“Nobody makes a conspiracy with words,” Leonard responded.
In an effort to “cut off hysteria from the right,” Leonard and the governor’s political team came up with the idea of launching a bipartisan Senate investigation of the Dow incident. The scope of the investigation would be limited to the protest and ways that violent confrontations might be averted in the future. They would stack the committee with moderates and have Jack Olson, the lieutenant governor, serve as chairman. Olson did not want the job but had no choice; Leonard and Knowles considered him mild to the point of boring, just what they wanted. The wording of the resolution was anything but judicious. Blame was already fully assigned as the committee was instructed to gather facts on “the riotous and unlawful activities” of students during the Dow demonstration.
The prospect of an investigation excited Roseleip and his cohorts. “This thing has been swept under the rug too long,” said Gerald Lorge of Bear Creek, in support of the legislative inquest. “When you pick up the paper and see the American flag torn down, when people are fighting and dying and being maimed in Vietnam, I think this”—the Dow demonstration—“is the most disgraceful thing I’ve ever heard of.”
For the second straight day Madisonians were picking up the paper and seeing the flag torn down. The Wisconsin State Journal devoted nearly half of its Page of Opinion to a Pictorial Editorial headlined “All This Must Go.”
What must go? Three things. The first was “Outside ‘Help’ from San Francisco,” rendered in this case by a small photograph of Miss Sifting and Winnowing, under the mistaken assumption that the whiteface mime was a member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe rather than Wisconsin’s own Vicki Gabriner. The second thing that had to go was Robert Cohen, who was pictured speaking into a battery-powered bullhorn next to the cutline, “A Teaching Assistant Gives Foghorn Leadership.” And the third thing that had to go was the flag cutter, caught in the act atop Bascom Hall again in Norm Lenburg’s photograph, this time displayed in four columns.
District Attorney Jim Boll was sitting in his office that afternoon when the phone rang; he picked it up and a male voice said, “I fought in World War II and I was severely wounded and I love the flag. Will you do what you can to apprehend the person who tore down the American flag and desecrated it?” The man had seen the picture, twice, in the paper, and was incensed that the culprit had not been caught. The picture had infuriated Boll too, and now he felt compelled to act. He could laugh it off when a raging young woman protester had shrieked at him, “Boll, you suck cock!” And it was disturbing, but not enough to rouse his prosecutorial fervor, when someone—obviously not an admirer—had slipped into his office the night before and left a white chicken in his chair with a swastika painted on it, and next to the chicken a swastika-decorated egg. Boll didn’t consider himself a fascist; he thought of himself as someone who was enforcing the law. He gave the chicken to a janitor, who ate it.
Boll was an officer in the National Guard and his father had fought in the trenches in World War I, and every year at eleven on the morning of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, Veterans Day, no matter what he was doing, he would stand up and turn to the east and pray to honor the war dead. Once, a few years before the Dow protest, he had performed this annual ritual in the courtroom during the trial of antiwar demonstrators who had been arrested for blocking a highway near Truax Field, the local air base. His nation’s symbols were deeply felt by Jim Boll. People could insult him but not the flag.
In his pursuit of the flag cutter, Boll teamed with Vernon (Jack) Leslie, the Dane County undersheriff, a former marine who had fought in the Pacific in World War II and who carried a palpable hatred for the long-hairs who now challenged authority and opposed the war in Vietnam. They were an unlikely duo, the prosecutor and the sheriff: Boll be spectacled and mild-mannered, Leslie a hard-drinking gamecock of a lawman who strutted through town with a menacing air. Whenever protesters landed in the county lockup, it was Leslie who gleefully ordered their long hair shorn, and in his own private manipulation he recruited a jailed rapist to be the barber. Boll, in describing Leslie, often told the story of the time they were preparing for another antiwar demonstration. Leslie had heard students chanting “One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war!” and decided that he could not tolerate the use of the word “fuck” in that context, so he instructed his troops to arrest anyone who said it.
“Jack, you can’t go arresting people for that,” Boll cautioned him.
