From the CinemaScope movie that was West Berlin, I’d parachuted into a grim two-dimensional black-and-white photo. Few cars. Eerily empty streets. Drab buildings in need of face-lifts. Blank windows, no curtains, no lights. No store signs. No window displays. No colors and lights and hype to tempt consumers. How did people know where to buy food or clothing . . . or anything?
Then it hit me. No need for signs. Or window displays. In a Communist society, the state owned everything—resources, means of production, services. That meant only one “brand” and no competition. People didn’t—couldn’t—choose from among competing products.
On that East Berlin street, a few men in gray work clothes and women in shapeless dresses scurried past, eyes fixed to the ground, trying to avoid attention from the ubiquitous, unblinking, uniformed men safeguarding intersections and entrances to important-looking buildings. Pistols on their hips and rifles on their shoulders, they didn’t crack jokes. Or even smile. I, too, avoided eye contact with those stone-faced centurions.
Hairs on my neck prickled. I was skulking about in a war zone, as nervous as a cat burglar on a police station heist. Why was I risking my personal freedom to experience these differences firsthand? Jack had warned me, “They aren’t nice people. Don’t call attention to yourself.”
I could have gotten swept up in a police dragnet, and no one would have known. Jack and Bonner were busy at the border, not waiting for Pippi Longstocking to waltz in from her escapades. My folks had no idea I had inserted myself into Commie land. And Terry was probably gallivanting around California with his cousins. It could be weeks before anyone noticed I was missing. While I was locked away in some gulag, pounding rocks, Jack might not figure out until winter where I was and come for me—if he saw fit to. After all, getting mixed up in my harebrained scheme could torpedo his career. But by that time, I’d be frozen to death.
I’d also entered East Berlin on a practical mission—to load up on juicy examples of propaganda. In my first year of teaching, I wanted to motivate all students, not only college-bound kids who grew up as readers. I would immerse them in real-life language and issues of the day and let them discover how important English was to their lives. Communist propaganda was the perfect vehicle: newspapers, handbills, and manifestos we could dissect as a class. But I didn’t see a single newspaper dispenser. And no flyers, no posters, no propaganda at all.
After an hour in East Berlin, I was anxious to flee the dreary place, but I had promised Terry I’d visit the Pergamon Museum, a spectacular collection of Middle Eastern artifacts from Turkey, Babylon, and ancient lands I’d never heard of. Using a minimalist map I’d found at my hotel, I tracked it down, asking directions each time I bumped into someone—a challenge in East Berlin, where few people spoke English. Or admitted they did.
Many wrong turns later, I dragged up to the titanic entryway, collapsed on a stone bench, and decided I couldn’t bear another grueling museum crawl. Gathering my energy for the hike back to Checkpoint Charlie, I was struck by a grand idea. I’d buy a museum postcard for Terry to prove I’d been there.
Inside, I chose the best from a beggarly selection: a drab black-and-white postcard that squeezed three poorly rendered photos of uninspired buildings onto one card. But never mind. It was East Berlin. Terry would love it, especially since it had been two and a half weeks since I’d written. I couldn’t let him dangle anxiously another five or six or eight days. When I paid, the cashier asked in halting English if I wanted stamps.
“Can I mail it here?” I asked.
She furrowed her brow. I pantomimed writing my card, stamping, and dropping it into an imaginary slot.
“Ja, ja!” She pointed to a padlocked box on the other side of the lobby.
“Yes! Ja, ja, danke.” I did a happy dance and bought the stamps. She almost smiled.
I hunkered on a bench and scrawled my note in green ink, pretending I was a Berlin correspondent. “Miss Ann Garretson is still alive and kicking, despite the fact she hasn’t been heard from for over two weeks.” My breezy note belied my pent-up loneliness and my wish that we could have explored East and West Berlin together. But I knew that the mailman in Center, Colorado—not to mention Terry’s brothers and sister—would scrutinize every word for mushy innuendos. They would get no such fodder from me. Still, in print half the size of the disclaimers on an insurance form, I added, “God, I miss you!”
