxious. I feel better as more and more people trickle in. I count roughly 400 of us and am happy that we turned out the numbers we had set as a goal. We march down Mass Ave, a police car in front, another in back, a couple of motorcycle cops buzzing in and out. We march behind a large banner that simply says, “End the War in Vietnam.” A few of us have hand-lettered signs: “Out Now!” and “Vietnam for the Vietnamese.” One student carries a sign that says “My life is not your toy!” This is our first attempt at a large public protest on the streets of Cambridge and Boston.

The noise of the episodic police sirens, blending with our chants, pulls men out of the bars and taverns as we approach. Out onto the sidewalks spill men who fought in the Second World War, men who fought in Korea, men whose brothers fought, men who thought they ought to have fought, men who have always worked hard, paid their taxes, drank on Saturdays, and went to Mass on Sundays, men who would have given everything to have one of their kids attend Harvard, men who, when seeing our signs, were furious. Angry and well lubricated yells greet us: “Bomb Hanoi,” “Victory in Vietnam,” and even an occasional “Better dead than Red.” “Why aren’t you millionaires’ kids over in Vietnam?” a middle-aged man in work clothes yells as we leave Central Square. Everywhere along the route we are met with jeers and hostile yells. I am ranging up and down the march encouraging people to stay tight, to not get into arguments, to keep marching. Not a single person we pass on the sidewalks utters a supportive word. Periodically we are charged by knots of men attempting to wrest away our homemade signs. Cambridge cops reluctantly push in and pull them off us.

We grimly march on, encouraged when our numbers swell to 600 as MIT students join us and then to 1,000 as Boston University, Boston College, and Northeastern feeder marches flow into us after we have crossed into Boston and march down the tree lined strip in the middle of Commonwealth Avenue. Arriving at the Parkman Bandstand on Boston Common, we realize we are not going to have an easy time of it. There are hundreds of counter demonstrators already on the Common. Some are passionate right-wing members of Young Americans for Freedom. Others are men who have emptied the nearby combat zone bars and are yelling, screaming, and swearing at us. They are enraged that any American would march against our leaders in times of war. “You are despicable,” they yell. “Love America or leave it,” some snarl. “Support our boys,” they cry.

We have planned a small speaking program for the bandstand, but it is impossible. By the time Chomsky tries to speak, chants of “Bomb the Commies” and “Go Back to Hanoi” are too loud. On the outer edges, skirmishes flare, are broken up, and flare again. Numerically there are more of us than the counterprotestors, but anger and alcohol-fueled passion is in their favor. Soon, mounted police decide that the rally is over. We disburse, grimly determined that we have done what we wanted to—register that there are at least some people opposed to the war and willing to publicly protest. We take comfort in the fact that in eighty cities over two days, a total of 100,000 people protested. We disband and call it a day.

The next week, senator after senator took to the floor to denounce SDS. James Reston, the most prominent of liberal journalists, attacked the protestors.³ Across the country SDS was constantly in the headlines. The result of those attacks, and of our protests, was a sudden jump in membership. As a special SDS Bulletin reported, “Our Harvard organizer reports that he walked into Harvard Yard with 30 membership cards and had to go back for more ½ hour later … He wasn’t lying. We just received 50 new membership cards from him special delivery.”⁴ Many of those students whom we had urged to become active and not worry about formal membership now wanted their SDS cards. The surge in membership jumped the national membership from 3,000 $2-a-year dues paying members to 4,000. In the chapters we saw membership double.⁵

The attacks on the organization were unrelenting. The national office decided something needed to be done. Paul Booth, the national secretary, and Carl Oglesby, the president, flew to Washington and held a press conference at the National Press Club. There Paul read a statement reiterating our opposition to the war. He also called on the government to allow young people the choice of national service in Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) and the Peace Corps rather than military service, saying “I predict that almost every member of my generation would choose to build, not to burn, to teach, not to torture, to help, not to kill.” He concluded by saying that SDS would continue to urge young men to file for conscientious objector status not strategy. The statement became immediately known as Build Not Burn.

