M-16, or 'The Little Black Rifle That Wouldn’t Shoot'

In Vietnam GI’s (VGI) first issue of January ’68, Editor Jeff Sharlet ran a front page story under a bold, large cap title calling attention to problems with the M-16 rifle. What was this about?

For those of us who soldiered in the Cold War ‘50s, the trusty M-1 was the standard US infantry rifle of the day. A long, heavy semi-automatic rifle which took an 8-round clip, the M-1 had carried us to victory in Europe and the Pacific in WWII. By the end of the ‘50s however, it had been superseded by the new M-14, also a big rifle, but a fully automatic one, which carried a 20-round box clip, used a heavier more powerful bullet, and maintained a much faster rate of fire at a longer range. It seemed like the Army and Marines had their new battlefield weapon for the long term.

Then came Vietnam. Not the big frontal war on the plains of Europe the Pentagon strategists and weapons designers had planned for, but small unit, close-up warfare in an unforgiving jungle terrain favoring the enemy’s hit & run guerrilla tactics. For American military personnel advising the South Vietnamese Army in the early ‘60s, it soon became apparent that the long (nearly 4 ft) and heavy M-14 was no match in combat for the Soviet-style AK-47 assault rifle carried by the Viet Cong (VC) and troops of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA).

As US involvement in what became its Vietnam quagmire deepened, the Pentagon in haste accelerated the development, testing, and deployment of a new basic firearm, a prototype of the M-16, called the AR-15 assault rifle. Standard procedure of seeking competitive designs and bids for a new weapon was ignored, and instead Colt, armorer to the cowboy era, which had acquired the rights to the future M-16 as a lightweight weapon with a black plastic stock, got the nod. In Secretary of Defense McNamara’s rush to deploy the rifle once the US escalated in spring ’65, unresolved flaws in the weapon, familiar to the manufacturer, were disregarded as M-16’s were shipped to the combat zone.

M-16 rifle

In one of the early skirmishes with the VC during spring ’65, an airborne unit suffered “many casualties” when a number of M-16’s jammed. Later the same outfit would report that a number of rifles had blown up, killing one GI in the process. Yet in its first major battle in November ’65, the new rifle was given unqualified good marks by the field commander in spite of the fact that the M-16 had only been issued to his troops 10 days in advance with little time for familiarization on the weapon. Did the new rifle really perform well, or was the colonel just practicing good military politics for the M-16’s debut? The occasion was the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley, which pitted the NVA against the new US 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) in heavily forested jungle terrain of South Vietnam’s Central Highlands. Leading the way were elements of the 7th Cavalry Regt, on its first outing since Custer, which was nearly wiped out after unwittingly stumbling into an ambush in an the area where three battle-hardened NVA regiments were bivouacked.

Only through the extraordinary valor of the American GIs backed by massive firepower and air support did the unit survive the hellish four days of the battle, albeit with very heavy casualties. However, the NVA losses were greater, leading US HQ Saigon and Washington to begin the Vietnam spin game, depicting the outcome as a great victory. Simultaneously, Ho Chi Minh and his generals studied the results and also declared victory. In reality, the fighting on the ground, often hand to hand, was closer to a draw.

♫The eastern world, it is exploding

Violence flarin', bullets loadin'…*

The conversion from the M-14 to its successor M-16 continued through ’66 as the number of US forces in Vietnam rapidly increased. Sporadic, scattered reports of the M-16 jamming in combat situations were duly filed, but generally ignored by the command structure. However, by early ’67, the problem, which had become the cause of casualties as GIs and Marines found themselves in deadly firefights with malfunctioning weapons, could no longer be ignored. Grunts were writing home about the jams, sending letters to hometown papers.

By then Colt was well aware, to put it euphemistically, of customer dissatisfaction among ground troops, but treated the matter as a confidential company issue which they hoped to resolve by re-engineering the M-16. The Pentagon, or at least parts of it, was also now aware that the rifle was costing US lives, but in classic CYA decided to classify the reports and restrict circulation to a Need to Know basis, lest the occupants at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue learn the seriousness of the matter.

However, the inevitable constituents’ letters began reaching Congress, and a special House investigative subcommittee was created in May ’67 led by Congressman Ichord of Missouri. Officers and NCO’s had tried to signal superiors through channels, but consistently ran into the standard command response, i.e., the M-16 was a fine rifle; the fault lay with troops not cleaning their weapons properly. Finally, out of concern for his men and in disregard for his career, a Marine junior officer made an end run around the brass, sending a well-documented letter simultaneously to the Washington Post, Senator Robert Kennedy, Congressman Ichord, and his local paper. He revealed that after one engagement, no fewer than 40 of his men reported rifle malfunctions to him, effectively blowing the lid off the Pentagon’s cover-up.

The word was out, the military had sent men into battle with an unproven rifle, and many troops had been found dead next to their stripped down M-16’s. The weapons had fatally jammed, leaving them defenseless against determined adversaries. As one night patrol leader radioed, “out of hand grenades, all weapons jammed.” When a relief column reached the position the next morning, all were dead.

As VGI reported to its GI and Marine readers in the first issue, the sources of the M-16’s problems were well known, both to Colt’s engineers and to the Pentagon’s ordnance brass. The M-16 had originally been issued to the combat infantry as a weapon which required little maintenance, one that could fire longer without cleaning than any other rifle in existence. As a result, minimal and inadequate cleaning materials were provided to the troops. Notwithstanding US technological hubris, the weapon frequently jammed due to incompatible ammo at an exceptionally high rate of fire which left a residue, fouling the firing chamber – even after a thorough cleaning.

As VGI wrote, once “the fat was in the fire” in Washington, the military began ordering necessary design changes, including replacement of the ammo and the use of chrome in the firing chamber, barrel, and bolt, of the new model M-16, making it less susceptible to corrosion and jamming. However during ‘67, US troop levels in Vietnam were approaching half a million. Replacing or refitting hundreds of thousands of M-16s in the midst of hard and constant fighting would be neither quick nor easy.

