64. Why the Viet Nam Hawks Weren't So Dumb

-->

To all us right-thinking lovers of reason the reflex anti-communists, the kind that supported Joe McCarthy, were dumbheads, but how about the senators and Congressmen who drew on those dumbheads for support? They were of the postwar generation John Gaddis (recognized "dean of Cold War studies," and teaching at Ohio U.) credits with a very reasonable aim, to apply the great lesson of World War II: stop aggression early. They needed the bumper hawks so that they could avoid the catastrophic mistake of their predecessors, letting the Nazis get strong before they could be stopped. If only, they thought, they could have had American bumpers plastered with 'get them fascists' when Hitler sent his soldiers into the Rhineland.

So Barry Goldwater and those bumper hawks were working for peace. Yes, peace. Not in the way of the mild but in the way of the stern: through credible threat. "When we make war on you we don't stop until we've crushed you." That was the way of the Romans, and it accounts, say the stern, for the longest periods of peace the world has ever had. (At the moment, in 2011, they would say that way accounts for the long peacefulness of the two countries most thoroughly crushed in World War II.)

It's a respectable way. Ask historians. If you define peace as time without blood-spilling (not cold) war then, they'll tell you, the stern way has the advantage over the gentle way. Examine the periods during which people lived in peace and see what gave it to them. Count up the days. Severity wins.

To make it win, though, you have to have credibility. If you don't have a track record of successful severity, something approaching the Roman, or the Spartan (or the British, at times), nobody will believe your stern threats, the ones that keep them from spilling blood.

So there's the rationale for throwing your all into Viet Nam. You're doing it for your track record, which gives you credibility, which gives you enemies who fear you, and neutrals who respect you. How can you hold back?

You wouldn't, readers, be university people if you weren't ready with a dozen reasons but our interest now is clarity, and I think we've made a gain there. What looked like a war between dumbheads, armies of the night, comes into focus as a reasonable conflict. All the thinking politicians who made use of an unthinking base (and what thinking politician doesn't?) to avoid the mistakes their predecessors made were thinking reasonably. Acting to meet a threat on time is reasonable, and acting to maintain credible threats is reasonable. (Remember, "reasonable" does not mean "right.") On the other hand, all the apparently mindless Yippies had their minds on a reasonable goal too, to avoid complicity in a crime.  Everybody was acting reasonably.  There's the sixties for you.

In the event, some of us wound up justifying Yippies and some of us wound up justifying Hawks.  I wound up on the Yippie side but my reasons are too long for here. Next post: Why the Yippies Were Almost Right.

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.

62. The March on the Pentagon

In America the students' great cause was ending the Viet Nam war. What did drugs and beards and obscenities on the forehead have to do with it? Don't ask me. I was in East Asia getting steamed up over the Korean students' struggle to topple Syngman Rhee.

Very little of that Abbie Hoffman kind of side play had appeared, though, in the March on the Pentagon, at least in the part I saw. The leader of the OU group, senior Elaine Herrald, dressed straight and ran a pretty tight bus. Write down the schedule, show up on time, don't wander off at the potty stops.

Exuberance she left to her lieutenants, one of whom showed me what "counter-cultural" meant, at least at the time, with them. He got up and led a cheer. Only not a real cheer. It was a parody cheer, sending up the jocks and the school-spirit sophomores — the "establishment" they were against. Here's the way it went: "Gimme a G." "G. "Gimme an L." "L!" "Gimme an R." "R!" "Gimme a B." "B!" "Gimme a P" "P!" "Gimme an L." "F!" "F!" "Whaddya got?" And everybody turned themselves purple trying to pronounce GLRBPF.

In Washington we were turned over to leaders equally firm but much more knowledgeable than Elaine. They were veterans of the civil rights marches. "Eight abreast, men on the outside. Take off necklaces and bracelets, anything a hostile spectator might snatch. Hold hands. Don't respond to heckling. Keep going."

