They Marched Into Sunlight

by David Maraniss

  One small measure of that tension in Madison was the diminishing circulation of the liberal afternoon newspaper, the Capital Times, which, along with the subscription decline that all evening papers faced, was losing even more subscribers on the east side, traditionally its strongest base of support, because of its early and unequivocal editorials against the war. Since its founding in 1917 by William T. Evjue, a leading figure in the Wisconsin Progressive movement, and during the 1950s and ’60s under Evjue’s disciple, Miles McMillin, the newspaper had developed a reputation for taking strong liberal stands on controversial issues—most notably in standing up to Wisconsin’s red-baiting senator, Joseph R. McCarthy—and the Vietnam war was part of that progressive continuum. On February 12, 1965, a month before the marines landed in Da Nang, the paper ran a headline reading “Negotiate in Viet Nam Before It’s Too Late.” “The fighting in Viet Nam is escalating to a point of serious danger,” the paper wrote:

  President Johnson, we hope, is finding out that the Goldwater policy leads to the dangers predicted. The President should go back and look at the election returns again. Before it is too late, the Johnson administration should move toward the negotiations that should have been initiated long ago.

  We are heading into a war that we can’t win. Even now, as Sec. McNamara has said, we cannot defend against the type of fighting being carried out against us. We are losing not only the military engagements. But we are losing prestige in Asia even faster. It is bad enough that we are looked upon as an intruder. We are looked upon as a bumbling intruder that can’t even match the fighting prowess of the Viet Cong guerrillas.

  The antiwar editorials continued incessantly from there, month after month: “The Only Way to Save Face Is to Get Out of Viet Nam.” “Why Are We Bombing When It Has No Military Significance?” “A Cynical Rationalization of Broken Promises on Viet Nam.” “Time for Congress to Reassert War Making Authority.” “Viet Nam Bombing Strains Credibility Gap Again.”

  On the west side of Madison, the epicenter of Wisconsin liberalism, people and institutions were judged not only by what they said about Vietnam but when they said it. Antiwar credentials were determined by the month and year one came out against the war: before or after the Gulf of Tonkin, before or after the marines landed, and so on through the Tet Offensive and other benchmark events of the sixties. By national standards Democratic senator Gaylord Nelson was regarded as an antiwar stalwart, but in his own retrospective accounting he did not enter the fray early enough. He had trouble excusing himself for voting for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution on August 7, 1964, a congressional acquiescence that LBJ used as authority to widen the war. Nelson had been skeptical during floor debate before the vote. He had been reassured, wrongly, that the resolution would not be used as congressional authorization for a full-scale war and had authored an amendment limiting the authority of the president to wage war, yet he thereafter regretted not having joined the two lone senators who voted against the resolution, Wayne Morse of Oregon (who was born in Madison and a graduate of the University of Wisconsin) and Ernest Gruening of Alaska.

  The divide in Madison then was chronological as well as geographic. A defining point on the timeline was the grassroots Hearing on the War in Vietnam conducted by Democrat Robert W. Kastenmeier, the liberal Second District congressman, on Friday and Saturday, July 30 and 31,1965. It was one thing to organize a teach-in on the war on a college campus, as Sewell had done a few months earlier, and quite another to bring the debate into the larger civic realm. Kastenmeier’s was the first such congressional hearing in the country. The issue was so controversial that he was denied use of the City-County Building and instead held the hearing in a downtown Methodist church. Opposition to the hearing was orchestrated by the local hard-hat boss, city alderman Harold (Babe) Rohr, a World War II veteran and leader of the building trades labor council who supported LBJ’s war policy, explaining that “building trades is a big part in any war.”

