University Communications

Facing The War Directly 1968-1969

 

Having been advised that public support for his Vietnam policy was sullen and slipping as 1967 closed, Lyndon B. Johnson launched a major campaign to sell the idea that the enemy had “met his master in the field.”

When communist forces unleashed their massive Tet offensive against cities and U.S. bases throughout South Vietnam in January 1968, the administration suddenly became vulnerable.

Eugene McCarthy showed that in the New Hampshire presidential primary. Robert Kennedy joined the presidential race and, at the end of March, LBJ dropped out of it. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot down only days later.

Urban ghettos exploded. At Wittenberg that winter and spring, student leaders were mobilizing for changes in social regulations, campus lifestyle and curriculum. A three-week seminar on the “Negro in America” began to shift the campus focus from black civil rights to white racism.

Student Senate offered non-credit courses on current affairs, including a ten-week study of Vietnam. Hope vied with helplessness that election year.

Hopeful of generating a “happy politicization of the entire student thing,” a newly formed Wittenberg Steering Committee for Peace Action fashioned a day-long “Festival for Peace and Justice” on April 26.

About two weeks earlier a group of students had gone with sociology instructor Bruce Ergood to the Spring Mobilization demonstration in New York. Out of that demonstration had come a national call for a student “strike” against the war.

The festival, though it had been in the planning stage a month, was Wittenberg’s version of a student strike. It reflected the soft-spoken, non-confrontational style of Dallas Dunlap ’69, a junior then who had become convinced two years before that the war couldn’t be won and was a tragic waste of life.

His dissent sparked harassing phone calls at night, and sometimes he feared for his own safety. Tet changed things. Now his Steering Committee was able to raise funds from individuals and campus groups, surreptitiously even fraternities.

The festival included band music, speakers of national importance and draft counseling. The Torch couldn’t counsel cutting class, but it urged students to attend the festival and “strike a blow at complacency.”

Vietnam had become a student happening that fused concern about the war and draft, racism and education in an affirmative way. Activism wasn’t limited to campus.

Students For Kennedy and Students For McCarthy spent several weekends working in the Indiana primary campaign that May. Antiwar sentiment was being mainstreamed at Wittenberg, as in the nation that spring.

Then the campus emptied for the summer. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. Hubert Humphrey’s candidacy was overshadowed by a televised police riot at the turbulent Democratic convention in Chicago.

The smoothly scripted Republican convention nominated Richard Nixon on a pledge to end the war. Shortly after school convened again in the fall, attention turned to the election.

Students packed the Alumni Room in the Student Union to hear Ted Sorenson, writer for two Kennedys and LBJ. Torch articles by faculty reflected concern and disillusionment with the electoral process.

Both Robert Cutler and Robert Hartje (history) were on record against the war: Cutler counseled against voting for Humphrey, while Hartje argued that the Democratic candidate was the lesser of two bad choices.

Richard Flickinger (political science) acknowledged the presence of irrationalism in the body politic.

On Monday, Nov. 4, the Steering Committee for Peace Action sponsored a rally and a walk into town to express concern that the election choices did not reflect the real views of the people, especially on the war.

Richard Nixon’s election elicited a wait-and-see attitude as the new president cultivated the impression that he would end the war.

By late spring 1969 leaders of the national antiwar groups had become convinced that Nixon remained committed to an independent, noncommunist South Vietnam state. They began planning for a fall Moratorium and Mobilization.

The Mobilization was designed to build a huge antiwar demonstration in Washington on Nov. 15. The Moratorium urged Americans to suspend work for a day of discussion on the war, starting on Oct. 15. This was very successful.

Without pushing a specific agenda, the Moratorium enlisted millions of Americans in all walks of life. The media gave sympathetic coverage as people expressed a profound concern to end the war.

At Wittenberg the Moratorium was sponsored by the Witt Forum of the Student Senate, chaired by senior Mike L. Smith ’70. It included a poetry reading, a forum of faculty and students, together with discussions in many classes.

A “tree of life” was planted at a memorial chapel service to honor all people who had died in Vietnam. Hamma theology students carried an empty coffin into town to memorialize those killed in the war.

There was disagreement in the columns of the Torch regarding the extent of participation and significance of the event, but at least the Moratorium was formal recognition that the war was a major campus issue.

Wittenberg could not know that the October Moratorium had preempted Nixon’s “secret plan” to end the war.

He had covertly warned North Vietnam to negotiate on U.S. terms by the Nov. 1 or suffer a rain of devastation from the air, but the October Moratorium made it clear that the American people would not endorse that threat.

An angry president called for support from his hitherto “silent majority” as his opponents redoubled their efforts for the Nov. 15 Mobilization. On campus, the week of Nov. 11-15 was dedicated to antiwar activities, again sponsored by Witt Forum.

Speakers included prominent Democrat John Gilligan (who drew an audience reportedly of 600), Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam co-chair the Rev. Richard Neuhouse (200), and Malcom Boyd, author of Are You Running with Me Jesus? (800).

Faculty members addressed the war from the perspective of their disciplines at daily chapel. Teams of students canvassed Springfield on war issues.

The climax of the week’s events came on Friday night when about 150 students, accompanied by professors Charles Chatfield and Robert Cutler, boarded three buses bound for Washington and the largest demonstration in the capital to that time.

Whatever motives prompted the trip, everyone was deeply touched by the experience of being part of a half million people with a single purpose.

“Everyone felt so much a part of all the others,” wrote Beth McCann ’71, “— so close to people who were really trying to show that they believed peace, co-operation, and concern are possible. ...” It was a sunny day though well below freezing.

People huddled together, danced and sang. Many of them walked down Pennsylvania Avenue in a mass march; for most there was simply not time, and they gathered around the Washington Monument.

There were interminable speeches from the major figures of the anitwar movement; there was singing led by Pete Seeger, and Peter, Paul and Mary, and the cast of Hair.

There were also appeals, mostly futile, to join a small, radical rally at the Justice Department after the official Mobilization. Few did, but when violence erupted there, many innocent bystanders (including some Wittenbergers) were caught in police tear gas.

For three students who summarized the day for Torch readers, the violence provoked by a tiny faction contrasted with the order and discipline of the mass of demonstrators to dramatize the “unbelievable success for almost all involved.”

For many who went, the experience was a defining moment. The trip to D.C. was also exhausting, physically, mentally and emotionally. The trip that was the antiwar movement could not be sustained at that level of intensity.

Following the Mobilization the movement dissipated. In part its financial resources were exhausted, and in part many of its leaders moved into the politics of the 1970 off-year elections.

And besides, the president was bringing the troops home: the war seemed to be winding down. At Wittenberg in the new year, other issues and activities claimed student energies until Nixon suddenly appeared to escalate the fighting again.