Springtime in Academe – ‘Truth Squad’ Meets Its Match

In the annals of the Vietnam War, the year 1965 has long been remembered as the year of the great escalation. The date of course pales in significance and consequence to 1941, but for those who opposed the war in Vietnam, springtime ’65 will always have a special place in memory.

American involvement in Southeast Asia had begun a decade earlier when the French were still fighting to retain their Indochina colony, but it was limited to military hardware and a few hundred technical advisors. President Kennedy (JFK) set in motion the first escalation in ’61 when he began a 20-fold buildup of US troops in South Vietnam, by then an independent country. South Vietnam was under constant pressure from Communist North Vietnam’s proxy military formation, the Viet Cong (VC), a tough and seasoned guerrilla outfit.

From his predecessor, JFK inherited a contingent of under a thousand military advisors, which he then increased to 16,000 American officers and men advising South Vietnamese Army units fighting the VC. Several years later however, after the VC had made great gains, it was the speed, scale, and composition of President Johnson’s (LBJ) escalation that set 1965 apart as US troop levels soared to 165,000 by year’s end.

In the history of the American antiwar movement, 1965 also became a marker date. Although there was some popular opposition to JFK’s low intensity war, it was minimal, barely achieving media notice. However, LBJ’s dramatic escalation beginning late winter/early spring ’65 was quickly met by a counter-escalation of protest on many college campuses.

LBJ’s dramatic escalation beginning early ’65 was quickly met by a counter-escalation of protest on many college campuses.

____________________________________________________________

The reciprocal escalation of troops and protesters occurred against a backdrop of continual VC terror attacks on US military personnel billeted in the cities and towns as the countryside was steadily slipping out of Saigon’s control. A particularly deadly VC bombing of a US barracks in February ’65 brought forth a punishing response from LBJ – fighter bombers launched to attack North Vietnam.†

In Washington, the retaliatory air strikes were spun as a spontaneous reply to North Vietnamese aggression in the south, but, as we would later learn when the Pentagon Papers – the secret history of the war – were leaked to the media, the raids had been planned months in advance behind the scenes. The White House had merely been waiting for an appropriate pretext, a sufficient provocation, which the VC provided.

The ensuing attacks on the North were actually dress rehearsals for the secretly planned full-scale escalation set in motion the following month – a systematic bombing campaign code-named ‘Rolling Thunder’ – along with the landing in South Vietnam of the first US combat units. We were at war in Asia.

Stateside, the universities were quick to react to LBJ’s move. It was springtime in academe for what would gradually become a nationwide antiwar movement. First out of the gate was the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, one of the more liberal and free-spirited campuses in the country.

Stateside, the universities were quick to react to LBJ’s move. It was springtime in academe for what would gradually become a nationwide antiwar movement.

____________________________________________________________

On March 23, ‘65 Michigan faculty and students organized the first ‘teach-in’, an all-night gathering at which professors reviewed Vietnam’s history and the conflict between north and south and led discussions on the major issues with the hundreds of students who turned out. The idea of the teach-in caught on quickly as some 20 other universities followed suit the next week. ††

Meanwhile, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a New Left organization founded in ’62 at Michigan, led the way, rapidly signing up many new campus chapters and hundreds of new members. With its ranks growing, SDS coordinated a major challenge to LBJ’s war policy, staging a 25,000-strong march on Washington on April 17^th. The lines of the emerging divide on the homefront between the government and the New Left were now clearly drawn.

I was then a young academic, a first-year Political Science prof at the University of Missouri (Mizzou) where a teach-in was also held. A relatively conservative campus, our event was sedate by comparison with Michigan’s. I was a co-organizer, but my motive was to support the war, not oppose it.

My younger brother Jeff Sharlet, an ex-Vietnam GI then back at Indiana University (IU), was on the other side of the issue. Later, after the Tet Offensive of ’68, I came around to Jeff’s view.

We held the Mizzou teach-in at a 500 seat auditorium. The place was packed with students and faculty, the overflow sitting in the aisles and standing at the back. I was joined on the pro-war side by a senior American historian. Our opponents, junior faculty like me, were both specialists in South Asia.

They argued against the war based on their extensive knowledge of Southeast Asia, the previous fate of the French colonialists, and the idea that Vietnamese nationalism was the essential driving force in what they considered a civil war.

As a JFK liberal internationalist, I placed the Vietnam conflict in the context of the global Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. I argued that North Vietnam’s campaign against the South was being facilitated by indispensable Soviet military materiel and was a challenge to the US policy of ‘containing’ the USSR within its imperial frontiers.

I did not dismiss Vietnamese nationalism, but insisted that Communist ideology was the major factor; hence, for me the conflict was a Soviet proxy war using North Vietnam and, in the South, its surrogate, the VC.