The immaturity I saw was touching. The demonstrators I was with knew little history. Those geezers on crutches falling in behind us at the reflecting pool. Who were they? The banner said, "Abraham Lincoln Brigade." What's that? They knew nothing of the Spanish Civil War. They used the word "fascist" with hardly an idea of its roots in Italy and Germany. It had become one of their words for "bad guys."

At the Pentagon, after the march across the bridge — serious, serious — I still couldn't be sure I wasn't seeing a mock. Some students knelt in the parking lot. Zen-looking. They were trying to levitate the Pentagon. They said.

The troops looked dead serious. The face I looked into, though as boyish as that of the students I was with, looked determined to follow orders. His bayonet was across his chest, as with others down the line. The orders would have come from his commanding officer, probably a captain. I, ready to cross the line he was ordered to defend, was a commander in the Naval Reserve, the equivalent of a lieutenant-colonel. I was tempted to do some mischief, showing him my ID card. Messing with his head. A surge of returning maturity stopped me.

I didn't have to cross the line; I found a way around it, and reached a grassy place, with small trees. Standing there I saw solders in the parking lot being formed into some kind of phalanx. They then marched toward the grassy place which, I saw, was filled with students who, like me, had found a way around, or broken through. The soldiers were in close order, taking tiny steps, their bayoneted rifles back across their chests. They marched in those bitty shuffling steps, the students having plenty of time to give way before them — the reason for the shuffle, I suppose — all the way to where I was. There they did a right flank, then another right flank, and shuffled back to the lot. The students resumed their position.

What was that about? I pictured the captain, thumbing through his tactics book. What the hell fits this situation? Ask the colonel, up on the roof. "Try the double-close-order sortie."

"Aye, aye," or whatever they say in the Army.

"Shit, that didn't work. Got any other ideas, major?" What a time to be an Army officer!

I made it to the steps of the Pentagon but didn't stay. It was impressive, the way people were sitting there silently in the half-dark, waiting to be arrested. It was too big a thing for me, though, and I had to get back to the bus.

61. The Student March that Brought Down Syngman Rhee.

-->

One of Hitler's gifts to the 20th century (and Lord knows how many later centuries) is greater confidence in the use of the word "evil." We may once, facing the mixed-up moral world, have been at a loss to find a reference for that word, but no more. Hitler nailed it, and at the same time nailed "good" as its opposite.

I think of that clarity now when I remember my response to the first two riots (or law-breaking demonstrations) I knew anything about. In the first, that at Newport in 1960 (see preceding Post), the students were to me clearly Yahoos, with no cause but their own pleasure. In the second, that at Korea University in the same year, the students were clearly true-blue soldiers in the fight for justice and democracy, the most noble political cause university people can have.

Though both of my responses were equally sure, my love for the fighters for justice and democracy went much deeper than my dislike of the Yahoos. I came home looking for a student leader to hug.  So too would you, university friend, if you had heard what I heard.

Try listening to this. A Korean professor of American Studies is explaining, over coffee, the political situation in 1960. "Syngman Rhee's way of governing is to declare martial law, round up the assembly members opposed to him, and make them vote his way. That's what he did in 1952, to defeat a motion for parliamentary government. He did the same kind of thing in March, 1960, to get himself re-elected. And nobody was doing anything about it.

"Except the students. You know what they did, the students of my university, my students? With the streets and housetops full of soldiers they organized a march, here to the Blue House, three miles, to try to pull the townspeople into some kind of fight. Fight all right. The soldiers let them have it. From the rooftops. When they reached the square. Two hundred [142, later] of them were killed, 2000 [1500, later] wounded. Our students they were, and students from the other universities, who joined the march on the way.

"Well, we had a faculty meeting to decide whether we should march.  But too many professors were afraid for their jobs, and maybe their lives, for us to make a decision. Still, when we came out each individual faced a choice. Turn one way and you were on a streetcar heading for your house. Turn the other way and you were heading for the government buildings. Some students had gathered around that path, waiting to see and, hopefully, help.

