Bancroft Library Symposium: FSM and the Legacy of Social Protest, April 13-14, 2001.
Panel: Vietnamization of the Berkeley Campus, 1965-1970. Paper by Leon Wofsy.The Faculty Peace Committee
Some memories of opposition to the Vietnam War that might resonate today
Remembering The Faculty Peace Committee is for me, and for many others, a source of pride.
It was formed in the early stages of opposition to the Vietnam War, drawing energy from many of the faculty members who had come together a year earlier in support of the Free Speech Movement. From diverse academic fields, we became friends and activisists, analyzing and exchanging views not only on the Vietnam War, but on every new turn in world affairs, national politics, and campus problems. We met often and informally, sometimes whoever could make it for lunch in the back room of the Hof Brau on Telegraph Avenue, at other times in one or another’s home. Out of this comaraderie, we organized many campus teach-ins and lectures, participated in campus and community anti-war marches, and initiated some unique special events that won massive participation by the campus community despite bans by the UC Board of Regents and explicit threats of disciplinary action by Governor Ronald Reagan. On behalf of the Faculty Peace Committee, Franz Schurmann, Peter Scott, Reginald Zelnik and Carl Schorske produced an excellent book, The Politics of Escalation.
The FPC was active for a period of almost ten years, from the mid-60s on. There was no avoiding the rip tides and cross-currents that tore at the anti-war movements and the campus community, including the disagreements and antagonisms among different groups opposing the war. Within the FPC, there was no binding ideology or political tendency, but over time, some shared attitudes provided informal guidelines that worked well. We were independent in our choices of what to do, what to support, and what not to do. We would respond to, but not be deterred by demands that we do things according the tactical or doctrinaire ideas of any group or individual. At the same time, we would respect diverse views and actions in opposition to the war, and not spend our energy judging or attacking others. We also put a priority on our interraction with students, working in full and equal collaboration to bring about the Vietnam Commencement of May 17, 1968.
I want to talk about the Vietnam Commencent and a few other episodes from those times that encourage me to go beyond nostalgia to some thoughts about today.
The Commencement was a remarkable event. At the height of the war, as UC Berkeley’s Class of 1968 was graduating, 866 seniors and graduate students signed an oath and affirmed it publicly before a huge assemblage in solemn ceremony in Sproul Plaza:
“Our war in Vietnam is unjust and immoral. As long as the United States is involved in this war Iwill not serve in the armed forces.”
About a thousand other members of the campus community signed this supporting pledge:
“Although I am not subject to the draft, my opposition to our government’s policy in Vietnam compels me to support those draft-eligible Americans who have pledged to refuse induction. I believe that their decisions are legitimate acts of conscience opposing an unjust and immoral war. I pledge to support those young men with encouragement, counsel, and financial aid.”
The size of the convocation matched the largest demonstrations of the Free Speech Movement. It was addressed by Robert Hutchins andCharles Sellers among others. The program included the mother of imprisoned Ronald Lockman, an African-American soldier who refused shipment to Vietnam, and the sister of another jailed draft resister, John Wells. Rather than describe the event in graphic detail, I will recall the atmosphere surrounding and leading up to it.
Our plans for the Vietnam Commencement, which we originally hoped to hold in the Greek Theatre, angered Governor Reagan and evoked a Regent’s declaration banning it:
UC Regents, resolution adopted at April 1968 meeting:
“After giving full consideration to the appeal and materials submitted in support of it and the opinion of the General Counsel that violations of the law will occur in the course of the event if held as proposed, and it appearing because of the history and format of the proposed ‘commencement’ it would be widely regarded as being a University ceremony if held on the campus”, it is the determination of The Regents that permission should not be granted for the holding of the proposed ‘Vietnam Commencement’.”
The San Francisco Chronicle reported (May 17,1968):
“Governor Reagan, in a letter dated May 10 to Theodore R. Meyer, chairman of the Board of Regents, declared the proposed exercises ‘in violation of Regents’ policy’ and demanded that the ceremonies be cancelled.
