Coversation with Everett Mendhelson

From Harvard Strike Project Wiki

Conversation with Everett Mendhelson

Everett: I have a question for you; you obviously came to Harvard with a purpose and came from the Archives – what is 1968/1969?

Maya: It definitely was a time of a lot of political uprisings by students towards the war and other things like the Harvard Expansion. It was definitely very chaotic. Riots and whatnot.

Kristin: We’ve been reading primary sources from times of the stike – newspapers, letters and flyers sent out by SDS and the Memorial Church Group and the Administration.

Jordan: We’ve been getting a sense of the politics of the time.

Everett: What did you find?

Jordan: A staggering amount of information. It’s hard to get a coherent picture, but I saw a lot of SDS documents. SDS and the Faculty look like the 2 main contributers.

Sophia: I looked through a whole folder of just Memorial Church Group documents

Maya: I found a lot of stuff like the proposal for an African-American Studies Program. I also found some stuff about the administration’s response.

Everett: How did the program get created?

Maya: The idea was that the students had wanted to create a program about the African-American people. There’s a correlation between their desires and SDS. They both think that the students didn’t have enough power at Harvard, so they designed curriculum while SDS went on strike.

Mike: I was studying SDS. They were a lot more for Student Power and Student Choice than the rest of the movement. They wanted the ability to create things of their own.

Everett: Why was this important to African-Americans at that time?

Kristin: Voting rights were still an issue.

David Giordano: MLK was assassinated, also.

Everett: King got his Divinity degree at Boston University. I met King on a number of occasions because I had been a classmate of Coretta Scott at Antioch. When she came to the conservatory of music to study voice she started dating Martin. We gave a party for them in our living room just a few blocks from here. I didn’t think then that MLK would have the impact he did. When you looked at the documents in Memorial Church, did you get a sense of their connection?

Sophia: I knew they had their own list of demands. When I was looking at the documents today I couldn’t look very thoroughly.

Everett: I ask because I know that one very significant part of – well, I should say that I was 37 in 1968 and a member of the senior faculty – I had been involved in desegregation in Yellow Springs Ohio at Antioch. What was the religious connection to the Civil Rights movement? The black church, etc. One whole set of roots and example of how you protest came out of the 1960s – sit-ins and so on. Those tactics were adopted wholesale as the 1960s developed. Boycotts were also big. I boycott this because as you look at your stuff, keep your eye out for those linkages. AT some point, the 1968 movement developed its own outlook, but that crossover was strong. Prior to 1968, the United States was a very conservative country – McCarthyism loomed large. The sense that you tried to find modes of protest which in a way would gain legitimacy within our society was important. In Paris/Europe things were different. The Parisian demonstrators wouldn’t have thought that any of their idols came out of the Church. But the black church was very important to the roots of black, latin American protest and by extension the antiwar movement.

David Spanagel: What was the Faculty like here? How did it respond to what happened?

Everett: The faculty here was relatively traditionalist and was quite hesitant in its initial response to student activism in the mid 1960s and the late 60s. Eventually they became quite worried. I remember that their was an old barracks built near the divinity school, 2 stories high. Now its got child care centers in it. at that time, it was part of the ROTC headquarters. People thought it might be attacked by students, or set on fire, in 1968. I got a call from the chief of police, who was trying to handle student protest in a thoughtful, non-confrontational manner, but he was nervous about the protest outside the ROTC. He knew I was familiar with an number of the students, and that they knew me because I’d been giving talks all around Harvard – could I round up a number of Faculty members and just be there so he could keep police away. Some faculty became recruited initially as monitors or go-betweens. When the students would decide that they wanted to have a rally – you won’t remember because they don’t have rules like this now – there were arcane rules about where you were allowed to have rallies. We had to arrange for groups to be able to hold their meetings on the steps of University Hall or Widener so as to let students have their say without setting them up for a confrontation. We wanted to give room for political speech but avoiding spillover into violent activity.

David Spanagel: What kind of exposure did students and faculty who wanted to enforce the rule of law have to each other?

