They Marched Into Sunlight

by David Maraniss

  By the time Paul Soglin was stitched up and released from the hospital, the demonstration was just about over. He walked back to Commerce to recover his schoolbooks—he had left a notebook and a history book inside—but the police would not let him in. They had control of the building, but a diehard band of demonstrators remained outside, “taunting from the edges.” The sharp odor of tear gas lingered in the air. Soglin walked all the way around Bascom Hall and entered through the front door, walking past a metal Sifting and Winnowing plaque on the way inside. Students were bounding through the foyer and hallway, most of them participants in the protest, some still seeking targets for their rage. One young man grabbed a metal Daily Cardinal news box, lifted it above his head, and heaved it at the wall, breaking the glass enclosing an ornate portrait of John Bascom. Soglin kept moving down the hallway toward the administrative offices and found whom he was looking for—Joe Kauffman.

  “You lied to us! You lied to us!” Soglin screamed at the dean of students, his antagonist in the legal case Soglin v. Kauffman. He was overcome by the rage of a generation, or part of a generation, that was feeling the betrayal of the young by the old. The way he saw it, the protesters were supposed to follow certain rules and the authorities would follow certain rules, but “we did and they didn’t.” Kauffman turned away, and Soglin followed him down the corridor, so angry that he started crying.

  It had been four years exactly, to the day, since Soglin had attended his first Vietnam protest, which also happened to be the first ever Vietnam demonstration on the Wisconsin campus. He was a sophomore then, on October 18, 1963, when he was photographed as a face in the crowd of a few hundred students who rallied on the Union steps to denounce the regime of soon-to-be-assassinated Ngo Dinh Diem. Four years: as long as the Civil War, as long as Americans fought in World War II, as long as an undergraduate education—a seeming lifetime during which nothing had changed and everything had changed. As the Vietnam war had deepened and become more complicated, so too had the antiwar movement at Wisconsin. The warm note that Soglin had written to President Harrington on May 19, 1966, the one in which he had said that he was “thrilled” about the way students and university officials handled the sit-in at the administration building, the handwritten note that had surprised Harrington so much that he made a typed copy of it and sent it back to Soglin so he might remember how he once felt—that seemed like ancient history now, gone forever. Instead, the metaphorical prediction that Soglin had made in his recent “Hi There, Badger!” column in the Daily Cardinal had come all too true. The pot had blown up in Chancellor Sewell’s face.

  HERE THEY WERE, side by side, on the front page of the final edition of the Milwaukee Journal that afternoon, both above the fold, early reports from the battlefields of war and peace. First, on the upper left, an understated dispatch from Madison: “Club swinging policemen and hundreds of angry, yelling University of Wisconsin students clashed Wednesday afternoon in a battle that left at least 12 students injured. At least one ambulance was called. The policemen waded into the Commerce building where about 150 demonstrators were protesting job recruiting by Dow Chemical Co., makers of napalm for Vietnam.”

  Then, tucked beside it, with a Saigon dateline: “A veteran Communist regiment ambushed two companies of the United States 1st infantry division in canopied jungles 41 miles north of Saigon Tuesday. After a day of fierce fighting, 58 Americans and at least 103 Communists had been killed and 61 Americans wounded. The battle took a costly toll of American officers. Among them were Maj. Donald W. Holleder, a quarterback voted the most valuable player of Army’s 1955 football team, and Lt. Col. Terry Allen Jr., whose father commanded the 1st division in Tunisia and Sicily in World War II.”

  Allen and Holleder were still the only identified casualties in the account from Vietnam. Even with the front-page story in the local paper, his family had no idea yet that Danny Sikorski had been in the battle.

  AT QUARTER TO FIVE, six hours after the first protesters entered Commerce, as the action appeared to be winding down at last, Chief Emery left campus to attend a Police and Fire Commission meeting back at the City-County Building. He let John Patrick Hunter of the Capital Times hitch a ride, and as they rolled through the October darkness away from campus, Emery sighed and muttered to himself, “It was just awful. It was terrible. How did they ever let things get down to this?”

  By half past five the last students had left the plaza outside Commerce, and the battalion of city and campus officers, along with the late-arriving sheriff’s deputies, finally withdrew from their battle stations. The Dow protest was over, but its effects were not. Nineteen officers, in addition to the forty-seven students, had been taken to the hospital, and three of them, including Detective McCarthy, were the most seriously injured of anyone. Sewell, after conferring with President Harrington, released a statement to the press. He reiterated the university regulations that led him to call in the police, an action that he had not wanted to take. “I deeply regret that it was necessary to bring police onto the campus to maintain the operations of the university. This was done only after our officers and staff found it impossible to maintain order,” he said. “I regret that students and police were injured. This must not be repeated.” In hopes of cooling things down, he added, he was temporarily suspending the Dow interviews pending a special faculty meeting that he was calling for three thirty the next day. Sometime after the statement went out, some angry students returned to Dean Kauffman’s office and tried to start a fire outside his door. The damages were minimal, the perpetrators never caught.

