Seventy-Seven Years of Editorial Freedom
EDITED .AND MANAGED BY STUDENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
UNDER AUTHORITY OF BOARD IN CONTROL OF STUDENT PUBLICATIONS
TwO views of the Columbia protest
On inhibitions Columbia never learned
-,
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Truth Will Prevail
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.Editorials printed in The Michigan Daily express the individual opinions of staff writers
or t L editors. This must be noted in all reprints.-
SATURDAY, MAY 4, 1968
NIGHT EDITOR: JOHN GRAY
. ,...+.w_..
The war isn't over yet
THE APPARENT agreement by Wash-
ington and Hanoi on .Paris as a site
for preliminary peace negotiations, of-'
fers, after many disappointments, a
glimmer of hope that an end to the Viet-
nam bloodbath may be in sight.
No one, however, should be deceived
into thinking that the war is now over-
as so many apparently were when Presi-
dent Johnson made his March 31 offer
to Hanoi.
Regardless of what is happening on
the diplomatic scene, the war in South-
east Asia has continued unabated. The
original promised bombing halt has
proved to be a cruel deception, for U.S.
planes are now dropping more explosives
south of the 20th parallel than they for-
merly dropped on all of North Vietnam.'
Within a week of Hanoi's initial agree-
ment to preliminary peace talks, the U.S.-
South Vietnamese command launched two,
massive search - and - destroy missions"
named "Determine to Win" and "Total
Victory" in what was hardly a concilia-
tory gesture.
THE RECORD on the Commnist side
has not been altogether. commend-
able. While the North Vietnamese did'
lift the siege of Khe Sanh shortly after
By MURRAY KEMPTON
I HAVE hated it as long as I
can remember and I am no
fair judge of its agony: After all,
an institution which has had on
Its Board of Trustees at the same
time the publisher of the New
York Times and the District At-'
torney of New York County can
get away with pretty much any-
thing in the way of lies and
swindles in this town. These things
are really not Columbia's fault,
since it has'never learned those
inhibitions - public opinion and
the force of law.
So I am a man whose dream for
Columbia is that it fall into ruin
like the Roman Forum, in the
18th century, with the Church
putting a cross over it, the grass
growing, the peasants tethering
their goats and, an occasional
traveler musing over the vanity of
worldly pride.
Still it does have inhabitants.
And what must it be like to teach
political science at Columbia?
Your theme is presumed to in-
clude the normal means by which
citizens impress their will on the
agencies of government. And you
teach against the background of
your university's decision to build
a gymnasium in Morningside
Park. That is hardly as bad an
example of Columbia's attitude
toward its neighbors as was the
outright contempt expressed for
them by Jacques Barzun when he
was Columbia's Provost three years
ago; still it is a fair sample of its
normal indifference. Harlem's pol-
iticans protested; Mayor Lindsay
had doubts; Columbia went ahead.
SO THEN a few hundred stu-
dents went on a sitdown strike;
and, as one of the fantasies which
afflict institutions with the garri-
son mentality, there arose the ru-
mor that Harlem might invade
the campus. Then and only then,
Columbia decided to halt con-
struction of,' the gymnasium.
Peaceful objections failed; direct
action and the rumor of riot may
have succeeded. It is difficult to
envy the political scientist who,
after that experience, has to go
on explaining the resources of the
orderly processes of democratic
debate our system,offers the poor
and powerless.
Yet you commence after a day
or so to feel a curious affection
the bombing halt; that action has not
been followed up and in fact, attacks on
the south seem to have intensified in re-
cent days. However, the Communist pos-
tion is understandalge in the light of in-
tensified American attacks.
So while diplomats pirouette about a
time and place' for the talks, men, Amer-
ican and Vietnamese, soldiers and civil-
ians continue to die and the physical
and psychological destruction of Vietnam
goes on.
The first order of business when talks
'begin next week must be an uncondition-
al halt to the bombing and an immediate
bilateral cease fire. Neither side can al-
low the fighting to continue while talks
drag on, as was the case in Korea; the
human cost outweighs ,any possible ben-
efit.
IN VIEW of this, requests by some politi-
cal figures, including formertVice Pres-
i'dent :RichardM. Nixon, that there be a'
moratorium on any debate about Viet.-
nam while peace talks are conducted is
clearly out of place. Every sort of political
pressure must be brought to bear to force
a speedy and unconditional cease fire.
The war is not over yet.
