While the Joint Chiefs and McGeorge Bundy were presenting their grand cases that day on what should and should not be done about Vietnam, LBJ arrived in the dining room preoccupied with two lesser documents, single pieces of paper that informed him of the real-life consequences of his decisions. He read both of these short notes before leaving his office for the war council lunch.
The first was from presidential aide Joseph Califano and came to Johnson’s desk at 12:50. Califano had just received an urgent call from Warren Christopher, a deputy attorney general in the Justice Department, concerning a mass demonstration under way outside the U.S. Army induction center in Oakland, California. The day before, at five in the morning, there had been a peaceful sit-in at the induction center, ending with the arrest of 123 demonstrators, including Joan Baez, the movement folk singer. It was the first act in a weeklong series of protests against the draft and the war machine that would roll across the country from the Bay Area to Madison to Washington. By Tuesday morning the crowd in Oakland had become larger and less passive, and the police had responded with clubs and gas, news that was swiftly relayed back to the president of the United States. In his note Califano informed his boss that the U.S. Attorney in Oakland had contacted the Department of Justice with word that “there are two to four thousand people outside the Induction Center milling around, that the situation is tense, and the police had to use mace, a debilitating chemical or gas, which makes an individual lethargic, in order to clear the streets immediately adjacent to the Induction Center.” The federal attorney, Califano added, was inside the building and “will keep us up-to-date.”
Johnson hungered for reports of this sort. He had become nearly as obsessed with the targets of protest as with the bombing targets around Hanoi. Since the beginning of October he had been receiving nightly memos laced with the latest intelligence on antiwar activities around the country, with a special focus on the huge national mobilization rally planned for Washington at the end of that week. Now, before heading down the hall and upstairs to the dining room for his Tuesday lunch, Johnson dictated his response to the news from Oakland: “Tell Joe to tell them to put their best men on it—be adequately firm—I want no pussy-footing on the part of the Department of Justice.”
The second note came from Arthur McCafferty, the briefing officer in the White House Situation Room, a windowless nerve center in the White House basement where the latest worldwide intelligence was monitored around the clock for the president and his national security staff. Every morning, apart from other intelligence, the Situation Room staff provided LBJ with a one-sheet summary of the previous day’s military actions in Vietnam. This included enemy and U.S. body counts, totaled by the day, week, year, two years, and duration of the war. Much like Califano’s update, McCafferty’s memo now provided Johnson with the latest urgent news. It reached the Oval Office at 1:15, and the president carried it, along with Califano’s note, into the Tuesday lunch. The latest accounts from the battlefields of war and peace.
Johnson sat down in his swivel chair and the meeting began. “It looks as though the news is all bad,” the president said.
He took out the two notes and read them. Califano’s first. Then McCafferty’s: “A battalion of US Army troops taking part in Operation Shenandoah II, 35 miles northwest of Saigon, fought a fierce four and a half hour battle yesterday in which heavy casualties were inflicted on both sides. Among the US killed was Col. Terry Allen, the battalion commander. US casualties in the engagement were 58 killed and 31 wounded compared with 67 enemy killed. The US battalion is still operational and is conducting a sweep of the battlefield area.”
Not accurate, but devastating nonetheless. No amount of pepper from the battery-powered grinder could make this taste better.
General Wheeler tried anyway, throwing more wildly false statistics at his commander in chief. The battalion “had about one hundred casualties out of a battalion of nine hundred,” Wheeler said. “Of course the battalion is still operational.”
IT LOOKS AS THOUGH the news is all bad, the president had said.
That afternoon in El Paso, Jean Ponder Allen was in the car with her live-in boyfriend, the rodeo clown, pulling into the driveway at the house on Timberwolf Drive. She saw a white government car come to a stop behind them. A man in uniform got out, and Jean immediately sensed what had brought him there. She turned to her boyfriend and said firmly, “Just leave!” He drove off and never returned, such was the depth of that relationship. The officer was nervous but tried to go ahead with his horrible assignment. He told Jean that her husband, Terry Allen Jr., was missing in action in Vietnam.
“He’s not missing in action, he’s dead!” she said.
“Ma’am, all I know…”
“Don’t tell me that. I know.”
“Ma’am…”
“For God’s sake, stop telling me he’s missing! I know he’s dead!”
Her husband was not missing, she was the one who was missing, emotionally, she thought. How could she possibly be allowed to grieve for a husband she had so publicly betrayed?
Another high-ranking officer was sent to General Allen’s house on Cumberland Circle. Their son was missing in action, Terry Sr. and Mary Fran were told. The old man was suffering from dementia, but he understood this news only too well. He sprang into action one last time. He called friends who knew people at the Pentagon and ordered them to find out what really happened to his dear Sonny.
