The Movement Was Silent But Vietnam Is Winning

PRESIDENT EMERITUS Nathan M. Pusey '28, must be eating his heart out. The nasty events that made his last years here so painful--building seizures, picket lines spewing obscenities, the threat of constant disruption--disappeared this Spring, leaving only faint memories, seniors regaling freshmen in library alcoves and dining halls. Pusey probably wishes he had ridden out the storm and not retired early.

The only feeble attempt to stage a disruptive activity--the graduate student strike last March--was an unmitigated failure. Undergraduates ignored picket lines, crossing them in droves, keeping class attendance from falling off appreciably and breaking the strike in four days.

After that, it was all downhill. Undergraduates did not get another chance to ignore bullhorn calls to action because none were sounded. In past years, the Yard at 12 noon has been the recruitment site for afternoon demonstrations. This Spring, the Yard was as quiet as a murmuring meadow.

In retrospect, the prospects for any resurgence in radical activity this Spring were dashed last January when the Vietnam peace agreements were signed and one phase of the decade-long American involvement in Indochina came to an end. The war is not over by any means, but its searing vividness has been dimmed enough to sever left-liberals from the radical coalition and leave radicals themselves temporarily floating about with nowhere to turn.

Opposition to the genocide in Vietnam and varying degrees of support for the National Liberation Front has always been the issue that has unified radicals and left-liberals at Harvard and shaped the character of protest here for the past six years. Every Spring radicals have sought to make the war the central issue in activist campaigns; every Spring, the success of those campaigns has hinged upon the extent to which the radicals could persuade the liberals to close ranks.

In 1967, the coalition formed briefly: Robert McNamara came to town and was greeted rudely by demonstrators clambering over his automobile. The coalition was bound together more strongly in 1969: the link between ROTC and the war, aided by the bloody bust that followed the takeover of University Hall, insured the success of the ensuing strike.

In 1970, the alliance was imposed from the White House: Nixon's aggressive television speech announcing the invasion of Cambodia, coupled with the killings at Kent State, sparked resistance at Harvard and at hundreds of other campuses.

The coalition never formed in 1971. The radicals who shouted down the pro-war speakers at the Counter-Teach-In in March ran roughshod over liberal territory. Denying the Nixon supporters their right to free speech, however disgusting their positions, rubbed the liberals the wrong way--and served to splinter the coalition, thus eliminating the chance for an active Spring.

Even in 1972, when the Spring's activism was given a decidedly local flavor by the black students waging their struggle to force Harvard to sell its shares of Gulf Oil stock, the war added to the tumult. Nixon's decision to increase the bombing and to mine Haiphong Harbor in an attempt to stem the North Vietnamese offensive, coincided nicely with the blacks' seizure of Mass Hall. The war prompted unrest; enough to swell the size of the picket lines that circled constantly around the embattled Administration building.

Vietnam is not yet free from war, and Nixon's criminal bombing continues to murder, maim, starve and make homeless the people of Cambodia. Yet even to a skeptic, the overall situation in Indochina seems today more peaceful than it has been since America's original escalation in the early sixties. The relentless aerial bombardment of Laos and of both sections of Vietnam for the past decade, highlighted in a perverse way by the savage terror bombing last Christmas, have ended--perhaps for good.

Although the bombing in Cambodia--now in its 99th consecutive day--may be just as severe, it does not have the same immediate impact. Most students know little about Cambodia yet. Reporting from the country is scanty and shoddy, the outlines of the political dispute are hazy, and the revolutionary Khmer Rouge, to whom many Harvard students would be attracted, are still a shadowy and elusive force.

As a consequence, Watergate--which is close to home--has gripped students as well as the rest of the nation while the more monstrous crimes go unnoticed. There is no Cambodian Bach Mai Hospital yet to which one can point as a vivid and burning reminder that the war has not ended.