-STEVE WILDSTROM
for the faculty. What President
Kirk abandoned, these men in
their poor confused way have de-
fended.
They are faintly ridiculous, of
course. You have to look and
sound ridiculous when the repre-
sentatives of order have scuttled
and you are brave enough to step
in and try to do their job, with no
loftier credential than is encom-
passed by the phrase ad hoc. On
the one side you have student
rebels whose prime demand was
that they be guaranteed immuni-
ty from any punishment for what
they had done and thus recog-
nized as still members of our great
untorturable middle class. On the
other you have anti-rebel students
whose only demand was for pun-
ishment.
Across from you is Mathematics
Hall where Tom Hayden com-
mands a college repertory com-
pany doing Marat-Sade; behind
you is Hamilton Hall, now Mal-
colm X University; Stokeley Car-
michael declared president. Be-
fore you is the terrible muddle
around the Low Library, where
students punched one another yes-
terday and where the motorcycle
cops waited to be unchained.
The faculty did not meet the
occasion with very impressive
rhetoric. Its conversation sound-
ed too much like the cartoons of
Jules Feiffer or letters in the New
York Review of Books.
ITS MEMBERS do not always
conduct themselves with a proper
sense of their own dignity. Since
Friday theyhad cordoned off Low
Library, because anti-rebel stu-
dents threatened to riot unless
the demonstrators were stopped]
from going in and out of there.
Yesterday afternoon, the dem-
onstrators outside began throwing
food at the demonstrators inside.
Every now and then, they would-
fire too low-Columbia has a de-
plorable record for completing
passes-and a broken piece of cit-
rus would fall on some professor
with tenure. Still they stood, with
accepted loss of dignity, and tried
to uphold the honor of their uni-
versity. Nowhere, in these melan-
choly scenes, was president Gray-
son Kirk visible. Whether by fair
means or foul, this poor man will
do nothing for his honor. His suit
will be free of stain and his rec-
ord free of nobility to the end.
Copyrigh,t 1968
New York Post Corporation
.
4
,i
Poverty
DID YOU KNOW "the conduct of the
vital ffunctions of the U.S. govern-
ment in the nation's capital is being se-
riously threatened by the actions of a
handful of self-annointed 'feaders of the
poor?'"
Sen. Long (D-La.) does. And he had the.
spunk to say so from the senate floor of
the nation's capital last week.
'"These disciples of lawlessness and civil
disorder are in the process of hoodwink-
ing thousands of the poor and downtrod-
den in our society that the way to get
what they want is to stage a mass 'camp-
in' or 'sit-in' in our nation's capital-the
object being to disrupt the work of our
government and thus blackmail Con-
gress, and the President into acceding to
any and all of their demands no matter
how outrageous or unjust some of them
may be."
Luckily, Sen. Long "will never bow to
threats, intimidation or blackmail." Rev.
Abernathy, one such self-annointed lead-
er of the poor requested in sugar coated"
words to see the senator, but the senator
knew what the disciple of deception was
really after.
"I WOULD be glad to go to see the pa-
rade," he said. "However, if they think
they can intimidate .;the junior senator
from Louisiana into voting to bankrupt
this government by paying people to be
more worthless than they are, or by pay-
ing people who refuse to work, they are.
making a mistake."
We must really understand, as Sen.
Long does, that despite our liberal inten-
tions and leanings, we must not succumb,
to the seductive lure. of Rev. Abernathy
and the handful of poor people who fol-
low him.
Even some well-intentioned senators,
like Sens. Hart (D-Mich), and Percy (R-
111.) have fallen into Abernathy's at-
tractive trap.
But we must beware the dangerous;
rallying cry of the poor.
"We're not going. to have white power
or black power," harangued Abernathy
in Memphis Thursday before the begin-
ning of the Poor People's March which
will end in our nation's capital. "We're
going to have poor power."
Sen. Long anticipates that these poor
people will'riot and burn, not because
they always have, but because he has seen
them do it of late. And Sen. Long knows
a fad when he sees one.
But the senator 'knows where this sort
of thing should stop.
"AS FAR AS I am concerned, when that
bunch of marchers comes here, if
they want to do so, before I would yield
to that kind of demand ('paying people
to be more worthless tha nthey are'),
whether done through riots, demonstra-
tions or intimidation, they can just burn
down the whole place and we will move
the national capital somewhere else
where we have someone who has cour-
age enough to enforce the law and put
those rioters in jail."
