Posters for Peace - Thomas W. Benson

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conference on May 8, President Nixon was asked repeatedly about student dissent and his administration’s reaction to it. Herbert Kaplow of NBC News questioned the president about what he thought the students were trying to say. Nixon replied, “They are trying to say they want peace. They are trying to say they want to stop the killing. They are trying to say that they want to end the draft. They are trying to say that we ought to get out of Vietnam. I agree with everything that they are trying to accomplish.”15 At five o’clock the next morning, President Nixon, accompanied by his valet, Manolo Sanchez, traveled to the Lincoln Memorial for an unplanned predawn conversation with fifty or so students who were in town for antiwar protests. In his Vietnam: A History, Stanley Karnow wrote that Nixon “treated them to a clumsy and condescending monologue, which he made public in an awkward attempt to display his benevolence.”16 Soon afterward, in actions that led directly to Watergate and the fall of his presidency, Nixon “ordered the formation of a covert team headed by Tom Huston, a former Army intelligence specialist, to improve the surveillance of domestic critics. During later investigations into Nixon’s alleged violations of the law, Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina called the Huston project evidence of a ‘Gestapo mentality,’ and Huston himself warned Nixon that the internal espionage was illicit.”17

      Shortly after midnight on May 15, 1970, on the campus of Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi, city and state police fired at a group of protesting students. Two students, one from Jackson State and the other a local high school student, were killed; twelve others were struck by gunfire. President Nixon expressed his regrets and continued his public campaign for support of his war policies. At the end of May, he appeared at a Billy Graham revival for a photo opportunity. Meanwhile, student protests continued around the country.

      At the Berkeley campus of the University of California, political protest had been intense since the day after Nixon’s Cambodia speech. Berkeley had been the scene of student political activity since at least 1958, when some student leaders founded SLATE, a loose confederation of progressive students, both graduate and undergraduate, to run as a united ticket in student-government elections. The administration had responded by removing graduate students from the student-government elections and by taking other actions to impede student political action. In 1960, the House Un-American Activities Committee held hearings at City Hall in San Francisco. Students from around the Bay Area picketed the hearings to protest that the committee was an enemy of civil liberties. Police with fire hoses attacked them and dragged them down the long flight of marble steps at the center of the City Hall rotunda, hauling the protesters away in paddy wagons.

      As the civil rights movement gained momentum, especially after the sit-ins of 1960, the Freedom Rides of 1961, and voter registration campaigns in Mississippi, Berkeley students circulated information and collected money on campus and at the traditional cluster of tables at the southern entrance of the university at the intersection of Telegraph and Bancroft. The university responded by declaring new rules prohibiting any campus political activity about anything other than purely university business. These restrictions gave rise to the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, which played out over the academic year of 1964–65. On October 1, 1964, a former graduate student who was sitting at the CORE table was arrested. The police car was immediately surrounded by hundreds of students. Over the next several days, support for the students grew. These were the demonstrations that made Mario Savio famous nationally.18

      In April 1969 a loose coalition of Berkeley residents and students declared the inauguration of what they called People’s Park on a vacant lot that the university had designated for eventual development but which was sitting unused just a short walk south of the university. The People’s Park movement quickly drew the enthusiasm of a diverse group of students, progressives, hippies, and local community activists. The university responded that they had no business being on the site, but then agreed that it would not evict them from the park without further negotiations. At this point, Ronald Reagan, who had been elected governor in 1966 in a campaign partly directed against the Berkeley campus, intervened.

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      The long history of these events created a student movement of considerable experience and commitment. It also created a long history of distrust between the university administration and the governor’s office, on the one hand, and the student leaders and those who sympathized with them on the other, with the Berkeley faculty distributed across the spectrum of opinion and in the middle. The experience of a campus community, and especially of its students, is in many ways discontinuous, because the students are on campus for only a few years. Not all of the history that it is possible to summarize now would have been entirely accessible to the student body. But this truism can work both ways. The indignation and the organizational skills that had repeatedly sparked into being in the decade before May 1970, both over broad issues such as race and war and over the more local frictions between administrators and students, were partly carried off campus with each graduating class. On the other hand, Berkeley gained a reputation as a center of campus activism, which attracted new recruits and allowed the creation of a large core of committed and experienced organizers. The intensity and visibility of the 1960s protest movement in Berkeley, and the continuing publication of movement news and history in local and national sources, kept the history alive and vivid.

      As the new academic year of 1969–70 began, just months after the People’s Park attacks, political activity was in daily evidence on campus, especially antiwar appeals, but the tone was muted for the most part, and politics and the war were clearly not the main interests of most students. Yet the war and the state did intrude.

      On November 12, 1969, Seymour Hersh of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch broke the story of the My Lai massacre, which had taken place in March 1968. At the village of My Lai, some 350 to 500 innocents, mostly women, children, and old men, had been killed by US troops: many of the victims were lined up at a ditch and executed. News of My Lai left faculty and students shaken and shocked.21

      Governor Reagan continued to campaign against the students. In early fall 1969, he announced plans for a 25 percent budget cut for the University of California. In the spring, he intensified his anti-university campaign. As the story is told by Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, three weeks before President Nixon’s Cambodian invasion was announced, Governor Reagan made a remark that seemed consistent with his actions toward Berkeley. “On April 7, 1970, addressing the California Council of Growers at Yosemite, Reagan was asked about the on-campus tactics of the New Left. ‘If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with,’ Reagan responded. ‘No more appeasement.’”22 Reagan’s remarks were quoted in a widely circulated underground newspaper, the Berkeley Tribe.23

      On the Berkeley campus in the days after President Nixon’s Cambodia speech, having heard Reagan’s threatening words and others like them, students tried to thread their way safely to class through roving bands of aggressive deputies and sought to avoid clouds of tear gas, fired sometimes from grenade launchers, other times from

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