They Marched Into Sunlight

by David Maraniss

  Napalm was cheap and easy to make. The latest variation of the hellish concoction, known as napalm B, was 25 percent gasoline, 25 percent benzene, and 50 percent polystyrene mixed together in what the industry dismissively called “bathtub chemistry.” Dow had begun producing napalm B at a plant in Torrance, California, in the summer of 1965 (three years after the U.S. Air Force, in its “advisory” role, began dropping napalm bombs in Vietnam), and within a year of getting the contract, it stood alone as the military’s sole supplier. The weapon and the chemical company thus became inextricably linked in the public mind just as napalm was emerging as the most provocative symbol of modern warfare, with press reports and photographs chronicling its horrible effects on civilians in Vietnam and the nightly news regularly jolting viewers as violent splashes of napalm exploded in the jungles on the small screen.

  Dow in turn became the most visible target of American antiwar protests, especially at colleges and universities where its corporate recruiters conducted placement interviews with seniors. The student demonstrations against Dow began in October 1966 at Wayne State University in Detroit and the University of California in Berkeley, and in the five months from then until the day Brandt left for Washington, there were forty-three anti-Dow protests staged around the country, from San José State to Wisconsin to Brooklyn College. The chant “Down with Dow!” and picketing placard “Dow Shalt Not Kill” were entering the protest lexicon alongside the napalm-inspired “Hey, Hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”

  In the middle of that stretch Brandt and his associates realized the severity of their public relations dilemma. “I would hate for Dow to come out of Viet Nam with the ‘Merchants of Death’ label that was pinned on du Pont after the first World War; and yet, unless we come to grips with this problem, it is likely to happen,” warned one Dow official in a red-flag memorandum that circulated in the company’s executive offices in December 1966. The danger, according to the memo, was that Dow was being used as “a pawn in the propaganda battle of those who are for and against the war. We are being kicked around, and we are not being portrayed with sympathy in the press. Enduring this sort of treatment with silence will not cause our enemies to forget about us; it will instead encourage them to whack us some more.”

  Before then, as Brandt once explained, Dow’s response to the protests had been to “as tactfully as possible…try to minimize its connection with napalm.” When queried by the press or public, company officials were instructed to read a simple statement:

  The Dow Chemical Company endorses the right of any American to protest legally and peacefully an action with which he does not agree.

  Our position on the manufacture of napalm is that we are a supplier of goods to the Defense Department and not a policy maker. We do not and should not try to decide military strategy or policy.

  Simple good citizenship requires that we supply our government and our military with those goods which they feel they need whenever we have the technology and capability and have been chosen by the government as a supplier.

  We will do our best, as we always have, to try to produce what our Defense Department and our soldiers need in any war situation. Purely aside from our duty to do this, we will feel deeply gratified if what we are able to provide helps to protect our fighting men or to speed the day when fighting will end.

  The more Dow emerged as the corporate symbol of the war, the less adequate that response alone seemed, with its subdued and somewhat evasive tone. Brandt’s office quietly began developing a large-scale public relations strategy, preparing to make the case publicly concerning both napalm’s use in Vietnam and Dow’s corporate philosophy. At the same time it hoped to shift the heat whenever possible to the Pentagon, and that is the part of the mission that sent Brandt to Washington. The word around Midland headquarters was that the military was getting away with something; they were the ones using the napalm; why weren’t protesters picketing them? What Dow executives found most exasperating was that the Pentagon seemed to like it that way, even if it was unfair.

  The very morning that Brandt traveled to Washington, an article appeared in the New York Times that could not have pleased him more had he written it himself. The author was Dr. Howard A. Rusk, a world-renowned medical rehabilitation expert who also served as a part-time columnist for the newspaper. Under a Saigon dateline, Rusk reported that he had spent the previous week on what he called “an intensive tour” of twenty civilian hospitals in South Vietnam and had seen “not a single case of burns due to napalm.” In addition, of the scores of doctors he interviewed during his trip, “many had not seen a single case of burns due to napalm and others had seen but a single case.” Far more prevalent, these doctors told Rusk, were burns from the use of kerosene in stoves and accidents involving land mines placed by the Viet Cong. His reporting led Rusk to the conclusion that “the picture that has been painted by some in the United States of large numbers of children burned by napalm in Vietnam is grossly exaggerated.”