“Reagan reiterated that such a ceremony ‘would be so indecent as to border on the obscene’.
“He called upon the University administration to ban the ceremonies on any part of the UC campus; to revoke the registration of the Campus Draft Opposition organization, and to institute disciplinary action against faculty members who have been aiding the draft resisters.”
Reagan was further quoted in the Los Angeles Times (May 18, 1968):“These academicians are taking advantage of a legal technicality. This meeting … could not be held without their being subject to charges of treason if there was a formal declaration of war with North Vietnam.”
Despite the unity and warm relationships achieved by student and faculty participants in the Campus Draft Opposition, a rather solitary note of discord and distrust was sounded in the days prior to the Commencement.
“WILL CDO SELL OUT FSM?”, leaflet signed by M.P.L., Member, Alameda Steering Committee, Peace and Freedom Party:
“…The moral character of CDO has been … compromised by the variety of professorial spokesmen who keep insisting on how legal the CDO really is …The fact is that public spokesmen for CDO really don’t represent many of those who signed the pledge. Many are the same professors who in 1964 told their students that shaking the boat was a mistake, that they should not commit civil disobedience to achieve free speech. These will be the same men who will try to take the commencement off campus if the Regents and their law courts don’t come through….”
Contrary to that prediction, CDO did not back down before the Regents and Governor Reagan.
CDO statements, May 16-17, 1968:
“In announcing these plans (for the Vietnam Commencement), we are fully aware that the Regents, having taken it upon themselves to pass judgement on the content of our projected program, passed a resolution that proscribes the use of any campus facility for such an event. We cannot accept the implication that it is in any way illigitimate, immoral or illegal to pay tribute to, and assist in full measure, young men who, as an act of conscience, have chosen to resist the draft.”
“We shall proceed in pursuance of our Constitutional rights. Though we intend to violate the Regental ban, we have no intention of otherwise challenging normal campus rules.”
Not only did the students who signed the anti-war pledge stand up to be counted, but close to 300 members of the faculty stood together behind the podium above the now renamed Savio Steps. The Berkeley campus administration set aside the Regents’ prohibition and sanctioned CDO’s right to the campus ceremony. The mood on campus would not have allowed the ban to stand, and Governor Reagan’s insistence on disciplinary action went unheeded when the Commencement was over.
Two years before the Vietnam Commencement, the Faculty Peace Committee brought about another memorable demonstration of growing opposition to the war. In the Spring of 1966, the campus was aroused in protest over the granting of a UC honorary degree to President Johnson’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Arthur Goldberg. Campus anti-war activists debated how to respond. One proposal that failed to gain support was to occupy the Greek Theatre during the night before the scheduled degree convocation and to try to stop it from taking place. Nevertheless, an overwhelming expression of campus sentiment induced the University and the Ambassador to agree to a public debate on the war between Goldberg and Franz Schurmann for the Faculty Peace Committee. On March 25, 1966, Harmon Gym was packed to overflowing, with an additional couple of thousand gathered outside to hear the debate through loud speakers. After listening without interruption to the entire exchange, the gathering voted with astonishing unanimity (no more than a handful in approval of Goldberg) against the Johnson Administration’s war.
My talk memorializes the Faculty Peace Committee, but, as Marilyn Milligan’s remarks remind us, much more was happening as protests swelled. I recall several occasions when informal “strategy sessions” brought together representatives of diverse movements. I remember one time when Tom Hayden asked to meet with some faculty and we got together in Peter Scott’s house. He wanted us to join in the effort to mobilize the demonstrations that were to besiege the 1968 Democratic Party Convention in Chicago. Most of us abstained, chastened perhaps by some of our earlier encounters and disagreements with Jerry Rubin over the advisability of direct confrontation with the Oakland police. I recall this now not to try to defend or criticize our attitudes at that time. Rather, the point I want to make is that diversity -- both philosophical and practical -- is inevitable in any significant struggle for social change.
