They Marched Into Sunlight

by David Maraniss

  THREE CHARTERED Greyhound buses idled on Langdon Street outside the Memorial Union late that Friday morning, loading passengers who were going to Washington to march against the war in Vietnam. The detachment of fewer than two hundred riders was slightly smaller than organizers from the Madison Mobilization Committee had expected, with a sprinkling of high school students and townspeople. Some activists at the university, Paul Soglin among them, decided to stay home and push the protest against university administrators and the police. Others, including photographer Michael Oberdorfer and friends from Connections, had piled into a Volkswagen minibus the night before and left for Washington on their own. To them the Dow protest signified a line that had been crossed. They had been using the phrase “from protest to resistance” all fall, and now it seemed more than rhetoric. They were no longer interested in marching peacefully or undertaking purely symbolic acts. The confrontation at Commerce only intensified their feelings that they had to do whatever they could, physically, to interfere with the war machine, if not stop the war.

  Among the high school students making the bus trip was Alison Steiner, a senior from Madison West, who that fall had become active in a group called Students for Social Justice. They had their own newsletter and tried to distribute Connections inside the public schools, though that effort was banned when the alternative paper featured a cover of a nude woman. Steiner’s father was an economics professor at Wisconsin; her mother had returned to college to study computer science (and had felt the sting of tear gas on campus that Wednesday). Alison was a budding activist, informed and naïve at the same time. She liked to hang out on campus, where she occasionally audited Harvey Goldberg’s lectures on revolutionary France and volunteered at the Wisconsin Draft Resistance Union. Yet until that morning when she boarded the bus for Washington, she had never traveled out of town without her parents, and though she hoped that people would mistake her for a college student, before she left she had to take her mid-semester tests at West High and get a written excuse from her mother, and in her pocket she carried a slip of paper that her parents told her to pull out in case she got arrested or faced some other emergency—the private home telephone number of Senator Gaylord Nelson, a friend of a family friend.

  There was deep interest among certain federal authorities as to what these protesters from the heartland were doing. Among the others finding seats in the buses outside the Union were two undercover agents sent by the Army Intelligence Command. Dave Wheadon, a twenty-three-year-old Syracuse dropout who worked as a lab technician at Oscar Mayer on Madison’s east side and was recruited to travel to the Washington rally by a friend in his apartment complex, later recalled that two men in their late twenties came aboard wearing trenchcoats and carrying clipboards. They said they were insurance representatives involved in the leasing of the buses and needed the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of passengers for insurance records. In reality the two men were undercover agents, and the names on their clipboard lists went directly into the files of dissidents to be watched by the FBI. Alison Steiner’s file began then; an agent accurately recorded that she sometimes wore glasses but wrongly stated that she had blue eyes. The federal effort that fall to monitor dissent—and stifle it—was massive and multilayered. Intelligence agents, some using phony draft cards, not only followed the protesters but also filmed them, photographed them, monitored them on amateur radios, compiled names for future investigations, penetrated most of the groups organizing the demonstrations, attempted to disrupt their activities, and even interrogated bus company owners, pressuring some to drop their charter contracts.

  If the action on campus seemed more relevant to some student activists and kept them back in town, there were a few protesters who would not have gone to Washington if not for the Dow protest. One was Judy Genack. The senior European history major had no intention of participating in the national rally until she was stirred to act by what she had witnessed on the Commerce plaza a few days earlier. After that she felt “very drawn toward wanting to connect” with the American Antiwar movement, which she related to her experiences in Jerusalem that summer during the Six-Day War. Since she had waited until the last minute before deciding to go to Washington, she traveled by plane rather than bus. Before leaving Friday morning, she made arrangements to stay with a friend of a friend, a young reporter in the Washington bureau of the New York Daily News named Steve Matthews, who was covering the antiwar events. Joining a march on the Pentagon was an “impulsive” act and one that did not please her parents, but Genack felt an overpowering need to stand up and be heard.

  At the White House President Johnson pressed his aides for updates on the imminent demonstrations while he went through his day with a business-as-usual air. Not long after the buses pulled out of Madison for the long haul east, Johnson was posing for photographers on the South Lawn of the White House with Souvanna Phouma, the royal prime minister of Laos. It was a bright day, and LBJ asked for his sunglasses. After the picture taking the two men conversed through an interpreter.

  The Laotian prime minister, as much as Johnson, was preoccupied with the Vietnam war. The North Vietnamese were filtering through Laos along the Ho Chi Minh Trail and using it to stage operations into South Vietnam. At the same time the Laotian military was battling the local communist insurgents, the Pathet Lao. They were losing ten to twenty men a day in that war, Souvanna Phouma told Johnson, and even if they won militarily, they might lose economically without additional American aid. Since “the neutrality of Laos” had to be maintained, he wondered if some “circuitous route” could be found to “relieve these financial pressures.” Johnson said the United States had budget problems of its own. His government, he claimed, was now spending $75 billion on defense out of a total $130 billion budget. And his foreign aid program had been cut by one-third. When Souvanna Phouma persisted, asking whether he could get assistance for refugee care and defense needs, the president advised him to talk with Secretary McNamara.

