The Indiana Surprise

The other old friend of Jeff’s who helped shape the memoir about my brother was Karen Grote, his girlfriend at Indiana University (IU). Like Ed Smith, the ex-GI, Karen had first contacted my son Jeff; unlike Ed, she knew from the outset he wasn’t the Jeff Sharlet she was seeking – too young, perhaps a namesake. Karen had searched further on the Internet and came upon the awful truth: Jeff was long gone, dead too young.

At first I thought Karen was an earlier IU girlfriend I’d met in the ‘60s, Karin Ford, whose whereabouts were unknown to me. Karen Grote told me how late that summer of ’03 she was holed up indoors during hot, rainy days – muggy weather like back in Indiana. The ironic lyrics of a ‘60s country tune crept into her head: “God didn’t make little green apples, and it don’t rain in Indianapolis in the summertime ….” Jeff had lived and worked in Indy, short for the state capital, during the summer of his junior year, 1966, and Karen had visited him there. She wondered where he’d landed in life, what he was doing now.

After my son forwarded Karen’s inquiry, what did I learn about Brother Jeff? How they met, how he introduced her to Chinese food and taught her to use chopsticks (which, like many Vietnam GI’s, he had carried since they weren’t washed, just wiped after each use), and other anecdotes of everyday student life in Bloomington IN. Karen also told me about IU’s Students for a Democratic Society chapter (SDS) and its local anti-poverty project on which she and Jeff worked before Vietnam came to dominate the national organization’s focus.

Campus Entrance, Indiana University

The work involved a pocket of poverty south of town in rural Monroe County, a place of no running water, rat-infested shacks, and no services. Jeff and others, in helping those people improve their lives and obtain social services, were not above lending a hand with the dirty hard labor of cleaning the communal well, repairing roofs, sealing rat holes.

Karen also gave me invaluable insight into Jeff’s temperament as a young ex-Vietnam GI. After all, I’d known him best as child years younger than me. She said he was usually quite reserved, both in public and in private. He’d been affectionate, never effusive, and she could recall only one time he showed any anger toward her. But there were dark moods as well when he’d become uncommunicative.

One episode she remembered occurred across the border in Kentucky where Jeff and other activists were trying to advise a young man on his draft situation. The advice was divided between recommending the man resist and do prison time, or accept the draft call and agitate against the war from inside. In face of disagreement, Jeff simply went silent. Another time Karen recalled him sitting on the stoop, head in his hands. When asked what was wrong, he answered in a tone of quiet despair, “We gotta get out of this place,” which happened to be a line from a ’65 hit song that became the anthem of Vietnam GI’s. She was puzzled, Jeff said nothing further.

I’d always assumed Jeff had worked for the railroad right there in Bloomington during summer ’66. Having taken my PhD at IU, I knew the town well, remembering the tracks a block or so beyond Courthouse Square, but no, Karen set the record straight. Jeff had gotten a job in Indy that summer, 50 miles to the north, working in the freight yards as a locomotive fireman and boarding with a carpenter named Karlis Zobs in his big old ramshackle house. As the summer drew to a close, Karen remembered Jeff on the verge of telling her certain things, but he never seemed to get past the openings. He’d begin, then become uncharacteristically anxious, and stop abruptly. On the last occasion he started to tell her what he did in Vietnam, not just about Vietnam, but broke off, saying he couldn’t, that she wouldn’t understand and hate him if he told her. Karen never knew what it was.

From Source to Searcher

After Karen and I had talked at length, I realized she was something of a wannabe sleuth, obsessed with facts, and unusually computer literate; she quickly volunteered to help me locate people from the various times in Jeff’s short but fruitful life, not an easy task in the days before social networking made its appearance. I’d been researching a quasi-memoir of the Cold War, especially its domestic impact on American life, and had blocked out two central chapters on my brother – as a Vietnam GI, and later as an antiwar leader.

Karen Grote Ferb, several years later

In short order, with the flood of new information on Jeff facilitated by Karen, those chapters evolved into an outline for an entire book as I learned much more about my younger brother; his times; the underground paper he created, Vietnam GI (VGI); and its role in fostering the GI resistance movement which contributed to the war’s end.