Teach-in, University of Missouri, 1965 – author at far right pondering

Both sides to the debate received supportive applause from the audience, but when a straw vote was taken at the end, the pro-war position had prevailed.

While I doubt that Washington took note of Mizzou, historical accounts tell us that LBJ was upset and offended that the learned community was leading the burgeoning protest against his policy.

Shortly after the antiwar left carried its opposition to the streets of the nation’s capital, the administration began marshalling its forces against the growing tumult at some of the nation’s foremost institutions of higher learning.

Meanwhile, since February’s retaliatory air attacks, the State Department (USDS) had been getting telephone calls hourly from citizens asking for an explanation of the sudden escalation that followed. In addition, by April of ’65 USDS had received over 20,000 letters of inquiry about the war. As a presidential advisor commented, the administration clearly wasn’t doing its “propaganda job right.”*

On April 25^th, Secretary of State Rusk commented briefly in an aside in a speech on an unrelated subject that he found much of the criticism he had heard against the war ‘nonsense’ and expressed surprise at the ‘gullibility’ of the academics leading the charge. The following day USDS began planning to counter the protests by ‘explaining’ the war policy to academe.

A Washington speaking team was dispatched to visit five universities in the Midwest. Leading the group, officially called the ‘Inter-Departmental Speaking Team on Vietnam Policy’, but soon dubbed the ‘truth squad’, was Thomas Conlon, a mid-level Foreign Service officer.

Conlon, an experienced 40-year old diplomat, was well qualified to lead the group, having served at the US Embassy in Saigon for two years. He’d even learned Vietnamese in the process and was an articulate and forceful public speaker as well. A ‘hawk’ on ‘containing’ Communism, Conlon strongly supported drawing the line in Southeast Asia.

He was variously accompanied by an official of the Agency for International Development (AID) and one or the other of two assigned senior Army officers – all with Vietnam experience as well. The rep from AID was Earle Young, a specialist in rural development who had served both in Laos and South Vietnam.

Earle Young, USAID, 1981

Young’s field experience was extensive. While working in South Vietnam, he had witnessed Saigon losing ground in the countryside. One of his postings was in Long An province abutting the capital region, which, on the cusp of LBJ’s escalation, was increasingly falling under VC control. One village, a mere 12 miles from Saigon, was so completely under VC sway that the government flag could not be flown there.

The Washington civilians were backed up by two colonels who had served as advisors to the South Vietnamese Army in its counter-insurgency campaign against the VC. In effect, it was a well-informed truth squad that landed in America’s heartland, confidently expecting to set the record straight on US involvement in Vietnam and quiet the spreading campus unrest.

The truth squad landed in America’s heartland confidently expecting to set the record straight on Vietnam and quiet the spreading campus unrest.

____________________________________________________________

Their first stop on May 4^th – during the weeks following the early March landing at Danang when Marine combat reinforcements were pouring in as a result of LBJ's ongoing buildup – was at the University of Iowa where the truth squad received its baptism by fire. The Iowa Socialist League organized a raucous evening reception before a hooting and jeering crowd of 200 students and faculty.

The government team argued the US was responding to Communist aggression from North Vietnam, a claim that flew in the face of the Iowa critics’ belief that we had intervened in a Vietnamese civil war. That first experience became a rude awakening for Washington’s experts, who had anticipated being heard by a typically tranquil and polite academic forum.

Braving shouts and provocative statements, Conlon soldiered on, replying to questions about why Vietnam was important to US national security with standard Cold War rhetoric; to wit, if we let North Vietnamese aggression go unanswered, it could lead to world war.

Toward the end of the evening at Iowa, Conlon began to lose his cool, agreeing with a questioner that it was a “crummy war,” but “the only war” we’ve got.** Predictably, the place erupted in hoots of derision.

The truth squad moved on to Drake University in Des Moines where they found some respite from the battle zone. The Drake audience was mildly critical but respectful, and the team was able to get its points across without incident. Traveling north, the next stop was University of Wisconsin at Madison, and it was back into the cauldron of antiwar protest.

Well before the Vietnam War heated up, Wisconsin-Madison was primed to play a role in opposition. Back in the ‘50s, the campus had a small but critical group of professors on the left led by Hans Gerth, an émigré German Marxist in Sociology, and William Appleman Williams, a Marxist historian. They were the cynosures of a graduate student Marxist study group that published a journal on left politics.

A week after Michigan’s teach-in, reacting to LBJ’s Vietnam escalation, Wisconsin activists mounted their own massive teach-in attended by 5,000 students and faculty with television coverage by CBS. A month later, Conlon and company were unknowingly heading into a buzz saw in Madison.

