chapter 12 Omnipresence of Vietnam

Page 157 →The big bang of the Sixties was the combination of the Vietnam War and the social movement for equality for minorities and women. We have had societal upheavals before that did not propel the youth to revolt. The real difference was that boomers had a real stake in these issues. The sins of the past came crashing down on us all at once, a perfect storm.

The turmoil surrounding the Law School and the greater university was unrelenting for most of my law school tenure. Protest activities against the Vietnam War and the emergent Black empowerment movement were ever present and often disrupted classes. In 1967 and 1968, the Law School was impacted by urban race riots and a tumultuous presidential election that divided the nation over the Vietnam War. President Lyndon B. Johnson announced on March 31, 1968, that he would not seek the presidency again because of challenges within the Democratic Party to his leadership in waging a hugely unpopular war. The caldron of hate simmering in the country reached such intensity that it ultimately exploded with two seminal political assassinations. During my spring break from law school, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, during his protest activities on behalf of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. And during final law school exams, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated on June 5, 1968, after his victory in the California primary for the Democratic nomination for President. The Kennedy assassination resulted in the cancellation Page 158 →of two law school exams—Property Law and the Development of Legal Institutions.

The morning after RFK’s death, an impromptu assembly was held in front of Langdell Hall to give students space to grieve. Professor Adam Yarmolinsky, one of President Kennedy’s whiz kids who was an aide to Secretary McNamara in the US Department of Defense, spoke to us to provide solace to those looking for closure in their despair. He recounted a parable about an island that was about to experience impending devastation because of an approaching tsunami. Since there was no escape from the disaster, most islanders either prayed or drowned their sorrow in alcohol. One islander sat quietly in his house working on a complicated equation. In the final hours, he was searching for the answer that would enable islanders to live underwater. Professor Yarmolinsky described that person as the Bobby Kennedy he knew—a person who never stopped trying to better society, even in the face of insurmountable obstacles. I have never forgotten that parable.

Unlike the two world wars and Korea, where we took up arms with clarity because we were aggressed upon, Vietnam was a war of ideology and choice. From the very start, the country was ambivalent about the war. We, and the French before us, failed to recognize that the Vietnam conflict was driven by nationalism. Mistakenly, we viewed the world as a big power chess board and felt that we would yield strategic advantage if we allowed one of our pawns to be captured.

The Vietnam War touched everyone in the United States. Every young male was vulnerable to the draft and faced life-altering choices. My student deferment ran out at the beginning of my second year at Harvard Law School. I was required to report for a military physical at the Boston Navy Yard. After passing, I was classified as 1-A—ready for service. I desperately needed options to avoid being drafted. Most of us experienced the anguish of being presented with the dilemma of serving our country, as we had been taught in Page 159 →the Fifties, or shirking our civic responsibilities through deceit or flight.

My first thought was to try to enlist in the Naval Officer Training Program at Harvard. I had been in the Navy ROTC program for a year at USC before I withdrew because the Navy would not permit me to study law. I figured that, since I was partially schooled in military science, I would have a leg-up in the Harvard program. However, there were so many students knocking on that door that it rapidly closed for me.

My next thought was attending medical school. However, timing was not in my favor. Under the best-case scenario, I would not be admitted until the fall of the following year and surely could not avoid the draft for 10 months.

My only option was to consult with an anti-war physician on Beacon Hill, who had a knack for creatively reading the military medical requirements. As the doctor was acquainting me with the medical conditions that would qualify for a deferral, he got to migraine headaches that were frequent and incapacitating. I recalled being diagnosed with migraine headaches when I was at USC. During the winter months, I would swim in a warm and humid pool. Every time I went outside into the cold air after swimming, I would get excruciatingly painful headaches. I went to the campus physician who diagnosed me as having migraine headaches and prescribed a strong painkiller. So there it was in the record that I might possibly qualify for that medical deferment. All that was necessary was to argue that the headaches were frequent and incapacitating. Suffice it to say that I was able to convince my draft board that I qualified for the deferment. However, the decision was not free of politics.

The five-member Orangeburg draft board had one African American, Earl Middleton; he was a classmate of my father in college, and he knew our family well. Mr. Middleton was very politically adept. Years later, he became the first African American to be elected to the State House of Representatives from Orangeburg County since Page 160 →Reconstruction. His view was very utilitarian. Since most of the young men drafted from Orangeburg County were Black, he saw no need to draft one of the most talented students from the county. I had done the Black community proud by attending Harvard Law School. Since he had an argument to hang his hat on—a medical condition that could neither be proved or disproved—he carried the day. I am truly indebted to Mr. Middleton, who was later awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor by President Bush.

Many others in my class were not so lucky. My class started out with more than 600 students in 1967 and graduated about 379 in 1970. Some were drafted, others enlisted or sought alternative service to get a better deal. I don’t know if any were conscientious objectors or sought safe haven in Canada, the most radical and life-altering option.