Everett: We knew each other. We were happy to have faculty who could keep everything calm. It took faculty awhile to realize that there would have to be demonstrations. I wasn’t here for the takeover of university hall, but during the winter of 1967 – 1968 I had gone to Vietnam to meet with people in the “3rd Force” a group of Vietnamese Buddhists who wanted to intervene between the ARVN and the VC. I had visited rather deeply in Vietnam and Cambodia and met some of the VC in exile in Cambodia. I was actually in Wey – about 2/3rds of the way up in South Vietnam (the religious center) so we met with religious leaders in early January of 1968. We were in Wey, staying in a small hotel in Pancion – we took a little motorbike which had a little wagon on the back – that was the mode of transportation. We were out there talking with this monk when some people came and said we had to leave and leave WEy…immediately. They had packed our bags and gotten ready to shuffle us out of there. We were sent to Saigon. That night, the Tet offensive began. We were in a small hotel just in sight of the National Cemetary – this was where caskets had been buried for a year. They were full of weapons. The soldiers would dig up the caskets and arm themselves. It was a tense few days in our small hotel getting very hungry because no food was coming in. I was with a Quaker delegation, and 2 of us decided to make our way to the home of a South Vietnamese peace person to get food. There was gunfire. We hit the ground and crawled back to the hotel, and after that we hid for a few more days until somebody brought us food. Most of the aid workers and civilian contractors had to hold up in hotels like that. It took some time for us to get out of Saigon. In the Crimson they did a 2-page interview with me about the war and my experiences. I was quite vocal. Then I went to England. When I came back, after all sorts of raw nerves had been exposed – I followed by reading the Crimson – there were four of us, 2 on each side, and we’d argue – anyway, there was a reception that fall and one of my colleagues came up to me and said “Everett, I can never forgive you for what you did last April!” “But I was in England!” “But if you were here, you would have…”

The one thing that was happening particularly after the building takeover was intense discussion and argument - and we had to move to Sanders theater because you needed to get about 600 people into the discussion. Some of my colleagues became radicalized. A few would wear student bandanas, break into 4-letter-words, etc. Those people became useless as part of the dialogue. They weren’t interested in how to run the university at a time of intense disagreement.

At that point you get the transformation of struggle between Civil Rights style demonstration to SDS/Weatherman style demonstration. I was lucky enough to teach 150 students or so a History of Science course. SDS students went there. At the Port Huron meeting in Michigan, 4 of the big names were in my class. Many of those people were opposed to the war but not violent or thoughtless. You can watch the evolution of modes of approach to protesting a war going on. I remember the joy when the dean, Franklin Ford, gave a speech and called the war “a bum war” – acknowledging that the students might have a real complaint. ROTC got decamped from Harvard over the next couple of years.

ROTC was run by army officers. One of the questions that came up, they asked if any of the 4 officers had a PhD. The answer was 0. Which have been involved in regular college teaching, not the military? 0 again. The devolvement occurred because of the deligitimization of credit for courses tought by the ROTC. Other campuses pushed them off completely. So what were the pressure points?

One was ROTC on campus – if the war was disapproved of, how should it be treated? You got the divergence. This was a focal point for students. It made the police nervous, but it brought the issue LOCALLY – it had to do with what happens here on campus.

Defense Dept. funded research – especially if the faculty members were not allowed to publish the results of their research in standard science journals. Forms of radio communication underwater, etc. The Faculty were concerned – should DoD research be carried out at Harvard? Is the University committed to open research and communication.

DOW chemical – manufactures napalm, which was used to “clear” areas near roads or villages so that the infiltrators couldn’t move through them. It became a focus of criticism. Not that DOW was doing napalm research on campus, but their money was at work on campus. The sit-in was a symbolic reaction to a company that was seen as collaborating in the atrocities of the war. It was a good focal point that brought the war symbolically close to Harvard. Dow came to recruit Harvard students in their senior year.

So the question becomes – how can these efforts be stopped other than by group confrontation and “closing something down”, which wasn’t seen as a legitimate way to raise a protest. So faculty would use arguments designed to get the agreement of fundamentally conservative faculty (which was most of them). I would counsel my colleagues to be sympathetic, to interact, but not to try to lead students. They should speak for themselves, but not try to lead the students. Listen to what they say, and to the extent that what they critique is also something of sensitive reaction to the faculty, deal with it?

Ryan: Why did it happen?

Everett: I’d say things were building. You have to read some of the books and articles that were written at the time and in retrospect. It’s not only the specific events here. The war wasn’t stopping. We had a moratorium that started here on Boston Common – we organized students to march in 4 directions against the war – I chaired that group. We attempted to broaden the circle of people who would call for a stop of the war. JC Galbraith had George McGovern speak that day and they were both against the war, and then we all went down in busses to Washington DC to protest the war, but…

You can imagine the feelings of students who saw the war continuing in spite of very compelling rational reasons to stop it. The radicals became attractive and started to overcome the progressives.

Kristin: You said that the students were getting mad because they needed their voice heard. Was the war an excuse to increase their representation?

Everett: Students critique morphed into a question directed at how decisions were made at Harvard and in this country. Also, remember there was a draft. I saw students burning their draft cards. They faced conscription and being carried off to fight the war. You can go from month to month on campus here and there is no difference.

David: Also, students can’t vote in the 1960s. You can’t vote, but you can be drafted.

Ryan: Also, class rank and the threat of deferment.

Everett: There were constant rallies about the draft and specific bad acts.

Maya: The strike was the result of a buildup of tensions?