The truth squad had been invited to Wisconsin by the campus ‘Committee to Support the People of South Vietnam’, but on arrival at the evening’s venue with 650 people awaiting, it was also met – ‘confronted’ would be more apt – by the ‘Committee to End the War in Vietnam’ (CEWV), a 200-strong umbrella group drawing on SDS and other campus left groups.  

Although there were empty seats in the room, the CEWV activists wearing black armbands insisted on standing along the walls and greeting the team’s pronouncements with a cacophony of hisses and heckling.

I happened to arrive at Wisconsin as a visiting professor a few weeks later   and found the campus still abuzz over the ever rising American troop levels and expanding bombing runs over North Vietnam. From my office window on the campus green, I saw occasional rallies and periodic marches up the hill to the Administration Building.

A police-student confrontation, the Wisconsin green a few years later

Though no doubt the majority population of a large Midwestern university was mostly mainstream politically, the campus left in Madison was highly visible, well beyond its numbers.

Battered but not cowed, Conlon and colleagues went across the state to the university’s Milwaukee campus for a relatively quiet evening of Q & A on the war, and then headed south.

At Indiana University the military officers held informal afternoon meetings with small groups of interested students and professors. A former IU grad student critical of the war told me that the colonels responded to queries about the fighting in rural areas forthrightly and with candor, earning the respect of those present.

However, the truth squad’s full-dress appearance in Bloomington that evening turned out differently. National press coverage on the uproar at Iowa and Wisconsin had preceded the team, and the large auditorium was full – a mix of supporters of the war, a sizable minority of opponents – liberals, the New Left, and even a few Old Left – and the largest group, people curious to hear both sides of the issue. 

Brother Jeff, who had returned to college from Vietnam the previous fall, was no doubt in the audience and well informed on the conflict. He had returned from ‘Nam highly critical of the war, but at that point in time was mainly preoccupied with getting back into the academic groove.

However, from his IU letters of the previous several months, I knew Jeff was worried about the possibility of the war flaring up and, as a Vietnamese linguist, being recalled to duty – a prospect he didn’t relish.

Although battle-scarred, Conlon led off with a strong, assertive line on Washington policy in his opening remarks to the IU audience; during the Q & A that followed, the critical minority dominated the floor, firing off challenging questions and often greeting the government’s responses with vocal disbelief.

In the audience that evening was Bernard Morris, who had only recently left a career at the State Department to join the IU faculty. Addressing a question to Conlon, Professor Morris became incensed with the answer, responding “I never thought I’d see the day when my government would lie to me.”†††

“I never thought I’d see the day when my government would lie to me.”

____________________________________________________________

At their final destination, the University of Illinois on May 11^th, the truth squad got more rough sledding from many in the hall who had followed the team’s rocky reception elsewhere. They flew back to Washington, Conlon unfazed by the Midwest reception, but the others no doubt relieved to be off the firing line.

In the end, what was the outcome of the first of what would become numerous confrontations over the war between the government and its critics, initially a very small minority which would eventually become legion? To read Thomas Conlon’s subsequent published account of the truth squad’s spring ’65 tour, one might come away with the impression that his team had successfully taught the students ‘the facts of life about Vietnam’.

He believed that the truth squad had rescued the universities from those who had fallen prey to ‘communist propaganda’. Of course he was referring to the ‘extremist’ professors he had encountered  –  often, as he pointed out, in fields like psychology, the sciences, and literature, hence not qualified by training and therefore lacking in expertise on Vietnam.

On the other hand, tapping back into activist circles at Iowa, Wisconsin, Indiana, and elsewhere, one hears the cheers of victory, ‘we have met the enemy and he is ours’. The klaxon had been sounded – rise up in protest against the war.

As for the canard about the need for expertise to understand Vietnam – a notion popular in Washington foreign policy circles – one of the country’s foremost critics of the war, Noam Chomsky of MIT, shot that one down a year later. As he wrote, “There is no body of significant theory or … relevant information, beyond the comprehension of the layman, which makes policy [on the war] immune from criticism.”***

In reality, the New York Times correspondent covering the truth squad’s tour, called its running battles with its foes a draw. Both sides came away with something. The government succeeded in reinforcing the “views of supporters” of  its Vietnam policy while the campus activists, with their critical positions “strengthened” by the clashes, emerged energized for the encounters to come.****

*Quoted in T Wells, The War Within: America’s Battle over Vietnam (1994), 29.

**D Janson of the New York Times, who reported on the truth squad in the Midwest, quoted in The Militant (June 14, 1965).

***N Chomsky, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” (1966) in American Power and the New Mandarins (1967), 335.

