Andersen, Kurt (40 page)

“At first,” Buzzy said, “I thought maybe he was doing some kind of snitch jacket. Earlier he’d said he wanted to phone you, and I thought maybe he had, secretly, you know. And that you were listening in long-distance. I unplugged the phone from the wall.”

“What’s a snitch jacket?

“An informer accuses someone else in the group who’s not an informer of being an informer. To fuck everybody up.”

“You are paranoid.”

“Yeah, I guess he was just really, really high. That’s Lima Sierra Delta for you.”

And that was that. A couple of afternoons later, Chuck told me he was going to Kirkland House after dinner to hear a professor give a talk about politics. “He used to work for Johnson. You want to come with?”

“I thought we were out of Mace.”

“Buzzy got another can from his buddy in Nevada,” Chuck said, “but no, I don’t mean to do an action, I actually want to go hear this guy talk—he was the War on Poverty guy, and my freshman seminar teacher says he’s not a racist like everybody says …”

“Yeah, right, and Johnson has a heart of gold.”

“This guy has been against the war. He’s a pal of Bobby Kennedy’s.” Chuck liked Kennedy, and Alex adored him. My parents had trained me to disapprove of him because of his early red-baiting work in government, and he reminded me of all the cute, mean, well-to-do, self-satisfied Catholic boys I’d known growing up. But I agreed to go.

With their high ceilings and arched widows and fireplaces and nineteenth-century portraits and wood paneling, the fine old public rooms at Harvard had a powerful bipolar effect: the clubby grandeur simultaneously seduced and disgusted me. That’s the speedball feeling I remember on that dark, wet night in the Kirkland House junior common room listening to Professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan talk in his ridiculous and arrogant, charming and brilliant fake-patrician way about America’s nervous breakdown.

“The most compelling phenomenon in the United States today,” he said to a hundred of us, “is the advent of a level of violence that no one believes to be characteristic of our society. We are approaching a crisis.” He said he thought that antiwar protests would make it impossible for President Johnson to campaign effectively for reelection next year.

I raised my hand. “Why is that a
bad
thing?”

He started to smile but quickly pursed his lips, suppressing it, and defaulted to some boilerplate about unfettered free speech being the mother’s milk of democracy, and said he hadn’t lost his faith in the wisdom of good, decent, ordinary Americans to put things right.

“Hitler was
elected,
” some kid said, “by good Germans.”

Moynihan replied that he was about our age during World War II, and he could assure us unequivocally that Lyndon Johnson was no Adolf Hitler.

I looked at Chuck, expecting him to make his Nazi-death-camp analogy that I’d heard so many times, and when he didn’t, I spoke up again to offer his two cents as mine. “Johnson may not be a Nazi,” I said, “but there are twenty-five thousand Vietnamese civilians dying every week as a result of his policies. Same as the extermination rate at Auschwitz and Treblinka.”

As Chuck walked me the mile back to Radcliffe and asked if I was crying, I lied, saying it was raindrops on my cheeks. But then I said, “We can’t just go on like this, discussing and debating forever.” Our roles had reversed from when we were fourteen, when I was the one bringing up moral uncertainty and unintended consequences. “There has to be something we can
do.
”

“The poll in the paper the other day said half of Americans think the war’s a mistake.”

“A
mistake,
” I said, “running a red light and rear-ending somebody is a
mistake.
Spilling coffee on your notes while you’re studying is a
mistake.
”

“Harvard stopped buying grapes.” The boycott of nonunion California grapes had been the great progressive victory of the fall semester.

“Whoop-de-do.”

“It took Castro and Che six years to win their revolution.”

Six years ago we were twelve. Six years was forever.

“Of course they let us ‘dissent,’” I said, “because it makes everybody feel better and does nothing to stop the war.” President Johnson had just announced his intention to continue full speed ahead with the bombing in Vietnam. “In fact? That’s like a definition of ineffective resistance—it’s permitted by the authorities.”

“The Dow sit-in was a start,” Chuck said.

As punishment for imprisoning the Dow recruiter for seven hours, 245 students were either “admonished” or, like the four of us, put on probation. Chuck’s parents had been surprisingly mellow about it, which I figured was because Chuck had agreed to return to Wilmette in February for his little brother’s bar mitzvah. Alex’s father was livid, and Buzzy said his mother either threw away the dean’s letter unopened or was too drunk to understand what it meant. My parents, naturally, were a little proud, especially since in her form letter to them, my Radcliffe dean apologized for “the sternness of tone” and referred to “your daughter’s moral objections to various features of our society.” Not one kid had been kicked out of school.

