A Parting Shot

SO HERE I AM, looking back over my life and times at Harvard, finding clever phrases that will somehow sum it all up. These marks I'm making on yellow paper will be sent out to the multitudes, some of whom (I am supposed to believe) will read them with something approximating interest, most of whom will ignore them, Some of them, I guess, really will use our product to wrap fish.

And what can I say to that but "right on"? Or maybe "so it goes."

Harvard. Well, I have to admit that the first thing that comes to my mind, even after seeing the blood all over the steps of University Hall one nice spring morning a while back, is John Kennedy. Did you know he was on the business board of the CRIMSON a few years before Camelot? He was. I read in Time last month that the editor of the Wisconsin Daily Cardinal refers to John F. Kennedy '40 as "one of the biggest pigs." And what can I say to that, too, but "right on"? But I cried for six hours, drunk, after his brother died.

John Kennedy; Love Story; coffee and other things to get us through impossibly boring papers; Henry Kissinger; page-proofing the CRIMSON and walking back to Eliot House at sunrise; friends booted out of school for fighting the war in the only way they knew how; tenured professors making jokes about other tenured professors who are homosexual; subtle but vicious racism between blacks and whites: the great view from between Lamont and Houghton of lovely Holyoke Center, the weird red Mass Ave buildings from which Harvard ejects tenants, and Wigglesworth; Nini's Corner; and sherry. We didn't drink sherry in Indiana, and I found out at my proctor's one night freshman year that you couldn't drink as much of that as you could of bourbon, and I haven't had any sherry since. Which may, or may not, explain why I was always lonely here.

Enough of that garbage.

So what am I going to say? Well, I could mention the futility of words. That's always a winner in CRIMSON closed reports. Or I could talk about how Harvard should either time-travel back to the seventeenth century or adjust to the newer ones. Or I could talk about my amazement at discovering that Harvard buildings are often littered with hand-scrawled signs bearing institutional messages instead of neatly printed ones. Or about the pure hate I have felt on occasion for University administrators-like on April 10, 1969. Or about the cold fear I feel when I realize that after the Class of '72 leaves very few of you will remember that dawn, which has always seemed to me the purest expression of Harvard's special grace I have ever seen.

Well, who knows. As much as I despise journalism for the way it conspires to deprive people of the truth in order to soothe their spirits and "draw them into the story." I retain enough (more than enough) of the journalistic ego that I just may talk about some of those things someday. Take me out for a beer, as they always say, and I'll tell you-especially if you can get me a job or build my career.

But journalists aren't the worst people in the world. Most of them aren't as bad as the Hitlers, or the Stalins, or the Henry Kissingers. And I'm afraid we have plenty of the latter, at least, around town.

So, you see, I'm going to devote my Parting Shot to the war. The ultimate sacrifice for the poor wretches we are bombing in Southeast Asia. You notice a slight edge of self-contempt? It's not your imagination. And I can't begin to express the contempt I have for you, too, all of you. But especially you little motherfucking Henry Kissingers-on-the-make.

(Whatever can he mean?)

Let me tell you a little story first. At home over Christmas I had my ritual fervent fight with my parents to counterpoint our otherwise pleasant time together. In fifteen minutes we managed to hit all the sore points, and finally we got to the war. My parents were urging that I go on into the Army rather than get out in some "dishonorable" way. And then my father said, "Look, you kids seem to think that you're the only ones who hate this war, who think about it every day. You're not. It's a goddamn mess-I know that. If I were drafted, though. I'd go-but I'd be damned if I'd kill any Vietnamese." My mother: "I don't know, David, sometimes I can't believe we're the beasts we seem to be."

OH, MOTHER, we're at least as bad as we seem to be. If you don't believe it, look at, say, Harvard. You might want to look at the Government Department first.

Samuel P. Huntington, chairman of the department: "At no time during the eight years on which I can speak with authority on these matters have members of this department acted on political grounds or divided along political lines on an appointment issue. There was no such division on Kissinger."

I can't complain that you don't divide along political lines, Mr. Huntington, but why don't you ever try moral lines. (Isn't it incredible that mentioning morality should instantly consign one to the realms of the banal?) Political lines. So it looks as if old Henry, fresh from the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Asians fighting for their right to self-determination, will come back here to bask in the glow of adoring undergraduates and (mostly) graduate students. What kind of people are these? What kind of person am I that I talk civilly to them? How can I have gone to dinner with the past head of the Government Department, sipped my wine and listened to his jokes about the foibles of certain professors-and to his arguments for kicking my friends out of school? The shame I feel at belonging to the same species as the men who thought up our little adventure in Indochina is bad enough, but to think that I actually enrolled in a school that trains such beasts!

It boggles the mind. Now, would you like to discuss meter in the works of Dryden, or speculate on the new trends in cinema, or examine the thought of the Puritans?

Or would you prefer to go to sherry in the JCR? or read that groovy advertising column in the Times? or discuss curriculum reform? or get drunk, or get stoned, or go skiing, or take a non-credit seminar at the CFIA?