While it generated headlines around the country, it also ignited a firestorm within SDS. On the one hand, we had not decided on a path of urging men to file for conscientious objector (CO) status and resisting the draft. On the other, many of us, including myself, felt that the tone of the statement was too accommodating. The internal opposition to the statement undermined the authority of the national office and fed into the antiauthoritarian “we have no leaders here” mentality of SDS.

While I was not happy with the statement, I was not particularly upset about it. I felt we had too much work to do. I asked Paul to come speak to the Havard Radcliffe SDS chapter and give it a boost. He came up and spent the day with me. I took him for a long interview with the Harvard Crimson. Before the large meeting that evening, we had a chance to talk at length.

Paul, sharp featured, lean, close cropped, had a reasoned intensity and a wonderfully wry wit. He seemed always cheerful and unruffled. We talked about the organizing that I had been doing. I had a secret agenda for the conversation, however. It had recently come to my attention that two of the hardest working members of the chapter executive committee were members of the Communist Party (CP). This bothered me. I could not understand why anyone would be a member of the CP. I detested the old left.

I had studied the history of the American left enough to know its outlines and to feel strongly that the CP had surrendered its soul, and its autonomy, to the Soviet Union. I was perplexed by the contortions that party members had put themselves through to be antifascists one day and then almost overnight switching to justify the Hitler–Stalin Pact. I knew that the CP had played a leading role in union organizing until it had been purged from the unions in the 1950s, and I was fascinated by the direct action it had spearheaded in the Depression to resist evictions. But that did little to lessen my contempt for the CP. Yet I also agreed with the SDS position of rejecting reflexive Cold War anticommunism. I liked the two members. I thought they did good work. As I tried to make sense of all this, I was confused, wondering over motives, and what was my responsibility now that I knew of their political affiliation.

Paul was sweetly patient. He pointed out that the two were probably born into CP families. And he asked me, if I was a young lefty wouldn’t I want to be in SDS? After all, Paul said, the old joke about more than half the current members of the CP being FBI informers was probably true. But SDS was growing; SDS was vibrant and exciting. Wouldn’t any lefty with half a brain want to be in it? Didn’t I just say they were doing good work and helping us grow? I needed to keep focus on the organizing and not spend any time worrying about a few CP members in an SDS that was growing by leaps and bounds. Reassured by his calm advice, I felt my worry drop away.

Then we went to the largest chapter meeting we had ever had, and Paul excited everyone with his wide-ranging analysis of the war, American politics, and the importance of the New Left. I felt I gained a mentor, someone I could admire and ask for guidance.⁶

Late afternoon of November 2, 1965, employees pour out of the Pentagon, the command center of America’s military might. With his one-year-old daughter by his side, Norman Morrison, a thirty-one-year-old Quaker pacifist, father of three, stands below the third-floor windows of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s office. He looks up at the windows, looks up at the Pentagon, looks up at McNamara’s office, moves the baby to safety, takes several deep breaths, and with calm deliberation he pours kerosene all over himself. He sets himself on fire, immolates himself in protest of the war, like the Buddhist monks in Vietnam.⁷

I read the front-page stories, stared at the photo. Stunned. I cannot imagine killing myself. I cannot understand how anyone could burn themselves to death. It baffles me, disturbs me. And yet Morrison has done exactly that because of the war. A man of profound belief and morality. Still, to immolate oneself. I cannot understand. At another level that I try to shove aside, I think with foreboding, to end this war, we may have to be serious, take incredible risks, indeed risk all.

A few weeks later, we boarded buses once again for Washington. The November 27 march in Washington against the war had been called by more traditional liberal and peace organizations, in part as an attempt to recapture the leadership from us and our scandalous refusal to adopt standard Cold War anticommunism. In the end they were forced to ask for SDS support and to offer the president of SDS, Carl Oglesby, a speaking role, although they purposefully slotted him in at the very end of the rally. The crowd was larger than it had been in April. Oglesby’s speech calling out liberals was electrifying and was the only speech that day to get a standing ovation. Our SDS contingents marched, a little reluctantly, but the need to oppose the war was more important than the games of these older people. We were part of 30,000 people marching. A little larger. Step by step.

