Parenthesis

by Jay Neugeboren

  At the Parade Committee there were groups and individuals who had always been ready to move from protest to action, but in the spring of 1966 even people such as Dave Dellinger, chairman of the Committee (and later chairman of the National Mobilization Committee, one of the first to actually get into the Pentagon in the fall of 1967) were insisting that the time was “not yet ripe” for mass tactics involving civil disobedience: SANE would drop out, the Committee would be split, we would lose the bulk of our middle-class constituency, we would alienate moderates, the uncommitted.

  After this, though I still tried to persuade “moderates” (in the manner of Draper, Fulbright, Schlesinger, Lippmann) of the immorality and impracticality of the war, I did so with less enthusiasm. The more I knew about Vietnam, and the more I argued about it—the less I wanted to argue, to know. My political activities began to seem meaningless, distasteful. If those who were most actively opposed to the war were still unwilling to go further than legitimate protest, what hope was there? The reasoning which had sustained my own antiwar involvement until then—that even if we’d had no effect on stopping the war, we (the peace movement) had put brakes on its escalation, we’d provided Lyndon Johnson with breathing space—with more options should he have decided he wanted to get out of Vietnam—the consolation that derived from such thoughts was unsatisfying, unconnected with what was going on in Vietnam. Once again, a plan of mine thwarted, I began to withdraw into myself. Everything I saw or felt (in the newspapers, in the ghetto schools, in the apartments of New York liberals) helped return me to the state of mind that had prevailed during my months in Indianapolis—this time, however, my depression led to no new political campaign. Things seemed, quite simply, hopeless; just as three hundred years of racism and exploitation weren’t going to be changed by civil rights bills and poverty programs, empire was not going to be stopped by advertisements, or genocide by court battles.

  Though I continued in the spring and summer of 1966 to work at any task and with any group that was trying to end this particular war, I began to believe that there were some things about which nothing could be done, and that Vietnam was one of them. The activities of the previous year (I was, by then, attending meetings five and six nights a week) bored me now, tired me—I wanted to get away from it all, to be far from meetings and marches. As long as I stayed in America, though, I knew I would continue to work against the war—but the only effect of my work, I felt, would be to drain me. (Although I’d written several stories and articles, since Big Man had been accepted—almost a year before—I’d been unable to begin a new novel.)

  The majority of Americans were comfortable, secure, untouched by the war in any direct way. They would, therefore, continue to acquiesce to anything the government did in their name. Those who opposed the war were not, in significant numbers, prepared to undertake the risks involved in escalating their protests. The government, I concluded, knew then that it could continue to do whatever it wanted. More than this, I began to feel that protest against the war was actually welcomed by the government—proof of those American freedoms for which American boys were dying.

  Betsey and I talked of leaving the country: I would begin work on another novel, I would be away from New York, I would be far from those political involvements which, though I couldn’t separate myself from them, I felt could destroy my fiction—and, therefore, me.

  If, by my actual and sustained involvement in politics I had lost my more extreme desires, I had also lost, by this same involvement, the hopes—the dream—that had first led me to political activity. I was left, I felt, without illusion about my ability to change the world—and without anything to do. I didn’t need, for the conditions of my own life, a revolution; I was no longer able, it seemed, to compensate for my helplessness and despair with dreams and schemes of omnipotence. My losses seemed, at the time, heavy, sad, final.

  That my political involvements had come to bore me was not so surprising, though; how, after all, could any political activity in the real world compare with the political campaign I’d created in the months following GM? While events in the real world—in Vietnam or at home or at a south Harlem junior high—could now propel me to “appropriate” action in the real world, they still did so, at least partially, so that my fiction would remain free of these events, would go beyond them—i.e., I still acted politically in order to exorcise things I thought of as being merely political—so that, I told myself, my fiction would not become didactic and journalistic. Since, in the five years since my letter to Kennedy, my politics had become less fictional, other things followed inevitably.

  In the summer of 1966 I did no such theorizing. I told Columbia that I wouldn’t be teaching there in the fall and Betsey and I made plans for spending a year in Europe.

  In the middle of the summer, Jerry Charyn called from California to ask if I wanted to come to Stanford in the fall as a writer-teacher. I said no, but the offer was tempting (I would be a teacher because I was a writer). When Albert Guérard called a week later and pointed out that Europe would still be in the same place nine months hence (and that I would have more money to enjoy it), we changed our minds and decided he was right: we would see California (something we’d talked of before), we would put away more money, we would have more time to plan our year (or two) in Europe—and, with a light teaching schedule and without New York committees, I was certain that I could get to work again.

  Big Man was published that August. When my editor called me on a broiling New York afternoon to say that copies had arrived, I ran to the subway, and arrived at the publisher’s downtown office, dripping sweat, a half hour later. It had been nine years since I’d begun submitting novels; when my editor handed me a copy of my first published book the only thing I could say was, “Gee—it’s so thin.”