****D Janson writing in The Nation (May 24, 1965).

†  http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2013/08/saigon-was-no-rear-area.html

††  http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2012/12/antiwarriors-mobilize-brothers-divergent.html

††† http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/06/maverick-mentor.html

On the Right Side of History

Jeff Sharlet, my younger brother, and I both subsequently came to know and respect Professor C. Leonard Lundin at Indiana University (IU) – I as a grad student and Jeff later as a political activist. It was as if we had known two different people – I knew him solely as a scholar of Baltic history, while for Jeff and the activist group in the late ‘60s, he was one of a small number of faculty† who actively supported anti-Vietnam War protest on campus – but all that was still far in the future.

Lundin remembered the first Red Scare. It was the early 1920s, he, a high school kid at the time, was left with the impression of an orgy of extralegality. The Bolshevik Revolution had taken Russia out of World War I, and postwar America was aflame with exaggerated fear of ‘reds’ and anarchists.

The government’s reaction, led by Attorney General Palmer and his right-hand man, young J Edgar Hoover, included illegal search and seizures; warrantless arrests; detentions and wiretaps; and the deportations of hundreds of resident aliens, many of whom were known radicals, as well as other individuals who merely fell under suspicion.

Even the New York State legislature – hardly a frontier institution – expelled its five Socialist members. In other states legislators rushed to enact an array of patently unconstitutional sedition laws as well as so-called ‘red flag’ laws making display of a red flag illegal. In a comic-opera waiver, Minnesota exempted red flags at railroad crossings. No surprise then that a bright and idealistic young Lundin would have been aware of the wholesale transgressions of the Constitution. Upon hearing Norman Thomas speak in Boston, Lundin, a Harvard student, joined the Socialist Party.

A student of early American history, Lundin had the good fortune to serve as research assistant to the doyen of the field, Samuel Eliot Morrison. A post-grad fellowship took him to Germany for a year’s study. Back at Harvard, young Lundin earned an MA before moving on to Princeton where he wrote his PhD under another luminary of the day – Professor Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker. It was the Depression, and academic jobs were scarce, but, as ‘Sam Morrison’s fair-haired boy’* and with the backing of his Princeton mentor, Lundin landed a position at Indiana University in 1937.

IU was then a sleepy campus in the southern Indiana town of Bloomington. It was deeply conservative country. Most of the students were from small town Indiana. Sports, fraternity parties, and the elections of pretty coeds as ‘queens’ for one or another social occasion were the salient events. Political apathy and cultural parochialism were the norm.

Among Lundin’s pre-war students there was no curiosity about the world at large. After the war in Europe broke out in ’39, one student told him that whenever war news came over the dorm radio, someone would call out, Turn that off, and get some swing music. Frivolity reigned.

The Ku Klux Klan (Klan) had a strong presence in the state. A decade earlier a Klansman had been elected Governor of Indiana. Bloomington was racially a Southern town. A man who grew up there remembered seeing Klansmen in full regalia riding into town on horseback in the late ‘40s. Predictably, the town was segregated, although by custom rather than law after pro-integration legislation in ‘49. Restaurants, bars, barber shops, and even most of the university’s main dining room were off-limits to the small number of Negroes enrolled at the university.

 

The KKK in Anderson IN, 1920s

 

When Lundin joined the History Department there were only 10 professors, all WASPs (neither Jews nor Catholics were welcome). With few exceptions they were as conservative as their environs. Curricular emphasis was on American history, the history of the Midwest, and Indiana history. A few of the staff taught Ancient, English, and European history.

 

History at IU was not a research department; only a few colleagues were scholars, Lundin among them, having published his first book in 1940.  There was a contingent of grad students, but the faculty’s ambitions for them were very modest. Even in the mid-‘50s the bar was still set low by the old guard historians. As one said to the new internationally-oriented chairman, the department should mainly be producing instructors for the likes of East Tennessee State Teachers College.

 

For young Professor Lundin who had arrived at Indiana directly from Boston, life in Bloomington initially involved a bit of culture shock. The Spanish Civil War was then raging. While students at Harvard were up in arms in support of the Spanish Republic against General Franco, who was supported by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, few at IU cared or were concerned with events in Europe or even knew where Spain was.

 

Lundin’s first political involvement was with a very small group in support of the beleaguered Spanish Republic. Because he had studied in Europe, he was in demand as a speaker on European politics and occasionally participated on a weekly local radio program on public affairs. After Franco came to power, he carried out a severe policy of retribution against the defeated supporters of the Socialist government. Back in the Midwest, an Indiana statewide Catholic magazine expressed unqualified support for the new fascist regime.

 

A copy of the issue came into Professor Lundin’s hands, and on his next radio broadcast he listed Franco’s draconian acts and rhetorically asked if those actions indeed reflected the Church’s position. The president of the state federation of Catholic women’s clubs promptly wrote the university president, Herman B Wells, complaining that Professor Lundin had slandered the Church and intimating that those responsible were ‘notorious Communists’. President Wells skillfully fended off the attack, ensuring that Lundin survived his first brush with controversy in Middle America.

