They Marched Into Sunlight

by David Maraniss

  Cameron ended by introducing a motion of support for Sewell: “Be it resolved that the faculty upholds the Chancellor’s action in recognizing his obligations to enforce the mandate of the faculty as expressed in Chapter 11 of the University regulations.”

  And the debate began. The atmosphere in the theater was electric, tense, heavy with rhetoric and things implicit but unsaid. There were blocs of professors on the right and left who thought Sewell was either too lenient with the students or too easy on the police, but most were somewhere in the middle. They were shaken equally by the sight of riot helmets and nightsticks on campus and by the way that protest leaders had radicalized the academic atmosphere, upsetting the quiet pursuit of knowledge by making everything political. It was as though these faculty members simply wanted the whole unpleasant scene to disappear. Part of the record of what happened at Dow was on film, and several minutes of that film had been provided to the faculty by Blake Kellogg, news director of Channel 27. Should they watch it before taking any substantive votes? The decision was yes, but barely: while 633 voted to see the film, 522 professors opposed the idea, either because their minds were settled already or because they could not bear to revisit the violence. After the film was shown, they took a two-hour dinner break.

  IN JAPAN BY THEN it was morning of the next day. Fred Kirkpatrick, the Delta Company point man, was nearing the end of his week’s break from fighting in Vietnam. He left the Club Bohemian in the Shibuya district and checked into the USO club in Tokyo, where he happened to pick up that day’s edition of Pacific Stars & Stripes.

  The front-page headline ran in boldface type: 103 Reds Killed in Triple Attack on U.S. Battalion. That was enough to grab Kirkpatrick’s attention, and he kept reading. “A communist regiment, heavily manned by North Vietnamese replacements…flare-up of fighting…northwest of Saigon…conservative estimate of 103 Communists killed…eight-hour battle…U.S. losses…56 killed and 63 wounded…”

  Then the connections started coming, and Kirkpatrick’s head began spinning. “Among the dead were Lt. Col. Terry Allen Jr…. Allen was killed when the battalion he commanded was hard hit by the enemy…fighting broke out around 10 a.m. when a squad from the 1st Inf. Div.’s A Co., 2nd Bn, 28th Infantry…”

  “That’s my battalion!” Kirkpatrick shouted. He called over to his buddy, Roy Key, another Delta rifleman on R and R who was standing nearby. They read the story together, stunned. They knew that their Black Lions were going on search-and-destroy missions two depleted companies at a time. Fifty-six killed and sixty-three wounded meant a complete disaster. “My God, they’re wiped out,” Kirkpatrick said. “Wiped out!” He left the club with his Japanese girlfriend, Keiko Kinoshita, who took him to a local market, but Kirkpatrick was overwhelmed by the horror he had escaped. What would he have done as a point man? Would he have been killed too? He was agitated, all nerves. He encountered a Japanese man who bothered him for some reason, Kirkpatrick didn’t even know why, and he cocked his fist and was about to strike the man in the face when Keiko grabbed his arm and stopped him.

  THE RANKS INSIDE the Memorial Union Theater in Madison thinned a bit for the evening session, down a hundred professors from the afternoon, but the student audience on the other side of the doors and out on the terrace had swelled in numbers and energy. As the faculty debated the Cameron motion and a counter proposal—the one acknowledging Sewell’s “good faith” but strongly condemning the “indiscriminate violence” of the police—the students reacted like a raucous sporting crowd jeering and cheering every pitch. In this crowd, as in most student protest gatherings, the range of alienation and willingness to rabble-rouse was wide.