  Rusk’s dispatch came as a direct challenge to a report that had appeared in Ramparts magazine a few months earlier asserting that at least a million Vietnamese children had become casualties of the war, many of them victims of American napalm. The Ramparts piece, accompanied by harrowing color photographs of disfigured young napalm victims, served as a powerful rallying tool for campus protests against Dow. (And in fact, according to David J. Garrow’s book on Martin Luther King Jr., Bearing the Cross, the photographs so upset the civil rights leader that they helped push Vietnam to the forefront of his moral agenda. On January 14, 1967, King was at a restaurant in the Miami airport on his way to Jamaica when he leafed through the magazine and caught sight of the pictures, which left him nauseated and energized. As Garrow told the story, when an associate asked King why he was not eating, he replied that “nothing will ever taste good to me until I do everything I can to end the war.”) The author of the Ramparts text was William F. Pepper, a political scientist and human rights activist who had spent six weeks in Vietnam as a freelance journalist visiting orphanages and interviewing government health officials. His report was passionate. “For countless thousands of children in Vietnam, breathing is quickened by terror and pain, and tiny bodies learn more about death every day,” it began. The statistics he used were extrapolations. He said that his conclusion of a million child casualties was reached by starting with a base estimate that 415,000 civilians already had been killed in the war. Since slightly less than half of all Vietnamese were children, he figured that the number of children killed would be more than a quarter million. He then multiplied that figure by three since military statistics generally figure three times as many wounded as killed.

  There were methodological flaws in both Pepper’s point and Rusk’s counterpoint. Pepper’s base number of 415,000 civilian deaths by the end of 1966 was a guess, not a fact. The number of civilian deaths during the entire war, which lasted another six years, has never been resolved. Most estimates placed the number between 300,000 and a half million. Vietnam war expert A. J. Langguth, writing of the situation at the time of the Paris Peace Talks in 1973, six years after Pepper’s article, said that the total number of civilians killed or wounded during the entire war to that point, North and South, men, women, and children, “may have run to a million.” One analysis of civilian casualties—conducted by American doctors opposed to the war—later found 800 “in all the hospital beds in Vietnam” during a survey period in 1967. Pepper’s assumption that slightly less than half the casualties would be children, based on their percentage of the population, was also problematic. According to statistics kept by hospitals in the Mekong Delta, where the fighting was heavy, there were 284 children among 1,141 civilian casualties admitted in January 1967, or about one-fourth of the total.

  Rusk, for his part, had close connections to the military and was not an impartial observer. He based his conclusions solely on brief observations and interviews at hospitals, which could not present the full picture in
a war-torn country where many civilian casualties never went to hospitals. One British physician who had been dealing with the civilian casualty issue for three years by 1967 estimated in a discussion with Jonathan Schell of The New Yorker that only two of ten casualties were being taken to hospitals. According to this account, there was an average of thirty war casualties a day, and ten percent of them, or three a day, came from burns. Also Rusk offered no data to support the final assertion of his article, true or not, that American-caused civilian casualties were “unpreventable in this type of conflict and…not nearly so great as the killing and wounding of civilians by the Vietcong.”

  Somewhere between the two conflicting reports rested the reality of what napalm was doing in Vietnam. Long before Pepper and Rusk visited and long after they left, respected American journalists based in Saigon filed scores of reports on what they saw and heard in the field, which tended to fall between Rusk and Pepper statistically but closer to Pepper anecdotally. For those opposed to the war, one account of the horrors of napalm could be enough.

  Why would they target Dow Chemical? The answer might be found in reports like one filed by New York Times correspondent Charles Mohr describing a peasant woman he encountered in a Mekong village who “had both arms burned off by napalm and her eyelids burned so badly that she cannot close them.” Or an article in the January 1967 Ladies’ Home Journal by veteran war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, who visited the provincial hospital at Qui Nhon and “saw for the first time what napalm does.”