  According to a top secret Memorandum of Conversation vetted by Johnson’s national security aid, Walt Rostow, Souvanna Phouma then told Johnson that he had seen “no improvement in the North Vietnamese attitude on the war” since late September when the president had broached the possibility of a bombing pause. Johnson agreed, adding that “in recent days North Vietnam’s position was even harsher.”

  What would the United States do? Would it harden its own stand? Souvanna Phouma asked. Johnson replied that his administration would “keep doing what it has been doing.”

  Souvanna Phouma hoped for more. He stressed how vitally interested his country was in this question because “most of the North Vietnamese equipment that infiltrated to the South went through Laos.” If the United States hardened its stand and heavily bombed all passes from North Vietnam into Laos, “the Lao would be happy,” he said. He was afraid that “since North Vietnam has failed to achieve victory” in South Vietnam, “it might very well turn against Laos” and invade his country during the next dry season.

  When Johnson asked whether he thought Hanoi’s intentions had changed at all since a year earlier, when the two leaders last had met, Souvanna Phouma said that after their earlier visit, when he had returned to the Laotian capital of Vientiane, he had asked a North Vietnamese diplomat what Hanoi would do if the Americans stopped bombing. The diplomat had said that Hanoi “would not accept anything short of a final and unconditional cessation of bombing.” It was, the two agreed, the same answer they had been hearing for years.

  Johnson was brooding again about his dilemma. How could the war be brought to an end? he asked.

  Put pressure on the Soviet Union to exert its influence with Hanoi, Souvanna Phouma suggested.

  The Soviets had already tried, Johnson said, but the Chinese were opposed.

  He asked if they “were any nearer to peace today than a year ago.”

  Perhaps, Souvanna Phouma said, but it “was a very difficult question to answer.”

  IN MADISON th
at noon hour the student protesters who stayed behind staged a rally on Bascom Hill. It was led by the just-formed Committee on Student Rights, chaired by Paul Soglin and now organized into subcommittees in charge of picketing, safety, petitioning, dorms, faculty, transportation, and a subcommittee to coordinate the subcommittees. This was a flow chart for ambitious plans, but in reality there was not that much to do. The class boycott, into its second day, was already petering out, with departmental deans reporting only negligibly higher absence rates, and those only in the social sciences. Teaching assistant Michael Krasny, the freshman composition instructor whose class inside Commerce had been disrupted Wednesday afternoon, had now turned his sessions into teach-ins about the war and student issues, typical of many of his colleagues sympathetic to the cause. The Bascom Hill rally drew about a thousand people, still considered a healthy crowd, and far greater than most campus rallies before Dow, but only half the size of the day before. The adrenaline rush was going, if not gone.

  What should they do next? Soglin and his comrades debated strategy for three hours in the open air near the statue of Abe Lincoln and arrived at a tentative plan. They would stage a march the next day, not unlike the march in Washington, but this one up State Street to the state Capitol. What should the march be about? On that question tension within the committee was apparent. Some student leaders, including Soglin, hoped that it would be about everything: the war, the police action, the establishment, recruiting on campus, the draft, the changing order. But they were now leading a group that included many students who had never protested before, who were not necessarily familiar with foreign policy issues and knew only that they were upset by what had happened two days earlier at Commerce. The group also included many distraught faculty members, who were most upset by the intrusion of police and the bloodshed on campus. Those two factions dominated now, and the majority decision was to limit the march to the events surrounding Dow—the charge of police brutality and the disposition of the cases against sit-in leaders.

  Within an hour notices were taped and stapled to trees, telephone poles, and bulletin boards around campus urging people to “March for the Rights of Students & Their Protection.” The march would not be a parade, the notices said. “It is not a joyous procession. It is a march of sorrow for the past, and for the future. It is our fear that this might be a funeral march for freedom and human rights on this campus. We march hoping that it is not…. We call upon all members of the University community and of the Madison community who are opposed to the action of the police on 18 October to join us. This is your battle, next time, it might be your head.”

  Inside Bascom Hall letters were beginning to arrive at Chancellor Sewell’s office, letters by the hundreds, six bags full. Letters of hate and letters of support, so many letters that one of the chancellor’s closest friends, fellow sociologist Bert Fisher, took it upon himself to form a volunteer squad to read and organize them for the appropriate response. There was the telegram from a professor of oncology who complained that he was “ashamed to be a member of the faculty” because of what he called the inappropriate use of tear gas and nightsticks on campus. And there was the letter from a professor of geography who wanted to offer a “positive suggestion.” A core of professors with “liberal credentials,” he wrote, wanted to offer themselves as replacements for city police when protesters threatened recruitment interviews. These liberal professors would form a cordon to protect access, offering “our bodies and our sensibilities, for we accept the hazards of both violence and vituperation.” Only the most hard-core of student activists, he predicted, would attempt violence against them.

