They Marched Into Sunlight (20 page)

Mel Laird muttering about “that damn war” was an image that would flash back to Cheney many times in later years. He would recall it for the first time less than three years later when the Wisconsin congressman was put in charge of the war as President Nixon’s defense secretary. But back in 1966 Cheney was the unmoved observer. He recorded the scene but was not changed by it. He thought of himself as “a reasonably conservative Republican, generally supportive of the Johnson administration at that stage.” He was “not by any means an antiwar activist or even a critic.” America was engaged, troops were committed, and he supported the war.

Supported it, but had no intention of fighting in it. His draft board in Casper, Wyoming, where he and Lynne had gone to high school, reclassified him often over the years. He carried student deferments three times and was switched to 1-A draftable twice, briefly, during the periods when he dropped out of school and worked for a power company building transmission lines. But those moments of vulnerability came in the early sixties, before the war heated up and the draft call intensified with it, and he managed to get through without being drafted. By the time he reached Wisconsin, he had three conditions helping him steer clear of military service: his age (they had stopped drafting from oldest to youngest by then), his school situation (graduate students were still protected; the policy did not change until 1968), and his status as husband and father (daughter Liz was born in Madison), which shifted him to 3-A until he was no longer of draft age.

If Cheney had no “moral or philosophical objections” to the draft, neither did he feel the slightest tinge of guilt about not serving. He was, as he put it later, “working my buns off” as a political aide and then full-time graduate student. He and Lynne lived in Eagle Heights, the housing for married graduate students up in the hills hugging Lake Mendota on the far western rim of the campus. They were young and “trying to get ahead in the world.” They had one problem with the established order, or at least Lynne did. She found it impossible to land a mentor on the English faculty, which she considered sexist; even the noted scholar Madeline Doran seemed interested only in helping male graduate students, she thought. That frustrated her, but she did not rebel against the system. Their friends were other young married students trying to make it in academia: one couple from Quebec, another from Ohio, a third from Georgia. The wife of the Canadian couple was a nurse who babysat the Cheneys’ infant daughter on the days Lynne taught. Vietnam and the draft were “not the most important things” in their lives, Cheney said later. “There’s a tendency now to look back on it, those periods of the sixties, especially on a campus at a place like Wisconsin, to think of it as the centerpiece, the most important thing going on, but it just wasn’t. Not for all of us.”

Dick Cheney walked around campus carrying boxes of IBM punch cards, each one holding eighty fields of data concerning the voting patterns of congressmen and senators. Computer time at the UW computer center was cheaper and more readily available at night, so he spent many midnights waiting for his computer runs, in which he and Professor Clausen used multiple regression analysis to determine why legislators voted the way they did. He thought of life as “good but very full and very intense,” and the last thing he wanted was for his studies to be interrupted by the war. Not by the draft and certainly not by protests on campus. “They were a distraction. They were disruptive,” he said later. “You didn’t get caught up in the issue that people were protesting or demonstrating against. There were a lot of us who felt, ‘This is a pain in the neck. I’ve got to get to class.’”

P
AUL
S
OGLIN
was more dabbler than zealot. He considered himself part of the left (perhaps more than some on the left considered him part of it), but he was interested in everything the times had to offer and moved easily between various interests and groups. That spring of 1967 he was the only self-described radical among six Wisconsin delegates elected to the National Student Association. During the run-up to the election he and other delegate candidates traveled from dorm to dorm debating one another, and after one presentation at the Lakeshore dorms he continued the debate with Cathy Dietrich, a striking young woman who had grown up in Madison and represented a relatively conservative, Greek-oriented party. She and Soglin had what Dietrich later described as “a feisty back-and-forth, a sort of one-upmanship to see who could get in the last word” that was charged with politics and sexual tension.