"We don't want to lose a man like the
senator, or a city like Washington. Surely
our American traditions should not be
sacrificed for the sake of human life.
Poor folk were really always lazy and not
very likeable anyway.
While Sen. Long recommends "censure"
or expulsion of any public official who
would tolerate law violation, you really
can't help but feel sorry for them. They
are misguided.
At the same time, we must pity the
senator whose old-fashioned words ci
wisdom too often are dismissed by those
who heed what they read.
Poor Sens. Hart, Percy.
Poor Sens. Long, Stennis and Byrd.
Poor people.
-HENRY GRIX
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5 Beekman Street
By RICHARD ANTHONY
College Press Service
NEW YORK-The elevators in
the building at Five Beekman
Street in Lower Manhattan don't
run all the way to the top.
They stop at the ninth floor,
which is sufficient for the lawyers,
architects,'and other professional
men who have offices there, but
not for the people who work on
the tenth floor, who must climb a
narrow flight of stairs to get to
work. The steps on the staircase
are rundown; the walls beside
them are grimy and flakey, all of
which is in sharp contrast with the
demure paneling and sparkling
mosaics that line the interior of
the elevators.
The contrast is appropriate be-
cause the stairs lead into New
York's "Peace Pentagon," a con-
glomeration of groups and non-
groups, organizations and publica-
tions, peace professionals and
amateurs, all of them working one
way or another to end the war
and all of them, without excep-
tion, poor.
Every office has its posters.
sometimes rising all the way up
the walls and spilling over onto the
ceiling. A visitor can identify, some
of the offices simply by looking at
their posters.
The Resistance, for example, has
familiar ones with legends such as
"Make love, not war," "Support
the troops, bring them home," and
"Where have all the young men
gone?" It also has do-it-yourself
posters which includes a clipping
of Bobby Kennedy with his hand
outstretched. Just beyond his hand
someone has pasted in a photo of
Eugene McCarthy's head. "Bouncy,
bouncy McCarthy," Kennedy is,
saying and someone has given Mc-
Carthy the label "co-opter."
The CatholichPeace Fellowship,
right next to the Resistance, has
some of the same posters but also
many that aren't found anywhere
else on the tenth floor-colorful
message posters by Sister Mary
Ceritea, a friend of the CPF, and
a large poster with the words "no
more war. War never again," a
quote from Pope Paul.
THE RESISTANCE and CPF of-
fices are \the first ones a visitor
sees when entering by the main
door. Beyond them are the of-
fices of the War Resisters League,
the oldest of the tenth floor group.
Since its founding in 1923, the
WRL has become a well-establish-
ed pacifist organization with a
more or less dependable middle
class membership (which is now
in Non-Violence; the WRL's New
York Action Branch; Liberation
magazine, which is edited by David
Delinger, who is also a co-chair-
man of the October 21 Pentagon
march; and WIN magazine, a bi-
weekly that has recently become
the official organ of /the WRL.,
In addition, there are traces of
organizations now defunct. Most
notably, the Committee for Non-
Violent Action, which merged with
the WRL last fall. In the office
once occupied by the CNVA are
large, round signs made of wood
and attached to long staffs which
bear the legend "Walk for peace-
San Francisco to Moscow." Above
one of them is a large map of the
United States with the walk route
across the country carefully mark-
ed on it.
Near the Resistance offices is
the office of the Teachers Com-
mittee on Vietnam. The commit-
tee has just placed the largest pro-
test ad in history in the April 15
New York Times-three full pages,
more than 9,300 names of college,
elementary and secondary teach-
ers. Yet it now rarely uses its of-
fice at Five Beekman. Most of the
time the office is used by the Re-
sistance for draft counseling.
The WRL is clearly the central
organization at Five Beekman. It
has been there the longest. It lends
its space to less established groups
like the Resistance rent-free. Its
officersare active in several of
the other organizations at Five
Beekman. For example, until his
death last year, A. J. Mustie; the
well-known pacifist, was chairman
of the editorial board of Liberation
magazine in addition to being head
of the WRL.
THERE ARE obvious advantages
to all of the organizations at Five
Beekman to being there together.
Besides participating in each oth-
er's activities, they can share
equipment, exchange contacts, and
discuss strategies with each other.
More important, having a variety
of peace groups together in one
place gives those who work there a
sense of community that is really
important for them.