Protest over the Vietnam War took a focal point at Harvard during April 1969. Students took over Massachusetts Hall, where the office of the university president was located. Unwisely, the administration called in riot police from the Cambridge Police Department. Mayhem ensued with 45 injured and 184 arrested. The bloody confrontation precipitated a student strike. The university ultimately made two concessions to end the strike and massive rallies: removing ROTC from campus and creating an Afro-American studies department.

The escalating police/student confrontations spawned an even larger protest rally on April 15, 1970. This was labeled the worst civil disturbance in Massachusetts history. The protest began as a peaceful rally on Boston Common against the military use of taxes. The leaders led the march down Massachusetts Avenue to Harvard Square. There, approximately 3,000 protesters were confronted by about 2,000 policemen from seven police jurisdictions. Chaos ensued with protesters throwing rocks, bricks, and bottles at the police, who met this violence with billystick beatings. The confrontation lasted for five hours resulting in $100,000 property damages to nearby Page 161 →businesses with hundreds of shop windows broken and fires set. There were 214 injuries on both sides and 35 arrests.

The Vietnam War split the country into two camps and claimed almost 60,000 US lives. Unlike World War II, it was a conflict in which the poor bore the brunt of the fighting. You could escape the fight if you got a student deferment or had the right connections. The war caused a polarization between college educated anti-war protestors and members of the blue-collar class who did the fighting. Class difference manifested itself in conflicts between college educated protesters and blue-collar police and National Guardsmen. One need only recall the police riot in Chicago at the 1968 Democratic National Convention or the shootings at Kent State in Ohio and South Carolina State College in Orangeburg.

The Orangeburg shootings, dubbed the Orangeburg Massacre, devolved from a group of South Carolina State College students picketing against the racial segregation of All-Star Triangle Bowl, a local bowling alley. Other students showed solidarity around a bonfire at the front of the campus. On February 8, 1968, the second evening of protest, South Carolina Highway Patrol troopers opened fire on the defenseless students at the bonfire, leaving three dead (two college students, Henry Smith and Samuel Hammond Jr. and one 19-year-old high school student, Delano Middleton) and 28 others injured. Cecil Williams, renowned civil rights photographer and author, recounts that the “less commonly” known narrative is that of the 30 troopers ordered to load their weapons and fire, 21 refused to obey the order as a matter of conscience, which adds to the complexity of the tragedy.¹

The leadership of the South Carolina Highway Patrol was responsible for events spinning out of control through the massive buildup of Highway Patrol troopers, National Guard, and other armed law enforcement personnel the day preceding the shooting. Armored tanks were deployed to patrol the streets, including Buckley Street where my parents were living. It is a double tragedy that no Page 162 →one was held legally responsible for the command ordering the firing or the shootings that followed.

The Orangeburg Massacre occurred during my first year of law school. The horror of that tragic event outraged and devastated me. While I did not know the students killed, my brother, Roy, knew Delano Middleton, who was in a class behind him at Wilkinson High School. I did have a high school classmate who was wounded. Although I had heard about lynchings of Black folks in South Carolina while growing up, I had not been closely connected to those monstrous events. But now the savagery was real since the killings occurred on the college campus that I frequented on at least a weekly basis while growing up in Orangeburg in the 1950s and ’60s. The white establishment had stooped to a new low by unleashing such deadly force on students exercising their First Amendment right to peacefully protest. One thousand miles away in Cambridge, the barbarous act prompted a friend from Columbia at Wellesley College and me to compose an editorial expressing our outrage, which she said was to be posted in a Columbia newspaper.

Where we stood on Vietnam would prove to define the political fault line decades later. The academic and social elite put up a presidential candidate—George McGovern—who reflected its anti-war, anti-establishment animus. He was trounced in the 1972 election, carrying only liberal Massachusetts. The liberal antics of the Sixties—trashing university offices, open drug use, and free love—had alienated many. Richard Nixon’s election in 1968, and especially Ronald Reagan’s in 1980, heralded a long era of right-wing hegemony.

The Sixties did much to advance the rights of minorities and women. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, passed in the wake of widespread social discontent, propelled the advancement of civil rights. The presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are testament to the changes that took place in the Sixties.

Page 163 →But the Sixties left an ugly byproduct. That period imbued boomers with an overarching sense of entitlement that exists to this very day. With the prosperity handed to them through the sacrifices of their parents, boomers felt no need to sacrifice or curb their self-indulgent desires or to accept conformity or limitations. And the beat goes on. The boomers refused to curb their desires as they grew older. Many attribute the excesses that led to the 2009 financial crisis to the insatiable greed of boomers. After all, boomers presided over many of Wall Street’s excesses—we felt that the party would just go on forever without consequences. Boomers are finally learning a hard lesson that nothing comes without a price. The ultimate revenge is that many are forced to work well into their twilight years and forego what might otherwise be a relaxing retirement.