Who can look back at the impact of the cumulative protests and not credit the events of Chicago 1968, as well as the Moratorium rally in Washington D.C., as well as the defiance of draft resisters like Mohamed Ali, as well as the action of Harvard students who lay down in front of Secretary of Defense MacNamara’s car, as well as the teach-ins and investigative journalism that eventually influenced the way millions of Americans came to view the Vietnam War?
In an article on the Vietnam Day Committee (Pacific Historical Review, Feb. 1995), Gerard De Groot argues that the VDC only antagonized the majority, that the message of the war’s immorality never reached the American people -- what only mattered ultimately were the mounting casualties in a losing war. I think that’s a very superficial view. It is certainly true that some of the in-your-face actions of militants were seized on to inflame passions against the protesters, and truer still that the human costs and futility of the war finally made the American people say “No!” But condemnation of the war as immoral was never the sole province of a few radicals. As the war progressed, stories emerged about napalm atrocities, Mai Lai, the wiping out of villages, massive bombings extending to Laos and Cambodia. Conscience became a part of the reality that reached more and more “ordinary” Americans. Concern for the “soul of the nation” was echoed by Martin Luther King, Eugene McCarthy, and, eventually, by Robert Kennedy, even Walter Cronkite and many, many others.
My immersion in a little bit of history, as I prepared this talk, provokes an urge to take some measure of the present. That’s a leap, of course, perhaps inappropriate to the occasion.
No progressive, no one generally on the Left, needs convincing that these are trying times. No single issue dominates as urgently as the Vietnam War. Yet from the point of view of where the country appears to be heading, the challenge is great. In some ways it is even more complex and difficult than was confronted in the 60s. There is an air of disbelief and alarm over the arrogant resolve with which the recently selected President is imposing oxymoronic “compassionate conservatism” in every direction. The open commitment of George W. Bush to the power of the corporations and the welfare of the very wealthy, his unbending loyalty to the social values of the Christian Coalition, have already brought a host of issues into focus. I won’t review the obvious here, except to anticipate growing resistance, especially from that majority of Americans who never voted for Bush in the first place. Nevertheless, to paraphrase Bush’s recent comments in another connection, the longer the situation lasts, the greater the damage.
I do want to pose two questions which I found myself thinking about as I looked again at the Vietnam War years. One is whether the impulses that led us into the Vietnam morass have gone away with the end of the Cold War. The other has to do with the nature of “unity” in movements of protest and, beyond, for serious social change.As to the first matter, the circumstances have certainly changed with the end of the Cold War, but I believe that basic drives that brought tragedy in the past remain to threaten the future. Military and economic interests that intervened without moral compunction to instruct and support murderous regimes in Latin America, Asia and Africa did not become benign because the United States is now on top of the world as reigning superpower. There is already ample evidence to the contrary in the dismissal of world opinion on environmental problems, on missile “defense”, on our unilateral bombing assaults and measures of economic strangulation against designated foes, and on our all-too-familiar military adventure in Columbia. The real test will come when more strains develop in global capitalism and challenges emerge to the status quo of “the new world order”, as George Bush the elder liked to call it.
We Americans have much to be proud of and to contribute to the world. Yet we and others have reason still to be wary of the arrogance of power -- all the more so, given our government’s invested interest in replacing the perilous Cold War balance with the unbridled sway of the world bank and multinational corporate institutions.
Now, the question of “unity”: is it a meaningful objective for the multiple constituencies on the progressive or left flank of American politics? As was the case during the protests against the Vietnam War, formal unity based on general consensus may usually be beyond reach, and may not even be a desirable goal. The only unity to hope for-- and a very important aim indeed -- is one that accepts diversity. There will always be a lot to argue about, but the inevitable diversity of ideas and actions needs to be respected, or at least tolerated to a degree that keeps commonly recognized targets in focus. The Left’s history in this regard, here and elsewhere, is hardly inspiring. Too often, ideological battles over the “correct” path proved to be a futile diversion, while demagogues led a nation down the garden path to reaction.
I am tempted to carry this argument further in regard to the last presidential election and current political perspectives. But that might be stretching today’s Vietnam topic too far.
Leon Wofsy
4/14/2001