I bounded over to the mailbox, kissed the card, and deposited my missive. Somehow, that tiny success generated new energy. I peeked into the museum. It was cool inside. I wandered from exhibit to exhibit, light-footed, stunned by the grandeur of the Ishtar Gate, with its blue and gold mosaic, and by the monumental Pergamon Altar.
Alone, amid the exquisite pink and gold and black mosaics of the wraparound Aleppo Room, I regretted mailing my postcard so hastily. No matter, Terry would be delighted with any word from me, especially on a card festooned with DDR stamps from behind the Iron Curtain.
By midafternoon, I’d made it to Checkpoint Charlie with only half as many wrong turns. In the museum, and along the way back, I kept my eye out for any written literature that would fulfill my propaganda mission but saw nothing. Gradually, I realized that if I did see anything in writing, it would be in German. How would that be helpful? What was I thinking?
The guard shack was as forbidding as it had been that morning. But while I wilted in line, tired, hungry, and thirsty, I spied a pamphlet—in English—touting the kind of propaganda I wanted to share with my students. Lying by itself on a counter was a white pamphlet with bright red letters: “You’re right, Senator Fulbright.” A small, blurry black-and-white photo in the corner seemed to be of our own Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, J. William Fulbright. Unobtrusively, I tried to read the smaller print upside down. It seemed to be saying he supported the right of East Germany to close the Berlin Wall. What? Really?
I wanted it. I was afraid to ask, afraid the East German guards would detain me, afraid the Americans at the other end would lock me up as a spy. I waited. I watched. When no one was looking, I snatched it. Yep, I stole it and stashed it in my purse. And over the next twenty minutes, I nearly disintegrated from anxiety as I smuggled my booty through both the East and West Berlin checkpoints.
Terry
Thursday, 16 July 1964, Los Gatos, California. We were abuzz—Kochers and Marshalls both—over Barry Goldwater’s call to arms that night: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!” In a landslide, the Republican National Convention had anointed Goldwater to oppose Lyndon Johnson for president. His battle cry was no slip of the tongue; he smacked us in the face with it. Pausing between each word, he shouted, “Liberty—is—no—vice!” Delegates applauded, cheered, whistled, and blew air horns in approval—for a thunderous sixty seconds. All of us watched it on TV.
Paula and I just shook our heads. Who decides what’s extreme? Who defines the defenders of liberty and the desecrators? Goldwater had done a backflip into the 1950s. Worse, the “cream” of the Republican Party—delegates from Maine to California—agreed. They leaped up, mounted hypothetical horses, and formed a modern-day posse ready to ride out of the Cow Palace and lynch any American who disagreed with them.
We truly were in for it—a spare-no-mud presidential campaign. The very next morning, the local newspaper, the San Jose Mercury, carried two articles that confirmed my fears. From page one:
Sen. Barry Goldwater Wednesday called President Johnson “the biggest faker in the United States” and “the phoniest individual who ever came around.”
And then from page five:
Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater issued a victory statement last night vowing to “conduct a vigorous campaign” against President Johnson, but one based on issues and not personalities. “I assure you it will not be a personal attack,” he said of his campaign plan against Johnson. “It will be confined to the issues only.”
The contradictory passages brought laughs from the whole fami
ly. But this wasn’t a joke. I had bought and read Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative (fifty hard-earned cents) and Phyllis Schlafly’s A Choice Not an Echo (seventy-five cents wasted), and I was convinced Goldwater would be a catastrophe as president.
Further, I objected to Goldwater’s position on civil rights, and not because I thought him racist, as many liberals claimed. He argued that racism and discrimination, while evil, were matters to be solved in men’s hearts, not by government intervention. Morality couldn’t be legislated, he said.
In Martin Luther King Jr.’s book Strength to Love, I’d found a clear rationale for rejecting that argument:
Let us never succumb to the temptation of believing that legislation and judicial decrees play only minor roles in solving this problem. Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless. The law cannot make an employer love an employee, but it can prevent him from refusing to hire me because of the color of my skin.
