They Marched Into Sunlight (23 page)

Second: that the critics lack the necessary information. I deny this to be the case. I deny it on the basis of my experience as a naval officer cleared for secret documents. I next deny it as an historian who has seen such data after the fact of failure. I finally deny it on the basis of several extended conversations with officials who have served, or are serving, in Vietnam. The information that some critics lack does not destroy the validity of their criticism.

Third: that, whatever mistakes we have made, we are caught in a situation of fact, and we have seen it through on the road we have chosen. This argument is part of a broader pattern of evasion. We humans are very prone, when we make a major mistake, to begin lying to ourselves. We go on indefinitely—until we pay the wrenching cost of the mistake, or until we muster the courage and the will to stop lying to ourselves. I am here to suggest that it is long past time to stop lying to ourselves about Vietnam.

James P. Hawley, chairman of the UW Student-Faculty Committee to End the War in Vietnam, said the Johnson administration was leading the nation into a war “which remains not only undeclared, but tragically undebated.” It was a war, he said, “that violates the ideals and the heritage of American democracy and freedom. The support of a series of unpopular dictatorships in the name of protecting the independence and freedom of the South Vietnamese people is not only hypocritical and morally wrong, but is utterly self-defeating. The administration says it wishes to protect the freedom and democracy of the South Vietnamese people from the aggression from the North. But in the place of protecting freedom, democracy, and independence, we have supported, aided, and when it was convenient, overthrown, a series of brutal dictatorships, all of which have come to power not by any means even vaguely representing democratic elections, but by a series of coups d’etat.” Hawley was one of several speakers who argued that the United States was intervening in a civil war and that the National Liberation Front in the South was not controlled by Hanoi. As Stuart Ewen, a history graduate student, told the hearing, “The assumption that the NLF is a direct and connected arm of the Hanoi regime is, I think, a fatal error.” The argument would be undone by later events but was an accepted part of antiwar rhetoric in the mid-1960s.

If there was a featured speaker at the hearing, it was R. W. Smail, a history professor at Wisconsin who specialized in Southeast Asian studies. Even more than Williams and the better known historians at Wisconsin, it was Smail whose informed lectures on Vietnam served as the foundation of the Madison debate. “I imagine that there is going to be a good deal of preaching in this room before this day is over,” Smail began his testimony. “For my part, I am going to try to confine myself to what I think is the plain power politics of the situation confronting the United States in Vietnam today. I do this not because I think that morality has no place in foreign policy but because I believe that neither the critics nor the supporters of our Vietnamese policy have been able to develop a moral position which is strong enough and clear enough and unambiguous enough to bear the weight of the extremely important decisions which must be made in Vietnam.” Smail’s analysis of the military and political situation in Vietnam led him to the conclusion that there was no prospect of a viable noncommunist government that could survive without a substantial American force to sustain it. “It is probably more accurate to say that such a government will never be possible,” Smail said. “In any case, it would be necessary…in order to create the conditions in which such a force could grow, to more or less completely clear the Viet Cong out of South Vietnam. On the conventional 10 to 1 basis, this would require over a million American soldiers for an indefinite period. I doubt if anyone would consider paying this price for the even-then uncertain chance of creating a stable independent non-Communist South Vietnam.”

Invading North Vietnam was not an option, Smail said, because even if it did not lure China further into the war (and he was already among those believing that Chinese assistance to the Viet Cong was considerable), it “would simply double the area to be garrisoned in the face of guerrilla resistance.” The strategy of the Johnson administration, he said, seemed to be to introduce enough troops into Vietnam to produce a stalemate and then negotiate a compromise settlement, which he argued was “theoretically possible” but “not very likely to achieve a permanent solution.” The remaining possibilities were to have a unilateral withdrawal or a negotiated withdrawal. The most practical course, in Smail’s assessment, was to have a negotiated settlement that would lead to a united Vietnam under Communist control. He acknowledged that this “may not seem a very attractive proposition to Americans,” but that it was at once the most likely eventual outcome in any case and also the resolution that would be best for the United States in the long run because, he argued, the interests of the Vietnamese and the Chinese inevitably would diverge, and the “long run goal of the United States in mainland Southeast Asia should be to split rather than to drive together China and Vietnam.”

Here, in 1965, from a liberal opponent of the war in Wisconsin, was an argument that seemed almost Kissingerian in its realpolitik formulation while at the same time challenging the prevailing government argument that if Vietnam fell, other countries would fall to the communists in domino succession. And in juxtaposition to Thompson’s rhetoric, it contradicted the notion that opposition to the war was shaped by foggy idealism and support by hard-headed pragmatism.

B
ILL
S
EWELL LIVED ON
the west side, and in some ways he seemed like an archetype of the west side liberal. He was an outwardly conventional man who would never want to be categorized as conventional. He collected cool jazz records, belonged to the Blackhawk Country Club, where he could shoot in the low nineties, voted Democratic, attended the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Unitarian church, wore corny sport coats and a spiffy touring cap, tooled around town in a red convertible, played poker twice a month in a faculty game called the Probability Seminar, grew a mustache, exercised in a morning regimen of push-ups, sit-ups, touch-toes, and running in place, began the evening with a two-mile walk in the woods near his home on Countryside Lane, chewed on a pipe, and stayed up reading monographs and abstracts from the
American Sociological Journal
until he fell asleep in his favorite blue leather easy chair. He could be impatient at times yet had the soul of a committeeman, able to persevere through endless convention sessions, academic panels, and departmental meetings, a trait that proved essential to his administrative rise. He was an institution man through and through, his academic career threaded with interconnections as a consultant to the Ford Foundation, the Division of Behavioral Sciences, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Fulbright Selection Committee, the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Office of Education. Some colleagues thought of him as a public democrat but a private elitist, meaning that people he considered the most talented got the most attention, yet he also was known for effectively pushing his department and the larger field of sociology to be more inclusive of women and minorities.