To which Leslie barked, “Why the fuck can’t we?”
Leslie and his men had been called in late, as a backup force, and had missed the Dow confrontation, and although Boll was among those who privately felt that the undersheriff’s absence was probably for the best, it had left Leslie unfulfilled. He was eager to bring the protesters into line. If he could not crack unruly heads inside Commerce, at least he could haul in the kid who had cut down the American flag. With the Lenburg photo circulating for a second straight day, Boll and Leslie had received enough tips to have the name of a prime suspect, a student named Stielstra. The problem was which Stielstra? Phil or Jonathan? The search was on.
Detective Tom McCarthy returned to police headquarters for a few minutes that afternoon of the twentieth. Bandages protected his nose after surgery at Madison General Hospital, the first of many operations on his sinus passages, which had been permanently damaged. His injury had been reported in the papers, eliciting a stack of letters, get-well cards, and telephone messages. Strangers offered him a free trip to LasVegas, and a group of lawyers wanted to pay his membership in a downtown athletic club. Jack Olson, the lieutenant governor, wrote to say that he felt “more secure knowing our peace officers are equal to any occasion.”
Nine professors from the UW chemistry department signed a letter to McCarthy saying they “regret terribly your injuries and the deplorable manner in which you and other members of the force were treated by certain students.” Local attorney John Fox, an old friend and golfing buddy, sent a jocular note with a hard message. “I am doubly surprised to see that somebody got close enough with a brick to use it on you. I imagine your old age must be causing a slowness in your reflexes,” Fox wrote. “Seriously, Tom, I do want to stress my sincere appreciation for your performance as well as the other police officers in this fantastic flaunting of the law by the students. You and I have talked about this in the past and I am sure we both realized that sooner or later this day would come when absolute force would have to be applied in order to impress these people that law and order still must prevail in this city.”
The captain of detectives called McCarthy into his office and asked, “Tom, what the hell were you doing there?”—meaning how did he end up at the Dow protest. McCarthy explained that he had tried to stay away but was recruited by Inspector Harrington to accompany him to Bascom Hill after the trouble started. “Well,” said the captain, smiling, “I’m glad the detective bureau was represented.”
This response reflected the swirl of contradictory feelings at the police department in Dow’s aftermath. Was it an unmitigated disaster in which the cops were undermanned and overwhelmed, or was it a triumph of absolute force? The prevailing wisdom among the police was a bit of both. Chief Emery, while privately uncertain of the chain of events that sparked the violence, went public that Friday in defense of his officers. He told reporters that his men were “actually fighting for their lives” inside Commerce and that they were “overpowered” by an organized resistance the likes of which they had never seen before on the Wisconsin campus. “We were met by brute force that equaled, and at times exceeded, what we could use,” Emery said. “Our use of force certainly wasn’t planned or wanted. But our men had to protect themselves and restore order, and I’m proud of the way they did it.” Emery’s men, especially the thirty or so who had been in the wedge that assembled under the Carillon Tower and marched into Commerce, had not necessarily expected the violence, but many of them were proud of their part. The
y coined a nickname—the Dirty 30—that boastfully acknowledged their rough methods. The epithet stuck, and for years thereafter, some cops wore Dirty 30 patches on their jacket sleeves to denote that they had fought on the battlefield at Dow.
AS THE BUSES from Madison made the turn around Chicago, Dave Wheadon noticed out the window that they had joined a caravan of chartered coaches carrying citizens from the Midwest to the national rally. It was an exhilarating feeling, he thought, to be part of something larger. The atmosphere inside was all buzz, chatter, and debate. Kent Smith, a sophomore history major from the small town of Cornell near Eau Claire, was still forming his feelings about Vietnam. He had decided to make the trip after reading a leaflet handed out at Sellery Hall; traveling alone, he found himself surrounded by people who made him feel like “the most naïve person” there. To Smith the war seemed “fruitless, wrong and unwinnable,” but now he was hearing more sophisticated and cynical explanations for why it was being fought, focusing on American economic imperialism. He listened in amazement as a passenger in the seat in front of him delivered a long, loud lecture about how the United States was in Vietnam not for the Vietnamese but for the profits of Coca-Cola and other American corporations.
