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

Peace Corpsmen and War Hawks

Though thousands of miles apart in spring ‘64, my kid brother Jeff Sharlet and I were both wrapping up our time abroad – I following a research year in Moscow, Jeff finishing a military tour in Vietnam. He was heading back to finish college, and I – well, I wasn’t quite sure until one surprising day when out of the blue an international cable arrived offering me an academic position teaching students at a salary of $8,000. That sounds like poverty scale now, but nearly half a century ago it seemed munificent. Accustomed to $3,000 graduate fellowships, I swiftly cabled my acceptance.

Jeff and I finished up at about the same time in May ’64. He hopped a flight back to Saigon, his orders permitting a week’s leave in the South Vietnamese capital where he rendezvoused with buddies from the Army Language School in California. All of them Vietnamese linguists, they helped Jeff say a long goodbye to the Paris of the Orient and its night spots.

Saigon ladies in ao dai and French-built Saigon City Hall 1963

 

Mine was a quieter departure. My Soviet colleagues came to the Belorussky Station bearing flowers and candy to see me off. We said our goodbyes, and I went aboard the overnight train to Poland. Compared to austere Moscow, Warsaw with its blonde barmaids and cold beer felt like the ‘West’ – though I was still in the Soviet empire.

 

From Saigon, Jeff flew to Clark Air Base in the Philippines, home station of his unit, the 9^th ASA, an Army Security Agency battalion. After a few days of exit processing, he boarded a military transport for the long haul across the Pacific with stops in Guam and Hawaii, finally landing at Travis Air Base north of San Francisco. My trip back was more circuitous. I made my way from Warsaw to Prague, then south to Yugoslavia. From Belgrade, I caught a transcontinental sleeper to Paris, a remnant of the famed Orient Express, and flew to New York.

 

 

 

Travis Air Base, northern California

 

Jeff and I soon returned to our respective academic haunts – he at Indiana University (IU), I at my new post at the University of Missouri (Mizzou). We were both in Political Science, Jeff a student, I a professor. By Spring term ’65, he was flourishing in his courses while I continued learning my craft.

 

By then the low intensity war Jeff left behind was heating up, and he grew concerned he might be recalled. As the first specialist on the USSR at Mizzou, I was preoccupied with teaching my course on Soviet politics & law. When President Johnson (LBJ) escalated the conflict with combat troops and bombing runs against the North a few months later, Jeff and I were on divergent paths. Each of us had our wars; for me it was the global Cold War, for him opposition to the Vietnam War, a very personal fight.

 

Jeff gravitated toward IU’s small band of New Left activists protesting LBJ’s new war policy; I signed on with the Administration to prepare for arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union. I had taken to heart President Kennedy’s (JFK) inaugural challenge: to “….ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

 

Our respective commitments dictated our summer plans. Jeff would hang out in Bloomington as the activist group laid the foundations for a chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) at IU; I took off for the University of Wisconsin in Madison to work on the arms control project. By the time I returned to Mizzou in September ’65, Jeff and fellow activists had SDS up and running at IU. Soon after they were part of a protest demo when Nixon spoke on campus in support of Vietnam policy.

 

Meanwhile the United States Peace Corps Agency (PCA) was training a flood of volunteers for work in underdeveloped countries collectively known as the ‘Third World’. The idea was to assist development in backward nations at the grass roots level, making the foreign aid blandishments of Soviet agents less appealing.

 

 

 

 

Mizzou was the site of the program for Thailand, a Southeast Asian country hosting American bases for the air war against North Vietnam, hence of strategic importance to the US. The volunteers were being trained in ‘Community Development’ or, in the glossary of Washington acronyms, CD. Thai language instruction was part of the curriculum. A young professor of Agriculture, a specialist in bovine diseases, was in charge.

 

Learning how to foster CD would mean placement in small villages in rural Thailand where Peace Corps volunteers would first assess local socio-economic resources, then strive to mobilize villagers to carry out manageable quality of life projects like bridging a small waterway to facilitate movement of crops from farm to market or water purification projects to ward off disease. However, PCA’s real purpose was neither bridges nor wells, but helping instill in locals, long under the spell of fatalism, a sense of community efficacy as a way of taking greater charge of their lives.

 

The Mizzou Peace Corps office invited me to lecture to the trainees. They would need to know the competition they’d be up against in the Thai countryside, and I was the one with a background in Marxism. I agreed and delivered several lectures on Communist political revolution and the Soviet strategy for rapid modernization. Apparently feedback was good because toward the end of ‘65 a PCA official flew in from Washington to talk with me.

 

The Agency was launching a major two-summer experimental program and had selected Mizzou to pioneer it. Previously trained only stateside, volunteers would also receive training in-country to facilitate language instruction and physical and psychological conditioning. I was offered the position of project director and $10,000 above my academic salary. Intrigued by the challenge and drawn by the extra money, I readily said yes.

