A Parting Shot

ONCE, ABOUT A year and a half ago, The New York Times asked me whether there was any evidence that college students "are doing more things just to have fun and not feeling they should be spending all their time worrying about the ills of the world." I was one of countless stringers around the country who received that query from The Times. And I doubt that any of those stringers had the slightest trouble providing evidence that students were having fun and forgetting the world around them. But The Times also wanted to know, since this was the case, "What do they do?" Now that was a good question.

So far as I can tell, most of us spend the majority of our time these days worrying about ourselves. Or at least, worrying less about the causes we supported during our first year at Harvard. The Class of 1973 entered college when student activism was cresting, when emotion ran high and effective protest seemed a possibility. Now, not four years later, we read of a return to normality on college campuses, of a re-emphasis on academic endeavor. This past fall, the powers that be even discerned a wave of apathy breaking over educational institutions from Cambridge to Berkeley and from Madison to Austin. Yes, colleges and universities had survived the turmoil of the 1960s.

What does this say about our generation of students? Richard Nixon would have us believe that 50 per cent of the young people in the United States, those who voted for him in November, are part of his New Majority. I don't think so, because I have too many friends at home in Dallas who voted for him at the same time they harbored a deep resentment for his candidacy. Mr. Nixon no doubt foresees a long period of campus dormancy ahead, perhaps even a return to the intellectual stagnation linked to the Silent Generation of the 1950s. And he interprets the most recent change in student populations as the inevitable triumph of American ideals; he credits to our generation a common sense, derived largely from a revulsion of the aims and means of our predecessors.

Neither inevitability nor revulsion are at the root of sputtering student activism, though; it is that our generation of students caught the crest of the late 60s without experiencing any of the conflicts with established order which came before. Met with the despair and cynicism of a generation that struggled for appallingly just causes, most of us have succumbed to the disappointments of the 70s because we never knew the hopes of that past generation. Our disappointments these last three years should not be so great, though, because it was our predecessors who built the causes in which we joined. We should be less embittered, and so be able to restore the vitality of our generation. It is left to us to reverse the moral backslide which dims the prospects for the future of this country, and for ourselves.

Our class received college acceptances not long after the inauguration of a President who would take dead aim at student activism, and not miss. We have witnessed the ascent of Nixonian Washington; we have watched its maestro change the face of America over the past four years, employing outright assaults on civil liberties, a determination to squelch or circumvent political opposition, and a jumbled conception of domestic and international priorities. Now that he has turned four years of criminal warfare into a so-called "honorable peace," we find ourselves in an odd position. We are the future of America at peace; we are a post-war generation, but one which inherits the legacy of a horrible and unnecessary conflict.

Unlike the previous post-war generations of the 20th century, most of us are ashamed of the war just ended, and of America's role in it. That was not America, we tell ourselves, that carpet-bombed North Vietnam to cow its "enemies" into a settlement; nor was it America that sent B-52s thundering deep into Laos and Cambodia three days after its envoys signed a peace agreement with the North Vietnamese and the National Liberation Front. No, this was one man who embodies a perverse diplomacy built up in Washington war-rooms over a decade. Our generation has still to face up to a second term of Nixonian Washington.

HOW IS IT THAT we have reached this desperate point? A point at which the President who first bestirred student protest in 1965, Lyndon Johnson, would say shortly before his death, "...many Americans have begun to believe that solutions do not exist. Many Americans have just given up." Lyndon Johnson would say in 1972, "A dangerous mood of despair and defeatism has come over America." This mood has not been missed among students whose every protest, upon which so many hopes were founded, has been ignored or beaten back.

Perhaps the only way to prevent a resumption, or a repetition, of the American travesty in Indochina is for us to fall back on our experience these past three and a half years, and take a hard look at the world about us. It is not difficult to recall the first semester the Class of 1973 spent at Harvard, though often it seems a lifetime ago. It was the fall after University Hall had been cleared in a bloody pre-dawn raid which most of us had read about, but few of us understood. Parents were having second thoughts about sending their sons and daughters to a hotbed of radicalism, Fair Harvard or not. I remember there was an electricity in the air that fall, a feeling such as most of us, particularly those like myself from America's far reaches, had never known before. The generation just ahead of us sensed a chance finally to achieve the goals set way back in 1965. It was impossible even for the most detached of Harvard freshmen not to be affected by the energy which surrounded us.

