They Marched Into Sunlight

by David Maraniss

  Some fragments of the American dream still held; young men who harbored revolutionary fantasies traded those in for a few hours of being Yaz or Lou Brock.

  LIKE 2.4 MILLION OTHER college students, Soglin was protected from military service with a student deferment during his undergraduate years, but the draft was an unavoidable part of the Vietnam discussion. He had decided that if the Lake County, Illinois, draft board ever tried to call him up, he would refuse to serve on grounds that he opposed the war. He did not consider himself a conscientious objector, nor did he want to go to Canada. His choice, he told friends, was jail, though it was a rhetorical option that he never had to take. When fifty students at Wisconsin signed a full-page advertisement in the Cardinal declaring that they would refuse to be drafted, Soglin was not among them. He was still in the second or third tier of student activists, not a major player in the movement, though he wanted to be. He was “crushed, just crushed,” that he had missed out, and later reflected, “How could they have been circulating it and I missed it? Was I stoned for two days?”

  The antiwar movement’s position on the draft was a jumble of contradictions. Young men who did not want to serve and did not want the university to cooperate with the Selective Service in any way nonetheless criticized the system for its inequities and the protection it provided them in contrast to minorities and working-class whites who did not attend college. For all the talk of revolution on campus, the proletariat was fighting another war, in Vietnam. In the spring of 1966 Congressman Alvin O’Konski conducted a survey of one hundred military inductees from his northern Wisconsin district and determined that not one of them came from a family with an average income over five thousand dollars.

  It was the draft that provoked the largest demonstration on campus during Soglin’s undergraduate career, coming only a few weeks before his graduation in May 1966. The issue was whether UW officials should provide grades and class rankings to the Selective Service, which had announced that deferments from the draft would be based on academic performance and that men in the lower half of their class would have to score well on a new test to avoid being drafted. Members of SDS and the Ad Hoc Committee on the University and the Draft presented demands to President Harrington and Robben W. Fleming, the chancellor, that the school stop cooperating with draft boards and that they call an emergency meeting of the faculty to revise the university’s policy. There was intense debate over how to proceed with the protest after the demands were presented, and though a majority of those attending an SDS meeting, including Soglin, voted against holding a sit-in, a smaller faction decided to go ahead with one anyway. The sit-in, which began on May 16 at the new Peterson administration building on Murray Street, soon took on a life of its own. “Everyone, regardless of their initial position,” joined in, Soglin recalled, and “within the night and the next day the place was packed.” Along with similar sit-ins that month at the University of Chicago and City College of New York, the takeover of the administration building in Madison marked another turning point in the antiwar movement: students were now occupying campus buildings as a means of protest.

  The demonstration ebbed and flowed for several days and nights. It was peaceful and at times jovial. Professor Williams stopped by one night to talk to the protesters, who found him supportive in theory but not in practice and in any case uncharacteristically incoherent. Students traded jokes with campus police and tried not to interfere with the personnel who worked there. Jim Rowen, a junior from suburban Washington, D.C., who stayed the whole time, was struck by the way friendly workers would bring food for students during the protest marathon; someone gave him a carton of milk—“very Wisconsin.” There were long discussions about the draft. Often there would be two or three self-appointed student leaders holding forth at the same time in different parts of the room, though the rhetoric was usually dominated by Bob Cohen, who made the most dramatic speeches. When things dragged, delegations were sent up the hill to confer with the administration. The city police force was kept away, as were antidemonstrators.

  For William Kaplan, a freshman from Wilmette, this was his first major demonstration, and he found it “pretty euphoric.” He “met a lot of people, had fun,” and felt part of an “instant peer group”—something he had never experienced at New Trier, his suburban Chicago high school. He could tell himself that he was saving the world and at the same time develop a social network and go out with different girls and watch the older protest leaders operate. He was especially taken by Soglin. “He wasn’t a Marxist, but he was kind of like a beatnik, and I liked that part of Paul,” Kaplan said later. “I didn’t like the Marxists. I wanted to be a beatnik rather than a Marxist. He was cooler, a little more hip. And I liked that side of him.”

  Soglin “picked up a girl” one night during the siege and faced a conflict that only a budding politician, not a true beatnik, could fall into—and solve. He wanted to take her back to his apartment on Dayton Street, only five blocks away, but worried that it would be embarrassing if anything dramatic happened while he was gone. If authorities came in and cleared the place out, it was important for him to be able to say that he was there. So he found Ralph Hanson, the campus police chief, a friendly adversary, and quietly got reassurance that there was nothing in the works. Sometime after midnight, Soglin and his newfound friend “slinked out a back alley.”