"Most profs went home but enough of us turned toward town to excite the students, who gathered around offering aid. 'Do you need a jacket? Water? A hat?' More students came running up, with some running right back toward the dormitories, carrying the news.

"There on the grass we made our banners, two of them. (A student had suddenly appeared with, surprise, cloth, paint, and poles.) On the first banner we wrote this: [My informant —  whose name, alas, I cannot now dredge up — put words, in Korean, on a card I still have.] It says, 'Make up for the bloodshed of our students.' On the second banner we wrote, 'Syngman Rhee, step down.'

"By now there were a lot of students, falling in behind us and cheering as we moved through the campus toward the streets. It was a rare thing in Korea. University teachers here are highly respected but aloof. They don't do this kind of thing. Ordinary students were amazed, as you could hear in the shouts from our margins to those in the buildings. 'The professors are marching! The professors are marching!'

"But it really was a student march. They poured in from all parts the campus, gathering behind their leaders. These leaders had been through it before — yes, all those dead, all those wounded, many by hostile (hired?) people on the sidewalks — and they knew what they were doing. They knew what we were worth to them. You could see that as we got to the campus exit onto the city streets. There we could see figures on rooftops. There the sidewalks were filling up. Just before we got to them, at some leader's sign (I suppose), the students formed ranks around us, front and sides, to protect us.

"There was little cheering from the students. It was too tense. And from the streets and windows, at first there was near silence. Surprise, I think. But you could hear individual voices. 'The professors are marching. The professors!'"

If I there had been any pretense to objectivity before it would have broken down here.  I get worked up as I think about it now and my source then, for all his Asian reserve, broke at this point into open confession. He had gotten a Ph.D. in American Studies at some Midwestern university. Drawing on material at the USIS, and on talks by Fulbrighters like me,  he had for eight years or more been teaching students the values of critical inquiry, open discussion, and democratic government. And he'd seen those values trampled on, and trampled on. And he'd done nothing about it. Now here were his students, not only putting their lives on the line for those values but putting them on the line for him.  It was the high point of his teaching life, maybe his life. He confessed it and said, "I looked at those students between me and the crowd and I said, 'I don't care if I die. I will finish this march with them.'"

The rest of his story was wonder. The streets began to cheer. "The students! The professors! Go! Go! Yea! Yea!" People came out of the doors with sandwiches. An elderly man broke through to give my colleague a Coke. There were more and more of them, the closer they got to the government house. The figures on the rooftops melted away. In the square there was unity, expressing itself in a roar. From streets and houses.

They stood for a while, presenting their message, then went their ways. My friend went to a noodle shop with some colleagues. "We went home not sure whether we'd have jobs the next day. Or a home." Next day, 26 April, a student came bursting in. "We won. We won. Rhee is resigning. We won."

If you react to that story as I did you can imagine the kind of shape I was in when, back in the States before the year was out, I joined the March on the Pentagon.  Next Post.

60. Memories of the Newport Jazz Festival Riots of 1960

-->

When will we ever have a riot like the one that closed down the Newport Jazz Festival in 1960? I mean a riot like, when it's over things are clear. At Newport you had students just drunk, just partying, throwing rocks at the police just to make trouble. Rich kids' trouble. They'd come into town in MGs and BMWs (you saw dozens of them down by the beach — I was there) and their clothes (when they kept them on) were the latest Bermuda fashion. Moralists like me could express pure disapproval.

And what support we had! The music community was right with us, mad as hell about losing their festival. And to whom? Not to people worked up by the music. Not to people so eager for it that they'd fight to get tickets. No. To people who didn't know crap about the music. Or anything. I believe it was Whitney Balliett, jazz critic of the New Yorker, who called them "Yahoos." Yes, Swift's name for unregenerate mankind. Gulliver found them in trees, throwing excrement. Perfect.

