Parenthesis

by Jay Neugeboren

  On the campus, some of us began publicly urging those of draft age not to serve in the military, and we made it clear when we did so that this was a violation of the law. My own approach and rhetoric began to change. Whereas in previous years I had advocated draft refusal on moral and altruistic grounds, I now began making statements which, when I read them back in newspapers, or in press releases from the Stanford News Office, continually astonished me. The San Francisco Chronicle dubbed me the “professor-provocateur.” I said things in public—outrageous, uncompromising (e.g., comparisons of U. S. and Nazi actions)—to hundreds of people, that I never would have dared say to a single person. In brief, if like many liberals I had begun by believing in civil disobedience because I loved my country, because I wanted, as those in the civil rights movement had, to demonstrate the depth of my desire to save what was good in it—I now began advocating direct action in order, I said, “to save the world from my country.” Anything, I stated, which gave support to the United States was, in effect, “to give aid and comfort to the enemy.”

  At the time of the national mobilization against the war that April, I worked on campus with a “We Accuse” campaign the student radicals had organized concerning Stanford’s complicity in military-industrial projects. The links of the university with the war (primarily through the Stanford Research Institute), with chemical and biological warfare research, and with the strategic hamlet program, were carefully documented.

  The faculty reaction to the “We Accuse” campaign was, again, disapproving. The posters—pictures of President Sterling and members of the Board of Trustees such as David Packard, with WE ACCUSE written across the bottom, and collages of wounded Vietnamese children, of burned villages, of dead soldiers behind them—were denounced by most students and faculty, and by the student paper, again, as being “in bad taste.” At a major rally that week, from the entire faculty, the students could get only Mitchell Goodman and me to speak publicly on behalf of the campaign.

  I tried to put things in perspective, to put brakes on my activity, my rage: if we couldn’t get more than a handful of faculty and students at a major university to endorse a few posters, what danger, really, did we—or the entire antiwar movement—pose to the work that was actually going on in military-research projects? I was not, in fact, very interested in denouncing President Sterling. He was probably, I pointed out in speeches and discussions, an “honorable man”—as were the stockholders in military-production corporations, the members of the Board of Trustees, the faculty who did the research. Most of these people probably regretted the fact that we were killing people in Vietnam; they probably believed they wanted an end to the war. They were probably all “honorable men.” But Chomsky was right—at the least, we had to speak the truth, and the truth, as I saw it, was that the president of Stanford and his assistants and the members of the Board of Trustees and those who did the research were the men in our immediate community who made the decisions and handled the money and signed the contracts which provided for the research and sustained the factories which made the weapons that went to Vietnam and killed people.

  The week-long series of tribunals, exposés, and rallies was not “successful” in terms of winning friends—we could get only fifty students and three faculty to march on the Stanford Research Institute with us the afternoon of the major rally—but they did, I was convinced, influence people. Though our campaigns seemed to make us lose the support of “moderates,” I was convinced that this loss was temporary. I felt optimistic, certain that just as those who had originally been against the walkout had come to approve it, so those who denounced the “We Accuse” campaign would eventually understand it and endorse it. At the least, we started people on their first steps toward recognizing—or even considering—the complicity of the university, by its daily business, in war crimes, and to considering this in a way that might not otherwise have occurred to them. Our irresponsibility seemed quite responsible to me.*

  Buoyed—or deluded—by the intensity of my own activity, and by the amount of activity around me, I felt, at the time, that it was almost impossible to be too radical. The further left one moved, the more those in the middle seemed to be drawn leftward.

  In New York that week we had gone beyond the dreams any of us had had a year or two before—somewhere between three hundred thousand and a half million people protested (I could remember marches in which we’d been pleased that our numbers had doubled—from five to ten thousand); in San Francisco we more than filled the seventy thousand seats in Kezar Stadium. The fact of such numbers, I felt, made certain things possible, and the argument I began advancing, became a statistical, a pragmatic one: if, I claimed, only 10 percent of those who were in the East and West Coast marches were now ready for direct action, then at least two things were true: 1) there were between thirty and fifty thousand people who would with their bodies, be ready to stop the progress of the war at specific points (the Pentagon, Port Chicago, major induction centers), and 2) there would be enough antiwar personnel left (i.e., the remaining 90 percent) so that all ongoing “traditional” protests could continue at more than full strength.

  This meant, moreover, that I no longer had to try to convince the unconvinced about anything concerning the war—my job, instead, was to search out those (the hypothetical 10 percent) who already agreed with me. The difference was crucial, I claimed, for it allowed many of us to abandon certain forms of liberal rhetoric and practice—we no longer had to worry about “alienating” moderates.

  From this point on, throughout the spring and summer, I spent all my free time trying to organize a national campaign for mass civil disobedience—and I was able, during those months, to believe that I had a chance of succeeding, that we had a chance of doing something which could actually bring about an end to the war.

  Something else: what had been true for my fiction now became true for my politics—I had only to do and say and write what I wanted. I no longer felt that I had to compromise my political vision in order that my fiction remain, in some way, free. I no longer had to try to convince others of what seemed obvious, beyond argument. Those I had to organize, those I would try to convince concerning tactics, already shared basic assumptions with me—about the horror of the war, about the need to do something commensurate with this horror.

