Tuchman Tells 293 Graduating Cliffies About Vietnam, Israel, Sex, Hippies

Barbara Tuchman '33, speaker at the Radcliffe commencement exercises yesterday, lambasted the U.S.'s intervention in Vietnam and its non-intervention in the Mideast crisis.

Mrs. Tuchman, noted historian and author of The Guns of August, implied that the U.S. had risked a Munich-like sellout by failing to come to Israel's aid more energetically. "If they [the Israelis] had not fought, the world would have sacrificed Israel -- with unction, with pious formula ... but without question," she declared.

"This would have been called Peace," she scoffed.

Against History

On the other hand she labeled the Vietnam involvement "an effort against history." "We cannot control the situation in Asia because we are not an Asiatic power," she said.

Since the Vietnam war is a war of containment -- that is, a preventive war -- it "can never be morally, politically nor, in the end, historically justifiable," she added.

Mrs. Tuchman addressed her remarks to the 293 graduating Radcliffe seniors and their parents who convened in Radcliffe Yard at 11 a.m. She also got around to sex.

Like any good Cliffie, she was pretty much all for it. She called for an end to all legal restrictions on contraception or abortion in order to prevent unwanted children. "The one aspect of the sexual revolution I find shocking is the careless breeding of unwanted children in increasing numbers," she explained.

"High school adolescents and others of the young often seem to regard pregnancy as a condition affecting only themselves with no thought of it as a condition that brings to life another human being."

She also took a slap at Cliffies who agitated this Spring for the privilege of living in off-campus apartments. "Judging by a minority on this campus it almost seems as if some want to feel aggrieved and, lacking any serious grievance in our youth-centered society, fling themselves angrily upon the trivial," she said.

Mrs. Tuchman interpreted the recent campaign as a protest that Radcliffe does not adjust to the individual needs. "Why should it?" she asked. "Life does not adjust to them either," she concluded.

Hippy Dippy Do

She also commented on the hippies, comparing them to the Greek Cynics whom she described as sort of grubby in appearance and gross in manner, seekers of the simple "natural" life. She prodded them for trying to reject the past. "One can no more reject the past than reject one's own skeleton."

Hippies rated much better Tuesday when Daniel Patrick Moynihan compared them to the 17th cenury English Ranters and concluded that like earlier protestors, they "number some of the finest spirits of the age."

For her final condemnation of the day, Mrs. Tuchman chose LSD. After cataloguing a few of the marvels of our times, she concluded, "It is an age that keeps one's mind popping continually and why any idiot needs LSD to expand his mind in this of all times, is to me a mystery."

And she closed by wishing all the Cliffies happiness, adventure and fulfillment.