Meanwhile the Congressional committee and the general public were treated to tragic stories of men’s lives lost in vain due to the M-16’s journey through the military bureaucracy “marked by salesmanship, sham science, cover-ups, chicanery, incompetence, and no small amount of dishonesty by a gun manufacturer and senior American military officers.”** Time quoted a wounded Marine’s letter home recounting the disaster which had befallen his unit in battle during late spring ’67:

We left with 72 men in our platoon and came back with 19. … I
just caught a little shrapnel. I wish I could say the same for all my
buddies. … believe it or not, you know what killed most of us? Our
own rifle … the M-16. Practically every one of our dead was found
with his rifle torn down next to him where he had been trying to
fix it. ***

Inevitably, once the press got hold of the story, comparisons were made to the enemy’s weapon of choice – the Soviet designed Kalashnikov, aka the AK-47. Heavier with a slower rate of fire than the M-16 (when it fired), the AK-47 was a sturdy, durable rifle with a large banana clip, a weapon which rarely misfired or jammed, ideally suited to Third World battlefield conditions. In contrast, GIs and Marines, stuck with an unreliable weapon, nicknamed their M-16’s the ‘Mattel Toy, or the ‘Little Black Rifle That Wouldn’t Shoot’.

NVA soldier with AK-47, Battle of Hue, ‘68

A Marine platoon Sgt, whose unit had been plagued by jammed M-16s in the heat of firefights during spring ‘68, picked up an AK-47 he found on the battlefield. A senior officer, spotting him in base camp with the rifle slung across his back, challenged him, “Gunny, why the hell are you carrying that?” The Gunnery Sgt replied, “Because it works”**** – Sir.

In late ’67, the Congressional subcommittee had issued its sharply worded report that the M-16’s malfunctions were “serious and excessive,” and the Army and the Marine Corps had been negligent. Too late though for a number of guys whose names would later go up on the wall of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington.

*Eve of Destruction by P.F. Sloan, 1965
**C.J. Chivers, The Gun (2010)
***Time, June 9, 1967
****Esquire, October 27, 2010

Surveilling and the Surveilled

I once had a brother; I remember him fondly. He died in 1969 at the age of 27, and I have been ‘searching’ for him since. My brother was much younger, so the trajectories of our lives often found us far apart geographically—never more so than the year 1963-64 when I was studying in Moscow while brother Jeff Sharlet was at a remote military outpost west of Saigon, the South Vietnamese capital. Jeff was a GI in an intelligence outfit; I was a graduate student researching my PhD dissertation. He was a Vietnamese linguist with the US Army Security Agency (ASA) under the aegis of NSA-Washington, the National Security Agency; I was a visiting scholar at Moscow University Law School. Jeff’s regular assignment was the North Vietnamese Army’s communications traffic; my preoccupation was Marxist legal philosophy, the language of my daily life, Russian.

That year the war in Vietnam, at least the American part of it, was still in its infancy, a low intensity guerrilla insurgency fought in the shadows. As such, Vietnam was just a set piece in the global Cold War, the dangerous rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States. In early ’61, President Kennedy (JFK) had begun building up US forces in South Vietnam, sending thousands of additional military advisors, including elite Special Forces as well as squadrons of helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft. At the superpower level of the larger Cold War, JFK and Khrushchev, leaders of the two great adversaries, presided over their respective spheres of influence. Each commanded thousands of nukes as well as the means of lethal delivery.

Both the Cold War writ large and its smaller regional offshoot in Southeast Asia, former French Indochina, had their origins in 1945 in the wake of WWII. That year Ho Chi Minh had declared Vietnam’s independence from the French Empire, igniting the first Indochina war as the French struck back at their colony. By ’54, the Viet Minh, a guerrilla army of Vietnamese Communists and nationalists, finally defeated France. However, reflecting the bipolar Soviet-American world, independent Vietnam was divided at the 17th parallel into the Communist North, a Soviet ally; and non-communist South Vietnam, a US client state. Several years later, North Vietnam secretly launched an insurgency in the South aimed at overthrowing the Saigon regime of President Diem and unifying the country under the red flag with a yellow star.

By contrast, the Cold War was a far more visible and dramatic conflict – beginning with the Soviet blockade of West Berlin and the US Berlin Airlift of ’48; the USSR’s explosion of its first A-bomb in ’49, ending the US monopoly; the beginning of the Korean War in ’50; the continuing Berlin crises of the ‘50s, culminating in the erection of the Berlin Wall in ’61; and, of course, the most dangerous moment in the long Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis of ’62.

I was in Moscow shortly thereafter, fortunate to have been chosen as a member of the small American academic group under the umbrella of the US-USSR Cultural Exchange Agreement of 1958. Jeff was part of a larger contingent of ASA personnel in Vietnam. I was in the Soviet Union for the academic year 1963-64; Jeff, too, was scheduled to leave Vietnam and head back to the States in late spring ‘64. First, though, we had to reach our destinations a world apart. As an internal political crisis intensified in South Vietnam during summer ’63, Jeff and a team of linguists were quickly flown from their base in the Philippines (PI) to Saigon in late August. The South Vietnamese generals were quietly planning a coup against Diem with Washington’s blessings. However, since the US had a political stake in Vietnam within its overriding struggle with the USSR, JFK wanted to be sure he was privy to the generals’ plans. Hence, Jeff and crew were posted to an Army Signal Battalion facility outside the capital – off in a distant corner of the base where they hooked up to giant antennas for clandestinely surveilling the coup plotters’ communications. The equipment was manned around the clock.

Signal base at Phu Lam, giant circular antennas visible right background

I made it to Moscow a month later – by ship, truck, and train. I crossed the North Atlantic by ocean liner, then the North Sea and the Baltic Sea up through the Gulf of Finland by a smaller Soviet passenger ship. Arriving at the port of Leningrad at the mouth of the River Neva, I and fellow students were met by a taciturn fellow driving a beat-up WWII-vintage army truck, the kind shipped to the beleaguered Soviet Army by the hundreds under the US Lend Lease Plan. The truck carried us and our luggage through the rain slicked streets of the city to the train station where we boarded the ‘Red Arrow’, the night express to Moscow.

I settled into the Lenin Hills dorms of Moscow University fairly smoothly. Few students were around. It was harvest time in the Soviet Union and the majority of the law students were thousands of miles away on the steppes of Soviet Kazakhstan, helping the peasants bring in the wheat crop. Upon completion of their so-called ‘social obligation’ to society, the students returned to the capital by special trains in late September when the Soviet academic year was scheduled to begin. I finally met my Soviet roommate, Volodya, a tall, lantern-jawed Russian of about 25 with a strong handshake and a hearty bass voice. He made me quite welcome. Actually we were suite mates since each of us had a private bed-sitting room and shared a common foyer as well as semi-private facilities. Volodya hailed from Astrakhan on the lower Volga. Before entering law school, he’d worked as a stevedore on a Black Sea freighter. In the fall of ’63 he was beginning his senior year in Criminology, a Soviet law school discipline for training detective/investigators who worked with public prosecutors.