  I no longer had to do what I’d sometimes felt I had to do—what I’ve feared, even while writing this book, I might feel compelled to do again; i.e., I no longer felt any need to justify my actions, to try to demonstrate why I was opposed to the war and how deeply I was opposed to it. I no longer felt any need to argue against the cynical accusation (one was against the war because it was fashionable to be against the war, because—as a committed [and committeed] member of the Left such a position was mandatory) which had usually been in the air, and against which I was always expected to argue. In previous years, especially among those who would claim, as if this made them the most liberal and open-minded of Americans, that “they had not yet made up their minds” about the war (if there were “two sides” to a story, it seemed to follow logically that neither could ever be right), I’d sometimes felt that I’d been expected to do more than argue, that I’d been expected to perform: to show—with eyes and voice and gesture—just how deeply, how sincerely my commitment to peace was.

  In the spring of 1967 things were suddenly different. Immediately following the April 15th march I called a meeting of several members of the faculty antiwar committee at Stanford and found a sympathetic response to the idea of mass civil disobedience. A half-dozen faculty members signed an initial call I’d drawn up, which I then revised, and sent out, along with two covering letters.

  Within a day we had sixteen endorsements, including several from faculty who had, only two months before, condemned the walkout on Humphrey. I remember, for example, going in to see one of the organizers of the white armband protest, and showing him the civil disobedience pledge. He read it and nodded. “Of course I’ll sign,” he
said. “But I was wondering,” he added at once, “—have you ever considered sabotage?”

  The tone of the pledge to civil disobedience was indicative of my hopefulness: “We do not want to protest the war any longer,” it said at one point, “we want to stop it. We are prepared, through mass civil disobedience to say NO to our government….” Using the English Department mimeograph machine, I ran off the pledge, a list of its sixteen signers, and a covering letter. I sent these to the entire faculty and staff—and additional endorsements beçan coming in at once.

  Encouraged by this response, I called a meeting of antiwar faculty groups from other bay area colleges (Berkeley, San Francisco State, San José State). The professors from these colleges, though surprised at the number of civil disobedience pledges we’d already received at Stanford, were unenthusiastic. Several hours, as I recall the evening, were spent in tearing apart our pledge, sentence by sentence. The vagueness of our objectives aroused fierce denunciations, wild arguments—civil disobedience against what? How could a Stanford faculty group organize a nationwide campaign? Shutting down the Pentagon, major induction centers—? This was dangerous talk, wishful thinking. To my repeated explanation—the targets could only be specified exactly when we knew our numbers—the obvious response was flung back: until we know the targets, how can we pledge to act?

  One “uncommitted” member of the Stanford faculty interrupted the arguments regularly every half hour by suddenly jumping up and declaring: “All right, I’ll sign—!” He would then give all the reasons for his decision to sign, only to interrupt at the next half hour to tell us that he had changed his mind, that he could not sign such a document, and why. Several times Mitch Goodman interrupted by shouting (to middle-aged professors he didn’t know)—“I’m disgusted with all of you!”

  Our initial objective had been to get about twenty faculty to pledge themselves to break the law—i.e., to enlist about 10 percent of those who had previously shown some form of opposition to the war; if the 10 percent ratio held at an enclave as conservative as Stanford, we would, I claimed, have no trouble in getting the movement going nationwide.

  Within a month of the April 15 march, we had about fifty pledges, many from the most prominent faculty at the university. We held a press conference and we received excellent coverage—good spots on radio and television, and page one stories in newspapers throughout the West (e.g., a San José Mercury headline: AT STANFORD: GOVERNMENT OBSTRUCTION PLOT HATCHED). On the Campus students told me that the news had “blown people’s minds.” Fifty Stanford faculty members committing civil disobedience and going to jail—? If this were true, anything was possible.

  I was more confident than I’d ever been before, though I do remember, when a TV reporter asked me at the press conference why we thought we would “succeed” where others had failed, replying with what seemed to me, then, to be the truth: that we didn’t, of course, know whether or not we would “succeed”—we hoped we would succeed, but what we were doing was more an “act of faith” than anything else—we would act as if we thought that what we did could end the war. What else could we do?

  By this time we had also, I thought, replied to one of the major objections the faculty from the other colleges had put to us—how were we going to get the campaign going nationwide? When we had shown the results of our month’s work to Chester Hartman, the acting director of Vietnam Summer, he’d been enthusiastic and had encouraged us. Vietnam Summer, a coalition which was to be the antiwar equivalent of Mississippi Summer, had just been organized, and it had the money and prestige (Mar tin Luther King was behind it, the Kennedys and Rockefellers were supposedly giving it secret support) to put the kind of national campaign we talked about into action. We could state at our press conference, then, as the news media reported, that we had “conferred with the head of a major antiwar group with facilities and contacts sufficient to support the movement,” and we could quote from a memo Hartman had sent us:

  …The “We Won’t Go” movement among draft-age youth represents an extreme, potentially effective, and apparently infectious development in the society…. There is a great need for an analogous activity on the part of those who are past draft age…. The response that people at Stanford have had among that faculty to the notion of civil disobedience against the war suggests that it is an idea whose time has come…

  Hartman’s memo also outlined a plan of action: We would send out mass mailings stating the case for civil disobedience in June, we would analyze the responses, we would then select the most appropriate actions and targets, recruit the key leaders, and, in late August, issue the call to mass action.