  Then there was the note from a graduate student in English who said she had been “continually appalled by the permissiveness with which the university has handled unruly demonstrators.” And a letter from a third-year law student named F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. saying that he intended to be interviewed by the Central Intelligence Agency when it came to campus in November and expected that those interviews would not be disrupted as the Dow interviews had been. Sensenbrenner, who would be elected to the Wisconsin assembly as a Republican a year later and go on to represent some Milwaukee suburbs in the U.S. House of Representatives, told Sewell that he “would appreciate being informed of the measures being taken to protect the personal safety” of the CIA interviewees and that he planned “to investigate the legal means available to insure adequate protection of persons like myself.”

  One of the first letters to arrive was a handwritten note on the stationery of Harry Charles Thoma of 4182 Nakoma Road in Madison. “Dear Chancellor,” it read. “As an alumnus, a taxpayer, a retired Army officer and father of a son killed in action in Viet Nam I back your stand 100%. Keep it up. Let’s hope you get more support in the months ahead. Dissent is a right, but lawlessness and violence cannot and must not be tolerated.”

  Here, in one note, was an unlikely thread connecting the disparate worlds of war and peace. Harry Thoma’s son, Major Charles J. Thoma, had been not only a soldier in Vietnam, but an officer in the Second Battalion, Twenty-eighth Infantry, First Infantry Division. He had been a Black Lion, serving as the battalion operations officer, the same S-3 job later held by Terry Allen Jr. and Big Jim Shelton. On January 12, 1967—ancient history, long, long ago in the war, more than a month before Allen arrived in Vietnam, six months before the C Packet soldiers on the USNS Pope got there—Thoma was with the Black Lions on a search- and-destroy mission in the jungle northwest of Saigon, part of the massive Operation Cedar Falls. That day they had found a Viet Cong munitions cache, several hundred tons of rice, and miscellaneous enemy documents. At two twenty in the afternoon, Thoma was shot in the head by a sniper. He died hours later in surgery, at age thirty. He was, as it happened, the first Black Lions officer to die in battle in Vietnam in 1967, and Terry Allen Jr. was the last.

  The turmoil at the campus end of State Street consumed the Wisconsin legislature that day. Since Republicans controlled the governor’s office, the Assembly, and the Senate, the argument was largely between mainstream conservatives and hard-line right-wingers. In some ways it was a mirror image of the fissure between liberals and leftist radicals on the antiwar side, though with less apparent bad blood. Senator Roseleip was on the loose, pushing for an academic coup d’etat in which state lawmakers would seize operational control of the university, or at least, as a fallback position, make sure that two leftist student organizations, SDS and the W. E. B. DuBois Society, were banned from campus. These groups, Roseleip said, were nothing more than “tools of the Communists.” It was left to Jerris Leonard, the Senate majority leader, a moderate conservative from the suburbs of Milwaukee, to keep Roseleip under control.

  Leonard had ambitions beyond the state legislature. Preparing to challenge Gaylord Nelson for a Senate seat the following year, he had been recruited by the state of Wisconsin’s Wall Street bond lawyer, John Mitchell, to chair the state campaign of Mitchell’s law partner and political friend, Richard M. Nixon, the former vice president, who wanted to run in the 1968 presidential primary. Before he could move on to those political pursuits, Leonard had to deal with the problems at the university. At the time of the Dow protest he was feuding with President Harrington over construction budgets and tax breaks for private schools, a political fight colored by personal animosity. Harrington was not a particularly beloved figure among state Republicans. They considered him an imperious academic who barely deigned to deal with elected pols, and they loved to point out that he rode in a chauffeured black Cadillac while Governor Knowles used a Rambler built by American Motors in Kenosha. Leonard’s distaste for Harrington only increased when word got back to him that the UW president, at a party in Madison, reportedly had declared, “We’ve got to destroy this guy Leonard.”

  But there were other factors shaping Leonard’s perspective now. Much like Knowles, whose agenda he advanced in the legislature, he wanted to get tough with protesters without disabling the university, which was vital to the econom
ic health of the state, particularly rural areas that relied heavily on the ag school and tended to be represented by Republicans. Furthermore he had come to believe that most student demonstrators were “venting their testosterone” and were not serious threats to the established order. And finally, he had learned a lesson already concerning reckless rhetoric. After an earlier episode on campus, he had criticized the Daily Cardinal for employing an editor who happened to room with the son of a Communist Party figure. He had “taken a ration of shit” for that attack and come to regret it as an unfortunate case of guilt by association. All of those things went into Jerris Leonard’s reasoning as he took on Senator Roseleip at the Capitol that October Friday.

  “You don’t outlaw organizations no matter how much you disagree with them,” Leonard told Roseleip during the Senate debate. “Everybody has a right to his point of view, even the screwballs in the DuBois Society. Unless you give a method of expression to every point of view in a democracy, you will have riots on the street corners.”

  “Don’t you think this is a conspiracy?” Roseleip thundered back.