  News of the calamitous events had reached the other end of State Street and sent the state legislature into full fury. Before adjourning that evening, the assembly passed a resolution calling the demonstration “a flagrant abuse and perversion of the treasured traditions of academic freedom.” Disruptive students, the resolution declared, should be expelled from the university. Milwaukee assemblyman Edward Mertz issued a familiar refrain, that the legislature should “take over” the university, which he said was in danger of being seized by “long-haired, greasy pigs.” On the senate side, conservative lions were roaring. “Communism is on that campus and it’s operating today,” declared Senator Gordon Roseleip of Darlington. Leland McParland of Cudahy was in an executioner’s mood. “We should shoot them if necessary,” he said of protesting students. “I would. I would. Because it’s insurrection.”

  AFTER EATING AND REGROUPING in the Rathskeller, Soglin marched up the hill one more time and returned to the Commerce Building to get his books. It was an eerie sight, the place empty, shards of broken glass still in the vestibule, the east-west hallway a mess of papers, plastic cups, clothing, debris. Soglin found his books, right where he had left them, and moved on to a seven o’clock meeting where protest leaders would talk about what to do next. Everything had indeed changed. A young woman walked into the meeting and declared, “I’m a radical! I’m a radical! I don’t know what it means, but will someone please explain it to me. I’ve just become a radical.”

  There was a mass meeting at the Great Hall in the Union at nine that night, and the crowd was so vast, more than three thousand students, that they moved it outside to the Library Mall. Ron Davis and his San Francisco Mime Troupe, who originally had been scheduled to hold a seminar on guerrilla theater, instead helped serve as meeting facilitators. “The meeting was hectic, but instructive,” Davis wrote later. “There was no clear line, many of the students, as usual, didn’t know about Dow’s involvement in the war or the complicity of the university. But many were disturbed that their fellow students had been bashed by clubs, gassed, and dragged off…. Personal assault was more important than any of the protest factors. We stood by, watching and listening. It was instructive to us as well. What would the organizers come up with?” Percy Julian, attorney for the students, took the bullhorn and asked people who had been inside or outside Commerce to provide eyewitness accounts that could be used in court. Several dozen sympathetic faculty me
mbers, alarmed that police had invaded their academic sanctuary, attended the open-air rally and formed a symbolic protective ring around the students, who finally voted to strike classes until the faculty permanently barred city police from campus and the administration agreed not to punish leaders of the Dow sit-in.

  Soglin had begun the day as just another person in the ranks of the protesters, but here was his opportunity to take a leading role. Stark was gone, and many of the protest lieutenants had gone into hiding, fearful that they would be suspended or expelled. Soglin and his University Community Action Party, which had supported the protest all along, were ready to assert leadership. He gave one of his first public speeches that night; countless more would follow. And along with his emergence, the ranks of the antiwar movement on campus seemed to have grown exponentially in that single day, or at least the ranks of people agitated by what they had seen or experienced. Davis was right in that respect; many in the crowd knew little about Vietnam, the distant war, but were reacting viscerally to the sight of the police clubs.

  John Pickart, the music major from Madison, who had witnessed the violence inside Commerce while trying to talk his friend Everett Goodwin out of participating in the sit-down protest, felt torn by competing impulses once again. He did not think a strike was the best way to protest the situation, but “decided to go along with it for one day” to show his sympathy for the strikers. “Obviously, a mistake or a series of them had been made somewhere,” he explained in a letter to his friend, Pam Crane. “When you see something like that you feel that somehow you have to do something actively.”

  Betty Menacher, the freshman from Green Bay, who had stepped out of her classroom to witness the police charge, walked over to the rally from Sellery Hall that night, the memory of what she had seen inside Commerce fresh in her mind. For eighteen years she had “gone with the program,” but now, for the first time, she felt an urge to reconsider her basic assumptions and think about the world around her. October 18 was “a turning point.”

  Jane Brotman was also in the crowd. The freshman from New Jersey had not changed her politics. She had only the vaguest comprehension of napalm, and she still thought the protest leaders were strange and frighteningly unlike her. But she felt she had “a personal responsibility” to go to the rally and make a statement about what she had witnessed. She found herself part of “a huge mass” of people who seemed as “personally upset” as she was. The issue, for her, was police brutality. “That’s what I felt I had to take a stand on,” she said later. “I did not like the protesters. I didn’t feel like I was supporting the people. But I had witnessed something and I felt I had to take some action. I kept thinking, if my parents were here, they would do the same thing. I had no doubt in my mind.” After the students had voted to stage a protest strike, Brotman called her parents from her room at the Towers and told them that she was not going to take her French exam the next day. She was anxious about her decision and felt she had to tell her parents about it, desperately hoping for their support. She knew that her mother was against the war, and that her father, while supporting the war, was a man of deep moral principles. He would understand, she thought. Instead her parents “freaked out” at the news. They could not believe that she would miss an exam. And Brotman found herself struggling again, just as she had hours earlier when she had to choose between watching the protest and going to her review class. Now what should she do?

