HOW I WON THE WAR

You weren't here when the war ended. You were on vacation -- in Bermuda or Florida or New York or Ohio. And you were watching television that night, never really expecting anything. Or you heard about it when the sun brought you a newspaper the next morning.

REMEMBER the war? The war is over. And for all of us, at Harvard and in Baltimore and all over the world, these are the worst of times.

Let me remind you. It was a tough war, but we won. On the last day of last month, the night before April Fool's Day, the President of the United States said that he had just about had enough. He said that he would not run for President again and he said that he would try to make peace in Vietnam. Whatever pushed him to that decision--the Vietcong or the anti-war people or a bad heart--it was over. And in Cambridge they snake-danced in the streets.

But even though everyone is talking peace and the stock market loves it and Averell Harriman is whispering and they are trying to find somewhere to talk and Irving Howe is happy, the war is not over--it is not anywhere near over. It is over in the hearts of our countrymen but not over in Vietnam. It will surely go on for at least two more years, and the situation at home will be much the same as it is over there: no one will want to take a chance on getting wounded or killed on the day before the armistice.

Since April Fool's Day, the anti-war movement has been running out of gas. Something called the "Academic Day of Conscience" April 15 was an utter flop--only 70 students showed up at Memorial Church for the ceremonies. Only six per cent of the Harvard Faculty could be persuaded to sign a moderately-worded statement backing draft resisters in an o so legal way. And at the latest Boston draft card turn-in, only 20 people turned-in.

That great wave of massive anti-war feeling that was washing over the country only two months ago has gone back to sea now. And it has left behind calm little peaceful puddles on the beach. People stand over the puddles, look at their reflections in the water and love it. Peace is so wonderful. It makes you forget about war.

But this year's senior class cannot forget about war--and neither can the junior class, for the war certainly will not be over by then either. They will all be gobbled up. Draft quotas are soaring. The seniors will not have a strong draft union behind them, backing them up, because (I must remind you) the war is over. So agonize, everyone, and go join OCS and ROTC and VISTA and PC and all those other capital letters. And those of you who still won't go, you will be hustled off to jail. Only no one will listen to you now. You are alone now. Everyone is listening to the false poets of peace and looking at themselves in the puddles. Everyone is listening to Eugene McCarthy.

LONG ago there were dreams of a summer in Chicago and all over. Tom Wicker was saying that hundreds of thousands would resist. General Hershey would not be able to get enough men, and maybe the war would end in that kind of glory. All of those thousands of college seniors and graduate students would build a strong movement for social change in this country.

But that will never happen now, because Gene McCarthy gave us hope, and because the war is over. After New Hampshire (and before too) McCarthy was drawing off the strength of the anti-war movement. He was taking the money that would have gone to support resisters, taking the works and days of hands that would have built a movement.

That is all too bad, you say. Gene McCarthy, you say, is a hero and he will end the war. But there are two problems: first, the war is over now, as over as Gene McCarthy could ever have hoped it would be, and second, Gene McCarthy is a United States Senator. He lives by the Senate's rules. He has his own chosen interests--drugs and oil, they say. And he has not introduced one major piece of legislation for social change in this country since he has been in office. But, you say, he was there at the right time, when his country needed him. Really, he was a few years late. He remembered Tonkin a few years late. There is New Hampshire, Gene McCarthy said, and I am here before anyone else, except maybe the anti-war movement.

And he told you to shave and to cut your hair and to ring doorbells and to listen to him. And you listened to him, and he was all gray hair and a gray suit and you loved him. The Times said it--When things looked worst, he brought you back into the system. Wonderful.

The anti-war movement is dying now because of its successes. John Lindsay will speak tomorrow at a big peace parade in New York, and for some that is a bit too much. Even Hubert Humphrey is sounding puddle-peaceful. We are being lulled to sleep by all of this.

Long ago we marched to Washington and the Pentagon with Norman Mailer and Dr. Spock. And there was blood on our heads. And we sat. up all night on the steps. And we were alone. And long ago we sat down in Mallinckrodt Hall and held a little old man prisoner for hours and they put us on probation to please the Boston Globe. That was so long ago.

MEANWHILE, in the world, the next thing is black revolution. And the next revolutionaries want nothing to do with the mostly-white anti-war movement. On the Monday after Martin Luther King was shot, about a hundred students, nearly all of them white, listened on the steps of Memorial Church as the men of the Resistance tried so hard to link up the black uprising and the anti-war movement. Hillary Putnam said that the philosophies of the two were really the same. And Howard Zinn said that the Resistance had long fought racism in America. But everyone was straining and straining.

Then, the next day, on those same steps, the blacks held their own service to King. And it was clear that the blacks did not want the Resistance, or any other whites. That unsuccessful draft card turn-in was supposed to be in honor of King, and it was pathetic. The same day on the Boston Common--with Kevin White and Cardinal Cushing getting into the act like Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey--everyone was passing out leaf-lets. End the War. End Racism. End Racism and the War. No one recognizes it, but the blacks do not want the whites. It is too late now for that. And the movement is dying.

Where are we now? For one thing, we are all over and nowhere. We are with McCarthy and we are alone. We are about to be drafted and we are alone. We are with everyone now, with John Lindsay and the thing called Establishment, and we are alone.

It is only when more than a few thousand activists realize that they are alone that this thing will work again. Since February and the days when Hershey told us we all had to go, only one thing has changed--we have been successful. Everyone wants to be on our side, really to put us on their side. We are being sucked up into the womb again, back to where we came from, safe and sound. But don't let them fool us: we are alone. And until we realize it, these will remain the worst of times, even though the war is over.