Soon after the election, in which both Dietrich and Soglin were elected, there was a regional NSA meeting at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. Soglin rented a car for the drive, and when the other delegates piled in, he secretly hoped that Dietrich would sit in the middle seat next to the driver, which she did. In Champaign, after the first session of the convention, out-of-state delegates spread their sleeping bags in the spacious upper floor of a university building. Again Soglin hoped that Dietrich would be next to him, and again she was. After the others were asleep, the odd couple, the dark-haired radical and the lissome sorority girl, undid their sleeping bags and zipped them up as one and crawled inside together. Soglin was shocked that she would share a sleeping bag, and the night, with him. He thought it was luck; later he learned it was the design of a young woman who was unafraid to act on her desire. The student movement might be utterly sexist, young women might constantly complain that activist men had an exasperating tendency not to listen when they had something serious to say, but in sexual matters women had more power and were learning to use it.

His male contemporaries often wondered, with a shade of envy, what it was about Soglin that made him so successful with the opposite sex. He seemed unkempt, hardly the classic model of attractiveness. But there was about him, Dietrich said, an “impishness and charisma” that “really attracted women.” She described him as playful, openly affectionate, flirtatious, and a bit dangerous. The crowd he moved with was especially edgy to Dietrich, unlike anything she saw over at Pi Beta Phi. Soglin and his roommates that summer were deeply into drugs, mostly marijuana, but also peyote and various synthetic concoctions. There were parties several nights a week at various student flats in what later became known as the counterculture’s Mifflin Street neighborhood, and at every party, Dietrich noticed, there was a “drug room” with a closed door. She never wanted to go in. Soglin always wanted to get high. It bothered her, but her discomfort was eased by the fact that dope seemed to make him happy, not hostile or depressed, and though he obviously enjoyed it, he showed no signs of addiction and appeared less beholden to the drug culture than some of his friends. Dietrich’s mother was a nurse who had access to free pharmaceutical samples. One night Dietrich brought a sample pack of Dexedrine over to Soglin’s apartment and watched in amazement as two of his friends meticulously took apart each pill to separate the stimulant from the downer.

Soglin and Dietrich spent the rest of the summer together. He worked with underprivileged boys at a recreation center on the south side. She served as a waitress at the Madison Club, an exclusive hangout for legislators, business executives, and lobbyists housed in a dark-brick building overlooking Lake Monona two blocks south of the Capitol square. She came home at ten every night with presents—“a piece of pie, a good sandwich, maybe tenderloin, half a pint of chocolate milk, sometimes silverware.” Most of his meals were leftovers of the city’s elite. One night she slipped him into the Madison Club’s cellar and let him clean out the fridge. He never had any money, she noticed, yet was proud of his possessions. He drove around town in a 1959 TR-3 convertible, red with a black top, though it was always in need of repairs and usually on empty. He also had an extensive record collection that he kept in shelves made of boards on cinderblocks next to the mattress on the floor. Junior Wells, Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Eddie Floyd, Irma Thomas, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, and all the Beatles. The
Sgt. Pepper
album seemed to be playing day and night.

In August they headed off together to the NSA’s annual congress, this one in College Park, Maryland, where they heard Allard Lowenstein, a former NSA president, talk about ending the war by dumping LBJ. They also participated in an encounter group, listened to an obscure new band called Wind in the Willows featuring an unknown singer named Deborah Harry, and watched a film about the liberation of Algeria. Soglin was not yet a known player on the national scene, but he seemed to be in the middle of the action. He was in one strategy huddle after another, talking not only about how to oppose the Vietnam war but also about the dominant internal issue of the year, a revelation that the CIA had been funding NSA activities for more than a decade, violating its charter not to get involved in domestic matters.