Although the groups are sub-
jected to little harrassment, aside
from hate mail and an occasional
visit from an FBI agent, there is
one threat that is constantly pre-
sent for many of the young peace
workers-the threat of prison.
Ed Fields, a former Cornell stu-
dent who has been with the Re-
sistance since early last fall, says
the fact that most of them expect
girl friends of some staff members
have broken up with them on the
issue of prison.
But he says that the presence of
men who have served prison terms
and who can offer advice on how
to deal with the problems that
prison creates has been a great
help to the younger peace work-
ers. He adds that in'order to make
this advice on a much broader
scale, the WRL has prepared a
tape recording of a discussion
about prison life by four men who
have been in. The next issue of
WIN will be devoted largely to ar-
ticles by former prisoners.
If prison is one problem for the
groups at Five Beekman, another
is the political situation in the
country now and prospect of peace
negotiations between the United
States and North Vietnam. It isn't
difficult to hear evidence of recent
successes by one or more of the
groups.
Tom Cornell of the Catholic
Peace Fellowship recently helped
to organize a protest ad by Catho-
lic writers against the subsidizing
of South Vietnamese militia units
by Catholic Relief Services, a huge
Catholic Welfare organization
which has since decided to end the
project.
Nevertheless, the changed polit-
ical situation has had.its impact.
"McCarthy is definitely having an
effect, particularly on the money,"
said Maris Cakers, head of the
WRL's tax resistance project. Ac-
cording to Cakers, the group that
has been the most heavily hit so
far is the Fifth Avenue Peace Par-
ade Committee, an amorphous
coalition of New York peace or-
ganizations that sponsored an-
other mass peace parade April 27.
Cakers expects that organiza-
tions like theParade Committee
and the. National Mobilization,
which are ad hoc groups speci-
fically asociated with Vietnam, Will
disappear if serious peace nego-
tiations begin but that pacifist
organizations with longer range
goals like the WRL will have no
difficulty surviving.
The Resistance is somewhere be-
tween the ad hoc groups and the
WRL in its orientation, which or-
ganized around the two issues of
Vietnam and the draft. Chris Ro-
binson, a former actor who now
does a good deal of draft counsel-
ing for the Resistance, believes
that the issue of the draft will be
a live one for some time to come,
even if there is peace in Vietnam.
"The next outbreak could come
in Rni v i a. n-, ndx 0,-a nI e nd
"Columbia tvilnever be the same"
By JAMES A. WECHSLER
(Columbia '35)
THESE REMARKS about Columbia's nightmare must be rather
personal; I have sentimental involvements in the matter. Many
of us who care about its future will remain haunted by uncertainty
as to whether the final collision was inevitable. My reluctant con-
clusion is that it was-and that the final tragedy was the performance
of some police officers who arrogantly defied Chief Inspector Garelik's
warnings against rough-stuff.
But this was the climatic misadventure in a sequence from which
few men can derive any pride or glory. For what has happened is a
triumph only for those who were resolved to transform the campus
into a shambles.
Students for a Democratic Society is not monolith movement; it
includes many young men and women who do not believe in raising
hell for its own sake, and are earnestly groping for niew values.,But it
would be a romantic'innocence to assume that many of the key .figures
in the guerilla war that began last week were disposed to seek a ra-
tional settlement or to accept any penalty for avowed civil disobedience.
SHORTLY AFTER, MIDNIGHT yesterday, following a two-hour
visit to the tense campus, I came home and listened to the remarkably
expert, unhysterical coverage on Columbia's WKCR. There I heard the
voice of SDS leader Mark Rudd, who seemingly views himself as the
hybrid offspring of Lenin and Che Guevara.
Columbia, he explained gravely, was not yet in a "revolutionary
situation"; its condition was more analogous to France in 1848, when
a "bourgeois" unheaval occurred. He voiced fear that a compromise
solution, involving a tripartite administration-faculty-student structure,
could only "legitimatize" the status quo and defer the coming struggle
for power.'"
Hearing his out-of-this world address, it seemed plain that those
who were trying to "negotiate" with him and his counterparts were
deluding themselves. Columbia had become a miniature battleground
in which chaos was the vital pre-condition for truly "revolutionary"
developments.
This was the university's entrapment; the basic challenge came
from those who cherished conflict at any price, and held strategic
command posts in the occupied territory.
