1968 (34 page)

Someone broke into the locked library, and like sleepy children the protesters silently climbed in. They wandered the building, drifting in and out of Grayson Kirk’s office with its Ming dynasty vases and Rembrandt. A few took cigars; others looked through files for secret documents and later claimed to have come across information on real estate deals and Defense Department agreements. In the early morning Rudd found a telephone and called his parents in New Jersey.

“We took a building,” Rudd said to his father, who had been learning of his activities on radio and television.

“Well, give it back,” his father answered.

The front-page article in
The New York Times
the next morning, raising the student movement to at least the level of the Linda LeClair case, accurately reported the wild events of the day, differing from Rudd’s own version only in that it credited him with knowing what he was doing. It read as though Mark Rudd, identified as the Columbia SDS president, had planned to lead the march from the sundial, to the park, and back to the sundial and then, at just the right moment, to call for the taking of a hostage. The reading public did not know that the SDS trained its “leaders” to discuss, not to make decisions. It also appeared to the
Times
that by bringing in some activists from Harlem, Rudd had involved CORE and SNCC and so Columbia was now part of a national protest campaign.

Tom Hayden came in from Newark. The Newark inner-city operation was being closed down, and he was about to move to Chicago, where SDS national headquarters was being established. After trying to live on a dollar a day with rice and beans and failing to recruit the support he had hoped for, he was astounded by what had occurred at Columbia.

I had never seen anything quite like this. Students, at last, had taken power in their own hands, but they were still very much students. Polite, neatly attired, holding their notebooks and texts, gathering in intense knots of discussion, here and there doubting their morality; then recommitting themselves to remain, wondering if their academic and personal careers might be ruined, ashamed of the thought of holding an administrator in his office but wanting a productive dialogue with him, they expressed in every way the torment of their campus generation.

He felt that “he couldn’t walk away.” He offered his support, but in the SDS way made it clear that he was to have no leading role. The protesters seemed pleased to have him, even in a silent capacity. He speculated, “What could be more fitting, perhaps they thought, than to involve Tom Hayden, the (twenty-nine-year-old) old man of the student movement, in this turning point of history?”

The longer they held the buildings, the more students joined them. As they ran out of space, they moved to other buildings. By this point Rudd had resigned from the SDS because the group refused to join the students and occupy more buildings. By the end of the week, Friday, April 27, students held five buildings.
The New York Times
continued to give front-page space to the student strike and to describe it as an SDS plan.

Hayden was in a building. Abbie Hoffman had arrived. But no one was leading. Everyone was discussing. Each building arranged “strike committees.” The blacks in Hamilton Hall, who had released their hostages shortly after the whites left, insisted on their autonomy from the other four buildings. Each building was having its own debates. Students were literally cranking out press materials around the clock on old-fashioned mimeograph machines. Banners went up on occupied buildings declaring them “liberated zones.” Some borrowed the slogan from César Chávez’s United Farm Workers, “
Viva la Huelga
” and others the old labor sit-in slogan “We Shall Not Be Moved.”

The campus was divided. Some wore red armbands, for revolution. Others wore green armbands, meaning they supported the uprising but insisted on nonviolence. The jocks, the short-haired male students who wore Columbia blazers and ties, seemed to the student radicals to be comic and irrelevant leftovers from the past. Even when the jocks attempted to blockade supplies to the occupied buildings, the radicals laughed and taunted, “Columbia lines never hold”—a reference to the fact that they always lost at football.

By Friday, April 26, when Columbia announced the suspension of work on the gym and closed the university, it was not the only university that had been closed. Throughout the United States and the world, students cut Friday classes to protest the war in Vietnam. There was a noticeably large participation by American high school students who, starting in April, became increasingly organized, establishing by the end of the year their own chapters of the SDS and a network of almost five hundred underground high school newspapers. The Universities of Paris, Prague, and Tokyo were among those that participated. The Italian university system was barely functioning. That day alone there had been sit-ins, boycotts, or clashes in universities in Venice, Turin, Bologna, Rome, and Bari. The absolute power of senior professors remained the central issue, and the students continued, to the great frustration of the political establishment, to refuse an alliance with communists or other political parties. In Paris three hundred students stormed an American dormitory at Cité University in the southern part of the city over the issue of banning mixed-sex dormitories. It was noted with concern that this represented a successful attempt by student radicals from the suburban University of Nanterre to spread into other Paris universities. On the other hand, the University of Madrid announced that it would reopen for classes on May 6, thirty-eight days after being closed by student demonstrations.