Moscow State University in the Lenin Hills

I was assigned to the Jurisprudence Department of the law school where the chair and nationally known Professor Doctor Denisov (Andrei Ivanovich once one became acquainted) became my Soviet advisor. He urged me to audit his courses in legal philosophy. I readily agreed and began my weekly routine of law classes and long hours of library research on my dissertation.

The law school was in a very old building on Herzen Street near the center of Moscow, a few blocks from the Lenin Library, the USSR’s equivalent of our Library of Congress, which stood within sight of the Kremlin walls. Getting to my destinations was a fairly long commute by bus and metro from the Lenin Hills, so once in downtown Moscow one usually spent the day, sometimes into the early evening. Meanwhile back at the dorm, aside from being friendly and helpful, Volodya had become very interested in my daily comings and goings.

Any time he heard me close my door to leave, he would pop out of his room and casually ask where I was going. During the week, invariably my answer was either ‘to the law school’ or ‘to the library’. Hearing me return later in the day, sometimes in the early evening since the library kept late hours, Volodya would appear again and with a big smile ask, ‘Otkuda’, where’ve you’ve been? I in turn would simply reiterate the day’s itinerary. This went on for weeks. He never tired of asking, and I unfailingly played my part in the friendly exchange. Curious, I checked with other visiting American scholars to see if anyone had noticed any unusual interest in their daily movements. No one. On the contrary, most reported that Soviet suite mates kept their distance, rarely initiating conversation.

Not surprising, since we were after all ‘bourgeois foreigners’ – there was no percentage for a future Soviet legal official getting too chummy with us in closely watched Moscow. I concluded that I had apparently been singled out by the mysterious powers that be – it was considered inappropriate in Soviet public etiquette to mention the secret police known as the KGB – for special attention. The likely reason, I surmised, was that I was the sole American in the dorms that year that had been in the military. I had been an ASA linguist based in Europe in the late ‘50s, and my classified work had involved the Soviet Bloc. Although that was all behind me and I was singularly focused on an academic career, one could never be sure what the Soviets knew about one’s background or, even less, what they thought about it.

Jeff in Vietnam and Volodya in Moscow had completed their respective surveillance duties by November. Jeff and fellow interpreter/translators had fed back to NSA-Washington on a daily basis all the South Vietnamese generals’ relevant conversations about the impending coup. On November 1st, the plotters struck, seizing power and assassinating Diem in the process. Volodya, too, had no doubt been conscientious, presumably passing his observations of my mundane movements up through channels, although on a less urgent schedule, probably weekly. Eventually somewhere across Moscow, a bureaucrat responsible for monitoring foreign students in the capital concluded, after weeks of reading Volodya’s monotonous reports, that I was in the USSR exactly as advertised, to assiduously study Soviet law and relentlessly research my PhD dissertation.

Mission completed, ASA flew Jeff back to the PI. Similarly, about the same time, Volodya from one day to the next ceased his incessant inquiries. His task finished and, nice guy that he was, he invited me to his room a few days later along with a few of his friends for a boozy celebration of the Anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the 46th for anyone counting. A flurry of за ваше здоровье’s* as we chugged vodka Russian-style.

Then one evening just a few weeks later, while hanging pictures in my room, I was stunned by the breaking news that JFK had just been assassinated, but that’s a story for another time.

*To your health.

John Wayne vs. Victor Charlie

In the wake of President Johnson’s major escalation of the Vietnam War in spring ’65, antiwar protest emerged and soon began to provoke a broad backlash. When presidents committed US troops in those days, the standard public response was to rally ‘round the flag in the spirit of ‘my country, right or wrong’. But the antiwar activists were obviously marching to the beat of a different drum. At first the antiwar movement drew mainly from college students as well as high school students in more liberal communities. Thousands of mainstream adults eventually joined the antiwar movement, usually through participation in major marches and demonstrations.

♫You and I travel to the beat of a different drum

Oh, can’t you tell by the way I run…*

But even at its peak later in the war, those active in the antiwar movement remained a small minority of the population. Most of the public accepted Washington’s dispatches on the war uncritically, but a sizeable number, especially in more conservative areas, strongly supported the war as well. These people were often critical of the young demonstrators, not least for their hippie-ish attire and behavior. The hippie movement was still young at the time, but highly visible through televised rallies in myriad places across the country. In many instances the Vietnam War divided families, with younger members in opposition and parents -- especially in veterans’ families -- supportive of the Administration. Even families of the Washington elite were riven by the war, including that of Secretary of Defense McNamara, whose children opposed the war policy he administered.

By the advent of ’64 there was broad social awareness of the Vietnam War. During ’63, gruesome front page photos of Buddhist monks publicly burning themselves alive in South Vietnam appeared, followed late in the year by extensive coverage of the South Vietnamese generals’ coup and the assassination of President Diem. These events were almost impossible to miss. Yet for Hollywood, 1964 was the year of now-classic films on the Cold War writ large. Seven Days in May with ‘General’ Burt Lancaster planning a coup against ‘President’ Frederic March about to sign a disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union; and the biting satire of Cold War nuclear politics, Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, with Peter Sellers in three unforgettable roles – played to huge audiences

The first year US combat troops were fully engaged against the Viet Cong (VC, aka Victor Charlie) and North Vietnamese Army (NVA), ‘65, brought more Cold War spy thrillers – The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and The Ipcress File – along with Hollywood’s continuing cinematic celebration of WWII, The Battle of the Bulge. Also playing that year, although in ‘art’ theaters to much smaller audiences, was a prescient French film, The Battle of Algiers, a black & white documentary-style depiction of France’s second defeat by a guerrilla army in a decade. Did anyone in McNamara’s whiz kid entourage at the Pentagon see this film at the arty movie house in Georgetown? I rather doubt it.

As the scale of war grew in faraway Vietnam and civil mobilization against the war increased on the country’s campuses and in its major cities, Hollywood remained silent and continued offering a slew of diverting movies, serious and not, on the theme of war. The system by which actors’ lives and contracts were completely controlled by their studios was on the wane, and the last thing the business-savvy moguls needed was picketing about the controversial Vietnam War outside their theaters. Audiences were treated instead to another taut Cold War spy movie in ‘66, Funeral in Berlin, as well as Steve McQueen’s compelling drama of an American gunboat caught in the Chinese Civil War during the ‘30s, Sand Pebbles.

On the lighter side of the Cold War, the movie industry offered The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming, a delightful comic tale of a Soviet submarine running aground off Long Island. In ’67 it was back to the heroics of WWII, The Dirty Dozen, but the first major film to reflect the new sensibility of the rapidly changing youth culture also appeared: The Graduate starred the inimitable Dustin Hoffman in a comedy drama portraying the dark side of the American dream. It was partly set in the San Francisco Bay Area, the confluence of the hippie culture and the rising anti-establishment sentiment of the restless young.