Each time we marched, there was a reaction against us that opened room for discussion and debate. Each march, each bus ride to DC, each demonstration, forced students to choose—would they stay silent or would they act? Once you pinned on an antiwar button, once you passed out a leaflet, once you boarded the bus to DC, once you marched, you were committed and part of a new community of activists. Each time a student said to me “I think you are wrong to protest,” I had the chance to make the case against this wrong war, to plant a seed of doubt, share facts, and offer an alternative framework.

In the long run, real-world events would prove decisive in building the opposition as the war was brought into living rooms through television in a way that no other war had been. But our organizing, educating, and constantly engaging with the young was required to create the room for dissent and build an organized antiwar movement.

While all this was happening, the bloody battle of the Ia Drang Valley was unfolding thousands of miles away. This was the first time American forces directly engaged North Vietnamese army units. Hundreds died. The American commanders and the Johnson administration fixated on the “body count,” the number of enemies killed. No comfort to the families of the more than 300 Americans killed. This battle confirmed the American strategy of air mobile forces and a grinding war of attrition.⁸

The next month, I helped organize a two-day regional SDS gathering with 120 students from two dozen colleges. I argued that we needed to take our antiwar work beyond the confines of the campus.

The Harvard Crimson interviewed me about the meeting. My responses catch the naïve hope I still had that our leaders would understand the war was a mistake: “students want to get off the campus … They’ve had marches and teach-ins, and they’re discouraged that the war hasn’t ended … Johnson needs a huge anti-war movement so if he decides to end the war, it’s politically safe for him to do it. The only way to get this movement going is to get out and talk to people.”⁹

We gathered a group of students for a foray into the meat-packing district wedged in between the expressway and the South End of Boston. The United Packing House Workers of America was a progressive union with a long history of interracial organizing. One of its leaders, Jesse Prosten, had been a supporter of the SDS’s Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP) in Chicago. Knowing that history, I thought the union members might be open to hearing from us.

One afternoon, we walked through idling trucks, by cold storage units with animal carcasses swinging from overhead tracks, men carrying slabs of meat on their shoulders, men pushing the carcasses, knives and cleavers in their belts, many using wickedly sharp, curved meat hooks. Our small band of college students handed out leaflets explaining why the war was wrong and attempted to engage lounging workers on break.

Most of those workers were Eastern European immigrants and fervently anticommunist. They saw Vietnam through the prism of the “enslaved nations” of Eastern Europe. Heavily muscled, blood smearing their aprons, knives and cleavers still tucked in their belts, they were not interested in a bunch of privileged college students telling them the war was wrong. They had the urgent patriotism of immigrants and the sons of immigrants. Some started asking unpleasantly if we were communists. Soon small knots of men were yelling at us. There was a rising chorus, a mixture of Boston and Eastern European accents: “Get the fuck out of here, now!” “Take your commie propaganda and shove it up your ass.” Some grabbed our leaflets and started burning them.

Suddenly the small team I had brought here was in the midst of an all too real nightmare. The possibility of physical violence rose; I felt it, physical and gut wrenching. The yelling men pushed closer, surrounding us. I started to panic. I was acutely aware of those knives and cleavers; my darting eyes kept landing on the bloodstains on once white aprons. I registered bleakly how many more of them there were than of us. I was at a complete loss.

Just then two African American men elbowed their way through the crowd, both glad-handing people and pushing them away. They were union stewards who barked at the men surrounding us to make room and directed us to follow them. They then hustled us, cowed and thankful, out of the cafeteria and out of the packing house complex. The stewards had saved us, but their last words were clear: get the fuck out of here and do not come back. I left with the dispirited group, embarrassed and gloomy. The whole day was a tough reminder of how far we had to go. Returning to Harvard, the best I could salvage from the day was that none of us had been injured.

I was depressed. These were members of a union with leftist leadership and a deep history of struggle. And they would not even listen. I came to see this small encounter as a vivid example of the divide that splintered the dominant Democratic coalition and reverberated through American politics for decades.