And the intellectual community? Oh, they were with us. They had to be. The whole thing started in downtown Newport when a fight broke out between two fraternities. Intellectuals can't be seen close to fraternities. They run with the music community. Whitney Balliett.

So we were at the center of a solid moral, esthetic, and intellectual front with a clear view of the opponents we faced. They were the uneducated; we were the educated. They were the immature; we were the mature.

That was 1960. In a few years nothing was clear. What looked like the same youth, throwing the same rock at the same policeman, could not really be the same youth, the one we disapproved of. He had a cause. First civil rights, then ending the war in Viet Nam. We approved of those causes. We were, by and large, doing nothing to further them. How could we disapprove of this youth who was, at least, doing something? Who was "more moral"? Could you call somebody less mature and educated than you were when he was more moral?

Then there was the view of policemen. In 1960 the young people were looking at officials with no history. A few years later they were looking at officials with a history of "brutality," variously earned but surely named. That let the young refocus our attention, and quickly. The issue after a riot (or an act of "civil disobedience"; it all came under "lawbreaking") became the performance of the authorities. "Yes, we broke the law but you didn't punish us right." Well, sometimes the police punished right and sometimes they didn't. Oi. There were enough complications without adding that one.

The recent riots in England roused my memory of these sixties' complications. The riots' origin in a protest over police action against a minority immediately raised a banner like one I honored in the sixties. The subsequent mindless behavior raised the same doubts. The authorities' reaction raised the same question about punishment.

All this makes me realize how lucky I am, in a sad sort of old-age way. The chances of life seem to have put me far closer to significant riots (or acts of disobedience) than a moralist has any right to expect. After the Newport riots I was in the student march on the Pentagon in 1967 and I was on the campus of Ohio University in 1968. I knew all about the bombing of the ROTC building and the storming of the President's house and the coming of the National Guard and the closing of the University. And I was in Seoul, South Korea, close enough to the fall of Syngman Rhee to be inspired — no, thrilled — by an account of the march that brought him down.

At the same time I was lucky to be assigned to teach two authors not often found in one professor's course assignments, Herman Melville and John Milton. Nowhere else could I have stumbled on such well-timed wisdom about the riotous human being. In the next post or two I will, as I recall the riots and street actions I have witnessed, try to make something of my luck.

59. "Proper"

An LRB blogger says, "I live about halfway between the site of the Olympics and the closest proper looting spree that I heard of, in Bethnal Green."

By this time we're used to the British use of "proper" (short for "what can properly be called a") but in some contexts, jeez.

58. "Consigned"

 

"The educated and affluent enjoy relatively strong, stable families. Everyone else is more likely to be consigned to unstable, unworkable ones." W. Bradford Wilcox, associate professor of sociology, U. of Virginia, quoted in NYT 8-17-11.

"Consigned to," like freight to a shipper, like an embezzler to Sing Sing, like a soldier to a triage row.  "Who put me in this lousy situation? Certainly not me."

If you deal with forces, as sociologists do, you can make a correction. "Son, you should be asking, 'What put me in this relationship?'" Deprivation, culture, heritage, oppression, anything but education and affluence will do.

"Consigned" is one of those removal-words, the thing removed always being personal responsibility. It does for us what "fate" did for Greeks and "predestination" did for Christians. Except that it does add something personal. There's always a hand in sight, signing the commitment papers, the bill of lading, the diagnosis — all visible in the Latin root, consignare, to put one's seal to.

Not that a writer can't obscure it, as Wilcox does, with that impersonal passive. Somebody's signing the sentence that sends you to a life of dysfunction, but who? Maybe the educated? No, if you name them you've got to argue, out in the light. Better the dark suggestion. Some kind of — could it be — conspiracy?

No, suggestions of conspiracy are inappropriate in science. Keep people out. "Consigned" will do for that. It gives you the impersonal force, it lets you see a system at work, but it gives it a hand, signing. Something you can blame, however faintly, and be superior to.