  In contrast to the UW teach-in, this was not an overwhelmingly one-sided hearing but reflected the fuller range of the Vietnam debate. In this civilized forum there was no jeering, but partisans applauded speakers on both sides of the argument. Among those testifying in support of the Johnson administration’s war effort were representatives of the American Legion, Young Americans for Freedom, the Military Order of the World Wars, UW political scientists Fred Von Der Mehden and David W. Tarr (with some reservations), and the chairmen of both the local Young Democrats and Young Republicans. The latter was a second-year law student named Tom Thompson from Elroy, Wisconsin, who testified despite having qualms about “the wisdom, advisability, and intent” of the gathering. “If this hearing is to take up that question of abandonment—if it is only to hear the cries of appeasement from people who cannot find enough distaste for communism to fight it—then this hearing does not serve a purpose, that is, no other purpose than to weaken dangerously the determination of our country and its people at a time when great determination and strong moral courage are demanded as fitting examples of democracy.”

  The YAF spokesman at the hearing, David A. Keene, focused his testimony on Viet Cong atrocities encouraged by the government of Ho Chi Minh as part of its strategy of destabilizing the South. Starting in 1957, Keene said, Ho Chi Minh “began a campaign of terror in South Vietnam designed to isolate the people from their government. Principal targets included teachers, doctors, nurses and village officials. The late President John F. Kennedy, in May of 1961, revealed that between May 1960 and May 1961 more than 4,000 low level officials were killed by the Viet Cong.” That number had grown to thirteen thousand by 1965, Keene added, and the only way to stop it was to defeat the Vietnamese Communists. American withdrawal, Keene said,

  would abandon fourteen million people to Communist enslavement…. More than a million of those people voted with their feet against Communism when they fled from North Vietnam following the Geneva Agreements of 1954. They have trusted our word and they have fought Ho Chi Minh. The South Vietnamese population has suffered more than we can possibly imagine to keep their country out of the hands of the Communist regime to their north. Communism, and this is too often ignored, is evil. It is a pseudo-religion which justifies a ruthless dictatorship. Since 1917 its disciples have been responsible for the planned deaths of many millions of innocent men, women and children. It is a system of government that destroys its opponents without mercy, controls the minds of those who live under it, and ambitiously boasts that it will one day dominate the world.

  Both Thompson and Keene would emerge decades later as players on the national political stage, Tommy Thompson as Wisconsin’s governor and as secretary of health and human services in the administration of George W. Bush, Keene as an aide to Vice President Spiro T. Agnew and longtime chairman of the American Conservative Union. Thompson joined the Wisconsin National Guard and did not serve in Vietnam. Keene, who opposed the draft even as he supported the war, was protected from the draft by deferments.

  The oldest speaker supporting the war was retired Captain Joseph Bollenbeck, representing the Military Order of the World Wars, whose service in the military went back to the First World War. “The Vietnam affair is not, as some falsely allege, a revolt against the government, but an invasion by the North Vietnamese Communist forces,” Bollenbeck said. “It is another incident of Communist violation of the 1954 Geneva Agreement and the basic principles of the United Nations which oppose the use of force. It is conclusive proof of the hypocrisy of Communists who talk peace but blatantly violate it as they arrogantly announce they will support “wars of liberation and popular insurrections.” He had little doubt, Bollenbeck added, that “American and foreign demonstrations…are largely Communist inspired. Leaders of college groups demanding our withdrawal have a long record of pro-Communist activities, and this is particularly true in Madison.”

  William Appleman Williams, the academic critic of American empire, appeared among the antiwar speakers and dealt first with Bollenbeck�
�s charge. “I should like, at the outset, to speak to three charges made against the critics of American policy in Vietnam,” Williams began.

  First: that some critics are Communists. This is true as fact. It is also true as fact that some extreme reactionaries are also critics of American policy in Vietnam. Both facts are incidental to the substantive issues. Criticism is properly judged by its relevance, by its evidence, and by its internal coherence and logic. If Communists offer a better critique than non-Communists, which I deny, then the effective non-Communist response is to do better homework on the issues instead of forwarding fantasy and hearsay to Washington.

  Second: that the critics lack the necessary information. I deny this to be the case. I deny it on the basis of my experience as a naval officer cleared for secret documents. I next deny it as an historian who has seen such data after the fact of failure. I finally deny it on the basis of several extended conversations with officials who have served, or are serving, in Vietnam. The information that some critics lack does not destroy the validity of their criticism.