By the time the bus caravan reached the Indiana Toll Road, the first of the weekend’s protests was under way in Washington, with Yale’s chaplain, the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, accompanied by Benjamin Spock, Norman Mailer, and a flock of antiwar notables, gathering on the steps of the Department of Justice. Judy Genack, whose plane had brought her to Washington in time for lunch, was in the audience alongside her new friend, the reporter Steve Matthews. She had never seen anything like this. Dr. Spock, the renowned pediatrician, was someone she had “never imagined could be an activist.” And there stood Mailer and the poet Robert Lowell. These were serious people, she thought, real thinkers, different from the hippies and freaks she encountered on the Wisconsin campus. The potent mix of intellect, passion, fame, and mass action thrilled her. She immediately understood what Matthews had told her at lunch: how intoxicating it was to be at that place and time, covering history in the making.
Matthews took notes and Genack listened in awe as Coffin delivered the major speech before going inside to hand over a bundle of draft cards, most collected at rallies earlier in the week, plus some given up now by draft-age men in the crowd. “We cannot shield them. We can only expose ourselves as they have done,” Coffin said of the young draft resisters. “We hereby counsel these young men to continue in their refusal to serve in the armed forces as long as the war in Vietnam continues, and we pledge ourselves to aid and abet them in all the ways we can. This means that if they are now arrested for failing to comply with a law that violates their consciences, we too must be arrested, for in the sight of the law we are now as guilty as they.” When Coffin and his delegation stepped inside with a bag containing 994 draft cards, they were met not by Attorney General Clark, as he had expected, but by an assistant, who simply refused to accept the draft cards. Coffin dropped the bag on the floor and walked away, complaining that the assistant was “derelict in his duty” for refusing to accept evidence. Mailer, the social historian on the scene, noted “a contained anger in Coffin, much like lawyer’s anger, as if some subtle game had been played in which a combination had been based on a gambit, but the government had refused the gambit, so now the combination was halted.”
In fact the little drama unfolded precisely the way Clark had laid it out to President Johnson and the Cabinet two days earlier. Still, LBJ was enraged by the act of resistance. He read about the draft-card dumping episode on a wire service ticker stationed near his desk at the White House and was so distraught that he called over an aide, Joe Califano, to read it with him. As Califano later recounted the scene, Johnson “began jabbing at [the UPI report] with his finger” while ordering Califano to let Justice know that the president expected the FBI to investigate.
Early that evening Johnson gave two off-the-record interviews to friendly reporters, first Ernest B. Furgurson of the Baltimore Sun, who was writing a laudatory biography of General Westmoreland, then the columnist Joseph Alsop, who supported the war and detested the protesters and was ushered in when Johnson wanted to leak raw intelligence reports detailing the ribald sexuality or political recklessness of antiwar partisans. After Alsop left, Califano accompanied his boss to the White House residence, where two Texas congressmen and their wives were to be dinner guests. As they were sitting in the living quarters before dinner, Califano later wrote, “the president called General Hershey of the Selective Service and delivered a monologue about the need to punish draft protesters.” At times LBJ seemed “infuriated,” according to his aide, “but at other times he seemed genuinely struggling to understand what could drive a young American to burn his draft card.” His dismay at the way the Justice Department handled the bagful of cards seemed to match Reverend Coffin’s. He complained to General Hershey that he wanted to know “who the dumb sonofabitch was who would let somebody leave a bunch of draft cards in front of the Justice Department and then let them just walk away.”
If his attorney general would not act decisively enough against draft-card burners and protesters disrupting the draft process, LBJ said, he hoped that Hershey would.
