ECHOES of 1969

ECHOES of 1969 Echoes of 1969 Recalling a time of trial, and its continuing resonances by Craig Lambert Recalling a time of trial, and its continuing resonances Compiled and edited by CRAIG LAMBERT Portrait illustrations by LUKE WALLER Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 n the late 1960s, American society seemed in crisis. The Tet ulty appointments, the Harvard Corporation refused to terminate it Offensive that began in January 1968 underscored the scale, completely. That March, after the faculty approved a degree program violence, and increasingly apparent fecklessness of the war in in Afro-American studies, students demanded further involvement Vietnam. The combat itself had opened ugly class divisions be- in shaping curriculum. tween those drafted into military service and the large cohort On April 9, 1969, the day after SDS pinned a list of demands on of Baby Boom students enrolled in college and, at least tempo- the door of the president’s house, about 70 students forced their rarily, exempt. In late March of that year, President Lyndon B. way into University Hall, evicted eight deans and other administra- Johnson withdrew his candidacy for another term—and days tors of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and began rifling through later, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, igniting a period of files. At dawn the next day, on President Nathan M. Pusey’s re- Iconvulsive urban violence that laid bare severe racial divisions and quest, local police officers and state troopers entered Harvard Yard deprivation, and prompting fears about wider disorder. Presiden- and, in 25 minutes that included clubbing and bloodshed, forc- tial candidate Robert F. Kennedy ’48 was murdered in early June. ibly evicted and arrested almost 200 of the occupying protestors, Like the war itself, home-front turbulence spilled into living rooms setting in motion wider protests, an eight-day strike, two mass that summer as the brutal Democratic convention in Chicago was meetings in the Stadium—and changes in University policy (the televised. In this context, campuses were drawn into the wider tur- reduction of ROTC to extracurricular status and a student role moil—notably, with the occupation of half a dozen in Afro-American studies appointments—a vote buildings at Columbia that spring. that future dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sci- Harvard seemed immune to those extremes—in ences Henry Rosovsky, an original champion of part, some thought, because of the supposed cohesion the program, denounced and later characterized created by its residential House communities. But as an “academic Munich”). campus controversies had already turned confron- The images from that time remain vivid for those tational (the November 1966 demonstration against who lived through it (see “Through Change and a visit by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara; Through Storm: Harvard, 1969” on exhibition un- the October 1967 blockade of a recruiting visit by til June at the Pusey Library). And spin-offs from Dow Chemical Company, which supplied napalm the issues that fractured both the campus and the to the military). And the same issues that agitated larger society remain very much contested terrain the wider society and fueled the national growth of in contemporary political discourse. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and similar A half-century on, Harvard Magazine republish- groups—opposition to academic leaders’ engagement es online Harvard Alumni Bulletin (as it was then with military policy and institutional research seen known) editor John Bethell’s definitive real-time as contributing to the war; the presence of ROTC Editor John account of the campus as it was being torn apart, programs on campus; University development in Bethell ’54 stayed on campus and his reflections a decade later. Supplementing communities surrounding the Cambridge and Bos- throughout the upheaval, those archival resources, we asked Craig Lambert ton medical campuses; advocacy for a more racially producing an iconic record with ’69, Ph.D. ’78, who retired as deputy editor of the diverse student body and curriculum—engaged and this memorable cover image; as magazine in 2014 (after a quarter-century of ser- radicalized more members of the community. In De- vice), to solicit recollections and reflections from cember 1968, an SDS-led cohort tried to sit in on a a service to readers, his full 1969 participants in, and observers of, the events of faculty meeting focused on ROTC, forcing its post- report, and reflections a decade that tumultuous spring and their aftermath. They ponement. The following February, although ROTC later, are available online at appear here, with Lambert’s own take on what it had been curtailed as an academic program with fac- harvardmag.com/1969-19. felt like then. vThe Editors By the