As I thought about the day, I was clear that the American “proletariat” was not going to be the engine for a movement capable of ending this war. Still, it was the sons of those guys in the meat-packing plants that were dying in Vietnam. The day left me more convinced than ever that it would be young people who would lead the assault on the tragic consensus of support for the war, not older people, not the unions. Yet I was worried. The burden felt heavy for our young shoulders.

It is easy to write about the demonstrations, the marches, the confrontations. They were dramatic and essential. However, they were only possible because of long hours of outreach, discussion, connecting. It was the mundane work of reaching out to students that occupied me, and the other SDS organizers and that made it possible for people to join the march, get on the bus, join the movement. Demonstrations not immediately followed by engagement, education, and organizing would do little to build the movement.

Evening after evening, I could be found in Harvard dorms or in small gatherings at nearby colleges talking about the war, about our lives, our dreams, our futures.

On a typical evening, I walk into Quincy House at Harvard. I had talked to several kids I knew who lived there, and they had pulled together a group of students in the common space. Some of the young men are still sporting the now increasingly out of fashion buzz cuts but others are beginning to let their hair grow long. One solid young man is a football player. Another gangly one is sporting a new, wispy, blond mustache just starting to grow out. Students slouch back in the chairs or flop on the floor. I am here to talk about the war and SDS. But I will not launch into a rant about the war.

I start by asking the football player how the prospects look for Saturday’s game. I ask the kid with the new mustache how he is enjoying social studies, the major where all the radicals are congregating. Then I turn to the heart of why I am there.

“I don’t know about you all,” I say, “but I am still trying to figure out how the hell I am going to live my life given this damn war and given how fucked up everything is. What,” I ask, “are you guys thinking about these days?” Hesitantly one of them says his parents expect him to become a doctor and he used to think he was set on that path. But now he is not so sure. How can he keep his deferment knowing that means other guys will be sent to Vietnam?

Another says he just doesn’t know what his future will be. What if I get drafted? Can I, should I, serve and go to Nam?

He doesn’t know.

Another says his parents expect him to go into business, but he is just not sure he can do it. “Why not?” I ask. He says, “Aww, I don’t really know but sometimes I just think, you know, is chasing after money all that matters in life?”

“Yeah,” I say, “of course that’s what we are told—you are what you buy, you are what you own, accumulate, accumulate. That’s what we are bombarded with every day and every week. But there is more to life than that. Think about the people in the Civil Rights Movement and what they are fighting for. Think about the poor kid that dies in Nam—he doesn’t care what he owns, he doesn’t care what kind of car he bought. Think about all those Vietnamese who are dying. We are being told that we must kill them to stop communism and it’s true that many of them are led by communists, but they have been fighting the French, the Japanese, and then the French again and now us for the last thirty years.”

Soon we are in a wide-ranging, freewheeling discussion about the war, about civil rights, about race, the university, about materialism, about commercialism and a culture of mass marketing, about human dignity, about what makes a life worth living, about all the things our classes do not include, and our professors cannot address. And then I am diving into the facts about the war because one student, or more, argues that this war is a necessary part of the struggle against communism. Soon we are discussing the history of the French in Indochina, the Geneva Accords of 1954, the quote from Eisenhower … and on we go for an hour, two hours, or more. Everyone’s talking. Everyone’s making jokes but are also serious. This is our lives we are attempting to figure out. Being young men, we veer off into sex and relationships—is it possible to have an authentic relationship in this fucked-up world? Then back to the war. Then on to poor people and race and the war and who is dying and what are we willing to do about it, what do we think we can do about it. And finally, the discussion has run its course. I have never suggested anyone sign up for SDS. But I will see Pat and his slowly filling out mustache at the next SDS meeting. The intense Rob, tortured by his family’s expectations for him, will finally decide months later, to get on that bus to Washington to protest the war. The football player will in a year turn in his bursar’s card in solidarity with those of us sitting in against the Dow recruiter.