  That night, while students debated whether to strike, President Harrington, Chancellor Sewell, Dean Kauffman, and Chief Hanson gathered at Kauffman’s house on Celia Court on the far west side. Kauffman’s wife and teenaged son drove to Kentucky Fried Chicken and brought back dinner. Harrington constantly worked the phone, dealing with legislators, the governor’s office, faculty members, and regents. With frequent interruptions the four men huddled late into the night, discussing how they should deal with the faculty, the legislature, and the press. It was difficult for them to understand or accept the reality of violence that had erupted on their campus, on their watch. The police had overreacted, they thought, and the students had turned on them with a vengeance. It was a mess and would only get messier, they knew. Now the university would be portrayed as an out-of-control institution and there would be more pressure from state legislators and the public to crack down on radical students.

  William Sewell was the most traumatized. He said little that night, then retreated to his house on Countryside Lane and slumped down in the blue leather easy chair that usually gave him so much comfort as he dug into his copies of the American Sociological Journal. Now he was overcome by dread. Feeling drained and defeated, he thought to himself, “My God, I’ve just screwed everything up. It’s my fault. I let those police go in there and I shouldn’t have. I’ve bollixed it up. I’ve just ruined my career. I’ve never been involved in anything in my life before where anyone was hurt. People won’t remember me for anything but the Dow riot.”

  Chapter 24

  “Bombing Washington”

  THE RELENTLESS DIFFICULTIES of war and peace had consumed Lyndon Johnson that Wednesday. At a midday Cabinet meeting, while the Dow protest inside the Commerce Building in Madison was devolving into chaos, the president and his department secretaries gathered in the White House Cabinet Room, where they received a detailed briefing from Attorney General Ramsey Clark on the massive peace demonstrations to be held in Washington a few days later under the sponsorship of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam.

  It was still “undeterminable” how many citizens would travel to the capital to protest over the weekend, Clark said, but FBI agents and informants had picked up signs that the crowds might be less substantial than antiwar leaders were predicting. While “they sincerely believe they will get 100,000,” Clark reported, the government’s “best count at the moment” was less than a third of that number. Clark then recited statistics that could be gleaned from any newspaper or wire service report. A four-hundred-car train was conveying an antiwar battalion from New York. There were 243 buses scheduled to bring protesters down from Connecticut and New Jersey, but only a hundred had been filled. Philadelphia was “down from fifty to thirty-six buses,” but Baltimore had three hundred buses making the trip.

  The Department of Justice itself would be the first protest target Friday afternoon, Clark reported. He expected a few hundred demonstrators “to seek access to the building to turn in their draft cards.” Two days earlier, as part of Stop the Draft Week, young men who opposed the war had turned in draft cards at rallies around the country. At the largest rally, an interfaith peace service at Arlington Street Church in Boston, eighty-seven men had burned their draft cards and another two hundred handed theirs to the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, chaplain at Yale. Coffin was now coming to Washington as part of a team of antiwar luminaries, including Dr. Benjamin Spock and writer Norman Mailer, to take part in the demonstration and deliver the card collection to government officials. Clark told the president and his Cabinet colleagues that the full group of antidraft protesters would be denied entrance to the Justice building, but a delegation led by Coffin would be received. Since Selective Service regulations required that draft cards “be in the registrant’s possession,” they would not be accepted by government officials during the protest, although, to be sure, FBI agents would be hovering in the shadows to gather “abandoned” cards from which they might launch investigations.

  The large demonstrations were scheduled for Saturday, October 21, with speeches on the mall, picketing outside the White House, and a mass march to the Pentagon. The “risk of unplanned incidents remains,” Clark said, but “police and military manpower have been marshaled in anticipation of unexpected outbreaks.” In addition to the D.C. metropolitan police force and federal security guards, three thousand army troops were on standby and fifteen thousand in “deeper reserve,” some from as far away as Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Fort Hood in Texas, and the Presidio in San Francisco.

 
“Above all,” Clark said, without apparent irony, “we want to maintain the appearance of business as usual.”

  According to notes of the meeting, Vice President Humphrey inquired about protecting the Capitol, two other department secretaries discussed security plans for their buildings, but LBJ himself remained silent. That was uncharacteristic of Johnson, who had been obsessed with the protest for most of the month and had been pushing Clark and other administration officials to let friendly journalists know about any and all communist affiliations of left-wing demonstration leaders. “The fact of communist involvement and encouragement has been given to some columnists,” Clark had reported at an earlier Cabinet session. “Let’s see it some more,” Johnson had replied. He always wanted more of it for himself. The bundle of papers his secretaries prepared “for the President’s night reading” often included documents about the protesters. One aide saw Johnson perusing a list of “antiwar leaders and their communist connections” as he got his hair cut at the White House barbershop.