Genesis

by Robert Zimmerman

  Within weeks politicians from both parties, including Eugene McCarthy, Edward Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Jacob Javits, were calling for an end to American involvement in Vietnam.156 At the same time the two leading Republican candidates for President, Richard Nixon and George Romney, renewed their attacks on Johnson’s policies.157

  By April 1968, when Mark Rudd stepped up to the podium to condemn the Columbia University administration, U.S. casualties in Vietnam had risen to almost 22,000 deaths and only eight days earlier had cost Lyndon Johnson the presidency.158 Johnson, having never clearly defined the goals of that war and faced with a rising storm of protest within his own party, had bowed out of the race for reelection.

  At Columbia University, the fury over this unwanted, badly-fought war barely simmered below the surface. At the center of that anger was Mark Rudd and his followers.

  Rudd was the head of the Columbia University chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society (S.D.S.). With about 30,000 members nationwide, the S.D.S. had for several years helped organize many of the earliest, most visible antiwar protests, such as the November 1968 rally in Washington.*

  *See the last few paragraphs of chapter six.

  Many in the S.D.S. leadership were hostile to the United States and capitalism, often expressing themselves in words reminiscent of Soviet propaganda.159 “What we are witnessing and participating in is a revolt of the trainees of the new working class against oppressive conditions of capitalism,” wrote S.D.S. vice-president Carl Davidson.160 Or as local Columbia University chapter officer Anthony Papert said, “A university controlled by imperialists is not going to allow these changes. So the practical answer is we’ll have to take it over.”161

  For Rudd, the specific reasons for protest, “to end university complicity with the [Vietnam] war,”were perhaps less important than the protest itself.162 In 1970 Roger Kahn, in his book about the Columbia University protests, described Mark Rudd as

  A curiously appealing young man, except when he is possessed by a vulgarity or hostility or arrogance. He speaks earnestly and forcefully about a new order. He wants to see mankind freed from toil. How? He is not certain, and he does not take suggestions well. When someone corrects Rudd . . . his rhetoric grows simple. “Aw, fuck off.”163

  In October Rudd had written what he called a “coherent strategy” for “radicalizing” the Columbia student body. His game plan called for a step-by- step escalation of the conflict, beginning with position papers and leading to petitions, “harassment of [ROTC] instructors,” demonstrations, and finally “a general student strike.”164

  Soon to join the Vietnam War and the “oppressive conditions of capitalism” as issues of protest was the gymnasium that Columbia was building in Morningside Park. Seven years earlier the university and New York City had made a deal: the university would be given a plot of land in the park in exchange for allowing community use of the gym.

  By 1965, however, a number of politicians and local Harlem community leaders were questioning whether the city should have been leasing public park land to a private organization. By the spring of 1968 the S.D.S. had joined them, demanding that the gym’s construction be stopped.

  On Monday, April 23rd, approximately five hundred students, some from the S.D.S., some from the Students’ Afro-American Society, and some merely curious bystanders, gathered in the center of the campus. There at the bottom of the grand steps leading up to Low Library they chanted and made speeches, condemning the gym as Rudd had done at the King memorial. Then about two hundred demonstrators proceeded to the gym construction site, where several attempted to tear down the chainlink fence that surrounded it. Three policemen intervened and a scuffle ensued. One student was arrested when a policeman was knocked down and kicked.

  In retaliation, the protestors returned to the campus to grab their own “hostage.” They moved en masse to the ground floor of nearby Hamilton Hall, where Rudd told a dean and two other faculty members: “We’re going to keep you here.”165

  Though the “hostages” were released the next day, by Thursday, five buildings were occupied and the campus was shut down. When one hundred fifty students seized Low Library, they broke into the locked building by smashing a window and injuring the security guard. Once inside they rummaged through desks and rifled the files of the university president.166

  Soon politicians and outsiders were inserting themselves into the conflict. Roy Innis from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) showed up to praise the demonstrators. “I’m proud of these kids. They’ve got the dean in what you might call an extended dialogue.”167 State Senator Basil Patterson arrived to negotiate for the students. When he could get no satisfaction he said, “I know Harlem . . . settle this by nightfall.”168 Tom Hayden, one of the early founders of the S.D.S., made an appearance and suggested that if the police moved in, the protesters should make use of the university’s collection of priceless oriental vases as a defense. “We take these pieces and put ‘em out on the ledges. First time a cop takes a step toward us, we shove off a Ming vase.”169

  The university’s administration and faculty stood by, unable to make up their minds exactly what they should do or where they should stand on any of the issues. The administration feared riots in nearby Harlem, and thus waffled on doing anything. The faculty wanted the protest to end, but opposed police intervention. Many, wearing white arm bands to identify themselves, stood in front of the occupied buildings, and like school crossing guards, ushered the protesters in and out as well as guiding both demonstrators and counter- demonstrators into neat and proper lines.