♫ Hello darkness, my old friend

I’ve come to talk with you again**

A number of prominent actors were critical of the Vietnam War, but John Wayne (known as ‘The Duke’ in Hollywood), perhaps the most popular star of his era, was not among them. Politically conservative, super patriot Wayne was highly supportive of the war and so anticommunist that legend has it that earlier Stalin (who actually liked Wayne’s movies) ordered his assassination—lucky for Wayne, Stalin died in ‘53 before the hit was carried out. In ’65 Wayne had visited the troops in Vietnam and wanted to make a movie presenting the war as a heroic undertaking by dedicated soldiers, a kind of celluloid response to the clamor of antiwar voices. However, none of the studios would touch a project so potentially fraught with controversy, so John Wayne took the matter in hand and produced The Green Berets with his own funds.

Taking time off from his standard fare of Westerns and WWII flicks, Wayne passed up the lead in The Dirty Dozen to star in and co-direct his Green Berets; the script was based on an Alamo-type story of the defense of an embattled Special Forces outpost nicknamed ‘Dodge City’. Wayne secured the cooperation of the White House and the Pentagon; Fort Benning in Georgia was made available along with assorted aircraft and authentic uniforms complete with insignia and name tags. Filming began during the summer of ’67. Not much notice was given on the post that the production was underway on a distant part of the base. Karen Ferb and her soldier husband Tom were at Benning at the time. One afternoon at the base pool they saw three Hueys fly over spewing clouds of purplish smoke. With many people unaware it was make-believe war, there was general panic poolside that day.

Theatrical Release Poster, ©Warner Brothers

Jeff Sharlet’s Vietnam GI (VGI) achieved a kind of scoop with a report from an involuntary extra within the production process on the shooting of The Green Berets. GI Maury Knutson was one of many Benning soldiers ‘lent’ to the Wayne production company by order of the camp commander (CO). The report was not Maury’s first appearance in VGI. While serving in Vietnam he’d been a staffer on a command-approved, but extremely irreverent unit paper that consistently mocked the military and the unit NCO’s. While the CO himself was tolerant of the paper, the NCO’s were not, so Maury and Little Giant editor Jim Pidgeon pulled a lot of extra duty as retaliation.

In a later issue of VGI, Maury Knutson, who by then had rotated back to Benning, gave an interview on how a GI could cope with Military Intelligence investigation (MI). He’d already had several run-ins with MI in Nam. Maury had kept a picture of Marshall Tito of Communist Yugoslavia over his bunk, while at Benning he had co-founded a hard-hitting underground GI antiwar paper, Rap! Maury’s advice to any GI summoned by MI was to show them you didn’t take them seriously. For instance, just after you get settled in the MI office and they’re about to ask their questions, “announce you have to go to the john and ask for a pencil or something so you can write some things on the wall.” When VGI asked what a guy says if asked for references for a investigation, Maury described how he handled it, offering the names of Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, Malcolm X’s widow, and his favorite bartender.

In Maury Knutson’s interview on his John Wayne Green Berets’ experience, billed by VGI as a ‘Movie Review’, he told how soldiers in his company were detailed daily to serve as extras in the movie. Reveille was at 4 am, they'd have chow, and then be driven to the movie location at the edge of the base where the production company had built sets typical of South Vietnamese villages and a replica of a Special Forces camp in the highlands. The extras were mainly used as VC  troops complete with uniforms, insignia, rank markings, and small fake wooden rifles. Maury, a small guy cast as a VC officer, can be spotted in one scene leading VC troops overrunning the Green Beret outpost, and in another when a bridge is blown and he falls in the water. For the long shooting days lasting sometimes until 8 at night, the extras were paid $1.40 an hour.

♫One hundred men will test today

But only three win the Green Beret***

David Janssen of The Fugitive and George Takei, Star Trek’s helmsman ‘Mr Sulu’, were first billed in Green Berets; husky Aldo Ray with his raspy voice, often a stock character in battle films, also starred. Maury’s comment: “Aldo Ray was a big star in the movie. We always had to stand around because he was so drunk they couldn’t start filming.” For many of the GI extras who had been raised on John Wayne war movies, seeing him in the flesh was a disappointment. Still in the aftermath of major cancer surgery, the hero of Sands of Iwo Jima was weak and tired easily. Green Berets was released on July 4th ’68. Combat GIs returning to Benning told Maury they didn’t think much of it: “The movie was a big joke, it wasn’t realistic at all. … God help the recruit who thinks that’s what war is like!” But John Wayne’s contribution to the war effort was a huge commercial success in spite of negative reviews. As Wayne himself said, “Nobody liked my acting but the public.”

Hollywood and John Wayne moved on. The familiar menu of ‘war’ films resumed in ’69 with The Battle of Britain; Topaz, another Cold War espionage film; and the French political thriller Z, based on the Greek anti-communist dictatorship. But that same year Easy Rider, the early independent film that launched Jack Nicholson’s career and became emblematic of the anti-establishment youth counterculture, was released. By 1970 WWII was back in the saddle with Patton, President Nixon’s favorite film; Tora! Tora! Tora!, a dramatization of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; and Kelly’s Heroes, a military caper film. Leavening that year’s traditional fare of war as glory and gain, however, was Robert Altman’s M.A.S.H., a satirical, black comedy antiwar film set during the Korean War.

Easy riders Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, and Jack Nicholson

As for John Wayne, he went on to make True Grit in ’69, for which he won his only Oscar – for Best Actor—the capstone of a long and mostly successful movie career. Even the Yippie radical Abbie Hoffman paid tribute to ‘The Duke’s’ singularity, saying, “I like Wayne’s wholeness, his style. As for his politics, well ….”

* Different Drum, by Mike Nesmith, 1967
** Sounds of Silence, by Paul Simon, 1965
*** Ballad of the Green Berets, by Staff Sgt Barry Sadler and Robin Moore, 1966

A Meeting in Stockholm

Men have deserted in all wars; the Vietnam War was hardly an exception. A soldier’s reasons for choosing to desert covered a wide spectrum. Personal grievances were often the driver, but opposition to the war was the overriding issue for quite a number of deserters in the case of Vietnam. The first notable political desertions were by the ‘Intrepid 4’, four sailors who jumped ship when their aircraft carrier Intrepid docked in Japan after conducting air operations off the coast of Vietnam. Assisted by Japanese peace activists, the four began a long journey through safe houses in Japan, by ship to the USSR, across the Soviet Union to Moscow, and finally to Sweden where they were granted temporary asylum. Arriving in Stockholm in late ’67, the Intrepid 4 were among the first of what became a gathering of US military deserters beginning in ’68.

