Witness to the Revolution

by Clara Bingham

  DANIEL ELLSBERG (defense expert, RAND consultant)

  Sam Brown called me and asked me if I would join the moratorium group as an advisor. It was just four students: Sam Brown, Dave Mixner, Marge Sklencar, and Dave Hawk. So, fine, good luck, I didn’t imagine that it would amount to very much.

  DAVID HAWK (Moratorium Committee organizer, peace activist)

  I had worked for SNCC in the South. I had come out of the same places as many of the Weathermen. I had been through some of the same experiences. But the “Days of Rage” stuff was kooky. It was crazy. At the time we thought, Oh, well, they’re going to do their thing, and we’re doing ours.

  DAVID MIXNER

  (Moratorium Committee organizer, peace activist)

  We felt that at this stage that some Americans who were against the war were being turned off by the tactics and rhetoric of the more strident people in the movement like the Weathermen. A classic yet small example was showing up at peace rallies with Viet Cong flags, which would alienate anybody who might have had a family member serve in Vietnam. I had relatives serve and die in Vietnam, and my family would have been turned off by that Vietnam flag even though they were antiwar. I had lost four first cousins, including one that was my best friend, in the war. Actually, I was one of the only ones on the Moratorium Committee that had actually lost somebody.

  SAM BROWN

  I had been the chair of the National Student Association. I probably knew people on a hundred campuses around the country. College Young Dems then had some of the same elements it probably has now; it was a little bit goody two-shoes, “Let’s be the next generation of political leaders.” We wanted to show the administration that there was a group of people opposed to Lyndon Johnson who weren’t Abbie Hoffman, and Jerry Rubin, and a bunch of crazies.

  Back then, the antiwar left had been portrayed as loners, outsiders, radicals, and not someone you’d want to have as a child. So we thought it was important, when kids show up on the doorstep campaigning for Eugene McCarthy, that people couldn’t dismiss them for their appearance, that they had to listen to their argument. Being Clean for Gene*1 was a door opener to a conversation. It was very important to get that door open and have people not dismiss you. So it was all part of the broad strategy to show that young Dems who were wearing neckties, coats, and were clean-shaven with short hair could be against the president.

  DAVID HAWK

  I had been involved with Sam Brown and the “Dump Johnson” movement. After the campaign, he went back to the Kennedy School at Harvard. I went to the National Student Association, where I organized a “We Won’t Go” petition. We got about two hundred student body presidents and college newspaper editors, and sought a meeting with Nixon so we could tell him how strong the antiwar opinion was on college campuses. We didn’t get a meeting with Nixon, but we got a meeting with Henry Kissinger and John Ehrlichman [the White House counsel] in the Situation Room of the White House. Kissinger was at his Harvard professor, meeting-with-graduate-students best. He was making the claim that they [the Nixon administration] inherited the war, and they were going to end it with honor, but we had to give them time. He was acting like a professor of international relations meeting with a group of graduate students.

  We had a dozen people who had signed this letter at the meeting. Kissinger made his plea and left, and Ehrlichman took over the meeting and read us the riot act. He told us, “If you people think you can break laws now just because you don’t like them, you’re going to force us to up the ante to the point where we’re giving out death sentences for traffic violations.” So, as thoughtful and rational as Kissinger had been in making a plea for a war they inherited and that they were going to try to end, Ehrlichman undid whatever public relations boost might have come out of the meeting by being the hard-liner that he was. So, of course, the student leaders were shocked, and the exit from the Situation Room, perversely, led through the Press Office. The letter to the president had been public. It had gotten small stories in the press; the press knew the meeting was taking place. So they asked the students what they thought, and their response was that these guys were going to be worse than the former administration. Ironically, Ehrlichman was the one who ended up going to jail, not the students.*2

  SAM BROWN

  I taught a study group in the spring of ’69 at the Harvard Kennedy School on contemporary American politics, and we spent the entire semester discussing what we could do to end the war in Vietnam. We talked about having a national strike, but the language wasn’t right, it was too Old Left industrial sounding. So during the course of the spring this became a discussion about what the real levers of power were. What are the ways you can influence those people in power? We had failed in the political realm by losing the ’68 election to Nixon, but we had failed in a broader realm to convince people that they could be against the war, and also be good Americans, and that was a decent, honorable, pro-American position to have. The unions hated the antiwar movement and hated Gene McCarthy. We had not figured out how to build a political movement that was going to make this change.

  DAVID MIXNER

  Sam approached me about this idea of working with him on this thing that they originally called Strike for Peace, and we thought that was too strident of a word, so we changed it to Vietnam Moratorium. People would take a day off and campuses would shut down, and people would read names of the war dead, and ring bells, and have interfaith services, and do it in their own communities, instead of all coming to one place, and they would talk about the war. I loved it. I had often talked about the need to have a broad-based antiwar movement that didn’t have Viet Cong flags, and that would reach into America’s middle class, and be able to have labor join us, and corporate leaders join us, which just wasn’t happening. I mean, even the UAW [United Auto Workers] at that time wasn’t against the war.