 

When Japan attacked China in the late ‘30s, the young historian became an officer of a committee to oppose Japanese imperialism. A few years later, following Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Lundin joined the committee for Russian War Relief, most likely a Communist-front organization; but, even if he had known that, one doubts he would have been deterred. It was all of a piece; he stood up against aggression in Spain, China, and the USSR because it was the right thing to do

 

Returning from WWII a captain, Professor Lundin was back at his teaching post and in fresh controversy not long after. Soon after the end of the war, the Indiana Communist Party (CP) sought a place on the state ballot. Under Indiana law, the party had secured the requisite number of petition signatures, but the political establishment in the capital was stalling and trying to block the move. No surprise in a state with Indiana’s political lineage.

 

The dean of Indiana’s Law School along with a few law professors – politically conservative to a man – and others supported the Indiana CP petition on the principle of free democratic elections. Lundin observed with approval, but then the law school group was vilified, not just in the statewide press, but in the media of other Midwestern states as well.

 

In the resulting furor, the legislature opened an investigation into Communist influence at IU, the state’s flagship institution of higher learning. Furious, Lundin denounced the investigation. President Wells saw it differently and told the legislators, Come ahead, the university has nothing to hide. In the end nothing came of the investigation.

 

A few years later in the early ‘50s, at the height of second great American Red Scare, Leonard Lundin joined others opposing the university’s plan to require all newly hired professors to sign a loyalty oath under state law, which read in part:

 

                    I solemnly swear that I will support the

                    Constitution and the laws of the United

                    States and the Constitution and the laws

                    of the state of Indiana ….**

 

The loyalty oath controversy stirred the statewide American Legion into action. Under pressure from its many posts, the university trustees were induced to hold hearings to detect if any subversive activity was afoot on campus. A wag mocking the Legion suggested that perhaps they should investigate the school’s colors of crimson and cream. In another unintentional light moment, a coed being interviewed by the trustee panel was asked if she was aware of any pro-Communist teaching on campus. She innocently replied, ‘What is Communist teaching’? The trustees were stumped.

 

In ’54, when the US Senate censured Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, the point man of the relentless anticommunist campaign, the pall had it cast over the country gradually began to lift. By then the Civil Rights Movement was underway, and the issue of segregation was being challenged in Bloomington. The Negro population at IU, while still small, had grown, but the same segregationist customs Lundin found on arrival in ’37 were still in place.

 

White barbers claimed they didn’t know how to cut Black hair. A Black woman who matriculated at IU in fall ’55 reported that she and friends could enter restaurants and sit down, but they’d either be refused service or simply ignored. The only place in town where she and students of color could eat, party, and dance, was the Black Elks Club.

 

The owner of one of the most popular student hangouts in Bloomington a block east of campus, Nick’s English Hut, where both I and later my brother spent time, made clear his racist feelings, “We’ll close the place before we serve Negroes.”***

 

Peaceful sit-ins by Blacks and Whites took place in the restaurants. Led by the local NAACP chapter and with the strong support of President Wells, and friends of social justice like Leonard Lundin and the student activist leader Tom Barton††, the town had been gradually desegregated by the time I arrived for grad school in the fall of ’60.   

 

By the ‘60s, IU as an academic institution had changed significantly under Wells’ visionary leadership. No longer the insular, inward-looking university Lundin had first joined, IU become a major center of international education. The History and Government departments now fielded diverse course offerings on nearly all the regions of the world while certain faculty members were in the process of acquiring national and even international scholarly reputations.

 

The university’s rich and diverse curriculum drew grad students from all over the country. I arrived at IU from the East Coast in the fall of ’60 drawn by the noted Russian and East European Institute, arguably second only to Columbia’s program. My classmates included graduates of Berkeley, Harvard, the University of Chicago, and other leading institutions.

 

Professor Lundin, who had retooled as a European historian, was part of the university’s new orientation. His course on Baltic history, cross listed between History and the Institute with the Baltic Sea as the organizing concept, was a unique course. With Russia and Poland among the historical Baltic powers, I found the course fascinating, and it was evident why Leonard Lundin had been one of the first professors honored with the university’s distinguished teaching award. Back then I knew him only as a teacher/scholar and was unaware of his longtime activist stands.

 

I finished up at IU in the summer of ’63 and left for a year’s dissertation research in the USSR at Moscow University on the Soviet-American Exchange. By then, brother Jeff was a Vietnamese linguist in military intelligence serving in Vietnam. Finishing his tour of duty in ’64, Jeff decided to complete his education at IU, which is where he too came to encounter Leonard Lundin in his role as a faculty activist.