Although the antiwar Swedish government would not grant political asylum, it did grant a temporary, renewable humanitarian asylum that permitted the deserters to remain in the country. When word got around the armed forces that Sweden was a sanctuary from US military justice, other deserters began to arrive – Bill Jones and others from US forces in Western Europe, Mark Shapiro and Terry Whitmore from US forces Vietnam via Japan and the USSR, and even several GIs from military posts in the United States along with a few American draft resisters.

In time, the deserter community in Stockholm and a few other Swedish cities grew to over 200. Along the way, an older American expat, Michel Vale, a Trotskyist and professional translator, arrived from West Germany and helped the deserters organize politically. They called their group the American Deserters Committee (ADC) with Bill Jones as its leader and Mark Shapiro and others on the governing committee. A major function of the ADC was to give the American deserters in Sweden a single voice, backed by numbers, for the purpose of lobbying the Swedish government on permanent asylum and immediate material support – housing, jobs and job-training, and language instruction.

The ADC also had a political agenda – to oppose the Vietnam War – but gradually the manifestation of its opposition became an internally divisive issue in the deserter community. One group took a hard line, not only opposing the war, but supporting the National Liberation Front (NLF), the underground shadow government in South Vietnam. Deserters, who were not comfortable with the ADC’s ideological stance, were much more concerned with the practical tasks of settling in Sweden and trying to normalize their lives.

Up to summer ’68, the deserters were a kind of ‘lost battalion’ of the emerging GI protest wing of the broad American antiwar movement. The ADC was concerned that its collective personal decisions to oppose the war through the act of desertion gain some visibility in the States, especially among the activists opposed to the war. Communication was established between Stockholm and the leadership of the US antiwar mobilization movement, the ‘Mobe’ for short. A joint decision was made to include the GI deserters as part of the opposition to the war. The decision was reached in part as the civilian movement in the States became increasingly aware of the rising antiwar protest in the ranks of active-duty GIs as well as ex-GIs. An overall plan was developed to incorporate GI protestors, including bringing US deserters in Europe into the Mobe. SDS, Students for a Democratic Society, took the lead.

Summer ’68 was declared ‘Summer of Support’ for GI protest. In late August, a Mobe delegation met with NLF reps in Communist East Europe. Initially, the meeting was scheduled for Prague, but the Soviet/Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia that overthrew the communist reform regime ruled out that venue. The meeting was relocated to Hungary. Bernardine Dohrn, a national officer of SDS, led the Budapest delegation that included Dave Komatsu, Jeff Sharlet’s associate editor, representing Vietnam GI (VGI). As a first step in bringing the Swedish group into the mainstream movement, several members of the ADC came down from Stockholm to represent the deserters

As the general plan unfolded, a high level SDS group visited Stockholm in September to parley with the ADC group, which was formally certified as a special chapter of the stateside organization. A statement welcoming the ADC into the American movement – signed by Dave Dellinger, titular head of the Mobe; three SDS leaders; representatives of the Black antiwar union; and a leading anti-draft organization – followed and was published in the ADC newsletter, Second Front. Then, in late October, a large delegation representing a cross-section of the US antiwar community under the auspices of Clergy and Laity Concerned about the War (CALCAV), arrived in Stockholm.

The CALCAV delegation of 16 strong had first stopped in Paris to confer with US deserters there. It included three theologians, Harvey Cox of Harvard Divinity School; Rev. Richard Neuhaus; and Michael Novak as well as John Wilson of SNCC, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee; Grace Paley, a well-known writer; several civil rights lawyers and mainstream journalists; academics from University of Michigan and University of California-Berkeley; and brother Jeff Sharlet, an ex-GI, representing the GI antiwar movement.

CALCAV delegates: Jeff (#9) standing left end; Bill Jones & Mark Shapiro, ADC, standing right

Dave Dellinger had asked Jeff to join the delegation coordinated by Martin Kenner, a Columbia University grad and leader of the large scale student strike at the university earlier that spring of ‘68. After graduation he had worked at the United Nations on economic development, later entering the New School for Social Research in lower Manhattan to pursue a PhD in the field. However, when the Columbia strike broke out, Kenner went uptown, assumed a leadership role, subsequently set aside his academic plans, and spent the next decade as a prominent social activist. (Decades later he would return to Columbia where he finally earned his PhD.)

The most important part of CALCAV’s three-day visit to Stockholm was a grand convocation held the first evening with the ADC leadership, a large number of the rank and file, and many Swedish antiwar activists in attendance. The meeting was convened in one of the city’s most notable public buildings, the Civic Center on Citizen’s Plaza in Stockholm’s southern section, where annual May Day parades begin. An impressive three-wing, Neoclassical Functionalist structure of yellow brick erected in the ‘30s with numerous windows to let in natural light, the building included a swimming pool and gym; a library; meeting rooms; a children’s theater; and a large auditorium named for a philanthropically inclined 19th c. snuff merchant, the venue in which CALCAV met with the ADC and the public.

The Civic Center as it looks today and the auditorium where the October 27, 1968, meeting was held

The Civic Center meeting was by design the kick-off event in ADC’s planned publicity campaign to better inform the Swedish public of the deserters’ situation. CALCAV’s principal purpose in lending its support was to legitimize the deserters as an integral part of the American opposition to the war writ large. The immediate issue for the ADC was the need for much greater material support from the Swedish government in order to project their image as a stable community and viable alternative for serving GIs who might be contemplating desertion. As chairman, Bill Jones spoke for the ADC, while four members of the delegation spoke on behalf of CALCAV and, more broadly, the US antiwar movement. Franz Schurmann, a distinguished Sinologist at Berkeley; Cox of Harvard; Wilson from SNCC; and the coordinator, Martin Kenner, all emphasized the American movement’s political support for the deserters, a strong message intended for the Swedish press and public.

A well-known Swedish novelist, Sara Lidman, had been invited and then rose to announce the formation of the ‘Swedish Friends of ADC’. Her novels depicted themes of alienation and loneliness of life in Sweden’s less populated northern region during the 19th c. As a Swedish activist, she also opposed Apartheid in South Africa and protested the Vietnam War, serving on the Russell International War Crimes Tribunal in that connection in ‘67. In her remarks she underscored the fragile position of the deserters in Swedish society with just temporary work and residence permits that had to be renewed every three months. Lidman vigorously argued that with the new Friends of ADC group in the lead, the Swedish public must “agitate” not only for better housing and job rights for the deserters, but also for political asylum as a guarantee against expulsion.