The old general would indeed act, six days later, by sending a letter to local draft boards urging them to draft any young men who violated draft laws or obstructed military recruiters. “I don’t want any revenge. I actually have a lot of confidence in the kids of this country,” Hershey would say, explaining the crackdown. “All I hope to do is to discourage some of the excesses we have had in the past.” Among the sharpest critics of this proposed policy would be Chancellor Sewell at the University of Wisconsin. It had been twenty-five years since Sewell worked side by side with Hershey in Washington, analyzing statistics for the wartime draft, and he still had a soft spot in his heart for his former boss. But now he would regard Hershey’s induct-the-Vietnam-protesters threat as a reactionary flouting of the First Amendment. It seemed to Sewell in that autumn of 1967 that defending freedom of speech from attacks by the left and right was nearly his full-time endeavor. His telegram to Hershey would go unanswered but be made public, prompting conservatives on the UW Board of Regents to call for his head, though eventually Sewell’s position would prevail, on the draft issue at least, with the Johnson administration backing away from the plan.
After finishing his long telephone conversation with Hershey that night of the twentieth, Johnson retired for dinner with Lady Bird and the Texas congressional couples, Jack Brooks and George Mahon and their wives. His mind was still locked on the protests. He had considered issuing a tough public statement, according to Califano, and had gone so far as to dictate the first sentence but decided it would only bring more heat his way. At dinner he mentioned the March on the Pentagon planned for the next day and, as Califano recalled, “worried that ‘Communist elements’ would take advantage of the situation to ‘make sure that there will be trouble in the Negro ghetto.’” President Johnson would not be run out of town—he had made that clear from the start—but now he wondered aloud whether he should ring the White House perimeter with army troops.
IT WAS TWELVE HOURS LATER in Lai Khe, South Vietnam, and the next morning had already broken in sunlight. The men of the Second battalion, Twenty-eighth Infantry—all the Black Lions, including scores of new troops but minus the wounded still in hospitals at Long Binh—gathered outside battalion headquarters for a memorial service to honor the soldiers who died October 17. They lined up in formation: Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Recon, Headquarters and Headquarters Company, with Louis Menetrey in command. The First Division brass were there, including Major General Hay and Brigadier General Coleman. There were some words about the brave fight and the great victory and the ultimate sacrifice, but the men were not listening. They stared straight ahead or bowed their heads, lost in thought.
In front of them stood a solitary pair of empty jung
le boots, and behind the boots an M-16, bayoneted into the ground. Atop the rifle rested a dusty helmet. It could have been Danny Sikorski’s, or Jack Schroder’s, or Melesso Garcia’s, or Pasquale Tizzio’s: it covered all of the dead. In the shade of rubber trees a chaplain read a prayer, a squad of riflemen fired a twenty-one-gun salute, and a mournful bugler played taps. When it was over, Top Valdez, Doc Hinger, David Stroup, and a few others were called forward and pinned with Silver Stars for heroism during the battle, and then more soldiers were called and given Bronze Stars.
Hinger was mortified, not by the honor, but by the timing of the presentation. It was a “miserable, miserable thing,” he thought, for those who lived to be given medals at a memorial ceremony such as this. Some of them died. Some of them were not allowed to.
Captain Cash was in Lai Khe that day, conducting more interviews for his investigation of the battle. He carried a bulky cassette tape recorder and a notepad and interviewed soldiers individually, scratching names from his list one by one. Giannico. Hinger. Jensen. Phillips. Stephens. Stroup. Troyer. Woodard. Each man’s description of the battle was different, conveying only the microcosm of what he saw, but there were places where the stories connected. One thread that wove through the interviews was an overwhelming sense of chaos early in the battle. Was this the usual fog of war or something more? The soldiers, whether in Alpha or Delta, talked about how hard it had been to know where the other friendly forces were. Should they return fire or cease fire? Were they shooting at the enemy or their own side? If the surprise attack gave the Viet Cong fire superiority at the start, the confusion about battlefield positioning helped them maintain it. Some soldiers said they anticipated trouble that morning, but none expected to be defeated. They marched into the jungle with the sensibility that the Black Lions intimidated the Viet Cong and could not lose. It was not until the battle was under way that they realized otherwise.
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