time Harvard boiled over in the spring of 1969, the fever in ant group of Yippie-ish protestors Cambridge had been rising steadily since I’d arrived as a freshman led by a Columbia dropout known in the fall of 1967. Proliferating campus political organizations were as King Collins started distribut- staging serial protests of varying intensity and ideological hues. The ing impenetrable manifestos and cataclysms beyond Harvard Yard’s gates—the Vietnam quagmire, staging pop-up demonstrations in the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Ken- Harvard dining halls. (The Crim- nedy, the riots of Chicago, and the ascent of Richard Nixon—had son merrily ran a backside-only shaken everyone I knew. At the Crimson, where I was a fledgling photo of a nude-in they staged in writer on the editorial board, we took all this seriously (even as a House laundry room.) In retro- we took ourselves somewhat too seriously). Stoned and not, we spect, it was a relatively benign talked late into the night on Plympton Street about politics and harbinger of the chaos that would the war. But our abject fear of the draft notwithstanding, we felt engulf the University, much as the safe in the Harvard cocoon. panicked public reaction to Orson Frank Rich Two weeks before the occupation of University Hall, the cam- Welles’s 1938 stunt radio broadcast, pus was roiled by a surreal bit of comic theater: a small itiner- “The War of the Worlds,” is now seen as an omen of America’s entry State police gather in front of Widener Library near sunrise on April 10. Harvard Magazine 53 Photograph courtesy of Harvard University Archives. HUA 969.71 Image 3 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 wood following a storm. I roamed room to room, feel- ing invisible, finally choosing cool darkness outside. Hunched on granite steps, hugging an iron railing, I watched knots of students tighten and loosen in muted lamppost light. Earlier, someone had growled, “What’re you doing here?” I understood his skepticism, as I’d always been fiercely apolitical, shunning war debates because my fa- ther, a gentle and perceptive diplomat whose life would be destroyed by Agent Orange, had volunteered for the Mekong Delta pacification program. I had found that choice impossible to embrace. But on April 8, wander- ing into an SDS meeting, I’d voted for action. The next day, returning to campus from volunteer work, I joined those I’d encouraged to act. My working-class neigh- bors felt Harvard’s squeeze, so President Pusey’s denial of the expansion issue transformed me from inactive BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES moderate to accidental radical. Shortly before noon on April 9, student demonstrators convened in front of After midnight I curled up on a rug, nested amid Memorial Church before heading to University Hall to read their demands. whispering pockets, welcoming sleep on my pillow into World War II. But I had an unexpected personal intersection of hands. Before dawn the alarm sounded: “The pigs with the Collins sideshow: as these protests subsided, a cousin of are here! Everyone downstairs!” The cops outside, framed through mine, a heretofore overachieving economics grad student at MIT, arched windows, weren’t my anticipated “boys in blue.” These were dropped out to “go underground” with this anarchist band. What state troopers sporting sky-blue jackets and visored helmets. Each was happening here? seemed a giant; each cradled a hungry baton. On the fateful day of the University Hall occupation, Crimson Downstairs, the front line swallowed me. I stared at puny chains staffers raced to the scene. To see Harvard administrators rudely shackling twin handles of massive double doors, visualizing the hustled out of their offices was a shock. After that came many long bulge when wood would challenge metal, snapping a single link to hours of waiting—the atmosphere was alternately ominous and let cops pour in. But our doors loomed immobile, silent. The melee, chattily festive—for a denouement we couldn’t imagine. There the screaming, came from behind. Having breached the southeast was still a sense that some sort of normality might prevail. In the entrance, police were clubbing that other front line. With arms tedious wee hours, an upperclassman editor earnestly worked with linked to others, I couldn’t turn around. That magnified my terror, me on a feature I had written about a student film starring the hearing an attack I couldn’t see. undergraduate actor Tommy Lee Jones. Surely we’d all pick up Then cops charged our line. Students on either side dropped my where we left off before? arms, returning me to solo action. Tailed by a trooper, I ran the The arrival of the police in military formations, helmets glinting maze of halls to its end and crouched against a glass partition, arms in the Yard’s lights, was terrifying.

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