There was the October Vietnam Moratorium, when 110,000 people poured onto Boston Common. The Harvard Faculty debated whether formally to endorse the Moratorium. I was just working out the distinction between professional football and the NLF. In November, there was a second moratorium, this time drawing a quarter of a million people to Washington. Antiwar leaders were gaining confidence after all, Nixon could not ignore protests of such immense proportions, could he? He did. In fact, he has fulfilled the prophesy of an editorial The Crimson published on the day of the October Moratorium which warned:

"...it seems very likely [that] the Administration will smooth out the rough edges of the war and [try] to make it a little easier for the American public to accept. The draft can be 'reformed' to take the pressure off troublesome college students. In time the policy of phased reductions might actually reduce the troop commitment in Vietnam to 200,000 or even fewer. The military command in Vietnam may be able to substitute even heavier air strikes for the costly ground operations that have sent so many young men back to the United States in wooden boxes..."

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? At the time it didn't really mean much to me, a Texas emigrant who conceived of the Vietnam War as some little incursion one of my state's residents had badly botched. That next spring, there was an angry march back toward Cambridge following an antiwar rally in Boston. A likely place to head, since Harvard was a beehive of war complicity. We were told that, but most of us didn't really know for certain. Nor did we recall the demands that had spurred the occupation of University Hall a year earlier. Most of us knew only that the antiwar movement was current, that it was gaining momentum with each new atrocity in Vietnam. We knew little of the background; we peopled the causes which others had built, and we believed it when those who came before us said that the world might end any day.

So when on April 15, 1970, Harvard Square erupted into a mad scene of police, tear gas, snarling dogs, broken windows and street fighting, we thought, "What in the hell is going on?" and wondered if the revolution we kept hearing about was more than a rhetorical prop. One senior I knew, who had been waiting a long time for that day, was in the Health Services with the flu. As he watched the police forays down Mt. Auburn Street, he begged the nurses to let him out. Instead, he ended up on the phone to The Crimson filing riot reports from his fourth-floor room.

It was an unsettling day for us, and for the perplexed jock from West Heights High, U.S.A., or the analytic wonk, with eight "fives" on his Advanced Placement exams. That spring, my roommates were up late one night when the phone rang. It was a friend at Radcliffe looking for her own roommate; she was hysterical, but did manage to say that the United States and Russia were at war. And she was serious, too. My roommates said okay, she hung up, and they sat around calmly discussing whether to wake me and tell me that the world was about to be enveloped in a nuclear holocaust. She had sounded convinced, they reasoned, so why should they doubt that it's true? Such was our state of mind that spring. My roommates finally decided to wake me up.

REMEMBER CAMBODIA? Kent State and Jackson State? May of 1970 when America's college students decided they had had it, and went on strike for an end to the war and domestic in justices? What did you do that spring? Canvass in Charlestown? Skip exams and play tennis? Go home early? I wrote impassioned stories about the Harvard employe strike for The Crimson. In retrospect, it did not matter what we did, individually or collectively. We thought students had attained a position of strength and influence; in another time and place, perhaps that would have been true. But it was a narrow-based movement then, eliciting only limited support beyond the left-liberal American intelligentsia. What is so frightening is that now, with the base of support broadened ten-fold, we have re-elected a President who declares publicly, "Decision-makers can't be affected by current opinion, by TV barking at you and commentators banging away with the idea that World War III is coming because of the mining of Haiphong. Nor can decisions be affected by the demonstrators outside." Richard Nixon actually said that last month, a couple of weeks after he had terror-bombed the Vietnamese for 12 consecutive days. And it we screamed and shouted for ten more years, Richard Nixon would still read his daily news digest, prepared by his staff as a substitute for television and newspapers, and bomb some more. No wonder Americans have begun to believe that solutions do not exist.

In the fall of 1970, Harvard didn't provide many solutions itself. The Faculty decided it had been duped by students during the Cambodia strike; departments began to renege on credit given the previous spring. The activist leaders of 1969 and 1970 were gone, either by graduation or forced leaves of absence. And there we were, the Class of 1973, growing older and trying to piece together the experience of the year past. We had seen a student movement racing ahead at an ever-accelerating pace, racing beyond what was possible in its own time, perhaps, seeking impossibly humane ends. Then we saw that movement come to an abrupt halt. We were unable to revive it because we lacked the optimism of our predecessors; the disappointment of the spring of 1970, of a President whose only response was a midnight visit to the Lincoln Memorial to talk about Syracuse football, left them embittered. But it left us in a vacuum.

