63. Hawks and Yippies, 1968

To be "good," you have to be "a good citizen," and in a democracy that means being "engaged" in politics, and that means supporting a side. But you have to support a good side, and if one side is doing more good than another you have to support it. But sometimes the goodness is very hard to see, and in riots it can be impossible.

It was close to impossible, at least for me, in the student riots of 1968. I'd come back from East Asia ready to believe that anti-establishment riots by university students, the enlightened, the well taught (by people like me), were almost sure to be good. They might not be as good as the Korea University students, demanding that their government live up to the democratic ideals taught them by their American-studies professors, but still, they'd be good.

In the 1967 March on the Pentagon the university students, at least the ones I saw, looked pretty good. And I thought I saw them clearly. Then in 1968 I didn't know what I was seeing. There on the screen were the Yippies. There were our students, painted like savages. Soon on bookstands there would be Jerry Rubin's "Do It" and Abbie Hoffman's "Steal This Book." What the hell did all that have to do with ending the war in Viet Nam? How could it possibly serve the good cause?

Irrelevance, diffusion of force, childishness — that's what we all saw in those people. Yet we had to call the side they were on the "good" one. It had to be good. The other side was the uneducated, unenlightened one: get-them-commies, nail-that-coonskin-to-the-wall, get-your-heart-in-America-or-get-your-ass-out.

Well, if you have to be on a doubtful side you'll find a way to explain the bad in it. Some of my colleagues and I told ourselves that in all that incomprehensible behavior the students were making a comprehensible moral statement: "We refuse to be accomplices in a national crime." Avoiding complicity in a crime is as morally respectable a thing as you can do, right? Hadn't we just been calling for it in Germany? "Where were the good Germans?" Well, the good Americans, those Yippies, were saying, "We're bailing out, and we're calling your attention to this open hatch here in your heartless bomber." The obscenity we saw on a 19-year-old's forehead said, "I am not Curtis LeMay."

I had seen some Curtis LeMay types during my own service. They loved what they were doing. War was their life, what they had trained for. But to keep it up they had to have an enemy. With the Axis gone they didn't need much of an excuse to turn somebody into an enemy, and the communists were giving them plenty of excuses. Those career war guys were dangerous and the bumper hawks made them more dangerous (great heavens, they could push us through Viet Nam right into a war with the Chinese). So the Yippies were onto something, it was rational, they were good, and we were good in supporting them.

That took some seeing, but we eventually saw it or came up with it. What we peace profs were incapable of seeing in 1968 was that the other irrational ones, the bumper hawks, might have been onto something too. You could make a case for their rationality. Next post: Why the Viet Nam Hawks Weren't So Dumb.