No one was changed in a single discussion. It took time and persistence. SDS distributed mimeographed leaflets in all the dorms once a week discussing the latest developments. SDS members talked, distributed newsletters, and talked more. Over and over again, we returned to the question of how we could manage to live a moral life in the face of mass consumer culture, racism, a stifling consensus in support of the corporate liberal state, and, above all else, an immoral war.

Increasingly we were fixated on the question of the “good Germans.” We knew that there must have been hundreds of thousands of Germans who opposed the Nazis. Certainly, there was opposition early on by the German left. But what of the more middle-of-the-road, decent Germans who must have been appalled by the Nazis? Where were they in our history books? Nowhere, because they had acquiesced. We were determined not to acquiesce to a war that was growing bloodier by the month.

Despite our efforts, there seemed an unshakable consensus of the center. However, that center did not hold. In a remarkably short time, we rode a blood-dimmed tide. How little we understood. We should have studied our W. B. Yeats more.

Throughout the year 1966 we remained a clear, if vocal, minority. By the end of that year, American forces in Vietnam totaled 385,000 men, plus an additional 60,000 sailors stationed offshore.¹⁰ More than 6,000 Americans were killed in that one year, and 30,000 wounded.¹¹ There are no numbers for the Vietnamese killed, wounded, driven from their homes. The bombs rained down.

In the fall, in New York City, more than 25,000 people marched in support of the war in Vietnam, calling for victory in Vietnam.

For my second year at Harvard, seven of us occupied two suites together on the third floor of Adams House. Harvard has a system of houses where students live after the first year. Adams House was known for attracting the artistic, creative, offbeat, and even rebellious. Its turn-of-the-century buildings, originally private housing for those students who could afford all the amenities, even included an elegant, small subterranean swimming pool that we could use at any hour of the day or night.

All seven of us were committed to SDS. Soon our rooms were an informal hub for SDS organizing.

We were learning that the war in Vietnam might not be a mistake, might instead be part of a larger pattern. In April 1965, 40,000 US troops had invaded the Dominican Republic.¹² Two years earlier, Juan Bosch had won the presidency in the first free elections in thirty years only to be overthrown by a military coup. Now the United States stopped a popular revolution seeking to return Bosch to power. That year also saw the start of a CIA-backed effort in Indonesia that ended up with the installation of a military dictatorship and the killing of one million communists and left-wing activists.¹³ We avidly studied the recent history of American intervention, discovered the overthrow of the popularly elected Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran, the overthrow of the popularly elected Jacobo Árbenz government in Guatemala. Vietnam, rather than a mistake, an aberration, started to fit a pattern of American intervention throughout the Third World. We began to conclude American foreign policy was motivated by making sure American businesses had access to oil, sugar cane, land, markets, and labor.

One late afternoon, as I was returning to our rooms, one of my roommates grabbed me in the first-floor entryway, saying, with an accusatory look, “There’s a woman on your bed crying.” I had no idea what he was talking about. I raced up the three flights to find, indeed, there on my narrow bed was a young woman, eyes red, my pillow wet with her tears. I did not recognize her.

As I come in, she sits up, haltingly says, “I am sorry… . I am sorry but I need to talk to someone … my friends told me about … My friends say you would be the right person to talk to … I just don’t know; I just don’t know.” And her tears well up again. I am dumbfounded. A young woman, tall, open faced and sad, lying on my bed, asking for my help. I sit on my desk chair squeezed next to the bed and say “Okay. How can I help you?”

She says, “I’m Peggy… . look, I love my father, I really do. But I cannot do what he wants me to. I just cannot. I love him but I think he is so wrong, and he wants me to do something that I think is just wrong. But I love him. Is it so wrong to love someone who is doing something bad?”

I ask her to explain more. Hesitantly, she says, “My father, well, he has a bank… . I am his youngest. I have always been very close with him … Well, he has this bank, and he wants me to go with him to an opening for the newest branch and I just don’t think I can do it. But he will be so disappointed … and it is so hard to explain … and he thinks he is doing good, but I don’t think so … And I just cannot go.”

I am confused. I gently press the question, “Why exactly don’t you want to go with him?”