He was an inveterate pedagogue, constantly looking for ways to inform the world around him and at the same time, as one colleague said, “always seeking relief from monotony and trying to add spice to the mundane.” His three children learned sampling theory during long car rides from Madison to northern Wisconsin for summer holidays. To keep them occupied, he would have them count license plates to determine whether there were more vacationers from Wisconsin or Illinois, but he instructed them not to count the plates of cars passing them in the same direction because those cars were speeding and speeders invariably came from Illinois, thereby skewing the sample.

Sharp humor was Sewell’s favorite spice. In a methods class once, he was discussing the role of the interviewer in conducting a survey. Margaret Bright was seated near him at the seminar table. “And he mentioned one should beware of hiring women interviewers who were too good-looking,” Bright recalled. “They made people uncomfortable. And without changing the tone of his voice in his inimitable way he added: ‘This is generally not a problem with women in sociology. They don’t usually come that good-looking.’” Bright refused to look up or show any sign that this bothered her. She kept taking notes. Finally, demanding a reaction, Sewell gave her “a good hard kick under the table.” His humor had a sarcastic twist that gave added weight to a political message. Mary, his daughter, would take into adulthood the lasting memory of her father driving her and two friends home from elementary school when she was ten or eleven and the girls in the back seat talking about what they wanted to do when they grew up. One said she wanted to be a teacher. The other said she wanted to be a nurse. From the driver’s seat Sewell blurted out, “Why don’t you be a doctor? All nurses do is clean up other people’s shit!”

Cleaning up for other people was a task Sewell seemed determined not to take on as he became chancellor. Joe could handle it. Joseph Kauffman, the forty-six-year-old dean of student affairs, took pride in being called “soft on students and a bleeding-heart type.” He had been recruited to Wisconsin after burnishing his liberal credentials with the Peace Corps during the Kennedy administration, as a dean of students at Brandeis University, and as a consultant for the American Council on Education in Washington, where he was known as “an advocate for students.” Kauffman’s arrival at Wisconsin in June 1965 coincided with the early stirrings of change on campus, starting with the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. Having seen the change coming before many others of his generation, he had warned the academic establishment. One of his reports for the education council stated that students who came back from Mississippi Freedom Summer civil rights work, after violating unjust laws in the South, would be willing to violate bad rules on campus.

Kauffman’s insights into student behavior made him much in demand. The National Student Association regularly scheduled him to speak at its yearly conventions, and a speech he had given on the depersonalization of students and the need for universities to get more involved with them served as the basis for an editorial in the
New York Times.
Most of his early work in Madison in 1965 and 1966 was directed toward giving students more control over their lives: changing parietal curfew rules, pushing to place students on faculty committees, encouraging students to express themselves in peaceful protest if they saw fit. When Tom Pettit of
NBC News
came to the university in 1966 to do a piece about student protest, Kauffman was asked whether the antiwar movement was communist. “To my knowledge, no,” he responded. And not only that, he added, but in his opinion “not enough young people are protesting.”

“Say that again?” Pettit said, and the dean repeated his statement.

Kauffman’s liberal philosophy was not the product of a bookish life of leisure and affluence. He was an immigrant grocer’s son, his early years in Norwood, Massachusetts, shaped by the family’s work ethic and the darkening world outside the store: the anti-Semitic radio rants of Father Coughlin, the reports from Germany of Hitler’s destructive rise. When Joe finished high school, there was no money for college. He helped at the grocery and practiced his first love, singing. His ambition to succeed as a professional jazz singer was within reach—he had made it to New York City as a featured crooner at the Roseland Ballroom—when he enlisted in the army in 1942 to fight the Nazis. The army trained him as a radioman with the light artillery of the Eighty-fifth Infantry Division and sent him to Italy, where they slogged away on the Cassino line, an experience that left him with more questions than answers. Fighting through Italy inch by inch, hill after hill, struck Sergeant Kauffman as unnecessary. They could have landed in the north and cut off the rest of the country, he thought. “War is stupid,” he concluded. “We were stupid. The only reason we won is they were more stupid than we were.”

When the war ended, he went through Denver University on the GI bill and earned graduate degrees at Northwestern and Boston universities, then returned west to open an office of the Anti-Defamation League in Omaha. His two closest allies in Nebraska were Whitney Young, director of the Urban League in Omaha, and Ted Sorensen, then in his final year of law school in Lincoln and editor of the
Nebraska Law Review.
He and Young worked on equal employment and open accommodations issues together, and a letter of recommendation from Kauffman was among those going out when young Sorensen, eager to go east and join the political world, applied for a job with Congressman John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts.

A decade later Kennedy and Sorensen were in the White House, president and wordsmith, and Kauffman was brought to Washington as an original officer of the Peace Corps. In his role as director of training, he lobbied to make the Peace Corps an alternative to the military draft, borrowing a phrase from William James—“the moral equivalent of war”—to describe its purpose. Peace Corps director R. Sargent Shriver Jr. held the same view, but they could not persuade a skeptical Congress. One result became evident to Kauffman as the sixties decade progressed: young men who did not want to be in school but faced only the military as an alternative and opposed the Vietnam war, flooded into the universities to avoid the draft. Kauffman was an early opponent of the war himself, speaking against it in 1964. He was particularly critical of student deferments, arguing that only the poor and unrepresented would be drafted. “If the sons of congressmen had to go,” he said, “we wouldn’t be having this war.” He also worried about the long-term psychological effects deferments would have on those who used them to avoid the war. The day would come, he told friends, “when these young men will feel guilty that they didn’t go and someone went in their place, and they will wonder if they had the courage and the ability to go through something like that.”