Everett: All I can do is reconstruct as to why this blew up. I don’t see any major thing that caused them to go into University Hall. It was a copycat of people at other Universities who were taking over buildings. They got in very easily. The big question is, what options did the University have. I know that the chief of the University police was nervous about clearing the building with force. I think if he’d had his way he would have cordoned off the building and let things calm down. The President was prevailed upon to react quickly. University police were not the ones who went in – it was police from the State and from Cambridge who went in first and dealt with the students, probably causing more violent response than was necessary. They were a bit more forceful than they should have been, and it blew up as much from trying to remove the students as from the invasion. Some of the students were happy for the blowup (now we were having our confrontation). And now the confrontation was a “strong power” confrontation rather than a “soft power” issue. In the months after, there was a lot of recrimination. Pusey put Archibald Cox in charge, and he’d decide if the police should be called or what to do in an emergency as a way of taking responsibility off of him. A less confrontational mode was sought and ultimately things did ratchet down. There was a big meeting in the stadium where kids got to “debrief” the takeover. It was the “anti-catharsis” where everybody got to talk and feel heard. By the fall of 1969 when I was back on campus there was still a lot of antiwar activity, but the whole expectation was that there would not be another confrontation of that sort. We were on to other ways of making our voices known. I put my name on a “moratorium day” to protest the war. Other colleagues argued yes or no on this…I recall that there was a compromise; faculty could postpone then hold an extra class during Reading period.

Jordan: You talked a lot about ROTC. What about the expansion of Harvard into Cambridge?

Everett: Lots of issues got brought in. All of them had to do with Harvard’s power and attempts to challenge it. There were citizens groups in Cambridge who really didn’t want Harvard gobbling property. It was getting more and more expensive to live in Cambridge. There was a movement from MIT/Harvard that squeezed low rent values towards Central Square. Students and Faculty got active in Cambridge policy and it was an issue that would get tossed up. It was a not-mindless sympathy – it loomed here at Harvard because there was heightened sensitivity to how power was wielded, whose voice was being used for what. It wasn’t opportunism, it was sympathy. Mind you, the Mayor of Cambridge, Al Velucci would propose to pave over Harvard Yard and make it a parking lot. He could actually affect building permits. The Harvard hierarchy had to be very sensitive to citizen voices.

The issue overlapped with the racial issue, because the medical school was going up in Roxbury, which was a black neighborhood, and that was part of a broader civil rights concern, particularly as civil rights expanded into economic rights. And by the way, I’ll mention that MLK took civil rights antiwar and antipoverty (I take some credit)

Lincoln: Was the Corporation involved with the proceedings in April?

Everett: The Corporation never did anything public. They operated internally and let the President speak publicly for them. Sometimes the Harvard Board of Overseers would make public statements, but generally the Corporation was consulted but not directly active.

Mike: Pusey keeps coming up. What was he like?

Everett: An anecdote. I knew one of the senior faculty who was generally respected, and he said that “In choosing President Pusey, the Corporation decided that it wanted a Boy Scout Headmaster, and that’s what it got.” He was a classicist. He had been president of a small college in Appleton WI. He was successful at some things. He replaced James Conant, who was a major figure in Harvard’s history (Conant went on to be a diplomat in Europe, and also supported the History of Science Department). Pusey was small by comparison. A decent man, but not a man of big ideas. He also didn’t have a big voice. Not just quiet, but not with big things to say, either. He was very successful at raising money. Pusey built more buildings than any other president “edifice complex”. On major social/education issues he was not a big figure. Until the Vietnam war, he wasn’t an impediment to things. He moved the University along. He did one gen. education reform, but not a significant one.

Joe McCarthy moved into Boston the year Pusey and I came. Pusey was at the core a civil libertarian. He had been president of a college in WI and he knew who McCarthy was and knew enough about him. Here’s where the Corporation was brave. These were the “big figures” from the “money families” and they stood with Pusey very clearly. A day after McCarthy denounced Harvard, the Crimson carried a story that “Lewis Loeb announces a gift of $5 million to Harvard”. Harvard’s power structure backed the University against this uncouth man from Wisconsin. You have to understand – there’s a story about a man who gets invited with his wife to tea and she says “I’m from Iowa”. “Oh, say the women, we pronounce that ‘Ohio’ here.” Non-tenured Faculty did get kicked out, and one tenured professor was put on paid leave, but mostly Harvard circled the wagons. I came up for appointment as a teaching fellow the next year and I was called in by McGeorge Bundy, the dean, and because I was an antiwar pacifist and accused of being a communist. I said “what kind of proof do you have?” and they wouldn’t tell me. I went to a Quaker attorney in Philadelphia and said “what do I do”. The attorney said he’d sue McGeorge and everything worked out after that. Once MG Bundy talked to me later “In those days, we were buying lists of communists. Your name came up, and I’m embarrassed.”