I had taught the Vietnam War for years and became intrigued by the cohort Karen and Jeff – had he lived – represented, a cohort that came of age in the middle of the Cold War, in the fever zone of Vietnam, the turbulent ‘60s, and beyond. I was constantly on the lookout for references to Jeff in the historical literature, had read Dissent in the Heartland*, an excellent study of the ‘60s at IU, and here I was face-to-face with a participant, a member of SDS who had known the activists the author had written about: Bernella and David Satterfield, Jim Wallihan, Peter and Lucia Montague, Joe Fuhrmann, Professor James Dinsmoor, and others who were all old friends with whom she’d lost touch, but now found.

The Owl Coffeehouse just off campus; IU’s alternative paper, The Spectator, edited by Jeff’s friend Jim Retherford; Guy Loftman of SDS wins IU student presidency; the rallies in Dunn Meadow. And there were the campus antiwar protests against the likes of General Maxwell Taylor and General Lewis Hershey, the head of the draft. Karen and Jeff were at those demos together.

Hershey demo at IU, May, 1966

Karen had special memory of the arrests of IU protesters in Indy, July ’66, on occasion of President Johnson’s speech at the war monument in the city’s center; she’d been one of those arrested, but that’s a story for elsewhere. Although Karen didn’t know them personally, she was aware of the campus pro-war conservatives, most notably Tom Huston, a law student; Robert Turner; and Bob Tyrrell, all of whom later rose to prominence in the nation’s capital.

In effect, Karen became my witness to the history of Jeff’s SDS years, to the rich IU chapter of his story. And I should add she's been scarcely less productive in tracking down his military buddies from the Army Language School (ALS) and ASA, or the Army Security Agency, as well as the Chicago group around VGI and the GI coffeehouse people who manned those antiwar outposts around the country outside the major Army bases. Names I had known only from old letters, photos, and articles in Jeff’s files turned into individuals I was able to interview and got to know, thanks to Karen, the tireless searcher.

*By Mary Ann Wynkoop.

Searches – Spectacular Shortfalls: Suzy Creamcheese

"Suzy Creamcheese." I naively thought what a strange name until Karen enlightened me. It was the name of a fictional character in a Frank Zappa song, a moniker obviously given my brother’s Chicago girlfriend. Inquiring among the Chicago Vietnam GI crowd, we came upon her real name, Susan Rosenberg, by all accounts a free spirit combining a lifestyle of counterculture irreverence and New Left seriousness. Everyone remembered her vividly, but she’d been neither seen nor heard from in years.

Several of the group thought she was still in Chicago, her hometown. Susie came from a well-to-do family; at the time she was neither a college girl nor did she hold a job. At one point we thought we’d spotted her in a photo from a recent reunion of SDS in Ann Arbor MI, the organization from ‘60s Students for a Democratic Society, but it proved a false lead. Another time we got the notion she might be a psychotherapist specializing in drug counseling with an address on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive. Bill O’Brien, a great friend to the project, left no stone unturned checking that one out, even drove by the presumed address, all to no avail.

Chicago Skyline and Gold Coast Beaches along The Drive

Then one day a notice crossed my desk, Susan Rosenberg, former Weatherman, ex-Federal prisoner, would be speaking at Hamilton College not far from where I live. She’d become a writer in prison and would speak in a program dedicated to edgy topics. I figured this was it, we’d finally found Susie Creamcheese. Made sense she could’ve drifted into Weatherman, the radical faction that split from SDS in ‘69, and it wasn’t surprising she would’ve served time, a number of them did. Susan herself had been a fugitive into the ‘80s until caught unloading weapons and dynamite from a car.

I contacted the Comparative Lit prof running the speaker’s program, told her the story of Jeff and Susie, said I planned to attend the talk, asked if I could have a chance for a personal word. Coincidentally, the professor was related to a well-known radical defense lawyer who, with his partner Leonard Boudin, took on challenging cases of left activists. Under furious siege from Hamilton alumni and all over the national press for inviting a Weatherman formerly committed to violence, the professor welcomed my collegial interest, even invited me to the private dinner for the speaker.

I was going to meet the elusive Susan face to face. Actually I’d spoken with her by phone decades earlier though I didn’t know it at the time. It was mid- ’69 as Brother Jeff lay dying in the Miami Veteran’s Administration (VA) hospital, though I didn’t know that at the time either. The date was June 15th, I had plane tickets for two days hence to visit Jeff and confer again with his doctors. That afternoon I got a phone call from the hospital, the voice of a young woman, extremely upset. Told me to come down right away, “They’re killing Jeff.” She didn’t give a name. Tried to calm her, said I’d look right into it.

