The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  E. J. Kahn, Jr.

  APRIL 19, 1969

  THE PREVAILING MOOD at Harvard the day after Crimson blood was spilled was one of sadness. There was disbelief, too, but to a lesser degree. Belief has been suspended, if not shattered, on many campuses of late. Still, Harvard was, and probably is, and maybe will even continue to be, something different—the quintessential university, the very symbol of higher learning. One junior faculty member we ran into in the Yard at noon on Thursday, twenty-four hours after the students had occupied University Hall and seven hours after the police had bludgeoned them out, declared sadly, “Some of us are suffering today from the kind of hangover that comes only from over-indulgence in hubris.” He went on, “It’s all so irrational. It’s surrealistic. A photographer who loves Harvard was roughed up first by the demonstrators and then by the cops. After that, he couldn’t focus his camera, because he was crying. A dean who told me about this started crying, too. And the mere telling you about it is putting me in tears.”

  There were those in Cambridge who were saying, perhaps not without hindsight, that Harvard had been overdue for trouble; it had been lucky too long, it was too prominent, too inviting a target to be further spared. The Students for a Democratic Society had been muttering about occupying a Harvard building, but threat-making is the principal S.D.S. line of business, and few thought that what happened would happen. Indeed, at an evening meeting on Tuesday, April 8th, the S.D.S. had voted not to occupy. But its leaders had swiftly announced a meeting at noon the next day to reconsider, and even as that session was getting under way members of its more militant faction—including many students affiliated with the all-out-revolutionary Progressive Labor Party—were moving into University Hall. They were well prepared, with chains and padlocks and placards reading “Fight Capitalists—Running Dogs” and “Put Your Body Where Your Head Is.” They had the occupants of the building hustled out within the hour. The evictions were accomplished without injury, except to pride. There was some pushing and jostling, and one frail, quiet, nonviolent assistant dean was carried out slung over a student’s back, because he refused to leave under his own steam. He was James E. Thomas, an ordained minister who is also a nuclear physicist and a graduate student in philosophy, and who has long been acclaimed as one of the most liberal-minded Harvard administrators. His nickname is Jet. When a student he knew ordered Thomas out, he refused to go. “This building is occupied,” he was told. “But surely it’s big enough for both of us to occupy,” Thomas said. “Oh, come on, Jet,” said the student, and hoisted him onto his shoulders. As Thomas was being carted off, another student walked behind him, solicitously picking up the things that fell out of his pockets.

  The S.D.S. had long since made known its demands, which, like many student demands these days, were proclaimed to be non-negotiable. The principal one was that Harvard abolish its Reserve Officers Training Corps. The Harvard administration had already stripped the R.O.T.C. of its academic standing and its instructors of their professorial rank; the faculty had voted by a ten-to-one ratio not to abolish the R.O.T.C. The S.D.S. apparently didn’t really care. It was not the issue that mattered but the event. By midafternoon, the S.D.S. had the situation well in hand. Its occupation was reasonably orderly. Early on, the students voted against doing willful damage to the building, and against smoking marijuana while inside. Some filing cabinets were moved around, to serve as barricades, and the contents of a few of them were inspected. (On Friday, an underground paper sold in Harvard Square published some documents that purported to reveal an unsavory connection between the University and the C.I.A.) Finding a batch of blank identification cards for freshman proctors, a few students at once conferred proctorial status upon themselves; others, aware that Ivy League acceptances were about to be mailed to high-school seniors, whiled away the hours by typing on Harvard letterheads warm notes to young men around the country, congratulating them on their admission as freshmen next fall. Still others typed stencils, and one mimeograph machine churned forth a manifesto that concluded, “This is the first action of many to build a strong anti-imperialist movement in this country.” Somebody painted an obscenity on a wall of the office of Fred L. Glimp, the Dean of the College; somebody else Scotch-Taped a note alongside it saying, “Dear Sir, We apologize for whoever did this. This vandalism was not a purpose of our protest.” At one point, there were at least four hundred students in University Hall, perhaps half of them observers. One of the latter, a senior, told us afterward, “There were more beautiful girls at this Harvard function than at any other I’ve ever been to. One of them lent me a book to read. It was Cuba: Anatomy of a Revolution. The thing that worried me most about many of the people in there was their ego-building. They seemed to spend half the day congratulating themselves on what they were doing.”

  From time to time during the afternoon and evening, the occupiers held a more or less formal meeting in the spacious faculty room, from which they voted to bar the faculty; they would communicate with the faculty, and with the administration, they further voted, only by public statements. Their friends outside provided them with food and with bedding. Other friends, and spectators, swarmed outside, in a blaze of television lights. One camera crew, it developed, was filming background scenes for a movie about a fictitious campus revolt. “Here we are in front of Jenkins Hall at Metropolitan University,” an actor impersonating a television commentator was saying. “The atmosphere here is like a carnival.”