The political legitimacy conferred by the CALCAV delegation on the ADC in the eyes of the Swedish public worked; Sara Lidman’s appeal for support proved effective; and the ADC’s own publicity efforts bore fruit: ADC Support Week was declared, interviews were given to the press, and supportive editorials and stories about the deserters appeared in leading national publications. The new visibility resulted in housing offers for the deserters, a new office for ADC, the use of a 40-acre farm, and the creation of various support and lobbying groups throughout Sweden.

Back in the US in early November ‘68, the Mobe declared National GI Week, the final part of its plan to bring GI protestors into the movement, which for the first time included grass roots support for the deserters in the States. In effect, less than a year after its inception, ADC, the ‘lost battalion’ of the American antiwar movement, had been found and brought within the ranks of the growing GI protest movement against the war.

Good Life at the Presidio

Late March ’56. The Army shipped me from the East to the West Coast. In a matter of hours I escaped the cold and slush of the Northeast for sunny, balmy California. Although I was outfitted in khaki gabardine with the signature ‘Ike jacket’ of the old brown-shoe Army, it was the Army Security Agency (ASA) that put me on the plane. ASA was a semi-secret intelligence outfit housed within the US Army solely for logistical purposes since it reported to the National Security Agency (NSA) in Washington DC.

Six years later in the dead of winter, my younger brother Jeff Sharlet made the same journey. Each in our own time had gone through Basic Training at Fort Dix in northern New Jersey. Dix was a small city of 30,000 troops complete with mid-rise buildings (barracks), parade grounds, and firing ranges. The only diversion – with permission – was Wrightstown just outside the gates, a regular grimsville. There, as members of ASA, the military arm of NSA, we were taught elementary martial skills such as marching, the M-1 rifle, and how to thrust the bayonet along with a few days of throwing grenades and firing the .30 cal machine gun. I can’t say either one of us emerged from Dix as well trained soldiers – that wouldn’t have been possible in our short time there, just eight weeks. Besides, that wasn’t ASA’s purpose in the case of those of us destined for California.

I was transferred to Fort Devens in New England, an ASA processing center where it was decided how I might be of use. Jeff was processed at the end of his Dix course. Both he and I had committed three years of our young lives to the military in return for extensive language training, but there was a caveat. One had to qualify by passing a language aptitude test. We both did and were ordered to report to the Army Language School (ALS) at the Presidio of Monterey on the California coast – an idyllic place in a universe of grim military bases.

Arriving at the Presidio late that March day, my travel mates and I quickly shed our heavy Army overcoats and beheld rows of well-kept WWII wooden barracks and well-tended lawns amidst shady trees. Quite improbably one approached the headquarters building along a path lined with bright flowers. All was set high on a vast bluff overlooking beautiful Monterey Bay. It was as if we had transferred overnight from a large, impersonal state university to the campus of a small, elite liberal arts college. In a letter, Jeff’s first reaction, “This doesn’t seem like the Army.”

ALS Barracks

And ALS was something of a college, but skewed toward a single discipline, the Modern Languages, the full array from Arabic to Russian. Back at Devens, I was promised Czech and ASA delivered. Years later, Jeff too was promised a Slavic language, but got Vietnamese. Though we lived and studied in different parts of the Presidio – Jeff in the Oriental languages section at the peak of the hill while I was midway down in the European languages area – we both followed the same curriculum of six hours a day language training, five days a week, 11 ½ months. As military duty went, it was a great posting – academic study with a break for lunch and few military obligations other than standing Retreat at the end of the week as the flag came down and the loudspeakers gave forth the sad strains of Taps.

Well, I should qualify that because Jeff told me life wasn’t that easy in the ‘60s. My barracks sergeant, a fellow student and long-time professional soldier, was always just glad to get back to his private room after evening chow. A master of the parade ground, sarge was not at home with language drills, grammar study, and homework every night. We rarely saw him outside of class and the mess hall and he in turn rarely took an interest in our college boy-like barracks where we bunked two to a cubicle. Being under the Army’s roof, we were obliged to have our bunks with their regulation woolen blankets drawn tight and brown wooden footlocker squared away, but not much else. It was the mid-‘50s, a quiet time in the Cold War.

While Jeff lived in a more modern barracks with semi-private rooms, tiled bathrooms, and piped-in music, his NCO-in-charge, a non-commissioned officer, was a young by-the-book Marine who ran a tight ship, including periodic footlocker inspections, after class chores, and occasional formations. While I and a few buddies studying Russian and other languages maintained our cubicles in good order, we actually lived off-post, illegally. Down the hill below the Presidio lay the small seaside town of Monterey, but we chose to rent a house across the peninsula in Carmel-by-the-Sea, a lovely place of fine shops, quaint pubs, and charming bungalows. As long as we made it to class on time in the morning, no one knew the difference.

♫Sittin’ on the dock of the bay

Watching the tide roll away…

…wasting time*

In mid-’62 Jeff’s social life began to look up when his fellow Albany Academy grad, Keith Willis, turned up at ALS. Keith too was shunted into Vietnamese along with Jeff, Ken Yonowitz, Vachel Worthington, John Buquoi, Steve Shlafer, David Elliott, Harvey Kline, and others training in the expanding program. Though Vietnamese was never as big as Russian and Chinese, the languages of America’s two major Cold War adversaries, the Kennedy Administration had begun stocking up on interpreter/translators; in time they would serve in our increasing involvement in the North-South civil war underway in former French Indochina. Like my instructors in Czech, the Vietnamese teaching staff were also refugees, mostly from Communist North Vietnam. In both departments, the majority of staff were not professional teachers. As individuals from a spectrum of occupations, civilian and military, fate had landed them on the shores of the Monterey Peninsula.

Jeff and Keith Willis (fresh out of Penn’s Wharton School), bought a used British motorcycle. It carried them up and down the California coast, south to Big Sur, north to San Francisco where they’d roar up to the front of the Mark Hopkins, premier hotel of the day; Jeff would dismount and hand off the cycle to the doorman to park. During our respective tours at ALS, Jeff and I also took in the pleasures of the peninsula, including funky eateries on then run-down Cannery Row of Steinbeck fame; the way off-Broadway theater on the Monterey Wharf; 17-mile Drive along Pebble Beach; fine restaurants like Gallatin’s; and great pubs like Sade’s on Ocean Avenue, Carmel’s main drag running down to a wide Pacific beach. Once classes ended for the week and uniforms gave way to civvies, life at the Presidio and its environs was very pleasant.

