They Marched Into Sunlight (84 page)

Jonathan Stielstra, who had cut down the flag atop Bascom Hall, spent twenty-three days in the Dane County jail during the early winter of 1967, then continued a Zelig-like existence that took him to virtually every memorable event of the counterculture and New Left in the sixties. Stielstra was, consecutively, at Columbia and in Paris, briefly, during the student rebellions of spring 1968; in Hanoi with a delegation of SDS leaders in May; on the streets at the Democratic Party convention in Chicago that summer, and later at both Woodstock and Altamont, the alpha and omega of sex, drugs, hippies, and rock and roll. “Hitched out here with 3 Madison friends,” he wrote to his parents after Woodstock. “It had to be the most incredible event: combination rock concert, be-in, Boy Scout jamboree, massive traffic jam, downpour during a Big Ten football game…all on a very-unbelievable-for-all scale.” He had another run-in with the law in 1971 when he refused induction into the U.S. Army but received three years probation after promising to undertake alternative civilian service. In 1974 he returned to Madison and started a natural foods grocery.

What once had seemed certain to Stielstra by the late 1970s appeared more complicated. If he had to do it over again, he believed, he would not have cut down the flag. It was a spontaneous act, he said, so he did not entirely regret it, but neither did he feel that it had any beneficial effect. As for refusing induction, he now felt that every person should fulfill some obligation to the country, though not necessarily military. His attitude toward the University of Wisconsin also changed. More than a decade after the Dow demonstration, he re-enrolled in school to obtain a degree in accounting. Most of his courses were in the very building where it all started, Commerce. From there he became a family man and accountant, living on a cul-de-sac in a quiet middle-class neighborhood on Madison’s west side, not far from the former district attorney who had prosecuted him.

Paul Soglin emerged from the Dow protest determined to broaden both the antiwar movement and his own political ambition, working—as young people were implored to do in the sixties—within the system. At the invitation of church groups, he spoke at forums on the east and west side about the meaning of the Dow protest and the Vietnam war. By year’s end he was plotting his race for Madison alderman in the city’s student-dominated eighth ward. He won that election in April 1968 and within five years was mayor, a job he held from 1973 to 1979 and again from 1989 to 1997, and which he sought again, a third go at it, in spring2003. (By then he was regarded as the “conservative” candidate—and he lost.) As years and decades went by, and as Madison prospered, making virtually every list of America’s most livable cities, Soglin came to be seen not as a threatening radical but as a cultural and political totem of a progressive town. When he grew tired of politics, he retired and went into the financial consulting business and moved with his second wife and their daughters into a modernist house on Madison’s west side. He also began teaching public policy at the university. His classroom was in the old Commerce Building (now called Ingraham Hall), on the first floor, around the corner from where his back and legs had been bashed by billy clubs that long-ago October day. That same building also now housed the offices of Wisconsin’s center for Southeast Asian studies.

Soglin’s first chief of staff in the mayor’s office was Jim Rowen, who had been in the Commerce Building during the Dow protest and watched Soglin curl into the fetal position as he was being beaten. They barely knew each other beyond that. The intervening five years had been mercurial for Rowen. As an investigative journalist, he had written an influential series on Wisconsin’s connections to the Pentagon through the Army Math Research Center on campus. In the darkest hour one morning in August 1970, a massive explosion shattered Sterling Hall, the building housing the army math center, killing a young physicist who had been working on experiments in another part of the building. Four young men were charged with the crime, and three—Karl and Dwight Armstrong and David Fine—were apprehended; the fourth, Leo Burt, never resurfaced. Rowen had nothing to do with the bombing. His writings were expository, not incendiary, but he was haunted by that event.