In our bafflement that fall, we were unable to pass on the energy that had been instilled in us during our first year at Harvard. Harvard students began taking leaves of absence in droves. Those who left didn't miss much: the renewed bombing of Cambodia on the biggest football Saturday of the fall, an invasion of Laos in February, and the final insult--Mayday in Washington. It was a time when a Harvard senior could write: "...nobody talks about the war much, because it's depressing and boring and well, the war was last year. Or the year before."

His generation, at Harvard and elsewhere, tried futilely to convey the outrage which Americans generally, and Congress in particular, felt only recently; and that is what is so terribly sad, that their efforts were so futile. In May of 1971, the U.S. government could round up 7000 Washington demonstrators in one day--10,000 in a week--and get away with it. Nixonian Washington had so undermined the credibility of students and the Left by then that most Americans visualized only a bunch of crazed hippies roaming the streets of the Capitol. A handful of people, such as those who marched in the Civil Rights movement a decade ago, understood the frustration felt by Mayday protesters. I remember writing The Crimson's stories from Washington, typing sentences that told of outdoor detention centers and indiscriminate arrests, and asking myself, "This is America?" I really wondered.

SO IT WAS that by 1972, The Quiet Campus had arrived, and newspapers were noting that students were studying more, and applying to medical schools and law schools, and drinking more beer, and wearing corduroys and skirts instead of blue jeans. Mr. Nixon mined the harbors of Haiphong and stepped up the bombing of the North, and students took a break from studying to attempt a strike that was doomed from the outset. Some of us, recalling the apocalyptic days of 1970, thought perhaps World War III was coming. Richard Nixon knew better, though, or so he told the Associated Press. Perhaps we knew better, too, because we had seen so many Nixonian aberrations go by the American people and the rest of the world, and we were still here, intact.

Yes, and we are still here and kicking. A few things have changed since the fall we arrived at Harvard. The apocalypse is not so much in our thoughts, if at all. Alternate lifestyles are not quite so fashionable. There is a new administration at Harvard, if not in Washington. The same Faculty which felt tricked two years ago can find a way not to punish 30 black students who occupied Massachusetts Hall for a week. The radicals who remain have forsaken the streets for community organizing. And many students are studying, for a lack of anything better to do, with an eye on professional school, or on a traveling fellowship which prohibits recipients from staying in one European city for more than three weeks at a time. We have changed as well; I know I will always credit Harvard not for its academics, but for the people here who pointed up to me the contradictions of this world over four years.

Politics is still not a topic of much discussion. What is there to discuss when Mr. Nixon is going to run the country any way he wants to, regardless of what people say? He admits to it offhandedly; he is convinced that he has The Mandate. So he dismantles poverty programs, jails reporters, and makes pompous statements about draft resisters: "...[they] must pay their price, and that price is not a junket in the Peace Corps, or something like that, as some have suggested. The price is a criminal penalty for disobeying the laws of the United States." My ex-roommate, the same one who woke me up to tell me about the end of the world, is a draft resister. And we wonder about Richard Nixon. What is the criminal penalty for obliterating an entire country, for shredding the spirit of the American people, or for smothering respect for the office of the Presidency?

There must be some penalty, and that is why I think it is time for my generation of students to get out of school, go out into the real world, and best Mr. Nixon at his own strategies. He says Congress cannot make him spend money by legislating expenditures. But how long will Congress tolerate that kind of arrogance? The American people are waking up. Peace with honor in Vietnam is for now an unproven proposition. But should it last, I for one want no part of a post-war generation which repeats the horrible mistakes of its forebears. Count me out of Mr. Nixon's New Majority of comfortable Americans who leave the poor, the deprived, the sick and the old to tend for themselves in his modern-day laissez-faire society. We must find a way to counteract through persuasion and unremitting pressure the perversions of logic and priority practiced by Mr. Nixon; in this way we can prevent another Nixon. And that will be our success.

My greatest fear is that the slow pace of progress will be stilled altogether in the next four years, and that the generation which best knows the errors of the past four years will lose its will to challenge what is wrong in America. It is time to disturb the silence which afflicts our generation. The ultimate tragedy would be for us to submit to the despair and cynicism attributed to us and to our predecessors, and become an ineffectual generation lost to the disappointments of the past. President, 1972-73