  Jim Rowen listened to the faculty debate with dismay, shaken by the violence of the day before and furious that the faculty seemed more interested in faulting students than police. Jane Brotman stopped by to show her solidarity with the cause, if not the people of that cause, still sorting out the feelings she had expressed in the letter to her father and worrying about her French literature grade. Betty Menacher, taking an interest in politics for the first time after being unexpectedly caught in the melee inside Commerce, came over from Sellery Hall, curious to learn more about the issues of the day. Paul Soglin was with the crowd on the Union Terrace. Even though he had been lead plaintiff in the legal brief against the university and had been among those obstructing inside Commerce, he was not picked out as a ringleader facing suspension and possible criminal action because he had not led the resistance against the police. If anything, as a student who had been pounded by nightsticks without responding, he was a poster boy for police overreaction. He was angry with the administration now but determined to avoid further violence.

  Robert Barnett, a senior in history from Waukegan, Illinois, with moderate antiwar leanings, had not participated in the Dow protest but came to listen to the faculty debate out of political curiosity. His focus that week was less on the war and more on a sophomore named Rita Braver, a reporter at the Daily Cardinal whom he had taken out the previous weekend and brazenly asked to marry him on their first date. Now as he stood amid the hubbub outside the theater, Barnett was stunned by a scene that would remain vividly in his memory decades later (when he was a Washington lawyer, agent for Bill Clinton, and Braver was his wife and a CBS News correspondent). That night in the Memorial Union theater hallway Barnett “saw a guy stand up above the crowd” and shriek, “Let’s kill the faculty!” A few bravado shouts followed, but the would-be revolutionary was largely ignored. Kenneth W. Thompson, a visiting professor of obstetrics and gynecology, was positioned nearby and observed a similar scene. There were, he said, “a few very evident belligerent male students who blusteringly talked of ‘taking the auditorium.’ All they needed was a spark of encouragement and they would have attempted something.”

  Dr. Thompson spent the evening mingling with the students in the lobby, because he was not a voting member of the faculty and not allowed inside. The group dynamics of the students struck him as so interesting that he later recorded his observations in a four-page memo. It was immediately apparent to him that these several hundred students “were vitally interested” in the faculty debate and that their focus was almost entirely on the issue of police brutality. “No concern was felt that students were in any way to blame,” he wrote. In his conversations with them, he had heard students say that they had expected a hundred or more of them to be “dragged off to jail” during the Commerce sit-in, that “the charging by the police was unwarranted,” and that no warning had been given for the tear gas outside. Thompson noticed that “there was good discipline” among the students and that certain leaders were obeyed with “excellent attention.” It seemed to him that the speeches of certain faculty members were “directed to the students and encouraging their obstructionism and disrespect for authority.” Although the causes were diametrically different, Thompson said the behavior patterns in some ways reminded him of when he was a foreign student at the University of Freiburg “in the early days of Hitler, when German students were organized to handle foreign students. We were to be guided down the path of admiration for the Nazi movement. The discipline among the German student leaders of the so-called Foreign Students Association was remarkable.”

  George Mosse, the renowned professor of modern European history who had in fact escaped Hitler’s Germany and spent his career studying Nazism and nationalistic mass movements, had a more subtle critique of the Dow protest and its handling. Like many liberal professors, he was against the Vietnam war but considered the Dow obstruction “a terrible mistake.” The confrontation inside Commerce marked what he later called an unfortunate “sharp turn away from the intellectualism” that previously had defined the New Left in Madison. Until then, even when he disagreed with his more radical students, he had found them stimulating and serious. But the leaders of the Dow protest, Mosse said, “however erudite they may have appeared, threw out a spark” that moved things in the wrong direction—“from thinking to mindless ac
tivity.” Any antiwar demonstration that provoked violence was self-defeating, he thought, because it only led protesters into a battle they could not possibly win. Where the visiting Dr. Thompson was struck by the discipline of the protest leaders, and found their manipulative skills analogous to Hitler Youth leaders, Mosse, while disapproving of their tactics, saw them as extemporaneous and disorganized and thus less threatening.

