At Berkeley in the Sixties: The Making of an Activist

54 Graduation

54 Graduation On Monday, April 26th, Mario Savio told the noon rally at Sproul Hall that he was leaving. After a speech denouncing the Meyer recommendations , he surprised us all by saying that the time had come for the movement to continue on its own. Wishing us “good luck and goodbye ,” he walked down the steps, leaving us all to wonder what had happened . The following day he explained in a letter that “if the student rights movement at Berkeley must inevitably fail without my leadership, then it were best that it fail.”1 A changing of the guard had been happening for some time. The FSM notables were preoccupied with the trial; those that weren’t still in school were also involved in civil rights and other causes. At the ¤nal Ex Com meeting that dissolved the FSM, I was the only one there who had been part of the United Front in September and one of a few who had been FSMers in October. A new cohort of activists was emerging. On Wednesday, Bettina Aptheker and Jack Weinberg announced that the FSM would be replaced by the Free Student Union (FSU), which would be a trade union for students. Mario was not present; he stayed away from the remaining rallies other than as an observer. The FSU had been in the works for some time, but it wasn’t quite ready to go public. A week later a deanlet told it to remove its table from Sproul Plaza because it hadn’t registered as a student organization with the dean of students . Bettina protested that it couldn’t register because it had no constitution , by-laws, or of¤cers, only about 3,000 members who had paid a quarter to join. ASUC president Charlie Powell averted a confrontation by registering the “Friends of the FSU” to sponsor the table. At the organizing meeting held in Harmon gym the next day, 350 students completed the formalities. They were organized into locals based on time, department, and interest, but no one went to meetings. Eventually the FSU just faded away, to be replaced by organizations focused on speci¤c issues.2 The political students were less concerned with student rights than with national problems, and in the spring a new issue emerged which would eventually swamp everything else—the war in Viet Nam. As early as 1963, students had protested U.S. support of the unpopular government in South Viet Nam headed by Ngo Dinh Diem. That fall, when his sister-in-law Mme Ngo Dinh Nhu toured the United States to drum up support, Berkeley was one of several places to picket “the Dragon Lady.” Even as we demonstrated, our government was secretly encouraging a military coup. On November 1st, Diem and his brother were assassinated , two days after Mme Nhu spoke on campus. We didn’t picket UN Secretary U Thant when he spoke at the Spring 1964 Charter Day ceremonies but we did hold up signs asking him to “Help Stop the War in Viet Nam.” These attitudes re®ected an awareness of the war in Southeast Asia that had not been present only a year earlier. Not until spring 1965 did opposition to the war in Viet Nam become a mass student movement. After President Johnson committed large numbers of U.S. troops to what he had said during the fall campaign was an Asian war to be fought by Asian boys, mathematics professor Stephen Smale and ex-student Jerry Rubin started the Vietnam Day Committee (VDC). It sponsored a marathon teach-in in the Student Union Plaza on May 21–22, one of several nationwide. For thirty-three hours, the lower Student Union plaza and an adjacent athletic ¤eld became a fairgrounds, with speakers, booths, and entertainers. An estimated 30,000 people came at some point, with the crowd peaking at 12,000. Although advertised as a debate, speakers who supported U.S. policy withdrew, claiming that the event was too biased for their views to get a fair hearing. Consequently , the steady denunciations of U.S. actions in Viet Nam took on the ®avor of a religious revival. “Teach-ins” became the rage at dozens of campuses as the war in Viet Nam became the top issue on the student agenda. The VDC registered with the dean of students as a permanent campus organization.3 I was there most of those thirty-three hours, even though I hadn’t quite made up my mind...