  Eventually, many of the two hundred students who remained in the building went to sleep. Quite a few of them still expected no trouble. They were wrong, of course. The administration had already decided—without consulting the faculty—to have them routed out at five in the morning. Some four hundred policemen were converging on the Yard. At four o’clock, to summon other students to the scene, fire alarms were set off—presumably by the S.D.S.—throughout the Harvard community. The students inside University Hall had been told by Franklin L. Ford, the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, within a short time of their taking it over that if they didn’t clear out in fifteen minutes they would be liable to charges of criminal trespass. Now, at 4:55 A.M., Dean Glimp warned them by bullhorn that they had exactly five minutes to get out with impunity. Apparently, nobody inside heard him. At five, the police moved in. There were two kinds—dark-blue shirts and light-blue shirts. The dark-blues were municipal police; their job was to clear students off the four flights of steps leading into University Hall. The light-blues were state police; their job was to get the students inside the building out. It is generally conceded that the dark-blues were the less disciplined and the more brutal. As they converged on the steps, clubs in hand, a few students inside the building leaped from windows and ran to freedom. Dozens of boys and girls were clubbed. One student in a wheelchair was hit. “I had to leave,” a Radcliffe girl told us. “I thought it was too voyeuristic to stick around and watch students bare their skulls to nightsticks.”

  A hundred and ninety-six boys and girls were bundled into police vans and taken off to jail. Some forty were injured. The cops were gone by six-fifteen. The Yard was littered with trash and rutted by police vehicles. Buildings and Grounds men moved swiftly into University Hall and painted over Dean Glimp’s profaned wall. All morning long, students milled about the Yard, in a daze compounded of sleeplessness and shock. “Whatever I think about seizing buildings—and I don’t think much of it—I keep reminding myself that human beings perform these acts, not three guys whose initials are S., D., and S.,” one of them told us. Some classes went on as scheduled. One bitterly anti-S.D.S. student reacted to the tumult by attending a course he hadn’t been to in three months.

  At eleven, while the students who had been arrested were being arraigned and, in most instances, released on their own recognizance, between fifteen hundred and two thousand moderate students held a meeting at the Memorial Church, in the Yard. The church had never before been so crowded; there were students perched atop the reredos. One of
the undergraduate leaders invited his fellow-students to turn to and reflect on Hymn 256 in the hymnals on hand: “O God of earth and altar, / Bow down and hear our cry. / Our earthly rulers falter. / Our people drift and die.” Professor Stanley H. Hoffmann, the social scientist, got up to speak on behalf of rationality. “This is the only university we’ve got,” he said. “It could be improved. It can be improved. But it cannot be destroyed.” He was loudly cheered. He advocated changes in Harvard’s decision-making processes, but he warned against changing the processes so much that the will of a minority could prevail. “No university can function if the minority insists on winning all the time,” he said. More cheers. The assembled students began debating what course of action they should take. They finally decided on a three-day strike, and they passed a number of resolutions—among others, condemning the administration for unnecessarily summoning the police, condemning the police for their brutality, and calling for the resignation of President Pusey if he didn’t meet student demands. “This is the most impressive and most exciting thing I’ve seen in four years at Harvard,” a Radcliffe senior said after the meeting. “It’s the first time that moderates have dealt with radicals on their own terms. There’s no longer a murky atmosphere here. The way the moderate students have reacted is electrifying.” A resolution to condemn the S.D.S. was tabled. Nonetheless, some of the S.D.S. people who had got out of jail had hastened to the church and were already crying “Foul!” They said that the administration had purposely delayed their release so they couldn’t get to the Memorial Church meeting in time to vote. The meeting broke up at two o’clock, amid ringing, responsible cries of “Clean the church! Clean the church!” Outside, a girl screamed “Bail money!” into the ears of a haggard passing dean. He winced. “Women shouldn’t be allowed to talk in public,” he said, not ill-naturedly. We caught sight of a student we know, a junior who hadn’t missed a demonstration throughout his stay at Harvard. He looked crestfallen. “My alarm clock didn’t go off,” he said. “I slept through the bust. I’ve lost my honor.”

  The Yard was still full of clusters of disputants. Graduate students from the Business School and the Medical School had drifted over to see what was going on. A Divinity School student came by and asked no one in particular if it was all right for a lady organist to practice in the church, between meetings, for an imminent recital. Two S.D.S. members ripped an orange sign off a tree. “Hey, that’s my sign!” yelled a student. “You wrote that?” one of the rippers asked scornfully. “Yeats did,” said the sign’s owner, even more scornfully. “The ceremony of innocence is drowned,” the sign read. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” The S.D.S. men shrugged and yielded up the sign.

  We had a word with an instructor in government. He had a booklet in one hand entitled “After Harvard—What?” He asked us if we were going to the faculty meeting. “What faculty meeting?” we asked. “There are meetings all over today,” he said. “This one’s at Sever Hall.”