  It was with that frame of mind that he rose to speak during the faculty debate. What worried him most was not whether the university was being too lenient, but whether it was exaggerating the danger of a few nihilistic students and worsening the situation by panicking and becoming inflexible. “I have seen more and more students who were never political picketing today,” Mosse told his colleagues. It was the sight of violence that propelled them to the picket line, he said, and he feared that a hard-line approach would lead only to more confrontations and “an escalation of violence.” He had seen the same cycle at the Free University of Berlin and other campuses around the world. By adhering unwaveringly to rules even at the expense of common sense, Mosse said, the university was becoming “as absolutistic as the students.” Would it make sense to invite Dow back the next day if it led to bloodshed? Did it make any sense in the first place, he asked, beyond a determination to follow every rule, to invite Dow to recruit on campus during national Peace Week?

  It was typical of Mosse that his words were cheered in the hallway by students he thought were so misguided. But he was surprised by another reaction—hostility from some colleagues inside the theater. He thought he was trying to calm the situation, but as soon as he sat down he felt “a wave of hatred” coming at him. He had greatly underestimated how threatened many professors felt by the student unrest.

  From the UW journalism school, Scott Cutlip, a public relations expert, rose in defense of the administration, saying that the state, the faculty, and the students were all “God damn lucky to have Bill Sewell as chancellor”—someone who would stand firm at a time when the university was being paralyzed “by two hundred nihilists.”

  A professor of engineering, Edward F. Obert, charged that students and sympathetic professors had exaggerated the confrontation and made the injuries to protesters sound worse than they were. The incident was not a case of police brutality, he said, but of “student brutality.”

  The law school’s Ted Finman, who was part of a group taking statements from students who had witnessed the police action inside Commerce, strongly disagreed. “We know enough to say there was police brutality and we ought to have enough guts to say it,” he told his colleagues.

  William H. Hay, professor of philosophy, said that he had watched the Dow demonstration from the northwest balcony of Bascom Hall and had concluded at the time that the police had made a tactical mistake—that they should have “moved the spectators back before attempting to clear Commerce.” The violence was “totally unnecessary,” he said, and resulted in large part because people were trapped.

  The debate dragged on hour after hour with a circuitous series of motions, amendments, and amendments to amendments. Sewell, feeling buffeted from all sides, eventually rose to defend himself again. He loaded his response with a street-brawling word—“guts”—that was not normally part of the academy lexicon but had been used more than once that night. “This faculty has already put me in a precarious position in its past actions and again here tonight,” he said. “You haven’t had the guts enough to admit that my reaction was an exact interpretation of what you intended.”

  In the end Sewell prevailed, though his support was tenuous. By the close vote of 562 to 495, the faculty defeated the resolution that condemned the use of “indiscriminate violence” while saying that the chancellor had made his decisions in “good faith.” After that the prosaic Cameron resolution upholding the administration’s actions was approved, 681 to 378. And finally, on a voice vote, they decided to cancel the last batch of Dow interviews scheduled for the next day.

  After listening for six hours over loudspeakers, their emotions rising and falling, the students outside the theater were left deflated. They felt that their side had lost and that the faculty was interested only in protecting its academic bubble, unwilling to address the moral issues of Dow and the war or the physical facts of the police action. For Paul Soglin, it was another dose of disillusionment. He had always looked up to his teachers—his father was a teacher, the people he admired most were teachers—but now he felt “an overwhelming realization that we could not count on them.” Jim Rowen had come to the Union that night believing that the faculty would condemn the police. As professors filed out of the theater, he stood in a crowd lining the South Park Street exit and joined in the subdued, mournful chants of “Shame…shame…shame.”

  Chapter 27

  A Life’s Worth

  IN MILWAUKEE the next morning, Friday the twentieth of October, Diane Sikorski was in her bedroom at 4369 North Forty-second Place, the room her father had painted blue. The doorbell rang and she looked out the window and her heart sank at the sight of an earnest soldier standing on the front stoop. The families of men serving in Vietnam knew what it meant when an unexpected uniform appeared at the front door. “They don’t come to visit,” Diane thought. “They come to tell you what you hope you’ll never hear.” She left her room, opened the door, and stared into the young man’s face, a soldierly mask. Her first reaction was to feel sorry for him. He asked to speak with her father. She turned away and entered the kitchen, suddenly light-headed and exhausted, a numb feeling moving up her arms and legs. Her father and stepmother were drinking coffee. She told her dad about the visitor in uniform, and a look washed over his face that she would never forget. They returned to the living room as a group, Diane and her father and stepmother, and waited for the soldier to speak.