The destruction of the Army Math Research Center was a pivotal moment in the national antiwar movement, and its effect was most profound in Madison. The intense antiwar movement that turned white hot in October 1967 with the Dow demonstration kept going for years, into the early seventies, through the protests against the invasion of Cambodia, but there was a sense that things changed when Sterling Hall tumbled down and took an innocent life with it. By 1972 Rowen was involved in a different world, traveling the country with his wife, Susan, on behalf of the presidential campaign of his father-in-law, the antiwar candidate Senator George McGovern. It was within a year of McGovern’s loss that Rowen returned to Madison and began a long, successful career moving between the worlds of municipal government and journalism in Madison and Milwaukee, his sensibilities shaped by feelings of outsiderness that came over him when the police marched into the Commerce Building.

Jane Brotman and Betty Menacher, who as naïve freshmen watched the events of Dow unfold—Brotman from the plaza outside, Menacher from the hallway next to her classroom—were each permanently touched by October 18, 1967. Three and a half decades later, the two women would attribute the course of their lives to changes that began that day. Menacher became a VISTA volunteer after graduating and eventually developed a career in educational policy in Milwaukee. Brotman grew more and more involved in the antiwar movement, started to develop a more internationalist perspective, and studied to become a psychologist. She left Madison in 1972, then moved back two decades later when her husband, a cardiologist, took a post at the University of Wisconsin. The job offer came on October 18, 1992. “There is something about that day for me,” Brotman would say.

Bill Kaplan, the junior from Wilmette who escaped into the Commerce bathroom when the police stormed the building, became temporarily radicalized by the events of that day, beginning a process of political maturation in which he first swung left into the SDS, and then gradually eased back toward the center-left, settling in the Washington area as a liberal Democrat. He looked back with self-reproach at some of his actions during the sixties and early seventies. What especially troubled him was the fraying of his relationship with his older brother. Jack T. Kaplan graduated from Wofford College in 1969, was commissioned through ROTC as a second lieutenant, then went through Special Forces School and headed to Vietnam in 1970. During that time, the brothers barely spoke. More than two decades later, in the 1990s, after their mother’s death, they began a reconciliation. “I wrote my brother a long letter saying, ‘I’m ashamed that while you were in Vietnam, I never wrote you, and I feel bad about it,’” Bill Kaplan told me, his eyes filling with tears, at the end of a long interview. “Jack then said to me that he didn’t feel bad about it because he remembered when I went to the airport with him when he left for Vietnam, and he never forgot that. I hadn’t realized that meant anything to him. I really spilled my guts and said, ‘I feel like an asshole, here you were, you could have been killed, and I’m not even writing you a letter because we were on different sides on the war.’ And that was wrong and I regret it enormously.”

On October 27, 2001, in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York, Kaplan wrote a guest column for the
Wisconsin State Journal
in Madison saying that he supported the U.S. military action in Afghanistan, where Jack Kaplan was again on the firing line with the Special Forces. “AntiVietnam War leader backs this effort,” read the headline. Kaplan drove his brother to the airport again, just as he had thirty-one years earlier, but “this time,” he wrote, “he not only has my love, but also my political support.” On Vietnam, however, Kaplan’s views had not changed. “I’m still against that goddamned war.” He was also opposed to the invasion of Iraq.

William Sewell’s chancellorship was short and unsweet. He resigned within a year of the Dow demonstration and took a year’s leave to study at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York, then returned to Wisconsin and continued his highly regarded career in sociology. The strains of the administrative job, with the constant pressure of dealing with radical students and a conservative legislature, did nothing to help his angina problems, yet he went on to live an extremely long and productive life. When I first interviewed him, he was ninety years old and still reporting to his office every day in the Social Science Building, monitoring the major project of his career, a longitudinal study of people who graduated from high school in Wisconsin in 1959, tracing their education levels, goals, and accomplishments. During the seventies and eighties he was interviewed for oral histories of the university. He had acute observations on the antiwar leaders he dealt with during his year as chancellor and seemed especially fascinated by Paul Soglin. Soglin, he said, was “one of the second- or third-rate people in the movement,” nowhere near as influential as Evan Stark or Robert Cohen, yet the one who rose politically. “He’s clever,” Sewell told an oral historian, “and he was by far the most consummate politician of all of them…. I don’t think Paul ever did anything in his life that he didn’t test the water pretty thoroughly first. But he’s managed, you know. I think he’s managed to do very well at it.”