  Finally, on Monday night, the administration decided to call in the police. In the early predawn hours of Tuesday a force of about a thousand policemen was sent in to retake Columbia University. In front of each occupied building about a hundred officers arrayed themselves, with the officer in charge announcing by bullhorn that “On behalf of the trustees of Columbia University . . . I have been authorized to order you not to remain and you are hereby ordered to remove yourselves forthwith.” At two buildings, underground tunnels allowed additional police officers to slip inside from below.

  Only one building was cleared peaceably. Hamilton Hall had been the first building occupied. After the first day the black protesters ordered the whites to leave so they could take sole control of the building. Now the blacks calmly told the policeman in charge that they would not resist arrest, but that they would only leave if arrested. All eighty-three were handcuffed and quietly led to vans and taken away.

  Everywhere else was violence. Students, both inside the buildings and in crowds outside, screamed “Pigs!” “Fascists!” and “Motherf-----s!” at the police. At some buildings the students and facility outside linked arms and tried to block police access to the buildings. Inside, protesters also linked arms, refusing to stand and leave when ordered to do so.170

  The cops retaliated with force, using batons and nightsticks. Pushing their way through the crowds, they dragged and shoved students from the buildings and into waiting police vans. Before long, the pushing and shoving changed to kicking, beating and cursing. Some cops cursed the students, shouting, “Commies!” “Bums!” and “Motherf----s!” Soon students and teachers alike (even those who had decided not to resist) were assaulted. In front of one building the police formed a gauntlet, and forced every captured protester to run through it, bludgeoning them unmercifully as they passed. By night’s end over one hundred people were injured, and over seven hundred were arrested.171

  This was just the beginning of the protests and violence. On May 17th 117 persons were arrested when about 1,000 people, including both students and some local politicians, occupied a university-owned tenement on 114th Street.172 On May 21st, sixty-eight persons were injured, including seventeen policemen, and another 177 arrested when students once again occupied Hamilton Hall. This time it was the students who went wild, smashing windows and doors, setting fires, and throwing rocks, bottles, and bricks at police.173

>   What made the Columbia University demonstration so shocking was that it involved the nation’s so-called elites -- its upper middle-class students, its Ivy League intellectuals, and its law enforcement officials.

  The students had been expected to spend their time learning about the world so that they could some day run it. Here, the protesting students seemed less interested in learning than in destroying the society around them.

  The teachers had been expected to understand these complex issues, and to wield wisdom in the name of justice. Here, they merely stood by, helpless, unwilling to take any stand.

  The police had been expected to firmly but justly enforce the law. Here, out of resentment and anger at the anti-American beliefs of some protesters, they violently broke it.

  Expected to lead the country away from violence and irrational behavior, the participants at Columbia all reveled in it.

  Possibly the most disturbing aspect of these protests was that, while the police and the school were justifiably condemned for their improprieties, the demonstrators were in the years to follow portrayed as noble heroes. As Jeff Kaplow, a thirty-year-old assistant professor at Columbia noted soon after, “I’m very sympathetic to [the] S.D.S. and I don’t deplore the taking of the buildings. It’s a silly piety to deplore it. It was done in a situation where all other remedies had failed.”174

  This is not to say that all protesters condoned this violence. Many people of good will participated in many peaceful Vietnam protests in the ensuing months. On April 24th, for example, with Columbia’s buildings still occupied, almost 200,000 college students throughout the New York metropolitan area gathered in Central Park to peacefully protest the Vietnam War.175

  Nevertheless, the aftermath of the Columbia protests could be seen almost immediately. Just three weeks later a group of forty students seized the registrar’s office at Brooklyn College, occupying it for sixteen hours, demanding that the college guarantee the admission of 1,000 more blacks in the coming fall semester.176 And this was only the beginning, as similar protests soon broke out in hundreds of campuses across the country.

  American society had seen the arrival of a violent protest movement that in years to come would tear at the social order, attacking and changing every assumption about the country.

  SATURN 5

  Twelve hours before Martin Luther King was shot in Memphis, the sun rose bright and clear at Cape Kennedy. At pad 39A, the countdown of the second unmanned test launch of the Saturn 5 rocket reached its finish. At 7 AM, the engines fired and, like a huge lumbering titan, the rocket began its slow climb skyward.

  Though less than twenty months remained before the arrival of Kennedy’s self-imposed deadline, NASA had only tested the complete package of this massive machine once before. In its first launch, on November 9th, 1967, the Saturn rocket had taken a test command module to a height of over 11,000 miles, at which point the service module’s engines had driven the module back into the earth’s atmosphere at almost 25,000 miles per hour. This accelerated return was intended to simulate the return of a spacecraft from lunar orbit. Its parachutes unfurling, the command module had landed safely in the Pacific, less than ten miles from the U.S.S. Bennington. It had been a perfect flight, putting a strong positive spin on what had been a sad year at NASA.

  This second launch, officially named Apollo 6, would be a repeat of that first mission, giving the ground crew a bit more experience for the first manned mission now scheduled for October. It would also reaffirm that the Saturn 5 and all its components were ready and able to safely put human beings into space.