  A few days into the sit-in, in the brilliant sunlight of a springtime noon, several thousand protesters marched up Bascom Hill. They flooded the wide lawn from the Abe Lincoln statue halfway down to Park Street a few hundred yards below and cheered thunderously when Williams called them “the conscience of the university.” Then Harrington and Fleming announced that a faculty meeting would reconsider the school’s draft policy. Word of the reconciliation infuriated many members of the Wisconsin legislature, none more than Republican legislator Gordon Roseleip of Darlington, who had denounced the sit-in as “a great help to our enemies and communism all around the world.” Equally upset were hard-line members of SDS who had stayed behind in the administration building. They complained that the students had been “out-finessed” by Chancellor Fleming, a veteran labor negotiator. Fleming was indeed proud of the way he handled the potentially explosive situation, and later, in a private letter, described his “pillow” strategy: “Students can punch the pillow but it moves over without greatly observable changes.” But one of those most heartened by the protest and its resolution was Paul Soglin. On May 19 he ripped a page from his notebook and wrote a letter bursting with optimism.

  President Harrington,

  Please excuse the way in which I am writing you this note (the notebook paper and pencil) but it is all I have with me at this time and I felt that it was important to express my feelings to you at this very moment.

  As I was walking up the Hill just now I recalled what happened twenty-four hours ago and the whole series of events since last Friday. All of us are so very critical of what we call the ‘multiversity’ and the resulting alienation that is felt by the student.

  No matter how this draft question is resolved I think this last week will be one that will most vividly remain in my mind when in the future I recall my four years as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin.

  Perhaps thrilling would be the best way of describing my feelings—thrilled at seeing so many people discuss, debate and resolve a difficult problem. Thrilled at being part of thousands who have taken part in the attempt to reach a consensus. And thrilled most of all at seeing an administration, a faculty and a student body—which according to myth are never supposed to agree on anything—working together so that the views and interests of all may be accommodated.

  For the first time I am able to say that I am proud to be a student at the University of Wisconsin.

  I feel that you and your administration are the ones who have created the atmosphere in which I have obtained this feeling—and I have an obligation to notify you of it.

  Thank you,

&n
bsp; Paul R. Soglin

  The next day came the reply, spare and ironic.

  Dear Paul:

  Thank you for your warm note. I want to keep it and share it with one or two others.

  Since you may later want to recall your feelings of May 19, 1966, I am sending you a copy of your letter.

  Cordially,

  Fred Harvey Harrington

  President

  The promising spirit of that exchange was soon lost. During the next school year, as the war in Vietnam persisted, the tone of demonstrations at Wisconsin took on a more confrontational edge. It was Soglin’s first year in graduate school. When the Dow Chemical Company visited the campus in February 1967, activists decided to stage protests and surround the corporate recruiters inside the Chemistry, Engineering, and Commerce buildings, where placement interviews were being held. SDS president Henry Haslach, a teaching assistant in mathematics, led a group to the Chemistry Building. They carried picket signs bearing the color photographs of napalmed Vietnamese children that had been published in Ramparts magazine a few months earlier. A campus policy, newly imposed for that event, banned the use of signs on sticks inside the building. When Haslach reached the front door, a police officer stopped him, declaring that the signs were too large and dangerous to be taken inside. Haslach was infuriated and argued with the officer, saying it was a question of free speech. The officer pinned Haslach against the wall and placed him under arrest for disorderly conduct. At the Commerce Building two more protest leaders, Robert Zwicker and Robert Cohen, the then-bearded but eventually shorn philosopher, were being arrested on similar charges. The three were bailed out that night and organized another protest the next day at which sixteen more students were arrested.

  In the midst of the action that second day, a band of demonstrators marched up to Bascom Hall and blockaded the offices of Chancellor Fleming and Dean of Student Affairs Joseph Kauffman, demanding that all charges be dropped and that Dow Chemical be barred from interviewing on campus as long as it made napalm. Kauffman found himself face-to-face with a crowd screaming “Joe must go! Joe must go!” One demonstrator came up to him and said earnestly that it was “nothing personal, but the chancellor is LBJ and you’re McNamara.”

  The siege lasted several hours, with more surreal twists. Kauffman’s wife kept calling, but the students who were sitting on his desk answered the phone and would not let him talk to her, until finally she threatened to call the police. When Kauffman lamented aloud that he felt like he was in a Shelley Berman sketch, one radical leader pounced on the cultural reference, declaring that Berman’s neuroses were too bourgeois and that it was “just typical that someone like Berman lives and Lenny Bruce dies.” The denunciations of “fascistic” university administrators at one point became too much for Kauffman, who sharply reminded the students that there were “only two people in the room”—the old guys, Kauffman and Fleming—“who had actually fought fascists.”

  Fleming warned the students that if he tried to leave the room and anyone touched him, they would face the far more serious charge of aggravated assault. “And I would just suggest to you that if any one of us starts to walk out of this room, you take very, very seriously whether you even put a hand on us.”

  “I would suggest that what the chancellor says is absolutely correct, both under criminal and civil law,” responded Robert Cohen, speaking as “one of the leaders” of the action. Cohen urged someone to get word to the large crowd blocking the hallway outside that “if either of these gentlemen at any time wish to leave they certainly are free to do so.” Fleming, acting cool, and Kauffman, clearly agitated, waited them out, and eventually the whole show—students and administrators—adjourned for an hour and reconvened, minus the siege atmosphere, in Bascom’s auditorium, where the discussion continued. During the break, at Kauffman’s suggestion, Fleming found a novel way to employ his “pillow” strategy again. In a decidedly un-LBJ-like act, he signed a blank check from his own bank account and directed one of his assistants to take it to the county jail and use it to post bail for the arrested students. The bail total was $1,260. When he announced his action to the crowd in the auditorium, some in the audience rose to give him a standing ovation, but the protest leaders, cemented to their seats up front, looked around with displeasure, feeling they had been co-opted.

