They Marched Into Sunlight

by David Maraniss

  On the ride back from church, Johnson asked his family if they would like to swing over to the Pentagon to see what was going on. From his morning updates, LBJ knew that most of the protesters had left, but there were still bands of demonstrators roaming the Mall. Several hundred remained encamped near the Pentagon, where they intended to stay. Lady Bird and Lynda agreed, and the little side trip, seen through the eyes of a Secret Service agent, was recorded in the White House Daily Diary. “At the Lincoln Memorial, it looked like there were about 150 people sitting on the steps—just scattered around the area. We drove around the memorial one and one-half times—looked at the Mall area and the Reflecting Pool area. Mrs. Johnson particularly noticed the litter and refuse left by those gathered at the memorial yesterday. The president was highly interested in what a hippie looked like, their dress, age groups, and items they carried…some were carrying flags, bed rolls, blankets, flight bags, flowers…. We then drove across the Memorial Bridge and turned down Shirley Highway—the road was blocked, but we told the Park Policeman we were Secret Service and they let us through. We went around the blockade and up the highway, looking to the right and left—right up to the line of soldiers guarding the highway. We drove slowly, and looked carefully at the Mall entrance of the Pentagon. We circled around, crossed the median strip, and then drove back to the White House.”

  The peace buses pulled up outside the Memorial Union in Madison at that same hour, after the long overnight drive from Washington. Alison Steiner’s mother was waiting to pick her up. The high school senior was exhausted but felt that she had accomplished something. She had said what she had wanted to say. Judy Genack had also returned to Madison, transformed politically and personally by the events of that tumultuous week. What she had seen outside the Commerce Building had compelled her to go to Washington, which had led her to stay at the house of the young journalist, Steve Matthews, who was to become her husband a year later.

  There was another rally on campus that Sunday afternoon, a silent vigil on Bascom Hill attended by three hundred students. Later, on the Library Mall, they held another vote and decided to call off the class boycott, which was fizzling in any case. Paul Soglin had resigned as chairman of the Committee on Student Rights. He was upset by the emphasis on police brutality rather than on the war itself, felt caught between moderates and radicals, and thought it was important for students to connect with the outside community, positions that would become only more his own as time went on. It was at that moment that Soglin intensified his political plans and started building the base that would see him elected alderman the following spring and mayor within six years.

  The events of that one week in October had changed things, indisputably, but the political implications of that change appeared contradictory. In that sense Wisconsin paralleled the nation. The number of people who now counted themselves in the antiwar movement was increasing, yet also growing was public disdain for confrontational demonstrations.

  The conservative backlash involved more than a few veterans organizations and right-wingers in the state legislature. In the aftermath of the bloodshed at Commerce, the Dow Chemical Company announced that a record number of students—at least one hundred and fifty—signed up for later interviews. The university chapter of Young Americans for Freedom also grew to record numbers under the leadership of its Madison-based national chairman, David Keene. Typical of the new recruits was Richard Swearingen, a sophomore who had stood in the crowd outside Commerce and watched Miss Sifting and Winnowing prance in front of him. Swearingen thought the police had gone too far but was more turned off by what he took to be the heedless belligerence of the protesters. He became vice chairman of the local YAF that fall, until his politics shifted back toward the middle again after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in the spring of 1968. Another sign of the conservative reaction was the arrival on campus of the Badger Herald, which served as a right-leaning alternative to the leftish Cardinal and eventually overtook the Cardinal in circulation. The Herald was founded by an ally of Keene’s in YAF, Patrick Korten (later spokesman for the U.S. Department of Justice during the Reagan era) with behind-the-scenes backing from editors at Reader’s Digest.

  On the national level a Harris survey in the aftermath of that tumultuous week showed the crosscurrents of dissent and reaction. According to the survey 59 percent of the public estimated that “sentiment against the war is rising” and an equal percentage said that “people have the right to feel that way.” But those who believed that opponents of the war had the right to demonstrate declined that fall from 61 percent to 54 percent. More than three-fourths of those polled said they felt recent antiVietnam demonstrations encouraged the enemy “to fight all the harder.” More than two-thirds thought the demonstrations were “acts of disloyalty against the boys in Vietnam.” And seven in ten believed the recent demonstrations only hurt the cause of opposing the war.

  “THIS WAS A SAD and brooding city Sunday night because everybody seemed to have lost in the Antiwar siege of the Pentagon this weekend,” James Reston wrote afterward in the New York Times, voicing the moderate liberal sentiment. “The majority of the demonstrators who marched peaceably and solemnly to the banks of the Potomac were unhappy because the event was taken over by the militant minority. The leading officials of the government were troubled by the spectacle of so tumultuous a protest against their policy in Vietnam and by the repercussions of this demonstration on their relations abroad.”

  The weekend of dissent, like much of what he dealt with that October, had indeed left President Johnson only more pessimistic. On the afternoon of Monday, October 23, when the last protesters had left town, he met with his war council for two hours, lamenting his elusive search for answers to his Vietnam dilemma.