Off-duty at ALS, Keith Willis going high for a Frisbee

Occasionally those of us enjoying the tranquil life of the military college on the hill were reminded of the Cold War underway across the globe.  In my day, it was the Hungarian Revolution of October ’56. The Hungarian language department was next to mine, and I knew some of the guys. In Budapest, Soviet armor, temporarily pulled out, swept back into the city igniting heavy street fighting with the Hungarian Freedom Fighters. Students from the several Hungarian classes disappeared suddenly from one day to the next. Their classmates were puzzled. Later we learned the missing GIs were Special Forces troops, then a little known outfit, who were abruptly and secretly sent to units in Europe on stand-by should the United States intervene. Six years later to the month, October ’62 during Jeff’s ALS tour, it was the Cuban Missile Crisis. Similarly to '56, other than the officers and NCO's for whom the possibility of military action meant career advancement, the dramatic events in the Caribbean made barely a ripple in the placid routines of the Army Language School. 

As students finished their respective 50-week courses, ALS mounted a graduation ceremony and everyone was given 30-days leave. Then the top ASA language students received orders for advanced intelligence training at Fort Meade MD while the rest of us were dispatched abroad to various theaters of operation. In spring ’57 I flew off to Europe, exactly where I wanted to be, while in early ‘63 Jeff headed for Southeast Asia, a reluctant warrior, eventually finding himself drawn into the maelstrom of the emerging Vietnam War.

*”Sittin’ on the the Dock of the Bay” by Otis Redding and Steve Cropper, 1967

Bad Intelligence, Sorry 'bout That

Vietnam GI (VGI) led off each issue with a long interview with a combat veteran talking about gritty aspects of the war rarely seen in the more sanitized national media. Jeff Sharlet, an ex-Vietnam GI, conducted most of the interviews, identifying an especially dramatic quote and running it across the front page as the header. In Vietnam, mainstream foreign correspondents worked under constraints. If they were too aggressive in their coverage of a combat unit’s embarrassments, a commanding officer (CO) might deny them transportation to the battle scene next time around. Similarly, their home editors in the States soon learned that consistently critical coverage of the war could get their domestic reporters shut out of White House backgrounders on other news stories. Hence, the field correspondents of necessity practiced a degree of self-censorship, and for those who didn’t, the home office would do the cutting.

In sharp contrast, the interviews in VGI with the combat troopers revealed the darker undercurrents of the war not seen on CBS or in the Washington Post – the inevitable command failures, communications breakdowns, and general foul-ups of war. Most often the result was loss of American lives. Here are excerpts from a typical VGI interview with Marine Cpl Craig Walden who served two tours as a recon and weapons specialist and a squad leader. Severely wounded, he was evacuated to the States in spring ’68. He tells the story of a post-Tet battle just below the border with North Vietnam in a calm, understated manner:

VGI:  How did you get hit over there?

Cpl Walden: This last fiasco we were in. I was with Bravo Company of the 1/3. We were sitting across the Qua Viet River last May [‘68] and we got a call there was a platoon of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) – a platoon of theirs is approximately 40 men at most – building up in this village, Dai Do. We were sitting up on the other side of this river, so Lt Norris, our CO, wants this great reputation for himself as a hero – he was gung ho … He says 'my men will go get them'...

Cpl Craig Walden, Vietnam, ‘68

So we got a couple of amtracks, amphibious track vehicles, we got our company on them, started going across the river and got halfway there when we started taking machine gun fire from the village. … So we hit the beach and got off the thing and they just started hitting us from all over. I’m thinking, man, this is some platoon they’ve got …. We started pushing across an open field to this one small little hill right before the large village. We had lost over half the company by now, so we decided this wasn’t a  platoon they had in the village.

All night we were losing people and getting rocket rounds and mortar rounds. Well, the next morning the shit was still flying, we’re still firing back and forth. … We had this one [amtrack left] and we were going to charge across this field and attack the village with about half our company. … We got halfway across the field and then it really started. We had two tanks come down along the shore line, which were blown up immediately, everybody in the tanks was killed. And they were still insisting this was an NVA platoon. …

Well, we kept pushing through until finally everybody was shot, everyone was out of ammunition and everything. We tried pulling back, all the corpsmen were shot. I was shot myself. We dragged back to the river so we had the river to our backs. Wehad 11 of us left now out of approximately 237 people. [AnotherMarine unit took the village a few days later] …they estimated final body count was over 1500. That was what we attacked with 200 something men.

It was in Time magazine.* They wrote up … that this Marine Company had attacked this full division, the 320th NVA Division. Said casualties were ‘light to moderate’, they said we had won and everything. They didn’t mention the fact that only 11 guys survived. I got medevac-ed out of there.

Craig Walden lost an arm and spent months in hospital at Great Lakes Naval Facility. Once again one marvels at the raw courage of Marines, continuing to attack against wildly superior forces with most of their men dead or wounded. And Craig was an impressive story teller, telling the hair-raising tale with the utmost dispassion. As he healed, a Navy doctor asked him if he was going back to his unit in Nam. Craig said, What could I do with one arm; the doc replied, Fire a pistol.

Later, returning to his native Chicago, Craig along with two other ex-Vietnam GIs, John Alden and Joe Harris, became a co-editor of Vietnam GI following Jeff’s death in mid-’69.

*Time, May 10, 1968, p. 32

Elvis and the New Left at Indiana

Elvis Jacob Stahr Jr was a person of considerable accomplishment. His life had been a string of consecutive successes – BA Kentucky ’36 where he was Cadet Colonel of the ROTC regiment, Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, prestigious law firm in New York, distinguished WWII record, dean of law at Kentucky, vice chancellor of Pitt, president at West Virginia, and Secretary of the Army under Kennedy (JFK). In ‘62 he became President of Indiana University (IU), and his luck ran out.

Stahr succeeded Herman B. Wells, IU’s long serving, legendary statesman-president, admittedly big shoes to fill. In his inaugural address, President Stahr spoke eloquently of further enhancing the university’s international research reputation while simultaneously accommodating the wave of Baby Boomers pouring into American higher ed. He also seemed preoccupied with the Cold War. Fresh from Washington where he’d played an important role in the Berlin Crisis of ’61 as Secretary of the Army, President Stahr said: “Military power of the most advanced kind will be essential to protecting freedom so long as the forces of antifreedom themselves have such power and are not content to stay at home."