  “Are you Edmund Sikorski?” he asked. Then he took out a telegram and began to read. We regret to inform… Diane watched his lips, but she could not grasp the words, her head was spinning too much. She heard “killed in action” and wanted to scream, but nothing came out. She started to shake and turned to her dad and saw him reaching out for his wife.

  The soldier kept reading. Diane heard almost none of it. But she did hear the punctuating grief of her father. Oh, God! No, not Danny. He was so young. Why couldn’t God take me instead? His wife held him while he wept. Diane wanted to hold him too but couldn’t move and stood shaking and feeling cold, as if someone had stripped her of her clothing and left her alone.

  Time became a blur. She could not remember the soldier leaving, but he was gone. She went back to her room and collapsed on the bed. Her arms and legs were heavy and aching. Her mother had died suddenly only a few years earlier, and now her big brother, Danny, was gone. He couldn’t be dead, she thought. Then she remembered the horrible dream, Danny calling out to her with his stomach missing, and the letter that would arrive in Lai Khe too late.

  Her father appeared, his face ashen, eyes red, voice breaking, and held out his arms. Diane asked, “Why does death always happen to our family?”

  Edmund Sikorski did not have an answer.

  Men in uniforms, faces set in soldierly masks, were trudging up the front steps of homes across the United States that day, delivering the grim news of Black Lions who had been killed in action in the jungle near the Ong Thanh stream. When two immaculate messengers of death reached the door at 11 Conselyea Street in Brooklyn to inform the parents of Paddy Tizzio, Terry Allen’s radiotelephone operator, a neighbor saw them before anyone answered the door and rushed out to stop them. The neighbor knew that Paddy’s mother was home alone and could not bear the news, so he persuaded them instead to go tell the father, Dominic Tizzio, a supervisor at the Thypin Steel plant in Long Island City. Paddy’s sister, Marian, got a call at the plating company where she worked and was told to hurry home. When she arrived, she saw her aunts and uncles and realized someone had died, but presumed it was her father until she heard her mother screaming. Then she knew: Padd
y was her mother’s light, and when he went out, so did she. She would never celebrate again—no holidays, no religious festivals, nothing for the rest of her life.

  At eleven in the morning, mountain standard time, two soldiers arrived at a ranch house outside Helena, Montana, where Eleanor Schroder had been living since her husband, Jack, left for Vietnam on the USNS Pope in July. She was the only adult home that day, taking care of her baby son, seven-month-old Larry, and babysitting the three young children of the friends with whom she was staying. She heard the knock on the door and opened it, “and there they were”—the bereavement officers. “You’re lying!” she kept insisting when the soldiers told her that Jack Schroder had been killed in action. They handed her a telegram so that she could read it herself. She went into the bedroom and picked up her baby son and rocked him as her tears fell on his chubby face.

  The night before, on the nineteenth, she had slept fitfully, but it was unfocused distress, and she had not worried specifically about her young husband in Vietnam. She had always expected him to survive and had not taken it as an omen that day when they had parted, four months earlier, and he had told her that he would rather die than come home crippled. In his absence she had imagined their future lives together; he would finish the dental training he had begun in Milwaukee and set up a shop where he would make false teeth, and together they would bring up a family. Now the future was lost in a daze. She was unable to absorb the reality of his death. At noon her friend came home. Eleanor told her the news and showed her the telegram and became so hysterical that the friend called the closest person who could help, a local veterinarian, who came by to calm the young widow with a tranquilizer.