Goldwater also argued that any legislation on civil rights should be the dominion of the states, not the federal government. To me, the civil rights movement had demonstrated that the states were a major part of the problem, not the solution, and that the mantra of “states’ rights” was code for preserving the status quo. Civil rights had to be protected and enforced nationwide by the federal government, not relegated to the states for an uneven patchwork of potentially conflicting, oppressive laws.
In one sense, Goldwater’s nomination seemed ideal. Here was a candidate with a clearly articulated philosophy of conservatism. I could vote against him because I didn’t buy that philosophy, not because of any of the thousand other reasons Americans vote for or against a presidential candidate. We did have a choice, not an echo—as Phyllis Schlafly so astutely put it
As much as anything, it still rankled that Goldwater had taken on the University of Colorado in 1962, forcing my untimely departure from the Colorado Daily.
That school year had promised to be stellar. Back at CU after having dropped out for a semester, I’d been promoted to managing editor of the Daily, second in command. Editor-in-chief Gary Althen and I planned a lively, hard-hitting campus newspaper that would earn national recognition.
On the Saturday before classes began, Annie and I went out for coffee. She was back in town after the summer working in Albuquerque and adapting to her folks’ new home. They had sold their ranch and moved to the city. We chatted on as if it had been a week since we’d last seen each other, not three months. We splurged, sundaes—hers chocolate, mine strawberry. My treat: $1.02. But she sat fidgeting like she was counting the seconds until I drove her back to campus. “What’s with you?” I said. “You’re not listening. You got a hot date tonight?”
“No. I’m excited for you, Ter. I really am. It’s that . . . well . . . I don’t think I can help at the Daily this fall. My schedule’s brutal—Russian, math, two lit courses, and Intro to Education—I’m going to switch from journalism to English.”
It didn’t surprise me. We’d talked often about teaching high school—she English, me history. Still it was a blow. She knew how to write, and I had hoped she’d help train the new crop of freshmen. Besides, I liked having her around. She was fun. She knew how to banter.
The next night we were back to old times—dinner with Annie at Twin-Burger, $1.43. Her treat, but she scowled. “How come when it’s my turn to pay—”
“Okay, tell you what,” I said. “Next week, we’ll eat here again. I’ll pay. Shakes and fries.”
“I’ll bet.”
I snickered, but her retort turned out to be prophetic. The following Sunday night I ate half a cold pizza in the Daily office. Only five issues into the school year, and the paper was under attack. In our September 21 issue, when we threw down two gauntlets that enraged CU football fans, alumni, the Board of Regents, Colorado’s Republican politicians, and, eventually, yes, US Senator Barry Goldwater, the resulting controversy battered my psyche and threatened my college career.
Gauntlet one. Editor Althen took on Big Eight football in an editorial. The previous year, our Buffaloes had won the Big Eight football championship—CU’s first ever—and fans had been delirious. But in April, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) sanctioned CU for illegally paying some of its athletes. The NCAA report ignited a furor, and the Board of Regents fired the coach. The uproar escalated. In his editorial, published the day before the 1962 season-opening game, Althen wrote:
We hope the Buffaloes lose tomorrow’s game and all those that follow. Only then, when the glory of the conference championship has been lost in a string of inglorious defeats, will the University see the idiocy of supporting an exorbitant weekly circus in the name of an institution of higher education. University officials could work toward making all teams in the conference either strictly amateur or strictly professional—or abandon football completely.
Dr. Dale Atkins, a CU alum, athlete, and candidate for the Board of Regents, blasted the Daily in the Denver media for “its defeatist attitude.” I interviewed Atkins on Sunday night and wrote the lead article for Monday’s issue. Atkins told me, “If I’m elected, I will investigate the student newspaper policy, its organization, its advisers, its political bias, and incomplete coverage.”
Atkins wasn’t alone in his outrage. In the coming weeks, campus sports fans and alumni rallied around the football flag as if it were Old Glory and we at the Daily had trampled it with feces-encrusted boots. My God, from the uproar, you’d think we had murdered the school mascot, Ralphie—a fifteen-hundred-pound buffalo—in cold blood.