  “It doesn’t seem we can win the war militarily,” Johnson told McNamara and Rusk. Then he complained that when he asked the Joint Chiefs for suggestions on how to shorten the war, all they talked about were things to do outside South Vietnam.

  “We can’t win diplomatically either,” he said. The Kissinger negotiations had reached a dead end. All that could be done now, he suggested, was to leak news of their effort so the public would know they had “tried and failed after going the very last mile.”

  He could feel it all slipping away. “We’ve almost lost the war in the last two months in the court of public opinion,” Johnson said. “These demonstrators are trying to show that we need somebody else to take over this country.”

  IN MADISON that Monday afternoon Alison Steiner was called out of philosophy class at West High and told to report to the assistant principal. He asked why she had been absent Friday. She said she had gone to Washington to protest the war in Vietnam. The school did not permit that, he said. Didn’t she have nine-weeks exams on Friday? Yes, she said, but she had taken them early. This did not qualify as an excused absence, he said. The grades would be counted as F’s. Eventually the administration would have to back down when Steiner’s mother came to the school to object. On the Wisconsin campus Jane Brotman returned to her French literature class, assuming naïvely that she could tell her professor why she had missed the six-weeks exam and that “he would understand” and let her take it later. Instead, without a trace of anger, the professor told her that he was sorry but that he had a policy and she had chosen not to follow it and therefore he would not allow a makeup test. He was giving her an F for the exam. Brotman, ever the worrier, was traumatized by the mark of failure but did not regret her choice and eventually got a B in the course.

  The UW faculty reconvened at the Memorial Union Theater that day for a second long session and this time voted to establish an ad hoc committee of professors and students that would investigate the Dow protest and present recommendations for how future confrontations should be handled. President Harrington opened the meeting. He said that he had “complete confidence” that Sewell and the faculty would “find a way to solve our present crisis.” His message for
students, Harrington said, was “Don’t despair for the future of the university or of its faculty; do not resort to violence or disruption; keep the lines of communication open to the faculty. I am thinking also of the people of this state, our state, the legislature, which gave this faculty its statutory power, the regents who have extended the area of faculty responsibility. This faculty does not want violence and it will find a way to avoid it. That is our immediate business.”

  After the debate and the creation of the ad hoc committee, Chancellor Sewell closed the meeting. It was, for the earnest methodologist, an emotional moment. “These recent days have been very trying for every member of the academic community—faculty, students, and administration alike,” he said. “No one knows this better than I.”

  Sewell said that he wanted to reiterate what he had said weeks before the Dow eruption, when he had first addressed the faculty on October 2. “Our students are greatly concerned with what they perceive to be injustice, and some are very active in mounting protests and demonstrations both on campus and in the larger community…. Great universities have always been bases of energetic contention and dispute. At no time have students taken matters more seriously than now. The faculty have vigorously supported the constitutional rights of students, which includes the right to dissent and to protest. I trust that we will never deny these rights. I said these things three weeks ago and I wish to affirm these principles today. As I said then and repeat today, there is much for young men and women to be upset about on the national and international scene.”

  But dissent, he said, had to be based on freedom of speech for all, not obstruction and repression of opposing viewpoints. “I feel it is the obligation of every student, faculty member, and administrative official of this university, as well as every citizen of Wisconsin, to support the expression of any and all opinions and engagements in any and all [legal] activities. If we do not protect the rights of any individual or group on this campus, we jeopardize the rights of all. It is only through such actions that we can provide an example to the state and to the nation that we are committed to maintain a constitutional and civilized society. Thank you.”

  Sewell left to a thunderous standing ovation.

  At the research lab at Oscar Mayer, where Dave Wheadon began another week of work, he was introduced to a new colleague and locker-mate, Dennis McQuade, an army veteran who had just returned from Vietnam. When McQuade opened the locker, he noticed a poster of the October 21 March on the Pentagon. What was that doing there? he asked. Wheadon said he had taken the bus to Washington to march against the war, and with that they began a daily conversation about the meaning of war and peace. McQuade would go on to become coordinator of the Madison chapter of Vietnam Veterans against the War.

  In a nationally syndicated sports column distributed that day, Red Blaik, the retired army football coach, criticized the March on the Pentagon. “What these demonstrators failed to comprehend is that the career soldier does not commit this country to war—war is the judgment of our civilian leaders elected and appointed. The Pentagon implements this judgment and the career soldier is the one whose duty it is to answer the call of his country—and not to question why…. Military men abhor war as they know it in the raw and to them the action of the belligerent demonstrator is incomprehensible.” Blaik made this argument in a column paying homage to a former player who had just been killed in Vietnam, the end turned quarterback who led his team to victory over Navy in 1955. No player he ever coached, Blaik said, served as a better example of his favorite axiom: Good fellows are a dime a dozen, but an aggressive leader is priceless. “The priceless leader is now the late Major Don Holleder.”

  In Milwaukee two soldiers returned to the Sikorski house that Monday, carrying another telegram. It was about Danny’s return and burial.