  Third: that, whatever mistakes we have made, we are caught in a situation of fact, and we have seen it through on the road we have chosen. This argument is part of a broader pattern of evasion. We humans are very prone, when we make a major mistake, to begin lying to ourselves. We go on indefinitely—until we pay the wrenching cost of the mistake, or until we muster the courage and the will to stop lying to ourselves. I am here to suggest that it is long past time to stop lying to ourselves about Vietnam.

  James P. Hawley, chairman of the UW Student-Faculty Committee to End the War in Vietnam, said the Johnson administration was leading the nation into a war “which remains not only undeclared, but tragically undebated.” It was a war, he said, “that violates the ideals and the heritage of American democracy and freedom. The support of a series of unpopular dictatorships in the name of protecting the independence and freedom of the South Vietnamese people is not only hypocritical and morally wrong, but is utterly self-defeating. The administration says it wishes to protect the freedom and democracy of the South Vietnamese people from the aggression from the North. But in the place of protecting freedom, democracy, and independence, we have supported, aided, and when it was convenient, overthrown, a series of brutal dictatorships, all of which have come to power not by any means even vaguely representing democratic elections, but by a series of coups d’etat.” Hawley was one of several speakers who argued that the United States was intervening in a civil war and that the National Liberation Front in the South was not controlled by Hanoi. As Stuart Ewen, a history graduate student, told the hearing, “The assumption that the NLF is a direct and connected arm of the Hanoi regime is, I think, a fatal error.” The argument would be undone by later events but was an accepted part of antiwar rhetoric in the mid-1960s.

  If there was a featured speaker at the hearing, it was R. W. Smail, a history professor at Wisconsin who specialized in Southeast Asian studies. Even more than Williams and the better known historians at Wisconsin, it was Smail whose informed lectures on Vietnam served as the foundation of the Madison debate. “I imagine that there is going to be a good deal of preaching in this room before this day is over,” Smail began his testimony. “For my part, I am going to try to confine myself to what I think is the plain power politics of the situation confronting the United States in Vietnam today. I do this not because I think that morality has no place in foreign policy but because I believe that neither the critics nor the supporters of our Vietnamese policy have been able to develop a moral position which is strong enough and clear enough and unambiguous enough to bear the weight of the extremely important decisions which must be made in Vietnam.” Smail’s analysis of the military and political situation in Vietnam led him to the conclusion that there was no prospect of a viable noncommunist government that could survive without a substantial American force to sustain it. “It is probably more accurate to say that such a government will never be possible,” Smail said. “In any case, it would be necessary…in order to create the conditions in which such a force could grow, to more or less completely clear the Viet Cong out of South Vietnam. On the conventional 10 to 1 basis, this would require over a million American soldiers for an indefinite period. I doubt if anyone would consider paying this price for the even-then uncertain chance of creating a stable independent non-Communist South Vietnam.”

  Invading North Vietnam was not an option, Smail said, because even if it did not lure China further into the war (and he was already among those believing that Chinese assistance to the Viet Cong was considerable), it “would simply double the area to be garrisoned in the face of guerrilla resistance.” The strategy of the Johnson administration, he said, seemed to be to introduce enough troops into Vietnam to produce a stalemate and then negotiate a compromise settlement, which he argued was “theoretically possible” but “not very likely to achieve a permanent solution.” The remaining possibilities were to have a unilateral withdrawal or a negotiated withdrawal. The most practical course, in Smail’s assessment, was to have a negotiated settlement that would lead to a united Vietnam under Communist control. He acknowledged that this “may not seem a very attractive proposition to Americans,” but that it was at once the most likely eventual outcome in any case and also the resolution that would be best for the United States in the long run because, he argued, the interests of the Vietnamese and the Chinese inevitably would diverge, and the “long run goal of the United States in mainland Southeast Asia should be to split rather than to drive together China and Vietnam.”