 

The program involved a great deal of advance planning which took all my spare time outside of teaching. I had an office at the Mizzou PCA headquarters, an administrative assistant, a letterhead, and a hot line direct to Washington. First tasks were to create a curriculum for the new program, then recruit people to teach it, ideally academics with field experience as well as expertise on Southeast Asia, traditional societies, community development, and Thai language instruction.

 

To look after the volunteers’ physical and mental well-being, I also needed a staff physician, preferably one with some knowledge of tropical maladies, along with a psychiatrist and a phys ed instructor. I recruited mostly Mizzou faculty, but when necessary telephoned around the country until I found the right person.

 

While I was busy preparing to help ‘save’ Thailand for the West, up at Indiana Jeff and the SDS-ers were planning protests against the war in Vietnam. In late February ’66, General Maxwell Taylor, the WWII hero, arrived at IU – as the historian of the university put it – as an “apologist”* for Washington on the war. No surprise there, the general was invited by the IU president, Elvis Stahr, JFK’s former Secretary of the Army.† Taylor had served both JFK and LBJ on the ‘Vietnam front’, first as presidential military adviser, then as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon, and finally as US Ambassador to South Vietnam.

 

Anxious that there might be a militant confrontation against his ‘friend’ the general, President Stahr took no chances in his introduction, devoting most of it to defending free speech for visiting dignitaries with minimal reference to the distant conflict driving the demonstrators to protest Taylor’s presence. Although the general was deeply implicated in the war policy, the occasion of his speech was a Midwestern Model UN General Assembly, so SDS decided to give their demo a positive spin. One of the Indiana senators, Vance Hartke, had criticized the war; hence Jeff and the activists marched in support of Senator Hartke, war critic.

 

 

General Maxwell Taylor at IU, February ‘66

 

Meanwhile back at Mizzou I was preoccupied filling out myriad forms and questionnaires required by Washington for my trip to Thailand. Especially time-consuming was the special form for Americans traveling abroad on government business. Questions included family demographics, military service, all the addresses I’d ever lived at, and previous employment. Then there were the daily immunizations against many exotic diseases, including cholera and yellow fever, both painful shots with lingering side effects.

 

By early spring the project was shaping up – curriculum approved and staff recruited, I was set to visit ‘the field’ as soon as classes ended for the midterm break. It was to be a brief visit to the training site in Thailand. Working in my Peace Corps office one afternoon, I received an unusual call from Washington, from an official with whom I’d had no previous contact.

 

The caller identified himself as the Agency’s Deputy General Counsel, and explained that he was calling about the travel clearance form I had submitted. I laughed and said that must have been an easy approval since I had held Top Secret and Cryptographic security clearances while serving with ASA-Europe during the ‘50s. On the contrary, he politely responded, that’s the problem.

 

                     You wrote you were in an Army intelligence

                     organization and Peace Corps has a firm rule.
                     No one with an intelligence background can
                     work for us abroad.

Puzzled and with yellow fever vaccine still raging through my system, I replied, “For chrissake! That was nearly a decade ago in the old brown-shoe army. I’m discharged, not even in the Reserves.” He reiterated that it was a firm rule and invoked the Cold War, which of course framed American involvement in Southeast Asia. “Look,” he calmly reasoned, “what would happen if they found out about your Army experience, and broadcast into the field that we’re sending secret agents out there. It’d be all over.”

Suddenly my deep background in Soviet Studies kicked in, and I thought to myself, of course he’s right. It’s a question of perceptions, appearances; the truth has nothing to do with it. We were locked in a struggle with the Soviets for hearts and minds in the Third World. Peace Corps was one of our instruments in the contest. Likewise, the USSR sent thousands of advisers into most of the same countries – agronomists, doctors, teachers as agents of social change promoting their development strategy.

Intellectual ruminations aside, I quickly and angrily got back to reality. I told the messenger that Peace Corps had been aware of my background as far back as the fall when I submitted paperwork to Washington to serve as one of their lecturers. I had even appended my professional resume that included my military service and the Certificate of Merit awarded attesting to my ability in Czech when I left the Army Security Agency.

“You’ve known all this for half a year – why the hell didn’t the man you sent out to recruit me for Thailand inform you of the ‘problem’ at the outset?” The lawyer at the other end smoothly replied, “Sorry about that, he’s a new man. Afraid he didn’t know the rule. I’m really sorry, but got to go.” Click.

As my plans for Thailand went into retreat, Jeff and SDS were mobilizing to confront yet another Vietnam war hawk headed for Indiana. Stahr had invited General Lewis Hershey to speak. A native Hoosier who had attended IU in 1915, Hershey had visited campus a number of times over the years. The general was well-known as the long-time director of the Selective Service System, known to every young male coming of age as ‘the draft'.