In his long address, the students got short shrift, a paternalistic nod, “they are questioning, debating, impatient, ambitious, sometimes confused, always expectant, never wholly good, never really bad ….” If any students were in attendance – I was not, studying for my PhD prelims – they might have been a bit put off by the all too familiar in loco parentis rhetoric.

By the time brother Jeff Sharlet finished his Vietnam tour and returned to IU in the fall of ’64, the placid waters of academe were stirring as troublesome events far away were coming into focus. JFK had escalated US involvement in the Vietnamese civil war. South Vietnam’s president had been assassinated in a coup on Jeff’s watch in ‘63. Political instability and social unrest followed. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was building membership on the nation’s campuses. Watching and listening, a small group of ‘questioning’ and ‘impatient’ students at IU, including ex-GI Jeff, were becoming angry and restive.

Several months later during spring ’65, President Johnson (LBJ) escalated the Vietnam War even more dramatically, and the IU cohort, along with students at many other schools, reacted in protest. Jeff and compatriots began gathering Friday afternoons on Dunn Meadow, a great lawn officially designated as a ‘free speech’ zone, where the air was filled with talk of civil rights, economic disparities, and the burgeoning war halfway across the world. A teach-in was launched at the University of Michigan -- faculty experts leading students in discussion of the war. The Ann Arbor event was broadcast, and concerned students at IU and elsewhere listened in via a telephone link. SDS organized an April antiwar march in Washington DC that exceeded all expectations; the IU group sent a delegation.

President Stahr’s record in dealing with ‘questioning’ students at IU was a mixed one. During the Cuban Missile Crisis in the fall of ’62 an ad hoc group of IU students announced its intention to demonstrate against “US aggression;” an IU student writing in The New Republic (TNR) reported that Stahr had urged the student body to ignore the dissenters, saying “The most effective way to deal with minorities with whom we disagree in the present … situation is to ignore them completely.”* In a letter later published in the local Bloomington paper, the TNR writer followed up, criticizing Stahr’s belief that it was “his function as President to use his office and means of communication to militate against a group of his students before the group has fully stated and defended its ideas.” The small group did protest the US naval blockade of Cuba by marching from the county courthouse to the IU campus; campus security stood by while a large, angry mob of conservative students threw punches and objects at them.

The following spring of ‘63, three student leaders of IU’s Trotskyist Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) were arrested and bound over for trial under Indiana’s anti-communist statute. Stahr earned high praise for himself in a New York Times editorial for refusing to take university action against the ‘Bloomington 3’, as they came to be known, declaring, “We have far too much to lose ultimately if we unleash the forces of suppression under the guise of protecting freedom.”**

By the academic year 1966-67, a strong SDS chapter was functioning at IU, trying to educate the student body on the war and mounting demonstrations against a series of prominent pro-war speakers appearing on campus. President Stahr in turn was rapidly losing patience with the ‘impatient’ critical minority on campus. In his remarks to incoming freshmen for the academic year 1966-67, he criticized an impending student demonstration in language suggesting subversion of “basic freedoms” was at hand.

Then at the end of the Fall term, in his annual ‘State of the University’ address to the faculty, Stahr singled out the campus New Left for sharp criticism, saying, “We are fortunate in knowing a good deal about the motives of the leadership of the so-called ‘New Left’,” and used terms like “dogma”, “conspiracy”, “deceit”, “puppets”, and “propaganda”. In February ’67, with the university budget in jeopardy in the conservative state legislature, the president issued a statewide release of his text, which also included a sly reference to the Hitler Youth in universities of Weimar Germany.

To say that Stahr’s public remarks were intemperate and inappropriate for an institution of higher learning would be an understatement, and Jeff, by then the elected SDS president, took note and responded. First, he and SDS vice president Bob Tennyson wrote an open letter asking President Stahr to either retract his attack or substantiate his charges. The president responded, effectively denying that he had made an attack; thus, there was nothing to retract. Jeff and Bob replied, quoting verbatim the offensive remarks in the president’s text and suggesting that perhaps he hadn’t read his own speech.

In a fuller response to the president on the following day, March 9, 1967, Jeff gave a 2500 word counter-address, “The Role of the New Left on Campus: The State of the Student”, at a weekly gathering to an audience of over a hundred activists; his remarks received wider circulation in the campus alternative paper where he was introduced as president of IU SDS, a senior Honors student in Government, and a veteran of the Vietnam War. Jeff began, “The presence of the left on campus is by no means a new phenomenon,” but, he added, time and circumstances had changed the thrust of its stance. The Old Left had critically engaged the larger society while the New Left across the nation was taking on the university itself and its role in society at large. Not surprisingly, Jeff continued, New Left criticism was evoking a harsh response from university administrators hoping to silence, “discredit and render ineffective student action on the campus”; he illustrated, quoting some of President Stahr’s choice phrases such as “enemies of freedom” and “a cynical effort to exploit the idealism of students.”

Jeff commented that “these are not the statements of a lunatic right-winger but of the president of our university whose professed concern is the education of our country’s youth.”  The main body of his speech followed – the prevailing New Left critique of the “corporate liberalism” of the modern university, its broader implications for American society, and a call for ‘Student Power’. Closing his remarks, Jeff called for more faculty and student participation in the intellectual life of the university and a more balanced convocation policy on a campus where only pro-war advocates such as Richard Nixon, General Taylor, and General Hershey were invited. Jeff stated that, absent anti-war speakers to engender debate, the New Left would continue presenting alternate views on the war and other issues of the day to the campus community at large.

President Stahr introducing General Maxwell Taylor, ‘66

We have no way of knowing Stahr’s reaction to the ‘State of the Student’, but we can guess he was extremely displeased because a little over a year later he fled academe, abruptly tendering his resignation as president, citing “presidential fatigue.” It was a convenient euphemism for a person acknowledging the first setback in a long succession of career achievements. As a man more suited to positions where no one pushed back, Stahr had clearly been temperamentally unsuited to lead a major university through turbulent times.

At Indiana University, by no means the most restive campus in the country, Elvis Stahr, in spite of his inaugural rhetoric about ‘questioning’ students, was well beyond his comfort zone. He had served only six years as president, a relatively short tenure. In an interview in Time marked by bitterness and vitriol a few months later, Stahr referred to activists as bigots and zealots “determined to destroy” and denied he had deserted his post.*** Moving on, he became president of the National Audubon Society, a quiet venue where he reburnished his laurels, generally receiving high marks. At his death 20 years later, Elvis Jacob Stahr Jr was interred at Arlington National Cemetery.

* Jay Neugeboren, The New Republic (9/21/63), 14.
** New York Times (5/21/63), 15.
*** Time (9/27/68), http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,902330-2,00.html