How do you plan to kill this day while the killing goes on in Indochina? What guts have you found that meet MWF at noon? Who's on Dick Cavett tonight? Did you read the latest message from the Weather underground? When's your book coming out? Have you seen the new Chabrol flick? Isn't it wonderful that since I've been here we got rid of the coat-and-tie rule and parietals?

I think of Charlotte Corday in Marat/Sade, fighting her sleep disease and painfully, haltingly asking, "What kind of town is this? What kind of people are these?"

The war. Do you want some facts? How about these: It is worse than we can imagine. Hundreds of thousands are dead; we've dropped many more bombs to implement our policy of 'forced-draft urbanization" in Vietnam than we used on the Nazis. Noam Chomsky (one of the few for whom I feel no contempt) writes, "By March 1969 the total level of bombardment had reached 130,000 tons a month-nearly two Hiroshimas a week in South Vietnam and Laos, defenseless countries." "Go easy on words like genocide," Henry Kissinger told students who visited him in the White House. "It is not the policy of the United States to bomb people." From the Kennedy Subcommittee on Refugees staff report: the target of the bombardment of Laos is "the economic and social structure of the rebel-held areas of the country." None dare call it genocide.

Do you realize how easily your eyes slid through the horror in that last paragraph?

Another anecdote: I remember as clearly as a nightmare one winter night in 1966 when, after a bitter argument about Vietnam with the two pleasant men who owned the small town store where I worked, it came to me like a flash that I could spare my voice. Surely, I realized, in a year or two these men and the men like them all over America-the men who had saved us from the Nazis-would realize that the war was wrong, wrong, wrong. And then the war would stop.

But just as I learned that night one rationalization to permit me to ignore the war, those men found out ways, too. And all the nice men and women at Harvard found their ways. Look around you at all the ways-from macrobiotic food to student-faculty politics to acid.

THEN LAST SPRING. The damned thing just wouldn't fade away, so we made the ultimate sacrifice after Cambodia, and gave up our C's and A's for mere passes and credits. The faculty, also going the ultimate-sacrifice route, let us. Although very few of us did anything much to fight against the war, we at least managed to think about it a whole lot for a few days. We took some small pride in our shame.

Soon summer, working, lolling around, nothing to do, relaxing, no antiwar activity, no watching the papers for the latest horror story, and at the end of the summer a CRIMSON executive saw that I had planned to reprint our editorial in support of the NLF in the Freshman Pre-Registration Issue and told me not to: "I think a lot of people have changed their minds since we passed that." A quiet fall, punctuated by renewed bombing of the North. Law boards. "It-really-isn't-so-bad, maybe-I-can-find-a-way-to-have-a-decent-life." A friend of mine, a really decent kid, a Rhodes Scholar, told me one day after the first fall raids on the North: "Listen, you can make it matter. I told myself I was going to make it matter, and I did. I really cared." It happened also to be the day of the Yale game, and he wasn't talking about the war. So the jocks play around on Soldiers Field, and the Loebies play around the Loeb, and the WHRBies play around WHRB, and the academics play around Widener, and the Crimeds play around here, on this page, indulging their egos and their fantasies, trying to please the Big Boys who aren't hiring these days anyway.

And nobody talks about the war much, because it's depressing and boring and, well, the war was last year. Or the year before. And because we have to go on with our God-awful lives. You can't just sit around and mope, you know. What is this self-righteousness? Get on with your life and try to make your corner of the world a little better. Through poetry in the Advocate, or wit in the Lampoon, or good works at PBH, or scholarly works on German philosophers, or research in Mallinckrodt or the Hoffman Lab, or research on underdeveloped nations at the CFIA, so it won't be so messy next time.

Ah, the loss of innocence. I came here, very naively, to find a glittering community of moral (though perhaps misguided) men and women. I found a cesspool of egomaniacs who are far more interested in themselves, Art, Science, Zen, Catholicism or marijuana than they are in stopping the slaughter we are committing over there. And I found that I was one of them. I came to the right place. Not better or worse than other places, perhaps, but cosmically bigger. Other places aspire to produce Henry Kissingers; we did it.

But you know all of this. Maybe it's something like these thoughts that has made so many of you junkies of one sort or another. But you know enough to keep a stiff upper lip and go about your puttering. There probably isn't much we could do, even if we tried. Lunacy is very deeply rooted in this country, and I suppose in other lands too.

So, my friends, keep a stiff upper lip. You freshmen and sophomores, maybe even juniors, to whom all this sounds a little strange: you just wait. You can get through it. If a full professor ever warns you that he can screw you on recommendations because of a news story you wrote about one of his committees, you just smile and pretend you didn't hear. He's probably a pretty nice guy-almost every one is in one way or another. It's just that I came here from a small town where I somehow. very foolishly, got the message that things were better here. College kids used to raise a fuss about the war, after all.

I can't help it if I find the taste of sherry sickeningly sweet. But I like a lot of you, almost all of you that I know, and I wish you well if I don't see you again after next few months. I realize this whole piece sounds, as an old grad wrote about an article two years ago, like "a child's mudpie." But that's what Harvard is all about, isn't it? A wonderful chance to make all sorts of weird mudpies of words, arguments and lifestyles. It's just that sometimes those childlike constructions get translated into mass murder, and that no one seems to care.