Chapter 19
The Spectacle
JIM ROWEN AND SUSAN MCGOVERN returned to Madison for the 1967 fall semester so late that they had no luck finding a place to rent near the university. They settled for a prefabricated garden apartment on Femrite Drive seven miles away in the town of Monona, a world apart from the sixties bohemia of the downtown off-campus streets. The Beltline was nearby, with its constant thrum of heavy traffic leading out to the interstate and beyond to nowhere, and the ambience was deathly dull. The lone signs of life within walking distance were a pizza parlor and a musty old go-go joint called the Satellite Lounge. For Rowen and McGovern, it was merely a place to sleep and to keep their dog, Schnapps, a mixed terrier that they had bought out of the window of Fur, Fin, and Feather on State Street.
They had been married almost two months, a merger of two families of the liberal Washington establishment, though such a description, while perhaps unavoidable, was not how the young couple defined themselves. Susan McGovern, the daughter of Eleanor and Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, was a senior in sociology. Jim Rowen, the son of Alice and Hobart Rowen, an economics writer at the Washington Post, was in his first year of graduate school in English. They were a compact and tight-wired pair who shared a love of books and movies and had two preoccupations: their studies and Vietnam. As “liberal Democratic kids, raised to be tolerant and respectful of other cultures,” the war to them seemed both unnecessary and indefensible. Whether the United States was fighting in Southeast Asia “on behalf of some half-baked imperialist extension of power or this outdated notion of anticommunism…it just seemed so ridiculous,” Rowen thought. On a date two years earlier, he and Susan had gone to see Bob Hope at Homecoming and had listened in disbelief as Hope interspersed his stand-up routine with an enunciation of the domino theory, saying “If we don’t stop them in Vietnam, we are going to be fighting them in the streets of Lodi”—a small farm town north of Madison.
When the audience applauded, Rowen looked at McGovern and thought, We are in the wrong crowd.
Rowen’s first political stirrings, like those of many antiwar activists who came of age in the fifties and first half of the sixties, before Vietnam and the cultural revolution, involved civil rights. His parents had taught him to respect other races and to avoid or challenge people and institutions that did not. When he was ten and his elementary school in Bethesda was being integrated, a teacher screamed at Joe High, a black classmate Rowen had befriended, and the incident upset Rowen and helped fix his sense of self as “an enemy of peop
le who treated blacks badly.” When a bowling alley in the community, Hiser Lanes, was reluctant to allow “negro” patrons, Rowen’s parents would not allow him to go there.
In the spring of 1963, a few months before Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Rowen was finishing his senior year at Bethesda–Chevy Chase High School in suburban Washington, where he had joined a group of classmates in challenging the genteel racist order. As a self-described “goody two-shoes,” he belonged to the Junior Civitan Club, a service club for teenagers. They met every few weeks with their parent organization, the Civitan Club of Bethesda, whose motto was “Builders of Good Citizenship.” Rowen and some friends questioned why an outfit promoting good citizenship met at Kenwood Country Club, a racially segregated institution. When they had started raising the issue a year earlier, their adult sponsors ignored them or told them to mind their own business. But the young men refused to back down, and finally Rowen and fourteen others quit the club in protest and wrote a letter, published in the April 26, 1963, Washington Post, that denounced the adult Civitans for not living up to their motto and “violating a trust with the community of Bethesda.” Standing on principle was “heady stuff” for young Rowen; he felt morally virtuous, yet it was not without consequences. One childhood pal declared that the fuss would destroy the Junior Civitans and promised that if Rowen persisted, their friendship would end and he would never talk to Rowen again. And he never did. The activists from then on were regarded by former clubmates as “pariahs.” From that small incident Rowen learned a larger lesson on what can happen when you act on your beliefs.
The transition from civil rights to the antiwar movement seemed natural and seamless, but by 1967, with Vietnam now dominant, Rowen found that opposing the war intellectually was easier than figuring out how to respond to it physically. Along with many classmates, he spent a considerable amount of time during his senior year at the University of Wisconsin debating what to do if he got drafted, and he viewed the draft dilemma, among other things, as another manifestation of racism. He saw the war “as a reflection of domestic racism,” both in how “the draft was taking minority kids not in college” and in how “the government, in our name, was making war on Asians with dark skins, the endless talk about gooks and slopes, our technological military destruction of life and culture across Southeast Asia—it all went hand in hand.”
Rowen eventually joined the Wisconsin Draft Resistance Union and signed a petition saying that he would not serve if drafted, but how exactly he would not serve was something that he and Susan “talked about endlessly” with no resolution. He knew that he was “going to beat the thing one way or another,” but he was also “overwhelmed with guilt” for his privileged status. McGovern broached the idea of escaping to Canada, but he never felt comfortable with that alternative, nor could he see himself going to prison as a draft resister. He was five foot seven and 135 pounds—at his heaviest. His size was considered substantial for a coxswain when he led the UW freshman crew to the 1964 national championship at Lake Onondaga, New York, but it would be of no use in prison, where he feared that he would “last about ten seconds.” In the summer between his junior and senior years, he and Howard Dratch, a friend who followed the same path from Bethesda–Chevy Chase High to Wisconsin, had nearly talked themselves into joining the U.S. Coast Guard, a way to fulfill their service obligation while probably—or so they thought—avoiding Vietnam. At the last moment, though, as they were heading to downtown Washington for the final paperwork, they decided that they were not sailors, that they were not fit for the Coast Guard, and that they were only doing it to beat the draft, so they turned around and came home.