♫Dear Uncle Sam

I just got your telegram

And I can't believe that this is me

Shaking like I am

For it said, "I'm sorry to inform you”††

 

By ’66, the Vietnam conflict had become a major war with US troop totals surging toward 200,000. This meant soaring draft calls for young men across the country.  While college students had been deferred, General Hershey had recently issued a policy change subjecting poorly performing students to the draft. In his plain-spoken, folksy manner, Hershey’s topic was the necessity of the draft.

♫Kiss me goodbye and write me while I’m gone

Goodbye my sweetheart, Hello Vietnam†††

 

Heartened by the success of its foray against General Taylor, SDS planned a large demonstration for Hershey’s appearance, complete with speakers including Jeff, the only Vietnam veteran in the chapter. Other IU students organized a counter-demo in support of the war. On the day of Hershey’s speech, about 2,000 students, pro and con Vietnam, turned out at Showalter Fountain in front of the auditorium. 

 

 

General Lewis Hershey
 

Vastly outnumbered, the 300 antiwar marchers remained calm in the face of catcalling, heckling, and even egg-throwing. A historian wrote that in spite of the provocations, the protestors paraded in orderly fashion “thus making their point even more strongly.”** IU SDS had succeeded in elevating the Vietnam War to a campus-wide issue.

While Jeff and fellow activists enjoyed successes against the war hawks at Indiana, my relations with Peace Corps had deteriorated. Washington’s belated invocation of its ‘firm rule’ to abort my mission to Thailand had thrown my professional schedule and personal finances into disarray. I was not pleased.

Long story short: I owed Wisconsin a second summer on the arms control project, but managed to get my obligation deferred until fall ‘66. This in turn necessitated an unpaid leave of absence from Mizzou. I had expected to recover the lost income from Peace Corps, but I now found myself behind the financial 8-ball; the only thing to show for my effort was surefire protection against yellow fever for the next ten years.

Holding Washington responsible for my dilemma, I insisted on partial compensation for the time put in. No way, responded the General Counsel’s office, my contract with the agency didn’t formally begin until June, and federal law did not permit payment until services were rendered. I turned to the university to take up my case. Somehow when I had been appointed project director, the Ag prof who preceded me had morphed into a special assistant to the chancellor for Peace Corps liaison.

 

He was of no help, Mizzou’s hands were tied, they were under contract to PCA and subject to federal law. I pressed my claim with Washington to the point where they warned the university that my pursuit of the matter could endanger pending negotiations on contract renewal. Apparently an additional program was in the offing – Bolivia. Aha, I thought, now I’m getting somewhere – leverage.

 

When I was summoned to the chancellor’s office, I figured I’d finally get some satisfaction. Wrong. When I entered, an unusual scene greeted me. Five chairs were lined up in front of a desk resembling the prow of a ship, four of them occupied by the hierarchy of administrators – in descending order – who stood between me and the CEO sitting in silence behind the desk. He motioned me to the empty seat at the end.

 

I waited to hear what the chancellor had to say, but he never addressed me. Instead he spoke rhetorically to the executive vice president asking him, “Does Professor Sharlet understand the importance of the Peace Corps contract to the university.” Having never met me, the VP couldn’t be sure, turned to the Dean of Faculty and on down the line to the junior Ag prof at my left, now a flack for the front office. He nodded affirmatively.

 

And so the mime conversation went on, with the man in the big chair posing a series of self-evident if-then questions about the adverse effect on Mizzou’s well-being because of my insistence on compensation. That is, until I interrupted and cogently informed the chancellor of the adverse consequences for me of Peace Corps’ bureaucratic blundering. I closed, advising him I intended to continue to pursue the issue until my concerns were met, and left without further ado.

 

Furious now with Mizzou as well as Peace Corps and having exhausted normal remedies for relief, I fired off a special delivery letter to Washington putting them on notice that my next communication would be to a senior US senator and member of the Foreign Relations Committee, a friend of the family.

 

That did it; I had pushed the right button. Within 24 hours the university informed me a check was being cut per my request.

 

Thailand, the ancient Kingdom of Siam, managed to remain apart from the violence and turmoil in Southeast Asia as the ferocity of the war in Vietnam grew exponentially. Though I was no longer available to do battle with Soviet agents of change in the Third World, Jeff would later go on to make a significant contribution to bringing an end to America’s long, divisive war in Vietnam – but that’s another story.

 

† http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/08/elvis-and-new-left-at-indiana.html

 

Links to music videos

 

††Dear Uncle Sam:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzHDrj56c7Q

†††Hello Vietnam:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fs4puvFVRmI

*Thomas D. Clark, Indiana University: Midwestern Pioneer, Vol 3 (1977), 592.

**Ibid, 593.