But obviously Rudd's disciples were a small fragment of the rebel-
lion they had initiated. There were. numerous other students wholly
lacking in esoteric revolutionary commitments who opposed the new
gym or favored severance of all university ties with the defense esta-
blishment. Most important, there were many students and faculty mem-
bers whose only concern was the avoidance of a massive police invasion
of the campus.
* * *
DISASTROUS AS WERE the long night and its aftermath, the
danger that had loomed largest was averted. That was the prospect of a
racial battle, extending beyond the borders of campus, over the eviction
of the 100 Negro students who occupied Hamilton Hall in a "separatist
venture obsequiously ratified by SDS.
On thi front the university exhibited sensitivity and thoughtful-
nes; so did the police. The Negroes, primarily stirred by the gym
argument, refused to act out the incendiary role assigned to them in
the leftist manuals. They held their ranks with dignity as painstaking,
continuing contacts were maintained with Truman and others;' they
shunned capricious vandalism. They also solemnly reached agreement
among themselves that, if the police refrained from pushing them
around, they would eventually leave without staging any battle scenes.
One unheralded hero of these events was Sydney Von Luther, a
graduate student and an official of Local 1199 of the Drug and Hospital
Workers Union. A militant Negro, he had the perceptiveness to recognize
that the young men in Hamilton Hall would suffer -most if they for-
feited all academic standing in a futile brawl while disciplined whites
found refuge in other colleges.
Thus what had been viewed- as the greatest peril point became
one of the few islands of sanity and hope for the future.
Sadly, I stil wonder whether Harlem will be a better place because
the gym-with extensive facilities for Negroes-has apparently been
blocked. But the symbolism of the dispute had transcended the sub-
stance many days earlier.
COLUMBIA WILL NEVER be quite the same again; it confronts
a long period of soul-searching. But neither, I suspect, will SDS. While
some of its super-strategists revel in the debris, there will come a time
when some adherents will ask whether the battle of Morningside
Heights can be authentically equated with the noble struggles for free-
dom being waged by students in Fascist and Communist despotisms-
and whether Columbia, while hardly the gem of the city, is the major
enemy of peace and progress.
Copyright 1968 New York Post Corporation
Humanzinag who M?
The Rocky road
GOV. NELSON A. ROCKEFELLER cele-
brated the announcement of his can-
didacy for the Republican presidential
nomination Tuesday by making his first
definitive statement on the Vietnam war
in well over two years.
For those despairing anti-war Repub-
licans who have kept hoping that Rocky's'
long silence meant that he was secretly
nurturing dovish sentiments, the gov-
ernor's denunciation of the "American-
ization" of the war must have come as
something of a disappointment.
Because what Rockefeller has in fact
come up with is "why-are-American-
boys-fighting-a-war-which-should - be -
fought-by-Asian-boys" kind of approach
which has become a sort of traditional
tentative 'entrance ramp unto the rocky
road from Hawk to Dove.
Politicians in the process of becoming
doves have developed a series of steps
pearing too foolish. First they ask why
the Vietnamese aren't doing more to help
themselves. Then they decry corruption
in the Saigon regime and threaten to take
our toy soldiers and go home if Thieu
and his friends don't play 'nicely. Next
they admit perhaps negotiations just
might not be such a bad idea, reiterating
all the time that the U.S. will not yield to
force or subversion and will continue to
protect the world - especially Asia --.
from ' the evils of communism. Finally
in high gear, they tell the Chamber of
Commerce (or perhaps the National
Council of Advertisers) that the war is
economically unsound, bad for American-
business, and as such threatening to our
entire way of life.
After that, anything goes: negotiations
with the NLF, unilateral withdrawal,
anything.
T-TAT'S THE attern And Roekefeler.
By MARCIA ABRAMSON
THE reputedly conservative en-
gineering school has jumped
ahead of the literary college with
a more extensive and enlightened
pass-fail program that should
also greatly increase the summess
of the move to "humanize" the
engineer.
The value of a partial pass-
fail program consists in allowing
the student to become acquainted
with areas of study outside his
field of concentration without
fail to all free electives and elec-
tives in the humanities and social
sciences, except for a 12-hour
English requirement that is com-
mendable in itself for its project-
ed inclusion of both great books
and modern culture sequences.
The engineering program will
even include some technical elec-
tives, although these are limited
to one per term. This may re-
flect a commendable move to-
ward extension of the no-grad-
ing principle beyond the realm of
non-major subject areas.
01