In New York, it was an especially violent day. One girl was hospitalized from riots between pro- and antiwar students at the Bronx High School of Science, an elite public school. Three were hospitalized from Hunter College. But the campus that had captured world attention because of extensive press coverage was Columbia, where the police were now guarding the campus gates and occupying all buildings other than those occupied by students. Just off campus on 116th Street, the police troops waited in long green vans. Even though Kifner now wrote in the
Times
that the movement was leaderless, that Rudd was only an occasional spokesman, and that each building debated its next step with its own steering committee, the occupation was still widely reported as organized by the SDS and led by Rudd.

The Columbia Board of Trustees denounced what they called “a minority” that had caused the Columbia campus to close. Since there were estimated to be about 1,000 striking students and Columbia had 4,400 full-time undergraduate students in 1968, the claim that it was a minority was mathematically correct, though it was a very large minority.
The New York Times,
with its two seats on the Columbia board perhaps evident, wrote an editorial that said, “The riot, the sit in, and the demonstration are the avant-garde fashion in the world’s campuses this year. To prove one’s alienation from society is to be ‘in’ at universities as far apart as Tokyo, Rome, Cairo and Rio de Janeiro.” This kind of thing is fine for Poland and Spain, where there is a “lack of avenues for peaceful, democratic change,” the
Times
declared, “but in the United States, Britain and other democratic countries there is no such justification.”

Even the
Times
credited WKCR, the Columbia University radio station, with being the hot media outlet of the week. With almost nonstop live coverage, WKCR was in the best position to clearly follow the chaotic events. On Friday morning the university ordered the station to discontinue broadcasting but relented in the face of a huge outburst of student protest. Rudd and other leaders, though they spoke with such reporters as the
Times
’s Kifner, kept in closest contact with the university paper, the
Daily Spectator,
and WKCR. Rudd often forewarned the campus radio station’s anchor Robert Siegel of events. He had told him to cover the speech of Colonel Akst.

About ninety thousand antiwar demonstrators filled the Sheep Meadow in Central Park on Saturday. Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King’s young widow, spoke in the place that had been scheduled for him, reading King’s “Ten Commandments on Vietnam,” which denounced the White House version of the war. To the last commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” she received a thunderous round of applause. The police arrested 160 demonstrators, including 35 who attempted to march from the park to Columbia to show support for the students.

A rival demonstration led by the archbishop of New York, Terence Cooke, who had been installed only three weeks earlier in the presence of President Johnson, promised to rally sixty thousand in support of the war but managed to attract only three thousand war-supporting demonstrators.

In Chicago organizers said that twelve thousand antiwar protesters marched peacefully from downtown Grant Park, but the Chicago police, who attacked with Mace and clubs, said there were only about three thousand marchers. In San Francisco about ten thousand demonstrators marched against the war, including, according to organizers, several dozen servicemen in civilian clothing and several hundred veterans wearing paper hats that said “Veterans for Peace.” In Syracuse, New York, an outstanding high school student, Ronald W. Brazee, age sixteen, who on March 19 had ignited his gasoline-soaked clothing near a cathedral as protest against the war, died. He had left a note that said, “If giving my life will shorten the war by even one day, it will not have been in vain.”