Rank and file delegates like Soglin knew nothing beforehand about the agency’s involvement. Only the NSA’s elected officers knew, and they passed the closely held but dirty little secret down through the years as though it were a password to one of Yale’s select societies. In the argot of the clandestine operation, those student officers in the know were identified as “witty.” When reports of the connection went public in 1967, and the students realized that they were being manipulated by the CIA in its fight against Marxist organizations, the effect was explosive. Some national student leaders tried to minimize the importance of the relationship, arguing that the CIA officers who ran the operation were open-minded and were not trying to redirect the NSA from its liberal-to-radical course on issues of race and war. But for Soglin and others, the disclosure widened the generational and ideological gap. Here was “conclusive proof that the CIA was not to be trusted,” Soglin said. The student activists were “not pure, sweet innocents,” and the radicals among them for some time had accused their national officers of being so closely aligned with the establishment that they seemed to be “running a little State Department” in Washington, “but we also had this naïve belief that while we were subject to overt government pressures, we never imagined covert activities.” Now they had evidence that the establishment was cynically manipulating them and trying to co-opt them, and it served only to push them leftward and leave them further disillusioned with old-line liberals.

Asserting its rebelliousness and newfound freedom, the student congress passed a resolution embracing the “by any means necessary” rhetoric of the black power movement, and delegates erupted in cheers when a television commentator labeled the NSA “a left-wing radical outfit.”

Soglin and Dietrich had slept in separate dorms in College Park, and when they got back to Madison, she went over to his apartment and he jumped at her from behind his door. They spent more time in his world than hers, but she did take him up to her parents’ cottage in northern Wisconsin for a weekend. Her family was Catholic, and the fact that she was dating a Jewish guy, and a radical no less, did not sit well with her father, who worked in the Madison post office. She also got him out on a tennis court and was surprised by his athleticism, and she took him sailing on Lake Mendota. It was, she would say later, an “idyllic summer, the sort you wish would go on forever, but they don’t.” At summer’s end she was looking for a commitment, and that frightened him. It was the last thing on his mind. He started pulling away. Having to find new housing for the school year, he settled on a first-floor flat at 123 Bassett Street, which he would share with two new roommates and two dogs, Che and Kafka. And there were other distractions: women, the
Cardinal
column, graduate school, opposing the war.

W
HEN THE NEW
school year began in September, Soglin and his political associates gathered each day outside on the Union Terrace, a splash of Paris set down in the American Midwest, with its vibrantly colored green and orange metal tables and chairs stretching from the back door of the Rathskeller down to the edge of Lake Mendota. They carried on a perpetual discussion, and one of the topics involved their personal histories: how their teachers in junior high school and high school had often been men who were veterans of World War II, and how the schools had preached to them about the nobility of the American fight against the Nazis and of standing up against evil. The patriotic message pounded into them during their teenage years had led them not to fight in Vietnam against the Viet Cong, but rather the opposite, to stand up against a war they considered immoral. “We had grown up on a steady diet of World War II issues,” said Bob Swacker, another activist affiliated with the University Community Action party. Swacker came from Kenosha, Wisconsin, the son of a tombstone merchant. “There was always that message of the ‘good Germans.’ Now we weren’t going to be the good Germans. It was the stock line in all of our speeches. We did not want to be the good Germans who would go along with brutality and war crimes. We had to be different. It was our turn.”

One afternoon, someone in the group was leafing through the registration issue of the
Cardinal
and came across a page that listed the corporations that would be recruiting on campus that semester. There was Dow Chemical Company, makers of napalm, scheduled to arrive on October 17 for three days of interviews at the Engineering, Agriculture, Chemistry, and Commerce buildings. The dates were circled and the beginnings of a plan started to form. Dow brought home the theme of the good German. This would be the fall event around which they would organize. The word went out. Soglin wrote about it in his “Hi there, Badger!” column:

The Placement Office has brought back one of the longest running road shows, the Dow Chemical Company. We are promised that the October 17–20 show, back for a second performance, will not simply be a rerun of last spring’s spectacle. To start with, the University has agreed to tell the Left where the show will
be held.
To give Dow an equal chance, the University will supply more police protection. The four day festival will be highlighted by an obstructive sit-in…