Transcript of Oral History Interview with George Mische

Oral history interviews of the Vietnam Era Oral History Project Copyright Notice: © 2019 Minnesota Historical Society Researchers are liable for any infringement. For more information, visit www.mnhs.org/copyright. Version 3 August 20, 2018 George Mische Narrator Kim Heikkila Interviewer September 28, 2018 George Mische -GM Kim Heikkila -KH KH: This is an interview for the Minnesota Historical Society’s Minnesota in the Vietnam War Era Oral History Project. It is Friday, September 28, 2018, and I’m here with George Mische. My name is Kim Heikkila. Today I’ll be talking to George about his role and experiences in the antiwar and draft resistance movement, including his role as a member of the Catonsville 9 [Catonsville, MD, May 17, 1968]. So, thank you so much, George, for sitting down and talking to me. GM: Sure, you bet. Happy to do it. KH: So, as I said earlier, I’ll start with about five questions that you can answer pretty briefly and then we can kind of go back and get the story. GM: Sure. KH: So, if you could just start by stating and spelling your name? GM: George Mische. M-i-s-c-h-e. KH: Okay. And when and where were you born? GM: St. Cloud, Minnesota, on July 30, 1937. KH: Okay. And how do you identify yourself racially and/or ethnically? GM: Well, both sides of my family are Germanic background—my dad’s father grew up in Germany and my mother here in central Minnesota, up where all those Germans live in Minnesota. 12 KH: All right. And I know I just said this in the introduction, but if there are other things that you identify yourself with in terms of antiwar efforts or antiwar organizations during the Vietnam era, what are those? GM: Well, you know, when I came back from Latin America, I really was focused a lot on Latin America and it took a while to tune in to what was happening in Southeast Asia and all of a sudden, I thought, Oh my god, this is exactly the bad policy that we’ve had in Latin America. And that had gotten me involved and I had done a lot of lecturing around the United States against US foreign policy over and around United States, Canada and Mexico, after I got back. And then, when I started to focus in on Southeast Asia and realized that all this nonsense about being a buffer with communism, it never was about communism; it was about the same thing in Latin America: natural resources. We wanted to control the natural resources in Southeast Asia, oil and everything else that was there, and that was basically our policy in Africa and all over Latin America. And I started realizing that American people are buying into this crap, what our foreign policy was about, and at the time of Vietnam, you know, at the time of Catonsville, 78 percent of the American people supported what was happening in Vietnam, what we were doing. And, you know, it was all fraud. And, what was interesting—by the time of the Camden 28 [Camden, NJ, August 22, 1971] action in 1972 and after that [it was] just the opposite, 75 to 76 percent of the people were opposed to what we were doing there, and also in Central America with the Contras. And that’s why, for the longest time, they had to cool it about what we were doing in our foreign policy. And unfortunately, it started all over again the way it was fifty years ago but, you know, what the US policy is. One of the interesting experiences I had a couple years ago—at Augsburg [Augsburg University, Minneapolis, MN]—I can’t remember the name of the national organization that funded this, but there was a program in June—I think it was two years ago—at Augsburg where they brought in teachers for I think it was two or three weeks and they were from all over the Midwest and it was to try to get them to be able to have the ability to have meaningful courses at a high school level on a whole bunch of issues, which was really interesting. So they contacted me—one of the days they wanted to have dedicated to was the antiwar movement by focusing on the Catonsville 9. And I agreed to do it and what you had to do—all these teachers who came in—they split them into three groups and they all had to read Dan Berrigan’s [Daniel Joseph Berrigan (1921-2016)] book, The Trial of the Catonsville 9, [The Trial of the Catonsville 9, by Daniel Berrigan, Beacon Press, 1970] which I hadn’t read in years and years. Had to read that and then the teachers split up into three groups. One-third of the teachers represented the prosecution; one-third of the teachers represented the defense; and one-third the jury. And so they enacted that whole thing and then I was to critique it in the afternoon and have questions. 13 And so I read the book a couple days before and chuckled at a few things that were in there. And one of the questions was, Well, you know, what do you think when you look back at that and where things are today? And I said, “Yeah,” I was—Tom Lewis [Thomas P. Lewis (1940-2008)] wasn’t a real articulate guy; he stumbled a lot when he talked, but he was a sincere guy and he’s trying to get the judge to understand. And the judge, by the way, during the trial, was trying to convince us and the audience how he kind of was sympathetic to us, or he understood it because, after all, his father was a Baptist minister. And we never let him to that. Every time he tried to—he’d get close to us, we’d be like, No, no. We’re not on the same wave length. And Tom Lewis is trying to tell the judge how terrible our foreign policy is and the judge says, “Now, Mr. Lewis, aren’t you exaggerating a little bit how bad things are?” He said, “Your honor, you don’t understand. Do you realize that the United States has military bases and troops in twenty-six or twenty-seven countries?” And I laughed. I told the teachers, I said, “The reality is today,”—two years ago—“that we have military operations in one hundred and forty countries around the world. So, it’s dramatically worse today than it was way back then.” And, you know, I was pretty sympathetic to almost any group in the country—SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] I thought did a great job on campus and getting the think tanks that were rampant with the faculty across America, who were doing all these programs on campuses, you know, public forums. I remember coming into St. Cloud State [St. Cloud State University, St. Cloud, MN] to do one and slept down here in Minneapolis, that was making people understand that there’s another side to what our foreign policy is. And that’s how the whole movement started. And then SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] —you know, people don’t understand what happened in the sixties. It wasn’t just one thing that was going on. When H. Rap Brown [Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, aka H. Rap Brown, (1943-)] took over SNCC from Stokely Carmichael [Kwame Ture, aka Stokely Carmichael (1941-1998)], Stokely said to the press, “You think I’m bad. Wait till you see this guy who’s taking over for me.” And Rap really was into organizing in the south on taking over elections and what not. And how many students from the north were going south during the summers hooking up with SNCC with their stuff? And Mario Savio [Mario Savio (1941-1996)] with the Free Speech Movement out in Berkeley [Berkeley, CA] was a whole other dimension. The women’s movement was really starting to build. You know, I always—National Welfare Rights League [National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO)]—is that the name of it? I think of the women way back then. They had a great organization. So all this stuff was happening and campuses were building—which we see today with—I think the circumstances in America are identical to the way it was fifty years ago. Look at how the students have responded in Florida finally and all the organizing. They’re out there on campuses getting people registered to vote. The Black Lives Matter stuff—so people are looking today the 14 same way they did then about how do we get our hands around the throat of the monster in a sense and do something besides peeing in a snowbank. Let’s really try to find something that’s effective, that changes public policy. So that was part of the long, you know, view of things that affected myself in converging to see that Latin America and Southeast Asia were the same phenomena. KH: So tell me a little bit about your background. You were born in St. Cloud. Did you grow up there? GM: Yes. If anybody would have told me when I grew up that someday I was going to end up in prison because of the US military, I would have said, “What are you smoking?” And, you know, a buddy of mine and I were dating a couple gals that we thought—it was very clear—we hooked up real fast for the rest of our life.

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