  “I furnished my personal funds because if I am going to have to disagree with students I don’t want to do it with some of them in jail,” Fleming later explained to the faculty. He expanded on that explanation in a letter to Robert E. Howard of Beloit College, a fellow administrator. “My reasons for putting up the bail bond were mixed. In part, they were tactical. I knew that unless I could persuade the students to change their position and refrain from blocking the Dow Chemical interviews…we were in for a major siege in which perhaps two hundred students would have to be arrested. I thought I could talk them out of it that night if I could gain their good will. I have been on campuses long enough to know that rightly or wrongly students do not like the police on campus. From a tactical standpoint, therefore, I thought that if I could gain their good will by an immediate stroke I perhaps could spend the rest of the evening vigorously disagreeing with them and talking them out of their position.” His action, in any case, at once defused the tension, frustrated the protest leaders, and widened the split between the UW administration and the state legislature in the Capitol building on the other end of State Street.

  Soglin missed the arrests, but he was among those jamming the corridors at Bascom Hall, where, he later said, he found himself “suddenly thrust in this position of leadership.” The intention was to block the doors and not let the administrators out until the matter was resolved. “And one of the assistant deans starts to walk out of the office, and the crowd which is sitting in is making a path for him, everyone moving out of the way.” Soglin said he called down from the opposite end of the corridor, “‘Why is everyone doing that?’ And somebody yells back, ‘He’s got to go to the bathroom. He says he’ll come back when he’s done.’ And, wait a minute, this is a sit-in! We’re holding them until this thing is resolved. If he wants to, he can go piss out the window, and the ranks closed up and he suddenly found himself stranded in the middle of the crowd and had no choice but to go back into the office. And this was the kind of momentary lapses that we had. It also showed our humanity.”

  According to Soglin, perhaps, but not according to the Daily Cardinal, which strongly criticized the physical tactics this time. “We are taken aback by the baiting and insults showered upon University administrators who were willing to consider the protesters’ points,” the student paper’s lead editorial stated. “A threat of confinement to men willing to cooperate turned the demonstration into a mockery of freedom rather than a fight for it. Discussion must be two-sided, not a one-way harangue.”

  Along with taking part in the protests, Soglin studied them as sociological cases. He was particularly interested in the way people lost their sense of proportion when they became members of a crowd, and why some people emerged as leaders. The leaders tended to be older, usually graduate students, and had a way with words; but not everyone who spoke was considered a leader, and not all the leaders were the most respected members of the group. Cohen and Evan Stark, a graduate student in sociology, tended to be at the center of the action even though many considered them caricatures of radicals. University administrators were awed by Cohen’s oratorical skills and exasperated by his mood swings. One minute he might be sitting in the dean’s office, bumming cigarettes and bemoaning how bad things were going for the left, then later he would target the same dean as first on the list to be hanged when the revolution came. Stark proudly called himself the “resident demagogue.” He and Cohen were out front, Soglin decided, because they were articulate, but more than that they had a psychological need to be there.

  During that spring of 1967 a woman student was seriously injured when she was struck by a city bus driving in a divided single lane that
urban transportation planners foolishly had decided to run the opposite way down one-way University Avenue as it cut through the campus. The incident sparked a massive student protest, including a sit-in on the avenue and a march the wrong way down the bus lane. Soglin would never forget Cohen’s attitude that day. “After the thing had kind of broke down after about three or four hours that afternoon, there were about a hundred, hundred fifty people who were finally left after everybody was scattered between being arrested and going to various corners and tying up the city…and Cohen comes up to me just as the crowd’s breaking up and people are scattering and says…‘Where’s everyone going?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, they’re going.’ He said, ‘How could you let them go?’ ‘What?’ He said, ‘You never let a crowd go. Always keep a crowd. Never let it go.’ And that was Bob Cohen. I remember him at the Union; he would start talking with one person, a little louder voice, a little louder voice, then there’d be three people, twenty people, and eventually forty people, and the larger the crowd would grow, the more he would go on.”

  TO SOGLIN and his political cohorts Vietnam had become the dominant organizing issue of their lives, but to many students at Wisconsin it was merely a distraction. They might be mildly for the war, but more than that they wanted nothing to do with it. Richard B. Cheney counted himself in that group. He was not a naïve freshman but a seasoned graduate student who had turned twenty-six in 1967 and was already a husband and father. This was his second year in Madison, and he felt that he still had some catching up to do. He called himself a “slow starter” academically, so slow that he had been kicked out of Yale twice before going through his home state school, the University of Wyoming, on the six-year plan. Now he was working toward his Ph.D. in political science and serving as a research assistant for professor Aage Clausen, whose specialty was studying voting patterns in the U.S. House and Senate. His wife, Lynne, was teaching composition to UW freshmen while studying for a doctorate in English literature, writing her thesis on the poetry of Matthew Arnold.