  At a cot by the door Gellhorn encountered a four-year-old boy. “Napalm had burned his face and back and one hand. The burned skin looked like swollen, raw meat; the fingers of his hand were stretched out, burned rigid. A scrap of cheesecloth covered him, for weight is intolerable, but so is air.” Gellhorn also encountered a woman from New Jersey who had adopted three Vietnamese children. “Before I went to Saigon, I had heard and read that napalm melts the flesh, and I thought that’s nonsense, because I can put a roast in the oven and the fat will melt but the meat stays there,” the woman said. “Well, I went and saw these children burned by napalm, and it is absolutely true. The chemical reaction of this napalm does melt the flesh, and the flesh runs right down their faces onto their chests and it sits there and it grows there…. These children can’t turn their head, they were so thick with flesh.”

  To the soldiers in Vietnam, there was no such thing as a benign way to kill, or to die, or to be wounded, yet napalm still evoked a special realm of dread. Only nine days before Brandt made his pilgrimage to Washington, an army historian interviewed Lieutenant Colonel Alvin R. Hylton, the chemical officer for the First Infantry Division. Hylton talked extensively about the use of CS gas, a tear gas, in Vietnam and said he thought his unit should be allowed to use other forms of gases as well. “There are all sorts of gases you could use here which would be more humane, for example, than burning a man up with a flame thrower that throws napalm on him.”

  WHEN NED BRANDT and two associates arrived at the Pentagon at ten on Monday morning, March 13, they were armed with a memo listing five actions the Department of Defense could take to help Dow. First, they wanted a statement from Defense explaining “the necessity for napalm, policies governing its use and its effect in terms of war effort.” Second, they would request a letter from Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, on his stationery, “stressing the need for napalm to protect American soldiers” and praising Dow’s contribution in that regard. Next, they sought another letter from General Westmoreland “emphasizing the lives of American soldiers which have been saved because of napalm.” Fourth, they would ask for a “visit by medal of honor winner or other battle-scarred veteran to Midland, Freeport, Torrance for personal appearances in plants. He can give first-hand reports of napalm’s tactical benefits.” And finally, they would ask whether they could “hire a free lance writer in Viet Nam to write battle stories where napalm played a key role in saving our boys on the front line.”

  Brandt assumed that his delegation might get no further than the press office or be shuffled from one low-ranking paper pusher to another. Instead they were ushered into a large meeting room where they found themselves being faced down by a panel of six colonels arrayed on the other side of a long table. The visitors were directed to sit submissively in front of the table. It was “kind of like a court martial setup,” Brandt thought, and his guys were in the chairs “that normally would have been for the accused.” If it was not a court martial, neither was it a freewheeling give-and-take about the relationship between the corporation and the military. For three quarters of an hour the colonels fired questions at the public relations men while revealing nothing about themselves. Brandt went into the meeting never having heard the Pentagon’s position on the anti-Dow protests and went out no further informed.

  As he was leaving, Brandt brought out a copy of a letter he had drafted and handed it to a Pentagon official. It was a suggested version of the letter Secretary McNamara could send to Herbert Dow Doan. (In a late revision he had even included a mention of Dr. Rusk’s napalm report from Saigon.)

  “Dear Mr. Doan,” the draft began, “We have followed with considerable interest and concern the newspaper accounts of the demonstrations and protests that have for some time been directed against your company as a major supplier of napalm for the armed forces. It is, as you know, highly unusual for such protests to be directed against the manufacturer, rather than the military user, of a weapon, even one as emotion-laden as napalm B. In what must surely be rather trying circumstances, the conduct of your company has been exemplary…”

  Chapter 6

  Madison, Wisconsin

  THE 1967 FALL TERM was not yet a month old when a crowd of rambunctious students at the University of Wisconsin spilled from the southeast dorms of Ogg and Sellery looking for action. It was midweek, a Wednesday, ten P.M., and the air was rapturously warm and alluring, a welcome break from the dispiriting blanket of gray that had settled over Madison so prematurely that year, wiping out the last month of summer and bringing intimations of the long frozen winter to come. Feeling free and easy in the balmy night, the young men marched north toward Lake Mendota, skirting the Library Mall and the Old Red Gym, then turned right and headed up the curve of Langdon Street, picking up more recruits from fraternity houses there until they were nearly a thousand strong. The first stop was Langdon Hall, at the time still known as a “girls” dormitory. “We want silk! We want pants! We want sex!” came shouts from the street, and out flew some panties but more rolls of toilet paper.