  We headed toward Sever. On the way, we were stopped by an undergraduate with a solemn expression. “Would you like to hear the views of an ordinary, middle-of-the-road student?” he asked. We said we would. “I have always been incensed by the moral arrogance of S.D.S., but I’m afraid that this morning they scored a brilliant victory,” he said. “Because of the administration’s response to their totally unwarranted action, the issue, God help us, is no longer what S.D.S. did. The issue is cracked heads. It puts moderates like me in an uncomfortable position. I won’t absolve S.D.S. of responsibility, and I won’t support any strike, but I’ll sign all the petitions in the world to disapprove of calling in the cops that way. Most of all, I am deeply concerned about the future of Harvard University.”

  So were the eighty faculty members who had gathered in Sever Hall. George Wald was there, and James D. Watson, and John Kenneth Galbraith, and everybody was sitting facing a blackboard on which someone had chalked “on strike.” As we entered, a man we didn’t recognize was saying, “For heaven’s sake, let’s ‘reject,’ or let’s ‘repudiate,’ but, whatever we do, let’s do anything but ‘deplore.’ ” They agreed that the sense of their meeting was that they repudiated the occupation of University Hall, the eviction of the deans, the calling of the police, and the failure to inform the faculty that the police were being called. Professor Daniel Seltzer spoke up. “The primary purpose of this university is to teach,” he said. “As long as one single student shows up for any of my classes, I’ll teach him.” Most of his colleagues nodded approvingly.

  A NOTE BY JILL LEPORE

  THE SOUND YOU hear reading these pieces is the sound of shattering. It’s unmistakable but faraway, like a rustle in the woods or a whistle in the distance. “We strain our ears, but we hear no bugles, no sounds of fifes and drums,” Michael J. Arlen wrote in a Comment about the Vietnam War, at the end of 1965. Arlen later said that when he sent in more powerful stuff about the war, more damning stuff, noisier stuff, William Shawn would say things like, “This is a Comment piece. It represents the magazine. We’re not ready to say that this is wrong.” And so there is, instead, this unnerving sound of shattering, muffled.

  “John Kennedy was killed, his life made to disappear right there before us, frame by frame,” Arlen wrote, in a piece about bearing witness to violence by watching television, and you can almost hear the screen cracking, breaking like a heart. There’s cut glass all over these essays: lenses and panes and, on the ground, shards as sharp as spikes. Especially, there are panes, and reporters peering through them. Here’s Daniel Lang, visiting a missile silo that reminds him of an operating room: “Through windows I could see two small rooms, one containing double-decker beds and the other a library of technical manuals stamped ‘SECRET.’ ” And here’s Charlayne Hunter, the first black student to graduate from the University of Georgia, walking through Harlem: “In the window of the meat market were rows of ox tails, turkey wings, and chops, and a sign on the window advertised chitterlings and hog maws at bargain prices.” More often, though, it’s the absence of glass that draws attention: “He was shot in secrecy, away from cameras,” Arlen writes about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., on the balcony of a motel in Memphis. Then there’s E. B. White on the assassination of J.F.K., shot while riding through the streets of Dallas in a car with the windows rolled down: “He died of exposure.”

  The pieces gathered here aren’t investigative: they’re not exposés. They’re scenes. They’re mainly letters from this place or that, chronicling one kind of fracture or another. (The historian Daniel T. Rodgers has called the 1980s the “age of fracture,” but, arguably, it was the 1960s.) Whether at Woodstock or in the White House, these writers are more likely to stare than to pry. Jonathan Schell attends a rally in 1968: “The crowd, which grew to well over a thousand as the evening progressed, was composed mostly of people whom we took to be in their twenties. There was a noticeably large proportion of college-age girls, and a peppering of Africans and American Negroes. Some people carried signs consisting of large photographs of half-starved Biafran children, and others carried signs saying, among other things, ‘Stop Man’s Inhumanity.’ ” Ellen Willis goes to a hearing before an eight-member committee—“all male”—of the New York State Legislature. The subject is abortion. Willis writes, “Of the fifteen witnesses listed on the agenda, fourteen were men; the lone woman was a nun.” Women who’ve had abortions turn up and insist on speaking. The committee hardly listens to these women. But Willis does. “We’re probably the first women ever to talk about our abortions in public,” one of them says, wandering out.

  Rovere doesn’t stare so much as glare, writing from Washington with wry and even cynical detachment about everything from the Cuban missile crisis (“there are dark hints that Moscow may be dissembling”) to Lyndon B. Johnson’s first hundred days (“it is entirely possible that things were livelier in this city in the middle years of the Pierce administration”). Charlayne Hunter was only
twenty-five when she wrote about a block in Harlem where she found, more or less, a mirror: “Near us, a young Negro woman who looked to be in her early twenties stood leaning against a car with a sketch pad and pencil in her hands.” When two men ask the woman with the sketch pad what she’s doing there, she says, “I’m a student, and I’m doing a paper for one of my classes on the changing face of Harlem.” The face of the United States was changing in the 1960s. The question was: Who was drawing those faces? Who was really looking?