!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!
Eddie called me a few days later from Providence. “I’m going down to D.C. this weekend for the Mobe. You want to come with me? This war has to end, we have to raise the stakes, make it impossible for Johnson to keep sending troops there.”
“The ‘Mobe’?”
“That’s the National Mobilization Committee. To end the war. All the anti-war groups, all over the country, set it up this spring. Don’t you remember, in April, the march in New York to the UN? Dr. Spock, Martin Luther King, the SDS set it up, and now they’re going to Washington, to keep it all going.”
“How does that work, Eddie? How does a march, even if it’s thousands of people, make a difference?
“It’s not any one thing, Janie. It’s a single drum beating, that gets joined by another and another and another, until they get so loud those people have to listen.”
“Well, I only just got to college. I feel like Alice through the looking glass – I have to run twice as fast simply to stay in the same place. So much reading, so much writing, everyone’s so smart, knows more than me, has more insight than I do.”
“Sure, I get it, you’ve got to study. I know how hard that is. I went to Brown, remember? Well, maybe there’s something you can do for me, for us, then. Arlene wants to go to, so we’d have to take Denise, but it’s no place for a kid, I think, so she’s going to stay home with Denise. Want to come down here for the weekend, baby-sit maybe? Then the two of us could go together. We’d be back early Sunday. You could take the train down here. She still naps every day, sleeps ten, eleven hours at night. You can do lots of studying with her, and on the train. Whadya say?”
I did want to see Denise, see what she’d be doing, how she’d be talking now. And I hadn’t left Cambridges, hadn’t really left the campus at all, except for that one day with Mike. Impulsively, I blurted out, “Sure. Pick me up at the station Friday around dinner, I guess?”
Denise kept me busy all Saturday. I read one page in my psych text, but otherwise I was catering to her whims, trying to keep her from running out into the street, or getting caught half-way up the jungle gym at the playground. Even so, I felt relieved to be free of Harvard stress, to be reminded that real life wasn’t always an intense discussion of endless new ideas. A little kid grounds you real fast, I decided.
Eddie and Arlene came back around noon. I drove Denise down to the station to meet them. The idea was to take that same train on into Boston, while they drove back home. We had maybe thirty or forty minutes to talk.
As soon as Denise saw Arlene, she ran to her and jumped in her arms. Hauling her little girl up, up, kissing her all over, then resting her on one hip, Arlene asked “Was she any trouble? Did she eat like she’s supposed to? What about a nap?” She didn’t really want an answer, as she turned away and walked over to the car, leaving me with Eddie.
He looked down, a bit bedraggled, baggy eyes, wrinkled shirt and twisted pants. He must have slept on the train. Still full of energy, though, he excitedly described the day. After a few speeches at the monument – “None as dramatic or inspiring as Martin Luther King” – 50,000 people walked across the river to the Pentagon. There, things seemed to get a little wild.
“There were a lot of cops. Thousands of them, really. Army, too, MPs, Marshalls. It was chaos. There was one guy, he had a bunch of flowers, going along sticking them in the barrels of the Army guns. Another group of guys, I think one of them was Abbie Hoffman, were acting like a bunch of hippies, just saying crazy things, trying to get people naked. At one point, they chanted and waved their arms up and down. Said they were trying to levitate the Pentagon, bring the whole war machine tumbling down. People broke through the fences set up all around. Sometimes, the MPs would grab them, by the hair or the collar, hit them with nightsticks. People kept saying the time for protest is over, it’s time for resistance. Hundreds – hundreds, Janie – of people got hauled off, got arrested. There was blood all over the steps. I don’t know where it’s all going to end, I don’t know how they can keep fighting when so many of us are against it.”
“That sounds scary, Eddie. Are you OK?”
“Arlene was with me. I’m not going to let the mother of our child get in any trouble. We stayed out of all that, didn’t even burned by any tear gas.” He almost laughed, but turned serious. “Dow Chemical is coming to Harvard this week. I heard at the march there’s going to be protests. Same thing all over every campus when they show up, recruiting science majors for the war machine.”
“Why Dow Chemical? What’s so bad about them?
“Napalm. You’ve hear of napalm, haven’t you”
I knew the word, but nothing about what it was, or why it might be bad. I shook my head, “Yeah, but not really.”
“Napalm. It’s like liquid fire. They shower it down from airplanes, to burn the jungle, so they can see the Viet Cong hiding there. Only problem, once it leaves the plane, you can’t control where it goes. It burns people, Janie, burns women, kids. It’s evil, it’s wrong, and Dow makes it. We need to starve them of new talent coming in from good schools, Harvard, places like that.”
The next Tuesday, hundreds of people gathered in the Yard, to protest the war. The SDS, the Students for a Democratic Society, called for an action the next day against Dow Chemical recruiters. Wednesday morning, after my morning class, I headed over to a mass of students with a sprinkling of faculty between Mallinckrodt Hall and the Conant chemistry building. The SDS leaders soon realized the recruiter in Conant had no interviews scheduled, that the real action was over in Mallinckrodt, so they urged the crowd to block that building. The Dean of the College was just coming out with the real recruiter, hoping to sneak him away from the protesters. Once he saw the crowd, they darted back inside. Dean Glimp then spent most of the next seven hours attempting to negotiate his “release”. Scores of students gave their Bursar’s cards in a thick packet to him, calling his bluff when he said he would sever their relationship with Harvard if they didn’t disperse and allow the recruiter to leave. It was a heated confrontation, but without any of the violence Eddie had described in Washington just a few days earlier. Even so, I felt things could erupt at any moment. My legs were wobbly, my mind raced, as I walked back home to Cabot, grabbed a few more books, and headed got Hilles for some pre-dinner studying.
That evening, I was still jittery from the scene in the yard. Jeanne and Marcia were both engrossed in writing papers due that week, so I chanced a call to Mike. He now shared a top-floor room with two other sophomores, and they had their own telephone, so I was pretty certain I could talk with him. His part of the suite was actually the living room, converted into his space while the other two occupied separate rooms intended, with bunks, for two each. How they had gotten this deal, I never really understood, but it seemed fairly luxurious.
“Mike, can we go to New York next weekend…”
“Uh, I’ve got this Organic Chemistry test on Monday, and I’m not doing so well there. I haven’t figured it out yet. I got a C minus on the first test last week.”
“I really need to get away. They had an anti-war rally here today, and I’m feeling so tense. I want to see a play, maybe walk up to Central Park.”
“How would that work, anyway?”
“I could take the train down to Meriden Saturday morning, you meet me there, then we go into the City, find a student rush matinee, it doesn’t matter which one, one with tickets. I’ll look in the New Yorker, see what’s happening. OK, please?”
He was quiet for several seconds, thinking. “Right. I can study tonight, tomorrow, Friday. What time does that train get in?”
Of course, I’d already figured this out. “The schedule says if I take the first one, I’m in Meridan at 9:12, we get into New York by 11:45.”
********