 

Professor Lundin, Indiana University, 1962

 

During Jeff’s spring term of ’65, President Johnson (LBJ) escalated the war in Vietnam, igniting the first sparks of protest on a number of campuses across the country, IU included. Jeff became involved with a small band of student activists who began to raise the banner of opposition at IU to LBJ’s war policy.

 

Professor Lundin, who from the beginning opposed US involvement in Vietnam, presided over the first outdoor campus antiwar rally in Dunn Meadow. Reflecting back several years later, he said that attempt to have an open discussion of the war policy was constantly interrupted by rowdy pro-war students. In March ‘65 the first antiwar teach-in was held at the University of Michigan with many other schools, including IU, linked in by telephone hook-up. Lundin participated in that first campus teach-in as well.

 

Nixon arrives for IU appearance, 1965

 

That fall, Richard Nixon, an unabashed supporter of LBJ’s Vietnam policy, was invited to speak at IU. Jeff, his new friends and other students from various campus groups mounted a protest demonstration against the former vice president outside the auditorium. Lundin happened to be walking by, spotted the signs and fell in with the marching demonstrators.

 

Jeff and fellow activists organized the IU chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the fast-growing national outfit taking the lead in the embryonic antiwar movement. When the group needed a faculty sponsor to become an official campus organization, Professor Lundin stepped forward to fill the role. Being a rather modest person, it’s doubtful that many of the SDS activists were aware of their faculty adviser’s long activist career on the right side of history.

 

Not long after Jeff finished at IU and went on to found Vietnam GI out of Chicago, Leonard Lundin again displayed the courage of his convictions in what may have been his finest moment as a champion of reason and fairness. It was fall ’67, and SDS and the larger umbrella group, the Committee to End the War in Vietnam (CEWV), had grown frustrated with the series of major pro-war speakers brought to campus by the president, Elvis Stahr, a former Secretary of the Army.††† In November, yet another super hawk was due to speak, Secretary of State Rusk.

 

The antiwar coalition decided to escalate its protest tactics. They began with the familiar demonstration outside the speaker’s venue, but this time they then entered the auditorium and carried out a planned heckling campaign against Rusk. The Secretary kept his cool – in the third year of an increasingly unpopular war he was clearly no stranger to protest – but the activists’ behavior was  unpopular with the majority of the audience who had come to hear a major public figure.

 

Secretary of State Rusk at IU

 

Rusk left under police escort, and the next day near universal condemnation from both town and gown rained down upon the protestors. Whether pro or con on the war, the consensus was that calculated rudeness to a visiting speaker had crossed a line. While antiwar protesters had always been a small minority on campus, that had never been more evident than when 14,000 students signed a letter of apology delivered personally by student council members to Secretary Rusk.

 

There was, however, one lone voice that defended the protestors in a not uncritical, but reasoned manner to the effect that the Secretary of State was more than merely a senior officer of the government. He was also a central symbol of the war itself. In an open letter Leonard Lundin conceded that the protestors conduct had been unmannerly, but added the caveat that Rusk had come to campus as a:

 

                    very high official and active director

                    of events, a foremost representative and

                    presumably one of the architects of our

                   war policy, a symbolic figure, a sort of

                   ‘Mr Vietnam War’.

He continued, “It is not easy to be polite to someone who seems determined to make you a corpse, an arsonist, a murderer, or a bully.”

Concluding, Professor Lundin forcefully argued:

                    possibly there are worse things than
                    bad manners toward a public speaker.
                    Possibly one worse thing is a government
                    lying to its people.****

Leonard Lundin certainly did not win all his engagements, but he remained steadfast throughout the years in his intent to bear witness for what was right – a singular man.

*C L Lundin, Indiana University Oral History Interview (1994), 8.

**A W Mommer, “State Loyalty Programs and the Supreme Court,” Indiana Law J, 43:2 (1968), 462, fn 3.

***J C Bell, The Time and Place That Gave Me Life (2007), 211.

****T D Clark, Indiana University, Vol 3 (1977), 598-99.

Links to previous posts:

†     http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/06/maverick-mentor.html 

††   http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/12/unsung-hero-of-gi-resistance.html

††† http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-generals-march-on-indiana.html and  http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/08/elvis-and-new-left-at-indiana.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                  

 

 

 

         

 

 

Antiwarriors Mobilize – Brothers Divergent

Brother Jeff and I returned to the States in the late spring of ’64, he from the Vietnam War still in its infancy, and I from the Soviet Union. I had just finished a year’s study of Marxist legal theory at Moscow University Law School. While I had been studying Communism, Jeff had been fighting it in Southeast Asia. How our experiences shaped us couldn’t have been more different.