  At one second past 7 AM, just as planned, Apollo 6 lifted off. Little else went as planned from this moment. Just over two minutes after launch, the engineers at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama began recording powerful oscillations in the thrust of the rocket. Like a badly tuned car, the rocket was actually bouncing five or six times a second as it rose into the air, the rocket’s thrust fluctuating up and down across a wide range of acceleration. For ten seconds these pulses surged along the length of the rocket -- pulses so violent that a large outside panel was ripped away.

  Then, just as the center engine of the first stage shut down on schedule, the pulses stopped. Fifteen seconds later the other four engines turned off, and the first stage was jettisoned on schedule. Now the five engines of stage two ignited, propelling the rocket forward with a million pounds of thrust. About four minutes into the burn, however, one of these engines began to have trouble. Then it cut off inexplicably, followed almost immediately by the cut-off of a second engine. Normally, the loss of two engines required the ground controllers to immediately abort the flight, but somehow the rocket was managing to balance the thrust of the remaining three engines. Making a split-second decision, flight director Charlesworth and first stage controller Bob Wolf allowed the rocket to keep flying, burning the remaining three engines of the second stage for almost five more minutes, fifty-nine seconds longer than originally planned and until its fuel tanks were dry.177

  When the rocket’s third stage engine (the S4B) kicked in, the ground controllers extended its burn as well in order to compensate for the lost thrust. As a result they managed to get the spacecraft into a wobbly orbit, 110 miles at its lowest altitude and 228 miles at its highest.

  After allowing the ship to make two circuits of the earth, the controllers now tried to simulate a command module’s return from the moon. By firing the S4B engine they would push the command module down into the atmosphere, increasing its reentry speed to over 24,000 miles per hour.

  Unfortunately, the S4B engine refused to reignite. Now the controllers were forced to fire the S.P.S. engine instead, extending its burn to almost seven minutes -- two and a half minutes longer than planned -- in an attempt to reach the desired speed. Upon hitting the atmosphere, the command module was flying only 22,000 miles an hour, and it splashed down fifty miles from its planned landing point in the Pacific.

  For NASA, the assassination of Martin Luther King acted to divert attention from these problems. The failure of Apollo 6 to perform as expected was hardly noticed by the general public.

  Yet, with only a year and eight months before the end of the decade, not only had three engines of the Saturn 5 not worked according to plan, but one whole outside panel had been torn from the rocket, and the oscillations during launch would have been strong enough to injure any astronauts on board at the time. “It was a fascinating flight,” controller Jay Greene said tersely many years later.178

  If NASA was going to send men to the moon in the next twenty months, it would have to find out very quickly what had caused these problems, and solve them just as fast.

  And the pressure was building. The Soviet space program was coming back to life. On March 2nd, one month before the unsuccessful Apollo 6 mission, the Soviets launched Zond 4. Since the death of Komarov eleven months earlier, the Soviet space program had established new flight guidelines. No manned space flight would take place until an identical unmanned robot spacecraft had successfully accomplished an identical mission.

  Zond 4, of a similar shape and configuration to a Soyuz spaceship, was intended to prove that this craft could safely return a human from lunar space. The capsule was lifted to an distance of about 205,000 miles, and then, just as had been planned for Apollo 6, dropped back to earth in order to test high velocity reentry procedures. While the launch was successful, Zond reentered the atmosphere at too steep an angle. At six miles altitude the Soviets blew the craft up, preventing it from crashing into west Africa, where they feared Western technicians might recover it.

  Then, three days after the unsuccessful launch of Apollo 6, Lunik 14 was launched, and after a three-day journey entered lunar orbit. According to Tass’s cryptic description, the orbiter was there to “conduct further scientific studies of the near-lunar space.”179 Speculation abounded, however, that this was a test flight of a Soviet manned lunar vehicle.

  The Soviets then topped this event on
e week later with the launch of Cosmos 213 and Cosmos 214. These Soyuz unmanned test craft successfully achieved the automatic docking maneuver that Komarov had been unable to attempt when his spacecraft failed one year earlier.

  Shortly thereafter, Frank Borman met in Houston with George Low, manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program. Borman, not one to mince words, described how well the capsule redesign was going. In his mind, the problems that had caused the launchpad fire more than a year earlier were solved. When construction on the first few Apollo capsules was finished in the next few months, they would be ready to take men back into space.

  As soon as the meeting ended, Low decided it was time to assemble a team to see if a flight to the moon was possible before the end of the year. He wrote a memo on the subject, and told his secretary to consider that memo “007,” which meant that once it was read by his superiors at NASA, she was to destroy it, not even keeping a copy for Low’s files.180

  Despite the death of three astronauts only fifteen months before, despite the failure of Apollo 6, and despite the lack of any manned test flights of a Saturn rocket, George Low believed the time had come to send a man to the moon. And he was convinced that they could be ready to do it in less than eight months.

  9. “THERE’S A BEAUTIFUL EARTH OUT THERE.”

  “You are go for rev two. All systems are go.” After an hour’s careful review of the S.P.S. engine’s performance, the evening’s flight director, Milton Windler, had okayed a second lunar orbit for Apollo 8.