  The crowd undulated up and down Langdon and then oozed across to State Street, passing more targets along the way. A small squad of Madison cops, some in uniform, others in plainclothes, monitored the students until they reached the sidewalk on the far side of Park Street at the bottom of State. That marked the official boundary of the university, and according to Inspector Herman Thomas, city officers would not enter the campus proper unless UW administrators formally requested their presence. Up the long rise of Bascom Hill went the student battalion, past the statue of seated Abe Lincoln and around the side of Bascom Hall onto Observatory Drive, dipping down the back slope past the Commerce and Social Science buildings, and then up again and along the ridge toward Elizabeth Waters, another dormitory for women. A score of young men were seen entering the dorm uninvited, but they scattered when spotted by a housemother, and from there the crowd dissolved in the darkness. There was minor retaliation the next night. A few hundred freshman women, mostly from Chadbourne Hall, rallied on the steps of the Memorial Union, then marched to Ogg, where they were greeted by the swoosh and splash of shaving cream and water balloons.

  The culture was changing in 1967, certainly, and Madison was said to be in the vanguard, but the counterculture stereotypes later imposed on the university, as on the entire decade, fail to capture the more variegated reality of that time and place. A nocturnal panty raid was still part of the campus scene. There was not yet a glimmer of the not
ion that young men and women would be allowed to live in the same dormitory tower, let alone on the same floor. Visitation hours for men in the women’s dorms were limited to 2:00 to 9:30 P.M. on Sundays. Three freshmen had been disciplined already that fall for breaking the women’s curfew on a Saturday night. They had gone to Milwaukee to participate in a civil rights march, after which one straggled back to her dorm a shade past 1:30 Sunday morning and the others were even later. As punishment they faced a week to three weeks of restricted hours. Along Langdon Street the Greek subculture had not yet slipped into disfavor. The talk that fall was of a meningitis scare that began with a “kissing party” involving fraternities and sororities. When one young smoocher ended up at University Hospital with a mild case of the disease, panic spread and five hundred students who might have had contact with him reported to the health clinic for preventive sulfa pills.

  Five years removed from past Rose Bowl glory, the Badger football team was dreadful, on its way to a winless season that inspired one loud and repetitive refrain from the student sections—“ooooohhhhhh shit!” But on the sidelines that fall, making their inaugural appearance, were sixteen pompom girls dancing in red and white miniskirts. A hundred coeds had tried out.

  The crosscurrents of the times were readily evident. On the first day of fall classes, a mime troupe affiliated with Connections, a radical alternative newspaper, put on an early version of performance art, or guerrilla theater. Posturing as rightwing storm troopers, they barged into lecture halls, hauled out student activist compatriots, and dragged them to mock executions at the top of Bascom Hill. Two nights before the puerile panty raid, Allard Lowenstein, director of the national “Dump Johnson” movement, appeared on campus and told a gathering of students that they could be the key to his entire scenario. If they produced a strong vote against the president in the 1968 Wisconsin primary, he predicted, “there would be many political implications.” McCall’s magazine had labeled Wisconsin the number two drinking school in the nation, but that was stale news to the student newspaper, the Daily Cardinal, which was running a series on the mind-bending effects of LSD and other hallucinogens. The albums of the Jefferson Airplane, Buffalo Springfield, and Big Brother and the Holding Company were being sold at Discount Records and Victor Music on State Street, and the Beatles had made their cultural turn that summer with the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—“She’s leaving home, bye, bye”—but WISM in Madison and WLS in Chicago were still playing a Top 40 list that included Tommy James and the Shondells, Bobby Vinton, Bobbie Gentry, Herb Alpert, and Nancy Sinatra.