Sewell managed too, even though, three decades after the fact, he still worried that he would be remembered only for a single violent day in a long-ago October. One spring morning in 2001 Sewell suffered a stroke while climbing up the steep hill from a parking lot near Lake Mendota to the side entrance of the Social Science Building. He drifted in and out of consciousness for several weeks before dying on June 24, 2001. Old friends and colleagues trooped to his bedside in his final days, and one afternoon he and some colleagues got to talking about the troubles of the sixties. Sewell said that he had no regrets and no hard feelings, though he still could do without Evan Stark.

Charles S. Robb, the University of Wisconsin graduate and Marine Corps captain who had married President Johnson’s daughter Lynda, sat in the family box in the gallery one night in January 1968 and listened to his father-in-law deliver the State of the Union address. Robb wore his “regular Marine greens” for the occasion, as President Johnson had asked him to do. He and Lynda “waited and waited” that night to hear words of resignation that President Johnson had confided to them he would utter, but the words were never spoken. Then came the Tet Offensive, and the candidacy of Eugene McCarthy, and McCarthy’s winning of 42.2 percent of the vote in New Hampshire, and the emergence of Robert F. Kennedy. On the evening of March 31, 1968, Robb was in Okinawa, on his way to Vietnam, when President Johnson gave a nationally televised speech. Lynda Robb had said goodbye to her husband from Camp Pendleton the day before and had returned to the White House distraught and in tears, challenging her father to explain the war. The family was in emotional meltdown. The president himself seemed more upset than at any time since his mother’s death. Now, here came the words: “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president…”

The Democratic primary in Wisconsin was held two days later, on April 2. It was common wisdom by then that Johnson could not win that primary. As the notes of the president’s war council later revealed, and as Chuck Robb and other family members later noted, LBJ was leaning against seeking reelection long before then, but nonetheless the prospect of defeat in Wisconsin might have been the final trigger to his decision.

During his years at the University of Wisconsin, political science graduate student Richard Cheney wanted nothing to do with Vietnam. He supported the war but did not want to serve in it, and was barely interested in it one way or another. He and his wife, Lynne Cheney, were on campus during the Dow demonstration in October 1967, but only vaguely remembered the protest, nothing more than Lynne’s recollection of a mime troupe prancing in white face. They just wanted to do their work and move on. Life works in odd ways: Cheney, like some other politicians who moved through the Vietnam era barely touched by it, would spend the rest of his career with Vietnam often on his mind. It was easier for him to ignore it while it was going on than after it was over.

Cheney left for Washington after his Madison interlude, first working as an aide to Wisconsin congressman William Steiger. In 1969, Steiger was a leading member of a group of young House Republicans who, at the request of President Nixon, conducted an investigation to determine whether universities that had been disrupted by radical protests should lose federal funding. Cheney did the advance work for the group’s trip to the University of Wisconsin, where the delegation met with faculty members and attended an SDS-sponsored event. The congressmen decided that Nixon should not cut university funding.

Six years later, when Saigon fell on April 30, 1975, Cheney was in the White House, working as a top aide to President Ford’s chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld. He watched Ford announce on television that everyone had been evacuated from the U.S. embassy, but then word came to their office that the announcement was premature. Sixteen years later, Cheney was sitting in the Pentagon office that Robert McNamara once occupied, dealing with questions of war and peace. He had never served in the military, had no qualms about avoiding service in Vietnam, and here he was, a defense secretary dealing with top generals, Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf, whose entire perspectives were shaped by their experiences as young commanders in Vietnam. At dawn one day as the Gulf War was about to begin, Cheney visited the Vietnam Memorial. He was alone, except for his security detachment. “I wanted to be reminded what the cost was if you blew it,” he told me later. “And there was no better, no more stark symbol of the cost if you didn’t get it right than those fifty-eight thousand names on the wall.” Cheney was talking to me twelve years later in his office in the West Wing of the White House. He was vice president now, a leading hawk of the Bush administration. Reminders of Vietnam echoed all around him as he led the push toward war with Iraq.