“I’ll bet Dow won’t be back on campus,” Chuck said.

“Well,
exactly.
Exactly! Physical action
works
! Liberals freak out and give in.”

He was shaking his head. “White people are not going to rise up and revolt like the black people in the ghettoes. They just aren’t. They’re too comfortable. We’re too comfortable. We’re pussies.”

Chuck’s ambivalence and hesitance had started to annoy me. “Something’s got to be done, something more than ‘protest’ and symbolic bullshit. Like Buzzy says, the only moral choice is to act, as individuals, to stop the evil. Like my dad when the Nazis occupied Denmark. Like your uncle in Israel.” Mrs. Levy’s brother had been an anti-British guerrilla in Palestine in the 1940s.

Just ahead in Harvard Square, we saw some Christmas carolers and then recognized them—four SDS kids. We heard the end of “O Come All Ye Mindless” and the first verse of their “Jingle Bells” spoof:

Preppie boys, corporate joys, Harvard all the way,

Oh what fun it is to have your mind reduced to clay!

I didn’t even smile. A week earlier, as my dad drove me to O’Hare for the flight back to Boston, he’d said he was my age when World War II started, but that during the five years the Nazis occupied Denmark, even in the internment camp, he’d never lost his sense of humor. He said he worried that, during the last year, I had. “Sorry, Dad,” I replied humorlessly, “but I don’t find pointless wholesale slaughter very amusing. Maybe I will when I’m older.”

The four of us had stopped going to rock concerts and Hollywood movies. The weekend before Christmas, we went to see
The Survivors,
a documentary filmed in North Vietnamese hospitals about the women and children maimed and burned and widowed and orphaned by American bombing. I was crying by the end, and I was the one who suggested we stay and watch it a second time.

Over Christmas break, Alex went skiing in Switzerland with his parents and made a side trip to visit his friend Darko in Belgrade. Buzzy drove his old wagon home to Las Vegas, so Chuck and I got a ride with him as far as Chicago. I was surprised by how sad I felt when he dropped us off in Wilmette—sad about being home, where Sabrina’s death cast a pall, but also about saying goodbye to Buzzy for two weeks.

My parents were hopeful about Senator Eugene McCarthy, who’d announced he was running as a peace candidate for the nomination against Johnson. Mom had even memorized lines from the poem McCarthy had written and recited at the press conference launching his candidacy—”I’m an existential runner / Indifferent to space / I’m running here in place.”

I snorted. I told my parents they were naive.

“
We’re
naive?” my father said, snorting back at me. He was losing patience. “You are the utopian, my daughter.”

“Uh-
uh.
” I wasn’t. I was extreme in my loathing of the current government, besotted by my notions of the possibility of right action. But I thought people who believed America was ripe for socialist transformation were like religious freaks—wankers, delusional.

“You’re not going to get a revolution, Karen,” my father said. “And if by some chance you do, you are not going to like it.”

I agreed with him, which I didn’t say. “Actually,” I said, stealing a quote from a book I’d read by a former national president of SDS, “the fundamental revolutionary motive? Is
not
to construct some kind of paradise. It’s to destroy an inferno.”

Two nights before Christmas, my parents and Peter and I were watching the news. The TV, now color, had finally been allowed into the living room. Eleven-year-old Peter sat as close as he possibly could to the semicircular pile of beribboned boxes under the tree, so close that his face was bathed in red and yellow from the hot Christmas lights. My mother always started her shopping early, so there were several gifts for Sabrina that would go to Catholic Charities after the holiday.

The top story was from South Vietnam. The correspondent said that “as 1967 ends, the U.S. has dropped almost a million tons of bombs on North Vietnam—more than in the entire Pacific theater during World War II, seventy pounds of explosives for every man, woman, and child in the country. Yet they struggle on.”

President Johnson was paying a holiday visit to the U.S. Air Force and Navy base at Cam Ranh Bay.

“All the challenges have been met,” the president said.

“I so despise him,” I said. His Southern-hick accent made him even easier to hate. During my entire childhood, whenever I’d watched the news and seen a squinty middle-aged white man talking in a Southern accent, he had been some loathsome enemy of decency and freedom.

