Guiding Goldberg Through Harvard: A Tense Drama that Ended in Dullness

There was an even deeper unhappiness about the meeting in the groups that had worked for a month to arrange it. "Everything he said was dull, boring drivel and made me more despairing than ever," a member of SDS's executive committee said about an hour after it was over.

After being questioned, applauded and hissed for more than two hours, Arthur J. Goldberg tried to sum up for his Sanders Theater audience a week and a half ago what he thought of the discussion.

"I think we have done something worthwhile here, having a meeting, exchanging points of view," he said. "This is in the libertarian tradition of the United States, something I value. I hope I am not old-fashioned in this regard."

He had caught, for a moment, just the point on which he was vulnerable. Later, those who were dissatisfied with the meeting would claim that he was "old-fashioned," that he had relied on old-fashioned platitudes, had never met their arguments directly.

But they would not go much beyond that in their criticism. The former Secretary of Labor and Supreme Court Justice was not a man who could be heated. He could not arouse--even in the most determined opponent of the war in Vietnam--the violent emotions that Secretary McNamara had during the Mill St. confrontation last November.

That was understood weeks before Goldberg arrived, from the time when Students for a Democratic Society, the deans and officials of the Kennedy Institute of Politics began talking about what he ought to do when he got here.

The discussion never really centered around Goldberg personally. It was always more abstract: The Kennedy Institute invited a member of the Johnson Administration to speak off-the-record to small groups as part of its Honorary Associates Program. SDS insisted, as it had insisted before McNamara's visit, that no Administration spokesman should come here without facing publicly hs anti-war critics. Could both he satisfied without a McNamara-like clash, without a clash at all?

Institute officials were not sure at the beginning that it could be. But they were determined to start talking early and not be--as they had felt they had been with McNamara--caught unprepared.

"If we had perceived last Spring that he [McNamara] would be coming against the background of such frustration, we would have done it very differently or not at all," Richard E. Neustadt, director of the Institute, said in a recent interview.

"But nobody expected trouble. SDS's demand for a public confrontation reached us late in the process. We felt there was no way to ask for such a thing as a basic change in the terms of his invitation; we wouldn't have dreamed of it."

The terms of Goldberg's invitation, of course, were the same as McNamara's. It was private; he was coming to talk informally with students (several Law School and Kennedy Institute seminars were on his schedule) and to consult with Faculty members (he asked to talk with Edwin O. Reischauer, University professor, and a group of "China experts").

But the way in which the Institute looked at the invitation was different. Institute officials still insisted that they were not running a "speaker's bureau." Yet the McNamara demonstration, and the discussion that followed it, had lent some weight to SDS's argument about why officials like McNamara should be asked to speak publicly.

"The questions SDS raised was whether the terms of our invitations to men like Goldberg and McNamara didn't inferentially put the University's prestige behind them," Neustadt said. "We found that this was a view held strongly by a fraction of this community, including some of its permanent members. And if, in their view, we are lending this prestige, then, in a way, we are."

Even more important, the Institute was not alone in caring intensely about the arrangements for Goldberg's visit. Dean Monro attended a meeting and went to dinner with SDS leaders after the McNamara demonstration; he was to have four long meetings with them during the month before Goldberg's arrival. Mill Street had changed the Administration's thinking and made it willing to share responsibility for the visit, to help get the Institute around the terms of its invitation.

In early January, a member of SDS's executive committee called Neustadt and told him the group had started thinking about the Goldberg visit. Neustadt arranged a meeting between three members of the executive committee and the Institute spokesmen--John Wofford, its associate director, and Ernest R. May, professor of History and chairman of its student activities committee. Neither had been involved in the planning for the McNamara visit.

When they met in Littauer on Jan. 16, May and Wofford pressed the SDS leaders to define just what sort of meeting with Goldberg they would accept. A large, public meeting with him, they said, might not be the best idea; the larger the meeting, the greater the chances for its getting out of control.

They proposed several arternatives--and one of them sounded good to the SDS delegation. Goldberg would discuss Vietnam with a small group of people selected by SDS; the discussion would be carried to auditoriums around the University through loud speaker and, perhaps, closed-circuit television. The Institute would prefer, Wofford and May said, that the meeting be "off-the-record"--that is, closed to newsmen.

The delegation, which included David Loud '68, one of SDS's co-chairman, and Ronald Yank, at Law School student and member of the executive committee, took the proposal to an SDS meeting the next day. The meeting didn't buy it. What SDS wants is to make Goldberg confront anti-war critics before the entire University community, members argued; it shouldn't settle for anything less than a full public meeting.

Michael Traugot '67, another co-chairman, summed up SDS's position at that point in a letter to Neustadt Jan. 23, ". . . Ambassador Goldberg should engage in a public debate with a serious critic of our government's Vietnam policy. This confrontation should take place in one of Harvard's large lecture halls... The spokesman for the anti-war position should be chosen by SDS from among the Harvard community."

Then Traugot added another proposal--that, following the debate, a panel of students question the speakers on their remarks.

He asked for an answer by Feb. 7. During the next two weeks, SDS had no meetings with Institute officials and only one with the Administration--a two-hour conference with Dean Monro and, for part of the time, Dean Watson.

Monro told a group of SDS representatives (more than he had expected; he had only invited Traugot) that he would be meeting with Dean Ford, Neustadt and other Institute officials to make a final decision on the Goldberg visit. What, he asked them -- as they had been asked before -- were their minimum demands?

They told him that they wanted to see a debate between Goldberg and an anti-war Faculty member. But this was not essential; what was essential, they said, was the opportunity to pursue questions. They did not want to see Goldberg, like a professor answering questions in a large lecture hall, move from one raised hand to another without ever having a prolonged exchange.