  The Army will return your loved one to a port in the United States by first available military aircraft. At the port, remains will be placed in a metal casket and delivered (accompanied by a military escort) by most expeditious means to any funeral director designated by the next of kin or to any national cemetery in which there is available grave space…. Forms on which to claim authorized interment allowance will accompany remains. This allowance may not exceed $75 if consignment is made directly to the superintendent of a national cemetery. When consignment is made to a funeral director prior to interment in a national cemetery, the maximum allowance is $150; if burial takes place in a civilian cemetery, the maximum allowance is $300…

  “Three hundred dollars,” Edmund Sikorski muttered when the soldiers left, the figure from the telegram sticking in his head. “They say my son is worth three hundred dollars.”

  Chapter 28

  Until the Angels Came

  AT EIGHT ON THE Tuesday evening of October 24, it seemed that all of El Paso filed into the Harding-Orr & McDaniel funeral home to pay last respects to a favorite son. The chapel pews filled to overflowing for the rosary, and the crowd spilled into the hall. It was a closed casket; the U.S. Army had declared the disfigured body unviewable. Five-year-old Consuelo participated in the ritual, fingering her beads and murmuring in unison with the multitude of strangers: ten Hail Marys, one Our Father. Her sisters were too young to understand. It had been a week since word arrived in front-page banner headlines. Even in El Paso, with sprawling Fort Bliss and its community of military retirees, the war in Vietnam felt distant, unreal, a world apart. But the death of Terry Allen struck hard. The Allens were considered El Paso royalty. The old general and Mary Fran and their officer son had constituted the perfect military home.

  Or so it had once appeared. Now the cataclysm of Terry’s death had accelerated General Allen’s mental disintegration. Family friends Bill and Bebe Coonly had reported to the house on Cumberland Circle as soon as they heard that Terry was missing and had stayed with the Allens the entire week until the body arrived from Vietnam. Hour by hour they had watched the general’s condition worsen and his hold on reality slip. “Terry is a good soldier,” he would say, using the present tense. “Terry is a good soldier. Terry would never get ambushed.” General Allen’s mind was stuck again on the Second World War and the little infantry booklets he had written long ago. Friends who came to console him were startled as he reached into his back pocket, took out a booklet, and proceeded to offer instructions on the advantages of night fighting. When he looked at his granddaughter Consuelo, who was the mirror image of her father—the eagle eyes, the sharp nose, the gentle curl of the lips—he thought he was seeing his own boy. He called her Sonny, invited her into his den, showed her old battle maps on the wall, and talked to her about his booklets.

  It was left to the general’s wife, whose life had been devoted to her family, the military, and the social protocols of El Paso, to hold things together, and Mary Fran Allen showed the steel and poise the task required. Not that she could reconcile herself to her son’s death, she told friends. Terry was “such a wonderful young man. He never caused us a moment’s worry in his entire life. He was everything that his father and I could ask for,” Mrs. Allen wrote in a letter to one of Terry’s friends. She was devastated but felt compelled to remain strong, if only for the sake of her three granddaughters. She was dealing not only with an addled husband and a son killed in combat but also with the humiliating situation created by her daughter-in-law, Jean Ponder Allen, who had been living and sleeping with another man at the house on Timberwolf Drive while Terry was in Vietnam. Mary Fran lamented in a letter that Jean’s “sadistic behavior” was “a nightmare” for her. “I don’t believe there was ever a worse scandal in El Paso. People were so angry at her and the man involved that had he not left town upon hearing of Terry’s death I do believe that he would have been tarred and feathered.”

  The man was gone, but Jean remained. She and Terry had been on the path of divorce, but were still legally man and wife when he died. She came to the rosary and sat there with her three fatherless girls, feeling the scorn of society.

  The next
morning a letter from Washington was dispatched to Timberwolf Drive. “Dear Mrs. Allen,” it began:

  The loss of your husband, Lieutenant Colonel Terry D. Allen Jr., in Vietnam has grieved me deeply. Please accept my personal sympathy.

  Our nation is grateful for your husband’s selfless and honorable dedication to duty and his country during this conflict to preserve freedom. He shares a revered heritage with other brave men who have fought to achieve ultimate freedom and the blessing of a free society. I pray that you will be comforted by the deep and lasting sympathy which we have for you and your family.

  Sincerely,

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Deep and lasting sympathy rarely came Jean Allen’s way. One of the few voices of comfort was that of Kiko Schuster, the psychiatrist she had seen that summer during Terry’s emergency leave. Schuster, an old friend of Terry’s and an honorary pallbearer, thought he understood her mental state after several counseling sessions. “Jean, I think I might be the only person who knows how you feel,” he said to her in a phone call after Terry’s death. The comment made her weep because she knew he was right. What she had done, she understood, was “horrible for the Allens, horrible for my father, it was tough for a lot of people.” She felt that she had no friends. Most of her childhood girlfriends had left town. She was the ridiculed outsider, and from that perspective, beyond the bounds of her prescribed social position, she saw things that she would not otherwise notice, pushing her even further outside. Inattentive to the effects of her own public behavior, she became observant of the private contradictions in the lives of others. She saw clearly now into the double world of El Paso businessmen “who were living this sort of façade and had girlfriends on the side—and who said things about the war that had a lot less to do with what they really thought about it than what they thought they ought to say about it.”