  As soon as my teaching ended, my schedule became set: I worked on my novel in the mornings, I ate lunch, and I spent my afternoons and evenings working on the national campaign—mimeographing material, writing letters, answering inquiries, telephoning, sending out copies of the Stanford Statement, the press release, press clippings, and Hartman’s memo to every prominent individual and peace organization I could think of. I was, in short, doing what I had dreamed of doing six years before—and this time I was doing it publicly, I was enjoying it, and I was getting results.

  The oppressiveness that had come to define New York politics for me was gone in the spring and summer of 1967. Nearly all the campus radicals were good three-man basketball players, and in the schoolyard a block from my house we’d play several afternoons a week, joking about jump shots and jail. On Sunday mornings we played softball. We went to meetings by foot and by car, not by subway; we met in backyards, in gardens; we demonstrated under the sun; we had picnics in Dave Harris’ backyard; most of those who had committed themselves to resistance were also working with black activists in the East Palo Alto ghetto—working in the day-school program that members of that community had put in place of an Upward Bound program they’d thrown out. Things could, I felt at the time, be accomplished in the Bay Area of California that could never have been started amidst the political entrenchments of the Parade Committee, the geography of Manhattan Island.

  We had come a long way from white armbands: Stanford now had more students pledged to draft resistance, over four hundred, than any college in the country—and Stanford only had about six thousand male students, graduate and undergraduate; through its former student body president, Dave Harris, it had become the organizing base for The Resistance, and for the October 16th turn-in of draft cards; and through its faculty, it was becoming the base for the first mass nationwide attempt at direct action by those beyond draft age.

  There was something else, something more intangible—something I’d experienced before only when I’d been a boy and something I would experience again only after I’d arrived in Spéracèdes—a sense of community, of things held in common, of a world that was—if marginally, partially—shared. Betsey and I felt it slightly, and we liked it; those of draft age, we knew, probably felt it more than we did. A month or two after we’d arrived in Spéracèdes, Bill Wiser passed along a copy of The Village Voice to me, and I found the following in it, from an interview with Emmett Schaeffer, a New York member of The Resistance. It articulated what I’d been feeling that summer about New York and California, and I clipped it out:

  The New York Resistance is almost wholly uncommunitarian. Very few draft resisters know each other, and even workers in the Resistance office conduct their extra-office lives in private. The California Resistance, on the other hand, is familial; many workers and organizers live together doing Movement work while one member holds an outside job to support the rest.

  There are a lot of advantages in that… People in California have each other’s support. When you join the Resistance there you really join a community. And I think people there feel that they’re building a continuing radical movement, not just an antiwar movement…

  …Resistance leaders talk a great deal about resistance as a process, a process of taking control of your life, of freeing yourself from the system which aims at channeling you toward its
own approved goals, a process, in the end, of continuing radicalization.…

  The initial response to our first mailings concerning the mass civil disobedience campaign was encouraging. We received endorsements from nationally known individuals, and from major peace organizations; we were assured privately that some of the nation’s most prominent religious leaders (e.g., the Reverend Dr. King, Reinhold Niebuhr, Rabbi Herzberg) could “be delivered” if we could demonstrate that the numbers were there for mass civil disobedience; and we received good coverage in the periodicals which were most likely to reach our projected constituency.

  At the same time, due in large part to the six-day Arab-Israeli War that June, there were signs that things in the middle-class middle of the peace movement were beginning to move in reverse. I received a letter, for example, from Noam Chomsky, who was working to organize some form of civil disobedience on the East Coast, in which he said that he had “received letters from a number of people saying, to my great surprise, that they now think perhaps the U.S. should be the policeman of the world (to save Israel, etc.). I think we will have to wait until things simmer down, and there is a return to rationality.”

  The Stanford statement and the number of people who signed it, are very impressive. I doubt that we could even come close to those numbers here, among tenure faculty, at least, in all the Boston area universities put together.

  My 10 percent-90 percent theory began to fall apart. In the jargon of the press, doves (on Vietnam) were becoming hawks (on Israel). Many who had, at first, been sympathetic to our proposals now began to question closing down the Pentagon, immobilizing induction centers. Might we not, as the argument went once more, “alienate” those moderates whose support we needed and had been (for so many years) trying to enlist?

  Most of those who remained responsive to the idea of civil disobedience now began to shy away from actual confrontation and sought (again) for symbolic confrontation—for acts which had as much (or more) to do with establishing the right to protest the war as they did with protesting the war. I received letters from people urging that we put our major efforts into “The Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority”—a statement which had been drawn up earlier that summer and which gave technically “illegal” support to draft resisters.