“The new branch is in Saigon. My father wants me to go with him to Vietnam. It will be a big deal. I agree with you, the war is wrong. My friends said you would understand. I just cannot go. But I do love him, is that so wrong?”

Peggy is tortured by the thought that her father is profiting from the war. Still, she does not want to disappoint him. She cannot go, symbolically blessing the war. She is tied into knots.

I confirm that it is possible to love someone, especially a parent, and still disagree with their views and their behavior. I say, “We do not get to choose our parents. But we do choose how we live our lives.”

We talk about how bad the war is. I tell her I doubt her father sees the harm the bank causes, that he believes he is a good person. I stress that the structure of society shapes people’s awareness and their lack of awareness. While we hold individuals responsible, we should always remember it is the system that drives what they do. And in that sense, they are not to be hated. It is important that we live by our principles. But our principles should include love and forgiveness.

We talk and talk, Peggy confirms that she will not go to Saigon. She seems to feel better about loving her father. I am quite taken with her. In truth I want nothing more than to give her a big hug, followed by a big kiss, and then an invitation to return to my bed. But I do nothing, indicate nothing, offer nothing beyond a sympathetic ear. We leave and I feel a bond and a possibility—but do nothing.

I have seen Peggy from time to time over the years. She has done remarkable things with her life. Repeatedly, she has figured out how to use her connections, her wealth, and her birth to benefit those who were not born powerful or wealthy. She has made a difference.

What Peggy was wrestling with in 1966 was common to many children of the elite. So many cabinet secretaries, senators, State Department officials, generals, and the masters of American industry and finance were finding it hard to have conversations around the dinner table when their daughters and sons came home on break from college. Their children might not join SDS, although many did, but increasingly they were being persuaded that the war was wrong. Increasingly they were seeing the war as being fought to defend the economic interests of their parents. Increasingly they were questioning the social and economic order that benefited them. Articulate, smart, brought up to be the next elite, they were tough to debate. Many a dinner table conversation ended in wrenching disagreements that shook America’s elite families at their core. The best and the brightest, the masters of the universe, began to have a sinking feeling that they were losing their own daughters and sons. They were right. Over the years the children of such high-ranking administration figures as Secretary of Defense McNamara, Vice President Spiro Agnew, and Richard Nixon’s key staff, H. R. Haldeman and John Erlichman, would join the antiwar movement.¹⁴

The day after I turned nineteen, LBJ announced the end to a five-week pause in the bombings; the air campaign intensified. That March, Senator Wayne Morse led an effort to repeal the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which had given Johnson total latitude to escalate and wage war in Vietnam. It failed by a vote of ninety-two to five.¹⁵

SDS and the National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam sponsored the Days of International Protest, March 25 to 26, 1966. Facing an escalating war that had near unanimous support in Congress, we were determined to turn out record numbers in opposition. About 25,000 marched in New York alone. We organized a faculty “speak out” with twenty-eight members of the Harvard faculty and then another local march.

With the memory of the debacle at the Parkman Bandstand still raw, we planned to hold the rally inside the Arlington Street Church. Once again, we marched behind a big banner demanding an end to the war. Our hand-lettered signs proclaimed “Immediate Withdrawal NOW!,” “Peace Now,” and “Stop the Bombing.” We marched to regular chants of “What do we want? Peace! When do we want it? Now!” For the first time some chanted, “Hey, hey … LBJ … how many babies did you kill today?”

The march route, once again down Mass Ave through Cambridge, was met with even larger hostile crowds. Cops on motorcycles did their best to keep the peace, buzzing between us and the snarling patriots. As the march neared the Arlington Street Church, the 1,000 of us marching were more than equaled by the crowds against us. Around us were nonstop yells of “Kill the commies,” “Down with Peaceniks,” “Support our boys,” “Go back to Russia.” As we approached the church, fistfights flared up here and there. Then a can of soup hurtled into our march, bloodying a young man’s face. Soon eggs and more cans and soda bottles and anything that could be thrown rained down on us; we rushed to get everyone into the church. I was too busy attempting to get everyone safely inside to feel any fear.

