They Marched Into Sunlight (78 page)

As these reports from Vietnam and America were being hailed throughout North Vietnam that Sunday, the Politburo was meeting in Hanoi. This was the midpoint of a critical five-day session, the culmination of ten months of strategic planning that had begun in the first days of 1967 when General Nguyen Chi Thanh had returned to Hanoi from the southern jungles and broached the idea of mounting a massive surprise attack on every province of South Vietnam during a holiday. Several military leaders, most notably Vo Nguyen Giap, the national hero, were skeptical of the idea, fearing that it was premature and would prove too costly in manpower. But month by month since then the design had taken shape. In April the Politburo and the Central Military Party Committee dispatched cadres to the battlefields of the South to analyze the military situation and prepare the forces for an offensive. In June the Politburo approved a resolution underlining its strategic resolve to “achieve decisive victory within a relatively short period of time”—meaning sometime in 1968. In July the General Staff briefed the Politburo on plans to use urban warfare to launch a general offensive uprising in the southern cities and towns. The effort only intensified in the months after the death of Nguyen Chi Thanh that July. They reorganized the military and political structure in Saigon and its surrounding provinces and improved the combat readiness of troops in the South, who had increased in number from 204,000 to 278,000 since the beginning of the year and from 126 combat battalions to 190.

Now the Politburo was laying final plans. The military committee presented the potential problems first. Even if they successfully assaulted every city and town in the South, they would not have the strength to hold them. And their overall capacity to launch annihilating attacks was “still weak.” Still, it was believed that “the strategic opportunity had presented itself” and had to be seized. The United States was “still obstinate” but facing more isolation in the world and opposition at home. And Westmoreland and his generals seemed oddly distracted, obsessed with the idea that the North was planning another Dien Bien Phu–style siege somewhere. What the Vietnamese lacked in weaponry, they would make up for in surprise. The Politburo decided to launch the surprise offensive even sooner than originally planned. They would strike during Tet Mau Than, the national holiday, at the end of January 1968.

W
HEN
S
UNDAY,
O
CTOBER
22, arrived in Washington, President Johnson received an early morning briefing on the demonstrations from Joe Califano, then ate breakfast in the White House residence with Lady Bird. At 9:23, after placing a call to Dale Malechek, the foreman of his ranch in the Hill Country of Texas, he went with the first lady and their daughter Lynda to the East Wing exit, where they slipped into the presidential limousine and were driven out past the security ring of soldiers and on toward National City Christian Church. His city was swarming with people who hated him. Even as the president was making his way up the steps of the church, someone in the back of a city bus moving down the street shouted out “Stop the war!” But inside Lyndon Johnson found a sanctuary. The minister, Dr. George R. Davis, was on his side. “There are greater torches by far than the torch of peace,” Davis said, referring literally to a peace torch that had been carried to the rally from San Francisco. “The torch of human freedom, and of human dignity.”

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.

“T
HIS 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.”

I
N
M
ADISON
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.”