  A few weeks later, when the first reviews had appeared, I asked a salesman in E. J. Korvette’s book department if he had a novel about basketball which I’d seen reviewed in the previous Sunday’s Times. “Big something—I can’t remember what—was the title,” I told him. “You mean Big Man,” he said, and led me to where the book was. I tried to act nonchalant, interested. We talked. I asked if the book was good, if it was selling, and when his replies were affirmative, I turned the book to the back cover—tried to smile modestly, to apologize for having misled him—and showed him the picture of the author. “That’s me,” I said. “Oh,” he replied. “Your uncle was in this morning—”

  Less than a month after publication, in September, 1966, we left New York for California. At Stanford, I was soon at work on a novel (its settings: Williamsburg schools and the West Side of Manhattan)—I was also more relieved than I’d believed possible, simply to be away from the rush of New York meetings, protests, politics. Betsey and I rented a house in Palo Alto—with lemon and orange trees, wisteria, roses, magnolias, morning glories, lots of closets, and a room for me to work in—the first time I’d ever had a separate writing room; the pleasantness of the climate, the people, and the campus life made it easy for me, I found, to believe that there was no urgent need to do anything or try to change anything. My disillusionment with politics, moreover, seemed to reinforce what my political activities during the previous three years had helped stabilize: the trust I put in my fiction. Because nothing I did or wrote could have any significant effect on whatever real world lay beyond my fiction, I might as well, I told myself, do what I wanted and write novels. The guilt which had previously bound my politics to my writing seemed gone.

  I let myself become involved in whatever campus antiwar protests presented themselves—but these were minimal. I attended meetings of the faculty peace committee held over lunch, outdoors, on the patio of the Student Union, and I was content, generally, to let others do most of the talking, organizing.

  The Vietnam war, to judge from these meetings, seemed cause, not for action or outrage, but for academic debate. I remember attending four or five luncheons in a row, where a half-dozen faculty members worked at makin
g a decision about bringing a speaker to the campus to “discuss” the war. The speaker’s chief merit was to be his potential appeal to moderate faculty members. One faculty member vetoed Hans Morgenthau as being too controversial.

  I let some people know that I found such activities absurdly inadequate, and some let me know that they agreed with me, that the campus had been more active in previous years (e.g., in a campaign against a nearby Redwood City napalm plant). But discussion that fall continued to be equal to action. The one suggestion I ventured—that the faculty urge draft resistance, that we “aid and abet” our students’ refusal to serve in the military—was transformed, after much discussion, into an announcement I sent out that fifteen faculty members were available for “draft counseling.” Our job, according to most of the faculty I was able to recruit for the counseling, was not to advocate any course of action, or to risk jail—but to try to “educate” our students about the war (a war we’d already been involved in for at least twelve years), to let them know, as one well-known professor put it, that in a nation which allowed dissent there was nothing “un-American” about “considering” Conscientious Objection.

  Things went on like this for about half the year, and I didn’t mind. Life was pleasant, untroubled. I taught, I wrote, I signed whatever petitions came to me, I was looked to as a writer. Most afternoons, after writing or teaching, Jerry Charyn and I would retrieve a bit of New York City schoolyard by playing paddle tennis with paddles Jerry had expropriated when he’d been a New York City Department of Parks “parkie.” Vietnam was far away—distant, abstract, always something of an idea. Newspapers, film clips, photos—these could shorten the distance now and then, but the immediacy of the war, if it came at all, came intermittently and always seemed to need some self-starting provocation; one had to work hard to ignite a sense of horror, to remember that abstractions such as murder, suffering, and death had individual instances, and that it was for these individual instances that one had first protested.

  The announcement, in January, that Vice President Hubert Humphrey was coming to the campus to speak, changed things, made Vietnam seem suddenly less distant. The campus was quickly in motion. An open meeting was called and the students who attended voted to walk out on Humphrey. The faculty who were present at the meeting pleaded (there, and after) for a more moderate action. A walkout, they said, would violate the Vice President’s right to free speech; it would “alienate” that large body of uncommitted students and faculty we were seeking to educate; it would—the phrase I remember most—be “in bad taste.”

  A faculty group called its own meeting and decided on its own form of protest: those who were against the war would come to the auditorium to hear Humphrey, but they would remain silent throughout his speech, they would neither heckle nor applaud, and they would identify themselves as opponents of the war by wearing white armbands.

  The faculty group issued a statement, which they ran as an ad in the student paper on the day of Humphrey’s visit: “We, the undersigned members of the faculty, welcome Vice President Humphrey to Stanford, but in so doing we cannot allow our welcome to imply approval of the Administrations’s resumption of the bombing of North Vietnam, extending a policy which Mr. Humphrey has unequivocally endorsed….”

  The decorous language of the faculty welcome pushed me over the edge, into action, anger. I began speaking around the campus—at meetings, rallies, at a marathon teach-in—and in my speeches I mocked the faculty armband statement, I said that Humphrey was a murderer, an agent of a murderous policy, and that to call him anything less was euphemism. The week of Humphrey’s visit, I telephoned Charles Stein, a professor of statistics, and one of the faculty members I knew would find the armband welcome as repulsive as I had. We met with one of the student leaders, Barry Greenberg (head of the campus “free university”), and I brought a statement I’d drafted which urged a walkout and which condemned Humphrey and the administration he spoke for as “murderous and criminal.” Within a few hours we had over two-dozen faculty signatures, and we ran our statement as an ad on the day Humphrey arrived. (The white armband ad was signed by 211 faculty.)