We had our rally against the war inside, sheltered in a church that had once housed the fiery meetings of abolitionists. I was certain we were acting in a great American moral tradition. Outside the crowd was just as certain that we were traitors. We waited for the police to clear the area before sending everyone home. No Boston newspaper decried the violence against us. They did not editorialize about free speech. Instead, they all called for supporting the troops and the president in a time of war. I tried to buoy spirits, pointing to the increase in our numbers, arguing against despair. However, I felt discouraged myself. It was so damn hard to make opposition to the war legitimate. But we had no choice, we had to keep on. The war was escalating. We could not stop. The isolation we felt engendered an even greater sense of responsibility. It was only us. It was up to us to find a way to stop the war. I felt that weight more and more, coloring each day.

At the end of the month a small group of young men burned their draft cards on the steps of the South Boston courthouse ushering in a new phase of resistance. Throughout the preceding months, there had been increasing discussion of draft resistance. In 1964 and 1965, 334,000 young men had been drafted. Their bodies were necessary for the war, and it was clear to us that many more would soon be needed.¹⁶ We debated what was the most effective way to resist.

For some time, I had been in ever more frequent, intense, and troubled conversations about whether and how to evade the draft. Now those conversations had shifted into debates about how to best organize resistance to the draft. Among my close friends, there was a growing sentiment for people to refuse to be drafted or tear up or burn their draft cards in public acts of resistance, which almost certainly would mean jail. The Selective Service law that governed the draft was amended through HR1036 to specifically make it illegal to fail to carry your draft card with you at all times and a crime for anyone who “knowingly destroys, knowingly mutilates” their draft card.¹⁷

Many close SDS friends argued for active draft resistance. Others came to draft resistance from a religious background, influenced by the Catholic Worker Movement and brothers Daniel and Philip Berrigan, Catholic priests who became dedicated to stopping the war. I was not so interested in acts of moral witness. I believed only a mass movement could stop the war. I thought that the potential penalty of jail would prove to be too extreme for more than the most committed to risk. A hundred thousand young men flooding the jails might disrupt the country and could be enormously powerful. However, only 5,000 or 10,000 going to jail, while a strong symbolic act, would only rob the movement of the organizers and activists it needed. I was torn. In the end, I supported draft resistance organizing, but I was skeptical that draft card burning would become something hundreds of thousands of us would participate in—and I believed it would take hundreds of thousands of us, millions of us to bring the war to an end.

It is estimated that 25,000 Americans burned their draft cards, but only forty-six were actually indicted.¹⁸

SDS friends, including John Maher, Nick Eggleson, and Vernon Grizzard, among others, organized the Boston Draft Resistance Group (BDRG) aimed at reaching young working-class men, providing them options for resisting the draft. While draft card burning never reached the level of mass action, draft evasion certainly did. The BDRG would become a well-organized effort that assisted an ever-growing stream of draft eligible young men to know their rights and many to evade being drafted.

That spring, General Lewis Blaine Hershey, head of the Selective Service, proclaimed there would be a new test for one million male college students. The results of the three-hour test, along with college grades and class ranking, would be used by local draft boards to determine who kept their student deferment, and who lost it and would be sent to Vietnam. This literally was to be a life-or-death test. The new testing and ranking system required colleges and universities to work with the Selective Service to decide who stayed in school and who was sent to fight in Vietnam. Universities had to share their class ranks and a student’s GPA with the government.