We met again that summer at our parents’ place in Coral Gables outside Miami. It was an all too brief reunion – Jeff and I both had to get on with our stateside lives. I headed north to Washington to finish up research on my doctoral dissertation at the Library of Congress. Jeff went west, back to Indiana University (IU) – where I was taking my PhD – to complete his undergraduate education.†

Back from Vietnam – Jeff in Florida, Summer ‘64

A half year later Jeff and I were again off on our different trajectories, I starting my academic career at the University of Missouri (Mizzou), Jeff beginning spring term at IU. I was teaching introductory courses on politics and international relations along with an upperclass course on Soviet politics with no prior classroom experience.

 

Jeff was taking a full course load, including US and comparative politics, American intellectual history, a course on the novel, and a course on totalitarian political patterns—totalitarianism at the time was very much in vogue as a descriptor of Soviet Bloc and Asian communist regimes. Colleagues and I would later successfully challenge the concept, but that’s another story.

 

Meanwhile back in South Vietnam (SVN), the low-key war had been steadily heating up. The South Vietnamese army (ARVN), assisted by some 15,000 US military advisers, was fighting a communist guerrilla insurgency against the Viet Cong (VC) supported by North Vietnam (NVN). The war was not going well for SVN, which had persuaded the late President Kennedy (JFK) to accede to the South Vietnamese generals’ coup against President Diem in November ’63.

 

Unfortunately, the situation in Saigon had only grown worse following the coup. A junta of generals, divided among themselves, could not effectively govern. Political instability combined with military ineptitude weighed down the floundering regime. A second coup toppled the junta a few months later.  Then followed a series of coups and attempted coups throughout ‘64. None of this confusion was lost on the VC, nor on their military mentors in the North. By early ’65, the VC had achieved de facto control of large parts of the country.

 

All this produced alarm among the Washington policy makers. The CIA had forecast that the time was near when the VC could triumph. The US guarantee of the independence of a non-communist SVN was at stake. More and more, the emboldened VC were infiltrating the cities and populated areas specifically to attack US military facilities and places where American personnel gathered for recreation.

 

On January 20, 1965, President Johnson (LBJ) was inaugurated, and just two days at a confidential briefing of the congressional leadership he broadly intimated that he was about to begin bombing North Vietnam. All he needed was a pretext; the VC obliged in early February with a destructive attack on the American base at Pleiku in the Central Highlands, and LBJ responded with air strikes against NVN. A few days later, a concerned Jeff wrote me, “I could get recalled very easily (Ready Reserves, Vietnamese linguist, Intelligence experience).”

 

It was soon evident that the retaliatory strikes had been pre-planned dress rehearsals for a full-scale bombing campaign, code-named Rolling Thunder, that was launched in March. Marine combat battalions soon followed to secure the air bases from which strikes against the North were being flown. By those two abrupt moves, LBJ had dramatically escalated the war. The sudden exponential increase in American involvement in the civil war of a country most people couldn’t find on a map, in turn elicited a sharp negative reaction among faculty and students at a number of major universities.

♫We'll smash down your doors, we don't bother to knock
We've done it before, so why all the shock
We're the biggest and the toughest kids on the block
And we're the Cops of the World, boys
We're the Cops of the World††

The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor quickly became the focal point of opposition to the escalation. A number of UM students were veteran activists of the civil rights movement in the South, and the campus had a strong chapter of SDS, Students for a Democratic Society, a national organization formed there in the early ‘60s. Michigan was also home to a sizeable number of politically active professors. These forces came together to organize what became the first ‘Teach-In’ on Vietnam, an initial step toward what would eventually become a nationwide antiwar movement.

 

As a political and moral response to Washington, a group of Michigan faculty planned a one-day teaching strike. The strikers would refuse to teach their regular classes and instead spend the time introducing interested students to the critical issues of America’s war in Vietnam. Nearly 50 professors signed up, but Governor George Romney and the university president opposed the strike. At the 11^th hour, a compromise was reached: instead of cancelling classes, concerned faculty would teach their courses, but continue teaching through the night; thus was born the idea of a teach-in as a forum for informed protest.

 

 

Ann Arbor Teach-In Poster

 

The first teach-in began at 8 PM on Wednesday, March 24^th and went on through the night until daybreak the 25^th. The dorm curfew for women was suspended, greatly swelling the turnout to over 3,000 students; along with 200 faculty, it was the largest demonstration in the university’s history.

 

The main speakers were two academics with field experience in Vietnam who knew the country well, an economist from the East, and a Michigan State anthropologist. One speaker recited Vietnam’s long history of fending off invaders, while the other simply pronounced the war unwinnable.

 

 

University of Michigan Teach-In, March 24-25, 1965

At other colleges and universities, small groups of activists gathered to listen in to the Michigan speakers via telephone hook-ups. At IU, Jeff was undoubtedly one of the best informed on the subject, judging by the discussion of Vietnam in his letters from that period.

