What a year for an Army lawyer to attend civilian schooling. It was June 1969, in the middle of the Vietnam War, and I was delighted with my decision to go to Northwestern to get a masters degree in criminal law.* It turned out my delight was short lived.
The students, the faculty and probably the janitorial service were strongly opposed to the Vietnam War. I must say that a small group of faculty and graduate students that I worked with treated me well. I was the only one on campus with short hair and, ironically, one of the few students who wasn’t wearing an Army fatigue jacket. There was a Federal law prohibiting the unauthorized wearing of military uniforms or pieces thereof. I mentioned it to a student one day and a professor overheard me and wanted to know why I had this deep-seated anger. Wow! I thought I was on my best behavior. Ripping the jacket off and throwing the kid out in the snow might constitute deep-seated anger.
Most of the student body was involved in draft avoidance counseling. I have to admit, it was not a good time to be a 19 or 20 year-old male. A young female student came up to me bubbling with excitement. It seems her family had found a doctor who was willing to certify that her brother was medically disqualified to be drafted. I don’t think she selected me out. I think she was telling everyone she saw.
This was the era when young women didn’t wear bras. I’m very observant. But, dammed if they didn’t walk around with their notebooks or purses pressed to their chests. Now, what kind of statement does that make? I don’t think it’s very enlightened.
I was asked during my second semester to participate in a moot court trial. They needed someone to play the arresting officer in a drug sale trial. I agreed to do it. The moot court was held in a class room and when I entered to testify, the students in the back of the room started hissing and booing. Not very professional. The professor was playing the judge and he did nothing to stop the nonsense. The facts were bad for the government and when the “judge” ruled that it was a bad search and the evidence was suppressed, everyone in the classroom cheered.
Northwestern had a world class criminal law department. As a graduate student in that department, I knew all the criminal law professors. None was teaching this class. After I testified and while seated in the back of the room, I asked one of the hecklers what class it was. He said, “It’s Poverty Law.” I asked him why they were doing criminal law. He said, “Hey man, lots of poor people get busted on bogus drug charges.” So, I had my answer. They could study whatever they wanted, as long as it happened to poor people. I guess that ruled out Trusts and Estates.
On April 29, 1970, US Forces entered Cambodia where the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong had been stockpiling arsenals for their next offensive. Northwestern, along with most colleges shut down in protest. A lot of students were able to avoid final exams while the protests drug on. I was a direct beneficiary of the Cambodian Campaign because my next assignment was Vietnam and I wasn’t located that far from the border. Shame on the US for entering a “neutral” country and destroying tons and tons of ammunition which belonged to the peace loving North Vietnamese. If we hadn’t, I might not be writing this.
While I went to school on the downtown campus, we actually lived in Evanston, just a few blocks from the University. The street that ran along side the University was Sheridan Road. During the Cambodian protests, students tore down property and piled it in Sheridan Road blocking traffic. The police did nothing to remove the blockade. However, when an irate citizen stopped his car and tried to remove some of the blockade, he was arrested for creating a disturbance! It was not a good year.
Periodically, I receive a phone call from someone at Northwestern asking for money. After about 20 minutes of me telling them about my Northwestern experience, they just want to get off the phone.
* See “Long Distance Decision Making Before the Internet.”
Boy…brought back bad memories. Ken
had same experience at Indiana U. Tho’
he and another army friend did have
several serious discussions with students who were blockading classroom
doors! Still takes a smile off my face!
Barb
Jack,
your web site is an excellent way to share experiences. You have many interesting ones, as can be expected from someone with a long and distinguished career. However, it’s
dangerous to enter into a discussion through this channel, because it lacks
the immediate feedback that is essential to ensure a proper understanding of the reaction. For example, if I were to try to explain how one could view the other side of
this same issue (which I understand to be the US policy in Vietnam, but not the excesses or the ad hominem attacks that individuals identified with the military had to withstand), what I write could easily be misunderstood. Then, you need a few email exchanges to fix the problem, and in the meantime
the damage is done: people listen even
less to each other when they are irritated than when they are calm.
In addition, not having been in the US during those days I don’t have a good feel for how sharp the divisions were in the US back then. What I can tell you something about, though, is the attitude of students in Europe, more
specifically those in the Netherlands, and certainly my own impressions back then.
You should know that in those days, the end of the ’60s, I had frequent but superficial contact with Americans: with my first wife (then-girlfriend) I lived next to the Anne Frank house, for which the visitors queued up in front of our kitchen window. On occasion, we got to talk to one or two, sometimes about the war. I remember in particular the son of a US Colonel (IIRC), who was trying to defend the Vietnam war as needed to protect SE Asia from the Communists. In contrast, all of us had long (well…. a few years) convinced ourselves that the US policy in Vietnam was based on a faulty premise and could not succeed. And worse, if the US would have managed to keep the Vietnamese government in the saddle for now, the belief that this government was not (snip) instituted among Men, deriving (its) just power() from the consent of the governed (snip), etc., and … it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…, would necessarily have the conflict continue until there would be ‘a just Government ….’. Since this was not going to happen peacefully (in our view, Vietnam was trying to leave its past as a feudal kingdom and join the modern world, and why would feudal lords give up their power peacefully: that’s never been done in the past, so why now?), the war
(as seen by the official US policy back then) could not possibly succeed. It didn’t, of course.
It would actually be very interesting to see now, with hindsight, which of the various arguments on the two sides have stood the test of time. Did the premise of the ‘communist threat’ really make sense? Or, was it a misunderstanding of history? Or, perhaps, a lack of trust in one’s own system of Government?
It’s been really interesting to see China develop itself precipitously through the ‘market economy’, while keeping the dictatorship intact.