Gauntlet two. In the same issue, we published a lengthy polemic on American politics by student Carl Mitcham, a stinging critique of Senator Goldwater’s political philosophy as expounded in his books Conscience of a Conservative and Why Not Victory? Near the end of Mitcham’s hundred-inch-long essay, he wrote:
Goldwater is the victim of forces outside himself, not because of fate, but because of the nature of violence. His delusion is his passion. Read for what he is—not as an abstraction or depersonalized politician—Barry Goldwater is a fool, a mountebank, a murderer, no better than a common criminal.
In Denver, Atkins condemned the Daily and the university as a hotbed for left-wing radicals. From Washington, DC, Senator Goldwater demanded that CU President Quigg Newton apologize for Mitcham’s words. By the end of the week, the CU Board of Regents had voted to investigate the paper.
Newton apologized. Goldwater scoffed, calling CU a “haven for un-American ideas,” and charged that Newton wasn’t qualified to be a university president. In response, Newton excoriated Goldwater for “unforgivable meddling in the affairs of the University.”
Pressure mounted. Newton asked the Board of Publications, the Daily’s governing body, to fire editor Althen. The board refused. The Denver newspapers and radio and TV stations all headlined the story. In mid-October, Newton himself fired Althen.
At that instant, I became acting editor in chief. A second-semester sophomore, I was propelled into the most prestigious position on campus for a student journalist. But the Daily had become the handmaiden of university administrators and Denver politicians. I couldn’t accept that. Nor could I turn my back on Gary Althen. Two Daily staff members resigned in protest that day—city editor Stefanie Wiercinski and I. The others stayed on. “We do not believe we should be silenced,” they wrote in an editorial, “and that we should not silence ourselves.”
Steffi’s response, “That’s bullshit! They’re gutless. They disgust me.”
I agreed.
Only a month into the school year, I had given up my coveted position—not just its prestige, but the opportunity to hone my journalism skills, which would have propelled me into a bright future. I was out of a job, without income, and, to put it mildly, damned angry. The only bright light in my life was Steffi. We began seeing each other socially—coffee breaks at first, like those with Annie. Then m
ovies, CU basketball games, dinner dates. All mixed in with late-night phone calls, strolls across campus, Sunday drives, good-night kisses, intimate touches, and passionate embraces.
In November, Colorado Republicans swept the election: governor, US senator, state house. To top it off, Dale Atkins won a seat on the CU Board of Regents.
And that meant he was going after the Daily.
At the root of the assault lay a national right-wing campaign that was far larger than the paper. Led by Goldwater, conservatives preached that colleges should teach America’s greatness, not point out its faults. In his missive to CU President Newton, Goldwater had written, “I have spoken with groups of some 250 colleges and schools in this country, and this is the only one where the Socialists seem to have the ability to do what they want without censure.”
Goldwater and Atkins attacked the basic tenets of what a university should be. Clearly, Atkins didn’t understand those tenets. So the day after the election, I sat down at my typewriter and explained them to him in a personal letter:
The university is the meeting place of ideas, a place where one has an opportunity to find the truth, whatever that truth may be. This, above all, is its function; and this, above all, is the function that you and other misguided patriots are inadvertently trying to destroy.
There are those of us at the university—who attend not to prepare for life within your society, but to find whatever it is we seek: the nebulous, perhaps unattainable, truth—of life, of ourselves, of our relations with others, of the very idea of existence. These goals are paramount. They cannot come without prolonged questioning and searching.
I had talked to Atkins in October. He didn’t listen. He was like a farm mule—you had to smack him in the face with a two-by-four to get his attention. So my letter had to be strong:
Yes, I hate the United States, with its base hypocrisy and undercutting rottenness that defiles and debauches the beautiful land that I love. I hate the people who are the United States; I hate their ideas, their actions, their goals, everything about them. I see a people corrupt and base; I see false goals and materialism; I see worship of your false God; and belief in your rotten free enterprise. And I detest it all, Dr. Atkins. I see the university as the only bastion of worth left in a society corrupt and despoiled—and I see you as one who would destroy that worth.
A Rendezvous to Remember: A Memoir of Joy and Heartache at the Dawn of the Sixties Page 24