They Marched Into Sunlight (19 page)

Thank you,

Paul R. Soglin

The next day came the reply, spare and ironic.

Dear Paul:

Thank you for your warm note. I want to keep it and share it with one or two others.

Since you may later want to recall your feelings of May 19, 1966, I am sending you a copy of your letter.

Cordially,

Fred Harvey Harrington
President

The promising spirit of that exchange was soon lost. During the next school year, as the war in Vietnam persisted, the tone of demonstrations at Wisconsin took on a more confrontational edge. It was Soglin’s first year in graduate school. When the Dow Chemical Company visited the campus in February 1967, activists decided to stage protests and surround the corporate recruiters inside the Chemistry, Engineering, and Commerce buildings, where placement interviews were being held. SDS president Henry Haslach, a teaching assistant in mathematics, led a group to the Chemistry Building. They carried picket signs bearing the color photographs of napalmed Vietnamese children that had been published in
Ramparts
magazine a few months earlier. A campus policy, newly imposed for that event, banned the use of signs on sticks inside the building. When Haslach reached the front door, a police officer stopped him, declaring that the signs were too large and dangerous to be taken inside. Haslach was infuriated and argued with the officer, saying it was a question of free speech. The officer pinned Haslach against the wall and placed him under arrest for disorderly conduct. At the Commerce Building two more protest leaders, Robert Zwicker and Robert Cohen, the then-bearded but eventually shorn philosopher, were being arrested on similar charges. The three were bailed out that night and organized another protest the next day at which sixteen more students were arrested.

In the midst of the action that second day, a band of demonstrators marched up to Bascom Hall and blockaded the offices of Chancellor Fleming and Dean of Student Affairs Joseph Kauffman, demanding that all charges be dropped and that Dow Chemical be barred from interviewing on campus as long as it made napalm. Kauffman found himself face-to-face with a crowd screaming “Joe must go! Joe must go!” One demonstrator came up to him and said earnestly that it was “nothing personal, but the chancellor is LBJ and you’re McNamara.”

The siege lasted several hours, with more surreal twists. Kauffman’s wife kept calling, but the students who were sitting on his desk answered the phone and would not let him talk to her, until finally she threatened to call the police. When Kauffman lamented aloud that he felt like he was in a Shelley Berman sketch, one radical leader pounced on the cultural reference, declaring that Berman’s neuroses were too bourgeois and that it was “just typical that someone like Berman lives and Lenny Bruce dies.” The denunciations of “fascistic” university administrators at one point became too much for Kauffman, who sharply reminded the students that there were “only two people in the room”—the old guys, Kauffman and Fleming—“who had actually fought fascists.”

Fleming warned the students that if he tried to leave the room and anyone touched him, they would face the far more serious charge of aggravated assault. “And I would just suggest to you that if any one of us starts to walk out of this room, you take very, very seriously whether you even put a hand on us.”

“I would suggest that what the chancellor says is absolutely correct, both under criminal and civil law,” responded Robert Cohen, speaking as “one of the leaders” of the action. Cohen urged someone to get word to the large crowd blocking the hallway outside that “if either of these gentlemen at any time wish to leave they certainly are free to do so.” Fleming, acting cool, and Kauffman, clearly agitated, waited them out, and eventually the whole show—students and administrators—adjourned for an hour and reconvened, minus the siege atmosphere, in Bascom’s auditorium, where the discussion continued. During the break, at Kauffman’s suggestion, Fleming found a novel way to employ his “pillow” strategy again. In a decidedly un-LBJ-like act, he signed a blank check from his own bank account and directed one of his assistants to take it to the county jail and use it to post bail for the arrested students. The bail total was $1,260. When he announced his action to the crowd in the auditorium, some in the audience rose to give him a standing ovation, but the protest leaders, cemented to their seats up front, looked around with displeasure, feeling they had been co-opted.

“I furnished my personal funds because if I am going to have to disagree with students I don’t want to do it with some of them in jail,” Fleming later explained to the faculty. He expanded on that explanation in a letter to Robert E. Howard of Beloit College, a fellow administrator. “My reasons for putting up the bail bond were mixed. In part, they were tactical. I knew that unless I could persuade the students to change their position and refrain from blocking the Dow Chemical interviews…we were in for a major siege in which perhaps two hundred students would have to be arrested. I thought I could talk them out of it that night if I could gain their good will. I have been on campuses long enough to know that rightly or wrongly students do not like the police on campus. From a tactical standpoint, therefore, I thought that if I could gain their good will by an immediate stroke I perhaps could spend the rest of the evening vigorously disagreeing with them and talking them out of their position.” His action, in any case, at once defused the tension, frustrated the protest leaders, and widened the split between the UW administration and the state legislature in the Capitol building on the other end of State Street.

Soglin missed the arrests, but he was among those jamming the corridors at Bascom Hall, where, he later said, he found himself “suddenly thrust in this position of leadership.” The intention was to block the doors and not let the administrators out until the matter was resolved. “And one of the assistant deans starts to walk out of the office, and the crowd which is sitting in is making a path for him, everyone moving out of the way.” Soglin said he called down from the opposite end of the corridor, “‘Why is everyone doing that?’ And somebody yells back, ‘He’s got to go to the bathroom. He says he’ll come back when he’s done.’ And, wait a minute, this is a sit-in! We’re holding them until this thing is resolved. If he wants to, he can go piss out the window, and the ranks closed up and he suddenly found himself stranded in the middle of the crowd and had no choice but to go back into the office. And this was the kind of momentary lapses that we had. It also showed our humanity.”

According to Soglin, perhaps, but not according to the
Daily Cardinal,
which strongly criticized the physical tactics this time. “We are taken aback by the baiting and insults showered upon University administrators who were willing to consider the protesters’ points,” the student paper’s lead editorial stated. “A threat of confinement to men willing to cooperate turned the demonstration into a mockery of freedom rather than a fight for it. Discussion must be two-sided, not a one-way harangue.”