In the meantime, the United States began a massive assault by Airmobile Division helicopters into South Vietnam’s Ashau valley. Ten aircraft were lost in a single day of fighting. At almost the same time as the assault began, the siege of Khe Sanh ended. Six thousand U.S. Marines who had been dug in and cut off on a plateau since January were relieved by a thirty-thousand-man force of U.S. and South Vietnamese troops led by the helicopters of the 1st Air Cavalry in what was called Operation Pegasus. Correspondents with the relief force described the hills around Khe Sanh as “a moonscape.” The earth had been churned into craters by the most intensive aerial bombing in the history of warfare—110,000 tons of U.S. bombs. It was not known if the two North Vietnamese divisions holding the marines in Khe Sanh had been driven off by the bombing or if the North Vietnamese army had never intended a costly final assault. In either case they were thought to have retreated to the Ashau valley, where they could strike Da Nang or Hue. In addition to the assault on the Ashau valley, an attempt to clear enemy troops from the Saigon area was mounted with the optimistic label Operation Complete Victory. Khe Sanh, where two hundred U.S. Marines died during an eleven-week siege and another seventy-one Americans were killed during the relief operation, was to be abandoned by the end of April.

That brief moment of optimism at the beginning of April when Johnson announced he would not run had already vanished by the end of the month. What had happened to the peace talks and the bombing halt? North Vietnam quickly announced that it would appoint representatives to begin talks. The United States then announced that W. Averell Harriman, seventy-six, a onetime Roosevelt liberal and cold war diplomatic veteran, would head up a U.S. team in Geneva or Paris. The United States also let it be known that New Delhi, Rangoon, or Vientiane would be agreeable sites for negotiating. The United States did not want the talks taking place in a communist capital, where the South Vietnamese and South Koreans had no diplomatic mission. On April 8 North Vietnam proposed the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. On April 10 the United States rejected this even for preliminary talks, because there was no U.S. embassy there. Then, on April 11, North Vietnam proposed to have the talks in Warsaw and the United States promptly turned down the offer. By chance this was the same day that Johnson finally signed the Civil Rights Act in the hopes of calming black America; it was also the day 24,500 reserves were called up, bringing U.S. troop strength in Vietnam to a record 549,500—a day in which the United States claimed to kill 120 enemy and lose 14 American soldiers in fighting near Saigon. The next week the United States proposed ten sites, including Geneva, Ceylon, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, Malaysia, and India. But Hanoi rejected the ten and once again proposed Warsaw.

Diplomacy was not working any better up at Morningside Heights. On Monday, April 29, almost a week after the protest began, Columbia remained closed and the buildings remained occupied. There was, in fact, little diplomatic activity, since both the trustees and a majority of the faculty had come out against the insurrection. The school did try to negotiate with protesters in Hamilton Hall, since it was being held by black students with ties to Harlem and Columbia did not want to enrage Harlem. But the black students, holding to their promise to Rudd and the white students, refused to negotiate separately from the other students. Vice President David Truman invited Mark Rudd and several other student leaders to his comfortable professorial apartment on elegant Riverside Drive. The student rebels were seated at a polished mahogany table and served tea from a silver service set, all in the best Columbia tradition. Unfortunately, it was at this moment that Rudd decided to take off his boots. His only explanation was that his feet hurt. But the affront was reported in the
Times,
where Truman also described Rudd as a “capable, ruthless, cold-blooded . . . combination of a revolutionary and an adolescent having a temper tantrum.”

The talks never found any common ground. Rudd told Truman that the students had taken over the university and demanded access to the bursar’s office and the school’s financing. Each “liberated” building evolved into its own commune. Young people living together on the floor, living the revolution, waiting for the siege, made for an emotional, romantic existence. One couple decided that they wanted to be married then and there in their occupied building. WKCR broadcast that a chaplain was needed at Fayerweather Hall, and William Starr, a university Protestant chaplain, answered the call. It was the kind of wedding
Life
magazine would have loved. The couple borrowed their wedding clothes. The groom, Richard Eagan, wore a Nehru jacket with love beads around his neck. The bride, Andrea Boroff, wore a turtleneck and carried daisies. More than five hundred people occupied Fayerweather, including Tom Hayden. A candlelight procession led the couple through a circle of hundreds of strikers to William Starr, who pronounced them “children of a new age.” Even Hayden, who had already discovered the calamities of matrimony, found his eyes tearing. The couple called themselves Mr. and Mrs. Fayerweather.