If the bombing continues uncontested, the eerie quiet will be shattered. Eventually, the voices of the screaming children will be heard at Harvard. Protest will slowly mount again, first in the form of picket lines and peaceful demonstrations, then, if the killing continues, the tear-gas and the riot-equipped police and rocks sailing lazily into the plate-glass windows will return to the Square. It may take as long as a year, but the criminality in Indochina will again be answered in the streets at home.

Vietnam, we recognize more as it seems to matter less, has touched all of us deeply. The first generation of sixties radicals links its conversions to the early civil rights movement and Cuba, but for those of us who quickened out anger in the latter part of the decade, Vietnam has been the critical experience.

THAT HAS there been about the character of this far-off struggle that has changed the lives of many of us? The professional sophists claim students opposed the war because they feared the draft. This analysis is a cousin of the explanation that hot weather caused ghetto rebellions. No revealing correlation between draft status and the intensity of antiwar militance has ever been proferred, and the skeptics will have to search deeper for a reasonable explanation.

Since the Second World War. Americans have been reared to hate aggression and indiscriminate killing. First the Nazis and then the Communists, we were told, were slaughterers and butchers on a vast scale, and the mass murder which characterized both of those political systems would soon characterize our system unless we kept up our guard continuously.

As the Vietnam war escalated and the body counts from Vietnam continued to mount, students, and others, began to apply this moral imperative against genocide against their own government. Even if the Vietnamese dead were all Communist automatons bent on subverting liberty, and even if the American cause was initially just, the extent of the killing, the mounds of the dead, indicated that the government was pursuing a policy of moral obscenity. No political goals were worth such a toll in lives.

Some people objected merely on grounds of inhumanity, while others protested the choice of targets itself. Many began to support, in varying degrees, the North Vietnamese National Liberation Front. But, in either case, for every activist who had come this far, the basis for a firm and lasting alliance was laid. The most hardened NLF supporter and the people who pasted white doves and peace symbols on their windshields had one goal in common--the killing must stop.

This aversion to mass murder of any sort, which grew with each year of bombing, napalming and free-fire zones, explains why a growing number of people, eventually including a majority of America's population, called for withdrawal from Vietnam. The continuing carnage sickened even those on the moderate right, and the unity against the killing gradually broadened.

Among students, however, who had access to greater information about the war and more time to ponder it, questions arose about the unseen enemy. In the face of a nearly total onslaught by the greatest military power in the world, why did these people continue fighting? Who were these Vietnamese, and why did they rebuild bridges with their bare hands and go into battle against an enemy that was vastly superior in the weapons of modern war? Why did they troop down the Ho Chi Minh trail, year after year, to face almost certain annihilation?

As our knowledge of the NLF and of North Vietnam grew, our political support for them also expanded. No longer was the killing itself our only reason for fighting against the war. A new dimension of hatred for the American government surged up in us. No longer were the actions of the U.S. government criminal merely because they unleased indiscriminate violence against a smaller nation. Now, we saw those actions as criminal because the destruction was intended to annihilate a people who were striving against almost insuperable odds to achieve some measure of dignity and control over their own lives--objectives Americans have traditionally championed.

Vietnam became for us a symbol, proof that socialism could work, that people could master their own destiny. The Vietnamese revolutionaries seemed almost superhuman, courageous and cooperative. Socialist Men and Women in the rice field and the high plateaus, calmly firing rifles skyward as American divebombers screamed down to engulf them in flaming destruction. Vietnam showed us that might can never subdue justice, that a people striving together to be free cannot be stopped short of genocide.

So we supported the National Liberation Front. We carried their flags, we honored their heroes, some of us went so far as to see ourselves fighting for them in the streets of America, a fifth column behind enemy lines. We awaited Vietnam's inevitable victory.

FORTUNATELY, the growing support for the NLF did not force radicals into tactics markedly different than those of the liberals who fought against the war on loftier, more abstract moral grounds. The goal for both groups was the same: an immediate end to American military involvement in Indochina. The liberals wanted the killing to stop; the radicals wanted the killing to stop and the NLF to win.