  Earlier that year, in one of my freshman English classes, we had discussed selections from several autobiographical essays on childhood—by Baldwin, Yeats, Kazin, Stegner, Nabokov, and Howe. My students had remained typically unresponsive. They seemed to understand the essays well enough, but they didn’t react to them. When I pressed them—this was after a discussion of Notes of a Native Son—one girl finally blurted out, with the first gesture of emotion I’d seen to that point: “Childhood wasn’t like that!” The rest of the class nodded in agreement. Weren’t these writers, the girl asked, “exaggerating?” The others echoed her question.

  It wasn’t that the students didn’t believe what Baldwin and the others had told them (they did), or that they had nothing in their own lives which could correspond to what Baldwin had told them (they did not)—but something which seemed sadder: that they had nothing within their experience which enabled them to imagine what had been described for them. Stanford students were, generally, intelligent, liberal, good-natured, open, wholesome, rich, and dull—archetypes of the WASP whom Erik Erikson has described as being “emotionally retentive.”

  The fact that Humphrey was going to be on this particular campus (a real agent of a real war, was the way I put it in speeches) rekindled in me all the resentment I’d felt earlier at the easy, insulated lives of the students, at the absurdly academic forms of liberal protest—and, most of all, at my own failure to have done much for half a year. The fact, that, before Humphrey’s visit, I would have agreed with most people that if a government official was safe at any major university in America, it would have been at Stanford—a week before his visit, Dow Chemical, maker of napalm, was on the campus and there had been no trouble—only gave me more reason to try to start something.

  On February 20, 1967, two years after we had first begun the bombing of North Vietnam, Humphrey chose as the subject for his opening remarks to the faculty and students of the university often called “the Harvard of the West,” Time Magazine’s “now generation” of that year. He said he came to Stanford “to be where the action is,” and, in his most memorable remark of the day, he referred to the late Pope John as one of the “now people.” He did not mention Vietnam in his opening statement, and about seventy-five people walked out when he was done. A while later, when in answer to a question, he stated that “if President John F. Kennedy were alive today he would be doing exactly what the Johnson Administration is doing at this very hour,” several hundred more people walked out.

  Humphrey’s remarks (broadcast to those outside on a PA system) and the frustration of many at not having had the chance to walk in in order to walk out (my own predicament)—on good evidence, many of us believed the audience had been “packed”—began to affect those of us outside the hall. We stationed groups at the various exits, and waited for the Vice President’s departure. Bloomington again, only this time I was, I knew, not in a minority.

  When the meeting was over and Humphrey used a Secret Service decoy where the largest crowd had gathered at the rear of the auditorium, in order to sneak out a side exit, several hundred of us ran after him, yelling “Shame! Shame! Shame!” continually. He was in the car before we got to him, and he drove away. That night the event seemed important enough (an “attack on the Vice President”) to be carried on nationwide television.

  The president of Stanford, J. W. Sterling, immediately issued a public apology to Humphrey in the name of the university, and tried to place the blame for the “attack” on “nonstudents.” We responded one sunny afternoon a few days later by marching on his office bearing signs such as “Give Credit Where Credit is Due,” and “We Are Not Nonstudents.”

  As before, I was at work at once on an article concerning the events I’d been involved in, and, again, the article was accepted by The New Republic. In their version it ended with my comment concerning the
dramatic rise in antiwar activities on the Stanford campus:

  All of this should seem heartening—as it did at first. But then one must remind oneself that although, in individual enclaves, the peace movement may grow, in Vietnam the war grows faster. Within a week of Humphrey’s visit, for the first time, we mined North Vietnamese rivers, we shelled North Vietnam from the Bay of Tonkin and from directly below the demilitarized zone, and we used paratroopers as 50,000 US troops invaded the alleged NLF stronghold in Zone C. As Humphrey had put it at Stanford, Hanoi will know “by the summer” [of 1967] that “the ball game is over.”

  The New Republic had, however—and I was furious about it—cut the final four paragraphs of my article; the part the entire article had been building to, the part I’d considered most important. In them I’d reiterated what I’d been saying in speeches on campus before and after Humphrey’s visit—that, for those who meant to be serious about their opposition to the war, the time was long overdue to move from protest to resistance, from dissent to direct action. E.g., ten thousand professors signing ten thousand more ads meant nothing; ten thousand professors refusing to teach, ready to act—that might mean something else.

  I had begun my article with a quote from an essay that was much talked about at the time, Noam Chomsky’s “The Responsibility of Intellectuals.” The “responsibility of intellectuals,” Chomsky had said, was “to speak the truth and to expose lies.” But it was also, as he inferred, and as I would write in an article for Commonweal that spring (“Disobedience Now!”), “to act on this truth, to do those things which neither convince the convinced, nor educate a few more citizens, but relate—on a large scale—directly to that horror which goes on every day in Vietnam.” The kind of mass direct action I had proposed in New York the previous year seemed, once again, necessary and possible.