Monro also pressed them, to their annoyance, on whether they would use "disruptive" tactics if Goldberg did not meet their demands. Monro urged them to pledge that they would not disrupt the visit. The Faculty is adamant, he said, on guaranteeing the rights of visitors; "disruptive" demonstrations would be met by severe disciplinary action.

The SDS leaders insisted, to Monro's annoyance, that it was up to the membership, not to them. The conference broke up without resolving the issue.

Monro the next day told Neustadt and Ford what had happened; they decided that Neustadt should pass it on to Goldberg. Under the circumstances, they thought it likely that he would decide not to come. On the one hand, they felt, he would not want to face a large public meeting, but he also would prefer not to be the cause of disciplinary action.

Still, if Goldberg wanted to come under the terms of the original invitation--without a public session--the Institute would have felt bound to arrange it. "We would have surrounded him with policemen and gotten him through somehow," an Institute official said.

Goldberg opted for the public meeting. He had, it was learned later, a ready-made excuse to postpone the visit in President Johnson's request that he go within the next few weeks to Vietnam. He didn't take it, Institute officials say, because he thought the public meeting was a good idea; it could correct, as he said there, "a failure to provide facilities for this kind of expression."

SDS leaders disagree. Goldberg could not have postponed his visit indefinitely, they argue. It would have been a clear sign of weakness, a giving in to pressure. He had to come; and, because SDS had not ruled out the possibility of a "disruptive" demonstration, he had to agree to the public meeting.

The Institute worked out an agreement to "release" Goldberg to the Faculty -- to Dean Ford -- for the first day of his three-day visit. Thus, informally, the Institute was still no "speaker's bureau." Goldberg was speaking publicly under other auspices. But everyone at the Institute admitted that the speech would make havoc of its plans. A number of meetings with undergraduates, which had been planned for Sunday, were scratched. And Institute officials realized that the two-hour public session would probably overshadow the rest of the visit, that Goldberg would spend the next two days tired and "tied up in knots."

On Feb. 6, a day before the SDS deadline, Dean Ford released a statement announcing the public meeting. "There . . . will be no arranged debate," the statement said, "but there will be an opportunity for faculty and students to question Ambassador Goldberg on all aspects of American foreign policy. Obviously, this format does not conform to the specific requests of any one student organization; but it will, I believe, satisfy widespread interest within the University."

The statement said that John T. Dunlop, David A. Wells Professor of Political Economy, would serve as chairman of the meeting and set up procedure.

SDS leaders, like everyone else, read the statement in the newspapers. And they were angry. They had talked to the Institute and Dean Monro on their own initiative; they had spent most of January "bargaining in good faith." Yet no one had seen fit to let them know about the statement in advance.

They told Dunlop this when they met him for the first time, the Tuesday before Goldberg's arrival. Dunlop had remarked, when Dean Ford first approached him, that he wasn't the man for the job. But his qualifications were obvious. He is one of the country's leading labor arbitrators and an old friend of Goldberg's. When Goldberg was Secretary of Labor, Dunlop had, in fact, helped arbitrate several important disputes for him, such as the missile base work stoppages. The meeting was, as he said through that week, just "another job" for him--and not a particularly difficult one. He was not arbitrating or negotiating, he insisted; he was simply consulting any groups interested in the meeting. The final decisions would be his and his alone.

Yet he won SDS's trust early and, except for one brief episode-- with which he clearly had nothing to do--kept it. One reason is that he knew, as any good arbitrator does, how to hold his counsel, and when not to hold it.

In the beginning, he spent most of his time simply listening to SDS's presentation, its argument that there must be a speaker or some kind of a panel to follow up Goldberg's answers. He did not commit himself. But, on Wednesday morning, SDS leaders told him they needed something to bring to their membership that night. He told them, he agreed that there should be some "preferential right to ask questions"--that was all. But, for the purposes of the SDS leaders, it was enough.

He was also incredibly frank. He thought the importance of the meeting was being exaggerated and he told them so. On Wednesday afternoon, Dean Ford, who had not been keeping in touch with the talks, said in answer to a reporter's question that it was his impression Goldberg's letter ruled out a selected group of questioners. SDS, in response, made public what Dunlop had told them that morning.

Dunlop was in New York at the time, but when he met with SDS leaders the next day he began by saying simply that it wasn't his custom to report closed meetings to the newspapers and that he didn't intend to operate that way. Again, that was all.

He also felt, and SDS agreed, that the group of questioners he put together didn't have to be "representative" in any sense; they simply had to be good questioners. The group of five he finally selected were all critical of the continued escalation of the war.

All of them, though, came to Sunday's meeting with very different kinds of questions--something Dunlop encouraged. Loud, who has been building up a file on Vietnam for years, wanted to challenge the official history of the war. Michael L. Walzer, professor of Government, tried to point out inconsistencies in Administration policy. Thomas C. Schelling, professor of Economics, talked about long-range policy in Southeast Asia. Gregory Craig '67, president of the Harvard Undergraduate Council, concentrated on problems of leadership; Jay B. Stephens '68, now president of the Young Republicans, on tactics.

And none of them were very satisfied with Goldberg's answers. He had not come armed with the facts and figures necessary for the kind of debate Loud wanted, nor did he engage in the kind of speculation Walzer and Schelling wanted. He was waiting for someone to ask him about the alternatives he sees for Vietnam in the very near future; nobody did.

There was an ever deeper unhappiness about the meeting on the part of the groups that had worked for a month to arrange it. "Everything he said was dull, boring drivel and made me more despairing than ever," a member of SDS's executive committee said about an hour after it was over. "It wasn't worth the effort. What is there to be said between government spokesmen and us?"

In the past few months, SDS has spent much of its time and emotion on two men--Goldberg and McNa-