The radicals, of course, were always more strenuous in their opposition to the war, but their participation in trashing demonstrations one day did not prevent them from washing off the tear gas and joining a peaceful rally the next. The antiwar movement was always characterized by several levels of participation: prospective liberal law students could avoid arrest by not attending militant actions and still contribute meaningfully to ending the war by joining the peaceful waves of people who clogged the streets in quiet and orderly marches.

Because the goal was the same, the difference in tactics was usually not broad enough to destroy the radical-liberal coalition. The two groups might have disagreed about the reasons for the war, the structure of American society, the ultimate vision for the just society, but on the central issue of the day they were in agreement--the war must stop. Now that the war seems to be over, this bedrock basis for a firm alliance is eroding, and the two groups are crumbling away from each other.

If the Cambodian bombing continues through the summer, the alliance will reform. But if, as is more likely, Watergate and Congress force an end to the aerial genocide in Cambodia, the war, which has united and shaped American campus protests almost since its birth, will have disappeared. Barring another brutal American intervention in the Third World in the immediate future, radicalism on campus will come to a temporary stasis, probing gently for new outlets.

THE NUMBER of confirmed radicals here probably hovers somewhere around 200--perhaps half what it was at the peak of the 1969-70 activism. Though smaller, this number is still large enough to provide the initial spark for successful activist campaigns. Moreover, most of the Harvard left is centralized in the New American Movement, a group which eschews the fanatic factionalism of the most recent incarnation of SDS. Organizationally, the left is stronger than it has been since 1970. NAM conducted a wide range of activities this year, including support for the United Farmworkers lettuce boycott, a petition campaign against Harvard's Faculty hiring policy--which allegedly discriminates against radicals--and, Vietnam-America Friendship Week, a program of antiwar films and teachins about the war.

By past standards, all of these campaigns were well planned in advance, yet all of them failed in varying degrees. The immediate fault lay not with the radicals, but with the lack of response from Harvard's phalanxes of left-liberals, who still make up the bulk of the undergraduate population.

As recently as 1960, a majority of the undergraduates here were Republicans, but the flow of events in the sixties shoved the entire campus quite a few degrees to the left, situating most students at a point on the political spectrum where they could be drawn into support for activist campaigns.

The analysis by professional mystifiers at Time Magazine not-withstanding, most Harvard students still adhere to this hazy left-liberalism. Polls taken last Fall indicated that more than 70 per cent of Harvard's student body intended to vote for George McGovern for president, so it seems the making of a coalition still existed, and no apparent obstacles blocked a radical-liberal activist campaign this Spring.

But then the war ended, and with it ended the immediate chances for a successful activist upsurge. No sane person would exchange a resumption of the genocide in Vietnam for the increased activist prospects it would bring to Harvard, but no new formula for unity was found to replace the old one. NAM sputtered about, groping for a new basis for the old alliance.

Whether such a synthesis can be achieved at Harvard after Vietnam is an open question. The war presented us with a stark contrast between good and evil, a contrast which blurs into varying shades of grey on other issues. The criminal apocalypses that seemed so imminent at many junctures over the past decade tend to appear juvenile in retrospect. With the war nearly over, the imperatives for action are less obvious, less strident.

VIETNAM HAS CHANGED the lives of all of us. It has illuminated the yawning chasm between our government's professed ideals and its conduct. It has forced us to examine more closely our society and our history, searching for an explanation for the decade of genocide.

At the same time that Vietnam painted the contradictions of American society in blood-red, it hinted at a way out of the impasse. The Vietnamese have prevailed. They have gone several steps further toward winning their freedom and are now in the process of constructing a socialist society of freedom, humanity, equality and justice across all Vietnam. Though the tactics of their struggle have little immediate relevance to the tasks before us in a modernized society, their success in the face of insurmountable odds gives us heart that those tasks can be accomplished in America.

Despite their battling in the inferno, the Vietnamese have not lost their humanity. The violence which for decades they have been forced to content with and resort to has not obscured their goals or tarnished their ultimate vision. Vietnam will be free, and Vietnam has taught America the price and the value of freedom.