By the fall of 1967 Rowen was waking up every day “angry that the war was still going on” and determined to do something to stop it. At the time, he said later, the “anger seemed so reasonable” that he never “slowed down to analyze it. It was just wake up, feel that anger, get dressed, get to a meeting, get in the streets.” That was his frame of mind early on the morning of October 17 as he and McGovern got into their little red Opal Kadett and drove to campus to participate in the first day of protests against Dow. They had attended many of the organizational meetings of the Ad Hoc Committee to Protest Dow Chemical and had talked about Dow with their friends at night around one of the heavy wooden tables in the Union Rathskeller. These were the two days they had been waiting for all fall. The war was escalating, the draft was escalating, the level of violence was escalating, in America and Vietnam, Dow had been on campus once before, the previous February, and Dow was coming back, and Dow made napalm. Dow and its napalm were not just symbolic targets, Rowen felt, but rather were directly responsible for some of the worst violence of the war.
The issue was not whether they would protest Dow’s presence on campus but how much they were willing to risk in that protest. They argued about whether civil disobedience was “a correct or legitimate tactic,” whether people had the right to obstruct other people’s free access into a building. Some of their friends contended that napalm “wasn’t the right issue” around which to make such a large personal commitment, which might lead to arrest, jail, and possibly expulsion. But finally they decided that they had talked enough, that “the university should not permit itself and its facilities to be used for war-employment recruiting,” and that they would try to stop the process. But not yet, not on this day of peaceful picketing; the civil disobedience could wait one more day.
Paul Soglin, who had run through the same debate with his circle of friends, made his way toward the first day of Dow demonstrations that morning on a far shorter and easier route. From the front bedroom of the apartment he shared with two friends at 123 North Bassett Street, he said good-bye to Che, his reddish mutt, named for the revolutionary guerrilla leader who had been hunted down and killed by the Bolivian Army earlier that month, and walked out the door and down the street toward campus. He followed his daily route, which included a shortcut through the back parking lot of Kroger’s, where a free improvisational breakfast awaited. Every morning between eight and eight thirty the grocery replaced its day-old doughnuts with fresh ones and placed the old doughnuts on a rack in the parking lot. Soglin, a creature of habit, pocketed a few chocolate and honey glazes and moved on, down University Avenue and right across Lake to State, then left toward the Library Mall, the Memorial Union, and up the shaded slope of Bascom Hill, where he would join other antiwar activists picketing outside the Commerce Building.
University officials, having had weeks to prepare, were going over their final plans. William Sewell, the chancellor, had arrived at his office at sunrise and after studying the day’s agenda, decided to survey the protest site before the action. Out the back door of Bascom Hall, down a few steps, right twenty yards, hang a left, and there he was, entering the glass double doors at the front plaza of Commerce at eight o’clock sharp. When he reached the first-floor hallway, an assistant dean of students was already there, reassuring Erwin A. Gaumnitz, an expert in risk management who had been dean of the business school since the Commerce Building opened in 1956, that there would be little risk to manage on this first day. Joe Kauffman, dean of student affairs, was in his Bascom Hall office, reiterating the assignments he had given his task force: Dean Clingan was to serve as negotiator during the demonstrations; Peter Bunn was to be on hand to clarify university rules; Jack Cipperly, known for his rapport with students, would also try to “establish communication” with the protesters; and Ralph Hanson, the university police chief, was responsible for “preventing injury to persons and damage to property.”
Hanson had been up since four, when the alarm went off in his house on Chapel Hill Road off Whitney Way, four blocks from the Beltline on the far west side. The early morning was his time to read poetry and paint. He liked outdoor scenes, favoring birch trees, lilacs, and forest streams, but also tried his hand at portraiture. One of his proudest works was a portrait he had given to Robben Fleming before the former chancellor left W
isconsin for Michigan. “Oil painting is a hobby of mine and I find it relaxing after every demonstration to splash a little paint on canvas,” he wrote to Fleming in a note accompanying the gift. “It keeps me cool! About a year ago, after the kids had taken over the administration building and Bascom, I started this portrait in your likeness. I did not complete it, however, until this spring, as we always seem to have a demonstration, so my painting got interrupted.”
“What’s it all about, Ralphie?” the students would sing. The activists thought of him as a congenial boob, or as a tool of the establishment, certainly not as an artist.
They Marched Into Sunlight Page 40