Activist Leaders at Indiana – Bernella & David Satterfield, ‘64

Thanks to national media coverage of the Michigan event, the teach-in format was soon replicated at over 100 other campuses, including the University of Missouri. At Mizzou, however, the organizers decided to stage a teach-in as a balanced debate between pro- and anti-Administration speakers. In contrast to brother Jeff’s growing opposition to US policy, I along with an American historian was the lead debater on the pro side of the question. We were opposed by two scholars of South Asia, one a political scientist, the other a historian.

 

For nearly five hours, the four of us debated US policy in Vietnam before an audience of 500+ students crammed into an auditorium in the Business School. The South Asian specialists both viewed the Vietnam conflict in historical and regional contexts, emphasizing the need for a negotiated settlement before the US got in too deeply. At the time as a JFK liberal internationalist, I looked at the problem within the framework of the bi-polar Soviet-American Cold War conflict.

 

The Cold War was then at an uncertain point. Khrushchev, a reformer, had been ousted from power in Moscow by a coalition of former Stalinists just six months earlier. Although he’d been aggressive in the international sphere (witness the Cuban Missile Crisis of ’62), the following year he’d agreed to JFK’s proposed treaty banning nuclear tests in the atmosphere – a very important step in the effort to slow down the dangerous arms race. By the spring of ’65 when I spoke at Mizzou, the full foreign policy intentions of Khrushchev’s successors, especially in the former colonial world now called the Third World, were by no means yet clear.

 

Hence, I saw Vietnam as a surrogate war between NVN, a Soviet and Chinese Communist ally, and SVN, a US ally. In those years, the US had put in place a policy of global ‘containment’ by means of an encircling network of bases and military alliances. The idea was to keep the Soviet empire and, by then, its rival Chinese sphere of influence, in check, i.e., not permit either the Soviets or the Chinese to extend the authoritarian communist model beyond their borders.

 

The US was particularly concerned about the Third World, which was undergoing rapid decolonialization that left power vacuums in its wake. South Vietnam was, of course, a Third World country; from a Cold War angle of vision, both the USSR and China were probing, via their proxy NVN and its agent, the VC, to expand the international communist domain to the South. No one, not even the ‘doves’ had any illusions that the North could carry the fight to the South without massive military and economic aid from the two giants of the Communist world.

 

After the debaters presented, the Mizzou audience was invited to pose questions or make short statements from the floor. In retrospect, the most prescient remark of that long afternoon was made by Professor William Allen, a noted young historian of Germany. He vigorously opposed US policy and advocated complete withdrawal from Vietnam. Of course, he was right.

♫It's written in the ashes of the village towns we burn

It's written in the empty bed of the fathers unreturned

And the chocolate in the children's eyes will never understand

When you're white boots marching in a yellow land†††

 

At the end of the debate, the moderator asked the audience to signal by applause which set of arguments they found most persuasive. While both sides found support, by dint of applause, the pro-Administration position seemed to prevail.

 

Most notable of the post-Michigan teach-ins were the national teach-in in mid-May and the ‘mother’ of all teach-ins that season, the huge one at Berkeley toward the end of the month. At the national event in Washington, broadcast live on radio and television throughout the country, two leading specialists on Vietnam, Kahin of Cornell and Scalapino of Berkeley, duked it out.

 

The Berkeley affair attracted an aggregate of 30,000 participants from the San Francisco Bay area listening to nearly 50 speakers over a period of 36 hours, by far the longest and the largest teach-in that spring. Although not intended as a balanced debate, at least one pro-Administration speaker was included. He and the lead-off presenter ended up as polar opposites in the spectrum of comments at the teach-in – one wildly idealistic, the other darkly dystopian.

 

A historian from Yale opened the teach-in, proposing civil disobedience so massive and persistent that LBJ and his war cabinet “will forthwith resign.”* At the other end of the spectrum, a Berkeley political scientist foresaw – absent continued US resistance – SVN as “Communist totalitarian regime” with a regimented population wakened in the mornings to the sound of bugles and forced to work long days in pursuit of the regime’s goals.**

 

That first turbulent spring of the newly escalated American war in Vietnam came to an end with what would become legions of ‘antiwarriors’*** mobilizing on the nation’s campuses. As for Jeff and me, our respective academic business finished for the summer, we continued our separate ways – he off to Mexico to hang out with friends; I to Washington to advise on US-USSR arms control. Brothers divergent.

 

*L Menashe, ed, Berkeley Teach-In: Vietnam (1966), 3

**Ibid

***The term is from Melvin Small, Antiwarriors: The Vietnam War and the Battle for America’s Hearts and Minds (2002)† 

 

http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/08/good-life-at-presidio.html

†† Cops of the World: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaTbI7FCLl0

††† White Boots Marching in a Yellow Land:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fq42reX_MPA