The reaction among students was swift and vehement. SDS organized, without much success, to demand that universities not participate. We decided to distribute our own test at as many test sites as possible. Our tests had our own questions with the answers included at the bottom. For example:

• If the US divided the money being spent on the war among everyone in South Vietnam, what would that amount be? Answer: $866 per person, making it the country with the highest per capita income in Asia
• What is the ratio of civilian deaths to Vietcong deaths? Answer: 2:1
• When the government of Indonesia launched a drive that killed 300,000 of its citizens, what was the US response? Answer: none¹⁹

We used humor, but our challenge was serious. We administered more than 350,000 tests. I was the regional coordinator for the exam in New England. “We can use hundreds of people on this,” I told the Harvard Crimson. “There are test centers all over New England that have to be covered. Local campus chapters will handle operations at their own schools, but additional manpower will be needed to man campuses without chapters or centers that are not located at a specific college … I don’t think there will be any violence here, but at places like the University of New Hampshire or the University of Maine, there’s a possibility that some incidents will occur.”²⁰

The official test was received with dread. The American educational system had entered a new period of tracking: there was the college track, the vocational track, and the death track. University administrators were now an explicit arm of the Selective Service and the machinery of war.

Most historians, when writing about the antiwar movement, stress the draft as the motivating factor in student opposition. However, without the draft there still would have been an antiwar movement. Undoubtedly the fact that twenty-seven million American young men thought they could be sent to Vietnam made a broad swath of the population take notice of what was happening. There is no question that the threat of the draft made many young men, and their families, take a serious look at the war and helped build opposition.

Still women, not subject to the draft, and many men who had deferments, worked passionately against the war. It is wrong to think it was only fear of being drafted that impelled most of us to act against the war. The facts and nature of the war in Vietnam demanded we oppose it. Many of us were tortured by the privilege of a deferment. I certainly thought day after day about the young men who did not have a deferment and were paying such a high cost for a war that should never have been fought. Guilt drove me to work harder against the war.

The new tests, university cooperation, and the increasing numbers being drafted added to our sense of urgency. The war itself and our efforts were steadily convincing more and more American college students that they should oppose the war. The fact that their lives might depend on ending the war added an edge of urgency.

That late spring of 1966, I supported trying anything and everything that might expand the movement against the war. More marches—yes. Draft resistance—okay. Antiwar candidates for office—sure, give it a try. Give anything a try.

I accepted a job to be the lead organizer on the campaign of Thomas Boylston Adams, who was running in the Democratic Primary for the US Senate against former governor Endicott “Chub” Peabody and John Collins, the mayor of Boston.

Adams, every inch a Brahmin, the great-great-great-grandson of John Adams, the second president, always acutely conscious of his heritage, first announced his candidacy in February 1966. The campaign produced an insipid fifty-five–page platform that did not advocate an immediate withdrawal from Vietnam. Adams was going nowhere. In May, with the deadline looming, the campaign was unable to produce the 10,000 signatures needed to get on the ballot. Desperate to salvage the signature collecting, his campaign offered me a paid leadership position. I refused. Still, I was intrigued with what a statewide campaign could do to boost the antiwar movement. Adams had no chance of winning, but could his campaign demonstrate that the antiwar movement had spread beyond the campuses? I agreed to negotiate.

After a series of intense meetings, the campaign, with a remarkably hesitant candidate, changed its official positions to support a total withdrawal of all US forces from Vietnam, the desegregation fight in the Boston schools, and Mothers for Adequate Welfare. I agreed to be the senior person in charge of field, hired SDS organizers for the field staff, and recruited Abbie Hoffman to leave his “Friends of SNCC” store and become the coordinator for Worcester. All in a somewhat successful effort to jump start a stalled campaign. We scrambled and in record time secured the requisite number of signatures. The campaign, however, could never overcome a candidate ill-suited for the role of insurgent, a candidate who had a profound distrust of his new staff.

In the end Adams received 51,436 votes or 8 percent.²¹ The candidate and the campaign were deeply flawed. The election had not proven to be a particularly successful way of opposing the war, unfortunately convincing many of my friends that electoral politics was a waste of time.

Despite the disappointment of the campaign, everything we had done for the last two years, the marches, the teach-ins, the protests, the organizing, and education, even the fact that Adams would run as an antiwar candidate at all, everything had indeed created room for dissent. There was now a powerful movement against the war. It was no longer fringe. It was growing. Now, we told ourselves, we needed to go “from protest to resistance.” We needed to find a way to shatter the unity of the country, throw ourselves on the gears and make them pause in their relentless turning. We were ready for a new stage in our opposition to the war.