  Here, in 1965, from a liberal opponent of the war in Wisconsin, was an argument that seemed almost Kissingerian in its realpolitik formulation while at the same time challenging the prevailing government argument that if Vietnam fell, other countries would fall to the communists in domino succession. And in juxtaposition to Thompson’s rhetoric, it contradicted the notion that opposition to the war was shaped by foggy idealism and support by hard-headed pragmatism.

  BILL SEWELL LIVED ON the west side, and in some ways he seemed like an archetype of the west side liberal. He was an outwardly conventional man who would never want to be categorized as conventional. He collected cool jazz records, belonged to the Blackhawk Country Club, where he could shoot in the low nineties, voted Democratic, attended the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Unitarian church, wore corny sport coats and a spiffy touring cap, tooled around town in a red convertible, played poker twice a month in a faculty game called the Probability Seminar, grew a mustache, exercised in a morning regimen of push-ups, sit-ups, touch-toes, and running in place, began the evening with a two-mile walk in the woods near his home on Countryside Lane, chewed on a pipe, and stayed up reading monographs and abstracts from the American Sociological Journal until he fell asleep in his favorite blue leather easy chair. He could be impatient at times yet had the soul of a committeeman, able to persevere through endless convention sessions, academic panels, and departmental meetings, a trait that proved essential to his administrative rise. He was an institution man through and through, his academic career threaded with interconnections as a consultant to the Ford Foundation, the Division of Behavioral Sciences, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Fulbright Selection Committee, the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Office of Education. Some colleagues thought of him as a public democrat but a private elitist, meaning that people he considered the most talented got the most attention, yet he also was known for effectively pushing his department and the larger field of sociology to be more inclusive of women and minorities.

  He was an inveterate pedagogue, constantly looking for ways to inform the world around him and at the same time, as one colleague said, “always seeking relief from monotony and trying to add spice to the mundane.” His three children learned sampling theory during long car rides from Madison to northern Wisconsin for summer holidays. To keep them occupied, he would have them count license plates to determine whether there were more vacationers from Wisconsin
or Illinois, but he instructed them not to count the plates of cars passing them in the same direction because those cars were speeding and speeders invariably came from Illinois, thereby skewing the sample.

  Sharp humor was Sewell’s favorite spice. In a methods class once, he was discussing the role of the interviewer in conducting a survey. Margaret Bright was seated near him at the seminar table. “And he mentioned one should beware of hiring women interviewers who were too good-looking,” Bright recalled. “They made people uncomfortable. And without changing the tone of his voice in his inimitable way he added: ‘This is generally not a problem with women in sociology. They don’t usually come that good-looking.’” Bright refused to look up or show any sign that this bothered her. She kept taking notes. Finally, demanding a reaction, Sewell gave her “a good hard kick under the table.” His humor had a sarcastic twist that gave added weight to a political message. Mary, his daughter, would take into adulthood the lasting memory of her father driving her and two friends home from elementary school when she was ten or eleven and the girls in the back seat talking about what they wanted to do when they grew up. One said she wanted to be a teacher. The other said she wanted to be a nurse. From the driver’s seat Sewell blurted out, “Why don’t you be a doctor? All nurses do is clean up other people’s shit!”

  Cleaning up for other people was a task Sewell seemed determined not to take on as he became chancellor. Joe could handle it. Joseph Kauffman, the forty-six-year-old dean of student affairs, took pride in being called “soft on students and a bleeding-heart type.” He had been recruited to Wisconsin after burnishing his liberal credentials with the Peace Corps during the Kennedy administration, as a dean of students at Brandeis University, and as a consultant for the American Council on Education in Washington, where he was known as “an advocate for students.” Kauffman’s arrival at Wisconsin in June 1965 coincided with the early stirrings of change on campus, starting with the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. Having seen the change coming before many others of his generation, he had warned the academic establishment. One of his reports for the education council stated that students who came back from Mississippi Freedom Summer civil rights work, after violating unjust laws in the South, would be willing to violate bad rules on campus.