  SAM BROWN

  I called David Hawk and David Mixner, who I knew from the McCarthy campaign, and I talked to a bunch of other people around the country, and over the course of the spring we developed this idea, and kept refining it, and “moratorium” became the operative word. It meant to take a pause. It grew from the discussion about strike. It wasn’t the image of “Let’s take a picket sign and go someplace.” Rather you could simply stop what you were doing and have a discussion for an hour, or a day, a teach-in on a college campus. You could honor the dead by a set of crosses on the campus. You could do a silent vigil. You could pick from the menu, or make up your own. The name “Moratorium” had a ring of respectability—people could choose their own path to it. In June of ’69 three of us went to Washington, opened an office, held a press conference, and said, “We’re going to end the war in Vietnam, and we’re going to do it starting in October.”

  SAM BROWN

  I had been involved in a lot of past demonstrations, and I knew that if you’re going to do a big demonstration that involves college students, you want to do it in the fall. You don’t want to do it when people are just arriving back on campus, or when they’re already in exams. You need to do it when the weather is decent, so people can actually be outside. You need to understand that lots of people may have an equal interest in the social aspect of it. There were a lot of guys who came to this march who were thinking that they were going to get lucky. Maybe a lot of women came thinking they were going to get lucky, too. The women didn’t tell me. The men all told me. So the October–November window was when you could do something substantial and make it work. But you needed a month or so after people got back to campus to get it organized, and we always knew that students would be the core. We settled on the date of October 15.

  I thought the organization was just right. It was complete chaos at all times. Our notion from the beginning was that it should be as decentralized as possible, as locally controlled as possible, that the only rules were that it needed to be nonviolent, that it needed to focus on bringing more people in. It was not to be a vanguard action. It was to be a mass action. For that reas
on we set up four or five regional offices around the country.

  DAVID MIXNER

  I’m from southern New Jersey. My father worked on farms, and my mother worked shift work in a factory. We were poor. We even had an outdoor john for a while. My family fit the profile of those who were drafted, or went into the military to escape from where we were raised. They were deeply segregationist, but vehemently antiwar. I had a cousin named Russell Garrison who was my best friend. We grew up together, across the fields. His daddy was a dairy farmer, and Russell worked on a dairy farm. He had to drop out of college because he couldn’t afford it. I was smart enough to get a scholarship, but he joined the military in order to get them to pay for his education—the biggest scholarship fund for my people. He was shipped off to Vietnam and killed in March of 1967.

  Ever since World War II, my family never was a big fan of war. I guess you can come back from World War II in many ways. My uncles were in the Battle of the Bulge and saw a lot of mass death. You can come back as a superpatriot, my country right or wrong, or you can come back and say, “I hope my kids never have to go through that hell.”

  It was the first televised war. We could see instantly these horrible images of napalm, and as we used to say back home, “It ain’t right.” I was concerned about appearing unpatriotic. I’m still the guy that tears up at the national anthem. I come from that kind of folk. I was the conservative one on the Moratorium Committee. I insisted on carrying a tiny American flag on the big march, which drove David Hawk nuts. I said, “David, y’all just be grateful it’s not a big one.”

  SAM BROWN

  David Mixner, David Hawk, and Marge Sklencar came to work. Mixner was a political strategist. He was a young man, very wily, very clever, a very smart guy about how politics work. He was a deeply closeted gay person at the time. Hawk was probably the most left of us. He was a draft resister. We all went to his arrest ceremony at Riverside Church, where Bill Coffin*3 spoke. He had the deepest, real roots in the civil rights movement. He was with Charlie Sherrod, in the Southwest Georgia Voter Project, which is one of the toughest places to be in ’64. Marge Sklencar was from Mundelein College in Chicago, and she helped us largely with women’s Catholic and liberal arts colleges. We didn’t want it to be just some Ivy League, West Coast, or Madison, Wisconsin, operation. We wanted to make sure that we had roots more broadly than that.

  DAVID HAWK

  Over the summer, our small office at the Vietnam Moratorium Committee started to call the dean of students’ offices at hundreds of universities and getting the phone numbers of next year’s student body president, finding them at home and convincing them to start organizing the week school started. Toward the end of the summer we were being covered by the press corps in Washington that covered the student beat. The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Time magazine, all had journalists whose beat it was to cover students. The journalists who were doing this would contact us over the summer, wanting to know what was going to happen when the campuses opened in the fall. I started telling them, with increasing confidence, that we were going to have this thing called the Vietnam Moratorium.

  DAVID MIXNER

  Before the Moratorium, the Nixon people had seen what the students were able to do to Johnson, and so they were making outreach like mad. They contacted me through their liaison, Jay Wilkinson, and a guy named John Campbell at the White House. And they actually took a group of us to the Airlie House retreat. I think it was a CIA retreat place, quite honestly. They flew us in a helicopter, from the White House lawn. Ehrlichman was there. [Chief of Staff H. R.] Haldeman was there, and [White House counsel] John Dean. We talked about war, and what students wanted. It was a bullshit meeting. But we were all gaga. I mean, come on, we just flew out on Marine One! I was twenty-three, and all these people were asking my advice on the war. Hello?