“The enemy is not beaten,” the president said, “but he knows that he has met his master in the field.”

“He is such a lying, evil pig,” I said.

The correspondent came on and said that Johnson was “recommitting himself more strongly than ever to his war policies.” Then came a shot of
Air Force One
taking off for Rome.

“Maybe he’ll crash,” Peter said.

Even I was shocked. No one said a thing.

Peter realized his faux pas and said, “I’m sorry.”

The president, according to the TV newsman, was heading to the Vatican …

“Maybe he wants to get a pep talk from Cardinal Spellman,” I said.

 … where he would meet with Pope Paul VI to discuss the war.

“Good,” my mother said, “
good.
Karen, did you see the latest thing Pope Paul said about Vietnam?”

“That it’s ‘Christ’s war for civilization against the Vietcong and the people of North Vietnam’?” I was quoting Cardinal Spellman’s remarks from when he visited the U.S. troops.

“That America,” my mother said hopefully, “had ‘tragically aggravated’ the ‘atrocious severities’ of the war. The pope!”

“Oh, great—that ought to take care of it, then. I guess tomorrow Johnson will agree to peace talks and the war will be over by New Year’s. Let’s celebrate.”

My mother sighed.

“See, Dad? I haven’t lost my sense of humor.”

At Harvard and Radcliffe, January consisted of a month of unsupervised self-obsessed hunkering, a two-week reading period and then a two-week exam period, a whole month without any classes or supervision or organized diversions. In other words, January 1968 was perfectly constructed to let us slide off the deep end.

Buzzy had returned from Christmas vacation with a white container the size of a peanut butter jar, still in its Smith, Kline & French Laboratories seals, that contained a thousand little white tablets, each a ten-milligram dose of amphetamine—“
phamaceutical
bennies,” he said proudly as he shook his plastic container. He planned to sell a hundred for a dollar apiece to cover his costs, but the rest were for us. Alex and Chuck and I had never tried speed. I knew about bennies from
On the Road
and from
Moonraker
—“‘Benzedrine,’ said James Bond. ‘It’s what I shall need if I’m going to keep my wits about me tonight. It’s apt to make one a bit overconfident, but that’ll help too.’” Alex mentioned that during the war in the Pacific, his dad’s B-29 bomber crew called themselves “the Benzedrine-29 boys.” Chuck said his mom, a devotee of pep pills, was annoyed when she’d had to start getting a prescription for them. In other words, bennies seemed modern and benign as well as cool.

We slept when we slept and awoke when we awoke, leaving our dorms only to go to one another’s rooms or out to eat. We occasionally watched TV on Alex’s set, but we exclusively smoked cigarettes, not pot, and the only movie we went to see all month was
Inside North Vietnam,
a documentary about the dauntless peasants pushing their wheelbarrows and riding their bikes to rebuild the dams and schools that U.S. bombs had wrecked. We studied some, but mainly, we read the harrowing news out of Vietnam and Washington and talked and talked and talked, wallowing in our anxiety and horror, stewing in our own bitter juices, feeling more and more as if America had gone mad and time was running out.

It was a wide-awake month of deepening nonstop doom and gloom but also of four-way thrills and chills. Every couple of days, almost always between midnight and dawn, we would achieve some breakthrough moment of insight and confidence and solidarity, followed by a celebratory snack of coffee and cold pie at the Hayes-Bickford, sharing the all-night fluorescence and Formica with taxi drivers and glowing, twitching hippies.

I stopped writing to Sarah after she told me I sounded “Chicken Little-ish” and that I should “go to New Hampshire and work for McCarthy instead of just bumming yourself out deeper and deeper with those bullshitting
boys.
”

The boys’ and my unspoken project that month was to temper and fortify ourselves, to leave childhood behind and turn ourselves into consequential radicals clear-eyed enough to help stop the war and somehow reduce the misery in the world. Unlike the SDS Walter Mittys, we never called one another brothers and sisters and mother-country radicals, or talked about creating liberated zones and a culture of total resistance, offing the pigs, smashing the state. “Sloganeering BS” was our phrase for all that. Which isn’t to say we were embracing nonviolence. “Bring the war home” was a New Left slogan we didn’t ridicule. Buzzy had said that was what we were doing with the homemade M-80s we planted at the ROTC building.