Her call stunned, puzzled me, my parents had assured me Jeff’s condition was stable since I last saw him in March. Corresponding with him gave me no reason to think otherwise. I immediately called my father. Yes, he was aware of the young woman’s agitation, told me she was high strung, everything was alright, I should come as planned. Reassured, I went back to tying up loose ends so I’d have no distractions in Miami. The next day, June 16, 1969, the phone rang again, my father in a choked voice, “Bob, Jeff’s gone.” Darkest moment of my life.

As I learned only several years ago, the young woman sounding the alarm had been Susie ‘Creamcheese’ Rosenberg. Jeff’s Chicago friends had made the long trip down to see him, Susie the only woman in the group. Would it have made a difference if I had heeded her call? Not likely, Jeff’s end was at hand, but I might have been at his bedside. Goddamn.

All this I intended to say to Susie out in Clinton NY. Meanwhile, with the unfriendly media attention focused on little Hamilton College, a contemporary picture of Susan Rosenberg surfaced, a nice-looking, dark-haired woman no worse the wear for 16 years in prison. With success near at hand, I shared the photo with Bill O’Brien who’d known Susie well. By return email back came the news -- that wasn’t Jeff’s Susie, a blonde and much shorter.

Alas, sheepishly, I wrote my Hamilton colleague cancelling my trip, mistaken identity. In the end it didn’t matter, Susan Rosenberg the writer spared Hamilton further grief by gracefully withdrawing from the gig. Meanwhile, Karen and I still search for Susie ‘Creamcheese’ Rosenberg, she’s listed on our mini-website below for missing friends. Where are you, old friend of Jeff’s? http://jeffsharlet-and-vietnamgi.com.yolasite.com/

About the Writer - Bob Sharlet

Bob in Tribute to Brother Jeff, 2010

For decades I labored in the groves of academe. The Soviet Union and then Russia were my beat. Fascinating journey, lived in Moscow, conferenced all over Europe, wrote a great deal about it all. Though limited expertise, always interested in Vietnam. Taught the war for many years at Union College, a kind of memorial to Brother Jeff. How did my books prepare me for doing a memoir on Jeff? Not at all, that was social science, law no less. Well at least I was a skilled researcher, right? Wrong. Studying Soviet law meant reading treatises, monographs, and occasionally talking with jurists on trips back to Russia. Those conversations, welcome reader, didn’t resemble anything you’re familiar with. No personal questions allowed, just law and jurisprudence, and even then no attribution by name.

Sure there was information about Jeff in print out there, not a great deal, mostly about his endgame --editorship of Vietnam GI. But what were his hopes and dreams as he finished school, what about his Vietnam tour, SDS days at Indiana, grad school in Chicago? How did he create and sustain VGI?

I soon realized I’d have to talk to people who knew him, lots of them since no single individual knew Jeff’s whole story. That meant ‘interviewing’, something I’d not done much of in the past. It was like an archeological dig except through words, collecting shards of memory to reassemble into tales of Jeff. Often a seemingly insignificant detail became a key piece in the mosaic. Needless to say, I made rookie mistakes in early interviews.

As the story of my brother’s short but interesting life emerged, I began thinking how to write it up, how to make a book out of it, to give Jeff his niche in the history of the Vietnam antiwar movement. A glance at my academic resume told me there were no role models there. During college years, I wanted to be a writer, but ended up a political scientist. Now was the time to again try my hand as a story teller.

I started reading memoirs to see how it was done. Calvin Trillin’s 'Remembering Denny' made a big impression. Like Denny, there were two Jeff’s, the younger brother I remembered, then Jeff the soldier, radical, GI activist others knew. Another model I found promising was Hilary Masters’ 'Last Stands: Notes from Memory' about growing up with his older father, the poet Edgar Lee Masters. Even more striking were the memories of his grandfather, beginning with the tale of his burial at Arlington as the last of the frontier cavalrymen – “His eyes were … cornflower blue … his hands were steady.” And of course, one of the first memoirs on Vietnam and for me still the finest, Phillip Caputo’s 'A Rumor of War'.

Then one day the problem got solved. My brother’s namesake, my son Jeff, a non-fiction writer joined the project as co-author. With a best seller to his credit, I now felt assured my brother’s story would not just be told, but written with literary merit as well.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, interviewing Jeff’s contemporaries was one thing, but finding them 40 odd years later another; hence “Searching for Jeff,” selected stories of how Karen Grote Ferb, my estimable assistant, and I reconstructed Jeff’s story and his times piece by piece.