  STEPHEN BULL (Nixon aide)

  I enlisted in the Marine Corps after graduation in 1963. By 1965 I would go to Okinawa, and then to Vietnam. We were part of the initial buildup. I was with a motor transport outfit. We got shot at from time to time, but they missed. ’Sixty-five was the beginning of a transitional year. There was a huge revolution, in about an eighteen-month period. I left the country around the time—do you remember Berkeley, and the Free Speech Movement in 1964, otherwise referred to as the dirty word movement? Mario Savio was leading it. When I was in Vietnam, Watts blew up.*4 I remember there was a notification that went around to various units in the Marine Corps, saying in effect, be on the lookout for troops smoking marijuana. I thought, Marines didn’t smoke marijuana. Marines don’t do drugs; they’re marines. Drugs were not part of my generation. But when I came back home, drugs were ubiquitous. The antiwar movement had just started. I got back in the summer of ’66.

  I grew up on Long Island, and when I started job seeking in Manhattan after only being home for two weeks, the first thing I see is a bunch of raggedy kids marching down the street, carrying Viet Cong flags, chanting, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is going to win.” And I’m thinking, What in the heck is going on? And they’re smoking dope, and all of this stuff is going on, and I’m thinking, What happened in this one-year period? Fortunately, I was there at the beginning of the Vietnam War. And perhaps because I had it all behind me, I could be more cavalier in my attitude because it didn’t really affect me directly. I wasn’t going to be drafted and be sent back over there. I was done.

  SAM BROWN

  What happened was almost incomprehensible. In August our office was quiet, and we were developing relationships, reaching out to people, but September and October blew our minds. People were constantly contacting us—people we didn’t know at all. They’d call us and say, “I’m in Wichita. What can I do?” “Well, what do you want to do? Let’s think together about what you might do in Wichita, and if it makes sense in Wichita. What do you think works? Who do you know? Who can you talk to? Who are the people you would reach out to in the community?” We were helping people think through what they could do.

  Interest built steadily in the last six weeks. And so, when you asked me to describe it, I said “incomprehensible” because of the waves of stuff that was happening every day. We were living together in a house out on Eighteenth Street, seven of us, sharing a house, and cooking spaghetti at one o’clock in the morning when we got home. I mean, we thought it was us against the world, and then suddenly it seemed like the whole world was standing outside our door.

  Anyway, the momentum grew, and grew, and grew, and it became more and more respectable, even in little towns like the one where I grew up, Council Bluffs, Iowa. But it was very tough on my parents. I would say the worst night was when they got a phone call at three o’clock in the morning saying, “Your son is dead, and we’re glad,” and then they hung up. They had been pillars of the local Methodist church all of their adult life, and there were many people who stopped speaking to them and wouldn’t shake their hand in church. It was nasty. The world was really split, and in those little towns I was considered a communist crazy, and it didn’t matter that I was the right wing of the antiwar movement. I was still a communist crazy by their reckoning.

  DAVID MIXNER

  Suddenly we were on the cover of Time and Life and The New York Times. The press practically organized it for us. At that time, that was the organizing tool. There were no chat rooms, no email—we had to do mailings. We had hundreds of volunteers on the floor of our offices stuffing envelopes and putting packets together to send to the organizers at these colleges. Then we’d take them to the post office, and mail them to the organizers. There was no FedEx; the post office didn’t do next-day delivery.

  STEPHEN BULL

  There weren’t that many of us working in the White House who had served in Vietnam. In fact, of the people that I was working with, I may have been the only one who had any real experience there. I mean there might have been a couple of guys on the National Security Council who may have been there. But I was about the only one who had a
ny real experience. Some of the other guys who were my contemporaries, they somehow had avoided military service. So anyway, my only point is, I’ve got a prejudice against those who are, in my mind, trying to tear down the country.

  I’m carrying that prejudice into my position at the White House. And I’m going to try to be careful not to project too much of my own attitude, which was, these are a bunch of raggedy-ass kids and I have absolutely no sympathy for you guys. I think you’re a bunch of commie pinkos and you all ought to be in jail. Now that’s perhaps an exaggeration of my attitude.

  I was a Nixon advance man in the ’68 campaign. The reason I came to Washington was because the Nixon administration had an old man’s image as a bunch of old pols. They needed some young faces down here, so the chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, invited me and a couple of other young guys to the White House. Initially we all worked for Haldeman, and in the spring of ’69 I moved into the position of Nixon’s personal slave. I was essentially the civilian aide that ran the Oval Office.

  DAVID HAWK

  On September 26 Nixon held a press conference, and we got some of our friends in the press corps to go and to ask the president what he thought about the announced student demonstrations for the fall. Nixon made a terrible comment that he didn’t care what the students did. He said, “I understand that there has been and continues to be opposition to the war in Vietnam on the campuses and also in the nation. As far as this kind of activity is concerned, we expect it. However, under no circumstances will I be affected whatever by it.”