Along with taking part in the protests, Soglin studied them as sociological cases. He was particularly interested in the way people lost their sense of proportion when they became members of a crowd, and why some people emerged as leaders. The leaders tended to be older, usually graduate students, and had a way with words; but not everyone who spoke was considered a leader, and not all the leaders were the most respected members of the group. Cohen and Evan Stark, a graduate student in sociology, tended to be at the center of the action even though many considered them caricatures of radicals. University administrators were awed by Cohen’s oratorical skills and exasperated by his mood swings. One minute he might be sitting in the dean’s office, bumming cigarettes and bemoaning how bad things were going for the left, then later he would target the same dean as first on the list to be hanged when the revolution came. Stark proudly called himself the “resident demagogue.” He and Cohen were out front, Soglin decided, because they were articulate, but more than that they had a psychological need to be there.

During that spring of 1967 a woman student was seriously injured when she was struck by a city bus driving in a divided single lane that urban transportation planners foolishly had decided to run the opposite way down one-way University Avenue as it cut through the campus. The incident sparked a massive student protest, including a sit-in on the avenue and a march the wrong way down the bus lane. Soglin would never forget Cohen’s attitude that day. “After the thing had kind of broke down after about three or four hours that afternoon, there were about a hundred, hundred fifty people who were finally left after everybody was scattered between being arrested and going to various corners and tying up the city…and Cohen comes up to me just as the crowd’s breaking up and people are scattering and says…‘Where’s everyone going?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, they’re going.’ He said, ‘How could you let them go?’ ‘What?’ He said, ‘You never let a crowd go. Always keep a crowd. Never let it go.’ And that was Bob Cohen. I remember him at the Union; he would start talking with one person, a little louder voice, a little louder voice, then there’d be three people, twenty people, and eventually forty people, and the larger the crowd would grow, the more he would go on.”

T
O
S
OGLIN
and his political cohorts Vietnam had become the dominant organizing issue of their lives, but to many students at Wisconsin it was merely a distraction. They might be mildly for the war, but more than that they wanted nothing to do with it. Richard B. Cheney counted himself in that group. He was not a naïve freshman but a seasoned graduate student who had turned twenty-six in 1967 and was already a husband and father. This was his second year in Madison, and he felt that he still had some catching up to do. He called himself a “slow starter” academically, so slow that he had been kicked out of Yale twice before going through his home state school, the University of Wyoming, on the six-year plan. Now he was working toward his Ph.D. in political science and serving as a research assistant for professor Aage Clausen, whose specialty was studying voting patterns in the U.S. House and Senate. His wife, Lynne, was teaching composition to UW freshmen while studying for a doctorate in English literature, writing her thesis on the poetry of Matthew Arnold.

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

From Arnold’s most famous poem, “Dover Beach,” the novelist and antiwar activist Norman Mailer could take the title of his book—
The Armies of the Night
—about the antiwar March on the Pentagon later that October.

Politics brought the Cheneys to Madison. In his final year at Wyoming, Dick Cheney had written a paper on the handling of right-to-work legislation in the Wyoming legislature, which for a rare, brief moment in that conservative state had one chamber controlled by Democrats. The paper won a contest run by the National Center for Education and Politics. Another of the center’s programs offered young scholars six-month fellowships in a governor’s office. Cheney’s adviser urged him to try for it, noting that no one from Wyoming had ever applied. He received a fellowship and was directed to Madison to serve his internship under Wisconsin governor Warren P. Knowles, a moderate Republican who was running for reelection by the time Cheney arrived in early 1966.

As the lowest staff aide, Cheney traveled the state with the governor, serving as gofer and valet, cruising in “the right front seat, riding shotgun” in a black sedan driven by a state trooper, with Knowles and the chief of staff in back. His main duties were to pass out “We Like It Here” buttons (economic development buttons with the slogan printed inside an outline sketch of Wisconsin) and to carry a Polaroid camera. They would “go through the county fairs and up and down the Main Streets of the towns,” Cheney recalled, and he would “snap pictures of everybody” the governor shook hands with “and rip off—Polaroid was fairly new—rip off that paper and leave it with whoever it was and they’d have a picture.” Knowles also was big on barbershops. His reasoning, according to Cheney, was that “everybody had to get a haircut, and when they got haircuts they talked politics. So he worked every barbershop in the state of Wisconsin.” This was the old culture, small town, traditional, a world apart from the change blowing into Madison.

Vietnam was barely a part of the political discussion, at least from Cheney’s perspective, except for one memorable night in the fall of 1966. Knowles, after attending a political dinner upstate, had offered to give Melvin Laird, then the Republican congressman from Marshfield, a lift down to O’Hare International Airport so that Laird could catch the first flight to Washington the next morning. Knowles and Laird were old friends who had served in the state legislature together. There sat young Cheney in the cramped cabin of a small plane, saying nothing, hearing everything, as the two pols talked through the night. He would never forget how Laird kept warning Knowles not to be “too enthusiastic” about the Vietnam war. Be careful about that damn war, Laird kept saying. “Not that Laird was antiwar at all, he wasn’t,” Cheney said later. “But he had doubts about whether the Johnson administration had its act together and understood what was going on.” (Since the introduction of ground troops in 1965, Laird had been pushing Johnson to expand the air war and diminish the vulnerability of infantrymen on the ground, and his harping on the subject inevitably irritated the sensitive president. “Take care of your boy,” LBJ once groused to Laird’s House Republican colleague, Gerald R. Ford of Michigan, even proposing a political horsetrade—Laird for the antiwar senator Wayne Morse.)